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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8253481" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think this is as "new age" as you're saying, and I think stuff like "never truly fail" is, to be charitable, a pretty big misunderstanding on your part. Not gating the critical path on skill checks or the like isn't "not allowing failure", it's basic and sensible design for more linear adventures (which not everyone runs).It's actually mostly applicable to games which are of a slightly older vintage than the most modern ones - i.e. later 2E and 3.XE stuff involving following complex and heavily-wrought "Adventure Paths", which can feel extremely rich and rewarding in ways sandboxes or quasi-sandboxes sometimes aren't.The most-modern games (and I'm talking over a decade old stuff now) actually don't really take that approach. Many of them are in fact failure-heavy, and use the failures to advance the plot and develop the characters and so on. Apocalypse World, for example, does a lot more with failures than D&D, and tends to give them more weight too.Of course there's the underlying issue that D&D, fundamentally, isn't, in any edition, a system that handles mysteries or the like with much elegance (whereas some other RPGs, like Gumshoe, absolutely do, because they were designed to).</blockquote>