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

[Faolyn]

Like failing to pick the lock makes enough noise to wake someone up in another room while success does not? A guard or nosy neighbor noticing them on a failure but not on a success even though it does not take longer to fail than succeed? Because those are the only ones I remember. I may, of course, have missed some.

You missed tons.

Guard dog.
Lockpick breaking.
Lock breaking or jamming.
Door locks behind them, meaning the PC has to pick the lock again in order to exit through that door.
Penalty to further lockpicking rolls in that house because the locks are unusual.
Trigger a trap (if they hadn't searched for traps).
Take a minor amount of damage from jerking their hand and cutting it on a sharp or jagged edge of the door or lock. Or take no damage, but still shed a drop of blood or two, useful for when the owner brings in the sniffer dogs (or magic) to track who broke in.

And why would a failed lockpicking make noise? Because in those times, there were no deadbolts. So the locks were often things like padlocks or bars. You lost your grip on the lock and it fell to the ground or clanged loudly against the door. If you didn't fail your roll, you kept your grip and the lock didn't go clang.

Because as far as I can tell the screaming cook is about as logical as any of the other reasons people have given. Which, if it's that easy to implement, it would take about as much time to give a better example as it does to tell people repeatedly that "we already told you."

Then all I can say is that you haven't been paying attention to what everyone has been telling you.

 

[AlViking]

You missed tons.

Guard dog.
Lockpick breaking.
Lock breaking or jamming.
Door locks behind them, meaning the PC has to pick the lock again in order to exit through that door.
Penalty to further lockpicking rolls in that house because the locks are unusual.
Trigger a trap (if they hadn't searched for traps).
Take a minor amount of damage from jerking their hand and cutting it on a sharp or jagged edge of the door or lock. Or take no damage, but still shed a drop of blood or two, useful for when the owner brings in the sniffer dogs (or magic) to track who broke in.

And why would a failed lockpicking make noise? Because in those times, there were no deadbolts. So the locks were often things like padlocks or bars. You lost your grip on the lock and it fell to the ground or clanged loudly against the door. If you didn't fail your roll, you kept your grip and the lock didn't go clang.


Then all I can say is that you haven't been paying attention to what everyone has been telling you.

Then all I can say is that it's just a preference and I don't see why it's hard to accept that I don't like fail forward as a concept.

 

[Gimby]

Then all I can say is that it's just a preference and I don't see why it's hard to accept that I don't like fail forward as a concept.

So, stop engaging about it? If you aren't interested, just drop the topic?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Then all I can say is that it's just a preference and I don't see why it's hard to accept that I don't like fail forward as a concept.

Wait... you don't?!!?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, it's their character, so they should know if its in character or not.

Except, like I said, people are bad about predicting this sort of thing even about themselves, let alone a fictional character. People break in combat or get fast talked all the time who don't think they would.

Assuming a game that's anything other than mostly normal people doing mostly normal people things, the PCs are people who experience terrifying experiences hundreds or thousands of times.

Over time, sure. Right at the start of play? Maybe, maybe not. Personally my feeling on that is to have something like what Eclipse Phase calls "hardening", which you accumulate over time if you keep hitting the same rough kind of stressors, or, if you think you've already done so in the past enough, can buy as part of character generation (though there's a price associated with that in having more distance from other people and making it harder to use most interaction skills against them).

They get used to it. If they're going to run away in terror, then they probably wouldn't have made it past their first few adventures.

If they consistently were going to, sure. But this sort of thing isn't that consistent. The same guy who will break one time manages to hang on the next. That's why we do these things with dice and not automatically.

 

[Lanefan]

Or alternatively it's advice against certain styles of GMing, for example "soft railroading" where successes aren't honoured because it's not felt that the win has been "earned" yet, leading to repeated tests until failure. It can be argued that it's just fairly standard good GMing advice but we know from discussions on this board and elsewhere that this isn't always followed.

I don't think anyone's really suggesting successes shouldn't be honoured. Sure there sometimes might be a complication attached but underneath, a success is and remains a success.

The flip side, though, is that failures should also be honoured; and not everyone seems on board with that.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

And yet at the same time succeeded in making the climb he'd just rolled 'fail' on.

Thus, a 'fail' was turned by GM fiat into a 'success with complication'; and while this seems to have suited the situation in question at the time, it still doesn't honour that original 'fail' roll.

Now had the roll in fact been merely to determine how long the climb took, with actual climb success already guaranteed, that'd be different, as in that case failure would indeed mean it took too long.

 

[Faolyn]

Then all I can say is that it's just a preference and I don't see why it's hard to accept that I don't like fail forward as a concept.

Because you continue to misrepresent it as being nonsensical "quantum screaming cook." Maybe if you actually acknowledged what it really was instead of continually using strawmen, we would accept it was a preference rather than, well, the conservatism of a D&D fan.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The flip side, though, is that failures should also be honoured; and not everyone seems on board with that.

My feeling is that at least some people have a very rigid definition of "failure" that's all or nothing.

 

[Lanefan]

Do you remember when I said, previously, that it was very frustrating that you instantly defaulted to the most anti-charitable reading possible, and then stuck to it even when others had (repeatedly) told you that that was not accurate?

This is that approach occurring again. It would be worth your time to consider taking a charitable interpretation, or trying to ask more neutral questions, rather than immediately assuming that a thing must be deeply stupid, harmful, and ridiculous.

If they don't want things interpreted in ways they don't like then they should write them such that those interpretations can't happen.

Taking the 'charitable' approach just opens the door for people to get away with stuff. No thanks.