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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 9860253" data-attributes="member: 7808">I'm going to do something never done on ENWorld before and disagree with your premise.The narrative is fine.  In fact, some of the best narratives come from dead rolls that lead to no action.  The sword fight where Dread Pirate Roberts battled Inigo Montoya was a dozen failed attacks where no one could manage to score a hit.  Countless sports games, from American football to curling, can have fans gnawing their fingertips as the teams push back and forth with only inches of change, waiting to see to who budges first.  In Pulp Fiction, a mook missing a point blank attack is discussed deeply and considered a "miracle".The problem is the players.  Players get bored.  Players want to do things.  Players get more annoyed when others do things and they don't.Reframing this problem this way starts to show some of the problems with your solutions.  First, they don't all allow tension to build.  Allowing things like free adjustments and defensive boosts minimize the tension from a failed roll rather than ramp it up.  That's counterproductive.  Second, providing something too powerful on a failed roll, like a legendary effect, means that players would sometimes prefer to get a failure to a success, which undermines the entire purpose of rolling in the first place.  And finally, having the same benefit from a failure every time doesn't actually help with the boredom problem, it just kicks it down the road a little bit.I propose some alternate solutions.1. Speed up the game.  Missing a round a doing nothing is a killer in Risk, where a turn could take hours and players are super bored. But missing a round in Ticket to Ride, where turns just take seconds, matters a lot less.  All you have to do to make misses matter less in D&D is make sure your combats have lots of short rounds rather than just a couple tediously long ones.  Part of this is insisting players learn the rules.  Part of it is forcing them to act quickly instead of measuring every spell effect and movement 5 times to optimize everything.  Part of it may just be properly using a VTT or a tables to speed up math.  Part of it may be disallowing character options that grind combat to a halt (3e grapple based fighter, you're out of here).  But any way you need to do it, it's the job of both the DM and the players to make sure the game moves fast enough that no one gets bored.  And giving lots of complicated options on a fail, like allowing additional movement, works directly against speeding up the game.2.  Find ways to make sure players are involved when it's not their turn.  Make sure movements of enemies and other players will have an effect on all players.  Make sure all players are being actively engaged; don't just attack the meat shield in the front while the archers in the back get bored.  Maybe consider changing some bonus actions to reactions so more things get done between turns rather than just on a player's turn.  In any cases, damage dealt on a failed roll doesn't help the problem of a player losing interest during other players turns.2. If you must do something to grant a benefit on a miss, make it a tiny thing that builds up over time rather than an immediate boon.  For example, I recently played a game called Mystic Punks which features a system where each player gets a token on a failed spell.  That token can be cashed in at any time to give a +1 or -1 on any roll (I'm guessing this isn't unique to Punks, but I don't know where it originated).  Now, a change of 1 isn't a lot by itself.  You have to build up a decent number of failures before you have a cache that will make a notable difference.  The fact that it doesn't help right away maintains the narrative power of a failure.  But it still gives a little bit of positivity to a bad roll.  And it helps keep the players engaged by attracting them to rolls by others players or enemies where their meta-currency may be useful.</blockquote>

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