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I'm not sure why it was used as an example in the linked article. I think it's a terrible example because it lacks the greater context that these techniques require to be understood. I think there's a desire to analyze the difference on the task level, but the issue with that is that these...

People are responding as if the people who are taking exception to the fail forward example are trying to sell them on fail forward as technique, rather than show why we view the example as reductive analysis of other people's play. The cook example is representative of poor use of fail forward...

The point of "make it some other complication" isn't trying to sell you on it. It's to address the faulty way the technique is being described. Acting like any of this is trying to sell anyone on anything in this thread is missing the point from my perspective.

That's fine. They don't have to. I'm not asking them to. I'm asking you and others to either present other styles of play in an accurate way that shows all the nuances of technique involved or not to present examples. The point isn't about what you and others want. It's about the reductive way...

If your issue is that fail forward means we're no longer in task resolution / sim mode, cool. You do you. An example of what fail forwards looks like is not needed to make that point. But if your issue/point is that fail forward means the results will lead to inconsistent or implausible fiction...

Kind of amazing how an example designed to make fail forward look ridiculous makes it look ridiculous. A much more artful version of the scene frame that happens on failure would be the cook coming in from a different room, looking around because of the noise the PC was making picking the lock...

Regardless of play techniques the GM is determining it. The question is based on what principles, priorities and constraints.

This all day. My favorite traditional games are ones like Chronicles of Darkness and Achtung Cthulhu! where you pretty much start out topped out the stuff you are specialized in and maybe get slighter better at this thing or that thing, but what you can do is pretty much what you can do from the...

So, the way I tend to view the listed GM Moves in any given game is that these are the things that you explicitly have the authority to do and also a list of the sort of things that you should be doing for the most part. But these lists are incredibly open-ended and usually if your reaction to a...

I think it's a huge mistake to cast GM Moves as just what GMs do. I know that a lot of us kind of intuitively picked up scene framing and so it seems like that's what GMing just is, but it's just one way to approach roleplaying games. Especially when it comes to moves like separate them that are...

Rand al'Thor and Luke Skywalker are just about the worst zero to hero examples one could come up with. They are good at just about everything they try, have special magic juju, come from great lineages even if they do not know them and are pretty much the embodiment of chosen by destiny tropes.

As a player and GM, I'm much more partial to the latter, largely because I have experienced so many times where we play to get to the experience we actually want and never quite get there. Easier to just start where we really want to get to.

Any game, wherever it's discussed, ought to be discussed within the context of its own design. Taking out pieces of a game design and analyzing them within the context of other structures of play will never bring understanding. Understanding starts with empathy, stepping into the mentality and...

I wanted to take a moment to show why it's important to look things through the prism of a game's intended GM and player roles when looking at mechanics. A lot of commentary gives mechanics like basic moves, or a failed dice roll is causing a particular thing in the fiction, but these mechanics...

No one is trying to get you or anyone else to change their preferences. We just want you to not be so careless in how describe play you do not care for because it presents a faulty impression of how it actually works in practice. Because as minority voices in the hobby it is already challenging...

When talking about fiction-first games the fiction refers to the shared/established fictional situation the table has agreed upon. It does not include the conceptions that the GM and other players might have about the setting or their characters. Because those conceptions are not meant to be...

Perhaps you could keep it to the actual principles involved, rather than providing play examples that do a poor job of reflecting the actual nuances of other playstyles. Because it's not about what you do or do not like, but accurately portraying the things work when people have a firm handle on...

Why are we assuming the GM has not put any work into establishing stakes here? That they have telegraphed no dangers? Because if it's the case that they have not then they are making novice mistakes for any game that involves these sorts of techniques. If this is listed as an example than it is...

How exceptional the characters are compared to the general population will vary from game to game, but I generally characters to be capable (but not too capable) in comparison to the situation the game focuses on. What I do not generally like is dramatic shifts in character capability over the...

It's a skill that needs to be developed and you are basically starting at square one as a GM. Experience running more conventional games will get in the way more often than it helps (in my personal experience). You would likely still not enjoy playing, but there is a tremendous difference...