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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6533190" data-attributes="member: 4937">This view of the game is strange to me.  I'm frequently told how one ought to practice "failing forward", and when I ask what is meant by that I'm often told that it is failure that doesn't result in the end of the story (as by death, or perhaps indefinite incarceration).  But then I say, "Oh, well yes, the party "fails forward" all the time, with or without my assistance or any special technique.  However, it seems to me that by fail forward you are just limiting the scope of failure, so that you want to prevent actual failure and substitute it for never less than a minor victory."Generally speaking, I'm then told that I don't get it, and that the failure is actually real.   But I find that their definition of "real failure" never seems to arise to the level of anything that would actually threat the PC's interests.   And now I here you saying that if the failure is so onerous that it means going back to town to resupply and delay in getting to the "good stuff", such failure is too much to consider.   I'm beginning to see as a general rule, "Thou shalt not allow the PC's to be inconvenienced, even if by their own actions."   Is it really such the case that failure now can't include death, disfigurement, disability, loss of possessions, or inconvenience?  I ask what form of failure is left that is actual failure to a typical sociopathic murder hobo?If we could entirely trust players to be reasonable, and confine themselves to carrying only what was reasonable for big darn heroes such as themselves, then I think we could do away with encumbrance in all forms.   But typically I find I have to do a bit of an audit, every few months, just to see whether the players are actually being reasonable about how many hands their characters have, and the volume of their packs, and whether its quite reasonable to be leaping about like an epic swashbuckler when they are carrying the entirety of Smaug's horde on their backs.  At such times I find myself having to demand that part of the good stuff is concretely imagining the experience their character is having (Just where are you putting your glaive, your morningstar, your longsword, your dagger, your shortbow, your backpack, and your two quivers of arrows?), and that part of the good stuff might be buying a mule or ten and a pack bearer if you plan on carrying out of the dungeon every item of the slightest value you find.   Knowing that if you have a sword in one hand, and a shield in the other, you don't have a hand left for holding a lantern or for fishing that potion of cure serious wounds out of your backpack is part of the good stuff.  And I find this isn't a problem that occurs rarely.  What I find tends to happen though if you don't continually correct for it is that you end up no longer playing in the stance where you can see the imagined world, but where everything is a sort of elaborate board game and nothing need be concretely imagined.  Whether something is in your left hand and something else is in your right hand doesn't preclude holding a torch and fishing through the backpack for a healing potion, because it's really not about being the character but about using your abstract resources to resolve abstract problems.   Now, I like abstract problems and board games well enough, but if I played an RPG like an abstract problem or board game I'd be forgoing all the pleasures that are actually unique to an RPG.The degree to which you pay attention to these things can be tweeked rather easily without violating the integrity of the imagined space.  Simply tweek the availability of the magical items that alleviate these problems by storing stuff in extradimensional spaces where you usually don't have to think about it.  If you really want to avoid this, hand out bags of holding, gloves of storing, and baubles of the unseen servant to ensure that  the players - when they ever need to think about this, which will be rarely - always have ready solutions.</blockquote>

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