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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7512788" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe. It depends what's going on both in the fiction (given the established fiction, the framing of the (failed) check, etc, what sort of thing might happen next?) and at the table (what were the players looking for from the check? what was at stake?).Maybe in the crime lord situation, the lead they are talking to suddenly collapses - dead, poisoned! That could easily make sense if (eg) one of the PCs is a poisoner, so that dealing with poisons and drug suppliers and so on is part of that PC's schtick, and now (in a sense) that rebounds upon him/her (poetic justice can be one way of honouring theme and respecting stakes) while also ensuring that play goes on - what sort of poison? who arranged the assassination? etc.Maybe the crime lord pursuit drops out all together because some other line of activity becomes more engaging and the games spins off in a new direction! (Whether or not it's true in film and novels that everything should resolve, I don't think it has to be true in RPGing - the lack of ability to rewrite and to edit I think means that resolution can't always be guaranteed.)From the GMing side, the key to the sort of approach I'm talking about is that there's no conception of "the story" or "the adventure" and so there's no event or information or whatever that has to happen or has to be acquired. The GM is adjudicating and narrating by reference to genre and theme and stakes and what is generating shared energy at the table. [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] mentioned improvised or semi-improvised. I think improvised is self-explanatory. Semi-improvised is an interesting category. There's no reason why the GM can't have some NPCs written up, with (loose) backstories and some sense of how they might fit into the unfolding situation at the table. These can then be brought out, to serve as foils or opposition or whatever as demanded by the situations that are being established in play.There's no reason why the GM can't have some situations in mind either - eg the poisoners' cult hideout.What's key is that the GM doesn't have a preconceived series of events and outcomes.Where the boundary lies is (I think) always a table-relative, mood-of-the-session-relative matter. Let's say the GM has prepared an idea for some sort of infiltration of the poisoners' cult hideout. So when the check to interrogate the lead fails, the lead drops dead in front of the PCs, poisoned. The PCs look around, the players succeed at a check, spot a figure with a blowpipe, a chase ensues, they arrive at the cult hideout. Is that fail-forward - establishing a new situation that respects the failure and reframes the situation as one adverse to the PCs but still engaging what was at stake for them in the context of the failed check? Or is that rail-roading - using the players' (and thus their PCs') hunt for the crime lord as an excuse to drop in something that is purely the GM's enthusiasm?My view is that there can't be a general or universal answer to that question. It's about trust and expectations at the table. It's about understandings of time frames (if everyone knows the campaign is going to go for years, there's probably a tolerance of slow build up that would be completely intolerable in a one-shot). It's about how the GM communicates to this group of players, here and now, that the things they take to be at stake really are at stake in this poisoners' cult hideout, even though the way they're being put at stake is driven by the GM and comes as a surprise to the players.Hopefully that makes some degree of sense!</blockquote>

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