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The number on the die is there specifically to inform the narrative result, isn't it? Yeah, another hideous mechanic that needs to die in a very hot fire and for the same reason: fail = fail.

Yep, and the story is still chuggin' along. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sometimes you succeed and get closer to (or even achieve) your goal, other times you fail and get pushed away from it. Snakes and ladders loses much of its point if you take away the snakes.

As long as the door remains locked on a 'fail' roll, it matters little to me what else might come of it. Because there is one very obvious and always-present consequence of failure, namely that you can't get through the locked door to whatever it is you want to get to on the other side.

The bits I bolded are to me "fail backward" rather than "fail forward". The way I see it, forward means you get closer to your goal, backward means you end up farther from it; and the story is going to continue anyway even if neither is the case and nothing happens.

In my case, that's quite intentional; often for these sort of things it's not a question of full success (though full success can still sometimes happen if you're lucky) but one of how far you get before things go sideways and your careful plan goes out the window.

Success with complications first requires a 'success' to be rolled on the die. To get what you're after you'd have to lower the DC for success by the amount you want the "success with complications" bracket to cover. It's the arbitrary over-ruling of the root success-fail aspect of the roll...

In 5e, true. But not in every edition.

Sure, and if that's the case then it'd be noted on the map or present in the GM's head as a possible complication. Many GMs might not necessarily think of this when making things up on the fly, however, even though it's perfectly plausible based on our own reality. That said, I'd see dealing...

Oh, I dunno - random NPCs as collateral damage matter too, especially when the PCs (rightly or wrongly) then get billed for a boatload of weregild for their deaths.

The difference is clear as day, and has nothing to do with how the cook was created or placed there: In a trad game, in order to meet the cook at all the character would have had to succeed on the pick-locks attempt. Otherwise the character wouldn't be in the kitchen, because the door is still...

IMO, no, if entry is to be made via picking the lock - a task at which you've just failed and thus the lock is not picked. A bad failure might be that you fail to pick the lock AND are noticed or something else goes adrift, situationally dependent. But if the tolls check fails then the lock is...

That's where I like to use an informal sliding scale on rolls like this. Roll a 20 (or a 1 if using roll-under) and you nailed all four of those without any trouble. Make the success by the bare minimum and sure, the door's unlocked but it maybe took some time or made some noise or whatever -...

Most of the time that'd be too much telegraphing for me. They did some experimentation with summoned monsters and learned some stuff, then did some personal trial and error and learned some more (for better and worse), then got out of there with the gem and destroyed it. One of the PCs had met...

Meanwhile everyone in the house is now wide awake listening to these guys have a long conversation in the garden...

There's some who would think this was a hella cool way for their character to die (and who might also reference Moby Dick). To some extent that's going to happen regardless. If the module I'm running says the room they're about to enter is a mage's lab with the mage in it, the story I can...

To the bolded: so in DW a character can never outright fail, or fail backwards, at an attempted task? Yeah, that's a bit much.

If the in-fiction characters aren't managing risk and avoiding obstacles when-where they reasonably can, that doesn't say much for their collective wisdom. :)

Indeed, but ideally they're not quantum: there's an in-fiction reason those wanderers are there and (unless there's a gate or spawner somewhere) in theory there should be a finite number of them after which there will be no more. I ran a dungeon recently that had Mind Flayers (infrequent) and...

Unless your characters all come with built-in featherfall I'd think there's often going to be a negative consequence of failing a climb, and it'll hurt. :)

Why can't it more consistently be "fail backward", though? When breaking into a kitchen and failing the roll, why can't the narration be that a previously undetected alarm goes off, or that an unexpected electrical trap in the lock shocks the thief for [a bunch of damage, however the system...