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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6358375" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think you two are actually saying anything different.   If there is always a path out of failure, then its not much like the experience of actual failure.  And it's even less like failure if the player knows that whenever he fails, a path out of the state of failure is supposed to appear shortly.  In practice, if you turn it into a rule, fail forward becomes, "All failures actually have silver linings and mitigating consequences, so in that way they are a lot like winning."  Fail forward grants every protagonist the superpower of every protagonist of pulp novels and action movies, and while that isn't 'bad', the problem with that is that the protagonist generally isn't genera aware in the story by the player certainly is.  So instead of simulating the experience of being the protagonist, you are simulating the experience of being the protagonist's author.If I wanted to simulate being a protagonist's author, I'd just write the dang story.Now, as a general practice, it's a good idea for the DM to plan for failure - that's the idea behind things like the three clue rule.  If your game can't sustain a player or party failure, then failure is the expected result and you are running a tournament game in a setting were typically most of the players have less competitive goals.   If you are trying to tell a narrative and it depends on one particular NPC not dying, or dying, or anything else - then your narrative technique is too inflexible.But when you turn DM's pathing out of failure states into a rule of play, it gets silly.   Players that fall into pits don't need deus ex machina to come along and save them - even if you dress it up as slavers that come along and capture them.  That's just putting a coat of black paint on salvation and pretending its a bad thing.  Players need to learn not to go into places where you can fall down and get stuck by themselves and to have their own back up plans for failure instead of relying on the DM to have one for them (Tie a rope to the thief!  Hopefully, we can at least retrieve his body when he fails his find traps roll!).   And once you reach the point that players who fall into pits expect deus ex machina to come along and save 'the story' (and with it, them), then you are running a game that is appealing to about as broad of spectrum of aesthetic goals as that PC grinder style tournament play.  Plus, you've hedged off into 'one wayism', where the game is meant for one type of play, and one type of player, and you just aren't doing it right if you don't 'follow the rules'.</blockquote>

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