D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

hawkeyefan said:

It means “wanting to conserve” or to maintain things as they are. It’s literally what you guys are doing. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Agreed as to what you say in the literal sense, however in a lot of countries (including the one I'm in) "conservative" carries almost overwhelming political baggage and thus isn't often a term friends apply to friends.

Lanefan said:

The one I can't stand is "fail forward". To me, all that concept seems to be is an end-run around failure to try to turn it into at least partial success. No. A fail is a fail, which means you do NOT get what you want even if it has complications attached.

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I have no problem with fail-forward as a concept. A Blades in the Dark heist would not be the same, mad rush into ever more precarious and desperate situations, without it.

I do have a problem when it is presented as the only way failure should be handled, regardless what game or style you're aiming for.

In general, I think the people advocating hardest for fail forward have experienced situations where there is an expectation that the game can't progress until the players find a way to move forwards. Fail forward is an obvious solution to this, but allowing (and encouraging) the characters to go sideways or backwards is also a valid solution to the problem.

DinoInDisguise said:

Rolls such as these are not a decision anymore, it’s just rolling dice until the numbers say you win. Without a real consequence, like loss of time that matters, noise attracting danger, or the lock becoming jammed, there’s no real reason for the roll to happen at all. Give the success and avoid the issue.

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Why should I just give success when the fiction (or the rules) dictates success isn't guaranteed?

That's why we roll: to see if they succeed.

DinoInDisguise said:

If you want the chance of failure, have it mean something. Prevent a retry. Give a clue or distraction. Do something besides just saying; "nothing happens."

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No retries in my game unless you do something differently. Even then, "nothing happens" is a common result of a failure.

DinoInDisguise said:

Finally, I have issues with the bold part. It makes a leap I’m not sure is supported. I think players generally want meaningful outcomes, which PbtA delivers structurally. Failure that changes nothing, however, feels anticlimactic and frustrating.

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Yes it's frustrating. That's the whole bloody point!

Occasional frustration is simply a fact of life for the characters, and as the players are in theory roleplaying these characters then why wouldn't they too feel some of that frustraton now and then?

DinoInDisguise said:

TLDR: GM advice: Stop wasting time. Give players a reason to care, or skip the roll.

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No roll = no chance of success.

How long do you think that will that hold up in play?

SableWyvern said:

I have no problem with fail-forward as a concept. A Blades in the Dark heist would not be the same, mad rush into ever more precarious and desperate situations, without it.

I do have a problem when it is presented as the only way failure should be handled, regardless what game or style you're aiming for.

In general, I think the people advocating hardest for fail forward have experienced situations where there is an expectation that the game can't progress until the players find a way to move forwards. Fail forward is an obvious solution to this, but allowing (and encouraging) the characters to go sideways or backwards is also a valid solution to the problem.

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I don't mind a marginal success roll getting a complication tacked on, but the odds of failure are often already low enough there's no reason whatsoever to make outright failure even less common.

The cynical side of me suggests another reason that fail-forward has become popular, but I seem to recall others getting red-texted for mentioning it in the past.

Lanefan said:

Perhaps more to the point, and despite narrative games' insistence to the contrary, there is nothing wrong with "nothing happens" being the narrated result of an attempted action that fails. As in:

Players: "We search the west wall for a secret door."
DM: <rolls in secret knowing there's no door there> "You find nothing."

Player: "Koun tries to pick the lock on the chest." <rolls poorly>
DM: "The lock resists your best efforts."

Player: "Kethera climbs the wall" <rolls very poorly>
DM: "Kethera, you make it maybe six feet up then slip, you take no damage but you're right back where you started."

All of these might be frustrating to the players, and to that my only response is so what. It'd be frustrating to the characters in the fiction as well, most likely, and I'm fine with that. In all these situations it's now on the player(s) to either come up with a plan B or abandon the attempt and go do something else.

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I'd like to add that the eddying or dead-ending that could be feared need not arise in play so long as the group will accept nothing happens and move on. (Sharing the appropriate lusory-attitude.) It observably can work better at times to simply say -- the door is barred, we can't go this way, let's look for another path -- accepting that as amply consequential. (To split hairs, it's possible to say that nothing happens isn't truly accepted by any group, only that different standards are applied to counting what matters.)

Prescribing consequences encourages (or binds) players to narrate in the directions the game designers intended. Discerning consequences leaves it up to players to narrate in the directions that they intend. It seems reasonably clear what jobs remain to be done: the former needs someone to say what list of prescribed consequences is invoked, whilst the latter needs someone to propose a list of consequences.

Lanefan said:

The question is whether a) play is specifically intended to actively create and maintain a coherent narrative, whether pre-planned or spontaneous, or b) whether play just happens on a one-thing-leads-to-the-next basis and any coherence to the narrative really only becomes clear after the fact.

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This reminded me of the Fading Suns 2nd ed. where they introduced the concept of Passion Play. If you played in this optional way you played the usual, GM-driven, way but then you had a kind of post-session where you attributed meaning to the events that took place. For instance a regular discussion about gardening to in hindsight become a discussion about rooting out the dissidents in the local government. It was a cool idea but my group never tried it.

Lanefan said:

I don't mind a marginal success roll getting a complication tacked on, but the odds of failure are often already low enough there's no reason whatsoever to make outright failure even less common.

The cynical side of me suggests another reason that fail-forward has become popular, but I seem to recall others getting red-texted for mentioning it in the past.

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I actually really enjoy Fail Forwards, Success with Complications and Degrees of Failure/Success.
As a DM you can allow for an increase in stakes (I'm thinking like poker), take the story in interesting directions and if the players are aware of the mechanics involved beforehand it elevates the sense of a game being played.

AnotherGuy said:

I actually really enjoy Fail Forwards, Success with Complications and Degrees of Failure/Success.
As a DM you can allow for an increase in stakes (I'm thinking like poker), take the story in interesting directions and if the players are aware of the mechanics involved beforehand it elevates the sense of a game being played.

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I have a problem with them if I'm running a more grounded game, with the Living World precepts we've talked about in this thread.

"Even if I fail, the story moves forward" is (to me) at odds with a world that doesn't care about the PCs. "If I fail, I've made no progress, and I might have to consider completely abandoning this whole course of action, for now at least," needs to be a viable option in some cases. Similarly, not everything needs to come with significant risk of complications. If the characters take the right precautions, there are times when they should be able to make an attempt and risk a failure without needing to worry that becoming embroiled in some other complication is a likely result.

They're concepts that are great for a particular sort of game, especially a relentless, high paced, high action one, but I don't see them as being universally applicable.

Micah Sweet said:

Given your aversion to evil characters on either side of the screen, what kinds of conflict do you prefer in games you run or play? Seems like you're cutting out something valuable narratively.

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I can portray evil NPCs--even quite vile ones--for the brief periods they appear. They occupy such a small portion of my attention, being only one part of the world, that I can sort of...not focus that much on how awful they are. I also have a tendency to make most villains either "Noble Demons" (affable but selfish/callous/duplicitous/etc.), something truly alien and thus to some degree walled off from my own thoughts, or to some extent genuinely insane (and thus, again, walled off from my thoughts).

Out of the top-level baddies I can think of in Jewel of the Desert, none have made official appearances, and those that have made unofficial/unrecognized appearances, one was a Noble Demon (the black dragon) and the other was to some extent genuinely insane (the Shadow-Fungus spirit-that-was-once-a-man.) The other two are a mix; one is alien+insane, the other is mostly insane with a certain narrow kind of nobility (a belief system, in this case).

So I'm not really trying to give them "depth of character" or the like, per se. Just make them realistic enough for five minutes' attention.

Micah Sweet said:

Ok, I understand where you're coming from even if I don't work that way myself. I'm a little ruffled by the idea that you apparently believe creative work is impossible unless you are so emotionally invested that you can't separate yourself from the work...kinda flies in the face of the entire entertainment industry IMO.

One more reason why you and I would probably be a bad fit for the same table, I guess.

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I tried pretty hard to reiterate that this is a me thing, but okay. I'm sorry I said anything that made you think I was disparaging the work of others. That isn't and never was what I wanted to communicate. I was talking, only and specifically, about myself, and to a very limited extent about other people I have personally known.

Umbran said:

Why? Maybe because you don't have enough like-minded people around to run the game exactly how you want to do it? Or maybe you really want to play with your BFF, but the fullness of your preference isn't quite their bag?

Or are we all absolutists around here, unwilling to make any compromise or adjustments for anything around our games?

I admit, I'm a service-oriented GM - my fun comes from the players having fun. Players >> playstyle dogma, to me.

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I can only speak for myself when I say that I have absolutely no problem gaining or retaining players and never have had an issue over decades and having to form new groups because of moving. I do modify things a bit for different groups but the difference is what I focus on. I will have varying levels of RP, combat, challenging non-combat encounters based on the group but pretty much everything else is the same.

Why should I change what works for me and my players just to potentially attract even more players when I already struggle with keeping my gaming group to only 6 players when I would prefer 4? I run a game in a fashion that I would personally enjoy and fortunately for me it matches up to what more people than I could possibly GM for happen to agree.