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

[Pedantic]

A thought I'm having on the fail forward discussion; is this a division of responsibility question? Setting aside the tools they have to change "the fiction" and the gameplay concerns I have, it almost reads to me like the real debate is over who is responsible to propose a change in the game state.

FF says it's the GM; they should do something to break the status quo after a player action declaration fails. The other view seems to be that it should be the player, who either needs to deploy a different one of their limited tools or to abandon their goal and pick a new one.

Obviously there's an imbalance in the available tools players/GMs can deploy, but the question of responsibility seems to be the real thing at stake.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's... entirely not the point here.

Maybe, but it's a reasonable response to what you wrote.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, my settings theoretically have billions of NPCs that "exist" in the setting. But the only ones that matter are the ones that actually interact with the PCs.

Oh, I dunno - random NPCs as collateral damage matter too, especially when the PCs (rightly or wrongly) then get billed for a boatload of weregild for their deaths.

 

[AlViking]

The difference is clear as day, and has nothing to do with how the cook was created or placed there:

In a trad game, in order to meet the cook at all the character would have had to succeed on the pick-locks attempt. Otherwise the character wouldn't be in the kitchen, because the door is still locked and he's still outside it, and thus doesn't meet any cooks.

In a fail-forward game, in order to meet the cook the character has to fail on the pick-locks attempt; the GM overrules that roll by narrating the character gets through the door and into the kitchen anyway, whereupon he meets a cook.

If one is using success with complications, there's not many viable options for complications in a kitchen at night. An unexpected cook is one, startling a cat or other pet is another, tripping over or bumping into some noisy pots and pans is another, but after that the list gets pretty short.

What makes the second example implausible to me is that on a failed pick-locks roll the character shouldn't be meeting anyone in the kitchen, because the dice have dictated he can't get there.

Magically opening the lock when your lockpick check fails is also one of my main issues with the example. I would not have made it up if it wasn't one of the rare examples of fail forward I could find when I googled. On the other hand in a narrative style campaign I can see where getting through the door is a foregone conclusion, the only question is how well do you do it. But at that point we're just talking about completely separate styles of play while also not explicitly stating that getting through the door was always going to happen no matter what.

Again it feels like two people discussing a football game and not clarifying whether they're talking about American football or what we would consider soccer. On the other hand if getting through the door is not a foregone conclusion because the narrative demands it, I don't know how the h-e-double toothpicks you're opening the door in the first place.

 

[Lanefan]

Or they live there. A feature of many manors that employed a maid or cook would be a maid’s room just off the kitchen. They might be in a position to hear someone breaking in.

Sure, and if that's the case then it'd be noted on the map or present in the GM's head as a possible complication. Many GMs might not necessarily think of this when making things up on the fly, however, even though it's perfectly plausible based on our own reality.

That said, I'd see dealing with or avoiding (or even noticing!) people sleeping nearby as a separate thing to resolve after first resolving whether the PC can get into the kitchen at all.

 

[AlViking]

A thought I'm having on the fail forward discussion; is this a division of responsibility question? Setting aside the tools they have to change "the fiction" and the gameplay concerns I have, it almost reads to me like the real debate is over who is responsible to propose a change in the game state.

FF says it's the GM; they should do something to break the status quo after a player action declaration fails. The other view seems to be that it should be the player, who either needs to deploy a different one of their limited tools or to abandon their goal and pick a new one.

Obviously there's an imbalance in the available tools players/GMs can deploy, but the question of responsibility seems to be the real thing at stake.

That's how I see it. As I've said before when I run a D&D game I may make the roads the players are driving the car. Even if they drive the car off the road, they're still the ones in control and at that point I'm still just describing the terrain.

 

[zakael19]

I wasn't commenting on the jargon to pick on you, it's just that it assumes all posters understand what you're talking about. As a software developer one of my strengths has always been that I can relate ideas and concepts to non-technical people in a way that they understand and vice versa. Part of that is using language and terms that the target audience understands. Because this is a D&D subforum, I assume that everyone here has at least a basic understanding of the game and therefore it makes sense to assume the audience you're speaking to knows D&D and don't assume understanding of anything else.

In any case it was just intended as free advice. It was likely worth what you paid for it.

As far as the example, I'm not sure where the fail forward is coming into play. It sounds like they just plain old failed and now have to deal with the consequences. It happens sometimes.

… ye-es, that’s what we’ve largely been saying. If you fail on a roll, consequences happen and the scene evolves. The forward bit is that the scene is always moving forward.

Again, the mechanics seemed to be less important then showing how the fiction starts -> the player tries a roll and fails -> the fiction changes immediately and consequentially as a result. I threw them in there just to show mechanics were happening, if you abstract it back to “Ana rolls and falls and X happens” it doesn’t affect the example much.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. That's a big problem for me, but how things are made up is a bigger one.

Yeah, where I see a problem is when things are decided in a way which subverts player's choices. The old 'quantum ogre' which appears behind the next door, no matter what, that is no good. The cook? Why is it a problem? Don't want to risk running into domestic staff? Don't break into houses! There's no quantum cook here, just a throw of dice deciding if you run into her.

 

[Lanefan]

It also has a loud gong that goes off when cast.

In 5e, true. But not in every edition.

 

[Campbell]

If the cook example is bad, why wasn't 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.

I'm not sure why it was used as an example in the linked article. I think it's a terrible example because it lacks the greater context that these techniques require to be understood. I think there's a desire to analyze the difference on the task level, but the issue with that is that these techniques cannot really be understood on the level of a single task. We need to know what's been telegraphed by the GM, what the character wants to achieve in the situation to understand if it was good framing. More details are needed.

We also cannot do the same sort of if the player did this x would have happened and if this would have been successful y would have happened because our only basis for extrapolation is only what has been revealed. We have an active GM who is making moves, framing scenes - there are all sorts of possibilities for what sort of scenes they would frame. The answer to if they would have explored further what would they have found or what would have happened on success is not knowable because the GM has not had a chance to frame those scenes and could choose from many possible fictional situations.

I don't think Narrativist games require a more skilled GM. I think they require a differently skilled GM and I have been up front about that for years on those boards. The role is different, and the skills are different. This is largely true of any game that changes up player and GM roles (Narrativist or not) - skills do not always transfer. Anecdotally, I am at my best running Apocalypse Keys, pretty good at Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts, was terrible at running D&D 3e, alright at Worlds Without Number and have to work really hard to run Vampire - The Requiem. All need to be approached differently.