Failing Forward

[grendel111111]

Well I mean rain introduces a more diverse set of changes. If your picking a lock and brake your pick, well you can't pick other locks. Meanwhile rain dose a lot. You have all kinds of penalties in it, some bonuses attached to it.

Though the general idea wasn't bad lockpicks cause rain, it more that the failure penalty doesn't have to be instant and directly related to the action. That opens up a lot of options to the GM to use.

Actually you can make things more nebulous. Like if we jump back to the zombie game. Making noise didn't summon zombies. It raised the danger level. It didn't have any concrete and direct results. You knew was going to lead to something bad, but you didn't know how it would come around to bite you. It was like a chaos theory or karma thing.

Now this thought is kind of unrelated to the idea of direct connecting. With fail forward, you want to take care to make sure that things move forward. You need to add choices not just take them away. (One of the reason broken tools doesn't work as well.) Jumping back to the zombie game. I toyed with a scavenging system were you always found what you were looking for. (If it was possible.) If you failed, you had to roll an extra 1d6 and that added buts to what you found. Like you found what you wanted, but someone else already looted it, you found what you wanted but it's inside a safe, you found what you needed, but it's not exactly what you wanted (like you were looking for a gun and found a spear gun.) That last one was extra common because it fed into my crazy crafting idea.

Some games work well like this. I like the idea of a karma where failure gives the DM a chance to do something bad to you later. But it very much depends on the players buying into that style of game. Leverage works on that basis and does it very well, but the focus isn't on individual actions in the same way it is with D and D.

For me the failing point with the rain, isn't that the rain isn't interesting, because it clearly is... but it would be interesting if you lock pick successfully or not.
I don't see the advantage of tying the chance of rain to the lock picking attempt. If the lock picking will happen anyway then the lock pick roll is not determining anything to do with the lock. So why would there be less chance of it raining if the rogue picks the lock rather than the barbarian. If you need a chance of the raining happening just pick a chance and roll.

nomotog what rule system were you using for the zombie game? (I'm looking for a system for an up coming game)

 

[I'm A Banana]

If you are as single minded as Captain Ahab in catching your white wale and don't care what happens to your friends and comrades and the crew of your ship or how many of them die, then yes the prize is the only thing that matters. And the very lives of your friends and comrades don't.

We're moving the goalposts a bit, but since this better reflects actual play than "this mountain with one goal" or "this dungeon with one goal", I'll totally play with the field.

Here, you've introduced multiple competing goals that cannot all be accomplished. Your character has a goal to protect their friends and comrades, and ALSO to get the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding. Choosing between competing goals is AWESOME. That wasn't an element of Mt. Pudding or the Dungeon with the BBEG and the Secret Door. But if Fail Forward means that you cannot do both A and B (get the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding and preserve the lives of your friends and comrades), my issues with it mostly evaporate, because there's still interesting choices about whether or not you want to do this. Fail the check, you can still get the coin, but some other goal you have is destroyed.

What would be interesting for me is some advice on how to get PC's to declare goals like this (as explicitly as possible!), and how to mix them together into plots where they can't be accomplished at the same time. I don't know if that's Fail Forward, but it sounds meaty!

The only issue there is that there's a lot of simplistic single-minded characters out there (most D&D characters I've seen, at least at the first few levels, only have a goal of "do this first adventure," and are still in the process of fleshing out their character motivations in more detail) - when the character IS Ahab, and their only goal IS the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding, there would seem to be no interesting choices to make. But I can see a lot to be gained from solving that problem by encouraging more varied and nuanced character goals.

this part here doesn't map to reality. Thomas Edison once quipped that he had found a 1000 ways to not make a light bulb. Implying he had failed a lot.

Now from the scope of standing in a cocktail party with Thomas Edison, he clearly invented the lightbulb as we are all now toasting his accomplishment.

But in listening to his actual story about it, it wasn't "I got up, baked some thread and made a bulb and tried it, and it worked"

The stuff in the middle was really, "I started 3 years ago, tried this, then that, then this other thing. Got sidetracked by a hernia..."

As no plan survives contact with the enemy, no success is actually without failures along the way. If it doesn't kill you, you're still likely to keep going. Or not.

Edison was a notorious huckster, so it often pays to fact-check him. And like with Mt. Pudding, this depends on what one's goals are. Do we say Edison failed because he failed to make neon lights? Why do we say that James Bowman Lindsay was a "failure" in inventing the light bulb when he set out to do all he intended to do?

To blow through the layers of analogy here, the ultimate point is that it requires some resource to be persistent, something you spend and that you can run out of. In Edison's case, this was money. In D&D's case, this is usually hit points. In the case of Fail Forward, it doesn't appear that the repeat attempt costs you anything of note (unless it requires the use of multiple competing goals as I point out above).

To get up Mount Pudmore, there might be 20 sections to climb (as defined by the GM originally). Do you really want to play through 20 Climb rolls, where as you get higher, the only difference is that you'll take more falling damage if fail?

Sure, it simulates escalating stakes, but statistically, you are going to fail a roll at least once, and murphy's law says it won't be the first one for 1d6 damage. Let alone, it doesn't make for an interesting story or any variance in the situation. Bad design of the challenge to be sure. But FailForward hands us a tool to consider shaking things up.

There's no simulation goal here. It's fun to make interesting decisions, and if there's no true cost to failure, then there's no real decision to be made in the face of failure, which removes one of the interesting decisions I could make as a player. That's...not something I typically embrace.

Climbing the ravine on the way up Mt. Pudding is the complication and difficulty to overcome in this example.

Speaking from a player's perspective - I WANT complications and difficulty. So the incentives here seems screwy - if as a player I want complications and difficulty then...I want to fail checks? And make a broadly incompetent character? Because success isn't interesting? I don't think I've got that right...

Let's not confuse the example again as I did upthread. The ravine is likely one of a number of challenges on the way to the peak of Mt. Pudding. I would add that rolling dice isn't typically to the player's benefit in a game where the GM decides on success, failure, or uncertainty. (The latter case is when we roll dice or otherwise resolve with some mechanic.) Hoping to get lucky with the dice isn't a good plan. Striving for outright success is better.

I'd continue to dispute that. It is fun to roll the dice. Outright success is not inherently better in terms of the player's play experience, because not very interactive. There's no interesting decisions to make, no tension, no uncertainty, no release... That can introduce those screwy incentives - I can achieve outright success, but why would I WANT to, if my goal in play is to overcome challenges? Speaking in concrete terms, this is why "roll to hit with advantage" can be more fun than "you automatically hit" , and why it's fun to roll fireball damage. To make the automatic success as fun to play through than dice rolling would essentially mean introducing puzzles, which is a very different kind of fun.

...though now that I think of it, I wonder if "puzzle fun" (AKA: achievement) isn't the fun that advocates of Fail Forward tend to slightly prefer, over "dice fun" (AKA: excitement). In which case we may have a good ol' fashioned goal misalignment when it comes to using Fail Forward as a tool.

I think some more issues are getting muddled here. Of course difficulty is desirable - it's part of what makes a challenge satisfying. And being desirous of interesting success and failure conditions is good and I share that (again, that's just stake-setting which is all fail-forward is!), but as some have stated, they don't care if sometimes things turn out not to be so fun as long as the net fun over the long haul is positive.

My impression is that Fail Forward removes a potentially interesting failure condition ("you can't") intentionally, so that a momentum toward a goal is maintained. My preference is instead for that momentum to be questioned at every point, making that failure condition rather important to actually use, BECAUSE it disrupts that momentum. Which is why I can't say I'm a fan of Fail Forward as described by Mt. Pudding or the BBEG and the Secret Door (though as elaborated by the "Captain Ahab and the Coin at the Top of Mt. Pudding," with the addition of competing goals, it seems to develop a certain significant quality that turns the momentum itself into something that is costing you a limited resource).

 

[nomotog]

Some games work well like this. I like the idea of a karma where failure gives the DM a chance to do something bad to you later. But it very much depends on the players buying into that style of game. Leverage works on that basis and does it very well, but the focus isn't on individual actions in the same way it is with D and D.

For me the failing point with the rain, isn't that the rain isn't interesting, because it clearly is... but it would be interesting if you lock pick successfully or not.
I don't see the advantage of tying the chance of rain to the lock picking attempt. If the lock picking will happen anyway then the lock pick roll is not determining anything to do with the lock. So why would there be less chance of it raining if the rogue picks the lock rather than the barbarian. If you need a chance of the raining happening just pick a chance and roll.

The thing about picking a lock is if you pass you progress, if you fail, then... Well most of the time nothing happens and you just try picking it again. Failing to pick a lock just stalls the game out. The idea with a fail forward system is to pull out these stall moments. The idea is to let a failure progress the game.

The rouge picks the lock faster. I mean odds are you have less chance of rain to start in one minute then in 12. You can make up reasons why this or that results in rain, but you are basically doing it after the fact. The real reason rain happens is because your pushing the players for not passing the skill check.

I kind of like the karma idea too because it's very broad. You don't need to think up new fail states for every action. You can use one fail state (losing karma) and have everything trigger that. An alternate version would be a stress system were every time you fail, you build up stress in kind of a inverse hp thing. Then you can make the "healing" of stress a narrative element.

 

[iserith]

Speaking from a player's perspective - I WANT complications and difficulty. So the incentives here seems screwy - if as a player I want complications and difficulty then...I want to fail checks? And make a broadly incompetent character? Because success isn't interesting? I don't think I've got that right...

Again, climbing the ravine is the complication/difficulty along the way to your goal of finding the coin in the pudding or whatever.

I'd continue to dispute that. It is fun to roll the dice. Outright success is not inherently better in terms of the player's play experience, because not very interactive. There's no interesting decisions to make, no tension, no uncertainty, no release... That can introduce those screwy incentives - I can achieve outright success, but why would I WANT to, if my goal in play is to overcome challenges? Speaking in concrete terms, this is why "roll to hit with advantage" can be more fun than "you automatically hit" , and why it's fun to roll fireball damage. To make the automatic success as fun to play through than dice rolling would essentially mean introducing puzzles, which is a very different kind of fun.

...though now that I think of it, I wonder if "puzzle fun" (AKA: achievement) isn't the fun that advocates of Fail Forward tend to slightly prefer, over "dice fun" (AKA: excitement). In which case we may have a good ol' fashioned goal misalignment when it comes to using Fail Forward as a tool.

It may be fun to roll the dice, but it is not to the benefit of you achieving your characters' goals, generally speaking, because you are leaving your fate up to fickle dice. I'm not sure what you mean by "no interesting decisions to make," because the decisions you make during play either precede or obviate the dice. The dice just resolve the outcome of your decision when the outcome is uncertain. But again, if you can avoid leaving your fate to dice, that is the way to go in my view. I'd much rather automatically succeed in climbing that ravine because I made some solid decisions rather than roll.

My impression is that Fail Forward removes a potentially interesting failure condition ("you can't") intentionally, so that a momentum toward a goal is maintained. My preference is instead for that momentum to be questioned at every point, making that failure condition rather important to actually use, BECAUSE it disrupts that momentum. Which is why I can't say I'm a fan of Fail Forward as described by Mt. Pudding or the BBEG and the Secret Door (though as elaborated by the "Captain Ahab and the Coin at the Top of Mt. Pudding," with the addition of competing goals, it seems to develop a certain significant quality that turns the momentum itself into something that is costing you a limited resource).

The ultimate goal is to find the coin in the pudding at the top of Mt. Pudding. Your achievement of that goal is made harder if not impossible by the fail-forward of "you lose your divining rod" upon failing to climb the ravine unscathed. So I would say that momentum toward your goal is in fact called into question. It also opens up a new decision point: Do I go commit resources to going down into the ravine to recover the rod or do I press on and have a harder time finding the coin when I summit the mountain?

 

[Umbran]

What would be interesting for me is some advice on how to get PC's to declare goals like this (as explicitly as possible!), and how to mix them together into plots where they can't be accomplished at the same time. I don't know if that's Fail Forward, but it sounds meaty!

This is kind of separate from Fail Forward - might call for a separate thread.

To blow through the layers of analogy here, the ultimate point is that it requires some resource to be persistent, something you spend and that you can run out of. In Edison's case, this was money. In D&D's case, this is usually hit points. In the case of Fail Forward, it doesn't appear that the repeat attempt costs you anything of note (unless it requires the use of multiple competing goals as I point out above).

Fail Forward only really comes into play when you'd be stalled on the failure. If you can just try again, and trying again is not tedious for the player, there's no need for failing forward. So, picking a lock is not a great example.

We should not simply conflate Fail Forward with Success With Complications. The former is a policy or mechanic designed to avoid stalling out play. The latter can help achieve the former, but it also has other uses - the most prominent SWC mechanics I know of are in FATE and Cortex+. And there, they do help Fail Forward. But they *also* help create adventure content. It allows the GM to start the game with only a small amount of preparation, because the act of playing will inject more content as matters progress.

Speaking from a player's perspective - I WANT complications and difficulty. So the incentives here seems screwy - if as a player I want complications and difficulty then...I want to fail checks? And make a broadly incompetent character? Because success isn't interesting? I don't think I've got that right...

As a player, *you* may want complications and difficulty. Not all players want them. In addition, even you only want a few complication and difficulties. The complications, done properly, make things harder, and/or add risk. If you are broadly incompetent, there's a point where this becomes deadly.

My impression is that Fail Forward removes a potentially interesting failure condition ("you can't") intentionally

No. As noted above - Fail Forward is called for when the failure is *uninteresting*, and is apt to lead to a stall in play.

so that a momentum toward a goal is maintained.

The, "toward a goal," is common, but not actually a requirement.

Let's state it simply, because after so many pages of highfalutin lingo, we can lose sight of the point - for the player (not the character), playtime is limited, and spending hours of it sitting on your thumbs because you cannot figure out what to do next, or everything you do try brickwalls with flat "No," and, "You can't," is typically frustrating, not fun, and not a good use of player time. Fail forward is intended to keep activity flowing so that frustration doesn't develop.

In improvisational theater, there's a technique often called, "Yes, and..." The idea is that improv actors do not reject material their fellows introduce into the scenario.

Fail Forward can be seen as a variation on that theme - "No, but..." The GM avoids saying only "No," because that doesn't give the player anything to work with. "No," is flat, uninteresting, and in and of itself adds nothing to the action. "No," doesn't itself give players any choices or decisions to make. If the GM says, "No," they can also hand the player something else to interact with.

There's actually a good reason for this - most GMs overestimate how many options they make clear to players. GMs *think* they give plentiful, useful descriptions with lots of material for the players to pick up on, or that other options for action are obvious*. Fail Forward admits this isn't the case - and makes sure the player has an explicit handle, here and now, on something that can be dealt with in a way that *something* happens, even if it isn't motion directly toward their intended goal.

My preference is instead for that momentum to be questioned at every point , making that failure condition rather important to actually use, BECAUSE it disrupts that momentum.

If the momentum is questioned at every point, then it is at risk at every point. The more points of risk you have, the less important any one of them is. The more points of risk you have, the more certain it is that momentum will be lost. How certain do you want it to be?

Note that momentum for the character and momentum for the player are not equivalent. Fail Forward is about player momentum and engagement, not character momentum.






*GMs also tend to overestimate how much players will venture based on incomplete information. Players typically like to have some sense that the action the intend is plausible. There is one thing worse than having plausible actions fail on the die roll - having them shot down before the die roll because the GM and player didn't have a shared understanding of the situation. Fail Forwards makes sure the GM hands them an element they can understand, here and now....

 

[Cristian Andreu]

I first read the title as "Falling Forward", and then wondered what could be so interesting -or contentious- about a PC tripping over as to warrant 40 pages of discussion.

Then I remembered we are in EN World and this is how we roll.

As for the topic, I like the concept in the manner Umbran describes it, working as a DM advice on how to deal with PC failure, rather than a specific mechanic.

I think it works well with a philosophy of "Instead of putting the party inside a puzzle they have to solve, put them in a room full of stuff and watch them create the puzzle for you".

 

[Balesir]

Warning - long and rambling post trying to address far too much since I last caught up...

Tying unrelated events to a skill makes it too disjointed for me.
In picking a lock a fail resulting in broken tools or alerting the rooms occupants is a logical follow on from failing to pick a lock (you used too much force, dropped you tools, etc.) but a failure that let you "open the door, but it starts raining" (somehow if you were better at picking locks you could have controlled the weather) is a step to far for me.

I understand this concern, but these days I tend to look at it a slightly different way.

Why might someone fail to pick a lock? The potential reasons are legion. They include failures of equipment, environmental factors, tiredness, lack of experience (a difficulty arises, for example, which they have never encountered before and have no plan for) or manual dexterity (simple klutzing), lack of time, don't happen to have the right tool, the lock is actually jammed and can't even be opened with a key, a disguise or illusion has misled them about the nature of the lock - the list goes on. Some of these reasons can be avoided with expertise and experience; with some the situation can be recovered with sufficient skill and experience - but with some it's just not a lack of skill that causes the failure.

In a typical roleplaying game system, all of these myriad possibilities are represented, if they are represented at all, by the roll of the dice. Particularly in a system like d20, all that a level of skill is doing - even quite a significant level of skill - is swaying the odds. A skill of 6 indicates that 30% of the time a circumstance that would cause an unskilled lockpicker to fail to pick the lock has either been avoided or the situation has been rescued by the skilled practitioner. That leaves 70% of the time when the outcome is essentially as it would have been for someone with no skill.

If the odd circumstances that either cause failure or accompany success are not incorporated in that die roll, where are they? What represents the guard coming round at the wrong moment? The slickness caused by rain causing the risk that the lockpick will slip out of your fingers? The probe snapping as it is used to turn over the tumbler? Picking interesting ones seems to me like a good alternative to havung a myriad rather dodgy tables.

But the Mt. Pudding example doesn't really dispel my concerns over the idea as a player or as a DM. That example posits that the intent of retrieving the pudding is something that is not really changing. Thus, it is related to my description of Umbran's "finding the secret door to fight the BBEG" - a "bottleneck" in that play can functionally proceed in only one direction (or be bereft of interesting choices/stop while we wait for someone to make a check/etc.). Though events happen on the way, the action is driven inexorably toward the pudding/BBEG, and this is accepted by all players as basically the ride you're on.

For my enjoyment, it is better to be able to be able to raise the question: what happens if I don't get the pudding/fight the BBEG? What possible actions are capable of potentially changing my intent, to use Manbearcat's verbiage? What would make Bob not want the Pudding, or make the Pudding forever unavailable to Bob, and how would Bob react?

I like these questions because they produce interesting gameplay scenarios about character motivations - what do I want, what am I willing to do to get it, what happens if I can't get it - and leave the ultimate arc of the narrative in question (is this going to be a story where the hero does something heroic or a story where the hero fails to do something heroic?). Every challenge becomes a decision point - do I undertake this risk, or do I do something else? Do I want the pudding that badly? Less "How do I get the pudding?" and more "Do I even want to get the pudding?"

I think there may be two quite distinct cases being confused, here - and I am not sure which is being raised any more than Mr. Banana seems to.

Case 1: the goal - gaining the pudding, or whatever - is the character's current Dramatic Need, which is to say their reason for adventuring, their motivation for risking anything at this "hero" lark.

Case 2: the goal is a step that is the current easiest way to achieve progress towards the character's Dramatic Need, but is not the Need itself or essential to it.
[MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION] seems to identify this, with this bit:

It's an old acting trick - what is your motivation and how is this scene building to it? The pudding isn't important, but the reason my character wants the pudding is critical. "Fail forward" seems a bit more concerned with the Adventure to Get The Pudding or the Quest to Slay the Evil Thing than it is with The Story of Bob (who might like pudding and hate evil), which weakens it as a role-playing tool, IMXP. At least if Umbran and Manbearcat present it fairly.

But I think the aim of Failing Forward is (for me, at least) misidentified, here.

If it's case 2 (just a step in the Story of Bob), then utter failure is not really a problem. There may still be some excitement in doing some stake escalation before ultimate success or failure is decided, which I think FF can handle just fine, but failure itself isn't really a big deal as long as another route to the Dramatic Need is clear to the player. I think [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] hit the nail, here. For there to be a story there must be an alternate way to the Dramatic Need available. The role of FF in this case is to provide that alternate if none otherwise exists.

Taking the example of the pudding; my initial conception of it was as follows:

- If Bob successfully climbs the mountain with the divining rod, finding the pudding will be automatic. The failure means that success in the plan originally envisaged is no longer possible. Either going back down to retreive the rod (requiring another roll to climb) or continuing without the rod (and needing a roll to find the pudding) would be open as ways forward - but failure in either might mean final failure. These rolls might very well be harder than the original climb (due to time pressure, closing darkness, weather worsening or whatever). The tension is escalated and excitement in play increased, but ultimate failure is still possible.

If getting the pudding were the ONLY way for Bob's motivational need/reason for adventuring to be fulfilled, however, then I think the function of FF becomes quite different. In this case (case 1), the function of Fail Forward is to make sure that there are alternatives visible to the player(s).

Now, maybe this has been taken care of beforehand. Maybe getting the dragon slaying sword is essential to slaying the dragon that threatens your family and all you love, but you fail to get it after learning that it was forged by the Dwarven smith Kalakul who was supposed to have retired to the Halls of Dvalinn on the Demiplane of Plothooktwo... But adding in the alternative before the initial option is failed can take away some of the tension from Option 1.

Depending crucially on the character's motivation, there may also be other obvious options. If the character's aim is actually to keep their loved ones safe, then maybe rescuing them before the dragon strikes is an obvious next step*. What I definitely want to avoid, however, is for the players to be casting around desperately for some half-arsed scheme, based on insufficient information, that they hope the GM will let them get away with out of sheer pity because they are, frankly, out of ideas.

*: You might say that some of the best parts of a story come when a character changes their dramatic need. Indeed, the case of switching from trying to kill the dragon to trying to rescue loved ones may look a bit like a case of this. My thoughts on this are twofold: (1) generally such plot twists are not really a change of motivation at all, simply that a means to achieve the real motivation was previously mistaken for the dramatic need itself, and (2) even in the extremely rare cases where there is a genuine change of dramatic need, it occurs no more than once in a story - and it is the crux of the tale if it happens at all. Mostly, though, it's (1); you may be trying to slay the dragon or get the pudding, but that's really just a means to the end of your ultimate goal. If you really do fail at your ultimate goal, it's generally Game Over (apart from a possible heroic death, possibly leading to a new story - cf. Darth Vader, although even there Anakin succeeded in saving his children, so maybe didn't ultimately fail at all?)

Which reminds me - creating a new villain out of a failure strikes me as a great way to Fail Forward!

 

[aramis erak]

I was curious how folks felt about this concept? I'm a fan.
[snip]
So what do you think?

Most of the people I see who dislike it also call it "using the wrong skill".

I like it plenty well. It solves the whole plot dead end. I don't always use it, because sometimes, you want a dead end...

 

[grendel111111]

Most of the people I see who dislike it also call it "using the wrong skill".

I like it plenty well. It solves the whole plot dead end. I don't always use it, because sometimes, you want a dead end...

Likewise many people who like failing forward see everyone who dislikes it as not understanding it. "If they could just understand it they would love it like I do." And so they try and explain the way it works, missing the fact that some people may well understand it and still dislike it for a variety of reasons.

I like alternative fail conditions, but I also like a close match between mechanics and outcomes in D and D in other games it is less important. If the thing that is in doubt has nothing to do with the skill check being used, and there is a better skill or ability to check the outcome on, then yes I do think that the wrong skill has been chosen to model the situation.

But this is because I generally decide what the outcomes that will result from the dice are before rolling. If I call for a roll as a DM then I know what the pass and fail are going to roughly look like. If I call for a lock pick roll and then if they fail suddenly go "damn I wanted them to pass, what the hell should I do" Then I most likely wasn't ready for them to make that roll.
Instead I decide what the likely outcome of a fail is. If it is "that the door is is picked but it takes a long time or I damage something" that is still a lockpick roll. But if it's "was it quiet enough" then it is a stealth roll?
I only call it using the wrong check if there is a better check to model the situation (and especially the possible outcomes).

 

[aramis erak]

Likewise many people who like failing forward see everyone who dislikes it as not understanding it. "If they could just understand it they would love it like I do." And so they try and explain the way it works, missing the fact that some people may well understand it and still dislike it for a variety of reasons.

I like alternative fail conditions, but I also like a close match between mechanics and outcomes in D and D in other games it is less important. If the thing that is in doubt has nothing to do with the skill check being used, and there is a better skill or ability to check the outcome on, then yes I do think that the wrong skill has been chosen to model the situation.

But this is because I generally decide what the outcomes that will result from the dice are before rolling. If I call for a roll as a DM then I know what the pass and fail are going to roughly look like. If I call for a lock pick roll and then if they fail suddenly go "damn I wanted them to pass, what the hell should I do" Then I most likely wasn't ready for them to make that roll.
Instead I decide what the likely outcome of a fail is. If it is "that the door is is picked but it takes a long time or I damage something" that is still a lockpick roll. But if it's "was it quiet enough" then it is a stealth roll?
I only call it using the wrong check if there is a better check to model the situation (and especially the possible outcomes).

The game from which I learned fail forward makes the failure known before rolling... Burning Empires.

BE's process:

Player states the goal, the method, and intended skill(s):
GM states difficulty and failure outcome:
Player can back out, or can assemble the dice pool.
Player rolls. GM and player narrate the outcome based upon the goal or failure.

I've used fail forward with D&D in limited cases. Mostly social situations.
Usually using

• DC made: get desired outcome
• DC missed by ≤5: either increased demand for compensation or part of demands met
• DC missed by >5: failed.

I've also used cases where failure merely wastes time and resources as:

• DC Made: accomplish task
• DC failed by ≤5: resources spent, next try gets DC-5
• DC failed by >5: resources spent, project blown

Those are both types of fail forward that fit nicely in D&D (and are based upon tasks stated in HotDQ).