Quote from: Spinachcat;1054875AW stole its idea from Better Games (Crimson Cutlass, Battle Born) who owned the Space Gamer magazine in the 90s. They had very traditional RPGs, but you had Fail / Mixed Success / Success and Mixed Success was stuff like "you jumped across the chasm, but your scabbard broke lose and your sword fell into the lava below".  That's not "failing forward", that's "mixed results" and many DMs were doing that back in the day in D&D when you just made the roll or missed it by one.

EDIT: "Fail Foward" has become this Deux Ex Machina that gets the game back on the rails so the players can choo choo along to the next encounter. That's a different beast than mixed results.

Yes and No.
Fail Forward (God I wish they hadn't borrowed that phrase from business-babble) means no character failure is "dramatically unsatisfying" for the unimaginative or for suckass GMs who design only one way to know or do something Key to progressing forward.

You Fail Forward by instead of Failing, Succeeding with a Cost/Complication, ie. a mixed result.  You get to the same place, but different paths.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1054875AW stole its idea from Better Games (Crimson Cutlass, Battle Born) who owned the Space Gamer magazine in the 90s. They had very traditional RPGs, but you had Fail / Mixed Success / Success and Mixed Success was stuff like "you jumped across the chasm, but your scabbard broke lose and your sword fell into the lava below".  That's not "failing forward", that's "mixed results" and many DMs were doing that back in the day in D&D when you just made the roll or missed it by one.

EDIT: "Fail Foward" has become this Deux Ex Machina that gets the game back on the rails so the players can choo choo along to the next encounter. That's a different beast than mixed results.

Well yes.  That was my point.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054393I can see where you're coming from there. I certainly agree that giving players who make bad choices no tangible consequences doesn't seem too fun, nor does scripting a narrative to be followed regardless of dice outcomes and/or player choices. The only times I'm OK with a scripted part is to tie things together logically, be it a prologue or denouement of sorts.

I've handled the "wilderness trek" both ways: a series of rolls going where they go as well as just rolling and hitting them with a little smack if failed. Both aren't bad, but my preference is now mostly, "You land near your destination and after a short but chilling walk through the freezing winds and snow, you arrive at the main entrance to the installation. What do you do?". We all want them to be at the installation, so why not just start there? Heck, I might even describe the door locked and no other (apparent) way in, so as not to waste time with, "Is the door locked?" and/or "Is there another way in?". After that, we just see where it goes.

What I do do is force them to go to the installation. That's poopy. I often remind players of things they might've forgotten but their PCs would probably think of or give them advice as to how I think the PCs might see something. I usually ask if they need/want a little advice and have no problem stating the obvious, "This is most assuredly a bad idea" if it's obvious (to the PC, at least) that it's assuredly a bad idea.

I like doing flashbacks when PCs have achieved some major improvement of their stats (i.e. 5-dot Skill or Attri ute in NWOD). I like to throw in a few rolls too to mix it up, give some interactivity to the experience so there's room for interesting stuff to happen even though we know the PC will still be alive at the end etc...

See my reply to estar below.

Yeah, I know. It sucks when you have to "movin' on...".

Quote from: estar;1054419Lately for journey I liking the Middle Earth approach. You have a table of events, half mostly positive and half mostly negative. There the chance for a friendly or hostile encounter as an event but the rest are mostly color confer minor benefits and complications. At most you roll a handful for a journey that take months. Then you sprinkle them in wherever they make sense. Which works well due to the vagaries of the map.

I've been doing by this default since damn near the start of my GM'ing games. Is this considered new? I did mine by doing 20 events, 10 pos/neg each, roll 1d10, odds neg/evens pos for that result, consult creature portfolio (drive-by, police stop, traffic jam, even red light -- mostly this is for negs). All homemade. Simple.

Quote from: TJS;1054856I may be wrong, not having played it, but I thought that in Blades in the Dark it was more like Apocalypse World where you can "succeed with consequences" rather than fail forward.

In AW there are basically three states fail/succeed awkwardly - with consequences/succeed.
Isn't this how Blades works?

Edit: the difference being that there still remains a clear "fail" state.

I think I'm using "success with complications" and "failing forward" interchangeably, which seems to be incorrect. By that way of thinking, yes, straight failure should happen. If, as a GM, you don't want to deal with that, don't role. Just move things forward on their own, provided it doesn't remove player choice.

This is an actual play experience from Dakka.

"Played today. 6 hour session preceeded with about 3 hours of character generation, which is a novel method of torture in itself.

It's basically like playing D&D 3.0 edited by the GW rules team. A bloated, convoluted, inelegant mess of a book with rules all over the place, inconsistent mechanics, summary tables contradicting each other on a regular basis and page references pointing in random directions.

In essence, this is a 90s RPG crossbred with the latest hipster brew of crunch-disguised-as-narrative. It's like someone played D&D for 20 years, then read FATE once and tried to mesh both together into a 40k simulator under strict orders that buckets of dice are fun, math doesn't matter and players should reference at least 30 pages worth of rules, inexplicably spread out across 300 pages of book, to do a basic attack.

I will actually give it a 0 out of 10. You are seriously better off taking a random d20 sci-fi build, or a FATE build if you're heavy into pretending that crunch is narrative if you put enough fluff behind each number, or just play Kill Team for combat and freeform the story, seriously anything else is better."

Quote from: Ninneveh;1054929 "...play Kill Team for combat and freeform the story, seriously anything else is better."

Precisely my plan.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1054901I've been doing by this default since damn near the start of my GM'ing games. Is this considered new? I did mine by doing 20 events, 10 pos/neg each, roll 1d10, odds neg/evens pos for that result, consult creature portfolio (drive-by, police stop, traffic jam, even red light -- mostly this is for negs). All homemade. Simple.

New to me in the way it presented to AiME. As for the history of the mechanic in the hobby I didn't make any comment or stated any opinion on the topic.

Most RPG I owned had you rolling for encounters on a periodic basis. So that what I did for along time. But the funny thing the more RPGs one tries the greater the diversity of techniques one learns.

Quote from: Azraele;1054385Dammit Alderaan, stop being so goddamn nice. I'm in a bad mood and I was trying to be an asshole god

He's even worse irl. :cool:

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1054940He's even worse irl. :cool:

You posteded that!

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054945You posteded that!

I fucking hate you.

Another relevant game design tangent. Oh happy day.

Quote from: estar;1054369It antithetical to pretending to be a character within a setting.

Not necessarily.

Quote from: estar;1054369Like in life (and fiction) character don't succeed all the time when the outcome is in doubt. The failure is just that failure then you move on to the next attempt or come up with a new plan.

The problem is that unless something happens on a failure a player can continue to roll until they succeed. And if the GM stops them they'll need to provide an explanation as to why in the fiction in order to avoid disrupting immersion, which means something happens on a failure.

Nothing never happens, and every action which can have a result should have a result.

Quote from: estar;1054388Me: (Playing Imperial Guardsmen Tannenberg) so I hop on the transport and head back to Capital. In the guise of making a formal report. I arrive at an audience with the Emperor and shoot him. Then assume the throne.

Ross: (The GM) That virtually impossible! OK roll the DN 25.

Me: (Rolls and fails badly) OK so I succeed in becoming Emperor although half my body had to be replaced by bionics and 3/4 of the empire lies in ruins after the ensuing civil war and I am now sterile and can't produce an heir except by cloning. But damn I am now the Emperor.

Substitute any number of intermediate steps (realistically it will be a lot) but this is the implication of fail forward. Either the referee or players can set a preordained result and they will achieve it.

That's a ridiculous example which has never happened in any game anywhere. It does however highlight an essential issue in RPGs: Which intermediate steps should be resolved through mechanics? That choice affects what the game is about, yet few designers seem to understand its importance. Of all the things PbtA contributed to the art, showing how to explicitly draw this line at thematically relevant points was perhaps the most important.

And 'Fail Forward' can be, but is not specifically about, preordained outcomes. All it strives to do is prevent the game from coming to a halt, and as long as failure leads to other avenues of exploration, it's forward.

Quote from: estar;1054388That you will always achieve the result, the roll is just to see how it was achieved.

Nothing wrong with this, though 7th Sea 2e convinced me that games based on this concept only work when the lines between the two are clearly established.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1055010All it strives to do is prevent the game from coming to a halt, and as long as failure leads to other avenues of exploration, it's forward.

Eh, that sounds nice, but that's not the truth.  Prior to this, things worked exactly like that.

So you fail to open the door/climb the wall/lift the gate, you have to find another way in, that's LITERALLY another avenue of exploration.  Why must it be you succeed anyway but X?

You fail to find the clue that leads you directly to the next stage of the investigation, you're going to move on anyway, even if incorrect, that's another avenue of exploration.  The whole "entire game relied on one single thing happening, so when that didn't happen we all just stopped playing" happens about as often as Estar's "I want to be the Emperor" example.

So what's the truth?  The truth is, Fail Forward is nothing more than a storytelling apparatus.  It's just the old Improv thing of "never go against what someone else says, just add to it".  The GM doesn't go against what the players say if they roll badly, he just adds to it, ie. has them succeed anyway, but with complications.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055013The whole "entire game relied on one single thing happening, so when that didn't happen we all just stopped playing" happens about as often as Estar's "I want to be the Emperor" example.

I agree, which is why I find Gunshoe to be such a waste of time, despite somehow attracting some of the best writing in the industry. Because the 'one thing stops the adventure' is not a system level problem but an adventure level problem.

What's important here is that rolling the dice must change the situation. What that change is depends on the game, but it still must occur. Because it isn't much of a game if you can keep rolling until you get what you want without consequence. Even the OSR addresses this by doing things like raising the random encounter chance on every attempt.

Something needs to happen on failure, or it really isn't failure.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1055053I agree, which is why I find Gunshoe to be such a waste of time, despite somehow attracting some of the best writing in the industry. Because the 'one thing stops the adventure' is not a system level problem but an adventure level problem.

What's important here is that rolling the dice must change the situation. What that change is depends on the game, but it still must occur. Because it isn't much of a game if you can keep rolling until you get what you want without consequence. Even the OSR addresses this by doing things like raising the random encounter chance on every attempt.

Something needs to happen on failure, or it really isn't failure.

You know - it had never occurred to me that that was the problem Gumshoe was supposed to solve.

To my mind the strength of Gumshoe - is that if I've invested in knowledge points they don't become frustratingly pointless  due to a bad roll in just those situations where they should actually give the character a chance to shine.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055013
So what's the truth?  The truth is, Fail Forward is nothing more than a storytelling apparatus.  It's just the old Improv thing of "never go against what someone else says, just add to it".  The GM doesn't go against what the players say if they roll badly, he just adds to it, ie. has them succeed anyway, but with complications.[/QUOTEGood way of putting it.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055013You fail to find the clue that leads you directly to the next stage of the investigation, you're going to move on anyway, even if incorrect, that's another avenue of exploration.  The whole "entire game relied on one single thing happening, so when that didn't happen we all just stopped playing" happens about as often as Estar's "I want to be the Emperor" example.

My example was meant to be a sarcastic extreme.

However, this is directed a general question, with the fail forward mechanics as outlined in Wrath & Glory can there be total failure? Can the entire party die or be utterly frustrated in achieving their goal? if so how improbable is the result? My expectation if that if the group tried to walk into the Emperor throne room, the admiral's bridge, the crime lord's den, the general's staff area and intend to take it out at the start of a campaign that the NPCs are generally going to kill the group. Is this possible in Wrath & Glory RAW?