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

AlViking said:

I said I don't want to play a game that uses fail forward in the way you describe with a cost that is not directly caused by the failure. It's a preference, I don't care if anyone else shares that preference.

Click to expand...

But it is a cost directly caused by the failure. If you had successfully overcome the difficulty of the cliff, your friend would be alive (albeit perhaps on death's door, if you got a partial success; that'd depend on what the roll was and how the GM adjudicated it). Because you failed, your friend is dead when they very easily could have survived.

It's like a Superman story. Superman is not interesting if you ask, "Can he complete this single task?" Whatever the task is, the answer is almost surely "yes", unless there's Kryptonite involved, in which case it's almost surely "no". But when you introduce collateral damage and bystander complications, suddenly he becomes fascinating. Can he save everyone from this burning building? Maybe, maybe not! That's a lot of variables and a tight timetable. Can he stop the volcano, or at least delay it enough to permit and evacuation? Unclear! That's putting him up against a threat that he can't just punch into submission.

Overly simple, hard-binary failure/success is much more limited as a mechanical structure than you (or indeed many!) recognize.

hawkeyefan said:

It’s one thing to fail because you made a wrong decision or because luck wasn’t with you. It’s another to fail because of poor game design.

Not sure they were presented as such. But if you wanna defend crappy design, be my guest.

Click to expand...

I don't see it as necessarily being poor design, though.

When I design a dungeon-type adventure, unless I'm intentionally designing something more gonzo or "funhouse", I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever first built the place and think "What makes (or made, at the time) the most sense design-wise for the intended purpose of this complex?". And if, while standing in those shoes, I want there to be a hidden area within what I'm building then I'm going to make sure there's only one way in to that area and also make sure that said way in is as hard to find as I can manage, for someone who doesn't already know where it is.

From there, I think about what subsequent occupants (if any) there might have been and what they might have done to the place in terms of renovations, additions, destruction, and so forth; eventually leading up to the complex the PCs actually find and explore.

And so yes, in this design there's a chokepoint (a well-hidden and hard-to-open single entrance to a whole new area) and the very real risk of things being missed. Poor GAME design? Maybe, but I don't care much about that; I'm far more interested in designing something that makes in-fiction sense (i.e. what to me is good design), and it's on the explorers to make sure they take the time to gather information, explore everything, and still be prepared to miss bits of it.

EzekielRaiden said:

But it is a cost directly caused by the failure. If you had successfully overcome the difficulty of the cliff, your friend would be alive (albeit perhaps on death's door, if you got a partial success; that'd depend on what the roll was and how the GM adjudicated it). Because you failed, your friend is dead when they very easily could have survived.

It's like a Superman story. Superman is not interesting if you ask, "Can he complete this single task?" Whatever the task is, the answer is almost surely "yes", unless there's Kryptonite involved, in which case it's almost surely "no". But when you introduce collateral damage and bystander complications, suddenly he becomes fascinating. Can he save everyone from this burning building? Maybe, maybe not! That's a lot of variables and a tight timetable. Can he stop the volcano, or at least delay it enough to permit and evacuation? Unclear! That's putting him up against a threat that he can't just punch into submission.

Overly simple, hard-binary failure/success is much more limited as a mechanical structure than you (or indeed many!) recognize.

Click to expand...

The death would not be caused by the failure in a game I run. A one time or rare ticking clock runs out because you don't get there in time? Not my style but okay. The GM always throwing in this kind of stuff on a failure? Nope, not for me.

I don't really care if you don’t understand or accept that any more.

EzekielRaiden said:

Is it that fail forward doesn't work there?

Or is it that there are multiple ways to view failure even in that context, and thus it is only in the way you choose to run D&D that induces such an issue?

Because I know for a fact that plenty of D&D games use this concept quite effectively.

Click to expand...

Have you read, for example, 5e's skill system? Like many of it's predecessor's its focus is on specific task resolution. That does not lend itself well to fail-forward, as @Lanefan has been trying to explain, because the kinds of results you regard as failure are not part of the roll.

Faolyn said:

In DungeonWorld (which I haven't played), the thief has a move called Tricks of the Trade. On a 7-9 (partial success), the player gets to choose what happens--but they must pick from two of suspicion, danger, or cost. They don't get to say "nothing happens" because something happens.

Click to expand...

Even if-when 'nothing happens' clearly makes the most in-fiction sense?

Faolyn said:

So here we get (back) into trust. Do you trust your players to pick two appropriate penalties out of suspicion, danger, or cost? I would trust my players.

Click to expand...

Depends on the player.

It still, however, puts the players into a position of having to work against their characters rather than for them, where I'd rather the players focus on advocating for and inhabiting their characters and leave it to the DM to provide the headaches.

Faolyn said:

...that's rather my point. Have the players said they want nothing interesting to happen? Are they going out of their way to avoid conflict in favor of opening up tea shops?

Or do they go out to the dungeons and ruins and towns that are in need of help and do things?

Click to expand...

Both. They go to the dangerous places and at the same time they're free to do what they can to avoid or mitigate the dangers found there.

Faolyn said:

Why do they "have" to realize that? Why is it important for you to hammer that into their heads?

Click to expand...

Either the world is bigger than the characters or the characters are bigger than the world. The latter is the usual conceit of superhero media, and - WotC's best attempts notwithstanding - I don't want to see D&D as being or becoming a supers game.

And thus, without "hammer[ing] it into their heads", I want as an underlying foundation that the game world is bigger than any of its inhabitants

EzekielRaiden said:

Again: Why not? You're asserting this like it's a universal truth, something self-evident. It isn't. Not even in old-school D&D.

Click to expand...

Show me some proof please.

EzekielRaiden said:

I for bloody sure agree WAY WAY WAY WAY more than "well we say there's a style but really there's 7000 almost totally unique people who just happen to claim that there is a style in common between them"!

Click to expand...

Well good for you. Clearly the rest of us don't necessarily work that way.

EzekielRaiden said:

Okay.

How is that different from what I originally said?

Lanefan specifically said it is that the players WILL have to go through the haggle motions unless they explicitly say no.

Click to expand...

Not quite. More that they CAN go through the haggling process if they want to, and that sometimes (not always) doing so can make a surprising difference down the road.

EzekielRaiden said:

That was in response to my policy, which I was quite clear that if the players want to do it, sure, that's clearly indicating that it matters to them. But I'm not going to make them do it every single time unless-and-until they say no...each and every time.

Click to expand...

I think we're closer on this than it seems.

Faolyn said:

Rule of storytelling: Deus ex machina is frequently cheap and/or boring. If an NPC is going to bust them out, it should be a known individual who has both the reasons and means to do so, not a random person who just showed up to save the day.

Click to expand...

It may be the admiration, rather than the person, that is secret. Or, as in The Scarlet Citadel, the unexpected visitor may come to gloat rather than to help.

As I've already mentioned, LotR provides another version, with Frodo and Sam. And yet another, when Gandalf is rescued by Gwaihir.

In its various manifestations, this is a very common trope in the inspirational fiction for FRPGing. To me it makes little sense if a FRPG is designed so that it can't occur.

kayakingpoodle said:

There is a reason the phrase "Are you SURE you want to do that?" is a mantra in D&D.

DM control is as much about saving players from themselves as it is anything else.

Click to expand...

I'm not 100% sure if you're identifying "Are you SURE you want to do that?" as a manifestation of GM-driven play. I think it is, and so may be agreeing with you on that.