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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enrahim" data-source="post: 9691835" data-attributes="member: 7025577">I answered more precisely in a different post. But for your extensive example here the analysis might be very simple, but I think can show a profound difference in language and mentality: Is the cook coming out a failure or a fail forward? Things that is completely natural to describe as a failure result is in my understanding simply describing a failure. In the scenario you describe a cook coming out seem to me like a perfectly natural description of failing to pick the lock quickly.Employing fail forward as a technique implies more than just "describe any natural failure state". It instructs you to have a certain mindset regarding how you describe failures. You can't look at a game where a failure be described in a way that happened to drive the story forward, and claim that this is "fail forward" in action. At least not in my understanding of the term. It requires the GM to deliberately try to come up with something interesting, despite "nothing happens" might be the otherwise most natural outcome.So in your example, did you introduce the cook because you genuinely thought it was the most natural thing to happen, or did the fact that it is dramatic factor in? This is of course hard to recognise in oneself in the heat of it, and this is a reason to warn against using it mindlessly. Once this has become an automatic part of your GM-ing strategy it can become really hard to avoid the biases it can create.EDIT: The above is also secondary to the principle of independent narrative content detailed in my other post, but I think this perspective suplement it nicely in terms of mindset - and might be more obvious in how to apply practically.</blockquote>

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