Failing Forward

[Nagol]

I'll aside to your aside!

I've been GMing like this for literally as long as I can remember. I've never run APs or modules. The very first thing I knew about my preferences as a GM was "I want to be in on the wild-eyed wonder (as much as possible) of what emerges from play, same as my players!" Then I thought "how do I accomplish this?" Prep what is only utterly necessary for a session (shockingly little to many GMs who have played in my games in real life). Develop a few guiding principles, techniques, and mental-overhead-management strategies which center around how to best evolve post-resolution fiction (to maintain continuity, genre constrains, pacing, and dynamism). Develop the in-situ clerical side (high utility short-hand and make flash-cards my friend). Mature to mastering adlib/improv skills.

When I first read Dogs in the Vineyard, my mind said "holy crap!...this is it!" Then I read Apocalypse World and finally Dungeon World. Then my mind said "holy crap!...this is it-ER!"

I use this technique with some games: Teenagers from Outer Space pretty much only runs this way. Other game styles like my current Conspiracy-X procedural are more focused on the players exploring the secret world and more needs to be known in advance to keep their glimpses of the jigsaw puzzle appropriate. There I generate the initial scene completely and improve secondary scenes and locations that mechanically and plausibly extend from the well understood start.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

To me this line of thinking is very much tied to the entire notion of "pre-authoring" to begin with. "Where's the plot? How are the PCs supposed to follow it? And if they get off of it, are they supposed to get back on it or not?"
Scene framing approaches don't really follow this line of thinking at all. Scene framing approaches say, "You're this character, framed in the fiction this way, with these goals/responsibilities/obligations. Here's what you understand is going on around you. Where do you want to go, and what do you want to accomplish when you get there?" Lather, rinse, repeat.

When I'm running a campaign, I literally have NO IDEA what's going to happen, or how it will end. NONE. For all I know the BBEG's might actually win . . . or maybe the PCs decide after killing the BBEG that they kind of liked the cut of his jib, and decide to finish what he started. Who knows? [/COLOR]

OK, I get that. But there's still a plot. There are still side-plots, sub-plots, whatever you want. You just don't know which was which until after the fact.

What I don't understand is how do you handle NPCs, NPC organizations, the stuff that's going on behind the scenes that drives the world whether the PCs do something or not?

Ilbranteloth

 

[BryonD]

Let me recap the course of events.

I'm going to skip the massive change of subject.

No. I'm saying that "I'd expose the PCs to things they couldn't beat with swords". I wouldn't send them to 200ft cliff land. But I would have them deal with active things they wouldn't kill.

False.
You said: "You wouldn't send first level PCs to 200 foot cliff land any more than you'd send them to the Demonweb Pits or to the lairs of elder dragons."

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473785-Failing-Forward/page56#ixzz3xPpwOZxf
You equated sending them to the cliff with sending them to the Demonweb pits or lairs of elder dragons.
There is zero room for ambiguity between this and the idea that you would send them there, just not to fight.

And, as I already offered, I get that you don't MEAN what you said. But you said what you said. Just as other have said things and then insisted they never said it.

It is however your fault that you equate "things they can't beat with swords" to 200ft cliffs and thereby create a strawman.

It is a direct quote. And I ALREADY said you probably didn't mean it.

You're confusing mechanics with guidance. The mechanics of e.g. jump checks is almost exactly the same as that of 3.X. The world is objective and there is nothing saying the GM must follow the encounter balancing rules. Merely that that's where things normally work the best.

No, I quite get the difference between mechanics and guidance.
But first, in the case of 4E the guidance is baked into the mechanics. Yes, you can ignore that, but as you have so clearly stated, 4e provides a system for telling a DM what height the cliff "should" be. There is a much tighter connection between mechanics and guidance (aka "the math works") in 4E. I make no claim whatsoever that a good DM can't ignore that connection.

And second, when 4E proponents say things like "You wouldn't send first level PCs to 200 foot cliff land any more than you'd send them to the Demonweb Pits or to the lairs of elder dragons." it is only fair to respond in that context.

But this long after the launch of 4e refuting the same old misrepresentations gets tiresome.

It is long after the end of 4E of the misrepresentations of the complaints also gets tiresome. Particularly when they still take the form of denying the exact word you used two posts earlier.

 

[BryonD]

I'm getting a little confused by this side tangent... is the claim that scaling DC's have always been in D&D (which are not the same thing as EL or CR)?? Because that seems to be what @BryonD is talking about... I might be mis-remembering and I certainly haven't played every edition of D&D but for the ones I have played (outside of 4th) I don't remember this being the case...

Now advice along the lines of matching challenge to your PC's (which could vary vastly depending upon the skill level of players, rules used, etc ) was definitely a thing but a system set up with hard and fast numbers for actual scaling of non-combat challenges is not something I remember. But @Umbran and @Neonchameleon I admit I could be mistaken... were these present in other editions? And if so why was pg. 42 lauded as so innovative and great by 4e fans if that type of system has always been a part of D&D?

I don't think anyone would dispute that the idea of level appropriate challenges has always been around in one form or another.
Certainly in 3E and PF, for which I make no secret of my admiration, CR and EL are front and center. So it would be really stupid to argue that.

But you are very much on the right track with the whole "page 42" point and as I just stated the mixing of "guidance" and mechanics in 4E. There is a double standard of how awesome and innovative these elements of 4E are, until someone points out a flaw and then you get slammed for claiming anyone ever actually used them in 4E games.


P flat out said he looked at party level to evaluate the cliff and NC has said he would not send 1st level PCs to a 200 ft cliff any more than he would the Demonwebs. Not long ago I was honestly feeling chagrined. I was quite confident that these kind of statements had been made but I was unanimously assured it never happened. so I conceded. Now I see it happening here. I'm *really* not edition warring, I'm being petty over the fact that it turns out I was right all along.

I have no illusion that certain people are going to suddenly open their eyes to different perspectives. An open-minded 3rd party could come along and read the words and see that the things I claim were said, were in fact said. That is good enough for me. So I'll drop it there.


Back on topic, I again find "failing forward" to be a highly valuable option for a DM to maintain in their back pocket. I think that if you start letting the nature of the world be a slave to the mechanics, you are creating a serious negative impact on the fun *for me*. But there are other ways to work this concept which don't require that.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think I understand this point. "Story" in an RPG is primarily a series of events resulting from the resolution of players' action declarations for their PCs. And those action declarations are resolved via checks.

I'm talking about the reasons behind what the DM is doing. If the DM is causing it to rain because of a failed climb check, the reason he is doing it is to make the "story" more interesting, not because the skill was checked. The skill only deals with climbing.

Story aspects should remain story only. If the DM thinks it will make for a more interesting story to have it rain while the climb is going on, it's fine for the DM to make it rain, but it should be due to an independent DM reason. It should not be because of a failed climb check.

In my experience, if investing resources in succeeding at checks has little or no effect on the direction of the "story" - ie does not tend to increase the likelihood of the player (and his/her PC) getting what s/he wants, then the players get frustrated.

Why would players become frustrated that being more successful at checks makes them more successful at checks? They are in fact getting what they want or they wouldn't have invested the resources to be good at those skills in the first place.

This has certainly been my experience in campaigns and gaming groups where heavy GM control, typically taking the form of imposing a pre-written plot, is the norm. In D&D a particular form that this takes is building PCs who very heavily emphasise combat capability, because even the most railroad-y D&D GMs tend to use the combat resolution rules, which means that building combat capable PCs is one way building PCs who will be able to shape the campaign (admittedly in a rather limited sort of way ie by killing things) via deployment of the action resolution mechanics.

Right. I guess I wasn't clear in my last post. Yes, success or failure at a skill adds to the story and affects both the story and the game world. That success or failure, though, is through how the actual use of the skill works out, not because something unrelated happened to make the story different. Failure to negotiate with the king isn't going to cause an earthquake that the party doesn't want to happen to become part of the story. Failure to negotiate with the king is going to cause the continued war with their country that the party doesn't want to happen to continue to be a part of the story. Similarly, success would likely cause the war to end and give the players/PCs what they want as a result.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think anyone would dispute that the idea of level appropriate challenges has always been around in one form or another.
Certainly in 3E and PF, for which I make no secret of my admiration, CR and EL are front and center. So it would be really stupid to argue that.

I haven't played Pathfinder, but CR and EL in 3e was so borked that they were almost entirely useless. I had to ditch them completely and just gauge PC abilities vs. monster abilities. 5 creatures of identical CR would range from pitifully easy to nearly impossible for one group of 4 PCs, but all of that would change for a different group of 4 PCs composed of different classes.

I loved 3e, but CR was one of the worst things in there.

 

[grendel111111]

Sorry this was in response to post number 582. but the quote didn't seem to work.

OK, I get that. But there's still a plot. There are still side-plots, sub-plots, whatever you want. You just don't know which was which until after the fact.


What I don't understand is how do you handle NPCs, NPC organizations, the stuff that's going on behind the scenes that drives the world whether the PCs do something or not?


Ilbranteloth

In this style of play there is no outside forces driving the world or anything else outside the field of what has been spoken in game. So if the characters hear that there is a town over the hill called Longford, then Longford now exists. If the characters catch a thief then he is just a thief, until they interrogate him and discover he is working for the assassins guild which has a contract on the players (Until this point no assassins guild has been mentioned so it doesn't exist till this point (or did exist out of sight). So they know know there is an assassins guild but not who bought the contract. It floats for everyone (DM included) until everyone finds out as the game progresses.
The key is that the fiction is written both backwards and forwards. Now that the assassins guild is in the world it must have always been there so what they were doing can be worked into the plot to explain things from earlier in the game (They later find a note that instructed a group of thugs to kill the characters, so the initial encounter they had when the first set out suddenly is tied to everything else). The only condition is do not contradict any that was said before (or more practically anything anyone remembers being said).

It's much like in lost when the pacing dropped they would add stuff to get them out of a corner they wrote themselves into, or something crazy happens with no reason other than to push the story forward, that later they try and tie back to make sense. Until the smoke monster is explained it could be anything, the others almost certainly did not end up anything like what the original idea of them was.
It gives a great illusion of the characters having figured things out and discovered things.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I can see the point, for something like D&D.

In something like FATE, I can "wing it" for a combat encounter with ease - how many levels of stress and consequences? A couple thematically appropriate Aspects, and I'm probably good to go. I can throw in a Stunt or two to covver a weird effect the thing can produce, maybe, if I want. It fits on a 3x5 handwritten index card. D&D traditionally has so many tactical fiddly bits (the equivalent D&D critter is an 8" tall column of small typeface print) that this approach doesn't work well. The GM must prepare beforehand. And that preparation is costly. It pays to have someone else do it. And, soon enough, you've got an Adventure Path that provides pre-prepped stuff that will cover *months* of gaming. For the modern adult player, this can be a godsend.

You've a very good point about the major edition that sells adventure paths here (3.x) - but it's far from traditional. Indeed I'd say from experience all TSR editions and 4e are almost as easy to wing as Fate (although 4e tries to hide it). You need a business card worth of materials in each case.

For TSR era your business card needs the fighter saving throws and attack bonuses by hit dice (unless you've memorised them) and possibly some weapon damages if you care. And then to create monsters you need hit dice, AC, attacks, and to look up the values on the card unless you want to create a spell caster (where you need to look things up)

For 4e you need the MM3 on a Business Card on one side and the skill challenge DCs on the other. Creating a non-solo requires a level, a combat role, a size, (minion, standard, elite - handcraft your solos) and a schtick or two (4e powers and Fate stunts are basically the same thing).

In both cases this is all you need for RAW-legal monsters and you can create them in the time it takes to sort out initiative (I speak from experience). So it's hardly true to say that D&D traditionally does it one way.

 

[grendel111111]

Amusingly (to me, at any rate), close acquaintance with probability and stochastic outcomes is a major reason why I see things quite differently in this respect. I'll see if I can illustrate why:

Consider a situation like the "finding the mace" case you cite. Imagine that we have a system akin to that you suggest, with one die roll - on a d10 modified by character skill - determining the thoroughness of the search carried out, and another roll - also on a d10 but unmodified - determining whether or not the mace is present to be found.

Now, consider further that we could devise quite easily a system that is exactly mathematically equivalent to the system above, using a single percentile roll.

In this percentile system, the character skill has an influence on the outcome, but - considering where the original system to which our percentile system is exactly equivalent - the chance of the mace being present to be found is clearly not connected to the character's skill level.

In most cases in D&D, skill level is not so overwhelmingly important that it is determinative of success or failure. It has an influence on the outcome, but does not (usually) make it a foregone conclusion. In this circumstance, I see nothing whatever wrong with viewing skill rolls as being analogous to the above "percentile roll". In other words, it judges ("resolves") success or failure at reacing a desired end-point based on a constellation of potential failure modes or reasons. In fact, given the general ways in which feats of skill work in real life, I see this view of skill rolls as far more plausible from a "verisimilitude" point of view than the "you either bungled or you didn't" perspective.

An exact mathematical percentile would be doing the following:
Take the roll needed, divide the chance of success in half, if you roll under half the mace is there and you find it, over half the mace is there and you find the arrows as well as the mace, then if you fail you need to divide that in half too, a bad fail the location of the mace, a "good" fail you find the location of the mace and the arrows.

My preference would be DM rolls d6 to see if it is there:
If yes:
Success: find the mace and the arrows hinting at the brothers predisposition to evil.
Fail: find the mace

If no:
Success: find the clues as to where the mace is and the arrows
Fail: find only the clues to the mace.

I think you are vastly overstating the sharpness of the divide, here. Not every failure will be taken to indicate that the mace is not there to be found; all it means is that the characters' best shot at finding it has failed to uncover it. Given how destructively thorough most players can be in their imaginations when "pixel bitching" a room, I will grant that the chances that the mace is there and still undiscovered by a balls-out search is slim, but strictly it's just "unknown".

As an aside, this is one of the things I'm liking a great deal about Dungeon World, so far (still reading and digesting - not run it, yet). Part of the GM's Agenda given in DW is "Play to find out what happens". This discussion has made me realise some of the dimensions of this; it is really talking about the "author only what you have to" that @Umbran mentioned upthread. If the PCs fail to find the mace (that might or might not have been there), what do you as GM take as "known"? Simply that they failed to find the mace - no more than that. It might now plausibly turn up somewhere else, or it might not (whereas, had the PCs found it, it obviously could not turn up elsewhere unless they either took it there or lost it again). Each resolution in play sets the parameters within which future resolutions happen, and as a GM you can be as surprised by what happens as the players. Looking back, there have been elements of this in my GMing previously, but I had not consciously singled them out as something "fun" I wanted to increase and develop. That may be changing.

I'm not assuming every example will be like this, As I have said many examples of fail forward I am fine with. It's only when it goes to this extreme that it doesn't work for me.


This works well if you like the dungeon world approach, Leverage has a similar approach and I enjoy that. But it is not the style of game I want to play all the time.
If they "fail" the check it could indicate that it took a long time to find the mace, or you didn't find additional clues beyond the essential mace.
If the mace isn't there then a success is quickly find evidence of where it has been taken and maybe other information, failure could be that it takes longer to find the clues to it actual location, or that other information is not found.

 

[Nagol]

You've a very good point about the major edition that sells adventure paths here (3.x) - but it's far from traditional. Indeed I'd say from experience all TSR editions and 4e are almost as easy to wing as Fate (although 4e tries to hide it). You need a business card worth of materials in each case.

For TSR era your business card needs the fighter saving throws and attack bonuses by hit dice (unless you've memorised them) and possibly some weapon damages if you care. And then to create monsters you need hit dice, AC, attacks, and to look up the values on the card unless you want to create a spell caster (where you need to look things up)

For 4e you need the MM3 on a Business Card on one side and the skill challenge DCs on the other. Creating a non-solo requires a level, a combat role, a size, (minion, standard, elite - handcraft your solos) and a schtick or two (4e powers and Fate stunts are basically the same thing).

In both cases this is all you need for RAW-legal monsters and you can create them in the time it takes to sort out initiative (I speak from experience). So it's hardly true to say that D&D traditionally does it one way.

To be fair, earlier editions of D&D would also require a sheet showing expected treasure allocation.