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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8135018" data-attributes="member: 29398">I earnestly hope you'll also agree with this equal and opposite variant: the GM is not just free to change the fiction in a way that negates the players' failures. If yes, then alert the media! We've found common ground: the GM can't arbitrarily change stuff to negate what the players/PCs did, for good or bad.Yet the whole idea of 'fail-forward' seems to be based on exactly this concept: changing or massaging the fiction such that failures aren't really failures.  How do you square that?This is a complete red herring.  Everything I posted assumed an ongoing campaign, which I thought would go wihtout saying.Unless the players/PCs have reason to suspect an illusion or deception, asking "What here is not what it appears to be?" sounds like someone fishing for adventure hooks. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I probably just use a different series of not-necessarily-hardcoded mechanics to get to a similar type of result here.I'd likely never use the brother-in-law one as I'm not too fond of dragging PCs' families into things unless the player puts them there first.The truncheon example: I might arrive at the same result where, after the PC one-shots the guard, I think to myself - and often ask myself out loud so the players know what I'm up to - "Did anything go wrong with that?"*, particularly if stealth is intended. Either I or the player roll some dice and on a poor roll then maybe the truncheon does clatter down some stairs or the guard makes some noise as he crumples or someone nearby saw/heard something and raises a shout or whatever. But more often we'll be covering this sort of thing in the moment: roll to hit, roll damage, and roll to see how quiet you kept things.* - and if I can't quickly think of anything that could have gone wrong, I skip this step. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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