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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7694850" data-attributes="member: 42582">Failing to find fresh water when navigating a desert looking for water is not success. It is failure - the noun failure being cognate with the verb failing in the phrase failing to find fresh water.Success with complications would be (for instance) arriving at fresh water, but having to negotiate with a nemesis in order to gain access to the waterhole (in this case, perhaps, the desert raider Wasal who had earlier evicted the PCs from his camp).If the party was equipped with a decanter of endless water (or spells to create water, etc), then what is at stake would obviously be different. But they weren't. Not dehydrating in the desert was (unsurprisingly, I think) key to what was at stake in this particular moment of play.In the thread that I linked to,  [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] gave an interesting actual play example: in order to defend the compound from assailants, the PC urges her tribe to help her build giant effigies to be carried to the walls to scare away their enemies; and the check failed, and so the tribe agreed to sacrifice the PC inside them, Wicker-man style, so as to scare away their enemies.That's not "success with a complication". That's failure.You could say that both chaochou's example, and the waterhole example, are "partial success" or "near success" - in one case, the effigies get made and the tribe has agreed to use them to try and drive away their enemies; in the other, the PCs do make it across the desert. But this only shows that "partial success" and "success with complications" are different things.(In chaochou's case, success with complications might mean - for instance - that the tribe builds the effigies and carries them to the walls of the compound, driving away the enemies, but attracting the adverse attention of the being of whom they are effigies.)</blockquote>

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