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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6284800" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Hey Nagol.  Good post and I typically always feel that I understand your position and your playstyle concerns after I read them.  I do understand why certain styles of conflict resolution would be adversarial to your preferred playstyle.I'm just going to try to answer the above right quick.1)  There shouldn't be a Pyrrhic victory with respect to the stakes outlined in the burgeoning moments of the conflict; "what, specifically, the PCs are trying to achieve."  If the conflict is set to resolve the question of "do I navigate the swamp and get to the hut of the medicine man (?)", then the success condition automatically affords the PCs the attainment of that goal.  The same can be said for a PC trying to "kick a bad habit" or PCs trying to "convince the king to change policy."  The PCs are playing their PCs, pushing toward the attainment of that overarching goal while GM is playing the totality of adversarial components that would interpose themselves between the PCs and the successful attainment of those goals (respectively, the swamp's denizens/hazards, the bad habits "will to remain", and the king's (and perhaps court or other relevant actors/circumstances) commitment to maintain the present path of policy.2)  Micro-failures in a challenge, while (by rule and GM principle) being unable to answer the question to be answered by the overarching conflict, do have relevance and their own fallout.  One immediate, and obvious brand of relevance and fallout, is the ablation of PC staying power/resources;  Healing Surges and/or others.  This will serve to (i) make the work day more difficult and (ii) potentially make the scene more difficult.  For instance, let us say that we're in the swamp to find the medicine man because we've contracted some kind of disease that he can heal.  The result of a micro-failure could be (a) the loss of a Healing Surge and (b) an immediately required Endurance check at the Medium DC, the result of which can only result in moving down a stage or remaining stable.  Moving down a stage may be debilitating.Other relevance and fallout will be on the reframing of the conflict's trajectory to pay heed to the evolution of fiction that will arise from the failure.  This will have immediate consequences and could have post-conflict relevance and fallout.  The immediate consequences could be that the decision-points that arise from the fiction evolved from the failure put the PCs in a spot.  This "spot" could be mechanically.  Perhaps the next check is at the High DC and out of the 3, or so, likely candidates for genre-coherent resource deployment, only one Skill is trained and without a supporting modifier; so perhaps only a 40 % chance of success.  There is an option within the PCs' collective portfolio of abilities which would afford them the opportunity to spend a Daily or invoke a Ritual for an automatic success (and perhaps another benefit such as a rolling + 2), but do they want to commit those resources?   Post-conflict relevance could be something such as one of the King's captain of the guard dieing while fending off an assassination attempt (because the PC's intervention failed).  The conflict was a "success" sure, the policy has now been changed.  But this fallout could make the king vulnerable off-screen and subject to further assassination attempts (and perhaps death while the PCs are on campaign).  Or perhaps this was his best friend and now he is horribly beset by grief and anguish, crippling his ability to properly act as king (providing opportunity for member's of his court to strategically move against his interests).  On an oceanic journey, a ship's hull can be breached by one failed effort and if the subsequent effort to save the crew is also a failure, perhaps key members of the crew dies.  Perhaps something important in the cargo hold is lost.  If the point of the conflict was to "get to the lost island of Bobville" then sure, you've made it if you've achieved the parameters for success.  But there will be relevant, post-conflict fallout (that may play out on-screen or off-screen).  These sorts of things will frame future conflicts to resolve and possibly provide future antagonists for the PCs to deal with.  This feedback loop is by design.Yup.  I can certainly understand that the design impetus and GMing principles of certain conflict resolution schemes are anathema to your playstyle objectives.  I've GMed this sort of play, a plenty, in the past, still do on occasion and what you say makes sense.  However, it is also true that the design impetus, GMing principles and system components of certain (many) conflict resolution schemes, coupled with deft and informed GMing, provide the precise (meaning not by blundering accident) means to pursue the sort of game that others might enjoy.</blockquote>

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