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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7483076" data-attributes="member: 4937">I am beginning to think inventing language is as bad of an idea as using a metaphor to explain yourself.   One of the many problems with inventing a term as short hand for some larger and often complex idea is that when people who haven't read the original essay begin using the term, they come up with their own definition for it as is suggested by your term and then beginning using the term to mean that instead.  The result is often more confusion rather than less confusion.   Another problem is that often the term you come up with clouds the issue simply because it is badly named leading to all sorts of back-flips and twists to get around what the words suggest as opposed to what they were intended to label.  I could here insert a lot of hot button examples from popular culture, but I think we are going to have enough heat as it is with 'Fail-Foward'.'Fail-Forward' was an idea that was originally addressing plot railroads, and in particular gates in the railroads where the plot passed through a very narrow aperture and some sort of success was required to get through the gate and no provision existed for what to do should a string of bad rolls lead to failure at that gate.   In other words, the problem here we are trying to solve is: "On failure, the story is over."The original essayist was basically asserting, quite correctly, that having a story have the possibility of stopping at some anti-climatic point just because the party missed one clue, or failed one open locks check, or couldn't solve the riddle might work OK for some sort of competitive one shot, but wasn't really how you should design a long running campaign.  There are a ton of ways you can address this problem at a design level or at a procedures of play level or at a mechanical level.  People have wrote essays about the "Three clue rule", and we could maybe have something like a "Three door rule.", where you designed problems where if one plan of attack failed, there was always at least one other way to go forward.  Where I think the whole otherwise fine idea derailed is with one-true-wayism, where systems not only called out the problem to the perspective GM, but told them that there was one way to approach the problem and that in particular this game was so superior to all those Old Has Been Games that didn't approach the problem this way.   Mechanics that tried to mechanically enforce that way as if GMs couldn't be trusted to run a good game unless the rules forced them to only added to the problem.  Add to that the problem that some players have taken the idea and run with it as a validation for a game where no real problems can occur as if the best way to have fun was always to receive immediate instant gratification.  Hmmm... does that sound like something that intersects the goals of a typical Min/Max player?That's not a desirable ending to a game, but preventing that result mechanically may cause more harm than good.  A better approach might be to suggest to GMs not to place a trap that might lead to a campaign ending TPK in a non-climatic scene of a story.   But beyond that, I don't even consider 'Trap goes off, everyone dies' really the problem Fail-Forward was trying to solve.  Better examples in my opinion are, "NPC dies, so story dies too.", or "Can't open this door, no story for you.", or "Nothing happens until the party finds the clue in the false bottom of the jewelry case in the writing desk of the boudoir.", or even "If the party goes left rather than right, they find nothing interesting."Rather than what has become known as "Fail Forward", I prefer to solve the same problem with "Story in All Directions".  You can still fail your way out of success, but unless you actively try to avoid story, you'll find it.</blockquote>

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