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

[FrogReaver]

Narrativism includes the phenomenon of narrative immersion.

What do you mean by narrative immersion?

 

[TwoSix]

It’s only a problem when one has entanglement + a premise that skill checks either are or ought to be about internal to character things.

Yes. That's exactly the problem; when a participant brings in concepts from other games rather than approaching a game as coming from its own stated procedures and nothing else.

And it's fine for a game's premise or procedures to not work for you! The problem is only when it's presented and explained as "this game is not doing procedure X right", when the real problem is "I as a participant don't feel comfortable with this procedure."

 

[TwoSix]

And now you know why many people don’t view 4e d&d as real d&d.

You know this though, which is why I don’t understand why you bring 4e D&d into it.

Come on, man, we don't want to have that argument. Everyone was more or less getting along.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yes. That's exactly the problem; when a participant brings in concepts from other games rather than approaching a game as coming from its own stated procedures and nothing else.

And it's fine for a game's premise or procedures to not work for you! The problem is only when it's presented and explained as "this game is not doing procedure X right", when the real problem is "I as a participant don't feel comfortable with this procedure."

Okay. But no one is doing that??

 

[Yaarel]

What do you mean by narrative immersion?

Narrative immersion is a specific phenomenon. For example, when reading a book one is seeing the scene being described, rather than the letters on the page.

 

[TwoSix]

Okay. But no one is doing that??

People have been doing that on this forum for 25 years.

 

[FrogReaver]

Come on, man, we don't want to have that argument. Everyone was more or less getting along.

Blame the person who brought it up.

 

[AnotherGuy]

That's just it - the way this is being presented, it sounds very much like the GM not only won't reward you for smart play but by the rules of the game, can't.

This is a fair question to ask.

The issue I see is that there are so many different interpretations and most of my searches just resulted in more arguments about what the term even means. One blog I found with a useful take on it was at Fail Forward which talked about finding a secret door, and the check fails. Instead of just ending there the party has an option to continue searching and if they do, they eventually find the secret door but it takes all day. At the game table it's resolved quickly, but in-world taking all day could be a significant penalty. I'm okay with this (and occasionally do something similar) because the cost of failure is directly tied to the declared action and in-world fiction.

I would need to know more context about that Secret Door. i.e. did the party know or heavily suspect it was there and that is why they kept searching for an entire day? Because if not, then that is just a trash idea IMO and not at all immersive or makes sense narrative wise.
Like would a party sit and look for a door a whole day when they do not know it exists.
If
(i) they did know; and
(i) they need to find this door for the adventure to continue; and
(ii) they're racing against time, have them take 10 (+10 minutes) and add a further complication or cost of the success.
But a full day? No thank you.

In my game if someone fails to pick a lock but doesn't totally blow it in my game they can still open the lock eventually but like the search example above it will take extra time. During the extra time it takes a guard may come by or not. Maybe I have the guards on a timer because it takes 5 minutes to do a circuit of the grounds, or it's just a 5% chance every minute. Maybe there are no guards but there's a 5% chance every 20 minutes of someone noticing. For me the difference is that I would be simulating some in world fiction, that there are guards for the building or regular patrols in the neighborhood, perhaps just nosy neighbors that look out once in a blue moon. There's also no "standard" timer, it depends on neighborhood, time of day, nature of what the characters are trying to do.

Having a timer is one thing, but for me (and probably my table) there are far more interesting stakes than having to keep going back to time and RE. Do not get me wrong, I use time as a constraint, but it would feel repetitive to continuously use that. Fail Forward allows one to mix it up.
And like you said there are many variations of Fail Forward/Success at a Cost.
@EzekielRaiden's example upthread was also pretty neat.

You have to keep in mind my table is also high level, so 5 minutes here and there is pointless tracking for high level characters.
Most of the time they just should auto succeed at their tasks, but the times they roll and fail, I would imagine, it would be due to dumb luck and that works well with Success at a Cost.

EDIT: I tend to lean Fail Forward for homebrew/impromptu content (character driven) to keep the adventure/story flowing in those areas and then for the sections in our campaign that are AP driven I tend to have player facing mechanics to limit my bias.

But to me there are just some incompatible assumptions on what it means to GM different games. I'm not a storyteller when I DM, I build the world and decide reactions to what the characters do but the results are based on in-world fiction, not what will move the game forward. Moving the game forward is the player's job, I just provide the setting.

I feel the bold is very understated.
We have already hashed that debate here with no, IMO, honest look at how much just the setting IS the story or at the very least a major part of the story.

 

[Eric V]

And now you know why many people don’t view 4e d&d as real d&d.

You know this though, which is why I don’t understand why you bring 4e D&d into it.

Except it is...so I guess the problem is with those people's perception.

 

[FrogReaver]

Except it is...so I guess the problem is with those people's perception.

You don’t get to make that determination for them.