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

[Faolyn]

Just because @Faolyn did ask for a citation, I'd point this out:



So, it's not like I'm pulling this argument out of thin air. @Faolyn is straight up saying that we cannot trust players to play in good faith because there is "no way to enforce this" and players would rather play a different game than actually play in good faith.

Because you can't. Because why should they? Nearly every other roll involves the players choosing to do something, or else succumbing to magical compulsion. This sort of roll has neither choice nor a good reason beyond GM fiat for the players to accept.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm sorry, but there are all sorts of games that do exactly that. You get hit, take damage, and the mechanics tell you how you react to the pain. Heck, even 5e has things like Vex which grants advantage on your next attack or disadvantage to enemies for their first attack. What exactly do you think that means? Why does hitting someone with a longsword give them disadvantage on their next attack?

If you're talking about the weapon mastery thing in 5.24, that doesn't say how the other creature is supposed to react at all. It just says you get advantage on your next attack against them. (If you're talking about something else, I have no idea what it is.)

So two things here:

If a player hits an NPC or another PC with that ability, the player is free to flavor what form the Vex takes however they want to. Maybe it's really painful. Maybe you carve your initials into their shirt, Zorro-style, and they get really vexed at you. Could be anything.

If a GM hits a PC with that ability, the GM is free to flavor however they want to, or to invite the PC to describe what happens. Heck, the GM doesn't even have to describe it at all (even if they should). They can just roll once normally, then roll for attack #2 with advantage without saying a word as to why.

There are abilities that tell the target how they react. Every one that I can think of is magical in nature, or at least is caused by a clearly magical or super-powerful being.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't see how that solves the problem. If you don't allow the player to change their again declaration in response, then there was hardly any point to informing them in the first place, or if they can, you're back to negotiation as they fish for different consequences.

In the game in question, there wasn’t really any option to negotiate their action declarations. The issue was a cliff that they needed to climb, and I provided all the relevant info, including DV and the consequence on a failure. They knew all this before they rolled.

The point of sharing it all ahead of time is that it gave them an idea of their odds and gave them a chance to deploy any spells, abilities, or items that might assist. Perhaps such a decision would have changes their declaration. If they had a fly spell or potion, then they may have decided for the strongest to drink it and carry the other two up to the top. Then, no roll is needed and no time is lost.

As it turned out, they didn’t use any such spells or items and just attempted the climb.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I disagree here. Killing a character is permanent, yes, but taking them over and making them act in ways contrary to what the player wants is kind of worse. It's akin to mind control in a way, made worse because it's not caused by a magical effect.

But you get that's a personal taste thing, right? I can probably say without too much loss of generality there's a lot of people out there who'd probably rather deal with a game with non-magical morale or fear checks than games with one shot death effects. A failed moral check says the game system and you don't entirely agree on how easy it is for people to panic in the situation (note my qualification there that there should be some nuance to that), but its not any worse than someone looking at the psych trait you took and reading it as stronger than intended/you assumed it'd be.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My point is that with games like GURPS and other games with traits you buy or make for yourself, you're choosing to buy that trait. With GURPS, there's a roll, and when you buy the disadvantage, you choose who severe it is, which affects the difficulty with the roll.

That's my point though; you've already accepted that in that situation a roll may make your character behave in a way you think is incorrect, you've just had the option to put your thumb on the scale.

How is that any different than my suggestion of there being a roll and the player has a choice to apply modifiers in one direction or the other, other than its more formalized?

In SWADE, a trait like Yellow gives you a penalty to your Fear check. With a game where you make up traits for yourself that have no mechanical impact (such as many narrative games) you still have a choice as how you deal with the triggering event.

But here's the thing: if in D&D, the GM says "This guy seems like he's telling the truth" (and assume the PCs make Insight rolls to back that up), the players can still choose whether or not they believe him or are willing to do what he says. Even if the GM is not very good at actually delivering such a speech like that for real, they can still roll for the NPC's Performance or whatever and say "you can feel your pulse quicken as you listen to his very convincing points" and still leave it up to the players to decide if they want to bite the hook or not.

So why is the binding nature of the roll acceptable in SWADE or GURPS but not here (other than the blunt object nature of it, which I address above)?

 

[Hussar]

The one non-negotiable for me, however, is that a failure on the roll cannot be turned into a success-with-complications, nor can a success be turned into a failure.

The problem here is that different systems have different granularity for rolls. For example, if a system has an "Explore" roll - be it explore a room, building, forest, whatever. You simply make a single check and the results of that check tell you information about that location.

What does failure mean? It could simply be "you don't find anything". Sure. Or, it could be, "While searching, you trigger a trap". After all, that's part and parcel to D&D since forever - a failed Find Traps roll (or variations thereof) trigger traps. Maybe, "While searching, you step on an angry badger, roll for initiative".

These are all fails. Although, from a certain point of view, the failed Find Traps check could be called a success since the trap was found, just not found safely.

The problem is when people start insisting on a one size fits all result. It's just not possible for failure to always be the same. Sometimes it's one thing, sometimes it's another.

 

[Lanefan]

As opposed to Level Drain, Sex Change and Alignment Change?
Granted we also had Ability Drain and Aging.

And the big one: magic item loss.

In 1e, if you failed a save vs AoE damage everything you were carrying then had to save or be destroyed. Makes for a far more "easy come, easy go" vibe, which I quite like.

And no my system uses your character's TBIF to reward you for following them when it serves against the rational (optimized) choice. You don't get rewarded for roleplaying your character when the stakes are low or don't even exist. Your character is defined in the tough moments.
And if you don't agree with the GM it's open to the table for discussion.

Better, but still a red flag (though not as big). I don't want to have to argue with the table to get my xp.

Alignment never worked for PCs. It had some setting/cosmological/world-building value but failed miserably for roleplaying purposes. But it's OK - that was the start of the hobby. 50 years on they still have nothing. Pretty lame.

Alignment works OK if it's not seen as a straitjacket and is allowed* to slowly drift over time as the character changes and develops. I like it more for the idea of aligned items and-or places, which require characters to also have alignments so we know what those items/places think of them and-or do to them.

* - exception: character classes with forced alignments have to stay there.

 

[Lanefan]

But that’s just terminology. It doesn’t matter.

10 is the “success with complications” target, 15 is the “success free and clear” target.

Then the actual DC should be 10, not 15.

Yes it's terminology, but it's terminology that matters. A lot.

 

[Lanefan]

So basically back to what Snarf originally described.

Snarf left the original DC at 15 and added a 10-14 range that turned a fail into a success. That's vastly different than simply lowering the DC to 10 and adding a success-witn-extras range up to 14.