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I love how Stonetop’s end of session bakes in this emphasis on relationships, it’s so fun to pause and reflect - and it means you should be always trying to form new or change your existing ones and really capture that. Hx and Strings do a great job of representing the same mechanically as...

Stonetop is pretty straightforwardly designed to be setting/exploration based narrativist play, which makes sense based on its 4e->DW roots with the idea of the Town itself being a major focus of play inspired from the dropped “Storming the Wizard’s Tower” game from the Bakers.

I mean, the fiction changed on each failure (the mirror attacks), they use the mechanics to reset and make choices, and you had a robust metachannel open. Sounds pretty solid and fail-forward to me :P. (this is partially a joke)

Most of the time when we attempt something IRL that carries risk, we know what the risks are at least to a general level. If you go driving and crash, you knew that crashing was on the table (I hope). If you're climbing a climbing wall beyond your skill, you know you might stall out and have to...

sounds like a lesser success/reduced effect to me. In fact a core example in blades (or scum and villainy or both?) is not being able to make it all the way across a guarded courtyard in a single sneaky prowl. A think I like about FITD games is you can make that an outcome, and then ask the...

It's far more implied in AW (eg: talking about asking questions and building on them, that's not 1st person answers a lot of the time, the moves that are full of meta-channel stuff like the "Read A...", talking about turning questions back onto the group at large, etc); but most newer games are...

PBTAs, FITD, Daggerheart, etc all advise the creation and maintenance of a "metachannel" at all times during play - rising and falling in and out of character to discuss procedures, check in on each other, validate the fiction, talk through framing, before falling back down into character view...

"Optimizing the fiction" to shape the outcome range is definitely part of what I see as fiction-first gameplay, for the games that bring that sort of thing in. Blades codifies this well in the Position conversation. But I dont think you ever intentionally and consistently hit the sort of "ok...

I'm simply not old enough to know about any of the early days of the hobby, but I definitely see this coming up the most as a complaint with regards to modules these days. Eg: grumpy posts on r/DMA about "my player read the module and is now complaining that Im not running it as written / knows...

I kinda misunderstood your previous post - I was agreeing with the idea that players not expecting / knowing of objective DCs for a hard skill system isn’t that inconceivable.

I mean a) you're encouraged to figure out ways to get Advantage bestowed by the GM on stuff, b) the DCs in pretty much every published adventure bear no relationship to the iterate-by-5s stuff in the DMG, and c) almost no DMs are open about the DCs of things. How would a player have any idea...

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...