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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6787649" data-attributes="member: 2067">We're moving the goalposts a bit, but since this better reflects actual play than "this mountain with one goal" or "this dungeon with one goal", I'll totally play with the field. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Here, you've introduced multiple competing goals that cannot all be accomplished. Your character has a goal to protect their friends and comrades, and ALSO to get the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding. Choosing between competing goals is AWESOME. That wasn't an element of Mt. Pudding or the Dungeon with the BBEG and the Secret Door. But if Fail Forward means that you cannot do both A and B (get the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding and preserve the lives of your friends and comrades), my issues with it mostly evaporate, because there's still interesting choices about whether or not you want to do this. Fail the check, you can still get the coin, but some other goal you have is destroyed. What would be interesting for me is some advice on how to get PC's to declare goals like this (as explicitly as possible!), and how to mix them together into plots where they can't be accomplished at the same time. I don't know if that's Fail Forward, but it sounds meaty! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> The only issue there is that there's a lot of simplistic single-minded characters out there (most D&D characters I've seen, at least at the first few levels, only have a goal of "do this first adventure," and are still in the process of fleshing out their character motivations in more detail) - when the character IS Ahab, and their only goal IS the coin at the top of Mt. Pudding, there would seem to be no interesting choices to make. But I can see a lot to be gained from solving that problem by encouraging more varied and nuanced character goals. Edison was a notorious huckster, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#History" target="_blank">so it often pays</a> to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan" target="_blank">fact-check him</a>. And like with Mt. Pudding, this depends on what one's goals are. Do we say Edison failed because he failed to make <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_McFarlan_Moore" target="_blank">neon lights</a>? Why do we say that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bowman_Lindsay" target="_blank">James Bowman Lindsay</a> was a "failure" in inventing the light bulb when he set out to do all he intended to do? To blow through the layers of analogy here, the ultimate point is that it requires some resource to be persistent, something you spend and that you can run out of. In Edison's case, this was money. In D&D's case, this is usually hit points. In the case of Fail Forward, it doesn't appear that the repeat attempt costs you anything of note (unless it requires the use of multiple competing goals as I point out above). There's no simulation goal here. It's fun to make interesting decisions, and if there's no true cost to failure, then there's no real decision to be made in the face of failure, which removes one of the interesting decisions I could make as a player. That's...not something I typically embrace. Speaking from a player's perspective - I WANT complications and difficulty. So the incentives here seems screwy - if as a player I want complications and difficulty then...I want to fail checks? And make a broadly incompetent character? Because success isn't interesting? I don't think I've got that right...I'd continue to dispute that. It is fun to roll the dice. Outright success is not inherently better in terms of the player's play experience, because not very interactive. There's no interesting decisions to make, no tension, no uncertainty, no release... That can introduce those screwy incentives - I can achieve outright success, but why would I WANT to, if my goal in play is to overcome challenges? Speaking in concrete terms, this is why "roll to hit with advantage" can be more fun than "you automatically hit" , and why it's fun to roll fireball damage. To make the automatic success as fun to play through than dice rolling would essentially mean introducing puzzles, which is a very different kind of fun. ...though now that I think of it, I wonder if "puzzle fun" (AKA: achievement) isn't the fun that advocates of Fail Forward tend to slightly prefer, over "dice fun" (AKA: excitement). In which case we may have a good ol' fashioned goal misalignment when it comes to using Fail Forward as a tool. My impression is that Fail Forward removes a potentially interesting failure condition ("you can't") intentionally, so that a momentum toward a goal is maintained. My preference is instead for that momentum to be questioned at every point, making that failure condition rather important to actually use, BECAUSE it disrupts that momentum. Which is why I can't say I'm a fan of Fail Forward as described by Mt. Pudding or the BBEG and the Secret Door (though as elaborated by the "Captain Ahab and the Coin at the Top of Mt. Pudding," with the addition of competing goals, it seems to develop a certain significant quality that turns the momentum itself into something that is costing you a limited resource).</blockquote>

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