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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8649235" data-attributes="member: 6790260">What "something else"? How do they know? What gives them the impulse to try? Why didn't they try those other things first, rather than the thing that failed? Why is it that their failure didn't change ANYTHING WHATSOEVER about the situation--unless it did, in fact, change the situation somehow?The answers to these questions are the very process of making it NOT "you literally just fail and nothing else happens." If the situation legitimately changed, it's not zero consequence failure. If there is time pressure, it's more than literally exclusively "you just fail and nothing happens."Evidence suggests this advice, while good, is significantly harder to actually employ than you're accounting for.I mean, in the very simple case, what if you prepare four methods of solving the problem, but the players completely don't even notice the first method, accidentally lock themselves out of the second method, and then roll poorly on both of the other two? This is hardly an unlikely sequence of events, especially for any game that runs long enough. This is why "fail forward" exists. It emphasizes that failure still happens and can still be costly, without permitting dead end situations whether through DM error by making a single point of failure, or by bad luck resulting in all roads being closed off or failing to pay off.Oofta replied by saying he likes failure to happen sometimes ("I don't want to always succeed"); this statement is only meaningful if it is understood to be rebutting a claim that tasks should always succeed. But since I was responding to your claim that bare, unadorned, doesn't-change-the-situation failure is useful, and NOT saying that all possible forms of failure are a problem, the only possible way one could get my argument to mean "players should not fail" is to presume that bare, unadorned, doesn't-change-the-situation failure is the ONLY form of failure.Hence my question: why is that the only form failure is permitted to take? I did not, in any way, at any point, imply or even vaguely suggest that players should always succeed at everything forever. I am solely taking aim at doesn't-change-the-situation failure.Nothing whatsoever in my post indicated any of this, so I am deeply confused why you would respond as though it did if you were not, as noted above, assuming this. What gave you even the slightest hint of "unrealistic safety bumpers"?Bare, unadorned, doesn't-change-the-situation failure IS boring. Period. Even in your own example you have given dramatically more than this: failure has the cost of fighting, or delaying, which may be a serious cost indeed.</blockquote>

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