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="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6488301" data-attributes="member: 4937">Now you are using 'fails foward' in a sense that is so loose as to be meaningless.  If the party wins the encounter, of course we ought to expect that the story goes forward.  It goes forward with the complication 'Bob is dead', but of course it goes forward because the party won!   Had the party lost, then of course we'd expect the story to change in some way.The fact that you equate winning an encounter with failing only me shows that 'fails forward' in practice just another way of saying 'never less than a minor victory'.  This would only be true if Bob had no role in the story and was about to be replaced by Bob II, which admittedly is a method many groups actually use, but in this case 'story' per se is not the major priority of such groups.  Instead there, death is a setback of some sort on their way to higher level.   Again, if the party wins but Bob dies, of course we'd expect the rest of the party - all that part of the party that wasn't Bob - to inherit the outcome and fruits of victory.   Of course Bob's defeat is primarily personal.Well, real failures however minor actually would.None of those stories require any creativity at all nor are any of these stories unlikely in your average game of D&D played with whatever primary agenda you like.  In short, these aren't things that the GM has to have happen by fiat because he's trying to rescue a player from death, nor are they outcomes that need to be privileged by the system.  These are stories that happen quite naturally because the players themselves are trying to rescue themselves from death.   We don't need a special system for ensuring accidents and mistakes have at least that much impact on the story, though frankly those impacts are so small I should be somewhat apologetic to offer them up as examples of impact on the story at all.  No these sorts of strategies for rescuing at least a partial victory from the jaws of defeat are things that players will just do so that they can live again to fight another day.   None of these are particularly story-changing at all, much less stories involving real failure.   Bob gets captured and then we don't get back in time to stop him from being ritually sacrificed and eaten, so that he can't even be resurrected because we don't have a body, now that is at least some sort of failure.   The BBEG wins and the party is forced to watch his triumph and flee because his ascendance is so great, that it is beyond the power of the PC's to see how ever they'll be able to bring him low again.  That's at least some sort of failure, albeit one that I think most players would in practice treat as a partial victory because at least they got away.  "We still live!"  "Aure entuluva!"Really though, if it bothers you that a death can be revoked at a price, then the solution would seem to make death less revocable.  As a practical matter, having rules that ensure anything that might have been a death converts to some other sort of failure, is like having unconditional unlimited resurrections built into the rules.  Yes, I too would have a problem if resurrections were occurring three times per day, and might find it silly.  But that's no less silly than what you propose and is at least established within the fiction rather than imposed without it.</blockquote>

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