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<blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 6257588" data-attributes="member: 12037">Kind of. I think the length of streaks of nothing is the largest factor. So, if nothing interesting is happening for one combat, but each combat takes only 3-5 minutes, then it isn't that important that you had a boring combat. If combat, on the other hand, takes 10-20 minutes, then you've entered a bad situation.Even then, take an example combat where you need a 17 on a d20 to hit on a &quot;long&quot; encounter. Every roll is going to feel like a slog, and when I personally do it, it isn't going to seem that uplifting, because I know I'm probably not going to hit for a while. Just that future expectation of failure is going to bring the moment down.To answer the second question, if failure has more consequence than &quot;... next&quot; then the game can be built in such a way that failure is less common. The benefit of a system in which failure leads to some kind of change in outcome is that even failure feels participatory. Failure conditions don't have to be incredibly bad. They could be something as simple as you fall prone, another enemy joins the combat, you get surrounded, and so forth. They don't have to be direct penalties or damage. So, if you fail roughly 5%-8% of the time, but something interesting happens when you do fail, you can start to look at those failures as interesting events instead of time wasters, which is how I see a miss in D&amp;D right now. Simply a time waster.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ThirdWizard, post: 6257588, member: 12037"] Kind of. I think the length of streaks of nothing is the largest factor. So, if nothing interesting is happening for one combat, but each combat takes only 3-5 minutes, then it isn't that important that you had a boring combat. If combat, on the other hand, takes 10-20 minutes, then you've entered a bad situation. Even then, take an example combat where you need a 17 on a d20 to hit on a "long" encounter. Every roll is going to feel like a slog, and when I personally do it, it isn't going to seem that uplifting, because I know I'm probably not going to hit for a while. Just that future expectation of failure is going to bring the moment down. To answer the second question, if failure has more consequence than "... next" then the game can be built in such a way that failure is less common. The benefit of a system in which failure leads to some kind of change in outcome is that even failure feels participatory. Failure conditions don't have to be incredibly bad. They could be something as simple as you fall prone, another enemy joins the combat, you get surrounded, and so forth. They don't have to be direct penalties or damage. So, if you fail roughly 5%-8% of the time, but something interesting happens when you do fail, you can start to look at those failures as interesting events instead of time wasters, which is how I see a miss in D&D right now. Simply a time waster. [/QUOTE]

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