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

[DinoInDisguise]

Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death is not a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, including some versions of D&D, that do not have character death. Consider Dragonlance stuff. Very much D&D--but the modules explicitly had rules against deaths for named characters prior to certain events happening. Hence death cannot be a necessity of any kind, structural or otherwise.


Nah. I had a whole thread about this topic a long, long while back (couple years at least now). Death is not the only thing that achieves these goals. It is merely one way to do so. IME, it actually is not the best way, because the extreme severity means a significant number of players turtle up and disengage, becoming no-experimentation, no-risk, no-derring-do types, because they're afraid of having their participation taken away. And no, in my experience, it EMPHATICALLY is not effective to try shock therapy on these folks. Quite the opposite; that's the fastest way to drive them away from ever participating in TTRPGs ever again. Further, because death is simultaneously maximum severity and maximum impersonal-ness (impersonality? hmm), it doesn't really motivate players very well in my experience, other than scaring them off. If you actually want to motivate them, they need a reason to dare, not a reason to be scared of daring--which means other motives are actually a lot more effective. Again, all IME.

So with the very foundation of your argument challenged, it's hard to really respond to the rest. You're working off an assumption I find not only personally inapplicable, but objectively incorrect. There are, in fact, versions of specifically D&D, not just any TTRPG, that involve no-death or minimized-death rules, and yet they still hold together, they still have weighty decisions, they still have meaningful tension, and still have stakes both general and specific. My DW game still has plenty of edge and isn't flat, even though I have told my players that they will never be subject to character deaths that are all three of (1) random (=fluke of the dice, not the result of an intentional incredibly dangerous choice or of accepting one's fate), (2) permanent (=character is dead and isn't going to come back on their own e.g. Gandalf in LotR), and (3) irrevocable (=players will not have the ability to reverse the death in a reasonably short period of time by expending resources or promising something to a being that can do the job.) My players are still highly invested and indeed even the brand-new-to-TTRPG players care a lot about many things in the world, and have done rash or dangerous things to protect who and what they care about.

I don’t think we’re in total disagreement. My prior post may have framed death in a bit better of a light than I actually believe. I don’t mean to argue that death is the only way to provide stakes, just that in traditional D&D and games with similar mechanical assumptions, it’s one of the structural consequences that helps frame risk and decision-making. If you ditch it, and the players know you wont kill them, you end up with odd player behaviors. There might very well be a way to fix that, where death isn't on the table, I just have not seen it.

I also agree with your point about turtling. If death is handled poorly, such as a sudden, meaningless punishment, you are correct, it absolutely kills experimentation. But to me, that’s a table culture issue more than a death issue. Some GMs use death as a blunt instrument, others use it more narratively. I’ve been on both sides, I’ve mishandled it before, and yeah, it shut people down. I've also seen it be a very powerful and positive force in a game when done correctly.

If I came across as advocating for death as an ideal outcome, that’s not what I meant. I believe the threat of death is usually enough to prevent the behavior issues I fear when it's off the table. And I haven't, personally, killed many PCs. What I was trying to contrast was death and forced persuasion. Because when death happens (at least when it’s done right), it’s the result of the player’s choices. Forced persuasion, by contrast, hijacks the character’s inner life, and rarely involves a choice they made. That involvement of the player's choices is core to what I feel seperates the two.

Personally, I’m already skeptical of status conditions like paralyzed or stunned, they can rob players of meaningful choices, and I’m not convinced they add much. So I’m not dogmatic about death either. Maybe in a year I’ll be convinced that it’s unnecessary. But I still think forced persuasion, especially when it overrides established character beliefs, is in the same category as the worst ways death can be handled. So I stand by the idea that it’s possible to be pro-death (in mechanical terms) while still opposing forced persuasion as poor form.

TLDR: Someone who is better at running games than I am, might be able to remove the threat of death and not cause issues. I can't, not yet anyways.

Edit: @Eric V for visibility, as this kind of addresses his reply as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that when it comes to player loss of control of character… whether as a result of some kind of supernatural effect like magic or dragon fear or mind control, or via more mundane means like persuasion or strong emotion or whatever… is something that each game handles in its own way.

I agree with folks who are saying they’d be put off by having non-magical compulsion of any kind in D&D. Not because it can’t be done, but because by default it’s not a part of D&D (with perhaps a few minor exceptions). I think if a GM wanted to incorporate this into D&D, they need to communicate this to the players and set expectations.

Having said that, I don’t think that it’s impossible to do this in D&D if one wanted to. Plenty of other games have elements of this in one form or another. It’s more a question of how to implement it.

If a game does include such mechanics, I think it’s too simplistic to describe it as a loss of player agency. That criticism is too simplistic. It depends on context. If it’s a part of the game, and loss of control is some form of consequence or drawback, it’s an understood risk. Positioning it as a loss of agency just paints the entire practice as negative… and that’s not really the case.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Nice Strawman there. I never said they didn't ask anything at all. I said they don't ask several times in a few minutes like would happen in a social setting.

My experience is entirely the opposite. "Asking can I do X" happens all the time in combat.

Maybe stop rolling so much and just roleplay. Social encounters go very smoothly if you don't stop to roll a lot or ask if you can do things every few seconds.

Nice strawman there. I never said that. But go off, friendo. I have little desire to discuss it further when you levy accusations and then do the exact thing you just accused me of.

 

[Enrahim]

Amazingly, the confusion was all on the part of folks who admittedly are unfamiliar with the games that use fail forward.

No one who is familiar with those games was confused at all. Why is that, do you think?

I mean… we’re all familiar with armor class as a game term, but if we weren’t, discussion about it could lead to confusion as well. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad term… it means that some folks aren’t familiar with it.

The problem, in my opinion, seems more about people who are unfamiliar with something not wanting to admit it, or that they can become just as familiar as others with like a quick look online at a blog or on reddit.

It’d be a lot more productive if people approached that kind of stuff from a place of curiosity rather than antagonism.

Of course the suggestion is intelligible. @hawkeyefan gave an example from actual play of 5e D&D. I've given examples from actual play of 4e D&D. There has been discussion of a blog example (about sneaking into a house and inadvertently alerting a cook) that the blog author clearly thinks can work in contemporary fairly mainstream D&D play.

That some people don't want to do something doesn't mean that the suggestion to do it is unintelligible.

Why does it matter? The reason for drawing someone's attention to "fail forward" as a technique is not to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as an example of "fail forward" - it's to enhance their repertoire of techniques for narrating consequences.

Yes, examples were produced. But when trying to understand exactly what was suggested - that is the neccessary and sufficient conditions for having followed the suggestion - I struggeled to even get a straight forward answer on if fail without retry would be following "fail forward" in the context of D&D as suggested. It was said it wouldn t count as fail forward, but when asked about why, it always pointed back to principles of other games than D&D.

To remind you of my last attempt:

The finer details that enable meaningful conversation about it.

That is how to reach a sufficiently common understanding of "fail forward" that we avoid conversations of this kind:

A: Avoiding the game stalling by the player getting stuck on a thing is great, and is called fail forward.
B: I agree. I generally never allow retries, and make sure there are always other options to pursuie on a failure, making sure the game never stalls.
A: Wait a second, that is not fail forward because [definition I of fail forward]
B: Oh, then I do not think I like fail forward as it seem to encourage [undesired behavior X]
C: But [undesired behavoir X] is not fail forward because [definition II of fail forward]
D: But [definition II of fail forward] seem to allow [undesired behavior Y] which would not be normally allowed in my game.
E: I do not see the problem with [undesired behavior Y]
D: Explains why [undesired behavior Y] is not working out alongside their preferences.
F: Pointing out that it is perfectly possible to just not get into the problems of [undesired behavior Y] with fail forward because of [definition III of fail forward].
G: Agreeing with F pointing out that fail forward is perfectly ok as simply not allowing retry would be failing foward according to [definition III].
D: Expressing sceptisism is this is indeed fail forward.
G: Reiterating that according to G's understanding just not allowing retry is failing forward.
A: (Having missed some key parts of the context due to the thread moving at breakneck speed) G-s understanding is wrong because as pointed out earlier [reiterate definition I of fail forward].

We are in a situation where there are several ideas of what the word "fail forward" means, and everyone keep replying as if their own understanding of the term is the universally correct understanding of the term, so people keep correcting each other for misuse of the term.

That produced the following 3 answers:

There may be as many versions as there are game systems. To indicate degree of variation via a few simplified paired alternatives

(A) Consequences of failure must be in sight upfront, justifying roll​

(A') Rolling entails consequences, and roll is justified on other grounds​

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(B) Character's action succeeds, and failure is a twist that complicates or derails their intention​

(B') Character's action can succeed or fail, and failure can include the consequences of failing their action​

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(C) Trinary outcomes, e.g. succeed, succeed with cost, failure with cost​

(C') Binary outcomes, e.g. succeed, failure with cost​

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(D) GM narrates failures​

(D') Player narrates failures​

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(E) Success goes as GM describes​

(E') Success goes as player described​

I can think of systems exemplifying every one of these, and some allow switching between them case by case. Additionally, what counts as a consequence varies. Some alternatives are

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(1) Consequences can be "soft" or "hard" where the former ordinarily sets up the latter​

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(2) Consequences must follow from situation and action to hand in an obvious way​

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(3) Consequences can include anything that can be narratively related to situation and action​

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(4) Consequences can be anything the group find narratively interesting, even if that's granular or subtle​

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(5) Consequences should steadily escalate​

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(6) Consequences may de-escalate​

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Those could all be summarized as being about change to game state (system, fiction) which brings in a further nuance

(i) No change to system without change to fiction​

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(ii) Change to system may happen without change to fiction​

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(iii) Change to fiction may happen without change to system​

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I'd say iii is quite normal, while cases of ii are often identified as meta-mechanics. The first is sometimes identified as a principle for play.

The above can't be a rigorous or exhaustive deconstruction. Nor does it represent any kind of view or detailed analysis on each component. My aim is only to list without qualitative judgement some features that may be noticed in versions of "fail-forward" in confirmation of your observation that there are multiple definitions.

"Things shouldn't hit a dead end" is a motive for FF. It is not what FF is. "Children should know how to read" is a motive for public schooling; it is not what public schooling is. A given attempt at/implementation of public schooling may or may not fulfill any given motive; any given motive may or may not be a good or sound one for why public schooling should exist. Likewise, "a literate population" is not public schooling, it is an effect of public schooling.

What Fail Forward is is, IMO, quite simple. "When a player attempts an action, all results advance the fictional state in some new direction." Usually, this means that one effect of FF is that, when an action fails, the state of play keeps moving toward...something. That "something" may be good, or bad, or merely different--but whatever it is among those things, it is not functionally unchanged.

Hence, with the locked château servant entrance, it is not Fail Forward to have a failure produce: "You cannot enter by this door. All remains quiet." That is the state of play remaining, functionally, completely unchanged. The characters' motivation remains identical to what it was before: find an entrance, remain undetected. The scenario in which they find themselves remains functionally identical: they are outside the house, not inside. And, since I was specifically told to limit what assumptions I might make and to presume only the barest minimum of anything, this was the only entrance the characters had, so not only have things remained unchanged, they're stuck with no further path forward.

Another common example (not previously used in this thread, to my knowledge) is one where the PCs are trying to stop an occult ritual, perhaps to save a captured victim's life, perhaps to identify the cult members. The characters need to find the secret entrance in order to get to the cultists. There isn't any other way to get to the cultists except to find the entrance. In traditional D&D play, this means you need to reach a certain minimum roll on a Perception check--so we get two situations if we presume failures. Either the characters just all attempt it and fail and then...the adventure just stops. Or, they all keep trying over and over and over and over until finally someone rolls a nat 20 (or whatever) and finds the secret bookcase (or whatever the secret entrance is). Both of these are, generally, understood to be Bad Results, even by those who heavily favor ultra-traditional play approaches. Fail Forward addresses both by saying that a failure doesn't mean they simply cannot find the door at all; instead, it takes a slight step back and asks, "What does failure actually MEAN here?" Here, the party's goal is, as noted, to save a victim, or to unmask the cultists. Hence, a failure of Perception, when they ABSOLUTELY MUST perceive in order to proceed, should not be understood as merely "you simply don't see anything, nothing happens".

Instead, since some kind of success (or perhaps some kind of failure!) is required for things to proceed, failure-vs-success is now a matter of "do you achieve the intent you sought", or to reference Lanefan's suggestion with the unavoidable iceberg, what is the nature of the collision? Is it a minor, glancing blow, something the ship can at least limp back to port to fix, or is it a tremendous, devastating blow that ensures total destruction? The act of treating the hypothetical "Pilot"/"Navigate" roll's success as "you mitigated the problem as best you could, and things might end up bad but survivable", and its failure as "you have turned a serious problem into an unmitigated, immediate disaster"--THAT is what Fail Forward is. Both success and failure advance the fictional state; they just do so in either beneficial or detrimental ways.

Looping back to the "find the secret entrance" example, this means the Perception check isn't--and shouldn't be understood as--"is it possible for you to perceive this?" Because that question is not contributing to play, as success is merely rubber-stamping continued play, and failure is merely bureaucratic hold-up that might evolve into total derailment. Instead, it should be understood in the same way as the hypothetical "Pilot"/"Navigate" roll mentioned above: success vs failure is a measure, here, of your speed in perceiving. This idea, that a roll may sometimes be used purely to succeed on a discrete task, and other times to determine how much you can do or how fast you can do it etc., is perfectly cromulent with some existing D&D rolls, e.g. Acrobatics to determine how quickly you can move along a narrow ledge.

Fail Forward simply means that we make that apply a little bit more broadly. The point of picking a lock is not simply the determination that the lock is open (or not open, for failure). If that were so, most doors would just get broken if they were locked, since that's almost always easier than picking a lock! Instead, just like with the "Piloting the Titanic" example, we care about things a bit further beyond: the overall safety and integrity of the ship, not merely whether the path it takes is the one you wanted it to take. With the lock, generally, one cares about remaining undetected in some way: residents(/guards/servants/etc.) don't know you're there, no visible damage is present, no obvious signs exist to link back to you, etc. Hence, just as "failing this Pilot roll means the Titanic is badly damaged" has been seen as a valid fail-state despite NOT being the instantaneous result of doing the piloting, "failing this Lockpicking check means someone is coming to investigate" seems a reasonable direction to take affairs. In both cases, they immediately lead to a new conflict of some kind, so the state-of-play advances, just in a direction generally undesirable to the characters.

"Fail forward" or "no whiffing" is a technique developed in the indie design space, to respond to what was seen as a couple of problems with received approaches to action resolution:

*That failure leaves the fictional situation unchanged (at least in any meaningful way) and hence tends to cause a stall or frustration or a lack of interesting game play;​

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*That failure tends to be narrated as the character failing at the attempted task, which makes them look incompetent although (often, at least) they are supposed to be an expert.​

Narrating failure by reference to intent, and narrating external forces that bring about the character's lack of success, avoids both problems.

Consistently with what @thefutilist posted not far upthread, it did not take that long for "fail forward" to be adopted by RPGers using a more conventional, GM-driven approach. In this usage, it refers to the GM narrating failure in such a way as to keep things "on the rails". This is where the idea that a certain event has to occur for the game to keep going comes from (eg the PCs have to pass through a certain door, or have to discover a certain clue).

Of these @EzekielRaiden 's answer is the only one I would be able to parse as a sufficiently concrete description of a concept that a suggestion to try it out in D&D become meaningful to me. (Edit - @pemerton 's description of the indie understanding is also concrete enough, but the assumption of expertice is not in general present in D&D. Hence I thought it was the "adopted" sense that would be relevant for D&D context, which is not what I believe was suggested. So this doesn't help me really understand what would be the suggestion)

And I want to cap out this reply with this quote I thought might be relevant.

That's interesting. But not entirely surprising, I guess. There is a tendency for notions from indie RPGs to be picked up as slogans, without much interest in the context in which those notions were coined or the sort of work that they're meant to support.

"Fail forward" is similar in this respect.

This is what I understood to be @Campbell's point, upthread.

The notion that there's some generic thing "RPGng" which has "best practice" that's a type of agglomeration of everything anyone ever said, isn't right in my view.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In what way are the rules for Apocalypse World unclear?

Well for starters, the name of stuff don't always seem to line up with the descriptions, from what I'm hearing here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is like saying, if all I write is fantasy, then why would I read examples of non-fantasy fiction?

It seems obvious to me that examples from games that I'm not playing, and from approaches that I'm not using, can be helpful and interesting for me.

Unless those games are not of interest to you, and you said so. Specifically.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If you choose to run a specific style of game, and refuse to alter it "because it isn't that kind of game", you are being bound by a restrictive principle.

Not if you decide, instead of the rulebook.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I thought it was clear, from @TwoSix's post, that the runes were runes of demon summoning.

The PC discovered as much by trying to read them.

The prompt at the table for the GM to (i) decide on that bad news, and (ii) announce it to the player, was the failed roll.

This seems like a counterpart to my runes example upthread, where the player fails the roll rather than succeeds, and so the PC's discovery of what the runes say/do is bad news rather than good news.

It reminds me of this, from my own Burning Wheel play:

The rogue wizard, Jobe, had a relationship with his brother and rival. The ranger-assassin, Halika, had a relationship, also hostile with her mentor, and the player decided that was because it turned out she was being prepared by him to be sacrificed to a demon. It seemed to make sense that the two rival, evil mages should be one and the same, and each player wrote a belief around defeating him: in Jobe's case, preventing his transformation into a Balrog; in Halika's case, to gain revenge. . . .​

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I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless.​

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I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert. Jobe (who has, as another instinct, to always use Second Sight), used Aura Reading to study the feather for magical traits. The roll was a failure, and so he noticed that it was Resistant to Fire (potentially useful in confronting a Balrog) but also cursed. (Ancient History was involved somehow here too, maybe as a FoRK into Aura Reading (? I can't really remember), establishing something about an ancient battle between angels and demons in the desert.)​

I think this is a fairly straightforward technique.

Not in trad gaming, even if the suggestion was for 5e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Obviously the universe doesn't.

But some people go through life without losing their precious stuff, so it's not as if it would be unrealistic for that to happen in the case of the PC.

The issue is decision-making process, not whether or not the fiction is verisimilitudinous.

Some decision-making processes are, to my mind, more verisimilitudinous than others.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Every game is full of rules that bind how the GM acts. The game tells you how to run an encounter, how to give out treasure, how to set up challenges, all to show what is and what isn't fair. You're just used to it so it's become invisible to you.

No, I don't like the specific restrictions under discussion.