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

[Faolyn]

Right, I don't really think that's a bad thing, so much as the earseeker was a stupid escalation that led to weird results. Fundamentally, I want players to come up with procedures to resolve problems as safely as possible. My ideal state as a GM is reluctantly acknowledging the player has successfully hedged all their bets and my villain does die in a rockslide and can't do anything about it.

Right, I'm not confused about how the GM would apply these techniques, I'm talking about the resulting game loop. Fail forward mostly seems to serve to undermine the gameplay value of player decision making, by cutting off both the value of good and bad decisions. Keeping the game moving is, for me, a lower priority than letting players make impactful decisions that lead to them getting the outcome they want or not, and my point is that the two things are in tension.

In a typical fail-forward/narrative game, the GM isn't reluctantly acknowledging anything. If the PC hedges their bets and decides to find another way, great! The game will continue from there instead of from here.

But no, it doesn't undermine player decision making or cut any of them off. And keeping the game moving doesn't mean that the players automatically go from A to B to C to D to E. It means that if the players are stopped at B, they won't have to turn around and go home in order to hire someone who can do the job for them, or spend two and a half sessions getting through there. It means that something will happen--both things @Lanefan has said has happened in his games.

...I don't know where the rockslide came from, though.

 

[AlViking]

One more note on fail forward - some people do define or use it differently than an immediate cost because we can't have common definitions. That would be just too easy!

An example I found from https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/408-failing-forward-losing-without-ending-the-campaign would be okay for me. The character is trying to smash down a crumbling brick wall and fails so they knock down the wall but take damage and are temporarily restrained. That makes sense to me, the bricks falling are a directly tied to breaking down the wall. Personally I'd call that a partial success and it's dependent on how much they missed the target number by. Miss it by less than 5 and you succeed at what you were attempting but it doesn't work quite like you hoped. In this scenario breaking down a wall, in a climbing example it might be taking some damage and more time because you fell part way.

On the other hand I'm not sure I'd even categorize their other example as fail forward - they fail to stop a thief. They manage to track down the thief only to find them dead and now have another trail to follow. To me that's just ensuring that a single incident doesn't end the campaign, the fact that the rogue they tracked down was dead isn't even particularly relevant. Not stopping the theft was a fail, they just had other options to get the McGuffin by tracking down the thief.

My primary thought on this though is that I do my best to avoid having only one way forward. The other ways may not be what you were hoping for but it doesn't end the campaign. Of course since I run a sandbox the thief getting away with the McGuffin is not the end anyway. You still have a chance to track down the thief or worst case the thief gets away Scott-free, the party's reputation takes a bit of a hit and they don't get paid. They move on to something else and perhaps have another shot at stopping the thief.

But what doesn't happen in my games is a consequence of failure being completely separate from the declared action.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And you are still wrong. Searching in real time and setting the fiction in stone is FAR different from reconning things later to add in having searched for herbs, or bought herbs, or had a fairy drop off herbs, or saw herbs on the head of a passing cow, or... in the past.

Sorry, I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. First of all players are always free to interject, "hey we want to gather some herbs along the way." Or maybe flashback or retcon in a minor way, what's the big deal? Also things like PbtA, or I'm sure BW, but even trad games potentially, can accommodate some goal-resolving play along the lines of "success, anticipating this need, I employ the herbs I've gathered" (IE being a wise healer, what better supports this RP?). Again I definitely want to hear how this can be argued against!

 

[Lanefan]

While this isn't a bad thing, I can't really say it's that much of a good thing? Like if there are rules and the players have no idea what they are and far too little data to figure them out, I'm not really sure how that's that much different from not having rules at all. The players won't be able to meaningfully respond beyond blind scrambling either way. I guess it contributes to a sense of "okay, so there were rules", which can build trust, but that could just as easily be a post hoc invention to make something without rules seem like it had them.

When the table I'm using is written out on paper, "not having rules at all" no longer applies.

And this isn't some "EVERY GM IS ALWAYS LYING!!!" thing either. Just that there are GMs out there who do in fact do that and recommend that others do it too. Like Matt Colville with his faked rolls (literally pre-rolling dice so he can "show" the player that it's "real"), which he explicitly admitted to in a YouTube video. When there is an active element of the community that poisons the value of after-the-fact messaging, the already rather reduced value of "when it no longer matters" demonstration is weakened even further.

I've never watched Matt Colville run a game and I don't intend to; what he does is up to him and has no bearing on what I do.

A reveal when there's still a meaningful chance for it to matter to the game, however, that definitely matters. (Note "meaningful"; I don't count "there's a 0.001% chance this might come up again!") Because that means you as GM have skin in the game now. The parameters are known and thus the players can, at least in principle, detect things that go outside those parameters. The GM can't just play silly buggers and then ad hoc justify it afterward by inventing whatever they like, since (as you have made clear) your rules are binding on yourself, you don't violate them once they're made.

Again, I'm not saying this to disparage what you did. It's good to let the players know about stuff. It's just not that much of a gesture to only do this sort of thing when it no longer matters whether or not you do...because it no longer matters. It's a much more meaningful gesture to do it when it still does matter, even if it doesn't necessarily matter as much, or even if it isn't guaranteed to come up again later.

So let me get this straight: by your take here, when the PCs see an open area below them* with a gem emitting intermittent flashing lights of different colours, I'm supposed to tell the players what those lights do and the mechanics behind how they work before the PCs interact with them?

Where's the mystery in that?

* - scene: the PCs are in a room above, with an 8-foot-wide 10-foot long shaft in the floor leading straight down to a large open 30-foot-high room below (thus the floor of the lower area is 40 feet below the floor the PCs are standing on). The flashing gem floats five feet above the lower floor, directly below the centre of the shaft to the room above. The flashes only affect the lower room, it's safe to watch from the top of the shaft or even in the shaft.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed. I never said single point of failure equals death, nor that I'm not open to different methods of adjudicating the scenario. I simply stated that death by falling when climbing to a potentially fatal height is on the table.

The problem, as I've noted, is unless you're making rolls using D1000's and the like, except in situations where the failure chance has increased dramatically, in practice it can't be; the normal mechanical tools you have would overrepresent its likelihood, probably vastly.

 

[AlViking]

When the table I'm using is written out on paper, "not having rules at all" no longer applies.

I've never watched Matt Colville run a game and I don't intend to; what he does is up to him and has no bearing on what I do.

So let me get this straight: by your take here, when the PCs see an open area below them* with a gem emitting intermittent flashing lights of different colours, I'm supposed to tell the players what those lights do and the mechanics behind how they work before the PCs interact with them?

Where's the mystery in that?

* - scene: the PCs are in a room above, with an 8-foot-wide 10-foot long shaft in the floor leading straight down to a large open 30-foot-high room below (thus the floor of the lower area is 40 feet below the floor the PCs are standing on). The flashing gem floats five feet above the lower floor, directly below the centre of the shaft to the room above. The flashes only affect the lower room, it's safe to watch from the top of the shaft or even in the shaft.

Multiple people have stated that if the players do not have full knowledge of the situation they can't possibly make an informed decision and it's bad GMing. I disagree, I want mystery and discovery when I play. Even when it comes back to bite me on the posterior.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. And not here, where everyone understands other modes of play and has assumedly already decided their preferences, but for a larger game audience, the question is "Do you love pretending to exist in a fictional world? Or do you just love making things up and telling a story? Or do you just like rolling dice and the camaraderie?"

Or, of course, some liminal space amidst the three. One of the reasons you only see me take on subsubjects in these sort of discussions is that I have a leg in more than one space here, and have for many years now.

 

[Lanefan]

The problem with this answer is that the limits are actually known, and the only random component is whether the actions will reach the win condition before they reach the loss condition. You know what your HP are, and even folks like Lanefan or Maxperson who very specifically don't tell their players HP do still give descriptions which are meant to be understood as corresponding, at least to proportions of HP. They know that both victory and loss are so close, a single roll could make the difference.

With limits that are completely invisible to the player, you don't have one axis of randomness, you have two, and the player can only know or address one. It would be like having the fight you describe, except that whether or not Jo succeeds at defeating that last heavily wounded opponent, they might still die anyway because they spent one to many rounds in a poisonous cave and now they've taken in too much.

Sounds like a perfectly good Ahab and the White Whale moment to me.

 

[Enrahim]

The problem, as I've noted, is unless you're making rolls using D1000's and the like, except in situations where the failure chance has increased dramatically, in practice it can't be; the normal mechanical tools you have would overrepresent its likelihood, probably vastly.

Just want to point out that D1000 isnt as silly as it might sound. Double 1 on a d20 is just above 2 in 1000. This is exactly the kind of situation where the typical group happily declare that the dice have clearly spoken a death sentence for that climbing character.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Just want to point out that D1000 isnt as silly as it might sound. Double 1 on a d20 is just above 2 in 1000. This is exactly the kind of situation where the typical group happily declare that the dice have clearly spoken a death sentence for that climbing character.

Uhm, a D20 is emulating a 50th of a D1000, and the D1000 would only be allowing you to trigger a secondary roll if you wanted to represent the actual failure-by-trauma average for climbers. If you're willing to accept that much higher a chance, then I have to stop taking seriously your claim that you care about representation; you just care about a particularly bloody form of drama being on the table.