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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grendel111111" data-source="post: 6800043" data-attributes="member: 6803870">I agree with both of these statements, about fail forward being a cluster of ideas (and some being better for some styles than others), and that pre-authoring is a continuum.I have a very strong preference for pre-authoring when I am a player (not so much when I am a DM).Every game has a level of "non-pre-authoring" in terms of unexpected things happen. Where I diverge from fail forward (and this may be just because of my love of math and probability and how it interacts, and how I view it in the game, etc.)  is that I dislike the tying of abstract thing to characters abilities.In the example of the mace here is the way I see it playing out.The DM does not know if the mace in the tower. With the fail forward example they will find it if it is there, and if it isn't there they will find the alternative path. So the difference between the 2 is not "did they search good enough" but is the thing they are looking for there.My preference is (if you need to decide and the DM can't) just roll a die not tied to a skill (50/50).One response to this was "we are tying it to "failure" not to the skill" but mathematically that is utter rubbish. You might mean that you don't care if it's tied to the skill, but it is easy to show that it is inversely proportional to your skill.Skill will succeed on (p) so chance of failure is (1-p) so chance of mace not being there is (1-p)As p goes up the chance of the mace being there goes down.As soon as a DM says to me "If you pass the roll you will find the mace, but if you fail the mace is not here and I will give you a clue to it's location" the "Schrodingerness" of the situation is staring me straight in the face.I do not see why tying the location of the mace to your search skill is any better than tying it to just to a random roll. Or just deciding which result would be more interesting and just going with that. (Having a chase here would be fun, lets go with that)I do understand those who have a strong narrative approach most likely won't have the issue (I am not trying to make them start having the issue), and won't see the issue (because it doesn't come up for them), but it is an issue for some people. However it doesn't stop us from finding good things in fail forward that we can use in our games. I have already found serveral new things and approaches from discussions like this that I have added to my game.</blockquote>

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