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

Micah Sweet said:

All I can say is that I've never experienced it, and it feels like the sort of problem you'd have if following a particular story is important to your group.

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And I explained why it can happen with a simulationist agenda just as easily. What do you want, Micah?

SableWyvern said:

This is where we diverged.

Either I'm running a game where inexperienced adventurers are expected to be able to handle long distance journeys into the wilderness, or I'm not.

If I am, then I can't forsee a sequence of events that will create such a dire situation. If a lost map and some bad weather are enough to ruin them, then the game isn't one where this type of expedition is a safe option.

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But again, it only became an unsafe option because of one specific event that, one way or the other, the GM introduced.

SableWyvern said:

And if it's not a safe option, this should be clear to the players. Heading into the wilderness under such circumstances should occur either with the correct skills and preparation or with a readiness for death and failure.

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"Should" is doing the heavy lifting here.

SableWyvern said:

To me, your scenario presents a situation where no one has put any thought into consequences. While I accept it's possible, I see it as a failure of design and/or communication by the GM. I do not see this as something that should be treated as an expected outcome.

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The fact its a failure of process somewhere was my whole point. Single points of failure always are. But they still happen.

Micah Sweet said:

Then fail-forward doesn't work in many traditional games where rolls often determine much more specific things than in Dungeon World. Your definition of failure works best if the roll is much more general than is usually the case in, for example, D&D.

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IMO. Fail forward usually invalidates some premises of traditional play.

Things like:

• Success is completing the task not some extraneous intent. Example: you open the chest but don't find the incriminating evidence you intended to find.
• Complications happen independently of your attempt to open the chest. Example: As you open the chest the guards come around the corner. (The guards would have came around whether you had opened the chest or just waited in the room instead of opening the chest).
• Etc.

SableWyvern said:

But I genuinely struggle to see how a "no way out, except based on this single binary roll" situation can just sneak up on everyone with no meaningful opportunity to prevent it by any of the participants -- it it happens, it's something everyone has embraced and accepted as an outcome they're willing to live with.

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Because these cases are rarely about things like outdoor survival rolls. They're usually more about things like the Very Important Thing is in a secret compartment, behind a locked door, or requires a riddle to be answered, requiring a single roll or very small number of rolls, and getting past it is either impossible for one reason or another or requires multiple sessions of play to do so.

Thomas Shey said:

And I explained why it can happen with a simulationist agenda just as easily. What do you want, Micah?

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I'm sure you're right for some folks, but it is outside of my experience.

SableWyvern said:

Well, yes. This is why I was specifically commenting about how the system made me feel, not how well it objectively simulates the real world (which I note you did acknowledge; I'm not suggesting you're now arguing I did otherwise).

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Yeah, I was just pointing out that “that’s not the way the real world works” is true of every RPG.

Because often in these conversations and comparisons, that idea gets lost and what people feel makes sense starts being presented as what makes sense objectively.

Not saying you did this here, just that it often happens.

Maxperson said:

Yes and no. Yes they encounter kings, monsters, and situations of note at FAR greater rates than the average Joe. In that regard chance is skewed tremendously. However, that doesn't mean that they don't haggle with merchants, walk for weeks down roads with no interesting encounters, etc. It far from ALL interesting things.

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Skipping past those things doesn’t mean they don’t “happen”, either. It just means we don’t focus on them during table time.

Maxperson said:

That style of play isn't for everyone and some just want to skip those parts, because they find them boring. So everything that happens in the game is interesting in some way. Even for adventurers that's far more than chance would dictate in a game like D&D.

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I don’t see how this makes any sense. Let’s say you run a game and spend time on those bits… the haggling and the travel and so on… and I run the same game, but we elide those bits.

The same events have happened for both groups of PCs. There’s no case of “more coincidence” for one over the other.

Where more interesting things are happening is at the table, not in the game world.

hawkeyefan said:

Yeah, I was just pointing out that “that’s not the way the real world works” is true of every RPG.

Because often in these conversations and comparisons, that idea gets lost and what people feel makes sense starts being presented as what makes sense objectively.

Not saying you did this here, just that it often happens.



Skipping past those things doesn’t mean they don’t “happen”, either. It just means we don’t focus on them during table time.



I don’t see how this makes any sense. Let’s say you run a game and spend time on those bits… the haggling and the travel and so on… and I run the same game, but we elide those bits.

The same events have happened for both groups of PCs. There’s no case of “more coincidence” for one over the other.

Where more interesting things are happening is at the table, not in the game world.

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For me it's about general approach. Nobody thinks D&D (or any other RPG that I know of) is a particularly good simulation of the real world, even if you assume magic and magical creatures.

An example of this is failing the roll to climb a cliff. In typical D&D, you just fail to climb the cliff. The only negative impact is that you didn't get to the top of the cliff and you may have taken damage when you fall. The consequence of your failure is similar to what would happen in the real world. In a fail-forward game you climb the cliff and find your dead friend. There was correlation between the failed roll and finding a corpse, but there was no causation, you also somehow still managed to climb the cliff even though you failed your roll that simulates the attempt.

I want a game where cause and effect are linked in fiction, not just correlation.

Micah Sweet said:

I'm sure you're right for some folks, but it is outside of my experience.

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Well, that's the gig; given I first saw this happen in a traditional dungeon decades ago, it was going to be hard for me to buy into "Only an issue when you're trying to tell a story". If you've managed to never have it come up, its because you've had some combination of being lucky and always thinking through what happens if the obvious method doesn't work.

AlViking said:

For me it's about general approach. Nobody thinks D&D (or any other RPG that I know of) is a particularly good simulation of the real world, even if you assume magic and magical creatures.

An example of this is failing the roll to climb a cliff. In typical D&D, you just fail to climb the cliff. The only negative impact is that you didn't get to the top of the cliff and you may have taken damage when you fall. The consequence of your failure is similar to what would happen in the real world. In a fail-forward game you climb the cliff and find your dead friend. There was correlation between the failed roll and finding a corpse, but there was no causation, you also somehow still managed to climb the cliff even though you failed your roll that simulates the attempt.

I want a game where cause and effect are linked in fiction, not just correlation.

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I don’t know if that’s accurate.

What if the low climb roll indicated that it took you a really ling time to climb the cliff… and because of that, your friend was killed?

There’s no reason that what happens in fail forward needs to be totally separated from the fiction. Most of the examples that suggest so seem to be coming from folks who oppose the idea… so I’m not sure if they’re doing so out of bias or some misunderstanding of how it can work or what. But it seems inaccurate to me.

Thomas Shey said:

Well, that's the gig; given I first saw this happen in a traditional dungeon decades ago, it was going to be hard for me to buy into "Only an issue when you're trying to tell a story". If you've managed to never have it come up, its because you've had some combination of being lucky and always thinking through what happens if the obvious method doesn't work.

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I had it happen to me, too… plenty of times. Mostly years ago when all the play I was taking part in would be called “trad”.

I think it’s far more likely or common in location based scenarios. The classic example is the secret door that’s missed which prevents the group from actually completing the “adventure”… they don’t find the treasure or the monster they were sent to slay or what have you.

I think there was more of a predisposition back then to approach each module as a distinct unit of play, and you wouldn’t proceed to the next one until you’d “beaten” the current one.

These days such a scenario is more likely to be part of a sandbox where the dissatisfaction of failing to “complete” the adventure is just something to deal with, and the players are expected to move on to something else.

Either way, it’s a recipe for dissatisfaction and, in my opinion, an example of poor design.