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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8836477" data-attributes="member: 29398">There's a secondary question underlying all this around types and degrees of fail-state consequences.This is important because, unless the challenges are illusory and the PCs are in fact always going to win no matter what, sooner or later they're gonna fail.  That failure can be individual, or as a group, whatever, but it will happen.So, fail-state consequences it is.There's two broad types, I think, which I'll label as "mechanical" and "narrative" for lack of better terms.  I'm only looking at major consequences here; minor ones such as failing to climb a wall and falling to the bottom are, well, minor.Mechanical consequences are those that directly and (almost always) immediately impact a character's (or, much less often, a party's) mechanics and abilities.  Death, level drain, sensory loss (blindness, deafness, etc.), mobility loss (paralysis, slow, etc.), stat loss, item or magic loss - all of these are mechanical consequences; all featured in older editions, but 5e has either dropped or moved well away from nearly all of them except death.Narrative consequences are those that affect the ongoing story, either now or later.  Their effect isn't always immediate and-or obvious, and if not immediate it's on the DM to ensure they rear their heads at the appropriate moment(s) down the road.  Sometimes both the failure and (some of) the consequences are clear - we fail to rescue the kidnapped prince thus no reward for us and the royal family's gonna be mad - while other times it's not - the guard gate is a spy for the local Thieves' guild and unknown to us he's just put us on their 'marks' list.The beauties of mechanical consequences for me are their a) immediacy, b) clarity, and c) non-negotiability; by the last I mean what happens happens and neither the player nor the DM can legitimately change the result.  Further, mechanical consequences can also lead to narrative consequences, where the reverse is rarely the case (e.g. having a vital-to-story item get destroyed or lost both deprives the PCs of the item's usefulness now and means there's gonna be a narrative consequence later when they realize they need it)Narrative consequences - particularly delayed ones - can IME put much more load on the DM, both to remember to introduce them when appropriate and to somehow ensure their effect doesn't get watered down or overly mitigated in the meantime, even if unintentionally.  For example, the gate guard's consequence will be much less if the PCs don't stay in town or (and I've done this in the past!) the DM forgets to have the local Thieves try to rob the PCs that night!</blockquote>

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