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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6208931" data-attributes="member: 22779">This nails things right on the head.  Which is why I get so frustrated by these conversations.  The DM has rolled the dice.  He has, at the table, established that you have a chance for success.  Now, you may fail, and that's fine.  But, you may also succeed, which is equally fine.What is the opposite of failing forward?  I guess you'd have to call it succeeding backward.  The player does everything right, follows the rules, and, most importantly, succeeds at the action he was intending.  But, he still winds up failing.  It's like Ahn's example from LotR where the party is trying to slog across the mountains, only to be forced to Moria.If the DM has allowed the dice to come out, then, unless there is no chance of success in the first place, there should be a chance of succeeding.  If the players do actually succeed, then they get across the mountains and skip Moria.  Them's the breaks.  If you didn't want that to happen, then why not frame the scene that way?  "You try to cross the mountains but the passes are blocked, you backtrack to the gates of Moria."   Done.  Why waste everyone's time?Same thing goes for the Glabrezu example.  The player did everything right.  He followed everything.  Only to have the DM declare, completely out of the blue, that he had no chance of succeeding in the first place.  Going back to another gaming story, I played a wizard in a 2e AD&D game that was using the Complete Wizard's Guide.  The CWG had (for the time) extensive rules for creating your own spells.  You had to have a lab, buy a library, spend time and money, and even then you had about a 1 in 3 chance of success.So, I spend the time, I buy a house to hold my library, buy the lab and the library.  Get everything in a row.  Write a new spell (IIRC, I wanted an Unseen Servant spell that lasted 1 hour/level instead of the 10 minutes that IIRC, the 2e duration was) and show it to the DM and ask if this is okay.  He okay's the idea, as it fits nicely with my character.  I pull out the dice and drop them on the table.  I succeed!  Yay, I got a new spell.Only the DM decides to change the rules on the spot.  He thinks that creating a new spell should be much more difficult and cuts my chances to about 1 in 20.  After all, only the most powerful wizards should be able to create new spells, is his justification.I react ... badly.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  I blow my top.  I had spent several sessions.  LEVELS (and this was 2e where leveling was glacially slow) getting all this stuff together.  All for nothing.  I'd have to try about 10 or 15 times per spell to succeed (each attempt taking weeks and lots of gold).  I was so frustrated.  It just totally ruined the character and the game for me.</blockquote>

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