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

[EzekielRaiden]

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 couldn't eve get a straight forward answer on if fail without retry would be following "fail forward" in the context of D&D as suggested.

"Fail without retry" is orthogonal to "Fail Forward". The two can appear together, each separately, or both absent.

Loose pure-hypothetical back-of-the envelope examples.

FWR+FF: Rolling an Arcana check to determine the destination of a teleportation portal before it closes. Can't really try that again once it's closed, right? But if you fail, perhaps you get a name or a word or the like, something you don't know the provenance of, but it's distinctive enough that it could let you go do research to find out where it went.

FWR alone: Making an argument in a literal actual court case, where you are trying to prove someone's innocence or guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. You only get your one shot to make the argument; the whole point of a trial is that neither the prosecution nor the defense gets a simple "do-over" for presenting their arguments. Could be Insight (reading the jury), could be Investigation (can you reason through the clues in an effective way?), Performance (can you make your case compelling, possibly with modifiers from having good evidence or bad evidence?), whatever--you get one shot, not several.

FF alone: I really do think lock-picking and climbing were already good examples here, but for a new one, how about a Perception (or I guess Investigation) check to determine what on earth your enemies are doing by looking at their formations and how they're deploying their resources? It's not like you can't keep trying such a thing. Just because you haven't figured it out right now doesn't mean you couldn't try again. "Fail forward" in this context could be that because you dithered about rather than making a decision, your forces have gotten antsy and have suffered reduced morale, thus making the enemy's initial salvo more effective than it would've been otherwise. Now you need to fix your side's morale and/or discipline issues and you still don't know what the enemy is planning.

Neither: Anything you could've done Take 10 or (especially) Take 20 with in 3rd edition. Attempting to figure out the command word of a magic item, for example, doesn't really have any cost to failure. (This is why I personally just skip this in most cases, unless the party is under high time constraints.)

In brief, for Fail Forward, I think the only necessary condition is that a player's action has to have failed. A (perhaps the?) sufficient condition is that no results from "does the thing you want to happen, happen" die rolls result in the status quo remaining unaltered. When you act, it always produces some kind of reaction, and when you fail, that reaction is undesirable.

Fail Without Retry is, IMO, a technique that is rampantly over used, so I think it should be employed only judiciously, in places where it really, truly just isn't possible that a second attempt could produce something different. So I guess a sufficient condition is "this is something that genuinely can't be attempted more than once", like with the trial or portal examples above. A necessary condition is generally that some finite resource gets expended in the trying; time, for time-crunch/genuinely one-opportunity cases, some kind of consumed material in cases where you use up an object doing the thing, or "calling in a favor" etc. where it's an interpersonal relationship being "used up", etc. Note that I used "a" not "the" for both of these; there may be other sufficient and/or necessary conditions for this.

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.

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

I very much think "fail forward" is a useful technique that can be applied anywhere. It will be slightly more challenging to do so in D&D, because it wasn't initially designed with such ideas in mind, but more challenging doesn't mean impossible. It just means that you have to be really carefully thinking about what the system is doing when you might otherwise just unconsciously go through the motions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

House-ruling a board game (other than Monopoly, which is chronically house-ruled in unproductive ways) is pretty rare. Further, a board game is--perhaps--a few hours' entertainment or lack thereof. It's trivial to not play it again with that person.

If you're the GM of a D&D game, you're usually gonna be in it for the long haul. That's an enormous disanalogy, because having a sucky time with one board game is almost always a single night's problem--often much less, as you can just stop playing that game and immediately switch to playing some other game. Not so with a TTRPG; they're long-haul games in most cases. Or at least that's what I would expect for most of the games run by folks in this thread.


It was a declared value in something Micah had explicitly described as his "platonic ideal" of simulation:

This in response to @clearstream posting a link to Sam Sorensen's "New Simulationism" manifesto, which explicitly says as its final point:

10. Players come before the fictional world.​

In all senses, the people you play with are more important than the game. Your play community is the foundation of play. Nothing matters more.​

It's hard to understand how these stances square up with one another. We are now seeing that, no, there are things that matter more, like maintaining the purest feeling of verisimilitude. That's a pretty damn big change.

And no, I don't agree that I am setting a hierarchy of play. I am asking why, given what Micah has said about something that does define a hierarchy of play where "nothing matters more" than the people at the table, he is now saying that the hierarchy of play does not say that "nothing matters more" than the people at the table.

Further, I'll note that I specifically set out a case that would be perfectly cromulent: the player willingly electing to put the thing they're invested in into danger, risking that element. If they've knowingly done that, all bets are off. They have given their consent to its possible destruction. This is for things where they have not done that.


The problem is that this is happening after the game has started. The player has already been invested. It's already clear what things about the character make them happy, make them interested in playing. You're correct that the ideal is that everyone knows exactly what everyone else wants and expects in advance, and all of those things are completely in alignment, and none of them change along the way. I find that in the vast majority of cases, that ideal is not met, and thus different people have different ideas of what is or isn't reasonable in a given context, disagree about what the group can/should (try to) achieve, and what is or isn't "fair game". The closer something gets to being the foundation of a particular player's investment or connection, the more extreme a risk it is to just destroy that thing dispassionately.

I never said it was universal either, just what I want out of a game, whether as GM or player.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not if you decide, instead of the rulebook.

Wait, so now players signing up for something is an absolute must-assume, it has to be true, and a player that then reevaluates is being a problem, such that we can and should question why they would do that...

But a GM running a system is completely the opposite???

For goodness' sake, this is some real serious "rules for thee not for me" stuff. If agreeing to the principles and concepts of a game is something the players should do, then by God that should apply even more strongly to the GM, y'know, the person claiming authority over others!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I never said it was universal either, just what I want out of a game, whether as GM or player.

So you think that that manifesto is your platonic ideal of gaming...but you directly and specifically reject prioritizing the players first?

Bit of a swerve, there. Not sure I can make sense of it.

 

[Maxperson]

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

Why? Do your players not know their abilities? Mine don't generally ask. They do. And if what they are trying to do won't have a chance of working, then I say something.

 

[pemerton]

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

Is this based on your reading of the text, or on the opinions of others (eg @Maxperson) who haven't read the text.

Like, what is confusing about a direction to the GM to Make the players' characters' lives not boring, but in doing so, to Be a fan of the players' characters'. Even without more, I think it's fairly clear that this rules some stuff in but rules other stuff out: eg one way to make a character's life not boring is to create a fiction in which they are persecuted by the gods and all their hopes dashed, but that probably isn't consistent with being a fan of the character (unless the character is a very particular sort of character).

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

I don't get this. The techinque is straightforward. @TwoSix gave an illustration of its use. The fact that you don't want to use it doesn't make it complicated!

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

Well, if someone is resolute in their determination to pay no attention to any ideas or developments in RPGing except those found in D&D rulebooks (excluding 4e D&D), that of course is their prerogative. It would seem to be reasonably described as a "conservative" outlook. They might want to argue that their conservatism is not exhausting, but I'm not sure how they could argue that they're not conservative.

 

[pemerton]

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

To me, this is a pretty odd claim. Particularly given that I know some of the processes that you use: eg rolling some dice to see who wins a sword fight doesn't seem especially verisimilitudinous as a process.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Why? Do your players not know their abilities? Mine don't generally ask. They do. And if what they are trying to do won't have a chance of working, then I say something.

Sometimes they don't. Many times, they're (or I'm!) thinking as creatively as possible, and applying something outside of the explicit, narrow definitions that the ability allows. My Dark Sun sorcerer, for example, using Burning Spray to set an oily oasis-mimic on fire rather than getting trapped by it. Or a Paladin using a power that specifically describes how it produces light, to pierce through darkness. In 5e, using something like chromatic orb to create a patch of ice (as it does in Baldur's Gate 3).

Combat affords a nigh-infinitude of similar but not identical situations. I strongly encourage my players to treat those situations as an opportunity to ask things. In the vast majority of cases, the thing they want is perfectly acceptable. In a minority of cases, it's not quite right on its face, but a little tweaking fixes it nicely. I almost never need to just say "no", as in I can't think of an example where I've ever had to do that during combat. At worst, I ask the player to sell me on the idea, and they clearly struggle to do so--which is a pretty good indicator even to the player that "oh, maybe that idea wasn't as good as I thought it was."

 

[Maxperson]

Sometimes they don't. Many times, they're (or I'm!) thinking as creatively as possible, and applying something outside of the explicit, narrow definitions that the ability allows. My Dark Sun sorcerer, for example, using Burning Spray to set an oily oasis-mimic on fire rather than getting trapped by it. Or a Paladin using a power that specifically describes how it produces light, to pierce through darkness. In 5e, using something like chromatic orb to create a patch of ice (as it does in Baldur's Gate 3).

I understand those sorts of things. My players wouldn't ask, though. They would tell me that they are using Burning Spray to set fire to the oily mimic, and then I'd allow it, deny it, or ask for a roll. They generally wouldn't ask me questions about those sorts of things.

Combat affords a nigh-infinitude of similar but not identical situations. I strongly encourage my players to treat those situations as an opportunity to ask things. In the vast majority of cases, the thing they want is perfectly acceptable. In a minority of cases, it's not quite right on its face, but a little tweaking fixes it nicely. I almost never need to just say "no", as in I can't think of an example where I've ever had to do that during combat. At worst, I ask the player to sell me on the idea, and they clearly struggle to do so--which is a pretty good indicator even to the player that "oh, maybe that idea wasn't as good as I thought it was."

I've worked hard to stop my players from engaging in a Q&A session. I want declarations that I can make rulings on, not questions to answer. They tell me what their characters do and say. Then I respond to their actions.

 

[Maxperson]

Is this based on your reading of the text, or on the opinions of others (eg @Maxperson) who haven't read the text.

It was posted and I read it.