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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5656188" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think in the great majority of cases you can stick with the N success before 3 fails basic structure, but sometimes you'll elaborate on that substantially or subvert it in some fashion. I would just say that 3 failures should indicate a narrative path that leads to failure. People usually seem to grapple with the actual SC system's evil shadow twin, the 'pile of rolls system', which is a sort of totally degenerated SC where you just roll checks until you pile up what you need or fail with no real narrative structure and thus usually no real rationale for what happens. In a few fairly trivial SCs you can do that and it works OK, but it isn't really the way you would want to run most SCs.When the SC has a narrative and the PCs hit that third failure it would be narratively explained as an end-point of the challenge. If a player has some great idea for salvaging the situation then it could be handled as a check to erase a failure or it could simply be something that happens beyond the scope of the SC. In the later case the party is presumably suffering failure consequences, but they could mitigate them if their plan is good enough. That might effectively turn failure into success, or at least 'not failure'. I think the thing is many people somehow expect a system that provides a detailed process for things outside of combat, but there is just never going to be such a thing in reality as there are too many radically different 'out of combat' things. You could build a number of different systems if you can identify classes of challenges that meaningfully use the same rules. OTOH these can turn into straightjackets too, and probably won't cover all cases adequately. SC was just an attempt to say "OK, here are a few things that can be reused in a lot of situations" It won't do everything, but it also won't get in the way much because you can just change any part of it as you see fit and not have to feel like "why am I not using the social combat system here." or somesuch.</blockquote>

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