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New 40k RPG?
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/07/03/wrath-glory-a-new-way-to-experience-the-dark-imperium/
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/249378/Wrath--Glory-Dark-Tides?it=1&src=Newsletter_OFT_text

What do y'all know about this game???

Quote from: Spinachcat;1053837New 40k RPG?
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/07/03/wrath-glory-a-new-way-to-experience-the-dark-imperium/
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/249378/Wrath--Glory-Dark-Tides?it=1&src=Newsletter_OFT_text

What do y'all know about this game???

I know there's a how-to-play comic extant with wholly inappropriate art (https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/02/22/wrath-and-glory-rites-of-instructiongw-homepage-post-4/)

I know the game has the same signs of lazy storygaming mass-consumer garbage design that makes me hesitant to even call it an "RPG" (Fail Forward, "roll for drama", player meta-currencies...)

Therefore, I know that anything remotely interesting that existed in the bloody, macabre and violent pages of clearly superior RPGs which share its branding is totally gone. Meaning it's not even a viable Dune-ripoff anymore (which is basically all it ever was).

But it's not about making something good or fun anymore; it's about the bottom line. I'm sure market research and strategy have made this loss-proof. Unfortunately, they've simultaneously doomed it to grow dusty and unused on the shelves of the ten thousand flighty millennial consumers who will shortly part with their money for it. There this tome of mediocrity will rightfully rot; uninspired, uninteresting, and forgotten.

I wanted to love this game, but I cannot. Just for a start, consider that a Tier 3 Adeptus Astartes Tactical Space Marine will have Strength, Agility, and Toughness scores of 5-7. That's on this scale:

Relative Human
Attribute Values
Value Relative Human Ability
9+ Superhuman: Only alien species or humans enhanced by
special powers, Adeptus Astartes gene-seed, or unusual
items are capable of such extremes.
8 Exceptional: The best most humans can be.
6–7 Outstanding: Very adept or smart, in top physical shape,
very popular.
4–5 High Average: Athletic, intelligent, or amiable.
3 Average: Normal physical shape, intelligence, or
likeability.
2 or less Poor: Unhealthy and weak, uncoordinated and stiff,
weak-minded, unlikable.

That means that the Space Marines are way underpowered. I understand the need for balance, but 7' tall genetically and surgically modified super-soldiers that can't even qualify as "Exceptional: The best most humans can be." (note, that this is speaking of unmodified humans) is just too sad.

The game also has a problem with suggested default arrays of attributes and skills that too expensive for many characters to even afford. I would rather the default arrays be affordable and that people could purchase up from there rather than have to prune down to an affordable level.

Oh, and ascension packages suck, particularly for the costs attached.

Quote from: Azraele;1053842lazy storygaming mass-consumer garbage design that makes me hesitant to even call it an "RPG" (Fail Forward, "roll for drama", player meta-currencies...)

ie. Narrative Shitshow.  I mean this not in the standard sarcastic manner of a game with OOC and narrative control mechanics, yeah this game has them in ridiculous abundance, but that's not really the problem.  The problem is, it's just a random mess of narrative mechanics from Narrative RPGs and Storygames.

"Storygaming mass-consumer garbage design" pretty much sums it up.  Ross Watson was the Lead Developer for the FFG40k system of games which didn't have much "Narrativium" at all (although it started creeping in a bit as the various lines went on).
He also worked on FFGSW, which is a Jay Little Narrative Dice System game.  Most of his actual design work is in not-Narrative designs, and this shows.  The game seems like someone who wanted to slap a bunch of Narrativisms together without really understanding the Whys and Hows of the parent systems that use the mechanics that inspired this one.

I am trying to knock it out of #1 on RPGNow, I am really trying ;)

So yet another bestselling "game" that won't sully the actual tables across the land?

I could barely make it through the comic...and I read 40k novels very happily.

Oh well. Thank all of you for your thoughts.

When the battlecry from Ross Watson for this edition was basically, and I literally quote, "Diverse and Inclusive!" I knew it would be shit.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1054060ie. Narrative Shitshow.  I mean this not in the standard sarcastic manner of a game with OOC and narrative control mechanics, yeah this game has them in ridiculous abundance, but that's not really the problem.  The problem is, it's just a random mess of narrative mechanics from Narrative RPGs and Storygames.

"Storygaming mass-consumer garbage design" pretty much sums it up.  Ross Watson was the Lead Developer for the FFG40k system of games which didn't have much "Narrativium" at all (although it started creeping in a bit as the various lines went on).
He also worked on FFGSW, which is a Jay Little Narrative Dice System game.  Most of his actual design work is in not-Narrative designs, and this shows.  The game seems like someone who wanted to slap a bunch of Narrativisms together without really understanding the Whys and Hows of the parent systems that use the mechanics that inspired this one.

FFG40K was already fully developed and grown before Ross Watson took over the lead development. To his credit, he continued the path that had been laid out before him. However, his own blueprint for the Ulysses version was a mashup of 5e, Savage Worlds, the D6 system, and Fate thrown in there. The results show.

I'm a fan of narrative systems and enjoy meta-currencies, however when I read the quickstart rules my no-no alarm started chiming. My issues isn't having things like "story points" (or whatever they're called in a particular game) it was to sheer amount of paying to fiddle with the narrative. It came across as really clunky.

In something like Cypher, for example, you can spend an XP to re-roll. It's manageable because you don't have infinite XP, but more importantly it doesn't have to happen. If you don't re-roll the game simply doesn't care. GeneSys has Story Points that are kept to only a few (1 for the GM and 1 per PC) and the game doesn't grind down if they aren't used constantly. Even when our group is swapping them back and forth it's quick and easy and the core experience isn't reliant on them.

I noticed that with games like 2d20, Fate and Wrath & Glory the spending of meta-currencies seems to be more of a must, although I could be wrong as I have only played Fate. That thinking may not apply to the others and please correct me if I'm mistaken. Fate was assuredly this way and that's the biggest reason I dislike it. I felt I had to constantly fiddle with the Fate Point economy is jarring ways and it became frustrating to try to remember who invoked that "The Room's On Fire!" Aspect first, etc. Aspects in general were frustrating as they opened up nigh-constant analysis as to if a certain one might apply.

When I noticed what seemed to be the same flow of "required fiddling" in W&G I cringed. Add in that the rules felt clunky in places they shouldn't and the bizarre Tier placements and my excitement waned quickly.

Quote from: Ninneveh;1054090When the battlecry from Ross Watson for this edition was basically, and I literally quote, "Diverse and Inclusive!" I knew it would be shit.

Where/when was that?!

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054102Where/when was that?!

I will amend my previous statement, it wasn't "Diverse and Inclusive" but "Broad and Inclusive". Cutting a few hairs with semantics though.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/08/40k-rpg-heres-learned.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQSVSANqZVg

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054102Where/when was that?!

I will amend my previous statement, it wasn't "Diverse and Inclusive" but "Broad and Inclusive". Splitting a hair with semantics though. It is pointed out in the article below, and in the two youtube videos Ross trumpets the phrase both when introducing his thesis for the game as well as when asked questions about the game by people in the audience. One could argue he means it in the way of being able to have an arbiter brushing shoulders with a space marine in a campaign, but it set my SJW spidey sense a tingling.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/08/40k-rpg-heres-learned.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQSVSANqZVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGOzPxzR4sM

Quote from: Ninneveh;1054106I will amend my previous statement, it wasn't "Diverse and Inclusive" but "Broad and Inclusive". Splitting a hair with semantics though. It is pointed out in the article below, and in the two youtube videos Ross trumpets the phrase both when introducing his thesis for the game as well as when asked questions about the game by people in the audience. One could argue he means it in the way of being able to have an arbiter brushing shoulders with a space marine in a campaign, but it set my SJW spidey sense a tingling.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/08/40k-rpg-heres-learned.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQSVSANqZVg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGOzPxzR4sM

Oh, I feel you on the Spidey Sense a-tingling at times. There's a video where Rodney Thompson's describing Dusk City Outlaws and he mentions the art being "diverse", I believe was the term (apologies, it was quite a while ago, it may have been "inclusive"). My hackles rose and then I saw the art and it was in fact diverse(/inclusive) but in a good way. It had black, white, hispanic, Asian, etc., which was cool because it got me into the feel of what characters might be like. It could've been SJW pandering, however in the absence of proof I put the onus on myself. I can't stand the broad-stroak assumptions SJWs place at the feet of others so I chose not to do the same. Still, the screeching mob's been so freaking prevalent in buzz words and pogroms, it's a natural response to be triggered by the things like the word "triggered". :D

The game itself is designed to be very broad and inclusive–that's basically the game's catchphrase, but with good reason. The goal of the game is for players to be able to tell the kinds of 40K stories that are exciting, all the way from a squad of inept guardsmen trying to take on a mission that is way above their paygrade, to the Eldar rangers hunting down mystic relics and adventure, to the squad of veteran space marines stomping through a seemingly-empty space hulk. It's an ambitious goal to try and have one system that's expansive enough to include the full range of 40K possibilities (well, excepting Tyranids, of course), while also remaining balanced.
Source: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/08/40k-rpg-heres-learned.html

It's a dog whistle. The SJWs hear "inclusive" and see the black dude with dreads in the comic and the publisher hopes they will become satiated and not attack them. BUT they keep saying "inclusive" means "all of 40k's fun stuff!" which is also true. "Inclusive" mostly means "all of you suckers give us your money."  Of course, the "Narrative Shitshow" mechanics [thank you CRK] and the nigh-anime art style in the comic also shows who they want as an audience. AKA, it's not built to draw 40k players (the canon issues in the comic alone would cause Dakka to go nuclear).

HOWEVER...the concept of a 40k game where you could do an Eldar campaign, an Inquisitor campaign, a Guard campaign etc IS interesting.

EDIT: Just realized I've actually met 3 black gamers with dreads, two play D&D via Org Play and the other was a Shadowrun/Cyberpunk 2020 GM.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1054114The game itself is designed to be very broad and inclusive–that's basically the game's catchphrase, but with good reason. The goal of the game is for players to be able to tell the kinds of 40K stories that are exciting, all the way from a squad of inept guardsmen trying to take on a mission that is way above their paygrade, to the Eldar rangers hunting down mystic relics and adventure, to the squad of veteran space marines stomping through a seemingly-empty space hulk. It's an ambitious goal to try and have one system that's expansive enough to include the full range of 40K possibilities (well, excepting Tyranids, of course), while also remaining balanced.
Source: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/08/40k-rpg-heres-learned.html

It's a dog whistle. The SJWs hear "inclusive" and see the black dude with dreads in the comic and the publisher hopes they will become satiated and not attack them. BUT they keep saying "inclusive" means "all of 40k's fun stuff!" which is also true. "Inclusive" mostly means "all of you suckers give us your money."  Of course, the "Narrative Shitshow" mechanics [thank you CRK] and the nigh-anime art style in the comic also shows who they want as an audience. AKA, it's not built to draw 40k players (the canon issues in the comic alone would cause Dakka to go nuclear).

HOWEVER...the concept of a 40k game where you could do an Eldar campaign, an Inquisitor campaign, a Guard campaign etc IS interesting.

(BTW: skip to 30:50 on first vid for specific quote for W&G for those watching)

(Also, original sourcer, actually timestamp the vid ya prick. Wasted a min scanning for it)

It's annoying how much this shit is now read into. Like bro, that's some serious reading into what he said -- it's literally about "alllll the space marines and bodygloves".

But the fucked-up thing is that now we HAVE to read into this crap these days because these right and left fuckers hold virtual tea parties over godamm words, debating what was meant by "dude, we're gonna make burritos an edible item because burritos, dude". Not even sentences. Words. It's nuts.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1054117It's annoying how much this shit is now read into. Like bro, that's some serious reading into what he said -- it's literally about "alllll the space marines and bodygloves".

But the fucked-up thing is that now we HAVE to read into this crap these days because these right and left fuckers hold virtual tea parties over godamm words, debating what was meant by "dude, we're gonna make burritos an edible item because burritos, dude". Not even sentences. Words. It's nuts.

Thats what my spidey sense automatically picked up at first hearing. But at the same time I am also aware that the goal of the game is to have one unified system where you can have retarded nonsensical party compositions as I noted above.

So how is it  in play?

Quote from: Ninneveh;1054106One could argue he means it in the way of being able to have an arbiter brushing shoulders with a space marine in a campaign, but it set my SJW spidey sense a tingling.

WEll of course you can do this in Wrath & Glory--because the beefy Arbiter is as strong and tough as a high school athlete while the Space Marine has the physique of a college freshman football player. That's how you show that everybody can fit in...by making them all suck.

Sure sounds like crap.

...anyone actually had any play experience?

I've enough 40k RPG to play for several decades but I'll pick this up too if it plays well.

I've played the Quickstart. It was fun. It was everything I hoped Mutant Chronicles would be, but with a simpler d6-based system.

Quote from: Azraele;1053842I know the game has the same signs of lazy storygaming mass-consumer garbage design that makes me hesitant to even call it an "RPG" (Fail Forward, "roll for drama", player meta-currencies...)

What exactly is wrong with "fail forward" (besides the name already being business world jargon (https://www.runagame.net/2015/12/fail-forward.html))? In theory it sounds like a common sense guideline. Since the point of a game is to have fun, then failing a roll should have interesting consequences rather than uninteresting consequences. This is basic principle of, say, Go Fish: if someone does not have the card you need, you draw another.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054358What exactly is wrong with "fail forward" (besides the name already being business world jargon (https://www.runagame.net/2015/12/fail-forward.html))? In theory it sounds like a common sense guideline. Since the point of a game is to have fun, then failing a roll should have interesting consequences rather than uninteresting consequences. This is basic principle of, say, Go Fish: if someone does not have the card you need, you draw another.

It antithetical to pretending to be a character within a setting. Like 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. Just like as if you were really there as the character.  In contrast failing in Wrath & Glory means that you suffer a wound or some other consequence but it never means that you will fail to find whatever the next part of the adventure that the referee has in mind.

It railroading the adventure to a preordained outcome. Using the example of the example of the webcomic the referee decided that the next step had to be the party arriving at the steel gate of the mining station.

An alternative and what I would do (based on the webcomic) example the consequence of failing the survival check would not been the group wandering around aimlessly (well from their PoV that would be the result) rather I would have a sense of what could found in the region and the group would encounter that instead. The adventure would proceed from that point provided that there isn't other factors like incompetence or very bad luck that results in death. It could that they get totally side tracked and never bother arriving at the gate of the mining station.

Often it not a source of frustration as it result in a new and unexpected adventure for the players to experience as their characters. In most cases they deal with the unexpected circumstances and eventually make their way finally back to where they were going in the first place.

I don't need a game designer to come up with a fail forward mechanic to tell me how to do that. One just need to keep in mind that with setting we are talking about entire worlds here with all the diversity that implies. There something nearly everywhere that can be interesting if presented well.

As illustrated here.

(https://www.ulisses-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Webcomicp1test.png)

(https://www.ulisses-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Webcomic2med.png)

Quote from: estar;1054369It antithetical to pretending to be a character within a setting. Like 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. Just like as if you were really there as the character.  In contrast failing in Wrath & Glory means that you suffer a wound or some other consequence but it never means that you will fail to find whatever the next part of the adventure that the referee has in mind.

It railroading the adventure to a preordained outcome. Using the example of the example of the webcomic the referee decided that the next step had to be the party arriving at the steel gate of the mining station.

An alternative and what I would do (based on the webcomic) example the consequence of failing the survival check would not been the group wandering around aimlessly (well from their PoV that would be the result) rather I would have a sense of what could found in the region and the group would encounter that instead. The adventure would proceed from that point provided that there isn't other factors like incompetence or very bad luck that results in death. It could that they get totally side tracked and never bother arriving at the gate of the mining station.

Often it not a source of frustration as it result in a new and unexpected adventure for the players to experience as their characters. In most cases they deal with the unexpected circumstances and eventually make their way finally back to where they were going in the first place.

I don't need a game designer to come up with a fail forward mechanic to tell me how to do that. One just need to keep in mind that with setting we are talking about entire worlds here with all the diversity that implies. There something nearly everywhere that can be interesting if presented well.

As illustrated here.

(https://www.ulisses-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Webcomicp1test.png)

(https://www.ulisses-us.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Webcomic2med.png)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing or playing a game that way. They arrived at the mining station because that's where they wanted to go. A failed roll should have consequences but not prevent characters from getting to what's interesting. That doesn't mean a side encounter would be bad, but repeatedly flubbing rolls and freezing to death for "muh realisms!" is simply obnoxious to me. If that works for others, awesome! I just wouldn't play in such a game.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054379There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing or playing a game that way. They arrived at the mining station because that's where they wanted to go. A failed roll should have consequences but not prevent characters from getting to what's interesting. That doesn't mean a side encounter would be bad, but repeatedly flubbing rolls and freezing to death for "muh realisms!" is simply obnoxious to me. If that works for others, awesome! I just wouldn't play in such a game.

I wouldn't play in the type of game you're describing. And I'm not an idiot: this "muh (whatever)!" bullshit needs to fucking die. It's not even an argument, it's you mocking something you both don't like (a matter of taste) and don't understand (a matter of your own cognitive failings).

You want a pre-ordained outcome based on player desires. I want the dice to simulate the character's skills in a measurable way to reinforce the integrity of the game's imagined reality. I want that because I've had it your way and I hated it; there was nothing genuine about the danger characters faced, no real consequence. It was trash, I loathed, and continue to loath, the whole concept. The entire design is rooted in the turgid confines of personal vanity and irrevocably taints anything it touches unless totally excised from principle.

You want that poison in your game? Cool fine whatever. Drink your filth. But those of us who don't eagerly gulp down that putrid slime aren't simpletons; we're demanding something better. And in this case, that demand is going to manifest as a significant chunk of gamers who would have laid their boogey-dollars down on this game not bothering. I can only hope it's a metric fuckload of us, so that we can finally get an "inclusive" 40k game that's as worth playing as Dark Heresy or, god help me, Zwiehander.

Quote from: Azraele;1054382I wouldn't play in the type of game you're describing. And I'm not an idiot: this "muh (whatever)!" bullshit needs to fucking die. It's not even an argument, it's you mocking something you both don't like (a matter of taste) and don't understand (a matter of your own cognitive failings).

You want a pre-ordained outcome based on player desires. I want the dice to simulate the character's skills in a measurable way to reinforce the integrity of the game's imagined reality. I want that because I've had it your way and I hated it; there was nothing genuine about the danger characters faced, no real consequence. It was trash, I loathed, and continue to loath, the whole concept. The entire design is rooted in the turgid confines of personal vanity and irrevocably taints anything it touches unless totally excised from principle.

You want that poison in your game? Cool fine whatever. Drink your filth. But those of us who don't eagerly gulp down that putrid slime aren't simpletons; we're demanding something better. And in this case, that demand is going to manifest as a significant chunk of gamers who would have laid their boogey-dollars down on this game not bothering. I can only hope it's a metric fuckload of us, so that we can finally get an "inclusive" 40k game that's as worth playing as Dark Heresy or, god help me, Zwiehander.

That's your opinion and I respect and defend your right to have it. Also, I dig what I've read about your upcoming martial arts game. Kudos!

Oh, "muh (whatever)!" certainly isn't an argument, but it's funny. ;)

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054384That's your opinion and I respect and defend your right to have it. Also, I dig what I've read about your upcoming martial arts game. Kudos!

Oh, "muh (whatever)!" certainly isn't an argument, but it's funny. ;)

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

Quote from: estar;1054369I don't need a game designer to come up with a fail forward mechanic to tell me how to do that. One just need to keep in mind that with setting we are talking about entire worlds here with all the diversity that implies. There something nearly everywhere that can be interesting if presented well.

I agree with you that railroading is lazy, but I disagree with your overall point and consider your argument hypocritical because what you are saying is that:

• the concept of failing forward is automatically bad because bad GMs will use it to railroad their campaigns, even though that does not logically follow
• you simultaneously consider the philosophy behind failing forward to be common sense, because as GM you turn failure into another path of the Choose Your Own Adventure book

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054379There's absolutely nothing wrong with writing or playing a game that way. They arrived at the mining station because that's where they wanted to go. A failed roll should have consequences but not prevent characters from getting to what's interesting. That doesn't mean a side encounter would be bad, but repeatedly flubbing rolls and freezing to death for "muh realisms!" is simply obnoxious to me. If that works for others, awesome! I just wouldn't play in such a game.

Me: (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.

This

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054379That doesn't mean a side encounter would be bad, but repeatedly flubbing rolls

!= (not equal) this

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054379and freezing to death for "muh realisms!" is simply obnoxious to me.

A fair referee would look at the base skill levels of the character and if they considered professional in survival then unless a improbable series of rolls occur, a determined party will be delayed not die. However if the party consist of nothing of urban dilettantes with minimal skill in survival then yes the likely outcome is death and the blame is not on the referee but on the players for trying to execute a plan that their characters are utterly unprepared for. Just as in my example Tannenberg wouldn't get far in his coup attempt and would likely be imprisoned, tortured, and then executed in short order.

What is the experience here? There is no challenge, no risk, no chance that the ultimate outcome will be anything but what was previously planned. And if you as a referee think that it is stupid that the party get lost, possible die, and get derailed from reaching the gate of a mining camp, why are you having them roll in the first place? Especially when it clear that Varkus the Space Marine is competent in survival.

Last why bother with having such a mechanic in the first place? The referee in tabletop roleplaying game always had the ability and authority to skew the results however they want. Just because the game designer deigned to allocate some word count giving permission to railroad, referees have been railroading since the beginning of the hobby. Just call for it what it is, using Wrath and Glory one is encourage to railroad the outcome of a roll. That you will always achieve the result, the roll is just to see how it was achieved.

In short this railroading dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054387the concept of failing forward is automatically bad because bad GMs will use it to railroad their campaigns, even though that does not logically follow

Read my post again, my main thesis was that it antithetical to pretending to be a character within a setting. Not whether bad referee will abuse it. In a follow up post, I demonstrated how a player can use the mechanics as a form of wish fulfillment that would otherwise be impossible.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054387you simultaneously consider the philosophy behind failing forward to be common sense, because as GM you turn failure into another path of the Choose Your Own Adventure book

Again setting are worlds with all their inherent possibilities. What I advocate is that referee consider fully the environment in which the characters exist. That often what seems like a result of death or total failure isn't quite that. I stated numerous times when talking about sandbox campaigns that a referee job isn't to always pick the most probable outcome but to look among the possible outcome and choose one that is most interesting. That also it is a good idea to pick several possible outcome and roll to see which one occurs to minimize one's own bias.

It not hypocritical all although on the surface both what I stated and fail forward gets the character to the mining gate. The difference that fail forward will always get the players to mining gate. While my technique will sometimes (but not always) result in the playing alter their decisions. In rare cases they will opt to ignore the gate and mining camp in favor of a new goal.

You bring up choose your own adventure. These books have choices true but they all prescripted. What I do instead is paint a landscape both physically, and socially. It is a canvas on which the player's choices play out on. As many degrees in a compass that how many options the players have at any given moment. It only looks like a AB style alternate path in hindsight as one looks back in see how the consequences of different choices led to what happened.

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

Shit, my bad. Hold on...umm...

"Azraele, more like ASSraele!" :D

Better?

Now, don't be in a bad mood! No matter what kind of style we like, gaming is fucking AWESOME!!!

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.

I'm not... necessarily a fan of some implementations of fail forward, but this is just a plain old uncharitable reading of fail forward as a concept. That's well beyond any reasonableness or implication of a game. Fail forward, as I see it in Wrath & Glory is actually... well... it's this:

QuoteA fair referee would look at the base skill levels of the character and if they considered professional in survival then unless a improbable series of rolls occur, a determined party will be delayed not die.

Delayed, not die. It seems the difference in what you're describing and what Wrath & Glory is describing is simply that Wrath & Glory actually said to do something interesting with the delay (such as the biting cold dealt them a wound because they took too long). In fact, the comic even made a point to show that it was the Raven Guard who was a professional in survival making the test.

You could even reverse the idea in your head and go with degrees of success, where "True Success" is not achieved until you get above a certain threshold. Everything below that is functionally indistinguishable from a fail forward concept in execution, albeit not in fact.

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.

This


!= (not equal) this


A fair referee would look at the base skill levels of the character and if they considered professional in survival then unless a improbable series of rolls occur, a determined party will be delayed not die. However if the party consist of nothing of urban dilettantes with minimal skill in survival then yes the likely outcome is death and the blame is not on the referee but on the players for trying to execute a plan that their characters are utterly unprepared for. Just as in my example Tannenberg wouldn't get far in his coup attempt and would likely be imprisoned, tortured, and then executed in short order.

What is the experience here? There is no challenge, no risk, no chance that the ultimate outcome will be anything but what was previously planned. And if you as a referee think that it is stupid that the party get lost, possible die, and get derailed from reaching the gate of a mining camp, why are you having them roll in the first place? Especially when it clear that Varkus the Space Marine is competent in survival.

Last why bother with having such a mechanic in the first place? The referee in tabletop roleplaying game always had the ability and authority to skew the results however they want. Just because the game designer deigned to allocate some word count giving permission to railroad, referees have been railroading since the beginning of the hobby. Just call for it what it is, using Wrath and Glory one is encourage to railroad the outcome of a roll. That you will always achieve the result, the roll is just to see how it was achieved.

In short this railroading dressed in the Emperor's New Clothes.

I 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 certainly flub my GMing at times but overall, I feel happy with how the games go. I sometimes railroad but if I do it's upfront; I don't remove or invalidate player choice. If I had to pick a style I might say "a bare-bones idea of things going on that are influenced by player choice and PC actions". I don't know if that's even a style, it's just how I do. I like players being creative and having agency and PC death is rare. Still, I find other ways to make them feel threatened and such. Trust is a huge benefit in our games and my way of GMing might not trip other people's trigger.

Quote from: estar;1054390Read my post again, my main thesis was that it antithetical to pretending to be a character within a setting. Not whether bad referee will abuse it. In a follow up post, I demonstrated how a player can use the mechanics as a form of wish fulfillment that would otherwise be impossible.



Again setting are worlds with all their inherent possibilities. What I advocate is that referee consider fully the environment in which the characters exist. That often what seems like a result of death or total failure isn't quite that. I stated numerous times when talking about sandbox campaigns that a referee job isn't to always pick the most probable outcome but to look among the possible outcome and choose one that is most interesting. That also it is a good idea to pick several possible outcome and roll to see which one occurs to minimize one's own bias.

It not hypocritical all although on the surface both what I stated and fail forward gets the character to the mining gate. The difference that fail forward will always get the players to mining gate. While my technique will sometimes (but not always) result in the playing alter their decisions. In rare cases they will opt to ignore the gate and mining camp in favor of a new goal.

You bring up choose your own adventure. These books have choices true but they all prescripted. What I do instead is paint a landscape both physically, and socially. It is a canvas on which the player's choices play out on. As many degrees in a compass that how many options the players have at any given moment. It only looks like a AB style alternate path in hindsight as one looks back in see how the consequences of different choices led to what happened.

We seem to have misunderstood each other. I only considered this on an individual immediate task basis, not the course of the entire campaign.

Quite honestly I think it depends on what the players want to do to have fun. If they care more about the journey than the outcome, then they might use your usurpation plot seriously or any of the other railroading conventions. If the plot is being made up on the fly, then it would work like you described you wanted the plot to be.

If you enjoy brutal and gritty campaigns where the PCs drop like flies only to be immediately replaced by new PCs, more power to you! My own tastes are vastly more childish in nature. Literally, I like fairy tale stories where logic goes out the window.

The problem I have with "Fail Forward" is that it often seems like a crutch for bad encounter design.  It's often defended with the idea that it keeps the game moving and stops everything coming to a grinding halt.  For example if the PCs don't find the clue the game can't go anywhere - to which, to my mind the correct response is of course it can - the bad guys advance their plan and the PCs have to react.

In general I don't like it - and I think it's usually a band-aid solution to a deeper problem - however it doesn't pay to be too ideological about this kind of thing.  Overland travel, such as described, is one situation where this kind of approach seems perfectly fine to me.   But really it come's down to knowing what you are rolling for.  Is the location so difficult to find that genuine failure is really option?  If not then it seems perfectly fine to say "roll to see how long it takes you to get there" and abstract from there.

There's also meta-concerns.  Do the players enjoy wilderness encounters or do they seem eager to get to where they're going - what happened last session - is there a risk of the game becoming boringly repetitive?  What we're concerned with here is as much, or more about the level of abstraction as anything else.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054393I'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..

Sounds good to me. The way I think of it is something I call "assumed competence". If the character has X experience with a skill, task, or profession (class) then I think it reasonable that for ordinary tasks to make the ruling that it just happens as the result isn't particularly uncertain. The only caveat that I would make a roll it if is something like a 1 or a 3 or 4 on 3d6 roll high. Then I would create some type of event with potential negative consequence that the player has to deal with. Why? Because shit happens even with routine. Not often but it happens. Adjust the odds to taste.

If you opt to do this, make sure make the players do the roll in full view. It just absolutely hilarious when a botch comes up even it if something minor as falling off a ladder and taking a point of damage.

Lately 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.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054394I only considered this on an individual immediate task basis, not the course of the entire campaign.

Sure however keep in mind a series of these can be connected together in pursuit of a larger goal. While Wrath and Glory has consequences so it not a total free ride. But from everything I read, it seem that the assumption is that the campaign will how the group wants it to go as metagame decision. That the mechanics just determines what happens along the way.  

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054394Quite honestly I think it depends on what the players want to do to have fun. If they care more about the journey than the outcome, then they might use your usurpation plot seriously or any of the other railroading conventions. If the plot is being made up on the fly, then it would work like you described you wanted the plot to be.

Sure storygame, hybrids, and purist games can be fun. However when something is being labeled as something that it is not, I am going to say sometime forcibly.

For example with the right plot and referee, railroaded campaign can be fun. While in most cases they are a negative experience it possible to execute them in a way that the player don't mind they are riding the rails to some foregone conclusion. Something I learned from managing and running LARP Events. The problem with LARP is that the live action impose constraints on time and resources. You just can't push event staff or get people to where they need to be. So having to schedule results in some plots being railroad and not as sandbox as one would like. So rather than throw up my hands at the limitation I just learn how to run really good railroaded plot when I needed too. And in the long run I was to able make things a little more flexible but  never completely escaped the constraints of live action.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054394If you enjoy brutal and gritty campaigns where the PCs drop like flies only to be immediately replaced by new PCs, more power to you!

Again the chance of failure != brutal and gritty. For any action successful or failure there what probably happens and there a range of what could possibly happen. Sometimes what probably happens is the most interesting. Sometime it one of the possible results that is more interesting although it not as probable.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054394My own tastes are vastly more childish in nature. Literally, I like fairy tale stories where logic goes out the window.

Actually Fairy Tales have their own logic or it would not exist as something one can point to and say "That is a fairy tale." And I don't consider it childish want to play in campaigns and be a character interacting with a fairy tale or whimsical setting

Quote from: estar;1054419Sounds good to me. The way I think of it is something I call "assumed competence". If the character has X experience with a skill, task, or profession (class) then I think it reasonable that for ordinary tasks to make the ruling that it just happens as the result isn't particularly uncertain. The only caveat that I would make a roll it if is something like a 1 or a 3 or 4 on 3d6 roll high. Then I would create some type of event with potential negative consequence that the player has to deal with. Why? Because shit happens even with routine. Not often but it happens. Adjust the odds to taste.

If you opt to do this, make sure make the players do the roll in full view. It just absolutely hilarious when a botch comes up even it if something minor as falling off a ladder and taking a point of damage.

Lately 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.

So much of how I do things is based on the game itself as well as our moods. We usually move past things where the dice results...good or bad...simply don't interest us. At times we'll let a single roll determine a large swath of in-game stuff. For example, if the group's traveling overland to a known location (familiarity, maps, etc.) on horses in autumn and it's not a terribly dangerous trek, they just get there. If, say, there's bandits about, the place is in difficult terrain/hard to find and/or the weather's bad, then the dice come out. Since we play things like GeneSys, Cypher and Forged in the Dark (the system Blades in the Dark uses), the results are almost always nuanced and interesting. If they simply get lost, it might mean going deeper into more dangerous territory. If it's a bandit attack, a fight. Or, they're lucky and the journey's safe and pleasant.

One thing I try not to do is have successive rolls of bad to worse without a big switch in the narrative. For example, if the group fails a navigation roll and gets lost, I don't usually just have them keep rolling at a higher difficulty, at least not without something cool happening. Maybe an avalanche blocks them backtracking. They roll to find a new path, but the map's obviously wrong (maybe that merchant swindled them!). Another roll and a failure brings, "You realize that despite your best efforts, you're lost. What's worse is you see the strange, menacing etchings in some of the trees, seemingly colored with blood...". A quick lore roll (or whatever's appropriate) let's them know it's the boundary markings of the Eight Sorrows Tribe. Nasty, violent folk who detest outsiders. Sadly, they got a little oopsie, too. The orcs might know they're there. Or the loremaster misremembered the signs of greeting. Or a storm's brewing. And so on.

Now, if everyone's simply wanting to get to where they're going and we didn't just elide time, the rolls might go the same way, but after they finally deal with the consequences...and assuming they survive...I might just say, "You barely manage to escape (assuming they do) the Eight Sorrows hunters, using the raging river to your advantage (again, assuming they do). As the current settles, so do your hearts, especially as you see the Curstley Ridge far in the horizon. You're off-course by days, but you're no longer lost...and are back in the Duke's lands. You're safe". The next scene is at a tavern or hunter's lodge or wherver they wish to go that's appropriate.

One thing I'm sure many will dislike is my disdain for killing PCs because of bad rolls. If a player is playing their ass off and shitty rolls doom them, but we can realistically say they live, awesome. They will certainly suffer for things, based on the severity of the defeat. For example, death might bring the loss of a hand and favored weapon. You might be blinded. Whatever is interesting, has weight but is most of all, fun. I don't mind players not being afraid to die all the time. They can die, to be sure, but it's a last resort to me. It's simply boring for me and can be frustrating as a GM to inject a new PC. That's not always the case and the players don't get away free, I just find it so much more interesting to see how a PC handles waking up blind or being told their best friend died saving them. If others loathe this, I can respect that.

Fail Forward only matters if you're on a railroad.

If the game isn't about following a pre-ordained plot, then "failure" just means the PCs have to do something different to achieve what they want.

Or roll up new PCs. That's not the end of the world.

Unpredictable dice are my friend. Without them, I can just write fan fic at home.

/caught trying to blow out the torch while tied upon the stake
:eek: "Gotta love us heretics, no?" :o

Quote from: Opaopajr;1054552/caught trying to blow out the torch while tied upon the stake
:eek: "Gotta love us heretics, no?" :o

Lol yeah my Fantasy game ended because the diplomat made a very convincing case that the group exposed themselves to corruption while trying to break up a Nurgle infiltration.  So they were burned at the stake just to make sure their souls were clean.  I guess that is succeeding backwards?

[video]https://giphy.com/gifs/tumbleweed-O38dU2kkQ9sWc[/youtube]

Quote from: Spinachcat;1054492Fail Forward only matters if you're on a railroad.

If the game isn't about following a pre-ordained plot, then "failure" just means the PCs have to do something different to achieve what they want.

Or roll up new PCs. That's not the end of the world.

Unpredictable dice are my friend. Without them, I can just write fan fic at home.

I have to disagree, especially with a game like Blades in the Dark that goes where it wants. Even with its high-level of player agency it's not railroady in the slightest. In fact, it feels very off if you try to run a predetermined plot. I'm not sure how "failing forward" would flow in a game like D&D, though. That might feel less organic. In the end, it's really about what people like, not if it's being done wrong.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1054580I have to disagree, especially with a game like Blades in the Dark that goes where it wants. Even with its high-level of player agency it's not railroady in the slightest. In fact, it feels very off if you try to run a predetermined plot. I'm not sure how "failing forward" would flow in a game like D&D, though. That might feel less organic. In the end, it's really about what people like, not if it's being done wrong.

I 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.

AW 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.

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?

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1055010The 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.

What happens in my campaigns is as if you really were there. I find that a lot of the complaints are because the referee doesn't paint enough of a picture of the environment or setting in which the players as their characters operate in. While it never possible to describe things in same level of detail as if you are there. What I do instead and tell my players is that I rely on stereotypes and genre tropes. That when I describe things I focus on the exceptions. For the rest I am pretty liberal about what can be inferred from knowing that it is a bedroom, an armory, a grocery store, etc.

By doing so the players tend to react more like they would in life. Look the surroundings, look at what they know and come up with an alternative plan that hopefully achieves their goal. But often leads to a very different set of circumstance than what was originally envisioned.

The difference between the techniques is that fail forward works by determines the outcome first. The point that the group is to be at after the challenge. The only thing that different between two different groups is path that it taken to that outcome.

With my approach, things will play out far more diverse ways and in some cases with paths that abandons the original goals. Not a source of frustration because like in life it all the player's choice. If the goal is that important they will come up with another plan, if it is not and something interesting comes along then they have fun perusing that.

Does it work for all players? No. Some players play as a form of wish fulfillment. I had a player who played a goofy barbarian from the stick while nothing bad happened to his character, it was obvious that the campaign more grounded then what he liked. The same player did better in a AiME campaign where his expectation of Middle Earth was more in line with mine.

I said elsewhere a well done railroad can be fun, a campaign using metagaming as form of wish fulfillment can be fun. Collaborative storytelling can be fun. But all three are not the same as being a character within a setting with all the risks and rewards that entails.

Risus has the best take on this, if I have not mentioned it already. The Risus Companion provides an example of an action hero outrunning a fireball. In traditional RPG school of thought, this is a simple save-or-die. In Risus, characters explicitly cannot fail to accomplish something their class/cliche would be expected to accomplish. Instead, the action hero rolls to determine how elegant their landing is. Success and they land in a clean chlorinated pool, fail and they land in a filthy garbage dumpster.

I believe every task resolution system should have outcomes like that.

I guess it's up to me to address the elephant in the room.

QuoteWRATH & GLORY??? Speak of this! Or I shall burn the heretics!

Why would you hesitate to burn the heretics? Could it be that you are a sympathiser yourself?

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055013So 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: estar;1055059However, 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?

Yeah, I'm not clear at this point on what exactly the definition of "fail forward" is. I am familiar with some related concepts, but it's hard to have an opinion at this point.

In general, I like the tendency of some modern games to reduce repetitive rolls. I find that in practice, many traditional games wind up with essentially meaningless repetitive rolls. i.e. The characters are going to get through the door, but there are a bunch of rolls for different tries. It makes sense to me to fold those up into a single roll. There are some faults that come with particular mechanics - but they don't necessarily outweigh the problem in the first place. I think of Burning Wheel's "Let It Ride", or Powered-by-the-Apocalypse with GM moves upon failure.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055068Risus has the best take on this, if I have not mentioned it already. The Risus Companion provides an example of an action hero outrunning a fireball. In traditional RPG school of thought, this is a simple save-or-die. In Risus, characters explicitly cannot fail to accomplish something their class/cliche would be expected to accomplish. Instead, the action hero rolls to determine how elegant their landing is. Success and they land in a clean chlorinated pool, fail and they land in a filthy garbage dumpster.

I believe every task resolution system should have outcomes like that.

This depends on the details of the genre and the hero. Roughly speaking, though, I agree that a roll shouldn't result in an outcome that is out-of-genre for the game - or that is unrealistic for a realistic game. If a character is extremely smart, a bad roll shouldn't mean that the character inexplicably becomes stupid for a time. The failure should be in line with what fits with the game.

Letting the action stop in it's tracks is not that rare. Shadowrun corebooks, for eg, have an explicit rule for letting players try a task again (and again, and again) just by adding a negative modifier on each new attempt. And I'm sure Ill find more examples in older games if I leaf through them.

This is one of the problems fail forward as seen in modern games (PbtA, Blades, Fate, etc.) solves.

Quote from: jhkim;1055130Roughly speaking, though, I agree that a roll shouldn't result in an outcome that is out-of-genre for the game - or that is unrealistic for a realistic game. If a character is extremely smart, a bad roll shouldn't mean that the character inexplicably becomes stupid for a time. The failure should be in line with what fits with the game.

That's on the GM, though. The GM is the one who has to interpret rolls and ultimately determine their result at their table. Some results may be hardcoded but even fairly shitty systems, in my experience, enable the GM to flex their creative or pragmatic muscles a little. To reiterate: this is solely on the GM.

Quote from: jhkim;1055130In general, I like the tendency of some modern games to reduce repetitive rolls. I find that in practice, many traditional games wind up with essentially meaningless repetitive rolls. i.e. The characters are going to get through the door, but there are a bunch of rolls for different tries. It makes sense to me to fold those up into a single roll. There are some faults that come with particular mechanics - but they don't necessarily outweigh the problem in the first place. I think of Burning Wheel's "Let It Ride", or Powered-by-the-Apocalypse with GM moves upon failure.

My current technique is that given time and enough competence they will succeed in most tasks. However given stressful circumstances like combat or there is a chance of ham if failed then there needs to be a roll. For the former the roll is about whether you do want you wanted to do within a round of combat.

Quote from: Itachi;1055131This is one of the problems fail forward as seen in modern games (PbtA, Blades, Fate, etc.) solves.

We've already established that at least two of those games,  (Pbta, and Blades, - not sure about Fate) - do not really have Fail Forward mechanics - at least so far as they avoid the "problem" of failure - as they still have outright failure as a possible outcome.

Quote from: estar;1055133My current technique is that given time and enough competence they will succeed in most tasks. However given stressful circumstances like combat or there is a chance of ham if failed then there needs to be a roll. For the former the roll is about whether you do want you wanted to do within a round of combat.

I'm currently playing around with a rules hack where PCs have an attribute called "Concentration", one of the main functions of this attribute would be that you get to add it your role on top of everything you normally get - in situations where you can afford to take your time to complete an action or retry multiple times. If you can't do it with that bonus then it's just beyond your ability altogether.

Quote from: TJS;1055156We've already established that at least two of those games,  (Pbta, and Blades, - not sure about Fate) - do not really have Fail Forward mechanics - at least so far as they avoid the "problem" of failure - as they still have outright failure as a possible outcome.

Hmm don't know if I follow you here. Failing Forward as a concept simply guarantees the fictional state will change, instead of getting stuck in it's place, even if one fails. It eliminates the "I missed, may I try again? (and again? and again?)" problem that would otherwise occur. And this is true for PbtA, since everytime a player fails (6 or less on the dice) the GM makes a hard move that changes the fictional state - thus the fiction "moves forward" (or sideways, or upward, or spireward :D ).

Or am I missing something here? :confused:

Quote from: TJS;1055157I'm currently playing around with a rules hack where PCs have an attribute called "Concentration", one of the main functions of this attribute would be that you get to add it your role on top of everything you normally get - in situations where you can afford to take your time to complete an action or retry multiple times. If you can't do it with that bonus then it's just beyond your ability altogether.

Quote from: Itachi;1055159Hmm don't know if I follow you here. Failing Forward as a concept simply guarantees the fictional state will change, instead of getting stuck in it's place, even if one fails. It eliminates the "I missed, may I try again? (and again? and again?)" problem that would otherwise occur. And this is true for PbtA, since everytime a player fails (6 or less on the dice) the GM makes a hard move that changes the fictional state - thus the fiction "moves forward" (or sideways, or upward, or spireward :D ).

Or am I missing something here? :confused:

I think people are differing on what they mean by "fail forward". For what it's worth, I'm familiar with Pbta and Fate, but not with Blades in the Dark, The One Ring, or Wrath & Glory.

Quote from: TJS;1055057You know - it had never occurred to me that that was the problem Gumshoe was supposed to solve.

RPGs designed by Robin Laws tend to revolve around solving a single problem, in this case the 'failed to get the next clue needed to proceed' problem.

Quote from: TJS;1055057To 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.

This is avoided by simply giving anyone with the right skills the core clues automatically, which Gumshoe does.

But instead of rolling for additional clues, it treats each skill as a resource, which creates additional bookkeeping and makes every investigative action a metagame where you must decide whether those resources are worth spending at that point in time. And once they're gone you'll only get the core clues regardless of how good your character is in that skill.

Quote from: estar;1055059with 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?

That's... a very good question.

Quote from: jhkim;1055130Yeah, I'm not clear at this point on what exactly the definition of "fail forward" is.

At this point neither am I.

I've alway taken failing forward to me that you specifically succeed at what you are trying to achieve - but that failure just means some kind of cost (although admittedly I've seen it interpreted differently as basically the the desired outcome happens - which I think is worse - it would be like trying to pick a lock, failing and then having the GM announce the door is suddenly opened by an Ogre coming through from the other side).

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1055185That's... a very good question.

Two comment, if total failure is envisioned as not possible then clever players can contrive a series of improbable events that leads them to things like one of their numbers becoming emperor. Without caveats fail forward will allow the players to achieve ANY imagined goal in the long run. Hence why I put out my earlier example. In a more traditional set of rules there are some outcomes so unlikely or requires very specific and narrow circumstances to pull off that the referee can fairly make a negative ruling.

Second, there is a potential logical inconsistency in that if two players goals conflict. There are times to a greater or lesser degree that for one player achieving their goal precludes the possibility the other players achieving their goal. The scale of the goal is not relevant only that logically one of them must fail in order for the other to succeed. For example use of a limited resource.

Granted I advocated that the fundamental bedrock of tabletop RPG campaigns is not RAW but rather the players describing how their characters interact with the setting and the referee adjudicating this by whatever factors or techniques they feel best. Often this means using mechanics described by RAW other times it may be fiat based on a judgment call, may be involve a bit of live action like first person roleplaying.

But one of the value of a buying a printed set of rules is to learn a designer's or a team of designers' take on how a specific genre or setting ought to be adjudicated. The logical inconsistency of fail forward must be something that was addressed during a campaign during playtesting. So did that method of resolution make it into the rulebook? Because in the promotional materials I am seeing nothing that addresses that other than the implication that Wrath & Glory still has a referee as central to the campaign.

Without having the rulebook my guess the designers probably considers this addressed in the section about managing a campaign. In my experience there is often advice in this section amounting to "Talk it out until everybody is on the same page." My view that is relying solely on metagaming to resolve in-game PC vs PC conflict.

Wrath and Glory page 63, titled "Fail-Forward"

Quote from: W&G p.63Back on page 48, it is mentioned that Wrath & Glory is a game where failure matters.

In a roleplaying game, failing a test is something that is going to happen with some regularity. Players have resources at their disposal (Wrath and Glory) to succeed, they can make great plans to tip the odds in their favour, and sometimes the dice will simply love them. However, there are also times when luck seems to desert your players, when their plans do not quite go as expected, or when they are depleted of their resources… resulting in failure.

The concept of "Failing Forward" for Wrath & Glory hinges on two main elements:

• Failing a test should not bring the action to a halt.
• Failure should have interesting consequences.

Failure can be interesting, and continue to drive the game forward, as long as the result does not equal "nothing happens." As the Game Master, try to narrate failure in your campaign as something interesting occurring in the scene. Resist the temptation to "just let the other players roll until someone succeeds." This leads to an expectation of inevitable success, and takes up valuable playing time just rolling dice to achieve an outcome you can create from the first roll.

The three main pillars of roleplaying are combat scenes, investigation scenes, and social scenes. Failing a test in combat already has consequences – you miss the opponent, take additional damage, or put others in danger. Failing a test in an investigation, however, should not mean that your characters simply miss the clue or do not advance towards uncovering the mystery. Similarly, failing a test in a social situation should not mean that the characters are shut out or shunned arbitrarily.

Failing-forward does not mean "you always succeed." In fact, it can mean that there are enormous risks for failing. What it does mean is that the outcome should not be boring.

Here are some suggestions on how to make failure interesting, and still have consequences for the players:

• Succeed with a Cost: Failing a test in a social situation might result in a loss of respect for the characters involved, resulting in temporarily costing a point of Influence (see page 264). Similarly, an NPC might demand a service or resource in return for their aid, costing the characters a point of Wealth (see page 267). In an investigation scene, failing a test might mean that the characters alert their prey, awarding the GM a point of Ruin (see page 60), or costing a point of Glory (see page 60) to continue without raising the alarm.
• Game Consequence: Tie the failure into a game penalty or something to do with the character's gear. Failure could mean the equipment breaks down or is lost. It could also mean that the characters suffer a penalty for the rest of the scene in a social situation (typically +2 DN).
• Story Consequence: Introduce a new obstacle that the characters have to overcome, or the failure means that the characters lose valuable time. Often, the best consequences having to do with story involve the individual characters' backgrounds, goals, and beliefs.
• Raise the Stakes: Failing a test while trying to cover ground in a dangerous environment might cause the characters to suffer Shock or even Wounds. Similarly, a failed test at the wrong time might mean that more enemies are aware of the characters' location, or that the battleground or ambush coming up later is that much more dangerous.

These suggestions are just that – each table and each group have their own particular playing style. If your group prefers to play with the risk of absolute failure, or if the consequence of failure is something far more appropriate to the particular scene or campaign, go with what works for you and your players.

What games mechanically support "success at a cost." Where the player can CHOOSE to succeed by making things worse for themselves.

Quote from: jhkim;1055130This depends on the details of the genre and the hero. Roughly speaking, though, I agree that a roll shouldn't result in an outcome that is out-of-genre for the game - or that is unrealistic for a realistic game. If a character is extremely smart, a bad roll shouldn't mean that the character inexplicably becomes stupid for a time. The failure should be in line with what fits with the game.

What is defined as "realistic" in RPG circles is more often than not arbitrary and biased. The "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" convention is a good example of that, and you wrote articles about how magic systems in RPGs are unrealistic in the sense that they are generally not built into the world from first principles and do not fundamentally alter the development of society as they would logically be expected to.

I believe a more accurate distinction would be gritty versus cinematic. Neither is realistic but instead set the tone of the game.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055220What is defined as "realistic" in RPG circles is more often than not arbitrary and biased. The "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" convention is a good example of that, and you wrote articles about how magic systems in RPGs are unrealistic in the sense that they are generally not built into the world from first principles and do not fundamentally alter the development of society as they would logically be expected to.

I believe a more accurate distinction would be gritty versus cinematic. Neither is realistic but instead set the tone of the game.

It's deeper than "tone" though; the way the game is played is radically different if you screw with the core assumptions of the player/game interaction.

"You cannot fail to make progress in an investigation or social situation" is a radical departure from how our real world works; you can overlook a secret, fail to get to the bottom of a mystery, or become totally shunned in a social situation in our actual reality. If those things became impossible, the game would cease to work in a way that upholds the "realism" of the imagined world; it wouldn't recognizably match our real world, making it artificial in a way that "has elves and magic" does not.

Changing the assumptions of the setting is different from changing how players interact with the setting. We need to separate the two concepts to have a productive dialogue about them.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055212Wrath and Glory page 63, titled "Fail-Forward"

Failure can be interesting, and continue to drive the game forward, as long as the result does not equal "nothing happens."

Failing-forward does not mean "you always succeed." In fact, it can mean that there are enormous risks for failing. What it does mean is that the outcome should not be boring.

Thanks. I think it's a common misconpcetion equaling the concept with "never failing".

Quote from: PencilBoy99What games mechanically support "success at a cost." Where the player can CHOOSE to succeed by making things worse for themselves.

I don't remember if the success is automatic, or if you gain a big bonus to the situation, but both Fate and Blades in the Dark allow you to push for a success as long as you accept some kind of setback, now or later in (it's called Devil's Bargain in Blades). Both must be approved by the GM though - if he/she doesn't think it makes sense for the situation at hand, he/she can veto it.

Quote from: Azraele;1055222It's deeper than "tone" though; the way the game is played is radically different if you screw with the core assumptions of the player/game interaction.

"You cannot fail to make progress in an investigation or social situation" is a radical departure from how our real world works; you can overlook a secret, fail to get to the bottom of a mystery, or become totally shunned in a social situation in our actual reality. If those things became impossible, the game would cease to work in a way that upholds the "realism" of the imagined world; it wouldn't recognizably match our real world, making it artificial in a way that "has elves and magic" does not.

Changing the assumptions of the setting is different from changing how players interact with the setting. We need to separate the two concepts to have a productive dialogue about them.

I would say suspension of disbelief is a better label for what you say here. Notice though, that it can be achieved even when the player/game interaction deviates from our real world assumptions - as shown by Gumshoe, for eg, where "you cannot fail to make progress in an investigation" is a given premise, and it still doesn't break suspension of disbelief for it's players.

Quote from: Itachi;1055240Thanks. I think it's a common misconpcetion equaling the concept with "never failing".

Damn right! It means "never failing if the GM doesn't want you to"

Which is so much worse

...

Hitting a dead end is supposed to be a clue that you need to change your strategy as a player. If a GM has a situation prepped, rather than an outcome or a "story", then you find that fail-forward isn't really necessary as either advice or mechanic.

"We turn the corner!" It's a brick wall "Okay, we backtrack!" isn't really the game-annihilating disaster people seem to assume it is.

"We fail in our objective!" there are hard consequences "We [do something in the aftermath and/or make new characters, because we're dead]!"

There's this assumption to "fail forward" that I've prepped outcomes rather than things. Just... Don't make that mistake, you won't have to worry about the game crashing to a halt. If they need to find the key to open the door to advance the plot, you've fucked up structurally in what you prepped and how; don't put them in a box with only one locked exit and then wonder why your game fails if they don't find the key.

Quote from: Itachi;1055244I would say suspension of disbelief is a better label for what you say here. Notice though, that it can be achieved even when the player/game interaction deviates from our real world assumptions - as shown by Gumshoe, for eg, where "you cannot fail to make progress in an investigation" is a given premise, and it still doesn't break suspension of disbelief for it's players.

I disagree with you. I'm not discussing the emotions of the players or their belief, I'm talking about the presence or absence of consequence in the game. Gumshoe violates this just as much as any other fail-forward; the players of the game know that, structurally, they can act in a way that the game's assumed reality will guarantee an outcome. They wouldn't know this even in a diceless game like Amber; they would only know that they could unfailingly investigate to a certain degree of capability, not that they were assured of progress in the investigation.

If the entire game is structured such that the characters "always succeed", with whatever consequence, at the "right" tasks, then you're structurally creating a game that discourages actually using or developing that skill for the players. Do you need to know anything about investigating to succeed at investigating in Gumshoe? No? Then by the same coin, using good investigation strategies won't benefit you: you fall back on "how well my CHARACTER investigates", ignoring half of the player/avatar dynamic.

In the comic, the characters cannot fail to get through the tundra, and the techpriest cannot fail to hack. That means you, as the GM, can't make an adventure out of either of those things; no actual logic puzzle to challenge the player at the hacking terminal, no actual map of the terrain for the guardsman to plan an optimal route through. Just rely on the unfailing strength of your avatar to succeed. This means the only real question asked by the game, of the players, is "Can you afford the price of not instantaneous victory?" and if the answer is "yes", you will get the next chunk of content.

Dying in the snow is fun, goddamnit. It makes getting through the snow an actual obstacle both in and out of game. That has nothing to do with my taste; that's a structural fact of excluding "fail forward" from a game's design.

This

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055220What is defined as "realistic" in RPG circles is more often than not arbitrary and biased. The "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" convention is a good example of that, and you wrote articles about how magic systems in RPGs are unrealistic in the sense that they are generally not built into the world from first principles and do not fundamentally alter the development of society as they would logically be expected to.

is not talking about the same thing as this

Quote from: jhkim;1055130This depends on the details of the genre and the hero. Roughly speaking, though, I agree that a roll shouldn't result in an outcome that is out-of-genre for the game - or that is unrealistic for a realistic game. If a character is extremely smart, a bad roll shouldn't mean that the character inexplicably becomes stupid for a time. The failure should be in line with what fits with the game.

Note that jhkim was careful in saying out of genre. It not the same thing as the realism you are talking about. Toon and Champions are not realistic games however they are both noted for being faithful to their respective genre. One reason they are consider faithful that if one uses their knowledge of the genre in both, the ensuing actions generally have the expected outcome for that genre. Which includes consequences for failure.

OD&D for example is a mixed of what Gygax thought was realistic and what he thought was important to use out of the fantasy genre. So it has a mix of realistic and fantastic elements. Other RPGs like Harnmaster and much of GURPS are mostly grounded in realism, what the authors thought would happen if you were there looking at what happening as a real world.

The objections being raised here to the fail forward mechanic of Wrath & Glory is a completely different issue. It about metagaming a preordined conclusion into the campaign. The goal of keeping the action flowing is a metagame consideration and has little to do with adjudicating what the players attempt to do as their character. The referee and players have to set outside of the game and decide as participant what is meant by keeping the action flowing.

The alternative I advocate is to consider things only from the viewpoint of the character. For the referee only to adjudicate on the basis of how the setting works or the attitudes of the NPCs. Using the example comic, the players won't know whether they will survive the blizzard as their characters to get to the gate. All they can decide look at what equipment they possess, what skills their character know and weigh the odds of the successfully surviving the blizzard at the moment in time. Or if they are playing Toons, the plan using a trap incorporating Acme TNT will finally get that wascally wabbit.

With Fail Forward in place most of that goes out the window. Failing skill rolls will cause complications but never ultimate failure. You will get to that gate although perhaps missing a hand due to frost bite. You will get the wascally wabbit by but maybe with all your clothes blown off.

Thanks again, CRKrueger for the quote. It gives at least a clear understanding of what is meant. Many people were talking about "fail forward" as implying never really failing - which is not what that section says.

Quote from: ItachiThanks. I think it's a common misconpcetion equaling the concept with "never failing".

Quote from: Azraele;1055248Damn right! It means "never failing if the GM doesn't want you to"

Which is so much worse

Hitting a dead end is supposed to be a clue that you need to change your strategy as a player. If a GM has a situation prepped, rather than an outcome or a "story", then you find that fail-forward isn't really necessary as either advice or mechanic.

In practice, even in a traditional game, it is pretty trivial for a GM to allow players to succeed rather than hit a dead end from a failed roll. The GM can allow a re-roll, or allow another player to take a try, or various other approaches. So while I agree that this could be used for railroading, it doesn't seem like a big difference in practice from traditional games.

On the other hand, it is easily possible for a GM using this "fail forward" to have the players hit a dead end when they wouldn't otherwise. For example, a PC tries to force open the door to the old mineshaft. In a traditional system, he rolls and fails. Now any of the other PCs can try their luck, or he can try again, or he can try to use a weapon to break it apart. In "fail forward", the failed roll could become an actual dead end - i.e. He tries to force the door, and supports break so there is a collapse in the tunnel.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055220What is defined as "realistic" in RPG circles is more often than not arbitrary and biased. The "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" convention is a good example of that, and you wrote articles about how magic systems in RPGs are unrealistic in the sense that they are generally not built into the world from first principles and do not fundamentally alter the development of society as they would logically be expected to.

I believe a more accurate distinction would be gritty versus cinematic. Neither is realistic but instead set the tone of the game.

This is a sidetrack, but "gritty" is very different from "realistic".  Realistic means in reference to the real world, while gritty means in reference to genres of fiction. Often, more gritty is less realistic. In gritty films, say, death often comes more easily than in reality - like a knife in the back means someone falls over dead, while in reality that is highly unlikely.

Yes, what gamers pick from reality can often be biased and/or arbitrary - but that doesn't invalidate the meaning of the word. Realism means being like the real world. It's a pretty simple and straightforward concept.

Quote from: Azraele;1055250If the entire game is structured such that the characters "always succeed", with whatever consequence, at the "right" tasks, then you're structurally creating a game that discourages actually using or developing that skill for the players. Do you need to know anything about investigating to succeed at investigating in Gumshoe? No? Then by the same coin, using good investigation strategies won't benefit you: you fall back on "how well my CHARACTER investigates", ignoring half of the player/avatar dynamic.

Well yeah, part of what every RPG does is abstract away certain skills, and they all differ by which ones they do. It's a feature, not a bug, and ultimately unavoidable anyway.

This is why so called universal or generic systems are a myth, and even a harmful one from a design perspective.

Quote from: AzraeleDamn right! It means "never failing if the GM doesn't want you to"

Which is so much worse

Bro, don't go there. Really. There's no objectively good or bad way to play RPGs, but simply personal preferences. Lots of people play Gumshoe and love it the way it is. Lots of people play games with fail forward and love them the way they are. Lots of people play  [insert game X here] and love it.

Discussing the features and consequences at table for each style/game is interesting enough, without the need to fall to "my style is better than yours".

Speaking of genre and styles, I remember playing Star Wars once and a friend protesting that he was severely wounded by a stormtrooper during a firefight. He said that don't happen in the movies and as such shouldn't happen in the game. After a brief discussion, the GM ended up agreeing with him and this became a new rule for the remaining of our sessions.

I think that reflects well the differences between simulating settings vs genres, and whats appropriate for each. Anyone else had this kind of thing happening?

Quote from: Itachi;1055343Speaking of genre and styles, I remember playing Star Wars once and a friend protesting that he was severely wounded by a stormtrooper during a firefight. He said that don't happen in the movies and as such shouldn't happen in the game. After a brief discussion, the GM ended up agreeing with him and this became a new rule for the remaining of our sessions.

I think that reflects well the differences between simulating settings vs genres, and whats appropriate for each. Anyone else had this kind of thing happening?

The problem with that is that you're conflating two different things.  Being a main protagonist has nothing to do with any genre or IP setting.  The main characters don't die in Star Wars because they are the main characters in a work of fiction.  However Luke gets his hand chopped off and mauled by a Hoth Yeti, Han and Leia are tortured, and Leia is shot by a stormtrooper (although not a grievous injury).  But Ben, Qui-Gon, Han, and Luke all die eventually.  Protagonists frequently have script immunity.  Even Game of Thrones hasn't permanently killed off Dany or Jon.  

No matter how light or dark in tone the genre is, or what its tropes are, protagonists live because they are protagonists, not because of a genre or setting trope.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055348The problem with that is that you're conflating two different things.  Being a main protagonist has nothing to do with any genre or IP setting.  The main characters don't die in Star Wars because they are the main characters in a work of fiction.  However Luke gets his hand chopped off and mauled by a Hoth Yeti, Han and Leia are tortured, and Leia is shot by a stormtrooper (although not a grievous injury).  But Ben, Qui-Gon, Han, and Luke all die eventually.  Protagonists frequently have script immunity.  Even Game of Thrones hasn't permanently killed off Dany or Jon.  

No matter how light or dark in tone the genre is, or what its tropes are, protagonists live because they are protagonists, not because of a genre or setting trope.

I agree here; regardless of genre and tone I often loathe killing PCs for crap rolls unless the player's good with it. There's usually a discussion as to if they want them to die and if not, I go with an interesting penalty (or several), such as a lost lomb, sight, memory, item, etc. Your GoT example is excellent and I'd like to focus on Jon Snow being betrayed and murdered. I found it much more interesting that he came back to exact revenge/justice than, "Oh, another GoT protagonist died". The same with Jamie's hand being cut off. He could've been killed but it was so much more interesting to see him grow despite his maiming.

Where I do think genre and tone matter is how a character suffers. Luke's hand getting cut off was pretty gruesome for Star Wars but it's child's play in GoT. Having a protagonist tortured by being severely beaten and sliced up might feel appropriate in a game like Blades in the Dark but might seem out of place in a heroic game of D&D. A lot depends on table preferences, of course.

Quote from: Itachi;1055340Bro, don't go there. Really. There's no objectively good or bad way to play RPGs, but simply personal preferences. Lots of people play Gumshoe and love it the way it is. Lots of people play games with fail forward and love them the way they are. Lots of people play  [insert game X here] and love it.

Discussing the features and consequences at table for each style/game is interesting enough, without the need to fall to "my style is better than yours".

Hey look, let me back up a little here: You can like what you like. I'm not going to call you an asshole for liking something. That's not what I'm about.

But I'm not making a normative statement here: I'm not saying "I dislike, therefore bad"
I'm making an analytical statement: "This incentivizes/discourages, therefore bad"

You can critique my analyses; they exist to be cross-examined. But if you make the mistake (and it IS a mistake) of classifying an analysis as "Just my opinion", you're completely misunderstanding my whole reason for even posting.

I don't like a lot of things that, analytically, are fine. But I recognize that my taste is distinct from my evaluation of it's mechanics.

Quote from: Azraele;1055353Hey look, let me back up a little here: You can like what you like. I'm not going to call you an asshole for liking something. That's not what I'm about.

But I'm not making a normative statement here: I'm not saying "I dislike, therefore bad"
I'm making an analytical statement: "This incentivizes/discourages, therefore bad"

You can critique my analyses; they exist to be cross-examined. But if you make the mistake (and it IS a mistake) of classifying an analysis as "Just my opinion", you're completely misunderstanding my whole reason for even posting.

I don't like a lot of things that, analytically, are fine. But I recognize that my taste is distinct from my evaluation of it's mechanics.

I backtracked to the original bit you posted and agree with the key example. I've been guilty of "Roll Perception!" until they find the one necessary thing and in hindsight that was poor GMing. Now, the key is simply found and they move on. Otherwise it feels like polyhedral Whack-A-Mole to me. I prefer to give a few choices and leave them open, often completely changing something behind-the-screen because a player came up with such a cool idea, to stonewall it would be shitty. That's not to say I change established things (the locked door is still locked) to placate, just that I don't like crafting scenes where there's an established menu of "How to Pass", if that makes sense. I enjoy adjusting for clever players doing things I didn’t think of.

I do see the merits of failing forward with, for example, the Wrath & Glory comic. If the scout fails the navigation roll and it's uninteresting/you don't want to go into them being lost or a random encounter, I see nothing wrong with the PCs arriving but they lose resources/time/equipment/etc. The reason for the failed roll could be they got lost, but you elided the time. This is a great way to move things along provided everyone at the table agrees. That's what I think is important as well as only calling for rolls when it feels appropriate. If it wasn't a threatening or difficult trek, just describe them getting there, especially if the scout is a bad-ass at scouting. (As an aside, I really love Cypher for this as players can adjust the difficulty for rolls they feel are important, to the point they pass without a roll, but it costs them. It really reflects PC proficiency)

I have had thankfully rare instances of things such as a vault door that stymied hacking, jury-rigging, damaging and the eventual "Fuck it, let's go through the (non-existent) vent". Given the logic of the situation it made no sense for there to be another route and a string of shit rolls stonewalled the group. That wasn't poor GMing or playing, it was bad luck and "going back to town" to get more explosives wasn't an option.

Now, we eventually got in after rolling several times but that wasn't fun. In hindsight I would've been fine with a "You manage to hack the door controls but its anti-intrusion defenses damage your rig. It's got a penalty until repaired". Or simply letting us pass as that's where we needed to go and turning back wasn't really an option. Or offering a lead to a key card somehow (the most complicated but coolest, especially if said card was in the building we avoided because of the danger). I do feel these things need to be up-front and clear as well as accepted table practice, otherwise it can feel railroady and remove tension.

Quote from: Azraele;1055353Hey look, let me back up a little here: You can like what you like. I'm not going to call you an asshole for liking something. That's not what I'm about.

Cool. Thanks for clarifying, and sorry if I sounded harsh or offensive. Not my intention.

QuoteBut I'm not making a normative statement here: I'm not saying "I dislike, therefore bad"
I'm making an analytical statement: "This incentivizes/discourages, therefore bad"

But you're still missing the important part: "This incentivizes/discourages, therefore bad"... bad in regard to what?  You can only assert something is bad in regard to the goals and purpose it has set for itself. Gumshoe goals are not making the game-space identical to real life-space, nor about the player ability to find clues in a physical scene.

Same can be said for failing forward. I can't speak for all games that use the concept, but the ones I know are not intent on making the player/character experience identical and thus "making the player deal with dead ends because that's what happens with real persons" or something. Their goal is moving play forward to the next genre-appropriate dilemma, thus cutting off the parts that do not add or enrich those, like combats where "I miss, you miss, he misses, repeat" is frequent, or task resolutions where "I fail. Try again (and again, and again)", etc. In fact, it's actually desirable to "think like a real person would" in these games too, but they will only prompt you to do so when their authors understand its genre-relevant.

To;dr: you can only judge something based on the goals it's set for itself. And not all games have "equaling player-character space" as a goal.

Quote from: Azraele;1055222It's deeper than "tone" though; the way the game is played is radically different if you screw with the core assumptions of the player/game interaction.

"You cannot fail to make progress in an investigation or social situation" is a radical departure from how our real world works; you can overlook a secret, fail to get to the bottom of a mystery, or become totally shunned in a social situation in our actual reality. If those things became impossible, the game would cease to work in a way that upholds the "realism" of the imagined world; it wouldn't recognizably match our real world, making it artificial in a way that "has elves and magic" does not.

Changing the assumptions of the setting is different from changing how players interact with the setting. We need to separate the two concepts to have a productive dialogue about them.

Alright, I misunderstood the argument I was responding to.

I do not believe that realism is appropriate for media entertainment. If people failed as much in fiction as they do in real life, fiction would be much more boring and pointless. Whenever people in fiction fail, the story still moves forward. It does not waste the reader's time (at least not if the editor is competent).

In traditional tabletop games, like Monopoly or Candyland or Go Fish, players always make some kind of progress including negative progress.

So I subscribe wholeheartedly to what I prefer to call the "pass/pass" philosophy. Whenever players roll to randomly determine the outcome of an action, it should either be something good or something bad that moves the adventure forward either way. The outcome should never be a waste of the party's time because this is a game played for entertainment. Using your examples: overlooking a secret has horrible consequences (e.g. the bomb explodes, the assassination succeeds, the nation falls, etc); failing to solve the mystery has horrible consequences (e.g. the werewolf eats the entire village, the ghost kills everyone in the mansion, the serial killer keeps killing, etc); being shunned forces the characters to resort to violence.

@BoxCrayonTales , I also subscribe to your philosophy (specially so nowadays, married with children). But I think there's space in the hobby for more... simulationist (?) bents. I just don't think it's fair to judge, say, a "realistic" game by narrative standards and vice-versa.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055348The problem with that is that you're conflating two different things.  Being a main protagonist has nothing to do with any genre or IP setting.  The main characters don't die in Star Wars because they are the main characters in a work of fiction.  However Luke gets his hand chopped off and mauled by a Hoth Yeti, Han and Leia are tortured, and Leia is shot by a stormtrooper (although not a grievous injury).  But Ben, Qui-Gon, Han, and Luke all die eventually.  Protagonists frequently have script immunity.  Even Game of Thrones hasn't permanently killed off Dany or Jon.  

No matter how light or dark in tone the genre is, or what its tropes are, protagonists live because they are protagonists, not because of a genre or setting trope.

I get what you're saying, and agree. But in my specific example the player got offense in getting seriously injured by a stormtrooper. If it was a bounty hunter, a sith or whatever he would be okay. But a stormtrooper? Come on, everyone knows stormtroopers are trained to not injure anyone. :D

Quote from: Itachi;1055376@BoxCrayonTales , I also subscribe to your philosophy (specially so nowadays, married with children). But I think there's space in the hobby for more... simulationist (?) bents. I just don't think it's fair to judge, say, a "realistic" game by narrative standards and vice-versa.

I don't remember judging a realistic game by narrative standards. I said I don't think realism is appropriate for entertainment, since real life is really boring.

It wasn't you. It was Azraele.

Quote from: Itachi;1055390It wasn't you. It was Azraele.

Azraele? Him? I like him. He digs ninjas and he's grumpy. :D

Haha I dig ninjas too.

Btw, did you know real ninjas didn't actually wear black pajamas, nor used straight swords called ninja-to? A pity, ne?

Quote from: Azraele;1055353You can critique my analyses; they exist to be cross-examined.

I didn't mean all at once! XD

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055359I backtracked to the original bit you posted and agree with the key example. I've been guilty of "Roll Perception!" until they find the one necessary thing and in hindsight that was poor GMing. Now, the key is simply found and they move on. Otherwise it feels like polyhedral Whack-A-Mole to me. I prefer to give a few choices and leave them open, often completely changing something behind-the-screen because a player came up with such a cool idea, to stonewall it would be shitty. That's not to say I change established things (the locked door is still locked) to placate, just that I don't like crafting scenes where there's an established menu of "How to Pass", if that makes sense. I enjoy adjusting for clever players doing things I didn't think of.

"Polyhedral Whack-A-Mole" made me smile.

I agree with you in terms of encouraging player creativity and not "boxing in" what "counts" as success; I think where we disagree is in the method.

For example, I don't feel like I'm being shitty if a stonewall a player's idea if and only if there's an actual reason for it to be stonewalled.

Like, if they have a clever solution ("We set a fire at the dungeon entrance, smoking out the goblins!") and that solution doesn't lead to the outcome they predicted (turns out there are more entrances to the cavern system that ventilate the smoke) it can lead to other, unexpected and enjoyable outcomes (Party deduces, then searches for, these ventilating alternative entrances)

I don't change things behind the scenes because that would replace the unexpected, organic outcome with one of my choosing. Meaning, in so many words, that I would dictate what constituted "acceptable" fun.

Remaining a neutral arbiter of physics and rules empowers players; it removes their agency if the world changes according to my whims.

Now, there are costs to running the way I do; you have to prep pretty intricately and there can be "dead zones" where the players genuinely encounter a no-content area (empty dungeon, f'rex). I find this preferable to the alternative, but ultimately that's a normative decision on my part as referee.

Paul Czege once said something to the effect of "It's boring if the same person who thinks of the puzzle thinks of the solution". I try to use that as a guiding principle when I prep and run.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055359I do see the merits of failing forward with, for example, the Wrath & Glory comic. If the scout fails the navigation roll and it's uninteresting/you don't want to go into them being lost or a random encounter, I see nothing wrong with the PCs arriving but they lose resources/time/equipment/etc. The reason for the failed roll could be they got lost, but you elided the time. This is a great way to move things along provided everyone at the table agrees. That's what I think is important as well as only calling for rolls when it feels appropriate. If it wasn't a threatening or difficult trek, just describe them getting there, especially if the scout is a bad-ass at scouting. (As an aside, I really love Cypher for this as players can adjust the difficulty for rolls they feel are important, to the point they pass without a roll, but it costs them. It really reflects PC proficiency)

That's a neat mechanic. I agree with you here; I don't feel that rolls should be structured in a way that "nothing happens" (a "null result") can happen with no consequences.

But that's a key point: no consequences. "Nothing happens: try again" has consequences in the proper circumstance. For example, in a dungeon, rolling to pick a lock. You can just "roll again" essentially as many times as you want... But each roll costs you time, which translates to an increased risk of the encounter dice generating a wandering monster.

In other words, the cost is time and risk of being eaten.

In third edition, they introduced mechanics that allowed you to "skip ahead" in time to generate an unrolled minimum number to add to your roll ("taking ten" or "taking twenty"). This is a different version of the mechanic you mentioned, replacing "player emphasis" with "available, risk-free time".

You can go further back, all the way to B/X (as I do) and skip the mathematical dimension altogether: If players are in a non-dangerous circumstance, they broadly can or cannot accomplish things as you'd expect a skilled person could.

Effectively the reasoning behind that mechanic has existed since the inception of the hobby.

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055359I have had thankfully rare instances of things such as a vault door that stymied hacking, jury-rigging, damaging and the eventual "Fuck it, let's go through the (non-existent) vent". Given the logic of the situation it made no sense for there to be another route and a string of shit rolls stonewalled the group. That wasn't poor GMing or playing, it was bad luck and "going back to town" to get more explosives wasn't an option.

Let me share something with you: I have done this exact same thing.

However, I would consider it failing as a GM if I created a circumstance that only had a single solution. I would feel like a fool if I made a dungeon with only one entrance, to go along with your example (note I'm not calling you foolish for this; I'm just talking about how I would feel)

I would rectify this negative feeling by learning from my mistake and making a more thoroughly Jacquayed dungeon in the future https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055359Now, we eventually got in after rolling several times but that wasn't fun. In hindsight I would've been fine with a "You manage to hack the door controls but its anti-intrusion defenses damage your rig. It's got a penalty until repaired". Or simply letting us pass as that's where we needed to go and turning back wasn't really an option. Or offering a lead to a key card somehow (the most complicated but coolest, especially if said card was in the building we avoided because of the danger). I do feel these things need to be up-front and clear as well as accepted table practice, otherwise it can feel railroady and remove tension.

There's something sneaking under your radar, and I want to draw your attention to it non-critically. You're making a value judgement about something that will happen in the game (the players will or must break in to the compound).

The definition of railroading, as it applies to TTRPGs, is in that value judgement. You've decided on the outcome: the dice, the mechanics, even player agency must ultimately conform to your idea of what will happen.

Again, I'm not criticizing here: I'm trying to explain that the reason your technique there seems railroad-y, the reason I avoid using it, is because it is structurally a railroad.

Quote from: Itachi;1055364Cool. Thanks for clarifying, and sorry if I sounded harsh or offensive. Not my intention.

You totally didn't sound harsh: I certainly did though! That post was me taking stock of my tone and tone-policing myself.

Quote from: Itachi;1055364But you're still missing the important part: "This incentivizes/discourages, therefore bad"... bad in regard to what?  You can only assert something is bad in regard to the goals and purpose it has set for itself. Gumshoe goals are not making the game-space identical to real life-space, nor about the player ability to find clues in a physical scene.

According to the tagline (and I admit to lacking a deeper understanding than very cursory research regarding Gumshoe or it's goals):

"GUMSHOE is a system for designing and playing investigative roleplaying games and adventures, emulating stories where investigators uncover a series of clues, and interpret them to solve a mystery.

In a GUMSHOE game, the player characters discover something which triggers their investigation, and then the Game Moderator (GM) narrates them through a number of scenes, during which they use their Investigative Abilities to gather the core clues they need to move the narrative forward. They must then put the clues together to uncover the secrets behind the mystery."

In other words, it's a story, not a game. In this story, the players (actors) rely on the investigative skills of their avatars (characters in the story) to propel the story to its (author-chosen) outcome.

I have news for you: this is a railroad. It structurally precludes the possibility of failure so that it's pre-determined outcome inevitably will be reached.

If you find this activity satisfying, more power to you: again, I'm not here to declare that doing this is wrong or stupid. But unless there's a possibility that an outcome other than the one selected before play begins can be achieved, I don't see how you can escape the conclusion that this isn't a game: it's an ultimately linear narrative. It just happens to use dice and involve your friends.

...

Additionally:

I don't really want to "make the game-space the same as life-space". But I expect "You can do what a person can do" and "most things work, physically and socially speaking, as you'd expect them to" as elements of the design.

This is a normative value I hold: I'll cop to that being 100% my personal preference.

Things like magic can break those rules (as a matter of fact, I'd prefer cool stuff like magic in my games!) but as ultimate touchstones for players interacting with a shared, imagined world? They're very useful and teachable.

Further, I want that shared imagined world to have solidity and integrity. I don't want things to "change behind the curtains": I am the least qualified of all idiot-gods, and I do not want to be "in charge" of the game's universe.

Maybe as a creator-god, putting in dungeons and monsters and treasure, but not as an always-editing George Lucas god, constantly re-evaluating everything to fit my current mood.

Quote from: Itachi;1055364Same can be said for failing forward. I can't speak for all games that use the concept, but the ones I know are not intent on making the player/character experience identical and thus "making the player deal with dead ends because that's what happens with real persons" or something. Their goal is moving play forward to the next genre-appropriate dilemma, thus cutting off the parts that do not add or enrich those, like combats where "I miss, you miss, he misses, repeat" is frequent, or task resolutions where "I fail. Try again (and again, and again)", etc. In fact, it's actually desirable to "think like a real person would" in these games too, but they will only prompt you to do so when their authors understand its genre-relevant.

I feel like you're inserting "appeal to the boring real world" as some kind of motive or standard I possess: I don't. Stop doing that.

Instead, use your efforts to understand my standard and goal actually is: Integrity

Not personal integrity (lord knows I don't have any of that wretched stuff) but setting integrity. If I establish that there's a door, then the players can trust that there is, indeed, a door. It functions as they expect it would, and they can interact with it as they'd expect they could.

I don't need to appeal to genre to know what good, engrossing gameplay looks like: it looks like players making meaningful decisions. It looks like them risking failure and consequences. It looks like them making plans that have value because they can understand and predict the world.

They can do these things because they know I'm not changing things behind the scenes based on what I consider "genre-appropriate" or making a personal judgement over what constitutes "enriching" activities, allowing or disallowing activities based on a narrative preconception.

The imagined world isn't realistic; myths and epics never are. But it does have integrity, because I'm not constantly shifting its established facts to suit my personal creative vision.  

If you replace "integrity of the imagined world" with "integrity of the genre/story/narrative" then you place yourself in the position of author, rather than referee. You find yourself curtailing the player's freedom to interact with the setting if it doesn't conform to the "plot" of your "story"

Is this bad? For me it is. Again, that's a normative judgement of mine. But when we talk about game structure, we should be concrete about these fundamental assumptions.

Quote from: Itachi;1055364To;dr: you can only judge something based on the goals it's set for itself. And not all games have "equaling player-character space" as a goal.

It's not too long, and I did read it and consider it carefully (your effort in writing it is worth at least that, in my estimation!)

Let me rephrase, one final time, my central counter-point to your post: You applied the idea of "equaling player-character space" as a goal, not me.

I want the risk of true failure. I want player's plans to matter independent of me deciding they matter. I want a game free of a normatively-chosen end-state.

I want these things because I believe (and have some evidence to support) that they make a more robust, tactically engrossing, challenging, immersive, and satisfying play experience.

And I don't want an RPG with "a narrative" with "an author", because If believe (and again, can argumentatively support) that it removes player agency, curtails genuine investment in the activity, and introduces volumes of systemic problems that are not only undesirable, they're totally unnecessary.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366Alright, I misunderstood the argument I was responding to.

That's okay; I do that all the time!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366I do not believe that realism is appropriate for media entertainment. If people failed as much in fiction as they do in real life, fiction would be much more boring and pointless. Whenever people in fiction fail, the story still moves forward. It does not waste the reader's time (at least not if the editor is competent).

That's true... Kind of. I'm fine with the "miss-miss-miss" combats described up-thread because, when you're fighting for your life in a monster-haunted dungeon, those near-misses are rich fodder for genuine tension.

If you're actually risking your life when you pick up the dice, there's a moment of real exhilaration when you pick up your attack dice; a moment of true disappointment and worry when you miss. A moment of real fear as the foe throws their attack, and a moment of genuine relief and hope when they miss.

All this from the dice; let alone a good, tense description of near-misses and close calls.

If not making progress towards the fortress means a real risk of freezing to death, then there's real terror in picking up the dice and a moment of genuine triumph if you succeed. I don't feel like that's a waste of time

Although perhaps you're not talking about those circumstances: you're maybe talking about "we stay out here in the cold while you hack the terminal"

It'd be a lot more fun if "you fail" was followed by "it gets darker, and the cold gets deadlier". Maybe an occasional "you hear the howling of mutant wolves in the distance". Add in a dash of "Hey, is that an access port up there on the mountainside?" that you could add in if there was more than one way in to the fortress (if the scenario designer hadn't provided a solution, but a puzzle)

I don't need fail forward for that: I could have (and constantly do) all of that with B/X. Again, all of this has existed in the hobby for a long time.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366In traditional tabletop games, like Monopoly or Candyland or Go Fish, players always make some kind of progress including negative progress.

I really like this characterization of games: it sort-of divides them into three broad states:

Negative progress ("We go further away from the fort because of a bad roll")

Null progress ("nothing changes")

Positive progress ("We get closer to the fort")

However, when you consider it, you can't really get that middle one: inevitably, something happens when you embark on your journey.

Time passes in the cold as you wander around lost. You get caught in a snow drift. You fall into an underground ice cave. You get attacked by mutant wolves.

So really, when you drill down into that analysis, what you find is that you're always making positive progress towards something happening.

The only thing fail-forward does is tell you that the GM will custom deliver this content to you. The way I structure games, this is redundant: every hex has a status quo of something happening there, every dungeon is full of rooms, every chunk of time passing risks an encounter throw with a nearby denizen.

So structurally, there's no need for fail-forward if you make a game that consistently delivers this kind of content.

Note, the potential for "empty rooms" (or null content, if you will) exists, but this is desirable; sometimes characters need to rest, or plan, or do something other than whatever the core thing of the game is. This makes "null" content into a resource for the players; it's strategically appealing to encounter a defensible location in the depths of a hostile dungeon!  

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366So I subscribe wholeheartedly to what I prefer to call the "pass/pass" philosophy. Whenever players roll to randomly determine the outcome of an action, it should either be something good or something bad that moves the adventure forward either way.

We are in total agreement here, I just wanted to point out.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366The outcome should never be a waste of the party's time because this is a game played for entertainment. Using your examples: overlooking a secret has horrible consequences (e.g. the bomb explodes, the assassination succeeds, the nation falls, etc); failing to solve the mystery has horrible consequences (e.g. the werewolf eats the entire village, the ghost kills everyone in the mansion, the serial killer keeps killing, etc); being shunned forces the characters to resort to violence.

Exactly! Perfect!

But (and this is a significant but): don't make a judgment call on what "wastes the party's time". Learning the hard way is still learning; wasting time means something you didn't anticipate happens, not that "nothing happens"
Was it a waste of time to go upstairs instead of down? It wasn't what the party should have done to kill the vampire sleeping in the basement; but they did risk an encounter with his ghouls up there (and a thrilling combat).

Or maybe they encountered nothing but a hayloft and learned, simply "the vampire's not here": enterprising players also learned that they had a great location to set up an ambush!

If I judged the hayloft a "waste of time" and excised it from the barn, they wouldn't have gotten that opportunity.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055366Alright, I misunderstood the argument I was responding to.

I do not believe that realism is appropriate for media entertainment. If people failed as much in fiction as they do in real life, fiction would be much more boring and pointless. Whenever people in fiction fail, the story still moves forward. It does not waste the reader's time (at least not if the editor is competent).

I don't think this has much to do with realism or not. There are plenty of people who do, in fact, read non-fiction for entertainment - biographies, travelogues, true crime, war stories, and so forth. Within non-fiction, it is equally true that the writer doesn't waste the reader's time - if the editor is competent.

Within RPGs, the core issue I think is repeated rolls versus a single decisive roll.

Azraele, I do not want to fuck with whittling down your reply on my tablet, so I will address the bits about railroading and "dungeon design". Firstly, it's not really railroading to me because the PCs belong there, by player or plot choice. In an upcoming session of our GeneSys game, the PCs will eventually go to this ziggurat one of them had dark dreams about. It will happen. Too much time has been invested, both playing and in the narrative, not to have them get there. It would be narratively dissonant otherwise. However, along the way things might go better or poorly based on their choices and dice rolls. It may take more time or resources than they want, adjusting what's ahead. In fact, a PC was arrested last session which could hamper their travels, warn the villain(s), ruin alliances or simply bring them harm. That's up in the air, but...barring something drastic...getting to the ziggurat (assuming it exists) will happen, mostly because they won't stop until it's found.

A quick bit is when I do wish railroad I just do it right off. For example, "After a long journey through hyperspace you break atmo on AV-829. A quick scan reveals the only structure, which must be the Archon's laboratory. You land a few miles away, staying under the radar, then walk to your destination. A few hours later the massive vault doors to the structure loom above you, clearly locked...what do you do?". From there we just see where it goes. That's probably not your style but we all enjoy it, so it works, eh?

As far as rerolling and taking more time, I don't use random encounters nor do I prep details, so I often find rolling again and again to be boring. That probably (most likely?) stems from the three systems I most enjoy: Forged in the Dark, Cypher and GeneSys, all which guide a lot of the outcomes and that I can quickly couple with my ideas on-the-fly. I'm a highly improvisational GM and set up a framework and sandbox of things that might be around, then see what strikes my fancy, where the dice fall and what things the players come up with, all through the lens of the mechanics.

The way you handle things makes sense and I respect it. I can learn from it, which I'm always happy to do. I have changed my GMing a lot over the years, coming to desire faster, more improvised play.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1055214What games mechanically support "success at a cost." Where the player can CHOOSE to succeed by making things worse for themselves.

Blades in the Dark and Cypher both have the option in their foundation. Bit of a "how much do you really want it" kind of thing.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1055425Blades in the Dark and Cypher both have the option in their foundation. Bit of a "how much do you really want it" kind of thing.

Any game where a player can choose a better chance of success at the "expense" of falling for a beautiful, naked woman is choice, eh? Sweet, stupid Ivan...;)

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055441Any game where a player can choose a better chance of success at the "expense" of falling for a beautiful, naked woman is choice, eh? Sweet, stupid Ivan...;)

Hey! That kinda worked out for Ivan.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1055444Hey! That kinda worked out for Ivan.

Yes, it did. Too bad half the crew thought releasing starving, insane shark-demons was a good idea, eh?

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055445Yes, it did. Too bad half the crew thought releasing starving, insane shark-demons was a good idea, eh?

Eh. Cut down on the homeless problem.

Quote from: Azraele;1055250I disagree with you. I'm not discussing the emotions of the players or their belief, I'm talking about the presence or absence of consequence in the game. Gumshoe violates this just as much as any other fail-forward; the players of the game know that, structurally, they can act in a way that the game's assumed reality will guarantee an outcome. They wouldn't know this even in a diceless game like Amber; they would only know that they could unfailingly investigate to a certain degree of capability, not that they were assured of progress in the investigation.

If the entire game is structured such that the characters "always succeed", with whatever consequence, at the "right" tasks, then you're structurally creating a game that discourages actually using or developing that skill for the players. Do you need to know anything about investigating to succeed at investigating in Gumshoe? No? Then by the same coin, using good investigation strategies won't benefit you: you fall back on "how well my CHARACTER investigates", ignoring half of the player/avatar dynamic.

In the comic, the characters cannot fail to get through the tundra, and the techpriest cannot fail to hack. That means you, as the GM, can't make an adventure out of either of those things; no actual logic puzzle to challenge the player at the hacking terminal, no actual map of the terrain for the guardsman to plan an optimal route through. Just rely on the unfailing strength of your avatar to succeed. This means the only real question asked by the game, of the players, is "Can you afford the price of not instantaneous victory?" and if the answer is "yes", you will get the next chunk of content.

Dying in the snow is fun, goddamnit. It makes getting through the snow an actual obstacle both in and out of game. That has nothing to do with my taste; that's a structural fact of excluding "fail forward" from a game's design.

Dying in the snow is fine. If your character extends only so far as "This is Thud, lvl 1 Barbarian. He's dead? Here's Thug, lvl 1 Barbarian". Xerox copies dropping like flies in the opening act is fine if they're shallow.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1055453Dying in the snow is fine. If your character extends only so far as "This is Thud, lvl 1 Barbarian. He's dead? Here's Thug, lvl 1 Barbarian". Xerox copies dropping like flies in the opening act is fine if they're shallow.

You find it incentivizes certain things

Like players developing their characters through the course of the campaign, rather than frontloading them with a backstory from the start

And playing more conservatively and intelligently as they emotionally invest in their character

And treating the game's world as a serious, threatening place with lasting consequences

I find that stuff desirable: it's completely understandable that someone might not feel the same way

Quote from: Azraele;1055461You find it incentivizes certain things

Like players developing their characters through the course of the campaign, rather than frontloading them with a backstory from the start

And playing more conservatively and intelligently as they emotionally invest in their character

And treating the game's world as a serious, threatening place with lasting consequences

I find that stuff desirable: it's completely understandable that someone might not feel the same way

-We don't detail much backstory, only what's "needed on-screen". A front-loaded backstory gets cumbersome for everyone.

-There should be lasting consequences, we simply find death one of many, and often the least interesting.

We do the same but get there a little differently, which is really cool! It's great there are so many switches and dials irrespective of system to gift the experiences you want. Azraele, you should really consider trying Blades in the Dark. It does a lot of what you seem to enjoy. And it's got three of my favorite design choices ever. :)

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1055452Eh. Cut down on the homeless problem.

Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Too soon...

Claudio was a dick then, but I get why you did it. lol

For context...if people care...one of Mr Squee's most excellent PCs (the fucker has so many awesome characters!) in our Blades in the Dark game grabbed a vagrant who had witnessed them dealing with a demon. The demon said, "Bring me the meat, dead one" (Claudio was a vampire), which he did. The demon grabbed the mewling, terrified man, distended its jaws and slowly bit his face off, his muffled screams giving way to crunching bone and gurgling blood. The demon then dove into the water with his twitching body and swam off, leaving a wake of crimson.

I miss that game!

Quote from: Alderaan Crumbs;1055463-We don't detail much backstory, only what's "needed on-screen". A front-loaded backstory gets cumbersome for everyone.

This is one of the things these modern games like PbtA, Blades and Cortex do right. Make backgrounds relevant to the actual game in a way that's on point and not cumbersome.

In our last Sagas of the Icelanders game (a PbtA) the clan members past grudges with each other ended up not only fueling, but driving, the adventures. And it was a blast. Our godi kept trying to make the shieldmaiden the predestined leader he saw in a dream, while the shieldmaiden kept being a prick provoking fights with neighbour clans and the father, chief of the longhouse, kept trying to hold the clan from falling apart. At first the group kinda expected the game to be about viking raids and great battles, but soon sidelined that opting instead to pursue their personal agendas. It was then that the game really took off, as the GM just backed off to a reactive stance while the players dictated the flow and direction of the adventures. Everybody got much more invested because of this.

It does seem like there is a central design concern of many games to eliminating players failing at stuff. Which is odd because somehow there's a ton of people who play games that allow failure and they have great times. Which is also weird because IN FICTION protagonists fail CONSTANTLY.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1055472It does seem like there is a central design concern of many games to eliminating players failing at stuff. Which is odd because somehow there's a ton of people who play games that allow failure and they have great times. Which is also weird because IN FICTION protagonists fail CONSTANTLY.

Some people have an expectation when playing an RPG that automatic success is baked in some shape or form into their stories. This is a product of wish-fulfillment that they require because of whatever shit they are unable to deal with in their own lives. Hence the rabid popularity with psychotic SJW's of games like FATE where the GM has less power and control than in other traditional RPG's.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1055472It does seem like there is a central design concern of many games to eliminating players failing at stuff. Which is odd because somehow there's a ton of people who play games that allow failure and they have great times. Which is also weird because IN FICTION protagonists fail CONSTANTLY.

For some people there is an expectation that automatic success be baked into their stories when playing an RPG. This is a product of being unable to separate gaming from their real lives and all the shit that they perceive whether unfairly or not that life has thrown at them. So for such people, their character's stories must succeed in order to counterbalance the unfairness of their own existences. This is why games such as FATE are so popular with the psychotic SJWs, which takes power from the GM (The Man who wants to keep them down) and putting more of it into the hands of the players unlike more traditional RPGs.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1055472Which is also weird because IN FICTION protagonists fail CONSTANTLY.

And (assuming competent writers) those failures are entertaining / dramatic / funny / tearful because they are scripted in advance. Remember Inigo trying and failing to break through the door to chase after the six-fingered man? You could have ended the movie right there, but it would have be dull as hell.

In gaming terms, I as the GM want to have a dramatic chase that culminates in a dramatic showdown. As the GM I could (and have) played the whole thing completely loose, but not for this particular game. In this particular game, I (and probably Inigo's player) know that the pursuit will ultimately succeed. In the event, Inigo's player failed his pursuit check, but in "interesting failure" terminology, I rule that Inigo is simply delayed until Fezzik shows up next round.

That's why I take issue with Azraele's analysis.

QuoteIn the comic, the characters cannot fail to get through the tundra, and the techpriest cannot fail to hack. That means you, as the GM, can't make an adventure out of either of those things; no actual logic puzzle to challenge the player at the hacking terminal, no actual map of the terrain for the guardsman to plan an optimal route through. Just rely on the unfailing strength of your avatar to succeed. This means the only real question asked by the game, of the players, is "Can you afford the price of not instantaneous victory?" and if the answer is "yes", you will get the next chunk of content.

As a GM, playing that style of game, I want the main action to take place inside the evil fortress, with interesting scenes beforehand serving as dramatic build up. The players fumbling some rolls in the first twenty minutes and their PCs all dying of frostbite ain't fun for them, and it ain't fun for me. The party will get through the snow, they will get through the door.
In a looser game, I might say "there is a snowstorm, and there is a locked door, what are you going to do?" The chips then fall where they may, but that's a different tone of game.

With GUMSHOE, there is plenty of room to fail, but generally it forces you to choose a different path (or possibly to burn additional resources), it doesn't bring the game to crashing halt.

One of the mechanisms that I like the sound of (but have bounced off in the couple of times I practised) is the one from Burning Wheel, where in order to improve skills you need to have a certain number of failures marked.

Compare that to say Call of Cthulhu where using a skill allows you a roll against your percentage (at level-up time). If you fail that roll, you improve the skill (harder to teach an old dog new tricks). It's good, but I've have seen that it tends to encourage people to push for the use of weird skills just to claim a roll.
In Burning Wheel, the players need to (can) have their characters make riskier decisions than they might otherwise would, the intention being that this adds more drama to scenes. (It didn't resonate with me, but I am not dismissing the creative intent).

Gumeshoe Investigative Skills only automatically work IF the clue is for that skill. That is, the GM or adventure designer has to design in advance that the clue is an Art History clue or whatever, and then IF you have at least one point you automatically get it with no role-playing required. I think this is right.

Quote from: Itachi;1055469This is one of the things these modern games like PbtA, Blades and Cortex do right. Make backgrounds relevant to the actual game in a way that's on point and not cumbersome.

In our last Sagas of the Icelanders game (a PbtA) the clan members past grudges with each other ended up not only fueling, but driving, the adventures. And it was a blast. Our godi kept trying to make the shieldmaiden the predestined leader he saw in a dream, while the shieldmaiden kept being a prick provoking fights with neighbour clans and the father, chief of the longhouse, kept trying to hold the clan from falling apart. At first the group kinda expected the game to be about viking raids and great battles, but soon sidelined that opting instead to pursue their personal agendas. It was then that the game really took off, as the GM just backed off to a reactive stance while the players dictated the flow and direction of the adventures. Everybody got much more invested because of this.

So true and a thing I have carried forward in my GMing. Even with a very character-focused/-driven game like Invisible Sun you only detail what's needed in the beginning. I really enjoy this way of creating characters lore.

The PCs are 40k heroes. If your players are too fucking stupid to figure out how these heroes can survive a snowstorm and enter a fortress, then you need new players.

No amount of rules are going to save those fuckheads.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1055669The PCs are 40k heroes. If your players are too fucking stupid to figure out how these heroes can survive a snowstorm and enter a fortress, then you need new players.

No amount of rules are going to save those fuckheads.

Well, Tier 1 characters are no heroes. Having some Imperial Guardsmen die of hypothermia or walking off a cliff in a blizzard isn't at all out of place.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1055013So 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.

Exactly, which is why it has no business whatsoever in an RPG.