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

[Micah Sweet]

For acute lethal radiation exposure in the real world, typically you have minutes to hours. The victim is typically dead in 3 days, depending on treatment availability.

Yeah. That's how much time you have. Not a lot, but maybe enough to do a couple important things.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To take a page out of the narrativist explanation - could it be because there’s a mechanic producing the cook instead of DM whim?

Also it's prep instead of mechanical enforcement.

 

[clearstream]

What you seem to be ignoring, and I don't know why, is that fail forward does not have to open the lock. Short of a specific RPG making a rule where it does always have to open the lock like the one mentioned upthread, fail forward could be guards walking around the corner, or someone from across the street shouting down from a window, "You there! What are you doing?!" or any number of other things that get the story moving and don't involve successfully unlocking the lock.

That different set of challenges you mention could be considered fail forward, depending on what they are.

Daggerheart defines it like this

FAILING FORWARD
In Daggerheart, every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way. There is no such thing as a roll where “nothing happens,” because the fiction constantly evolves based on the successes and failures of the characters.
​

And it's clear from the rest of the text, examples, actual plays, that failure can mean you don't open the lock. The designer's purpose seems similar to that of 5e i.e. "consequences resolution". What I wonder is if others take fail forward to properly include not opening the lock (as an option), just so long as there are consequences?

 

[TwoSix]

Isn't that just the opposite? Looking for reasons for the desired effect to make sense rather looking for reasons for it not to?

I mean, I think trying to GM scenes such that "everything makes sense" is kind of the point! Much like rolling an encounter on a table and discarding it because it violates plausibility, as you mentioned earlier.

 

[Pedantic]

The last part here indicate we are not disagreeing at all with regard to the enumeration part? You open for novel interactions, which means you preserve the possibility of actions outside the set actually described by your system. Hence you are not enumerating actions in your system. (Maybe the confusion is in the term enumerate? My understanding of the term is that it involves listing up all possible actions so that you can theoretically give a number to each)

No, I believe the design task is to set a series of rules that can as completely as possible adjudicate any player proposal, using knowable, player facing rules. That most systems fail at this is not an indictment of the goal. Obviously, some abstraction is necessary, but you can get pretty far with a solid range of modifiers and some generic systems, like object hit points and hardness.

I'm not concerned with the precision of those rules as a simulation (though it is obviously helpful and easier to use them if they align with player's intuitions, so that can be a useful design guideline) so much as their predictability and universal application.

But, then how is this system not just as open to your criticism of being "incomplete" due to the requirement for the GM to come in and try to work as a designer modeling a solution based upon existing examples? That exactly the approach taken by basically all traditional RPGs?

The GM as designer of last resort isn't a good thing, it's a patch to keep the game functioning. The less it occurs the better, and the more a designs celebrates it, the more I can assume it's not going to be a complete game, and the less player agency I can expect. My point was that if it does become necessary, the more complete the system, the less adhoc design work is necessary and the more likely a GM's ruling won't be disruptive to the player experience, because they'll have more existing rules structure to model it on.

And I really cannot understand your second sentence. I guess you are not claiming those playing tournament D&D modules with a scoresheet and defined conditions for getting points were not playing TTRPG?

I'm sorry, I'm also not totally sure what point you're referring to here, though that is an interesting question. I think the ability to support varying and updatable victory conditions is the definitional element of the form. The players agreeing to bind themselves to specific victory conditions ahead of time doesn't really impact that. Compare to a board game; outside of the variance of scenario play, the system of interaction can't be repurposed to broadly support a bunch of goals, and gameplay can almost never continue from the same board state after the evaluation of victory.

Not a point I'd considered before, but your example does make it clear the potential of the rules to be applicable to broad goals and continued play is more significant than the specific goals themselves, or whether play continues.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Fail backward" would be, "not only did you not succeed, but now things are worse than if you hadn't tried at all."

You want a disincentive to trying things? You got one right there.

But why is it called failure if you succeeded at what you were trying to do? It really seems like the wrong term to use.

 

[Maxperson]

With the qualifier that there is no objective "makes sense", yes.

The lengthy discussion of a single example has largely overridden the fact that there are nigh infinite other scenarios to choose.

Don't like the cook? Make it some other complication.

"Make it some other complication" ignores the point of contention about the cook scenario. Namely that many, if not most traditional DMs don't want to use fail forward as a technique.

We understand that there are countless ways to present fail forward, which just makes countless ways that we don't want to do it. For us the cook(and countless other things) should be present or not before the unconnected die roll is made.

 

[TwoSix]

But why is it called failure if you succeeded at what you were trying to do? It really seems like the wrong term to use.

The "failure" is the metagame result of not meeting the target number, not so much the narrative result.

I just thought of another fun example of "failing forward": damage on a miss.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, I think trying to GM scenes such that "everything makes sense" is kind of the point! Much like rolling an encounter on a table and discarding it because it violates plausibility, as you mentioned earlier.

I'm not sure. I've never thought of GMing as "running scenes", and I see no reason to start now.

 

[TwoSix]

"Make it some other complication" ignores the point of contention about the cook scenario. Namely that many, if not most traditional DMs don't want to use fail forward as a technique.

We understand that there are countless ways to present fail forward, which just makes countless ways that we don't want to do it. For us the cook(and countless other things) should be present or not before the unconnected die roll is made.

Then....don't?

Personal dislike of a technique is completely orthogonal to the technique's validity.