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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7694842" data-attributes="member: 42582">A near-success is not a success with complications. A near-success is a failure; something short of success.And your assertion to the contrary makes me wonder how much experience you have with "no whiffing" or "fail forward"-style mechanics.There is a very long recent thread on this, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473785-Failing-Forward" target="_blank">here</a>. A number of actual play examples have been menioned. Here are two, from my BW game:(1) The PCs are travelling through the Bright Desert, heading to a ruined tower in the Abor-Alz which, up until 14 years ago, was the home of the PC mage and his (NPC) brother - they abandoned it when it was attacked by orcs and the brother, in an attempt to cast a might spell against the orcs, failed his casting and was possessed by a balrog. The elven ronin ranger PC is guiding them through the desert. The elf's orienteering check fails. The consequence, as narrated by me (the GM): the PCs arrive at the waterhole at the foot of the Abor-Alz, but it has been fouled be a dark elf, and so there is no fresh water to be had. Another Forte test has to be made by each PC, resulting in more loss of Forte due to dehydration. (2) Having arrived at the tower, the PCs are searching it, looking for a nickel-silver mace that the PC mage had forged some 14 years ago, and had abandoned in the tower. The Scavenging check fails. The consequence, as narrated by me (the GM): the PCs find that the mace is not in the tower, but they do discover something - in the ruins of what was the private workroom of the brother, they find cursed black arrows, identical to the broken arrow that the elven ronin carries on a cord around his neck, which was shot by an orc and killed his master. Up until this point the goal of the mage PC has been to free his brother from possession; now he is forced to consider that his brother may not be redeemable, and that his evil may have led to the balrog possession rather than vice versa.These are examples of "no whiffing". Failure does not lead to "treading water" - something changes in the fiction. Failure does not reveal the PCs as incompetent - they do not get lost in the desert, or overlook anything in the tower. In neither case do they succeed, however - they do not find fresh water, and they do not find the mace.A third example also mentioned in that thread does exemplify "success with complication": in the first session of the campaign, the mage PC used aura reading to determine whether a feather being offered for sale as an angel feather really was such a thing. The check failed; and the consequence that I narrated was that the feather was indeed an angel feather, but it was also cursed.But the idea that "fail forward" or "no whiffing" is always, or even typically, "success with complication" is simply not correct.</blockquote>

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