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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fearsomepirate" data-source="post: 8108357" data-attributes="member: 7021420">Note that what I'm talking about is very different than "failing forward." Think about the last action or adventure movie you ever saw. What do you know, right away, at the beginning? The sneering villain is not going to win. But lots of other bad stuff might happen. The hero might die in the end. Maybe he loses the love of his life. Maybe his dog dies while saving him from an alien. Maybe his vintage necktie collection gets Hawaiian Punch spattered all over it, rendering it worthless.Look, the reality is that if I spend $50 on this storybook campaign, you can be damn well sure that we're going to enjoy its content! In Out of the Abyss "and they were never heard from again, and the demon lords ate the world" is really not a satisfying outcome to checking out some troubles in the myconids' garden. So, starting on page 1, one thing you can be pretty sure of is that we will somehow get to the final battle, or reasonably close to it. Even in the event of a TPK while fighting the raging Stone Giant in Gracklstugh, c'mon, that's incredibly anticlimactic, we're gonna come back with a new party somehow.Consequently, to have something other than You Died (Reload/New Game) suspense, meaningful failure conditions have to be built into the various chapters. Don't leave it to a newbie DM to figure out what to do if the party makes a brief raid into the Gray Ghosts' hideout, but chickens out and goes back to the inn to sleep for a couple days after their first big fight. Spell it out: the Gray Ghosts abandon their hideout, spirit away the dragon egg to where it can't ever be found again, and the party's failure results in them being unwelcome in Gracklstugh. Give a few points about what this failure means for the rest of the adventure.</blockquote>

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