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I agree with their "it's often better". As opposed to always better. Sometimes the character does fail. But sometimes events conspire against them. Going back to Aedhros - his failed attempt at kidnapping is on him; the fact that harbour officials, guards etc keep harassing him, is the world...

Right. The "refutation" of fail forward by presenting examples of it being done badly - fully-staffed kitchens in the middle of the night; cooks introduced although all prior fiction suggests there is no cook in the house; etc - is bizarre.

If a player wants their PC to hunt, their PC can go hunting. What exactly are they doing? What's their intent? Then we set an obstacle and resolve it. If you aren't hunting, you won't be rolling your hunting skill. You'll be rolling whatever other skill maps to the task that you're attempting.

This is pretty different from my experience.

This last claim seems to me to be false. Or rather, to be true only if the GM is bad - that is, if in response to the info-gathering moves the GM says <this stuff>, and then when the time comes to follow through with a hard(er) move, the GM ignores all <this stuff> and instead introduces the...

This goes to @Campbell's point. Someone who doesn't like "fail forward" gives an example of clumsy GMing - narrating the cook in the kitchen with no foreshadowing/soft move/other rationale, and when it makes little sense due to it being the middle of the night - and this is supposed to show that...

Agreed. Upthread I think I posted this play example: The encounter with the harbour official is not an "obstacle" that Aedhros has to overcome in order to succeed at "an adventure". Nor is it a puzzle to be solved. It's not something on the way to the real point. It is the real point.

OK. So if the break-in is in the middle of the night when the house is quiet, why would the GM use a cook as the complication? As opposed to, say, a watchman? Three things here: (1) Why are you saying the GM is ignoring the failure? You say that the player is cognisant that the failure will...

What I replied to, about adventures, was this: And that characterisation is (in my experience) not accurate for Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel play is not about overcoming a series of obstacles in order to succeed at "an adventure". That is the "finish line" model I've referred to upthread, and...

I don't think anyone would! Because choices determined by someone other than the player would, of necessity, not be the player's.

"Official" where? It's not found in any rulebook I know of, but obviously I don't know every rulebook. All the rulebooks that I know provide examples and advice.

The answer to this is: the dice roll is a thing that happens at the table. It's purpose is to determine whether or not the attempt to pick the lock goes well. If the roll fails, the attempt does not go well. And the GM's job is to explain what that not going well looks like. One way for breaking...

Because the "quantum" label is being applied to a technique. But you refer to the thief - a character in the fiction - as the observer. In the fiction, the cook is doing whatever the cook is doing, where ever the cook happens to be. The moment and manner of authorship - the thing that happens...

I've provided many examples. Most are from actual play, but I posted an imagined one involving a cook:

As I've already posted, there are ways for a choice to matter other than the sorts of instrumental ones you seem to be foregrounding. And even within the domain of the instrumental, there are ways for choices to matter: different options may enliven different skill rolls, and may thus affect...

People like having bigger numbers? They like the feel of their PC being more powerful/competent? The desire to advance one's PC is fairly widespread among RPGers. BW doesn't use random PC gen. It's a type of intricate, multi-faceted points-buy, filtered through a lifepath system. So I could...

This is not accurate. Or, rather, it is a taking of a term coined to describe a technique for a complete different type of RPGing, and then applying it to railroad-y play. In the RPGs I'm familiar with that make the exclusion of "nothing happens" an important part of play - Burning Wheel...

This "fixed world" game is in my view a very distinctive thing: In my experience, which when it comes to random encounters is based on the B/X and AD&D rulebooks, wandering monsters tend to be regarded as coming from what is - for game play purposes - an endless supply of such beings.

It would have been great if an experienced Burning Wheel GM had been posting for the past many pages that "fail forward" is a label for resolution where "nothing happens" is not an option . . . Where Daggerheart is incomplete is that it misses the other aspect of "fail forward"/"no whiffing"...

This seems to confuse an imaginary person - the thief - with a real world social event - the conversation and rolling of dice at the table.