NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9701587" data-attributes="member: 6790260">"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.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.</blockquote>

Verification