We're going around in circles and I think I'm not explaining myself well. My whole point is that fail forward design structure can render player decision making less impactful; you're trading player ability to learn about and manipulate the situation for a more procedurally dynamic situation.
No, I got that you believe that. But it's not true. The player can learn and manipulate the situation--they'll often have moves to let them do just that--and it doesn't turn anything into any sort of "procedurally dynamic situation", whatever that actually means to you.
What actually happens is that the players and GM work together to find out what happens.
Right, but they do the reconnaissance to get an advantage. They plot the guard routes, they practice on the window lock and so on. They're making choices to force a desired outcome, and gaining information to avoid unwanted outcomes.
Same with fail-forward.
Well, maybe not. In a heist game like Blades in the Dark, The things you talk about above would be done in flashbacks, because that stuff is all fairly boring.
In Monster of the Week, there's a move called Read A Bad Situation, which goes as follows:
When you look around and read a bad situation, roll +Sharp. On a 10+ hold 3, and on a 7-9, hold 1. One hold can be spent to ask the Keeper one of the following questions:
• What’s my best way in?
• What’s my best way out?
• Are there any dangers we haven’t noticed?
• What’s the biggest threat?
• What’s most vulnerable to me?
• What’s the best way to protect the victims?
If you act on the answers, you get +1 ongoing while the information is relevant.
Now, MotW is specifically about fighting monsters, a la Buffy or Supernatural. But as you can see, if the PCs are investigating a vampire's den, they'd be able to find most of the information you've been talking about via this roll. What they wouldn't have to do is make a different roll for each and every thing they want to do, because with luck they'd be able to get three answers with one roll. Nor would they have to specifically roll to practice on the lock because that sort of thing is quite boring and unnecessary. And actually considered to
not be the way to play in most tradgames, where you get one shot to do something like that and that's it.
Now, maybe you don't find it boring. OK, whatever. But "this is a thing I like" is very different than what you've actually been doing, which is trying to claim a game works differently than it actually does.
If those outcomes are not subject to their ability to gain information or make choices, but instead contingent on the rolls they trigger, there is no point in doing the reconnaissance, because there is no advantage.
That's only true if you think of an RPG as something you can "win". Which... they're not. RPGs are pretty famous for being games you can't win; you can only enjoy playing them.
The best gameplay advice would be "roll better," instead of a set of steps that make it harder to fail heists.
All I can say is that you're working from profound ignorance on how these games actually run. You may want to actually read some thoroughly, or even play one.
No, it is utterly different! The consequence is a function of the player's roll, not a function of their decisions. It would be ideal as a player to only roll when the risked failure outcome is "nothing happens." A fail forward design prevents that from happening, unless you want to start getting into just outright negotiation.
Again, you're completely misunderstanding how these games work.
And no, it would
not be ideal if "nothing happens" is the best result because that is the most pointless and boring result. What it does is turn those types of games into people rolling the dice until they happen to roll high enough or low enough or whatever before they can continue--Lanefan's example of spending 2.5 sessions, each multiple hours long, on getting past one door. That is
such a waste of time.
I really don't know what else I can do to explain this. The point of games is to use systems to get to a desired goal. Those systems should present a series of interesting decisions as you try and navigate them. I want that to be a thing in my RPGs, wherein players can use systems to try and to reach the desired gamestate, and for their decisions to matter in whether or not they get there.
Having to roll only to find out either nothing happens or you win is
not a system that sounds even remotely interesting to me.
