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

[zakael19]

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 one way to look at it I guess. Let’s look at Daggerheart again:

Keep the Story Moving Forward
“Every time a player makes an action roll, the story should move forward, success or failure. On a failure, the GM says how the world responds and keeps the story moving. This is often referred to as “failing forward.” A character might not get what they want if the roll goes poorly, but the story advances through escalation, new information, or some other change in circumstances.”

and couple that with:

Make Every Roll Important
“Action rolls in Daggerheart describe and resolve a moment within a story; these moments might be as short as a split-second dodge, as long as a full exchange of blows in combat, or an entire montage of chasing leads over the course of an evening.

Because the GM can choose to make a move in response to a player’s failed roll or a result with Fear, and since every roll generates Hope or Fear, only ask the players to roll during meaningful moments to ensure that every roll contributes to the story. Daggerheart is designed for cinematic play— when you provide information freely and allow characters to succeed at tasks in line with their skills, the moments where characters do roll carry more risk and weight. Failures should create heartbreaking complications or unexpected challenges, while successes should feel like soaring triumphs!”

 

[Lanefan]

What if we called it, "success with complications" instead of "fail-forward"? That would remove the issue with failure being success, and also also for more than two states of play after the dice are rolled.

Success with complications first requires a 'success' to be rolled on the die.

To get what you're after you'd have to lower the DC for success by the amount you want the "success with complications" bracket to cover.

It's the arbitrary over-ruling of the root success-fail aspect of the roll that sticks in my craw. Well, that and the general idea that the PCs seemingly can't fail outright at whatever they try.

 

[Lanefan]

One critique of your preference would be that if a player wanted to stealthily pick a lock, find the map in the house and get out without being seen that could easily be 4+ skill checks. An initial stealth check on entering. A lockpick check. An investigation check. A stealth check on the exit. I know from a probabilistic perspective that you've just plummeted the characters chances for full success.

In my case, that's quite intentional; often for these sort of things it's not a question of full success (though full success can still sometimes happen if you're lucky) but one of how far you get before things go sideways and your careful plan goes out the window.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

The bits I bolded are to me "fail backward" rather than "fail forward". The way I see it, forward means you get closer to your goal, backward means you end up farther from it; and the story is going to continue anyway even if neither is the case and nothing happens.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Success with complications first requires a 'success' to be rolled on the die.

To get what you're after you'd have to lower the DC for success by the amount you want the "success with complications" bracket to cover.

It's the arbitrary over-ruling of the root success-fail aspect of the roll that sticks in my craw. Well, that and the general idea that the PCs seemingly can't fail outright at whatever they try.

Maybe if you hit the DC exactly? I've seen that as an optional rule.

 

[AlViking]

… 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.

And I'm saying that the world doesn't stop spinning just because the only result of a specific action is that the action specified didn't work.

I recently ran a game where the characters had to retrieve a McGuffin from a longhouse (1 big long room). The McGuffin was at the back, there were workers and guards scattered throughout the room preparing a feast, a door at the front and a door at the back. There were also a couple of windows. So the players decided the best approach would be for some of them to go in the front door, get the attention of everyone and the cleric would cast silence in the back while the sorcerer cast stinking cloud. The rogue would dash in, grab the McGuffin and run out.

Great plan, right? Group A created the distraction, all the NPCs started moving forward and pay attention to group A, cleric and sorcerer do their thing. Then the rogue goes to open the back door and it's locked. So when plan A didn't work they improvised plan B which was a bit messy and included a combat they could have avoided but it still worked. That to me is just part of the game. Same way with Ana, they made a risky attempt so the people following them caught up. It was just a direct result of their failure, I didn't introduce any threat that was not already apparent, they just weren't able to avoid a fight.

Compare your two examples. In example 1 because Marshall failed a roll a threat that had not existed previously was introduced. In example 2 because ana failed a roll they did not successfully escape pursuit. I don't care for example 1 because it's triggered by a roll that had nothing at all to do with the approaching threat. The only reason I see the threat being introduced is because the game specifies that something has to happen after the player's attempt. I don't care for that kind of decision being forced onto the GM.

Example 2? That's just normal gameplay, the character attempted to flee and they can't so the pursuers catch them. Or at least that's my take on it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

For me, she is involved. She is in the house somewhere, and that will determine the consequences of the players actions.

Then I'm not sure why you'd object to a failed roll alerting her. She's involved.

This sums up my main problem with the approach. It makes everything dependent on the rolls rather than player choices. For a bad roll, the complications can be a cook, or a hound, or the Lord, or whatever...but it doesn't really matter, because none of these things existed beforehand.

No, it doesn't. Success or failure... good outcome or bad outcome... is what depends on the rolls. But beyond that, there are plenty of factors to consider which may make a choice between picking a lock on the first floor meaningfully different than climbing in a second story window.

I mean, at the most basic, you have the different skills involved. Maybe the thief is excellent at climbing, but not as good at picking locks. Then there is the goal of breaking in to consider... someone mentioned it was to find a map (I don't recall if this was from the actual example or not)... where is the map? On the first floor or the second? Is this known or suspected in some way? And so on.

Again, As @Campbell has pointed out, the example isn't very good because there are so many details we don't know which would likely be known or at least considered in different ways depending on the type of game being played.

To me, the example offered seemed to be a way to use a fail forward approach in otherwise trad play... which is totally possible. But that will work differently than a narrativist game.

because it's creating a connection between two fundamentally unrelated events, why should the presence of the cook be at all dependent on the rogue's ability to pick locks?

Because she was roused by the clumsy lockpicking and came to see what the noise was.

There's no reason that these events need to be unrelated. They absolutely can be related.

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?".

Again, the attempt to pick the lock is happening in what should be a dynamic environment. Do you make multiple rolls for the same task? A lockpick check to unlock the door, a stealth check to do so quietly? And then what to determine how quickly the task takes?

Doesn't it make sense to include all of those things in the related skill since they're all related to lockpicking?

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.

If you don't think that someone possibly hearing a lock being picked or a thief picking a lock being seen as he works are possible outcomes, then I'm really not sure what kind of simulation you're doing.

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.

It wasn't "official" it was from like a blog or something.

I think it's more that the skills are different. Like, it's possible to be good at baseball and basketball, and although there are some areas of overlap, there are also different skill sets. Using only the skills for one to play the other generally isn't going to work out well.

Because I prefer games where the player's choices don't affect the world beyond what their PC can do.

Again, how does the choice to pick a lock not potentially affect the world?

 

[Enrahim]

The earliest examples i recall didn't actually have characters succed - failing forward was failing, but with an obvious sign of what other course was available - You fail to open the lock, but notice an open 3rd story window.

This feels like a joke. In the almost freeform game I was playing with my 7 year old a few weeks ago - upon her character failing to force open a ground floor window, I introduced an open window on the second floor. Did I just independently reinvent fail forward? :O

 

[Lanefan]

Because this doesn't move the game along or provide an interesting consequence. It's merely punitive. Or worse, if the thief had checked for traps and rolled well--yes, there are traps the thief might not be able to see, but you're making one up here on the spot for no reason other than to "fail backwards."

As long as the door remains locked on a 'fail' roll, it matters little to me what else might come of it.

When it comes to picking the lock, if there's no consequences for failure other than "nothing happens"--there's no deadline they have to beat, no monsters or guards that might find them if they take too long, nobody relying on them, nothing to learn from the lock itself, a failure simply means "nothing happens"--then why have them roll at all? Why not just say that the thief picks the lock? Having them roll, whether it's a failure or a success, is just a waste of time.

Because there is one very obvious and always-present consequence of failure, namely that you can't get through the locked door to whatever it is you want to get to on the other side.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Yep, and the story is still chuggin' along.

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

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sometimes you succeed and get closer to (or even achieve) your goal, other times you fail and get pushed away from it.

Snakes and ladders loses much of its point if you take away the snakes.