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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6798547" data-attributes="member: 6696971">The disagreement is very subtle due to precisely what you reference.  We have different dimensions of the technique and its place in play priorities and overall play aesthetic in mind.  For instance, I entirely agree with the below:The play priorities of "fail forward" (and Narrativist play in general) do prioritize dramatic need and premise/theme as paramount.  However, this doesn't render inevitable a play aesthetic of disjointed causal logic underpinning the world the PCs occupy (as some have contested in our past conversations of Schrodinger's Gorge, warlords and mommies kissing boo boos away, and here with Bob, his defying crevice-related danger, and his loss of his pudding divining rod).  It is entirely logical for a failed navigation check to cause you to be unable to escape pursuit due to an encounter with a nigh-impassable gorge or to cause you to miss a crevice and nearly fall to your death (losing precious gear in the death defying effort instead).  Rather than discovering nothing, it is entirely possible to discover something terribly regrettable when seeking out something precious (black arrows instead of a nickel-silver mace).  The agenda of process sim is all about the aesthetic of OODA Loop inhabitation (which is really the only thing that matters for process sim...it is a means to the end of that aesthetic) for immersion and agency.  If, while playing a PC in your Burning Wheel game or your 4e game, I found out a horrible reality about my brother while seeking something precious relevant to him, or weather's turn for the worse dashed the fragile hopes of parley...I certainly would have neither my immersion nor agency budged by those prospects.  Those things are entirely plausible outcomes of my intentions.  Life worth living is about taking a series of "Geronimos" off cliffs (certainly the adventurer's life!) where reality oft intervenes in unexpected ways to dash hopes on rocks.  Now if you have internalized an RPG model whereby content generation in the shared imaginary space can solely be a process of discrete checks of extremely fine granularity and extremely narrow constraints (find handhold/foothold > climb 10 feet/fail to climb/fall > roll on a table if failed roll is odd to see if foothold fails > roll on another table to determine consequences of failed handhold > if gear then roll vs your inventory > make gear saving throw to retain or lose specified gear)...then you're going to have an issue with the aesthetic that "fail forward" engenders.  Hope that makes sense.</blockquote>

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