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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6798526" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think so - though [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] doesn't agree (maybe we have different dimensions of the technique in mind?).What I have in mind is that "fail forward" requires adjudicating outcomes of action resolution, and extrapolating the fiction, by reference to dramatic necessity rather than ingame causal logic. Which tends to leave process sim behind.Relating that to BW and granularity: I think "fail forward" can take process sim as an input, in framing action declarations. (BW does this; Marvel Heroic RP, by contrast, does so much less - eg many Distinctions, or Affiliation dice, don't have a causal logic behind their inclusion in the pool.)It's when we look at outputs that we see the lack of process sim.Nowhere in the actual play examples I've given is the player deciding what his/her PC does other than by looking through the PC's eyes. In the mace example, the PC last saw the mace in the tower, when it had to be abandoned to the onrushing orcs. Now, 14 years later, the PC returns and wants to look for the mace.Backstory authorship is primarily in the hands of the GM, not the players, in the examples I've given. (And in the Mt Pudding example also.)From the players' point of view, though, how does it disrupt immersion to have the GM decide the relevant backstory as part of adjudicating action resolution? How is that not seeing the world through a PC's eyes?For me the check also has real concrete meaning - the PCs are searching for something, and the check determines if they find it or not.The difference seems to be in the range of permitted explanations for why they don't find it - which in your approach includes that the GM decided it's not there even if the check is successful. (Is that "fair" or not? Opinions may differ.)Here is <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=1361" target="_blank">a Paul Czege quote</a> perhaps relevant to "fairness":By god, when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . .t [is] my job to find out what the player finds interesting about the character. And I know what I find interesting. I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player.I doubt my games are as intense as Czege's, but the basic principle is the same: I am not a neutral arbiter. My job is to confront the PC (and thereby the player) with adversity. When the player succeeds at a check, the PC overcomes the adversity - there is no GM's secret backstory (like having already decided that the mace is not there) to thwart him/her. When the player fails, the ball is in my court - so of course the mace is in the hands of their enemy, who after all has had 14 leisurely years to loot the tower.But as I said, this seems to me to be orthogonal to character immersion or seeing the gameworld through the PC's eyes.Some examples were given by [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION]. In the particular example, if as a GM I've decided that the mace is not there, then you can have the players devote a lot of table time + resources (eg fate points, treasure finding potions, whatever else) to looking for the mace, get an excellent roll, and still be told they don't find it.The jailer is interesting only if the narrative context makes it so. In this example, it is the PC being trapped that makes the arrival of the jailer interesting. (I think that what I have just said is pretty consistent with [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]'s reply on the same point.)</blockquote>

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