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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6776390" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Umbran seems to have gotten in ahead of me and said most of the things I would have wanted to say.</p><p></p><p>I generally dislike 'Fail Forward', but I believe it is appropriate and even necessary in certain situations. The basic idea of 'Fail Forward' is that after a failure, the game not only needs to go on but needs to remain exciting or interesting. </p><p></p><p>However, the method for implementing 'the game must go on' is going to very between game styles and even between specific situations. Encoding fail forward and especially encoding it mechanically tends to very much limit the range of styles and means of continuing the story that are available to the GM. </p><p></p><p>I prefer as a GM to keep my options open, and I've experienced situations both as a GM and a player were failure was earned and you just had to accept it. Those situations have helped me learn better and less brittle design techniques, which tend to mitigate against the need for a mechanically enforced solution to failure. Avoiding chokepoints and having back up plans in the event of a choke point are just necessary parts of good DMing. It also helps to have a mindset where you don't see chokepoints as chokepoints because you aren't committed to single outcomes, so that no NPC is so critical to the plot that the timing of their death has to have plot protection, or no scenario is dependent on player actions to resolve in some particular way you are committed to. </p><p></p><p>As a GM, you have to be willing to have the Rebels either lose or win the Battle of Hoth. Your idea of what the story should be shouldn't preclude that the party doesn't split up, and Han and Leia end up on Dagobah with him, or are instead destroyed by Vadar in the asteroid field, and so forth. This means you as a story teller sometimes have to relinquish what you think is the perfect literary outline for 'the story' and instead be willing to have the story be different things and go in different directions. </p><p></p><p>But in a game, 'defeat' - real defeat - I think needs to be an option on the table. I've seen 'fail forward' defined in ways that argue for failure to be succeeding at a cost, such that real failure is removed as an option. The cost is always turns out to be what the player can bear, so that failure always turns out to be the difference between a Marginal Victory and an Decisive Victory (at most). In my opinion, you can't really savor a character surviving if death never really was a meaningful possibility.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6776390, member: 4937"] Umbran seems to have gotten in ahead of me and said most of the things I would have wanted to say. I generally dislike 'Fail Forward', but I believe it is appropriate and even necessary in certain situations. The basic idea of 'Fail Forward' is that after a failure, the game not only needs to go on but needs to remain exciting or interesting. However, the method for implementing 'the game must go on' is going to very between game styles and even between specific situations. Encoding fail forward and especially encoding it mechanically tends to very much limit the range of styles and means of continuing the story that are available to the GM. I prefer as a GM to keep my options open, and I've experienced situations both as a GM and a player were failure was earned and you just had to accept it. Those situations have helped me learn better and less brittle design techniques, which tend to mitigate against the need for a mechanically enforced solution to failure. Avoiding chokepoints and having back up plans in the event of a choke point are just necessary parts of good DMing. It also helps to have a mindset where you don't see chokepoints as chokepoints because you aren't committed to single outcomes, so that no NPC is so critical to the plot that the timing of their death has to have plot protection, or no scenario is dependent on player actions to resolve in some particular way you are committed to. As a GM, you have to be willing to have the Rebels either lose or win the Battle of Hoth. Your idea of what the story should be shouldn't preclude that the party doesn't split up, and Han and Leia end up on Dagobah with him, or are instead destroyed by Vadar in the asteroid field, and so forth. This means you as a story teller sometimes have to relinquish what you think is the perfect literary outline for 'the story' and instead be willing to have the story be different things and go in different directions. But in a game, 'defeat' - real defeat - I think needs to be an option on the table. I've seen 'fail forward' defined in ways that argue for failure to be succeeding at a cost, such that real failure is removed as an option. The cost is always turns out to be what the player can bear, so that failure always turns out to be the difference between a Marginal Victory and an Decisive Victory (at most). In my opinion, you can't really savor a character surviving if death never really was a meaningful possibility. [/QUOTE]
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