Perhaps it depends what is mean by "risk mitigation" and "maximising the chance of succeeding at longer-term goals". But what you say here doesn't seem to me to be borne out by my experience.
For instance, as someone (@FrozenNorth, maybe) already noted upthread, 4e D&D uses - or largely uses - "fail forward". That did not stop the players in my 4e game having their PCs take a bag of lime with them when they went off to confront a purple worm. And at an appropriate point one PC poured the lime down the worm's throat, thus reducing the damage its stomach acid was doing to another PC who had been swallowed.
In a different context, one reason that Aedhros puts up with being bullied about by Thoth (in one of my Burning Wheel games) is because he doesn't want Thoth to hurt or kill Alicia, who is lying in Thoth's workrooms recovering from a mortal wound. That's also a type of risk-mitigation in pursuit of a long-term goal. As a player, what I am doing is not declaring actions for Aedhros that would stake Alicia's wellbeing while in Thoth's custody.
But maybe these aren't the sort of thing that you had in mind.
Your examples indeeed aren't quite what I had in mind. The archetypical situation I'm thinking of is where the players proactively strategize to advance one of their goals, and have identified one or more potential points of failure (i.e. points where the plan will likely require some sort of dice roll with a possibility of failure.) They've got backup plans in case one or more of those failures are realized, and have taken action to pre-emptively ameliorate likely complications. From the players' perspective, the best-case scenario if they do encounter a failure while executing their plan is "nothing happens" and they smoothly pivot to execute one of their contingency plans. If the GM nevertheless applies a technique that forbids "nothing happens" as the outcome of a dice roll and introduces a complication on a failure that the characters haven't accounted for (which will always be possible--no plan can be comprehensive) that undermines the value of the players' strategizing.
Your first example with the bag of lime is indeed an example of a contingency the players prepared for when strategizing to defeat the worm, but in 4e I would assume a failure in combat when trying to feed the lime to the worm would just be a "nothing happens" miss. I could be mistaken, but I don't believe anyone is advocating for avoiding "nothing happens" results for individuals misses on a round-to-round basis in D&D combat. If I'm correct, then the tension between GMing techniques to avoid "nothing happens" and the players' strategizing to mitigate the in-combat risks of fighting the purple worm simply never arises in this example.
Your second example of Aedhros accepting being bullied seems less pertinent, as it appears that the character is accepting the bullying as a means of avoiding taking a risk, rather than strategizing to mitigate complications from a deliberate risk. More pertinent would be if Aedhros chose to be there and accept the inevitable bullying as a way to (e.g.) preoccupy Thoth and prevent him from becoming a complication while the rest of the party rescues Alicia from Thoth's workroom. If whatever die roll that could have alerted Thoth to the rescue attempt on a failure (had he not been preoccupied) now instead has some other complication tied to it just to avoid a "nothing happens" failure, that would undermine the value of the players' strategizing and risk-mitigation efforts.
i have no idea how so many people in this thread are just completely ignoring the actual topic to -CENSORED- themselves about how Good And Pure And Noble their style of gaming is.
FrogReaver wants games that HAVE to cater to him. No one playing them can have experiences which avoid catering to that desire. It is hard-baked into the foundational rules of the system. Everyone playing it must always have the risk of completely unavoidable, completely unpredictable "gotcha" failure. Anything less is insufficient, and thus an affront to simulation, because such events occasionally happen in real life.
Everyone wants games that cater to them. This is normal, and not something to be attacked or questioned. At no point, ever, in the history of the universe, has @FrogReaver said that everyone else has to play their games the same way @FrogReaver prefers. I defy you to find anything anywhere where they have said anyting remotely like this.
I want to play the games I like, the way I like, with people who want the same things.
You want to play the games you like, the way you like, with people who want the same things.
@FrogReaver wants to play the games they like, the way they like, with people who want the same things.
Let us imagine for a moment that @FrogReaver gets their ideal game, with all the stuff they love and that you hate. How will this hurt you? Who is going to be forced to play Froglord, the Hypersimulationst Game of Reaving Frogs, against their will? Will @FrogReaver send his army of amphibians into peoples homes and make them play?
If by exclusive catering you mean, "Only I should ever be catered to," then no one in this thread is claiming this. If by exclusive catering you mean "I should be able to play games that cater to me instead of ones I don't like" then you should be. You should demand that you never be forced to play a game you don't want to play.
Instead, of saying, "I only want to play the games I like," you are saying, "No game should be played unless I like it."
There's a huge difference between "winning all the time" because the game says I have to and "winning all the time" because of what I've done as a good player of said game.
Is there? You've never made room for such a distinction before. Why is it suddenly relevant now?
And would you seriously not think that something was wrong if you were " 'winning all the time' because of what [you]'ve done as a good player"? I'm pretty sure you'd find that, as the kids say, pretty sus.
Further...I find this whole thing really confusing in light of your previous commitment to "gambling". Now you're saying it is a game of skill, one where the player should be able to completely obviate randomness. So...which is it? Is it fundamentally a gamble, where skill simply cannot be enough (as you have said to me before, albeit in different words), or is it fundamentally a game of skill, where randomness can be progressively pushed away until it's gone?
Never mind that it's not about winning all the time but about reducing the odds of losing - in other words, it's about making that 10% difference that you mock as being so trivial.
The difference of a single +1 is already more than +10% in Dungeon World and other PbtA games, and affects every part (success, partial success, failure).
With an unmodified roll, outright failure happens as often as partial success (which, note, not the same as ALWAYS "success with complications" nor ALWAYS "complications arise", it's more nuanced than that). That is, both failure and partial success are a bit less than 42%, exactly 15/36), while outright success happens in the remainder, only ~17% (exactly 6/36).
Getting even a single +1 shifts this significantly. Now outright failure is only ~28% (10/36), partial success is , and full success is now also ~28% (10/36), while partial success is the remainder, ~44.44...% (16/36). So your chances of some kind of success have shot up by quite a bit, and naturally failure drops an equal amount.
The more you get, the less likely failure becomes. Even just having a +3, which isn't hard to achieve in specific things purely through gaining levels and increasing your stats, makes it so you only fail if the dice show 2 or 3, meaning, you only fail 1/12 of the time (8.333...%), and full success happens on more than half of all such rolls (58.333...%). In D&D, a +3 modifier (assuming we keep a fixed difficulty of 10) is the difference between succeeding 45% of the time and succeeding 30% of the time. And if you manage to get a +4, which again isn't at all beyond the realm of possibility, you only fail 1/36th of the time--meaning, even less than how lots of people run D&D, where a nat 1 is a guaranteed failure.
Of course. But you can take steps to reduce that risk and those steps should be mechanically rewarded. The bolded bit would indicate you agree with me on this.
...because the game does reward it, but usually not in direct mechanical terms unless some kind of move has been made, and most moves require a roll. Not all, but certainly the vast majority.
DW tends to avoid mechanical rewards of that kind, unless produced by a move, and instead favors returning to the fiction with instruction to the GM that the state should evolve in favorable ways, so long as they make sense. So, for example, if a player has played a mansion-infiltration, and as part of doing that romanced a servant-girl (again, stealing from Sherlock Holmes here) to get insider information or access, I might not necessarily ask for any roll--if their wooing seems like it should just work, then it does, and they get the information or access they desire. The "complication" for such an act is that now this character has built up a relationship with an NPC who won't take kindly to merely being used and dropped, which could potentially come back to bite that character in the butt, should circumstances warrant it.
And this makes loads more sense than what I saw earlier, which implied that the roll couldn't be modified by anything the character did in the fiction. That it can puts to rest many of my concerns with at least that part of it.
Well, I can certainly say that I, personally, try to make bonuses beyond +4 special. I used to require that they be supernatural in some way, but I've relaxed that condition to merely being particularly noteworthy. More or less, you can get any combination of bonuses up to +4; getting +5, which genuinely pushes failure completely off the table, needs to be Special in some way. Doesn't have to be supernatural, as I run things, but it needs to be more than merely a pretty good idea, well-planned effort, or wisely-chosen approach. If we still intend to roll, and thus to leave the result to chance rather than just outright declaring the obvious result, I expect that thing which pushes you over the edge into "no fails at all" to be...well, like I said, special somehow. The player has to sell me on it, with a very slightly higher standard than I might otherwise use.
As noted, the "up to +4" can come from anywhere. Mostly stats (which leads to one of the really excellent design things in DW; see below), but consumable items, favorable conditions, a clever idea--all sorts of things can give a +1 here or there if they're warranted. I tend to be enthusiastic but not lenient, if that makes sense? I want a player's ideas to succeed, because that rewards creativity and the gumption to keep trying. Thus, if I'm not convinced by their argument or (IC) actions, I converse about it to see if we can get to where I am convinced. Usually, that conversation either succeeds, or sometimes us talking it out reveals something problematic the player hadn't considered--so I encourage them to keep thinking.
One of the truly brilliant design touches of PbtA games is how they handle XP. See, one of the two primary sources of experience is failing on rolls. Which I'd say makes sense. Failure teaches more than success. But this means that as both the character AND the player get better--as the character grows in personal power, as the player grows in gameplay skill--that XP from that source dries up over time. You fail fewer rolls because you get better at the things you roll frequently, after all, why wouldn't you? And you try to avoid making risky rolls when you don't need to. So...you don't need the XP to go up to crazy amounts, like a quadratic or exponential scale, because rather than having the amount needed constantly going up...the game is designed so the amount acquired goes down.
Likewise, the other primary source of XP is from the "session wrap up" questions, which in DW center on the interactions between the characters, formalized through their "bonds" that change over time, and whether they did any of: learning something new and important about the world, overcoming a significant enemy, looting a meaningful treasure. Which, of course you'll learn new (and important) things early on when you're still new, and fewer of them later when you're experienced; of course significant opponents become rarer as you become better at overcoming things; of course what counts as meaningful treasure gets pushed higher and higher as you accrue fancy things and come to see your earlier conquests as baby steps on the journey.
So, between the two, high-level characters take longer to level even though you always only need 7 plus your current level in XP points. Fewer sources, spread out across more time. By being experienced, it takes more effort to get experience. Such a wonderful little system. I don't think it can be ported over to D&D, but it's something I always keep in the back of my mind whenever I consider designing games.
One area that Eero Tuovinen really fails to grasp at when it comes to simulation (and I think this has been a general failure within our community but especially within the Forge) is not really grasping with the legacy of Pendragon, Ars Magica and Vampire. Particularly the way in which these games mechanics (rough as they were) helped to achieve a heightened understanding of characters' internal states. There's a legacy of embedding character mentality into the mechanics of the game to help us immerse into our characters those games brought to the table that inspired Narrativist designs, but never really got significant coverage from a theory standpoint.
I think from an agenda standpoint a large part of why I like the Narrativist games I like has to do with their adjacency to simulation of character mentality. Like the basic moves in Apocalypse World, Apocalypse Keys and Monsterhearts directly embed the same sort of modeling of character psychology we see in Vampire - The Requiem and Pendragon. I think that as much as the crucible model (even perhaps more than the crucible model) is really drove me to invest in those games.
OK, now we reach the true crux of the issue. @FrogReaver'a preferences should be opposed and derided because there's a chance that if they're allowed to be defended and repeated they might become widely popular and it's important to you that only your personal preferences should be accepted as normal and preferred.
So, tell us again who expects to be catered to exclusively?
Deeply unclear what "traditional" means there, and I'm worried it's probably 5e. It's very clear my high player agency rules heavy stuff isn't welcome in the OSR, but 5e first players seem to glaze over when you try to present them with a fully developed skill system, so I think I might be out in the cold.
