The Dumbing Down of RPGs

[Dausuul]

Oh absolutely. I don't think the terms are bad things at all. Indeed, the most important contribution of Forge to gaming has been the invention of all this technical language that lets us talk about these sorts of things. In the 'old school' days, we didn't really have the ability to have this conversation, and to the extent we could have, we would have gotten lost in non-clinical language that would have muddied the waters even more than Forge speak.

Muddled as this is as we argue over the nuances of failing forward, it's far clearer of a conversation than this would have been in 1985.

I'm not actually sure that's the case. It seems like this thread has spent several pages arguing over nothing but the definition of "fail forward." In 1985, someone might have had to spend a post articulating the concept and maybe a couple more refining the definition, but the discussion would have been about the concept rather than the phrase.

The Forge did us the service of showing that one could create technical language for such concepts, but it also did us the huge disservice of using very muddy and unstable definitions for its technical language... mostly so that Ron Edwards would never have to admit being wrong about anything. Jargon can be a useful tool, but jargon with no clear meaning is worse than useless. (It's one reason I avoid using the terms "narrativist," "simulationist," or "gamist.")

 

[Celebrim]

And in practice old school D&D is arbitrary and makes no sense. Right.

Applied outside of its original structure, often yes, yes they were. Taken as a whole, which they almost never were, they were sensible and logical. I never really appreciated that until I was in a situation comparable to the one Gygax was in. If you don't know what problems the tools were trying to solve, then you can't judge the effectiveness of the tools. You'll be using a hammer to try to remove a screw and wondering why in the world this tool doesn't work right. Which brings us back to fail forward.

As originally written wandering monsters did not carry loot. And the goal was to avoid combat because it was lethal and the XP rewards for combat were minor compared to the XP rewards for loot. 2e vastly changed the nature of the game by dropping XP for GP from the default. Fighting wandering monsters: All the risk, 20% of the XP reward, and doesn't get you deeper. Wandering monsters were a problem.

I didn't say wandering monsters weren't a problem. You are quibbling here to evade my central point, which is that wandering monsters were a problem because they caused tangible loss of resources - lost opportunity for loot, lost opportunity for XP, and most of all lost hit points placing you closer to actual failure (or forcing the consumption of other limited resources). But as far as quibbles go, this is even pretty ridiculous. The point is that they tangibly carried less loot (whether no loot or just on a reduced table of possibilities), and that loot was a concrete measurable reward. Games that heavily embrace fail forward as mechanic or rule of play rarely have things like measurable XP, measurable loot, and hit points or other tokens as a logistical sub game that causes a real loss when they run out. Instead, they tend to be on the abstract side and if they have tokens that run out, it generally brings only the color of hardship - the DM narrates something grim dark to you.

Apply also to your claims about Fail Forward. And no it isn't where repeated skills are explicitly allowed.

Oh I am applying it to claims about fail forward. I'm saying that using fail forward as a rule of play consistently leads to bad GMing. I don't have to make a straw man out of the concept. The concept itself makes a straw man out of GMing. It inherently 'dumbs down' the process of GMing because it implies that there is a one size fits all solution. If every dice throw brings 'fail foward' - a concept implicitly or even explicitly in the text of some games - then I don't have to do anything to the concept to make it ridiculous. It's self-mocking.

I do mean negative. You're just beating up on a strawman here.

No you don't. You are still operating under GM illusionism. If we were to provide actual examples of really negative, you'd argue that they weren't fail forward. And you'd be right! But despite that, you persist in claiming that the heart of 'fail foward' is that it is somehow more negative than fail. "That door is never going to open." is really fail, but it's not "fail forward". It's an inherently a worse consequence than any fail forward approach.

Changing situations getting more dangerous should be interesting.

Should? I don't know about should, but in practice situations getting more dangerous is not inherently interesting. Back to the pit, if we are going by the rule that 'failure should bring negative consequences', we could easily have the consequence be - "You fall down and break your leg." Now this is dangerous in a way that most fail forward games never consider. The players resources are presumably reduced in some way. It's entirely possible that the 'forward' on this game is now equivalent to the playing out of events of Jack London's 'To Build a Fire'. Now there is a guy who really understood failure isn't always forward! But in general, 'more dangerous' isn't the rule of fail forward, and I dare say the authors of game system that endorse it would declare (correctly) that "You fall into a pit and break your leg" isn't in and of itself "failing forward". But it is certainly "more dangerous" and "more negative".

Getting messed up by failure is in line with failing forward.

Not necessarily. Getting messed up isn't inherently forward. It's certainly in line with the failing part, and it happens all the time whether failing forward or not.

Where Fail Forward kicks in is where there would be rolls without consequences.

No, that's just one small subset of the technique where you are misapplying the focus of technique. And the real kicker is compared to Gygaxian D&D, all 'Fail Foward' rolls are without consequence. Gygaxian D&D is about "Save or die.", or sometimes "Die no save." It's about "Failure.", with an emphatic period. Trying to argue that somehow failing forward is less kid gloves, more harsh, and grim darker than "Failure." is to be utterly confused about what you are trying to do. If that's what you think, then you are the one that is "dead wrong". There is nothing harsher than failure without the forward part. There is no more failure than failure. Fail forward isn't about heightening the consequences of failure generally. It is as I said about making sure that failure is interesting. It's removing the emphatic period from the end of failure by making sure there is mitigating consequences. In Gygaxian style D&D - heck even in modern D&D - it's enough to mark failure by the fact that you lost some hit points. You have been tangibly punished for failure (or not, perhaps you have a ring of feather falling, in which case you are tanglibly rewarded for having the ring). Whether you are now at the bottom of a pit that is hard to climb out of our not isn't the really important point.

And for the record, Ron Edwards wasn't an 'everyone else is doing badwrongfun' snob.

I don't really intend to derail the thread by being fully honest about what I think of Ron Edwards. Suffice to say that I think Ron Edwards could probably hardly have a worse spokesperson for his own ideas than himself, and I'll leave it at that without going into the evidence I have for my thesis or really getting out the harsh.

If you want to see Fail Forward in action done well, go watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. In it Indy fails at just about everything he sets out to do just about every time he tries.

No, Indy succeeds at just about everything he does. Indy never gets less than a minor victory at any point. Even the one time in the story he loses his main goal - obtaining the golden idol - considering the circumstances and the overwhelming advantage that Bellock has, that he gets out alive is a minor victory. In military terms, it's a small tactical defeat and a major strategic victory. I'm not going to quibble about whether 'Raiders' is fail forward done well, but if we assume it is then it makes my point well. Failure forward is about coloring success with the illusion of hardship, but never any sort of hardship that would actually lead to failure. Indy's ultimate success is assured. Indiana has no hit points he's losing. There isn't a point where he'll just take too much of a beating and then have to concede. All that beating he took in the prior scene won't carry over into this scene and handicap him or reduce his options. If Indiana needs to jump on a submarine and ride it across the Mediterranean in order to 'fail forward' and prevent the bad guys from getting clean away, that's just what he does. What you see as failing spectacularly, I see as one victory after the other with each victory being colored in such a way that he's 'barely' succeeding - but succeeding nonetheless. And that is what failing forward really does. If you want a game where the protagonist always wins but the color of the victory is that it is just barely enough, failing forward regularly will do the job.

There is a reason I consider the 90s the nadir of good game design.

Ron Edwards?

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not actually sure that's the case. It seems like this thread has spent several pages arguing over nothing but the definition of "fail forward." In 1985, someone might have had to spend a post articulating the concept and maybe a couple more refining the definition, but the discussion would have been about the concept rather than the phrase.

'Skillful play'? 'Monte Haul'? 'Death Dungeon'? 'Munchkin'? 'Power gamer'? 'Realistic'? 'Rule zero'? This isn't a new feature of RPG discussion. I could bring up examples from the EnWorld boards, but I don't want to draw myself into more arguments than I'm already in.

The Forge did us the service of showing that one could create technical language for such concepts, but it also did us the huge disservice of using very muddy and unstable definitions for its technical language... mostly so that Ron Edwards would never have to admit being wrong about anything.

I'm not a fan of Ron Edwards either and yes he is a HUGE part of the problem.

But part of it isn't his fault. Part of it is that the short phrases and terms where stand ins and mere pointers to larger complex ideas. 'Fail Forward' makes perfect sense in the context of certain common RPG narrative problems. It only starts becoming nonsense if you think that it is a universal tool that needs to be applied to every single fortune check. When you do start thinking of it as that universal tool, what you have to do to continue justifying it is make it fuzzy and vague because otherwise it would be clear that it really didn't fit.

And that does go back to Ron Edwards and his ego. Personally, I'm fine with the terms 'gamist', 'simulationist', and 'narrativist'. The problem is not with terms but with the GNS framework. The GNS framework is just dead wrong in multiple fundamental assumptions. In defending it though, Ron Edwards has to make sure that the terms are vague enough to be non-falsifiable, which in turn undermines their utility.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I didn't say wandering monsters weren't a problem. You are quibbling here to evade my central point, which is that wandering monsters were a problem because they caused tangible loss of resources - lost opportunity for loot, lost opportunity for XP, and most of all lost hit points placing you closer to actual failure (or forcing the consumption of other limited resources). But as far as quibbles go, this is even pretty ridiculous.

That's because your point here is irrelevant. Not all wandering monsters are fought. Not all wandering monsters are lost opportunities for loot. You can negotiate with some, you can scare some, you can even trade information with some. But all wandering monsters are a complication. All wandering monsters, if not dealt with make the whole thing harder - even if all they do is run away screaming (and by doing so alert all the other monsters in the dungeon).

If we were to provide actual examples of really negative, you'd argue that they weren't fail forward. And you'd be right! But despite that, you persist in claiming that the heart of 'fail foward' is that it is somehow more negative than fail. "That door is never going to open." is really fail, but it's not "fail forward". It's an inherently a worse consequence than any fail forward approach.

It's also boring.

Should? I don't know about should, but in practice situations getting more dangerous is not inherently interesting. Back to the pit, if we are going by the rule that 'failure should bring negative consequences', we could easily have the consequence be - "You fall down and break your leg." Now this is dangerous in a way that most fail forward games never consider.

It's also dangerous in a way oD&D never considers and for exactly the same reason. oD&D has hit points - a third level PC can be pounded on by an orc with an axe for a full minute with the orc doing as well as they possibly can and not go down.

It's entirely possible that the 'forward' on this game is now equivalent to the playing out of events of Jack London's 'To Build a Fire'. Now there is a guy who really understood failure isn't always forward!

And such games exist within the Storygames family. Montsegur 1244, Dread, Grey Ranks.

No, that's just one small subset of the technique where you are misapplying the focus of technique. And the real kicker is compared to Gygaxian D&D, all 'Fail Foward' rolls are without consequence. Gygaxian D&D is about "Save or die.", or sometimes "Die no save." It's about "Failure.", with an emphatic period. Trying to argue that somehow failing forward is less kid gloves, more harsh, and grim darker than "Failure."

That's because Gygaxian D&D has precisely two conditions. Alive and dead. And if you are dead you can roll up another character in five minutes flat and be back into the game. Darkness isn't binary, it's having to live with the consequences.

In Gygaxian style D&D - heck even in modern D&D - it's enough to mark failure by the fact that you lost some hit points. You have been tangibly punished for failure (or not, perhaps you have a ring of feather falling, in which case you are tanglibly rewarded for having the ring). Whether you are now at the bottom of a pit that is hard to climb out of our not isn't the really important point.

In short under your metrics in Gygaxian D&D, if you have a ring of feather falling you have not been punished at all for the failure. With a retriable skill like picking locks you haven't been punished at all for failing to pick the lock. The really important point is aways "What do you do now?"

I don't really intend to derail the thread by being fully honest about what I think of Ron Edwards. Suffice to say that I think Ron Edwards could probably hardly have a worse spokesperson for his own ideas than himself

On this we agree.

No, Indy succeeds at just about everything he does. Indy never gets less than a minor victory at any point.

Indy fails at just about everything he sets out to do. He loses the ark, he loses Marian, and despite his spectacular efforts he fails to get them back. Indeed at the climax of the film he's captured, tied up, and the Nazis have the ark. And the only way he gets out of that one is by working out the near literal deus ex machina. His "minor victories" are just exactly the sort of minor victories that allow Fail Forward to work - just enough to keep him going rather than stop him cold.

If you accept Raiders of the Lost Ark as Fail Forward, as I think you do from your response, does this mean that you accept that you can add this to the list of genres that Fail Forward fits?

Ron Edwards?

The two dominant games of the 90s (2E and oWoD) having playstyles that they are utterly unfit for. And one of them blaming the players and writing screeds about "Rollplaying not roleplaying".

 

[innerdude]

There's a larger discussion to be had here, I think, surrounding player expectations of success / failure. At what level is it "acceptable" for a character to fail at a given task?

For example, the Trailblazer system goes out of its way to show that there's a pretty hardwired expectation of a 65% success rate in the D&D 3.x system. All of the basic task / skill / BAB bonuses are pretty evenly balanced to give a 65% chance of success for "level appropriate" challenges.

Savage Worlds backs this up---even the lowest-skilled character with a d4 in a trait has a 62.5% chance of success on a standard target number / difficulty check of 4, with the percentage only going up as the die size increases (d6, d8, etc.).

It's possible the principle of "fail forward" is orthogonal to this, but I'm not sure. I think there's two layers to that expectation; one, that as a PC we want our "heroes" to have heroic potential . . . . but also that a GM should ensure that there should situationally be very few times where any given failure presents a brick wall, or impasse that can only be divined by reading the GM's mind.

 

[Umbran]

For example, the Trailblazer system goes out of its way to show that there's a pretty hardwired expectation of a 65% success rate in the D&D 3.x system. All of the basic task / skill / BAB bonuses are pretty evenly balanced to give a 65% chance of success for "level appropriate" challenges.
...
It's possible the principle of "fail forward" is orthogonal to this, but I'm not sure.

They are mostly orthogonal. Failing forward isn't so much about individual die rolls as it is about situations. You might fail because you didn't manage one climb check, or your failure might be a protracted combat with 50 die rolls. Or it might be an investigative scene with 5 die rolls. Or, you might fail without any die rolls at all, simply having not understood the importance of a piece of information clearly given to you.

High success rates on die rolls, however, is more about how much incentive a player has to try to act. If you have an under 50% chance of success, then the player's best strategy is to *avoid rolling dice*. Since important task resolution generally involves the dice, this means avoiding important tasks. If you aren't failing forward, you quickly end up not getting anywhere, yes. But even if you do fail forward, the player is apt to rapidly become frustrated, and figure that staying back at the Inn would have been the better roleplay experience. But, then he'd probably have failed a social skill check at the Inn, gotten into a bar brawl, and gotten pummeled.

 

[Celebrim]

There's a larger discussion to be had here, I think, surrounding player expectations of success / failure. At what level is it "acceptable" for a character to fail at a given task?

I don't think that is the heart of the matter. D&D _usually_ is binary pass/fail in terms of proposition resolution. It either works or it doesn't and it doesn't pay much attention to the niceties and complexities of degree of success very much. In some cases, this has really bugged people. For example, how much damage you do doesn't really relate to how well you hit something. D&D doesn't consider hitting something and doing damage to be really separate simulations at all. The first 'to hit' roll is binary, and then it discovers how well you hit.

But for now, let's imagine a generic system that tried to resolve degree of success in all cases. In such a system, the '65% success rate' you mention doesn't necessarily mean much, because often we care about the degree of success before we know whether you succeeded in a meaningful way. You might succeed in hitting the target, but the degree of success wasn't enough to overcome the targets armor.

Usually such systems have a range of results for any action you take.

1) Critical Failure - You tried to do something and made the situation spectacularly worse - shot yourself in your own leg, for example
2) Failure - You plain failed to accomplish what you were trying to do. You shot and missed.
3) Failure with mitigating factors - You failed to accomplish what you wanted, but it wasn't all bad. Your target lost his balance when dodging your arrow and now he'll be easier to hit on the next shot or otherwise hampered.
4) Success with complications - You succeeded, but not in the way you intended or not without problems. - You shot your target but also hit your friend, or lost your balance and now are hampered, or you hit your target but he yelled out and summoned reinforcements, or whatever.
5) Minimal Success - You grazed your target doing real but minimal damage.
6) Greater and greater degrees of success - Usually such systems have several different ranks of success. For example damage might be computed by multiplying base damage by the degree of success (x1, x2, x3, x4, etc.)
7) Critical Success - You got lucky and hit the 'I win' button. Your target is dead or dying.

Now obviously, game play will vary greatly depending on the particular percentage chance of not only that you succeed (whatever that means) but of each particular category. Often games of this sort in my experience end up revolving around 'Who gets lucky and rolls critical success first?' because they make the odds of critical success too high, especially at higher levels (where it also often turns out that foes have such spectacular defenses that really only critical successes can work anyway).

Consider games with 'Fail Forward' highly privileged as being particular cases of the above. Typically they have the appearance of binary pass/fail mechanically, but they have a strong exhortation or guideline to privilege #3 and #4 as results in the 'fail' case. As a result, they tend to play out something like this:

1) Critical Failure - 0%
2) Failure - 0%
3) Failure with mitigating factors - 25%
4) Success with complications - 10%
5) Minimal Success - 0%.
6) Success - 65%
7) Critical Success - 0%

Of course, a lot of this isn't actually hard wired necessarily but left up to GM interpretation so depending on the GM you could all sorts of actual results in play. Note that typically #3 and #4 in other systems are rare results just because they burden the GM somewhat harshly in my opinion.

I should also note that I'm somewhat simplifying this. Umbran is correct in that generally 'fail forward' is not applied on the level of individual rolls of the dice, but on the level of scenes (a combat, a negotiation, etc.). You generally wouldn't see fail forward applied to every sword swing in a combat, although the thought of what doing so would be like does somewhat illustrate some of the reasons I'm not a fan of the concept applied generally even at the level of scenes.

Basically, the point of the technique is to caution the DM against thinking that 'nothing happens' is the correct way to narrate failure and to keep the game from getting stuck in an uninteresting place. There is a lot of high minded philosophizing around the idea that failure shouldn't suck but should be fun that I think is a bit too utopian though.

 

[innerdude]

Usually such systems have a range of results for any action you take.

1) Critical Failure - You tried to do something and made the situation spectacularly worse - shot yourself in your own leg, for example
2) Failure - You plain failed to accomplish what you were trying to do. You shot and missed.
3) Failure with mitigating factors - You failed to accomplish what you wanted, but it wasn't all bad. Your target lost his balance when dodging your arrow and now he'll be easier to hit on the next shot or otherwise hampered.
4) Success with complications - You succeeded, but not in the way you intended or not without problems. - You shot your target but also hit your friend, or lost your balance and now are hampered, or you hit your target but he yelled out and summoned reinforcements, or whatever.
5) Minimal Success - You grazed your target doing real but minimal damage.
6) Greater and greater degrees of success - Usually such systems have several different ranks of success. For example damage might be computed by multiplying base damage by the degree of success (x1, x2, x3, x4, etc.)
7) Critical Success - You got lucky and hit the 'I win' button. Your target is dead or dying.

Now obviously, game play will vary greatly depending on the particular percentage chance of not only that you succeed (whatever that means) but of each particular category. Often games of this sort in my experience end up revolving around 'Who gets lucky and rolls critical success first?' because they make the odds of critical success too high, especially at higher levels (where it also often turns out that foes have such spectacular defenses that really only critical successes can work anyway).

Consider games with 'Fail Forward' highly privileged as being particular cases of the above. Typically they have the appearance of binary pass/fail mechanically, but they have a strong exhortation or guideline to privilege #3 and #4 as results in the 'fail' case. As a result, they tend to play out something like this:

1) Critical Failure - 0%
2) Failure - 0%
3) Failure with mitigating factors - 25%
4) Success with complications - 10%
5) Minimal Success - 0%.
6) Success - 65%
7) Critical Success - 0%

Of course, a lot of this isn't actually hard wired necessarily but left up to GM interpretation so depending on the GM you could all sorts of actual results in play. Note that typically #3 and #4 in other systems are rare results just because they burden the GM somewhat harshly in my opinion.

I should also note that I'm somewhat simplifying this. Umbran is correct in that generally 'fail forward' is not applied on the level of individual rolls of the dice, but on the level of scenes (a combat, a negotiation, etc.). You generally wouldn't see fail forward applied to every sword swing in a combat, although the thought of what doing so would be like does somewhat illustrate some of the reasons I'm not a fan of the concept applied generally even at the level of scenes.

Basically, the point of the technique is to caution the DM against thinking that 'nothing happens' is the correct way to narrate failure and to keep the game from getting stuck in an uninteresting place. There is a lot of high minded philosophizing around the idea that failure shouldn't suck but should be fun that I think is a bit too utopian though.

This is some interesting stuff. Your breakdown really resonates with me, as well as the consideration of whether failure should be applied at the scene / encounter level, or at the individual activity level.

I fully understand where the concept of "fail forward" comes from, because I think in the past, with a "gamist" style of Gygaxian play, the whole "getting stuck" in one spot was largely viewed as a failure of the player to be as creative as possible.

"You're not getting this because you just haven't thought enough about how to solve Problem X." Of course in the hands of poor GMs, this leads to the "We've tried everything, there's nothing to do and nowhere to go" syndrome that ultimately doesn't serve anyone in the goal of having fun at the table.

I need to think this over a bit more when I have more time, but this is interesting.

 

[Celebrim]

I fully understand where the concept of "fail forward" comes from, because I think in the past, with a "gamist" style of Gygaxian play, the whole "getting stuck" in one spot was a failure of the player to be as creative as possible.

Just as a caution here, while I agree that Gygaxian play is undoubtedly 'gamist', I think it is also undoubtedly 'simulationist' as well. Don't pigeonhole his thoughts into a single narrow convenient box. In FORGE speak, that the system had two goals makes it the equivalent of 'badwrongfun' since according to the theory no system is able to fulfill both goals at once well. Such a system and its designers are supposedly be confused, discordant, conflicted, or whatever PC term they are calling it now. However, I argue that the theory is wrong. No system that isn't able to fulfill multiple aesthetics of play can claim to be truly deep and satisfying in the long run.

So when you look at Gygaxian play, you could get 'stuck' because being stuck fulfilled multiple aesthetic goals of play. Failing sucked for sure, but the only thing that would have sucked worse would have been not allowing failure because it undermined everyone's presumed goal of feeling like real participants and even heroes in a real fantasy world. It was a challenge to step on up to for sure, but it was also a logical result within the simulation of the living world as a whole. The DM had in Gygax's mind no responsibility for seeing any individual challenge could be overcome. In Gygax's mind, the party 'fails forward' simply by taking a different corridor. The party, or (and this is key) a different party with perhaps different players could perhaps find a way to open that 'unopenable' door. And incidentally, that is a narrativist goal as well, because it meant that that party would now have a unique story which could be shared with the other players perhaps after classes the next day. So you can see that Gygax here even had an aesthetic of play the GNS theory doesn't encompass - play as a way to create a sense of shared community. And incidentally, that may not be GNS but it is for many players a primary goal of play. The challenge, drama, and sense of being in an alternative world can be for a player entirely secondary to that.

To understand Gygax fully, I think you have to play the way he was playing. I certainly didn't appreciate that until I was running a game in a similar fashion.

 

[Janx]

"You're not getting this because you just haven't thought enough about how to solve Problem X." Of course in the hands of poor GMs, this leads to the "We've tried everything, there's nothing to do and nowhere to go" syndrome that ultimately doesn't serve anyone in the goal of having fun at the table.

I think this kind of situation is where Fail Forward and "Don't say 'no', say "yes, and..." come in.

While there are great DMs that can design good encounters/puzzles, and run them, there are others who suck at it. And they sucked in such a way that concepts like that evolved to encapsulate how to avoid them.


By itself, it is not bad advice to make sure the Unopenable Door is openable/bypassable somehow. Either by specific method or GM flexibility to accept a good feasible solution from the players

It is not bad to have a room that is really hard to get into, unless that room is required to complete the adventure AND the solution is so obtuse that you'd have to be the GM in order to solve it.

That's a the kind of rail-roady crap that starts the ball rolling toward GMing ideas like Fail Forward and such, that taken to the other extreme, look like a Dumbing Down of the game.