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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6784928" data-attributes="member: 8835">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.A GM likely has to decide when to use a FailForward to make it interesting, from just letting you take damage as you fail your 3rd climb roll.  I'd posit that some climb failures should be a slip, with a chance to catch yourself.  Some should be straight falls.  Others should be some other result (like the dropped wand).  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.</blockquote>

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