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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, this was part of my problem with narrative games. The chances of success don't really vary based on approach--as long as you roll well, almost any approach will do--so it became a game of "how can I justify to the DM that I'm using Hunt here?" That's much less interesting than choosing an approach that your character may not be optimal for because it is easier within the fiction. Imo.

Ehhhh, I gotta push a bit back on this. The player is describing their character's actions (In DW this is explicitly in character). The GM then decides if something was triggered. If you want to Hunt, you better describe some actual hunting! If there's no hunting to be had, guess what? I mean, OK, if your bad GM decides to let you roll whatever, that is more a failing of GMing than a fault in the Narrativist conception of play.

Now, BW maybe works a bit in the opposite direction, but then I don't think BW players are justifying anything to anyone, they're just doing stuff.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

It is even better than this! Why did the random encounter happen? Because the random encounter clock ran out and a check was required. Why did the clock run out? Because the thief spent 5 turns failing to pick the lock on the door!!!!

 

[The Firebird]

Ehhhh, I gotta push a bit back on this. The player is describing their character's actions (In DW this is explicitly in character). The GM then decides if something was triggered. If you want to Hunt, you better describe some actual hunting! If there's no hunting to be had, guess what? I mean, OK, if your bad GM decides to let you roll whatever, that is more a failing of GMing than a fault in the Narrativist conception of play.

I mean it makes it so the actions I describe would be more "hunting" actions than they would in a fixed world game. I play the mechanics more than I would otherwise because as long as I hit 10, everything is gravy.

Not every action can be reduced to that but in general I find it less organic. For me.

 

[Maxperson]

I swear to god we talked about how a simple “pass/fail” lock pick isn’t a worthy example for “fail forward” techniques absent stakes, and I know for sure @hawkeyefan has belabored that point to death. If you want to keep grabbing a bad example and furthering it for digital ink, that’s on you.

If i was doing map & key or even @TwoSix ‘s suggestion of fairly no-prep 5e id have tossed some stakes on there; otherwise the character proficient in lock picks has all the time in the world to get in and we move on to the complications inside. Either way, whatever we need fails forward from the fiction and stakes as established.

It was a joke man. Peace.

 

[zakael19]

It was a joke man. Peace.

No jokes, ONLY RAGE. at the machine

Different people have different definitions which causes confusion. The failed check and the screaming chef is one. You don't have to like it or agree with it, but other people have given examples similar to this for quite some time.

So I've posted a few of the bits of advice Daggerheart has to handle situations like this, and I'm using it because the game is more or less designed to be a bridge from folks used to playing 5e in a story-forward CR style to a more intentionally designed narrative game. It's not quite story-now narrativism like AW etc, it's doing its own thing and doing so in a really cool way.

The way DH wants you to set up the "fail forward" stuff that I shared previously (Make Every Roll Important, Keep the Story Moving Forward) is to Begin and End with the Fiction:

“The fiction” refers to the story being created as you play. Use the fiction to drive mechanics—for example, when to call
for rolls, which GM moves to use, what Difficulty a roll should be, or whether it should have advantage or disadvantage.

Daggerheart’s rules exist to facilitate collaborative storytelling, so the flow of play should begin with narrative and lead to mechanics when needed. The GM then connects the results of the mechanics back to the fiction so play can continue smoothly.

If you follow this, you use the fiction as already established - along with the guidance under Calling for Action Rolls (Establish the Stakes/Make clear any guaranteed consequences) to determine the outcomes of any fail-forward techniques you need to apply.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I'm considering the facts as presented by the fiction. Picking a lock does not create a significant amount of noise, someone that is awake and reasonably attentive might hear it, someone in a different room especially if sleeping would not.

Except you aren't considering the facts presented by the fiction. You're inventing new facts. Like that picking a lock or opening a door can only be heard from immediately next to the door.

Are they being careful to be quiet? Would you hear them using their keys to open the lock? Are you awake in your kitchen?

Absolutely I would hear the door if someone opened it with a key, even if they tried to be quiet. I put it to the test when I returned home from work today. Definitely clearly audible from inside the house.

If a door being opened is audible enough to be heard it is not the failed check to pick the lock that is being noticed, it is the act of the door being opened. Those are different actions and in my game the response will always be based on the action taken.

The skill used is broad enough to cover both picking the lock and opening the door, particularly in the absence of an "open door" skill.

 

[FrozenNorth]

okay i missed that the example was a random house they were trying to rob, but that doesn't actually significantly change the point i was making, the players announce they want to rob the house and maybe even also their intended method of entry via lockpicking, the GM now, in complete isolation of the lockpicking check, rolls to determine the inhabitant(s) of the house and their respective locations.

Why does this make a difference?

You keep on returning that in one case, the cook is just "created" but in the other case they aren't, but the reasons you give don't support the claim that the cook is "just created" in the fail forward scenario, but isn't if the GM is improvising the scene using a random encounter.

in said fail forward scenario the cook has a 0% chance of even existing if they don't enter through the kitchen, but the players may instead encounter the butler, or the lady of the house or, or, or..., none of which existed before a failed roll in their entry attempt, do you not see the difference? in the trad scenario the cook, the butler and the lady all exist in their set locations and can all be potentially encountered or avoided by good or bad decisions, not good or bad rolls, decisions, in fail forward none of them actually exist anywhere until a failed check calls for a complication and they pop out of the woodwork specifically to impede the players.

Except they don't exist in their set locations. Because the location is a random house the player was trying to rob. So everything is improvised. None of them exist anywhere.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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

In a fail-forward scenario, the consequence for failing forward is necessarily one the GM would consider plausible, so it is natural that the GM would be prepared to explain why the consequence is plausible.

What you wouldn't see in a fail-forward scenario is a situation like the one here, where @AlViking provides an example from a website, than complains that the situation isn't plausible, then when examples of why it might be plausible are raised, searches for reasons why the situation isn't plausible.

 

[FrozenNorth]

"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.

You speak for most traditional DMs now?

As far as I recall, fail-forward was included in the 4e DMG, 2014 DMG and 2024 DMG, so it is a pretty standard tool and piece of advice in DM's arsenal.

If you want to claim that many, if not most, DMs don't want to use the technique, you're going to have to bring the receipts.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You speak for most traditional DMs now?

As far as I recall, fail-forward was included in the 4e DMG, 2014 DMG and 2024 DMG, so it is a pretty standard tool and piece of advice in DM's arsenal.

If you want to claim that many, if not most, DMs don't want to use the technique, you're going to have to bring the receipts.

Awful lot of D&D before 4e (and games inspired by D&D before 4e). But I agree that how many DMs do anything in particular is not a relevant factor.