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

[pemerton]

The finer details that enable meaningful conversation about it.

"Fail forward" or "no whiffing" is a technique developed in the indie design space, to respond to what was seen as a couple of problems with received approaches to action resolution:

*That failure leaves the fictional situation unchanged (at least in any meaningful way) and hence tends to cause a stall or frustration or a lack of interesting game play;

*That failure tends to be narrated as the character failing at the attempted task, which makes them look incompetent although (often, at least) they are supposed to be an expert.​

Narrating failure by reference to intent, and narrating external forces that bring about the character's lack of success, avoids both problems.

Consistently with what @thefutilist posted not far upthread, it did not take that long for "fail forward" to be adopted by RPGers using a more conventional, GM-driven approach. In this usage, it refers to the GM narrating failure in such a way as to keep things "on the rails". This is where the idea that a certain event has to occur for the game to keep going comes from (eg the PCs have to pass through a certain door, or have to discover a certain clue).

 

[clearstream]

What encourages risk-taking is player knowledge that failure won't bring the trajectory of play - or the PC - to an end. "Fail forward" can be a component of that.

I have heard folk saying they have felt an aversion to doing things that could invoke fail-forward rolls, because they worry about the potential to cascade into consequences.

Having a "trajectory of play" in mind seems like failing to play game as game. Or do you mean rather that when your goal is rising tension, failing forward can continue that? If so, doesn't that imply escalating costs on risks, which could well form a deterrent!? That's why I described it as more about elevating the 'sincerity' of the risk-taking.

The underlying idea is that the players are ready to take risks in advocating for their PCs, and the failure as a consequence of those risks won't bring that advocacy to an end. Because the situation that the GM narrates, in response to failure, will still speak in some fashion to the PCs' concerns.

Equally, player can speak to their concerns by saying what they do next, rather than relying on GM to interpret what they care about. And again, play doesn't stop on failure! Its flow is merely diverted down fresh lines... which the group can continue to ensure speak in some fashion to the PC's concerns

Fail-forward is an excellent technique, that is becoming a norm in RPG design. It's just no better at encouraging risk-taking than simple-fail.

As I posted upthread, the roll only when failure is consequential framing tends to me to suggest GM-driven play: that is, that the GM is the one who decides whether or not failure is consequential.

Appropriately, as 5e is GM driven play and it is indeed GM that decides whether failure is consequential. They're permitted (and encouraged in the DMG) to ensure that is about what matters to the PCs.

I drew the contrast to "say 'yes' or roll the dice", where the need to roll is determined by what is at stake in the situation, and this then dictates that failure must be narrated in a way that is consequential. This is how Burning Wheel, for instance, does things.

Without disagreement, upthread I list some variations in versions of fail-forward. Hopefully that clarifies that I'm not saying here that 5e has the same implementation as BW. There are important differences as you spell out. I would say that there are other mechanics in BW (or TB2 which I'm experienced with) that are contextually important and it is probably more lack of these rather than the fail-forward structure itself that embeds differences that would be taxing for DM to replicate without emulating as written house rules.

 

[pemerton]

Having a "trajectory of play" in mind seems like failing to play game as game.

The idea that situations have a trajectory - implicit threats and promises - is fairly key to play in which "fail forward" is used.

In its bowdlerised version, rather than implicit threats and promises the trajectory is the GM's railroad.

 

[FrogReaver]

Not really. I don't see how rising action is to be analogised to a car. The latter is a machine, that has parts.

I wasn’t. I was analogizing ‘example of’ and ‘part of’ since you specifically declared you didn’t understand what I meant by them.

Rising action or rising conflict is not a machine. It's a sequence of events. Its components are events. Put in an event like Andy Warhol's Sleep, or an hour of two of play focused on inventory and calculating healing times, and you will not have rising action. At least that' show it seems to me.

Well, it seems you do have understanding of the difference between what I mean by ‘part of’ and ‘example of’. Component is good synonym for what I meant.

But you’re still just restating your conclusion instead of explaining how you get there.

For rising action/conflict
1) Does it matter how long in real time any event in that sequence lasts? (I don’t think so but maybe you disagree). What if the inventory management was 10 seconds instead of 2 hours? Does that change anything?

2) Would your concept of rising action/conflict include any series of events that go from event A lower action/conflict to event B as higher action/conflict to event Z as the highest action/conflict? Must every event in the sequence go from lower to higher?

3) What if the 2 hours of inventory management was a component of a component? Say for the purposes of some rising conflict we don’t associate
the 2 hours of inventory management as a separate event, but as part of one of the events in the rising action sequence. If you think that should be treated as a component of one of the events in the sequence of rising action/conflict then how do we determine when something is an event vs a component of an event?

 

[clearstream]

In all of these circumstances, the fundamental action still failed: no catching the assassin. But instead of that just being a dead end with nothing further, as the party has almost no information to go on, failure still gets them a something--whatever that something might be--which permits the story to keep moving. The state-of-play neither (a) remained functionally unchanged, nor (b) changed into a complete dead end. All of the above are things that could be rooted in information the GM already knows, or in things they could reasonably extrapolate from what is already known--standards that have been repeatedly emphasized as essential to the "traditional-GM" running a sandbox-y campaign. Which, if any, would be "correct" for a given game depends on information I cannot possibly have--knowing the specific context of a given campaign, its world, its players, its GM.

(Emphasis mine.) Alternatively, 'instead of that flowing into new directions, as the party leverage other abilities and everything they've learned so far...'

Which is to say that helping yourself to negative characterisations of that which you don't like is distracting rhetoric. To me it's more compelling when the best cases are compared. Assassins are more than capable of leaving a sting with the party on simple-fail because play continues.

 

[FrogReaver]

Fortunately, that isn't what I wrote.

I too "don’t agree that the intent of fail forward is to get the characters to take risks." It's about what happens once they take that risk. I might say "value" instead of "intent", just on the grounds that one can intend things even mistakenly.

I’m saying everyone is in agreement on that. No one thinks fail forward is about getting the characters to take risks?

Sorry for the lack of clarity in my previous post, it was made late when I should have been asleep.

 

[Enrahim]

No, I am not. Bolded for emphasis:

This was in response to someone else saying:

IOW, Enrahim was saying "characters need to always make the most rational, pragmatic decision possible", because anything else is bad. Hence, characters need to be played such that they always make the most rational, pragmatic choice possible.

It wasn't my argument that characters needed to be like that. Quite the opposite. I think that most people make the best approximation of rationality they can...and that that approximation is often loose even in favorable conditions.

Because "perfectly" of course has to mean "the most (...) possible" in the context of a rant.

 

[clearstream]

The idea that situations have a trajectory - implicit threats and promises - is fairly key to play in which "fail forward" is used.

So fail-forward is about railroading? Of course that's not what you mean, but pursuing dramatic narrative has been observed to be in tension with playing game as game. Kim, for instance, discusses this.

In its bowdlerised version, rather than implicit threats and promises the trajectory is the GM's railroad.

That's not down to choosing fail-forward or simple-fail. Perhaps it's true though that simple-fail is not about committing to a trajectory... seeing as any preconceived notion of what ought to happen can wind up derailed.

 

[zakael19]

Why is it a bad term? Has anyone who sat down to GM Apocalypse World ever been confused or led astray by it?

Even more specifically: it's not left there dangling as a sentence and a "ok cool, figure out how to do this." It's defined with explicit guidance around how to run the game (and what not to do) to achieve that goal, and then you're provided with a long list of GM Principles and Moves that help you structure your side of the conversation to achieve that. It's often easy to pick apart the surface bold line directives of a PBTA (eg: something like "begin and end with the fiction" is actually really confusing for people picking a game like this up for the first time, thankfully games which say that also ya know, define what it means), but you could ask what the game means by that if you're not familiar with it instead of assuming it's something as facile as it appears.

 

[clearstream]

In this usage, it refers to the GM narrating failure in such a way as to keep things "on the rails". This is where the idea that a certain event has to occur for the game to keep going comes from (eg the PCs have to pass through a certain door, or have to discover a certain clue).

I've never seen it used that way in GM'd play, and am curious to know which game texts codify it?