Failing Forward

[Imaro]

And, let us be frank - this is a *discussion* board. If you put an idea out there, it is open for *discussion*. This isn't a, "Confirm my personal position and don't question me," board.

Then wouldn't it be worthwhile to also consider the other side of this discussion (rational reasons, preferences, non-D&D/WoD games, etc.) and the possibility one or more of these could also be the reason... as opposed to assuming the reason(s) (irrational biases/ being a veteran D&D/WoD player) you've latched onto have to be the cause?? From where I stand you (and @Neonchameleon) aren't really discussing anything just stating/re-stating what you believe the cause is, without any real evidence to back your assertions up and summarily dismissing any viewpoint that is different from your forgone conclusion. All you've done is show that irrational biases exist in people (well yeah no one is arguing they don't)... but you've yet to show how this fact in any concrete way accounts for the dislike of fail forward in some people... You're speaking of addressing holes in arguments in a vague way, well what are these holes and in whose arguments?

 

[Janx]

I think there is a reasonable complaint about this sort of technique though. There are plenty of gamers who really enjoy the sense of being there in their character's shoes and giving them world editing abilities like this can both take them out of their character's headspace and blur the line between the character and the setting. For these kinds of players, the GMs role in saying "yes there is a chandelier" or "no there isn't" is pretty crucial and if you shift that to the player it becomes an issue. Not saying these kinds of points are bad. But there is a play style and player type where they are not the ideal choice.

I think part of the problem I have with this camp is the whole embiggening of the significance of FailForward.

It is not "World Editing" or "authorial stance".

The player just asked a question. Is there a hat shop?

Or the player failed to find the secret door that it turned out to be a chokepoint to the rest of the evening's fun.

What the GM decides to do and how they decide it is a mystery to the player. It really just isn't their business if they trust the GM. The player need not know if the paper said there was a hat shop or not. He only knows the GM said "yes."

If a player loses their immersion because they asked the freaking question and they have to stop and ponder how the answer was derived, that's for the player's shrink to help them resolve.

Let's not make a mountain out of a small resolution tool for GMs to decide things. The player is not stopping the game and reworking the entire dungeon to be to his preference and making the GM run it that way instead.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think part of the problem I have with this camp is the whole embiggening of the significance of FailForward.

It is not "World Editing" or "authorial stance".

The player just asked a question. Is there a hat shop?

Or the player failed to find the secret door that it turned out to be a chokepoint to the rest of the evening's fun.

What the GM decides to do and how they decide it is a mystery to the player. It really just isn't their business if they trust the GM. The player need not know if the paper said there was a hat shop or not. He only knows the GM said "yes."

If a player loses their immersion because they asked the freaking question and they have to stop and ponder how the answer was derived, that's for the player's shrink to help them resolve.

Let's not make a mountain out of a small resolution tool for GMs to decide things. The player is not stopping the game and reworking the entire dungeon to be to his preference and making the GM run it that way instead.

I wasn't talking about failing forward, Umbran mentioned players spending resource points to edit the setting and that is what I was responding to.

Still if someone noticing failing forward finds it disrupts their immersion, that is hardly crazy. It is just a preference on their part.

 

[Nagol]

I wasn't talking about failing forward, Umbran mentioned players spending resource points to edit the setting and that is what I was responding to.

Still if someone noticing failing forward finds it disrupts their immersion, that is hardly crazy. It is just a preference on their part.

Well, yes and no. Fail forward shouldn't be particularly immersion-breaking since hopefully the resolution leads to continued scenes that are plausible. There is no stance change on the part of the player; he simply needs to react to the changed circumstances resulting from partial success/sudden complication.

It may lead to player frustration in the sense that they would prefer to simply stop and move on from this situation -- something a simple fail accomplishes more readily.

 

[Umbran]

I wasn't trying to make an argument. I was just expressing that I wasn't convinced by the poster's assertion that this is a learned behavior from D&D and WOD.

I don't think we need to point to particular games, either.

Still I don't know that D&D caused people to want to stay in character.

Oh, I think we have a fundamental misunderstanding here. My suggestion isn't that D&D made people want to stay in character. It is that D&D players will find D&D-like mechanisms less disruptive to staying in character. Basically, folks who have engaged with a particular type of mechanic a lot will be used to it, and be able to smoothly elide over it without disruption to their concentration. We ignore it when we are familiar with it. Put a notably different mechanic in front of them, and they will find it disruptive.

So, it isn't that any particular mechanic is necessarily more or less disruptive, in any objective (or even statistical) sense. It is more that anything different from what you're used to will seem more disruptive.

Now, this is where we can run into issues of failing to find a real root cause properly. You can play a given system a couple or a few times, and find some mechanic in it disruptive, and then say that it is the mechanic's fault, or you just prefer other mechanics. But a game or two really isn't enough to become fully inured to the mechanic. It is still pretty new to you, so you have not removed a significant potential cause of the disruption. This is why I wondered, publicly and aloud, about how much time had been spent looking at the rules, as opposed to playing with them. Personal experience is what we'd call a "confounding factor", which gets in the way of more objective comparison.

At this point, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "I still find this mechanic disruptive, and I don't have the time to invest to get it to where it isn't disruptive, so I'm going to avoid it." Time is precious, after all. But if you're going to do that, you probably shouldn't argue against using the mechanic, as you're admitting insufficient experience to really know what it can do.

My point is once someone has gone through the effort of trying things, once they've been open minded and given things a shot on multiple occasions, it is a bit snobbish to suggest they are just not open minded enough or they are merely operating on a learned response

We should expect any mechanic to be disruptive to immersion until such time as it becomes second nature, or until you find a GM that engages you so much in other ways that mechanics are a secondary concern to play. That's going to generally be a considerable amount of play.

(one could just as easily hurl that back at someone who likes Fate points or any other mechanic).

Hurling it back doesn't work if the person you're hurling it at claims to like *lots* of systems and mechanics.

 

[Janx]

I'm not at all closed to that possibility. However, if I am presented with a supposedly rational preference, and the rational basis seems full of holes, I am, by my curious nature, going to poke at them. In humans (again, myself included) this process often reveals that the preference isn't nearly so rational as one previously believed.

And I'm good with that too! People do actually have emotional lives, and it is fine to live them, and have those irrational preferences. I have, for example, an irrational preference for my wife! I love her with the fire of a thousand suns, and no rational argument can tell you why. But, we should admit and recognize when something is an irrational preference. When we instead try to wrap irrational preferences in the cloak of rational justifications, then we run into (at least) two problems:

1) We dismiss the value of the emotional in our lives. The only real reason to wrap an emotional preference in rationalizations is that we devalue the emotional, which isn't healthy.

2) We take actions based on those reasons that are actually contrary to reality. Admittedly, in the gaming context this isn't a huge real hazard, but it isn't a good habit to be in, and does lead folks to misrepresent what's actually going on.



And you will note how I have not pursued a single person who has said, "I just don't like it"?

Along this line, it's what I didn't like about Saelorn's earlier answer about how an RPG is supposed to be a certain way that FailForward and other "adaptive" GMing strategies weren't RPGs.

It's too absolutist to rationalize his preference. I don't like that. John Wick is wrong. D&D is an RPG. We can play it many different ways for many different reasons. Many of us play it in varying styles within the same game session even.

This means that there are moments where FailForward is an acceptable GM solution, and moments when it is not, all within the same adventure, possibly even the same scene.

It's a tool.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Along this line, it's what I didn't like about Saelorn's earlier answer about how an RPG is supposed to be a certain way that FailForward and other "adaptive" GMing strategies weren't RPGs.

It's too absolutist to rationalize his preference. I don't like that. John Wick is wrong. D&D is an RPG. We can play it many different ways for many different reasons. Many of us play it in varying styles within the same game session even.

This means that there are moments where FailForward is an acceptable GM solution, and moments when it is not, all within the same adventure, possibly even the same scene.

It's a tool.

I think fail forward doesn't make something a non-RPG. But it is a style issue that isn't going to be useful for all groups or all games. It is a tool like you say. I just think sometimes people get too excited about the tools they happen to like and think they are equally good for everyone. That is where I disagree. I'm not terribly fond of this technique myself, though I can see why some people like it and why its of use to them. I don't discourage it in those cases, but I don't keep it as a tool in my belt when I am running a game (and I don't think my sessions suffer as a result).

 

[pemerton]

You can't role-play as a character who makes the best of the world as it is, if you're also the author deciding what's in the world.

Any time you're making a decision about the world, or about what happens to your character, is an instance where you're not making a decision as your character.

These are empirical claims. I have personal play experience that refutes them.

I'll retell a story I've told before on these boards:

* An NPC hexer had turned the PC paladin of the Raven Queen into a frog. As per the rules of the game, the effect had a duration of "until end of next turn".

* After the end of the next turn, the paladin turned back into himself. He charged the hexer.

* The hexer taunted the paladin: "I'm not scared of your or your god. After all, I turned you into a frog."

* The paladin replied, "But the Raven Queen turned me back."​

At that moment of play, the player was stipulating something about the gameworld - namely, that the end of the baleful polymorph effect (as stipulated by the rules), was due to the intervention of a deity. And the player was also playing his PC, and in particular giving voice to his PC's faith in that deity.

Other more banal examples could be given - such as when a player, in character, describes his/her PC's family background, making it up as s/he goes along. But I've given the example above because the moment of play, and of player-PC immersion, was far more visceral.

Also - this has very little to do with "fail forward".

 

[The Crimson Binome]

At this point, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "I still find this mechanic disruptive, and I don't have the time to invest to get it to where it isn't disruptive, so I'm going to avoid it." Time is precious, after all. But if you're going to do that, you probably shouldn't argue against using the mechanic, as you're admitting insufficient experience to really know what it can do.

There are some games - not RPGs, or even story-based games, but games none-the-less - which require the consumption of alcohol as an integral aspect of the game. Some people aren't going to want to play those games, and aren't going to want to get to the point where they would want to play those games, because alcohol is just that distasteful to them. Those people just won't play those games, regardless of what other merits they might have. Or there's something like chess-boxing, which is also going to put a lot of players off of it because they just really dis-like boxing (or chess) so much that you couldn't even convince them to try it once.

I am like that with story games. As soon as a game suggests that I'm telling a story about a character, rather than making my decisions as the character, then that instantly puts me off from wanting to play the game. I'll keep reading the book, sure, because I bought the book and there might be some otherwise-useful information in there, but I'm not going to want to play it unless I can figure out how to do so without treating it as a story (which can be difficult, but might be possible for certain games). I don't want to play FATE, any more than I want to drink alcohol or get pummeled repeatedly; I have nothing against people who do enjoy those things, but there's no reason for them to assume that I would enjoy them, just because I like games and role-playing.

 

[Reinhart]

Also - this has very little to do with "fail forward".

Yeah, it's why I've pretty much ducked out of this conversation. I get why people's acceptance of fail forward can be related to play-style preferences, but there's not much point to heavily scrutinizing those preferences. We're extremely unlikely to convince Saelorn, or anyone else, to be less absolutist about actor-stance play, but it seems harmless to leave them to their own play. Better to either end the conversation of refocus it to something more productive.