D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

My bolding.

I agree to the principle, but the devil lies in the fact that we in trad play doesn't actually specify what is the failure mode for the task at hand. And most tasks can have several failure modes. This is the ambiguity that typically allow for fail forward in traditional play. In other words, I reject the bolded assertion.

Take the player saying "I pick the lock". A success on the roll typically would be expected to mean quite a few things:
1: The door is now unlocked.
2: The character did it in a reasonable amount of time
3: The character stayed silent while doing so
4: The door was left reasonably unharmed.
Which one of these are of the player's primary concern is generally not stated. For instance you as a GM might think that managing 1, 2, and 4, but making a bit of noise is an appropriate ", but" on a just barely succeeded roll. However the player might actually have preferred the door to not be opened (they could have taken the windows anyway) over making noise.

As such the approach that allow for the least GM bias would be the stance that all of these expectations is fulfilled on a success result. But what then about the failure result? To on a failure narrate "After working on the lock until dawn, your character loses patience, screams out in frustration and kicks the door so it leaves a dent" might be hilarious once, but is not conductive of a game that tries to take itself at least a little bit seriously. Hence the sane response to what should happen on a failure is that at least one of the things that would indicate a success did not happen, but not necessarily all.

And this is the conceptual "loophole" that allow for trad-fail forward. If you free your mind from the idea that it has to be number 1 that is the primary concern in the resolution, you could allow 1 while rather having one or more of the other success criteria fail.

I think this depends on the table/DM outlook on the situation. From my standpoint, the only assumed thing there is number 1. Opening the lock. The other stuff is variable and would be something declared by the player that I would factor into the attempt.

This means that if the player says that his rogue is trying to unlock the door, he's not rushing, trying to stay silent or avoid damaging the door(though short of setting of a trap I don't see how this happens).

If the player is like wants the rogue to open the door quickly, because guards are coming, the roll will likely be at disadvantage from the rush. Failure would be a failure of numbers 1 and 2.

If the player wanted to stay quiet while opening the lock, he'd tell me that and I'd add a significant amount of time to how long it takes to open the lock. Success would be success at both. Failure would be a failure to open the door, but would not be a failure to stay quiet unless the player rolled a 1. The player sacrificed time to stay quiet and I wouldn't take that away without a critical fail.

What you describe would only really apply to DMs who don't build those considerations into the roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've slightly lost track of this line of thought. Are tables adduced into an argument that in essence both D&D and AW (or PbtA generally) include quantum chefs? (Encounters with NPCs not prefigured in the fiction, as a result of a roll.) This argument doesn't turn on whether tables indeed supply value to play (so that no more need be said about that.)

One response then has been proposed by @Maxperson, which is that the table is used only because the fiction contains the right conditions. That seems to mirror @pemerton's careful and repeated explanation that the consequences of fail forward (such as a chef) can and ought to be prefigured in the fiction.

Another response, also by @Maxperson (and apologies if I'm misreading) is that tables may also be situation establishing (part of setting up the fiction). I need to reflect on how that stands in relation to the general worry.

I do think the when of that determination matters a great deal, to me at least. I don't like to generate stuff like that in the moment, in response to a die roll, unless that's the only practical method under the circumstances.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, that's not what I had said, though I was the one who gave the example.

My example was one where the player is fighting in a place where poison gas is present, and they have a random number of turns before it becomes unavoidably lethal but not instant death--so even if they beat their opponent, they may already be "dead" and just not yet knowing that. (If you prefer, you could think of it as radiation exposure rather than poison--something that doesn't kill instantly, but which a sufficient dosage will cause death eventually.)

Not much of a thrill to narrowly survive only to find out "oh, actually you were dead the whole time".


Still seems rather pointedly at odds with your previously-stated stance of "story is exclusively something that happens afterward when we reflect on what happened". Here, you seem to be advocating for mechanical setups which produce a particular experienced story, just with a layer of probability making it so the DM can't be certain of what will result.

As you say, radiation works that way, and I would value that setting logic more than the "thrill" to which you refer. In response to your desire for drama though, a sure death through radiation really puts a doom clock on your activities, providing a strong motivation to tie up loose ends.

 

[FrozenNorth]

the difference is that in the trad example the cook's existence does not hinge on a failed roll, they exist in the house regardless, and the GM has rolled for their location and determined them to be in the kitchen far enough before the players even decide to enter through the kitchen door that the success or failure of the lockpicking roll has zero impact on if they'll encounter them or not,

No, it doesn’t. You’re changing the example to justify your conclusions.

The example was that a rogue PC unexpectedly decided to break into a random house for cash. In both examples, the DM needs to come up with a resolution on the fly.

So, when the DM rolls on a random encounter table and gets a cook, how is the cook any less « created out of thin air » than in the fail-forward example?

if the players instead decide to climb the trellis and enter through the 2nd floor balcony there is a 0% chance they'll encounter the cook there instead because the tables have determined them to be in the kitchen independent of player choices.

In a fail forward scenario, if the players decide not to enter by the kitchen, there is also a 0% chance that the will encounter the cook.

 

[Maxperson]

I was struggling to follow your reasoning on why quantum and why not earlier but this makes more sense. It's that you are viewing the scene from the players perspective.

Essentially players in D&D don't encounter any player facing quantum resolution mechanics in their play and so from their perspective the cook was always there.

To say it a bit more poetically, Schrodinger looked in his box before they arrived on the scene and so for them the superposition of the cat was never in question. The DM being Schrodinger and the cook being the cat of course.

Yes. I'm looking at the moment of the picking of the lock and opening the door to the kitchen. In that moment in one method the cook is there or not there determined by a roll, and in the other method the cook is pre-established to be there or not and the roll to open doesn't matter.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I would generally agree with your position, I think this is a trope that might be attractive to some players - you defeat the bad guy in some darkened hole then crawl out, fatally wounded, to catch one last glimpse of the sun or a last word with your friends who were just a moment too late to save you. It's common enough in genre fiction that I think it would be a satisfying end for a character for some players

That would certainly be exciting, although I wouldn't build a narrative to generate such an outcome intentionally.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can actually have it both ways, to a point: have one of the options in the table read "Make s*** up." or "DM prerogative". This can be really handy if it's a table you use frequently, as unless there's lots of options it can start getting repetitive after a while.

As do I, to a certain extent. They can be overdone, though, as proven by the very existence of Hackmaster.

...I kinda love Hackmaster.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What's ugly about the fact that different people play RPGs differently, for different reasons?

When one behaves as if the same techniques should apply to games with different expectations.

 

[Maxperson]

The issue that I have is that the story moves forward in some way that is interesting to the GM, the group has no say in how things move forward. It feels too close to a railroaded moment, the GM has decided the group will get through the door so therefore it happens but there has to be a cost. As I said above, I'd much rather provide alternatives for the players to choose from.

That's why it's a playstyle choice. Some folks have no issue with it and want to play that way. Some folks don't. And as I've pointed out, fail forward never has to include success at the task at hand. Only that the STORY moves forward.

In one of the examples given, the rogue failed to open the lock, but an alarm spell/trap went off and now the player has to decide what to do next based on people waking up and coming to look to see what's happening. Is what's inside important enough that you try again and see if you can take it by force? Do you run your rear off immediately to avoid guards or witnesses? What do you do?

 

[FrogReaver]

You can play for advancement in Burning Wheel. I'm pretty sure I posted about this upthread: when I play BW I am overwhelmingly in "actor" stance, declaring actions as I think makes sense for my character; my friend declares a lot of actions in "author" stance - that is, he makes a decision as a player and then retrofits that to his character. And one of the main things he has his eye on is what tests he needs for advancement. Thus, his characters advance more quickly than mine do.

Okay. Why would someone play for advancement vs not?

I'm not sure about optimisation, though. Compare The Fighter to The Fisherman: pretty different 3-lifepath builds, but is one optimised and the other not? I'm not sure what the optimisation parameters are supposed to be.

I'm asking whether you can even evaluate whether one will generally be more successful at whatever challenges the game puts in your way. My impression is that the answer is most likely no.

1. The challenges change depending on your character goals/beliefs which makes things rather difficult to evaluate.
2. Even if you made a character with the same goals/beliefs/connections/etc presumably you could customize some other aspects of said character. Would any of those other aspects lead to having greater success at obtaining their goals?