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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6792361" data-attributes="member: 42582">Having a quick look at the <a href="http://www.runagame.net/2015/12/fail-forward.html" target="_blank">article</a> that  [MENTION=13080]Reinhart[/MENTION] linked to upthread, I don't agree with this:When people talk about Fail Forward in RPGs, they mean that failure should not stop the action, and failure should always have interesting consequences. I suggest that we stop saying "fail forward" now, because it's confusing, it's business jargon, and googling it finds all the wrong links.  I don't need to make up yet another term to replace it.  Instead, I suggest we just start using the term for it from Fate Core, "succeed at a cost.""Succeed at a cost" is only one way of ensuring that failure has interesting consequences, and often not the most interesting or most appropriate. Most of the actual play examples I've given upthread don't involve succeeding at a cost. Nor does  [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s example of losing the rod while climbing Mt Pudding.EDIT: The language of "succeed at a cost" also produces comments like this one to the linked article, which echoes things that have been posted in this thread:t's important that it's not always 'failing forward' or whatever we decide to call it. Sometimes it's just outright failing. In fact there is nothing wrong with failure always producing interesting consequences which drive the action on - which is what game designers like Luke Crane, Robin Laws, Ron Edwards, Jonathan Tweet, Vincent Baker etc have in mind in advocating "fail forward" as a technique. This is completely orthogonal to whether the PCs always, frequently or only sometimes get what they want. In 4e, which is a very heroic game, the tendency is towards "frequently". In BW, which tends towards grittiness, it is more like "sometimes". Others who know the Apocalypse engine better than me can comment on the sort of frequency of success it tends to produce. But all these systems deploy "fail forward" in the sense of "the consequences of failure should be a challenging new situation that drives the action onward."</blockquote>

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