Most of the people who run in a race
lose. Nevertheless, they make it to the finish line.
In
@hawkeyefan's example, the character
failed to make the climb in time.
Exactly. As with many of these things, and as I previously noted with the assassin example or with the lock example, we care about the context and intent.
Failing to pick a lock does not, necessarily, mean "you literally just cannot get through this door, period, no matter what". With both real-world examples of lockpicking, and in-game examples, it is much more likely that a "failure" means "I don't know how to pick this lock
fast enough to be worth doing". And that is why a re-attempt doesn't help, unless you change something; it would take you half an hour to pick the lock (or an hour, or whatever ungodly length of time one prefers to set as "just way to frelling long"), and so you can't do it
in that context, with the goals and interests you currently have.
With climbing the wall
@Lanefan, it is essentially guaranteed that you want to climb it
for some reason, not simply because you got a wild hair up your hindquarters and elected to climb. Perhaps you are fleeing pursuit, and the wall offers a dangerous shortcut. Perhaps you are pursuing, and need to catch up. Perhaps you are trying (as was referenced a zillion posts back) to save someone who'll die without your help.
For all of these, climbing up...only to find that the horrible thing you were trying to prevent has already come to pass...is still, objectively, unequivocally, a failure. Just like how the assassin getting away is still objectively, unequivocally a failure, even if you've got his cloak, or she's bringing an assassin squad back afterward to take you down and you don't know that, or (etc.,)
Or, to use an example I've actually seen in real games: You followed the assassin to a particular building...but that building is vast and full of LOTS AND LOTS of people, and you don't even know if the assassin is still there or not. You failed to catch them. That's failure. It just isn't failure that results in "thumbs twiddled".
Failing a climb by moving so slowly that, when you reach the top, your friend has already had his heart cut out? Sounds like a pretty serious failure to me. Just means skipping the umpteen re-attempts before you finally pass the check; a simpler, more
streamlined experience. Failing a climb by having it so when your eyes crest the top of the cliff, you see the squad of soldiers waiting to apprehend you sounds like a pretty bloody serious failure....we've just gone for the (slightly) more dramatic "being captured at the top of the cliff" rather than the (slightly) less dramatic "you rolled 4 checks, none of them were high enough, so you just got captured at the bottom of the cliff". Etc.
These things are still, quite clearly, failure, and that failure is the direct result of not climbing the cliff effectively. The one and only thing that changes is that we allow for "failure" to mean "reaching the top and getting
nothing you wanted". Just like your own example of the pilot of the Titanic, where "success" cannot avert the collision, it's too late for that, but it
can make the ship survive long enough for everyone to escape, or perhaps even, with a great deal of luck, to limp into port--but failure is guaranteed doom and makes everything so, so much worse.
If we can have a situation where "the collision is inevitable, we're determining how bad the consequences are", what is so horrible about "oh you'll reach the top, we're determining what the consequences are"? You were so keen on "guaranteed success on task A, we're determining the degree of success" and "guaranteed failure on task A, we're determining the degree of failure" earlier. What changed?
