Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6782049" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've had a read through the thread and a few posts stood out."Fail forward" isn't an alternative to failure, and moreso, therefore, isn't a way of guaranteeing success. It's a particular method of narrating the result of a failed check. It's a way of giving effect to failure.I think [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] gave a good example of a "fail forward" mechanic that is not degrees of success/failure: namely, task succeeds but intent fails.Degrees of success/failure seems to me to be more closely aligned to a causal interpretation of the resolution system: the degree of numerical success correlates to the degree of causal effectiveness of the character's effort.Whereas "fail forward", at least as I'm familiar with it from designers like Luke Crane, is about narrating consequences, not interpreting ingame causal processes.In the example of the cursed angel feather I mentioned upthread, for instance, the task (aura reading) succeeds - but the answer is not the one the player (and PC) was hoping for. Task succeeds, intent fails.The example of the mace is a bit different - the PC's task fails under the most narrow description (he doesn't pick up the mace) but it succeeds under a broader description (the party recovers the mace) but the mode of success thwarts the player (and PC's) intent (because the PC doesn't have the mace to use as leverage against the other PC).I think these posts evince a fairly fundamental misunderstanding of "fail forward" as a technique. It has nothing to do with keeping the game "on track" or the GM deciding that something "HAS to happen in a specific way".It's about a certain sort of narrative dynamism - something has to happen, but it is not "in a specific way". It's about responding to the particularities of the situation and the ongoing game and the players' signals.In the example of the cursed angel feather, it never occurred to me until the player declared that his PC approached the peddler in the bazaar to see if any magical trinkets were for sale, and I decided to have the peddler offer to sell an angel feather.In the example of the mace, having the mace flow down the stream didn't even make sense as "failing forward" except for the fact that, due to other events that had happened in the session, a couple of the PCs were following some servants who were washing a priest's vestments in the stream below the keep.These aren't predetermined outcomes. They're more-or-less spontaneous responses to, and riffs on, the evolving in-game situation.There is a connection here between "fail forward" and the (mostly but not completely tangential) discussion about player vs GM world-building. "Fail forward" is a GM-side technique. It's about the GM maintaining control over scene-framing and narration, because the player - in failing to succeed on a check - did not acquire the authority to stipulate the content of the ingame situation. But GM control over narration and backstory isn't - under any definition I'm familiar with - equivalent to railroading. It's just the GM doing his/her job within a fairly traditional assignment of RPG responsibilities.I've given a couple of examples upthread and elaborated on them in this post."Fail forward", at least as I understand it, is not about putting "the plot" behind a secret door. It's a technique generally associated with games in which there is no "plot" and no "adventure design" in the sense that you use that phrase.It's a technique for maintaining narrative dynamism in the face of failed checks. It depends upon a certain fluidity of backstory that is pretty much the opposite of "the plot" or "adventure design".I don't see this as very relevant to "fail forward". For a start, how do the players even know there is a secret door to find? Assuming that they don't - this is written in the GM's secret notes - then, from their point of view, the dramatic question of the encounter is not "Can you find the secret door"?Fail forward is about narrative dynamism. So it is concerned with the narrative as the players experience it, not with the narrative as understood only by reference to the GM's secret backstory.From this point of view, the dramatic question is more likely to be "Can we proceed through this apparently blocked passageway?" The players then declare some sort of check aimed at some sort of goal - in Burning Wheel this could be anything from Ditch Digging (to hack their way through the walls) to Secret Passage-wise (to recollect knowledge about secret door methods and locations); in 4e it would most likely be a Dungeoneering check (similar to Secret Passage-wise) or Perception check (to spot a secret door) or STR check (to hack through).If the check succeeds, the PCs succeed in their task and in their intent - so they spot a secret door, or successfully dig through the wall, or recollect some relevant fact about secret passages, or whatever else follows from the way the check was framed.If the check fails, then the GM narrates some dynamic failure instead. The PCs spot a secret door, but also a trip wire. (This is somewhat analogous to the cursed feather.) The PCs recollect that the secret doors in this area can only be opened via speaking the right magical phrase following a blood sacrifice. The PCs make a hole in the wall, but break their tools in the process. Or whatever else seems appropriate to the task and intent declared, plus the broader context of player and PC goals, what makes for a meaningful consequence (tools are more important in Burning Wheel than 4e, for instance), etc.The contrast with "adventure design" should be fairly clear: adventure design is about establishing a secret backstory; whereas "fail forward" depends upon a readiness to create new backstory in order to narrate meaningful consequences for failure that maintain narrative dynamism - such as the curse on the angel feather, or the trip wire on the secret door.But to again draw the link to the world-building discussion in this thread - this is not the players building the world. It is the GM building the world, in response to players' declared actions and the results of player dice rolls.</blockquote>

Verification