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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6358677" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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.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.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".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.   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.  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.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.Ron Edwards?</blockquote>

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