No. The point of the check is to find out if you are successful at whatever task you attempted. At least that’s it for traditional play. There’s a subtle but important difference there.
But if you're using "fail forward", then you're not adopting this aspect of traditional play.
Or to put it another way, it makes no sense to say "fail forward doesn't work because the point of the check is simply to find out if the attempt at the task succeeds". If what someone wants to say is
I prefer the point of the check to be simply to find out if the attempt at the task succeeds, and therefore I prefer not to use "fail forward", then to me it makes more sense to say
that.
The purpose of calling it unconnected is not to make a statement about the legality of the move by the rules of whatever narrativist game is being played. We believe you that it’s a valid move and being used correctly in your examples. None of that has any bearing on what we mean by the connectedness of it.
As such I don’t understand this analogy at all. Not one bit.
The analogy follows from what I wrote just above.
I prefer that the outcome of a skill check - succeed or fail - be an immediate causal consequence of the bodily motions performed in making the check is clear and coherent. So does
the consequences in "fail forward" narration are not always connected in the way that I prefer them to be, namely, as immediate causal consequences of the bodily motions performed in making the check.
But saying that
the consequences are unconnected or
unrelated makes no sense. Because it's false, and obviously so. Because the consequences and the action
are connected/related: there was an incipient threat or promise, and the action was performed, and now that threat/promise is paid out. That's a connection! And a pretty straightforward one.
Haven’t you always understood that as the meaning though?
No. When someone says that two things
are not connected or
are not related, I take them to mean that no connection or relation holds between the things in question.
If one changes what rolls mean, what the purpose of play is and a ton of other non-trivial things about the game then everything works fine, but doing that means I have no easy language to communicate what I like or dislike about such changes.
Really?
What about things like
I prefer the relationship between (declared) action and (resolved) consequence to be causally tight in the fiction, preferably limited to immediate results of bodily movements. That's clear. And is something that has been discussed as an approach to RPGing for over two decades and probably more. And is a preference that has been
designed for since the late 1970s.
A related preference is
that all consequences that depend upon the location and disposition of persons and things be worked out taking those locations and dispositions as prior inputs, determined by the GM. I think this covers the cook scenario fairly well, and explains - for instance - why someone might be happy to roll on an encounter table to see who is in the kitchen (that is "just in time" decision-making by the GM to work out the location and disposition of a relevant person), but not happy to narrate the cook's presence as part of establishing failure.
In my experience, one obstacle to talking clearly about these preferences is that some posters assert that certain RPGs satisfy these desiderata, when according to their rulebooks and frequent practices they actually don't. For instance, I don't think it's uncommon for GM's to narrate failed climb checks as involving crumbling ledges or handholds; but that
crumbliness is introduced as part of the resolution, not as part of a prior determination of the state of the purchase-points on the cliff. And so then it turns out that the preference has much more subtle parameters than my bald statement of it, and sometimes as those parameters are teased out it seems that they might correlate very closely to
what I'm familiar with or
what became typical in AD&D by around about 1984.
This also relates to the idea of "changing" what rolls mean, what the purpose of play is, etc. The first RPG I tried to play was Classic Traveller, after I was gifted a copy in the late 1970s (from memory, 1979). According to those rules, if a character tries a non-ordinary manoeuvre while wearing a vacc suit (eg jumping, running, hiding etc) they have to make a throw (+4 per rank of Vacc Suit skill) to avoid a dangerous situation. The GM is at liberty to describe what the situation might be, and there is no prohibition on introducing new setting elements (eg sharp, protruding rocks that might rupture a suit or an air hose) as part of that. In fact, it turns out - I can say from experience - that Classic Traveller plays very well if GMed in the general sort of fashion that is described in Apocalypse World.
Classic Traveller (and Apocalypse World, and Burning Wheel, and . . .) don't
change what playing a RPG is and how it works. They are just
different from some other approaches to RPGing.
a totally alien game
<snip>
In this thread it’s been asserted by you that your game isn’t about overcoming challenges, it’s about playing to find out (whatever that actually means is never going to be clear to me). But when those are the descriptions you give about your game, then I don’t think it’s hard see how that gets understood as ‘telling a story’.
A couple of years ago I GMed a session of In A Wicked Age for 3 players, two of whom were teenage children who had played on 5e D&D, and their dad who back in the day had played AD&D and Rolemaster, and more recently had also played some 5e D&D.
It took very little time - maybe 5 or 10 minutes, via a combination of explanation plus modelling - for them to work out what the game was about. They noticed that having ratings for "With love" and "With violence" and "For others" and "For myself" is obviously a bit different from having ratings for STR, DEX, CON etc. Nevertheless they were able to play their PCs, they leaned into their "best interests" (that system's version of BW Beliefs), they thwarted some NPCs, and they seemed to have a pretty fun time. They didn't find it "totally alien".
The idea that someone would find Burning Wheel (for instance) "totally alien" and would be unable even to
comprehend it because it is played differently from typical AD&D is really pretty strange to me.
Your comment about "story telling" is also strange to me. As if the only two things one might do with a fiction is (i) use it to set up an arena for overcoming external challenges or (ii) tell a story. What about (iiI) finding out how it unfolds? And things can unfold in ways other than the overcoming of external challenges.
And if you're wondering how to prompt action declarations, other than by presenting external challenges, look at some of the examples I've given. In real life people have experiences and make decisions that are not all variations on Indiana Jones and Ocean's 11, because they want things that bring them into conflict (with others, with the universe, with themselves). RPGing can involve that too.
Part of the reason this discussion keeps failing is because the meaning of simply understood jargon from d&d gets overloaded by narrativist jargon and that muddles ever bit of the conversation from there. And no one starts with these axiomatic differences so of course we reach different conclusions and appear to end up at a total impasse.
What impasse?
I think I have a pretty clear idea of how the D&D (or D&D-adjacent) games played by many of the posters in this thread work. I've learned about some interesting stuff being done in D&D - eg from
@AnotherGuy, who seems to me to be doing stuff with 5e Adventure Paths that is not typical, and that probably deserves to be more widely recognised and talked about.
And anyone who has read this thread not knowing much about how Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World works has had a reasonable chance to learn.
