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Im not telling you you're doing it wrong, I'm saying that every game I'm personally aware of which bakes fail-forward into its design and advice (most recently Daggerheart) tells you to be open and clear of the stakes of a roll. To incorporate it into D20 systems (see: Errant), you need to be...

Well, yes. I'm not talking about playing OSR or anything in its realm where "the solving of problems via player skill" is a significant question/priority. If that's what you want, you don't want fail forward play - I'm pretty we've said that a billion times. That doesnt change that the...

I just recently re-read the first three books of the Nightrunner Series, every dang roguish moment either happens as narration (he carefully pried the window open and listened for a bit), or has stakes and a conflict and escalation.

No, it's about what failure means for play. My players fail to get their full intent all the time. We had a crap ton of 6-s rolled last Monday. What we show is that a) you're not failing because you do something a competent person in that situation wouldn't do for laughs, b) that failure doesnt...

Yeah, I'm not sure that BW seems to do this as much as TB2 (or at least MBC's TB2?)? But it's a preference of play and how the GM frames scenes and makes moves as things snowball, along with some innate design choices that many games have moved away from in that sphere since to provide a...

Oh, loss is fascinating. That's totally different then whiffing on a task and then standing around looking at each other.

It's table culture priorities, right? Like we have games now that make PC Death an inherently consent-based mechanic (and I say "now" when I'm pretty sure @pemerton has pointed at some pretty old games that did that as well, as does AW). Like pretty much everything @Lanefan posts about their...

Failing a dice roll doesn’t teach anything. If you say “it’s cool that TTRPG can teach or enhance lateral thinking” I’m with you. If you want to say they can do all sorts of cool stuff around collaboration and imagination, totally. There’s burgeoning fields of TTTRPG as therapeutic tools, one...

Hey, I don’t spend 3 sessions with my players bashing their heads against a puzzle ;). And again, you’re doing the least interesting or charitable interpretation. You’ve been told multiple times that a competent character will not be facing a locked door in a vacuum and told “roll or fail.” If...

Sure, but by and large this sort of play is being done as a short lark, in games designed for it as the premise (see: Blades), or by players that have largely been pushed out of many spaces because they’re objectionable in many ways. Edit: The excellent book A Theory of Fun talks quite a bit...

Not true. Cooperative games exist. TTRPGs are largely held to be an excellent example of those. In fact, pretty much every TTRPG rule book I’ve read over the last decade has said it’s not a game where you have winners and losers.

I think the most interesting game for me here is Errant, which draws a fun distinction between Rules and Procedures: "Errant is rules light, procedures heavy...procedures are not rules, but neither are they vague, general guidance. They provide a framework to structure the game, and can be...

I don’t see it used much any more beyond people being dismissive, and I think as this thread has demonstrated in incredible detail that categorizing games is somewhat less useful then play or what we’re seeking to do. @Micah Sweet is looking to play a game focused largely on simulating a...

You’re picking a concept of game-running apart by relying on an absurdist and constructed example. We’ve said many times that people who actually run games this way would simply not set up the fiction so the scene hits a locked door in a vacuum. That’s already boring to start, before we get to...

“Storygames” is terrible and doesn’t say anything and is implicitly dismissive in the way “hardcore gamers” derided video games like Gone Home as “walking simulators.”

Look, if you have to start your post out with “I mean nothing insulting with what I’m about to say” you probably could’ve done something different. He could’ve left it at “childhood make believe” instead of picking a deliberately provocative way to word things as seemed to be common in that...

Some expanded thoughts on stuff: First: One thing that's kinda interesting to me is that from my little perspective over here a lot of the arguing respectful discussion in this thread is between conservatives of very different preferences around styles and systems of play. For instance, BW and...

More thoughts later, but DH expects that the characters are “protagonist-heroes in a story.”

Right, I think this sort of thing only really matters if your focus is on maintaining a specific narrative thread. There's also lots of ways to gracefully give the players a couple of immediate potential nudges forward on a failure that aren't quite "you immediately get something" but more "hey...

@pemerton just to share Daggerheart's specific guidance for your note, it calls the "narrating failure as your PC sucking ass" out under the Pitfalls to Avoid: Undermining the Heroes section: (it does also note that hey, maybe you're doing a comedic tone and the character tripping over their...