Why should I just give success when the fiction (or the rules) dictates success isn't guaranteed?
If success is actually impossible, then you wouldn't roll at all.
But you're doing the rather typical thing of openly taking the least-charitable possible interpretation and presuming it must be true to skewer it, rather than asking, "Wait, does that mean success is guaranteed?"
Because, unlike what you say here, success isn't guaranteed even with fail forward. I'm at least 90% sure you and I have specifically discussed this before.
That's why we roll: to see if they succeed.
Certainly. But failure does not mean "wow, a fat load of NOTHING happened".
No retries in my game unless you do something differently. Even then, "nothing happens" is a common result of a failure.
And that is a pretty boring consequence. I find it rather frustrating to see people hold it up as though it were some awesome achievement of gameplay that you made people jump through hoops in order for
literally nothing to actually happen.
Yes it's frustrating. That's the whole bloody point!
No, it isn't. On both counts.
Specifically, you are conflating two different kinds of "frustrating." On the one hand, there is, "I,
the character, am trying to succeed, and not reaching success". That, I agree,
is the point of rolls. But it's not the point of rolls where the only results are "things proceed without issue" or "nothing happens and we just spent the past 2-5 minutes literally
not seeing anything happen", which is frustrating from the, "I,
the player, have just wasted several minutes of time literally achieving
nothing whatsoever, not bad, not good,
nothing."
The former type of frustration is a good thing, and should happen with a reasonable frequency. (Different people, obviously, disagree on "reasonable" frequency. I'm pretty confident your threshold is
much, MUCH lower than mine, for example. But the idea that there is a threshold isn't in question between us.) The latter is bad and should be avoided as much as possible.
No roll = no chance of success.
I'm fairly confident that is not true, because there are at least three other options. One, no chance of
failure, unless you force characters to roll to check to make sure they can walk across rooms, open doors, shave without decapitating themselves, etc. Two, where neither success nor failure actually matters in any way whatsoever. And three, where the action in question isn't a matter of success or failure, but rather
degree of success only (this is rare, but consider for example
magic missile, which, AIUI, explicitly doesn't use an attack roll nor a saving throw in any edition. That's something where you ask for a roll, the attack just
hits...or just misses, if the target throws up
shield in time.)
How long do you think that will that hold up in play?
I mean, in my experience, it holds up extremely well, on both ends of the table.
Failure is still failure, it just means SOMETHING happens. The world continues spinning. Maybe you """succeed""" in a way that is completely hollow, like "you found the secret entrance
eventually, but by the time you were done, the cultists were LONG gone and knew not to leave evidence behind because
they could hear you the entire time." Maybe you fail, and now that's created a problem: "In trying to disarm the trap, you've not only set it off, you seem to have triggered some kind of deeper, more magical defense system. That's...really really not good. You can hear strange noises in the distance. That's probably worse."
If failure would contribute
literally nothing whatsoever to the experience of play other than delaying the party's next effort, what is the point of rolling? Like seriously. If literally nothing comes of failure--not even expending resources, genuinely actually
nothing happens--why should you roll? Save the rolling for when it's actually interesting to fail,
and interesting to succeed. Rolling to avoid trivial stupid failure like "you walked across the room wrong and flung yourself at the floor" isn't helpful, and there are a LOT of things I've seen GMs ask for rolls about that really should not have required anything of the kind.
