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="pemerton" data-source="post: 6802312" data-attributes="member: 42582">The flip side (in "fail forward" play) is that, if the mace is not there, then the players don't make a check. You just tell them that, after scouring the ruins of the tower, their PCs do not find the mace.Once the check is framed, and the goal of the check is "find the mace", then if the check succeeds the PCs find the mace. In BW terminology, that's "intent and task" at work.I think this is a case where different RPGers think of "plot"/"story" and "railroading" in different terms.The sort of game you describe strikes me as similar to what the Alexandrian discusses in his posts on the "three clue" rule. To me, those sorts of games are very GM-directed: the GM is establishing all the key scenes/transitions in advance, and the players' choices determine the precise pathway through them. I don't mind this sort of game for a convention-style one-shot, but do not particularly like it for campaign play.Two things.First, discovering that the brother was always evil is terrible for the character. He was hoping to save his brother from possession, but now learns that his brother is beyond redemption. Imagine learning that a loved one was in fact a vicious killer. That is not a good thing for anyone!Second, it is by no means guaranteed that the brother was always evil. There is evidence for this: the black arrows. And the PCs currently believe this. But the campaign is not over, and so new revelations (triggered by new checks) are possible. (These would most likely result from successes for the brother PC, or from failures for the assassin/sorcerer PC who hates the brother - her former master, who treated her abominably - and who intends to flay him and send him to hell.)Think about the various revelations around Gollum/Sméagol in LotR, and the ways in which he appears first as a villain, then as a victim, and then as a villain again. The real-time generation of that sort of story is (part of) what scene-framied/"fail forward" play is aimed at.I don't see how this relates to any of the play examples being given by the "fail forward" RPGers in this thread.In the case of my BW game, if - in the end - the balrog kills all the PCs, then they will never learn whether or not the brother was evil, or capable of redemption.As was being discussed a long way upthread, the "fail" in "fail forward" refers to failure. It's not a euphemism for getting what you want.</blockquote>

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