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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6795383" data-attributes="member: 6778044">This is where a number of us disagree. It all depends on what you're considering in play for the climb check. The extreme narrow view is that the climb check determines solely whether you succeed and move forward up the wall/cliff, and failure means you fall. In other words, the roll is specifically about a task during that situation, and nothing else. The reality is this doesn't allow even a simple you didn't fall but you also didn't move forward. Others feel that it can encompass more than that. Using a degrees of success/failure allows other things to happen, such as pulling some loose rocks free that starts a small rockslide and causes minor damage. You don't fall, but still suffer consequences and don't move forward. Or your piton pulls loose, and again you don't fall, but don't move forward. Or your pack gets caught on rocks and roots and you must free yourself.The rod falling out of your pack is a step beyond that in general concept in that it's looking at the situation rather than the specific skill or task. So instead of failing to simply move up the wall/cliff, or falling, you have a setback that may require some action on your part to resolve.In a non fail forward approach, many DMs might have had something like the rod fall out of the pack if they rolled a 1 on their climb check. Or maybe it falls out as you tumble down the mountainside, and it's stuck up on a ledge and you must retrieve it before you can continue.The point is that it's a widening of what the check covers. The wider net the check throws, the more options you have as a DM, and the fewer additional checks you'll need. It's largely about mechanical economics, and how many possibilities do you want to cover, and how many different checks do you need to do it with? By tying the events to the successes and failures of a skill check, you are creating a hybrid of DM fiat and letting the dice decide. The dice say whether it's good or bad, and by how much, but the DM leverages the fact that he's a human and not a table with 'x' number of choices to tell you specifically what it is.Ilbranteloth</blockquote>

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