NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6777325" data-attributes="member: 177">Well note the first - I was talking about mechanics implementing fail forward.  Surely, individual GMs may choose to do just about anything any time they please, and we cannot speak to frequency of such without some major data-gathering efforts, if at all.  So, I turned to the game with such mechanics that I expect is most commonly played.Second - "scene" is not "overall effort", in general.  A scene is typically one chunk of an overall effort - the overall effort will, in the end, be a chain of scenes, and the point of fail forward is to make sure that one crappy die roll does not mean the players have to give up and go home.This will, in general, come to your awareness on the scene-level, because the result of not failing forward is the failure to move on to another scene.  That can become a confounding bias when you're looking at the result and trying to suss out the implementation.  You may become aware of it on the scene level, because you notice it on the die roll that would otherwise bring things to a crashing halt, and miss it on all the other times because it either doesn't apply or doesn't call for anything drastic on the less-important die rolls.  Can you actually find a mechanical implementation of it on the scene level? I can't think of any at the moment.Take, for example, FATE.  It does have some notion of "scene".  And there's a thing that allows fail forward on that level - if a PC is "taken out" in a fight, the GM has a choice as to what to do with that character.  The character may die (which we can consider failing, I expect) or the character may live, and be captured, or otherwise discomfited (which we might consider failing forward).However, this decision *isn't mechanical*.  There is an affordance for failing forward, but not an actual mechanic that enacts it.  It gives an explicit moment where a human choice is to be made, not a mechanical resolution.We might quibble a bit on wording of this later, but for sake of argument, I'll leave it be for the moment.I think it is quite the opposite - if you (the player) have a notion of how you want this to end, and are invested in it, not failing forward leads to breakign from expectations, which is a good way to leave you with a dissatisfied player.  In short, the player kind of expects to get a shot at the BBEG eventually.  DO you frustrate that expectation?They aren't?  I'm not so sure.  I would be completely unsurprised if, on the whole, when you look back at the history of most campaigns, that's basically what it looks like - a series of highs and lows, but life continues on from one adventure to another (until it stops, either abruptly and violently, or at the end of the campaign).  The only difference is that in a game that isn't using fail forward, some of the lows can be of the "stuck unable to move forward on the player's intended goal" variety, where those particular are going to be less frequent with fail forward in place. Ultimately, that's the basic difference - does the player experience those points of frustration that come with having hit a brick wall due to dumb luck, or not?  The idea of fail forward is an entirely metagame, pragmatic one - don't subject the player to such moments when you can easily avoid it.That's fine.  So, where in this whole discussion have we had it be that the *player* gets to choose how the fail forward occurs?  Hm?  I believe the answer is *never*.  This is not a mechanic in which the player writes the pages.  The GM is still doing that - creating a new setup where the player gets to make more choices, and avoiding the times when the player has no meaningful choices to make.</blockquote>

Verification