Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8136594" data-attributes="member: 5142">I will admit that I find this reaction to the game perplexing. IME, it's an atypical one as I don't think that I've ever heard people read the PbtA family of games and say "everything was so tightly constrained" when it comes to world interaction, as the game lives and dies by the principle [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] outlines ("the fiction must flow from the fiction") as well as "say yes or roll the dice." That said, I could see from this how you may prefer games like 3e and/or PF2, where action outcomes are more delineated for each skill or action. Though in the case of PF2, it has introduced critical failure, failure, success, and critical success to the mix of outcomes for even things like spells and skills. I think a lot of the desire or motivation for adding complicated success to increasingly more games is not to create "partial failure," but, rather, to add "at least some success." I will agree that sometimes one of the more difficult aspects when GMing PbtA comes from understanding the difference between a soft move and a hard move and understanding what GM responses (even if they flow from the fiction) are appropriate to each type of move. If a person doesn't have a solid grasp on those principles or rules, then it can potentially make 7-9 seem more like failure than is intended, hence (I suspect) your feeling of unpredictability with outcomes. Not to invalidate your tastes, but I haven't really experienced the feeling of "partial failure" as a player when dealing with complicated success games. In fact, a lot of the fun for me as a player comes from these moments of complicated success. For example, if I try climbing a wall in some games like D&D, my only options are often make it fully or fail to climb. But complicated successes add twists to the outcome, sometimes with decisions to make. I can make it up the wall, but there may be a cost: e.g., I alert the guards below or the guards are waiting for me at the top. Or maybe I drop my family heirloom or weapon while climbing. Or maybe I have to make a choice: do I make it up stealthily but lose the gold I'm stealing or do I keep the gold but alert the guards? Or even do I try saving my family heirloom or the gold? You may view this as a "partial failure," but to me it's a success. I feel successful as I ultimately get what I wanted from the action: i.e., I make it up the wall. I may not make it up the wall smoothly or with the gold, but I do successfully climb the wall. But complications and costs for success drive the narrative forward for me as a player in new and interesting ways outside of binary success and failure states. It results in new fictional situations that my character has to deal with, and that's fun for me. Hmmm...I don't think it's that far removed, for example, from the relatively common use of a critical fumble in d20 games. It's often a point where you don't know what the outcome will be or how the GM will adjudicate it. And one of the oft floated criticisms of critical fumbles is that they often don't honor the competency of the PCs or humiliate them in some way. IME, however, soft/hard moves triggered by failures and complicated success in PbtA/FitD/Fate games more frequently flow from the fiction than critical fumbles and the like in D&D. Again, all IME. If I am rushing into battle with goblins triggering Hack and Slash and I get a 7-9 success, then I likely know what some of the potential outcomes could be: e.g., I take damage from the goblins in the exchange, I get surrounded by goblins, or maybe running into the goblins now leaves my young ward defenseless. The outcomes are fiction-bound. I honor how you may see the checks as "partially blind," but I see the checks as mostly transparent, as I know each and every time I pick up the dice that I achieve full success on a 10+, trigger a soft move or complicated success on 7-9, and that I trigger a hard move on 1-6. I often have played "complicated success" games where the stakes are stated forthright so you know what the potential outcomes before you roll, but I also think that clear stakes are an important part of making rolls. Games like Fate and Cortex often operate by the principle of "don't roll unless there are interesting positive AND negative consequences." Or don't roll unless something is at stake. But this is basically another way of saying "say yes or roll the dice."</blockquote>

Verification