What strawman have I used?
You're kidding, right?
The fact that many of us have said that it was a bad example, and yet you keep bringing it up as if it's
the way to do fail forward, is a ginormous strawman. Even though we have shown you many other examples.
The answer people kept repeating was "The cook heard it <guard wandered by, cat freaked out, neighbor saw the attempt> on a failure" which I see no rules justification for and to me is saying that the cook was added because of the failure without clearly stating it.
I pointed this bit out earlier, although I will admit I forget if it was to you or to someone else.
When someone rolls badly on Stealth, there are no rules that say
why they failed. There's no d% table of Reasons Why You Failed The Stealth Check. Yet you don't just expect the
character to shout out "I ROLLED A FOUR!" a la OOTS, and I'm sure you don't just shrug and say "you failed" and that's it. Instead, I'll bet that either you or the player
make something up. You make up a
reason why the Stealth roll failed. Right?
The fail forward/partial success examples we give are exactly like this.
No, the rules don't
say that there's a cook that hears you. But it makes sense to say that
because you bungled your roll, you were clumsy with your attempt to pick the lock, and
because you were clumsy, you made noise and were heard, or you didn't keep to the shadows enough and were seen. Just like it makes sense to say that you stepped on a twig or knocked into some furniture and
that's why you failed your Stealth check.
You have been the only one who gave answers (which I do appreciate) of broken lockpicks or cutting themselves and leaving blood. But it was not clear whether the lock was open or not. If it was not then these were just extra penalties and you're not failing forward, it's just failing with an extra cost.
Remember that fail forward is there to keep the game moving. So such an event should mean that either another way through is revealed--someone ages ago brought up the idea of "you can't pick the lock, but you suddenly notice an open third-story window"--or they succeed but there's a cost--such as the screaming cook, or cutting yourself on the jagged lock, or damaging or losing your tools.
We can either discuss platitudes and vague proclamations or we can discuss actual examples and details of how things work in a real game. Lately people simply insist "We already gave examples" but the only example I remember was from
@hawkeyefan of rolling to see how long it takes to climb a cliff. Which is discussed in the DMG under Trying Again as "If failure has no consequences and a character can try and try again ... call for a single ability check and use the result to determine how long it takes for the character to complete the task." It's also similar to how I've described retries on picking a lock. They don't seem to fit the fail forward idea.
It
does fit
if there's a time crunch involved. If you only have an hour to get in and get out, then spending ten minutes on the lock will mess up the rest of your plans.