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

[Maxperson]

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;

That's a pretty meaningless distinction, though. It's like arguing that you aren't losing your hair, you are just follicly challeged.

Also, the failure doesn't necessarily mean backwards. It can and often does go sideways.

and the story is going to continue anyway even if neither is the case and nothing happens.

Yes, it still moves very incrementally forward since there's I can't think of a result that produces exactly the same situation after a failed attempt. At a minimum, time has progressed and you've learned that what you are trying is difficult/impossible since failed.

That's why earlier in the thread I said that a better definition would be that it moves the story forward in a way the group finds interesting.

 

[The Firebird]

Now, can you please explain to me what the explicit connection is between the PC's happening to be at a particular location at 6 PM and those randomly generated monsters appearing at that particular location?

To me, it rather seems that there is no explicit connection. Any randomly generated encounter based on an arbitrary die roll result is going to be complete disconnected between whatever the party is doing and the resulting encounter.

So, if random encounters, which are at the heart of sandbox play are effectively, no different than an encounter resulting from a failed die roll by the players, what is the issue here?

What? There is no explicit connection and that is the point. The world exists independently of the players.

In the failed die roll case, the encounter exists only because the players failed. It is entirely dependent on the players.

 

[Maxperson]

mostly it would be - because that's the particular game being played.

Or style. It would be pretty easy to apply fail forward to D&D, even though the game system isn't that way by default.

 

[Maxperson]

So those trolls might be at any location the party happens to be at a particular time.

No. The roll was for the monster to wander into the group in that specific forest at a very specific time on the day I know that they are there. If for some reason the party teleports somewhere else before the wandering monster would arrive, they will not encounter trolls. The same would happen if they somehow transported a significant way through the forest, since the wandering monster would not be in that area.

What I'm saying is that if the party is in the same area, it doesn't matter if they walked the entire time or spent a bit of time foraging. They are still in the area where the wandering monster is.

But they’re not quantum? Right.

Correct.

 

[Faolyn]

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

Well, no. Because you might be in a railroaded game and not realize it because you haven't made a "wrong" decision so far, or because you haven't realized that your choices are limited.

Like, we have people saying that they'd establish everything ahead of time--that's the "platonic ideal", at any rate--but not much about what happens if the player picks something unexpected, beyond, maybe, roll on a random table. Either these GMs believes themselves to be omniscient, or they have unimaginative, or at least highly predictable players, or they don't let the players make unapproved choices.

It's like the example I came up with way upthread: the PCs are passing through a town, which you, as the GM, expect to be nothing more than a pit stop. Instead, one of the PCs decides to break into a house and rob it. You didn't prepare the house or its inhabitants ahead of time. What do you do? One person, I believe it was @The Firebird, indicated the house would simply remain an empty shell, rather than come up with inhabitants and their belongings on the fly in response to the player's actions.

In this case, this means your choices as a player are meaningless, because the GM isn't going to respond to them in any but the most technical way.

 

[Faolyn]

No.

And yet you took "you couldn't tell they were making it up" to mean me saying that cheating is OK.

Maybe I wrote it badly. So here it is again: How would you know that the GM is using improv instead of having written everything down before?

 

[Faolyn]

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

The thief was trying to sneak into the room and succeeded on their Stealth check. Shouldn't that mean that an ordinary cook not hear or see them enter?

 

[Maxperson]

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.

It's only a problem if you don't like that style of play. It's not inherently a problem, like most things dealing with mechanics. However, it is a quantum cook since the cook is both behind that door and not behind that door until the die is rolled and her position in the house is fixed.

 

[Faolyn]

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

And this is probably why you had to waste two and a half frustrating--your words--sessions trying to solve a children's riddle--instead of actually playing the game and doing things that were not frustrating.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

That doesn't make any sense. If you succeeded in your roll, there shouldn't be any complication attached to it. Success with a complication would be if you failed, or maybe if you failed by a very narrow margin.