Uh...er...before I jump in on this one you'll have to redefine what this is about, I'm afraid, as I've lost the topic somewhere.
Is it acceptable for the GM to forbid some outcomes and permit other outcomes, because the forbidden outcomes would be bad for the campaign in some way (e.g., "the campaign just ends in a really dull and disappointing way"), while the permitted outcomes would avoid whatever is bad about the bad outcomes?
Well, yes it is; if the die roll says 'fail' and the DM decides it'll be something else instead then it's fiat all day long.
Nope! Because,
as I have now told you at least three times, "fail forward" DOESN'T MEAN YOU SUCCEED.
Do I need to put it in thousand-foot-tall neon letters? I'm getting extremely frustrated here, because I know I've said this to you several times over, and you keep saying stuff like this.
It has fail in the name but not always in the outcome.
Proper application of fail forward should always have failure in the outcome. Period.
If you're trying to climb a wall where success means you reach the top and failure means you don't then by both RAW and RAI a fail roll has to mean, regardless of anything else, that you don't reach the top.
Only if you define failure as
that one circumstance and nothing else ever, forever. That's the problem here. You are
rigidly defining one and only one consequence as what "failure" means, and excluding any other possibility that
could still be failure, but not that SPECIFIC failure.
Fail-forward advocates would have it that on failure you might indeed reach the top...which immediately turns what should be a failure, based on the roll, into a success. And that ain't right.
Consider: You are climbing a rocky cliff face in order to save your friend. You fail the roll. The GM says, "You reach the top...and find the corpse of your friend, dead long enough that rigor mortis has set in."
Is that not a failure? I don't see how one can parse that as anything
but a failure. It's just not a failure
in the one narrowly-defined sense of "you fell off the cliff face". It accepts a broader range of results that are still, objectively, failures. The only difference is that the roll is not the singular narrowly-defined condition, "Did you climb this cliff face, yes/no?" It is "Did you succeed at your goal?" The goal was to save the friend--and that failed.
It's worth noting here, Dungeon World (which is my PbtA game of experience; I know most others work mostly the same) does not have a "Climb" roll. If a character tries to climb a sheer cliff face, that would be a Defy Danger roll. You are acting despite an imminent threat. In this case, you'd be defying the danger of the wall, in order to
do something. What is that something? That is where the failure lies. If you roll 6-or-less total on your check (2d6+MOD), then you failed. In this case, the danger of the cliff overpowered you; sure, you
got to the top, but the danger meant you could not reach your goal, namely, saving your friend's life. Now they're dead, and that isn't going to just go away. Maybe you can fix it, maybe you can't. That's why we play to find out what happens.
Sorry, but in this case the man of straw is merely an illusion. Roll to disbelieve.
Well, I rolled and you got a 2 on the d20. (I actually
did roll, in the roller bot I use for my Dungeon World game; I can get a screenshot if you care. Roll was made at 12:52 AM Pacific time, with the description "DC 16 Illusion" for fluff. I gave you a +2 modifier for presumed Wisdom bonus.) So I'm afraid you can't disbelieve this illusion!
More seriously, I've made the argument above.
Ideally, yes it does. Practicality, unfortunately, then rears its ugly head and says we can only play through bits of it.
Well then,
@SableWyvern, I think I've made my point. There is in fact at least one person in this thread who
would do that, if time allowed. Likewise, the above example of the GM admitting a mistake and correcting it is something Lanefan would never do.
