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

[Faolyn]

I'd rather instruct people on how to do and discuss better design instead of just throwing on a duct tape patch.

It's not a duct tape patch; it's a mechanic which many games use to great ability.

No I didn't. They failed to catch the assassin but didn't somehow manage to catch them anyway. Instead they have completely different options to track him down. They failed to achieve their goal in this instance, now they have different alternatives to achieve it.

Perhaps shockingly, the term fail forward can be used to mean both "partial success" and "partial failure".

Of course I haven't mapped everything. Meanwhile there will likely be other ways of getting into the house, including ones I hadn't thought of ahead of time. There's nothing wrong with "You try to pick the lock and nothing happens" because they can still achieve their goal, just not in the way they had planned. This happens pretty regularly in my games and is part of what the players enjoy.

The only difference between this and fail forward is that you're not saying "you failed to do this, but something else happened." Instead, you're saying "you failed to do this" and waiting for the players to figure out what else to do.

The game never comes to a screeching halt simply because they failed to achieve a specific goal. There are numerous opportunities and goals they can pursue instead. It's one of the main reasons I don't run linear campaigns.

It does come to a halt--the PCs can't progress here. They have to find something else to do instead.

 

[Pedantic]

I think you must have missed the context. This is the example we are discussing (some steps up the reply chain)

For this example staying unnoticed is clearly relevant enough for the player that this is what they ask for in their initial request. The context here is also how to interpret this situation in a very particular form of principled trad play task resolution. While your observations about the virtues of higher level conflict resolution for this kind of scenario might be correct, I fail to see how they are relevant for this particular context?

Oh I see. Sorry, I was already drifting away from the initial example, which I would read as unparsably incomplete. The player hasn't specified an action specific enough to resolve, I would be asking how they wanted to achieve that goa.

Or, more likely given how I've played in the past, the player might be sufficiently competent that this is a riskless endeavor, and they completely outclass any security measures or observers. I'm which far I would elide playing through it and jump to the outcome. This is what I was saying earlier about generally desiring PCs have high agency abilities.

 

[Faolyn]

"Is fudging ok if my players can't tell", and more at 11.

Ah, so you think that improvisation is the same as cheating.

 

[zakael19]

I appreciate the examples but I still wouldn't want to use the technique. Probably because I don't care if Marshall doesn't learn anything from their action, I don't understand the jargon from the 2nd example enough to comment other than to say it's not my style of game. But again, the issue here is that we're on a D&D subforum, D&D general label and you make no attempt to relate what's happening into D&D terms or how it could possibly apply to a D&D game. That's why I thought the locked door/chef example was better. It may not be what you would do in Songs for the Dusk but at a certain point we're comparing apples to baseballs.

But in the 1st example I don't see there to be a reason for the sound of metal or barking to be triggered off the failed check. I would have rather seen those two things happen no matter what and if the check had been successful the characters get some bonus that helps them in the ensuing scenario.

Sure, ok, here: think of it as like a Handle Animal roll with Aided Advantage, and the ability to idk drop a Hit Dice analogue to pay a cost to make the failure slightly less bad. Does that help?

I figured the framing of the fiction in actual play set up/adjudication/scene evolution was the important bit here since that seemed to be what people were getting hung up on with their absurd white room examples, but I guess not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In older editions of D&D, attempting to pick a lock would absolutely involve a random encounter roll. As would searching a room or X amount of time spent moving about a dangerous area like a dungeon.

Also, I've always looked at random encounter tables as a list of people/creatures that can be encountered in the given area. The roll doesn't conjure them into existence... they were always there... it just means that they're now right here, where the PCs are.



Yes. It's not at all required that the actual attempt succeeds when there was a failed roll... it's more that something unwanted or otherwise negative happens which creates a new situation. It's not about "the narrative" or "the story" moving forward. It's about the circumstances... the situation... moving forward.

So instead of opening the door and finding the cook, instead the thief is noticed by the neighbor across the street. Or the neighbor's dog begins to bark nearby, having smelled the intruders.

Any number of things. It really is just about not saying "nothing happens".



Because a player rolling for stats has nothing to do with my point?

You're saying that because you as GM don't want total control over a setting, you enjoy when a creature's presence is indicated by a die roll.

But that's what the lockpick attempt is doing. We're just having it do double-duty, so to speak. It's a die roll that tells you of the presence of the cook.



I'm surprised to hear a fiction first fan such as you ask that. I mean... it's obvious without looking at any rulebook, isn't it?

The roll is about picking the lock successfully. That's clear in understanding how skills work in traditional games. All those other factors are about a different result than "lock opened yes/no?".

Unlike the common perception of OSR fans, i like rules. Most of my favorite games have quite a few. I just want the bulk of them to be simulationist to some degree, and I don't want the GM's hands explicitly bound by them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The better way to look at it is on a successful roll, things go well, on an unsuccessful roll, things go poorly.

And that's fine if fail-forward (still don't like that name) works for you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That isn't a point of contention. Nobody thinks you actually secretly want to do it.

The points of contention seem to be whether the stated reasons for not liking the technique are:

1) based on the realities of the technique, instead of false impressions/strawmen.

2) self/internally consistent.



So, a question - do your players never meaningfully interact with things in the world that aren't explicitly in your notes before play begins?

Not unless something truly unexpected happens and some degree of improvisation is needed. I try to be thorough in my prep, but things happen.

 

[The Firebird]

I was not responding to your response about my point about targets being more visible. I was responding to your claim that

Which I have a hard time reading as anything else than a response to my claim it is hard to find any causal connection between shadowdark's light out system and increased the increased rate of encounters that system prescribe in darkness.

My apologies; you're right.

I do find the monsters perceiving light as a threat to be plausible, though. Not for every monster, but in enough cases for it to matter. I guess the system could grade monsters by type for more realism but I think that's a reasonable concession to gameability.

Ah, so you think that improvisation is the same as cheating.

No.

 

[Micah Sweet]

People are responding as if the people who are taking exception to the fail forward example are trying to sell them on fail forward as technique, rather than show why we view the example as reductive analysis of other people's play. The cook example is representative of poor use of fail forward as a technique because the example does not include any of the telegraphing that goes along with it and the consequence does not follow from the established fiction in any meaningful way. Presenting fail forward as a technique with accuracy and grace might not be important to those objecting it to it, but their failure to do so ought to be something they are accountable for because this sort of misrepresentation spreads. I know because I have had to address these concerns with players I've recruited into my games who get false impressions of various play techniques to online discussions this one.

If the cook example is bad, why was it used as an official example of the technique? And if you're supposed to be really good for the technique to not feel clumsy, shouldn't that information be available in the games that demand its use? I've played several games that use this stuff, and every time it felt clumsy and artificial to me. Do Narrativist games simply require a higher minimum level of GM to be good? If so, folks should just put that out there.

 

[Faolyn]

It actually doesn't. What it does is have a mechanic that generates a prompt for the GM to describe one of many possible fail forward states that the GM must then choose.

Yes, that's the mechanic. That's how it works. Mechanics don't have to mean that there is only a single possible result.

The actual choice of fiction isn't dictated by that mechanic at all.

Often it is. In PbtA, a miss means the GM makes a hard move.

But it's not just you. Most narrative proponents seem to elide this fact as well and instead substitute the notion that their narrativist 'mechanics are what generates the particular fiction'. But all those mechanics don't actually tell the GM what precisely that fiction should be. And again, that's perfectly fine and has many pros to doing it that way, but let's be clear about what precisely is going on.

We're not playing computer games where there's a limited possible actions that can be taken and a limited number of responses to those actions. We're playing games that are built around improvisation and back-and-forth between players and GM, where almost anything is possible, at least within the constraints of the genre and the characters' abilities.

Ideally the results all make sense on the random table and if one doesn't in a particular scenario then the GM should reroll on his table.

So how is "rerolling until it works" better than "make something that works right away, but on the fly"?

Not at all. I said "2) extrapolated directly from established and preauthored facts."

And if you don't have those facts? If the PCs decide to do something you haven't planned out in advance?

So the GM has enough established and preauthored facts to determine what happens next without a table. Great. We've just added to the established facts of the session, which then can be used in future decisions and then repeat this process hundreds of times. Video games don't do that. Video games have gotten better about giving players more choices, but it's always from a far more limited list than a ttrpg provides. Maybe this changes with gen AI in the future, but we aren't there yet.

The issue here isn't the plausibility. I agree fail forward can provide always plausible fiction. But that's rather beside the point and the issue.

Again, the issue is how, not whether it make sense when held up after the fact.

Probably perfect sense, or at least as much sense as a random table would provide. Probably more, because I can work my decision into the world rather than just take what was rolled as-is.