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

[AlViking]

Have you even bothered to google "fail forward D&D" to find out ways to use that method with the game?

How do you think I found the example?

An example that did sort of make sense to me (which I thought I mentioned long, long ago) was a character trying to knock down a crumbling wall. They fail their check and break down the wall but take some damage and are buried under rubble. Something I could see using but doesn't exactly apply all that broadly. https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/408...g-without-ending-the-campaign#failing-forward. The reason it worked for me was because the result was a direct in-world result of the action. Most of the results I found were just more examples from other systems and vague.

 

[AlViking]

...

So, let me get this straight. You want me to give you demonstrations of Fail Forward...in the contexts where that technique appears...

But you demand that it ONLY be examples from campaigns specifically using D&D?

Are you serious?

This is not a not general gaming forum, it's a D&D forum. So of course any technique you talk about people will assume you're discussing techniques that can be applied to D&D. If I wanted to discuss how to run fail forward in a PbtA game I'd go to one of the forums where people discuss PbtA games.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, did I just see a moving goalpost?

I don't know, I don't speak French.

Mod note:
Hey.
The snarky antagonistic attitude isn't constructive. If you can't do better, take a break from the thread, before a break is provided for you.

 

[Emerikol]

I don't understand how FF could ever...not be kept in the GM's control. It's purely expressed in how GMs frame scenes where someone failed to achieve something they wanted to achieve. How could that ever be anything else...? I'm truly confused here.

Well, several factors. The dice indicates something special happens. The player is going to be looking at the DM to tell him what that something is. If the DM has established any sort of precedence, the player will expect exactly that. I like it conceptually but I would want the players to not be staring at the die result with expectation. So I could roll the die OR I could have some system for interpreting the die result that the players don't know and that they know I use.

 

[AlViking]

So now the quiet picking of the lock guarantees quiet opening of the door and quiet entering of the kitchen? And the cook has to be there or she wouldn't be present to hear the failed check. If the check determines if she's there or not, we're back to having a quantum cook who is both there and not there until the die roll fixes her in place somewhere.

The skilled thief making a lot of noise on a failure, when he is using the same level of skill at lockpicking as with a success, is silly. The noise for failure would actually less than with a success because you don't have tumblers tripping and the final click open of the lock.

Correct. I'm never going to "get" quieter = louder.

Then the principle has nothing to do with making characters' lives not boring, which is what I have been saying.

See, if they included a "more" in-between "lives" and "interesting," it might be accurate. At least it wouldn't be guaranteed to be wrong like it is when it's worded as written.

That's a really bad analogy. An accurate analogy would be if the principle is, "A parent should make their childrens' lives interesting." and then described it as protecting the child from danger when it rears its head.

I could do that, too, and without having that principle. Because the principle is really, "make something interesting happen on a failed attempt," and not anything to do with characters lives being boring.

To play devil's advocate to support a method I personally would not use: on either success or failure the door is unlocked. The sleight of hand to open the lock is changed, it's no longer whether or not you can open the lock (that's now automatic), it's how quietly it is opened.

That's not the rules of the game, but that's the only way it makes sense to me unless the cook only exists because of the failure. It also means the cook is still an obstacle and I'm not sure how you open a door "stealthily" but at least it follows the logic of the game. How I might run it is that my house rule is that if you fail by 10 or less you can try again but this time you're rolling to see how long it takes, which is mentioned in the DMG. I make it a separate roll because the expectation is that we're following the rules and the sleight of hand only takes an action and I want to give my players a chance to change their course of action. If something takes up to 20 minutes to accomplish instead of a few seconds it will of course come with it's own risk.

 

[Maxperson]

But that NPC will likely only be present in the campaign for a tiny fraction of time. That PC will be present (barring unforeseen circumstances) in every scene throughout the campaign. There's no difference in the scale. That NPC loses 100% of their agency, but, that's okay because you have so many NPC's. That PC loses agency, but, that's okay because you have so many interactions and time with that character.

Again, I'm failing to see the difference. In both cases, you're losing a "microfractional" amount of agency.

Again, nothing about this is forcing you to play your character in a way that is untrue to the character. It's that the mechanics provide the direction. How you interpret that direction is still up to you.

I'll admit though, I'm in the minority here. This ship has sailed a LONG time ago. There's no way that the fandom will ever allow this sort of thing in baseline D&D. Granted, in my current campaign, I have insanity rules, which means it's entirely plausible that your character will act in all sorts of bizarre fashions. And, I like games like FATE where you have Aspects and the DM can invoke that Aspect to compel you to play the character you created. Huge fan of those sorts of mechanics.

You can't just arbitrarily change the scope. The player has only 1 PC and has lost control over 100% of the characters he controls. The same cannot be said about mine, since I control billions and have only lost control over 1 whatever billionths of the NPCs I control.

It's not about length of time. It's about percentage of characters you have the ability to play. So no, it's not a microfractional percentage of the characters the player controls. It's all of them.

The reason you are in the minority, is that most people don't like losing all of their agency and being forced to roleplay in a very out of character manner.

Edit: And yes I am absolutely being forced to act out of character at least some of the time. It's always going to be a 100% loss of agency, but some of the time I will be persuaded to do something my character would never do, or not do something he would do 100% of the time. In those moments the "direction" the mechanics are providing for me to interpret, require 100% of those interpretations to be out of character. Sure I have the option of figuring out how I act out of character, but I don't have the option to refuse the result of the die roll, which would be the ONLY way to act in character.

 

[AlViking]

Nah - if it's remote, I'm out.

But get us together in a pub sometime and hells yeah, count me in. Even if we didn't actually play anything, the discussion and arguments would be increasingly epic per beer consumed!

Yeah, I pretty much hate remote gaming myself. Did the whole Roll20 thing for a while during COVID and it was just okay. Unfortunately I suspect we're pretty widely dispersed and when we travel my wife tends to pull out the stopwatch everywhere we go because we have to stick to an itinerary. On the other hand we're planning a visit to New Zealand next February so if we want to set up a game in Hobbiton* I'd be game.

*I'm excited for the trip, not so much for the tourist trap. Loved the movies, don't really need to see the set but since my wife is also my travel agent I just go where I'm told.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Yeah, I pretty much hate remote gaming myself. Did the whole Roll20 thing for a while during COVID and it was just okay. Unfortunately I suspect we're pretty widely dispersed and when we travel my wife tends to pull out the stopwatch everywhere we go because we have to stick to an itinerary. On the other hand we're planning a visit to New Zealand next February so if we want to set up a game in Hobbiton* I'd be game.

I'm not great with IT, I tend to use Discord, but the positives are

• One can get through material rather rapidly in a short space of time
• It is very useful when the party is split, so 1-2 players. I use it particularly when I know it is likely to be a less combat heavy so ToM or no combat.
• No catering or cleaning up if you are the predominant host (which I am). This saves you on much time.

Otherwise, my games are very much face-to-face.

Regarding your trip to NZ there are at least 3 New Zealanders on the forums which I know.
Pemerton I believe is in Australia.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So now the quiet picking of the lock guarantees quiet opening of the door and quiet entering of the kitchen? And the cook has to be there or she wouldn't be present to hear the failed check. If the check determines if she's there or not, we're back to having a quantum cook who is both there and not there until the die roll fixes her in place somewhere.

The skilled thief making a lot of noise on a failure, when he is using the same level of skill at lockpicking as with a success, is silly. The noise for failure would actually less than with a success because you don't have tumblers tripping and the final click open of the lock.

Correct. I'm never going to "get" quieter = louder.

Then the principle has nothing to do with making characters' lives not boring, which is what I have been saying.

See, if they included a "more" in-between "lives" and "interesting," it might be accurate. At least it wouldn't be guaranteed to be wrong like it is when it's worded as written.

That's a really bad analogy. An accurate analogy would be if the principle is, "A parent should make their childrens' lives interesting." and then described it as protecting the child from danger when it rears its head.

I could do that, too, and without having that principle. Because the principle is really, "make something interesting happen on a failed attempt," and not anything to do with characters lives being boring.

Like I said, Max... time to shrug and move on. Very little of what you said above makes sense to me.

All I can do is recommend that you read Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts and pay extra attention to the principles and everything they say, and what their purpose is. I think that would go a long way for you.

 

[Maxperson]

When someone posts some direct-quoted rules text and that text says X, it's not my fault if I read it as saying X even though the writer may have intended it to be read as saying Y. And this goes right back to day one; Gygax was guilty of this on a far too frequent basis and I (and others) have spent decades trying to tweak his game such that what says X, means X.

The problem with Gygax was that he was very schizophrenic in his writing, often writing passages and rules that were in complete opposition to other passages and rules, leaving us trying to figure out which he meant, with no real way to do that. It was further compounded when he and others he played with revealed that how he played the game as completely different from the rules he wrote to sell us, meaning that was really intended for game play might not be either one of passages/rules that we are looking at!

That's why I don't give a whole lot of weight to "Gygax said..." and "Gygax wrote..."