The game incentive for checking if anyone is awake in the house is the same as the game incentive for declaring any other action - which can vary from player to player, moment to moment, and of course system to system.
Perhaps the player thinks it's what their character would do. Perhaps, slipping into author rather than actor stance, the player thinks that making this check at this time will support some PC advancement goal. Or the player may engage in a different bit of author stance reasoning - that making their move in this field of endeavour rather than this other one might improve their chance to take some control of how things unfold.
These things can overlap, of course. Why did Aedhros wander up into the better parts of the city? Because he has his various connections to the Elves, and he has an instinct, when his mind wanders, to quietly sing the Elven lays. And by acting on his instinct and causing trouble (in the instance I posted most recently, he was accosted by a guard), I earn a Fate point.
Providing a list of reasons the player may do something, doesn't answer a question about the game incentive for doing it. Not all reasons a player does something are based on game incentives and that's fine, but my question is specifically about the game incentives in the context of a specific scenario. Maybe the answer is, there is no game incentive for the player to do what I describe in my scenario.
I don't see why I'm obliged to run a game about screaming cooks to satisfy you and other posters. I've posted actual examples from actual play. If you don't want to talk about them, and instead want to worry about screaming cooks, that's your prerogative. But that doesn't impose any obligations on me.
I'd argue it certainly can. Now, if you have a fairly spread out set of options there, and there's some discussion of assigning them in the books that provides enough examples to be useful, the advantage is that it can become pretty obvious if the bias is at all present (or at the alternate end, if the GM is being radically inconsistent).
You keep pointing to an example where the consequence - the screaming cook - has not been telegraphed, has not been expressly or implicitly put at stake, and appears like a rabbit out of hat.
When people who actually play Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World and other games in which "nothing happens" is not a GM-side move point out that your example is silly, you ignore them.
I've seen people struggle with hard moves in the moment. Like, when the dice miss, the MC stares at it like, "Crap! Now I have to invent something! Better make it dangerous and cool! Uh... some ninja... drop out of the ceiling... with poison knives! Grah!"
Don't do that. Instead, when it's time for a hard move, look back at the setup move(s) you made. What was threatened? What was about to happen, before the PC took action? Follow through on that. Bring the effects on screen. Bring the consequences to fruition.
That's what "fail forward" looks like. Not "quantum cooks".
I know you're trying to answer but the the thing is that saying "...look back at the setup move(s) you made. What was threatened? What was about to happen, before the PC took action? Follow through on that. Bring the effects on screen. Bring the consequences to fruition." is meaningless to someone who doesn't play the game. It also doesn't explain how this relates to fail forward in any way. This is what I'm talking about when it comes to vague answers that are meaningless. They make sense to you, but anyone else? Pretty hit or miss.
Aedhros had helped collect the corpse, and also helped with the Taxidermy (using his skill with Heart-seeker), but was unable to help with the Death Art. He was reasonably happy to now leave the workshop; and was no stranger to stealthy kidnappings in the dark. I told my friend (now GMing) that I wanted to use Stealthy, Inconspicuous and Knives to spring upon someone and force them, at knife point, to come with me to the workshop. He called for a linked test first, on Inconspicuous with Stealth FoRKed in. This succeeded, and Aedhros found a suitable place outside a house of ill-repute, ready to kidnap a lady of the night. When a victim appeared, Aedhros tried to force a Steel test (I think - my memory is a bit hazy) but whatever it was, it failed, and the intended victim went screaming into the night. Now there is word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.
Aedhros's Beliefs are I will avenge the death of my spouse!, Thurandril will admit that I am right! and I will free Alicia and myself from the curse of Thoth!; and his Instincts are Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to, Always repay hurt with hurt, and When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the elven lays. Having failed at the most basic task, and not knowing how to return to Thoth empty-handed, Aedhros wandered away from the docks, up into the wealthier parts of the city, to the home of the Elven Ambassador. As he sang the Elven lays to himself, I asked the GM for a test on Sing, to serve as a linked test to help in my next test to resist Thoth's bullying and depravity. The GM set my Spite of 5 as the obstacle, and I failed - a spend of a fate point only got me to 4 successes on 4 dice.
My singing attracted the attention of a guard, who had heard the word on the street, and didn't like the look of this rag-clothed Dark Elf. Aedhros has Circles 3 and a +1 reputation with the Etharchs, and so I rolled my 4 dice to see if an Etharch (whether Thurandril or one of his underlings or associates) would turn up here and now to tell the guards that I am right and they should not arrest me. But the test failed, and the only person to turn up was another guard to join the first in bundling me off. So I had to resort to the more mundane method of offering them 1D of loot to leave me alone. The GM accepted this, no test required.
Then, repaying hurt with hurt, Aedhros followed one of the guards - George, as we later learned he was called - who also happened to be the one with the loot. Aedhros ambushed him from the darkness, and took him at knife point back to the workshop
The common modern usage of the term "Fail Forward" means that you succeed at what you attempted but there's an additional cost or complication. In other words the kidnapping would have been successful but it would have been at a cost. Which is the crux of the issue - the phrase may have once meant one thing but it is used in different ways in blog posts and on this very forum (and not by me).
So your summary of events
Failed attempt at kidnap => word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.
Failed Sing to try and restore my sense of self => harassed by a guard.
Failed Circles hoping that an important Elf will turn up to help me => another guard turns up.
This is what fail forward looks like in play.
None of these are fail forward from the definitions and examples I've ever seen since I first heard of the term. To me they aren't fail forward, they're just you failed and didn't accomplish what you wanted. The game didn't end because of these failures but there were consequences. The exception is #3, which I would consider something along the lines of "partial success". You succeeded but not as well as you had hoped. Again though, it doesn't match how other people currently use the phrase Fail Forward.
The example of fail forward that started this was "You climb the cliff only to find your dead friend." Examples of what I can find online are some variation of "You fail your lockpick check but open the door anyway and there's a screaming chef."
I understand that it doesn't match your personal definition. Your favorite game uses the phrase to mean something different from current common usage. For better or worse the meaning of words and terms change over time. The word "cool" once only referred to temperature (and I assume it's about as outdates as "the bees knees" is today), but for many people it still means "excellent".
So maybe instead of just telling people they're using the phrase wrong, accept that different people use the phrase differently and try to find commonality. Because I have no issue with the way that you intend the phrase, it's just not how it's commonly used.
Note - I apologize if I missed this earlier but this thread moves so fast with so many posts every hour it's hard to keep up with everything.
It also matters how often what you're looking for is even going to get checked for. If you've got a game that only makes the check that is liable to trigger the low-incident event one in five sessions, whether it happens one in 2000 or one in 400 may well be invisible (which begs the question of why you even feel the need to do the check but that's neither here nor there). If, to use the example it hand, you do a lot of climbing checks so it'll happen every other session and happen multiple times a lot of the times it happens at all, that 400 is a lot more likely to be noticeable (and if you have anyone who's done a lot of climbing, feel pretty weird). As noted in other contexts there are dynamics to repeated checks that increases abnormal probabilities in a way that just looking at the individual probabilities doesn't necessarily spell out to people not looking at the full picture.
(It should be noted that even my reference to D1000s probably makes some of these things too frequent because of this To be fair to Micah, some of what he's said suggests he's really thinking more of injury--which is a lot more frequent in reality than death--than "two bad rolls and you die"--but that's not what someone using a simpleminded version of "fumble means fall" in this situation or some equivalents that can come up with jumping or swimming can produce).
Failed attempt at kidnap => word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.
Failed Sing to try and restore my sense of self => harassed by a guard.
Failed Circles hoping that an important Elf will turn up to help me => another guard turns up.
This is what fail forward looks like in play.
The whole point is that there are no toy examples. Fail forward, as a technique, assumes characters with motivations and wants, fictional situations laden with threats and promise, etc.
That's what John Harper is illustrating in his examples. I assume they're inadequate somehow, but I don't know in what way.
Following from the fiction is a foundational principle for RPGing (outside of the absurdist, I guess). Because Apocalypse World is a complete set of rules, it states it as a principle that the GM is to have regard to in making their moves, whether soft or hard.
What do you mean by previously didn't exist? If you mean that it is established that a room is empty, then it wouldn't follow from the fiction to narrate it as occupied.
But there is no expectation in AW or BW play that every individual who might figure in play has to be documented ahead of time. To me, that has been a pretty typical features of RPGing since I first read Classic Traveller in the late 70s - that game has rules for random encounters with people, who don't have to be taken from already-authored lists of the populace. And the classic D&D rules, which have random encounters with people as core elements of game play, are similar in this respect (it probably makes more sense to say that Traveller is similar to D&D, but I encountered Traveller first).
This I think is why some people don't like fail forward. Your expectations of play are different.
I know this seems obvious, but for some reason we all want to re-litigate "my preference is different from your preference" over and over ad infinitum.
I know you're trying to answer but the the thing is that saying "...look back at the setup move(s) you made. What was threatened? What was about to happen, before the PC took action? Follow through on that. Bring the effects on screen. Bring the consequences to fruition." is meaningless to someone who doesn't play the game. It also doesn't explain how this relates to fail forward in any way. This is what I'm talking about when it comes to vague answers that are meaningless. They make sense to you, but anyone else? Pretty hit or miss.
Aedhros had helped collect the corpse, and also helped with the Taxidermy (using his skill with Heart-seeker), but was unable to help with the Death Art. He was reasonably happy to now leave the workshop; and was no stranger to stealthy kidnappings in the dark. I told my friend (now GMing) that I wanted to use Stealthy, Inconspicuous and Knives to spring upon someone and force them, at knife point, to come with me to the workshop. He called for a linked test first, on Inconspicuous with Stealth FoRKed in. This succeeded, and Aedhros found a suitable place outside a house of ill-repute, ready to kidnap a lady of the night. When a victim appeared, Aedhros tried to force a Steel test (I think - my memory is a bit hazy) but whatever it was, it failed, and the intended victim went screaming into the night. Now there is word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.
Aedhros's Beliefs are I will avenge the death of my spouse!, Thurandril will admit that I am right! and I will free Alicia and myself from the curse of Thoth!; and his Instincts are Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to, Always repay hurt with hurt, and When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the elven lays. Having failed at the most basic task, and not knowing how to return to Thoth empty-handed, Aedhros wandered away from the docks, up into the wealthier parts of the city, to the home of the Elven Ambassador. As he sang the Elven lays to himself, I asked the GM for a test on Sing, to serve as a linked test to help in my next test to resist Thoth's bullying and depravity. The GM set my Spite of 5 as the obstacle, and I failed - a spend of a fate point only got me to 4 successes on 4 dice.
My singing attracted the attention of a guard, who had heard the word on the street, and didn't like the look of this rag-clothed Dark Elf. Aedhros has Circles 3 and a +1 reputation with the Etharchs, and so I rolled my 4 dice to see if an Etharch (whether Thurandril or one of his underlings or associates) would turn up here and now to tell the guards that I am right and they should not arrest me. But the test failed, and the only person to turn up was another guard to join the first in bundling me off. So I had to resort to the more mundane method of offering them 1D of loot to leave me alone. The GM accepted this, no test required.
Then, repaying hurt with hurt, Aedhros followed one of the guards - George, as we later learned he was called - who also happened to be the one with the loot. Aedhros ambushed him from the darkness, and took him at knife point back to the workshop
The common modern usage of the term "Fail Forward" means that you succeed at what you attempted but there's an additional cost or complication. In other words the kidnapping would have been successful but it would have been at a cost. Which is the crux of the issue - the phrase may have once meant one thing but it is used in different ways in blog posts and on this very forum (and not by me).
So your summary of events
Failed attempt at kidnap => word on the street of a knife-wielding assailant.
Failed Sing to try and restore my sense of self => harassed by a guard.
Failed Circles hoping that an important Elf will turn up to help me => another guard turns up.
This is what fail forward looks like in play.
None of these are fail forward from the definitions and examples I've ever seen since I first heard of the term. To me they aren't fail forward, they're just you failed and didn't accomplish what you wanted. The game didn't end because of these failures but there were consequences. The exception is #3, which I would consider something along the lines of "partial success". You succeeded but not as well as you had hoped. Again though, it doesn't match how other people currently use the phrase Fail Forward.
The example of fail forward that started this was "You climb the cliff only to find your dead friend." Examples of what I can find online are some variation of "You fail your lockpick check but open the door anyway and there's a screaming chef."
I understand that it doesn't match your personal definition. Your favorite game uses the phrase to mean something different from current common usage. For better or worse the meaning of words and terms change over time. The word "cool" once only referred to temperature (and I assume it's about as outdates as "the bees knees" is today), but for many people it still means "excellent".
So maybe instead of just telling people they're using the phrase wrong, accept that different people use the phrase differently and try to find commonality. Because I have no issue with the way that you intend the phrase, it's just not how it's commonly used.
Note - I apologize if I missed this earlier but this thread moves so fast with so many posts every hour it's hard to keep up with everything.
I don't see why I'm obliged to run a game about screaming cooks to satisfy you and other posters. I've posted actual examples from actual play. If you don't want to talk about them, and instead want to worry about screaming cooks, that's your prerogative. But that doesn't impose any obligations on me.
I wouldn't worry about it. Different expectations of play mean that this circle is extremely unlikely to be squared. This part of play is IMO too different for both sides to reach a comfortable place.
