D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[Charlaquin]

And, often, to ensure spotlight sharing: ‘what do you, specific character, do about’...

Yeah, asking a specific player instead of asking the group is good policy for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately in my regular group, three out of my five players have pretty severe social anxiety, so singling them out tends to make them shut down. The other two are a professional actor and his wife who also has a lot of stage experience, so my group dynamic is pretty different than most, where the spotlight stays mostly on two players except when one of the other three indicates that they would like to be in it for a bit. It’s usually brief but always worthwhile.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I’m up for helping

The other resource I would love is the "Goal and Approach 'Cyclopedia of Tricks, Traps, and Secret Doors."

Basically a really, really long list of partially fleshed out ideas to incorporate into your own games, including creative ways to telegraph.

It's funny that the biggest criticism I personally have for goal and approach hardly ever gets mentioned: aspects of it require a lot more work by the GM.

 

[Campbell]

And, often, to ensure spotlight sharing: ‘what do you, specific character, do about’...

I am a big fan of addressing a specific character for a couple of reasons:

• It helps a player focus in on the fiction. When you say "Vertigan, There's a dragon in front of you, blocking your path. What do you do about that?" it helps the player focus on the details of the fiction and making decisions for their character.
• It becomes that player's decision to make. The pressure is on them and no one else. They need to make a decision right now.
• It helps bring the focus on the here and now. Everything is immediate in this moment rather than some abstract sense of time. What do you do right now?

 

[Charlaquin]

The other resource I would love is the "Goal and Approach 'Cyclopedia of Tricks, Traps, and Secret Doors."

Basically a really, really long list of partially fleshed out ideas to incorporate into your own games, including creative ways to telegraph.

It's funny that the biggest criticism I personally have for goal and approach hardly ever gets mentioned: aspects of it require a lot more work by the GM.

It’s more work in some ways, but less in others. Overall I’d say it’s a similar net amount of work, but it’s spent differently.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Seriously dude? You really need to go there? What does 4th Edition have to do with this topic at all?

I really do like Fifth Edition, but these sort of side swipes do nothing for the tenor of the community. For a long time statements like this actually stopped me from wanting to try Fifth Edition.

Mea culpa. A bit more foresight and I would have written 3rd instead of 4th.

I should have asked to make an Insight check.

 

[Oofta]

This is really well put.

The trap I've fallen into in this thread (and others) is to take the offered scenarios...which occur in ask-for-rolls games...and then try, at the last second, to "convert" them to goal-and-approach.

What you see as "scenarios designed for ask-for-rolls approach" I see as "situations that come up in game with an uncertain outcome that don't really fit the goal and approach structure".

So if you have a hard time describing how to implement it, perhaps it's because no one structure will handle some common gaming scenarios. You can get around that by making sure those scenarios never arise, but that's not very satisfying for some people. It seems to cut out a significant chunk of what makes D&D D&D to me.

If you do write up a page, I'd probably write up a counterpoint. Not that I have a problem with other people having different preferences than I do, just that it would be easier to link to the next time this silly argument comes up.

 

[iserith]

I am a big fan of addressing a specific character for a couple of reasons:

• It helps a player focus in on the fiction. When you say "Vertigan, There's a dragon in front of you, blocking your path. What do you do about that?" it helps the player focus on the details of the fiction and making decisions for their character.
• It becomes that player's decision to make. The pressure is on them and no one else. They need to make a decision right now.
• It helps bring the focus on the here and now. Everything is immediate in this moment rather than some abstract sense of time. What do you do right now?

"What do you do?" - great. It means DM is done describing the environment and now it's the players' turn to describe what they want to do.

"What do you do, Tordek?" - also great. DM is putting the spotlight on Tordek, specifically, so that Tordek's player can describe what Tordek is doing and hopes to achieve. It's important that spotlight be shared with reasonable equity so that everyone has a chance to contribute. It's good table management in my view.

"What do you do (or what does Tordek do) about this specific thing?" - sometimes good, sometimes bad in my view. This is a leading question. In some ways it's editorializing from the DM in that he or she is saying what the important thing to respond to is and it can create a perceived constraint on the players' responses. This is risky as a result. Overreliance on this technique can be problematic as it can push play in directions the DM prefers. Sometimes that's good when play has become unfocused and unproductive. But otherwise, proceed with caution on this one, I say.

 

[5ekyu]

Okay, I've done a bit of organizing thinking on this, and here's the rub: If you're going to use goal and approach as a method, you must present a game that offers handles to the players to propose goals and approaches. In short, yes, it's part and parcel of the method that you must change how you present situations. If you're only going to call for rolls for things that are uncertain and have a risk of failure, then it's incumbent on the DM to present uncertain situations with consequences of failure. This doesn't work if you just have hallways that may or may not be trapped, as what happens is that players are now asked to do repetitive goal and approach declarations and this gets old fast. It's easier handled in an ask-for-roll approach as the entire exercise in the fiction is abstracted and pushed off onto the mechanics to get past this repetitive play and move to the bits with heft.

Goal and approach require that the DM change the presentation of the game. You have to present challenges that prompt the players into action. This is different, as most games just have the DM present the description of the room and have other information gated behind the obligatory skill checks. You either gain the information or you do not, and this affects the actions your take and if the things you did not notice affect you and now call for new checks or if you engage what you have noticed via other checks. Goal and approach, though, doesn't work at all with this presentation -- you must provide a handle on the action for the players. As such, it requires a form of framing more akin to more narrative-style games where you present a dynamic situation with a clear call to action and then say, "what do you do?"

Yes, this method misses some of the things that the ask-for-rolls does -- they are completely different styles of play. What's missed, though, are the things that no longer make sense in terms of goal and approach play. I don't miss that my players ask for rolls, fail, and give me the opportunity to create new fiction to describe their failures because my method does this well, just in a different context. My method creates consequence based on what the players express rather then what I, as DM, think. I find this preferable. I have to do a bit more work on the front end -- I have to provide a clear call to action in my scene framing and this isn't trivial -- but I offload a lot of work on the backend as I'm now just reacting to the players and following their lead through the scene. This is very different from the much more DM mediated experience of asking-for-rolls and using rolls to gate information and provide tension. Both are very valid ways to play. Neither can recreate the experiences of the other. That's actually a big selling point for me -- most of my pain points with D&D came from the heavy DM load and I find goal and approach lightens that considerably and presents play that I enjoy very much. YMMV, and that's part of the coolness of this hobby.

I agree with this in that games seem to be including different scene selections and presentations depending on the playstyle.

But this part still to me points to an issue of perception.

"I don't miss that my players ask for rolls, fail, and give me the opportunity to create new fiction to describe their failures because my method does this well, just in a different context. My method creates consequence based on what the players express rather then what I, as DM, think."

My initial thought was "but so do games like mine where a chsracter's failed action (roll) does indeed open up the setbacks of FM choice - since its what the character is doing that is starting the event and the consequences will follow to some degree from that. When my PC fails his insight check lie detector roll in a bar and gets some good info but not all of it he could and gets pickpocketed while distracted - its coming from the character's actions and the player's choices yo perform that action.

But then it did hit me... it is different. My reference was over and over to "the character action" not ""consequence based on what the players express" and to whatever degree that is important, it seems like a notable difference.

Like I said, in my games I present very few scene of significance where success or failure matters much and anybody can succeed. So, it more often comes fine to the choices, actions and the PCs who do them more that what the players "express".

This gets a bit back to the " meaningful consequence" paragraph where it mentions success without referencing the sheet even. Those exist in my gsme, they just dont get screen time worth noting and aren't key moments.

 

[Charlaquin]

"What do you do?" - great. It means DM is done describing the environment and now it's the players' turn to describe what they want to do.

"What do you do, Tordek?" - also great. DM is putting the spotlight on Tordek, specifically, so that Tordek's player can describe what Tordek is doing and hopes to achieve. It's important that spotlight be shared with reasonable equity so that everyone has a chance to contribute. It's good table management in my view.

"What do you do (or what does Tordek do) about this specific thing?" - sometimes good, sometimes bad in my view. This is a leading question. In some ways it's editorializing from the DM in that he or she is saying what the important thing to respond to is and it can create a perceived constraint on the players' responses. This is risky as a result. Overreliance on this technique can be problematic as it can push play in directions the DM prefers. Sometimes that's good when play has become unfocused and unproductive. But otherwise, proceed with caution on this one, I say.

My “what do you do about” phrasing is designed to be a nice, pithy soundbite, rather than to comprehensively encapsulate best practice. My point in it is that it’s important in your description of the environment to include details for the players to interact with. “What do you do about” doesn’t necessarily have to be about one specific thing (though there are times where that’s appropriate). It can also mean what do you do about this scenario you’re in with several points of interest. It’s just a note-to-self I use to remind myself to focus my description on providing the players with interesting things to interact with, rather than merely stating what is present like a lot of the boxed text in published adventures does.

 

[Guest 6801328]

What you see as "scenarios designed for ask-for-rolls approach" I see as "situations that come up in game with an uncertain outcome that don't really fit the goal and approach structure".

If you look at some of those situations you are talking about, they come with expectations about resolution.

I can easily have a free-for-all wedgie fest, or a chance to win 100g in a festival, or whatever. It's not that the situations can or cannot come up, it's that some folks come with preconceptions about the means by which they get resolved.