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There are a few different parts to the issue, which as per usual are the most glaringly worst in D&D. 3.5e and similar iterations get excessively simulation-y with how checks are handled, so if you fail to pick a lock the GM is left going "um, try again I guess?" This attitude gives us the idea of "taking 20", because the game assumes that every isolated attempt to pick a lock is a single die-roll made over the course of a 6-second round, so if you have enough time you can just spam until you roll the maximum. A lot of other systems suggest that failing to pick the lock should naturally mean that you just can't pick that particular lock under current circumstances no matter how long you try, so it's time to find another course of action for the story to proceed like finding a key or kicking the door in or just knocking politely and hoping for the best. Doing things this way then puts some burden on the GM to not have single-point-of-entry bottlenecks that can dead-end the campaign, but it's certainly more interesting than "try again". It's then an entirely different discussion as to whether failing to pick the lock should result in the door opening anyway, but now with wacky consequences, but I personally prefer for failed checks to mean that the players have to improvise new plans rather than just throwing more hazards at them.
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Apr 2, 2021 02:30
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Liquid Communism posted:Matt Campbell talks about it in his rant on failure states. Basically the logic is never letting a failed roll derail the game. He does a great explanation of what it looks like using a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark as an illustration, check that out. It's pretty good but I want to add two caveats:
Like, this stuff isn't easy, but I want to highlight how it isn't easy.
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Apr 2, 2021 02:54
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LatwPIAT posted:It's pretty good but I want to add two caveats: The trick here is that this kind of failing forward makes a lot more sense for the GM than for the players, because they know what would have happened if the PC hadn't failed. The player doesn't know, especially not if the difficulty was a penalty or a bonus to the opponent. Stories can generally be enjoyable because of the surprise of how the hero doesn't die, but in an RPG it's just you and your buddies who have to come up with that.
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Apr 2, 2021 03:26
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hyphz posted:It seems "fail forward" has had two meanings at different times. Sometimes it means "if you fail the roll something else happens". Sometimes, it means "if you fail the roll, you succeed but something goes wrong later on" (eg, "if you roll low to pick the lock, you do open the door but the guards get a bonus to detect you because they heard something weird"). I think the last one was taken from Sorcerer at some point? LatwPIAT posted:It's pretty good but I want to add two caveats: The "forward" in "fail forward" means "motion", not "progress". A better statement is "don't make them roll for the same thing twice". If somebody's not on a critical plot path, bounce them off and point down the path; if somebody's on a critical plot path, give them a price to pay to keep going. Since Indy jumping is on the critical plot path - well, it's a bit unfair to point D&D at that, because D&D is a binary pass-or-fail skill system, it doesn't really contain the idea of a price to pay. If Indy beefs it in Blades in the Dark, you just tell Indy that he beefs it, plummets into blackness, and dies in obscurity - then he can resist as normal. If Indy beefs it in an Apocalypse Engine game, maybe you were planning if he almost made it to give him the choice between going full-tilt and taking damage from the collision or backing off enough to land somewhere secure and burning some adventuring gear to climb up, so you just do both - he takes the (unexpected to him) damage and winds up somewhere he needs to burn adventuring gear to get up. In Fate, the easy out is to rack stress or consequences or negative boosts to make up the margin of failure, depending on how far away Indy is from a scene break. But in all of these systems, it's generally good practice not to get sucked in by the odds and think only about Indy's success when you present him with the roll. Think about failure, and don't let him make the roll until you've come up with a way for it to be interesting. Getting sucked in by the odds can be a big problem when you're writing an entire adventure, leading you to create scenarios where success is expected and unremarkable and failure is complete and devastating.
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Apr 2, 2021 03:36
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LatwPIAT posted:It's pretty good but I want to add two caveats: The biggest thing for 'not guaranteed to survive the story' is communication. It is an absolute must that you as a GM sit down with your players and discuss before even making characters what kind of game you're running. Are you running a tactical combat game where the enemies are going to play the rules as sharply and intelligently as the players, and are trying to win? Are you playing a more narrative focused game where the mechanics are there to make the heroes' story more complicated? Somewhere inbetween? All of these are fine, but any of them require everyone at the table being on the same page. The deeply attached to their characters and expecting to play out the story of how they got through the narrative group is going to be unhappy and traumatized if you merk out one of the PCs, especially unfairly, and it will probably stop the session and derail the campaign. The tactical and adversarial group is going to consider that to be a challenge to be overcome. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 03:58
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Liquid Communism posted:The biggest thing for 'not guaranteed to survive the story' is communication. It is an absolute must that you as a GM sit down with your players and discuss before even making characters what kind of game you're running. Are you running a tactical combat game where the enemies are going to play the rules as sharply and intelligently as the players, and are trying to win? Are you playing a more narrative focused game where the mechanics are there to make the heroes' story more complicated? Somewhere inbetween? Oh, certainly, but Matt Campbell assumes it a given that players want to play heroes who don't die to falling down the pit, which is not always the case.
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Apr 2, 2021 04:25
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LatwPIAT posted:Oh, certainly, but Matt Campbell assumes it a given that players want to play heroes who don't die to falling down the pit, which is not always the case. Absolutely. To use an anecdote, this came up in a Shadowrun game I was playing in. The players are breaking into a highrise apartment to try and track down a guy one of the runners thought he killed in backstory, but had turned up and told them to come turn themselves over to be killed or he'd kill their friends and family. They infiltrate the target's 70th floor apartment to find him waiting with a hostage (one of the players who couldn't make it's character, used by agreement), and his bodyguards. He says he just wants to talk to the guy who killed him, and if he comes over everyone else can leave quietly. Otherwise his bodyguard would mince the hostage. Not wanting to be responsible for killing someone's character while they aren't even there, he says sure and heads over to talk to the guy. Guards let him past, and they have their conversation, hostage now standing unthreatened next to them. Meanwhile, one of the bodyguards is giving the other PCs poo poo, lording over them how the big scary shadowrunners got beat by an old man. Conversation finishes, old man says 'Oh, one more thing...'. Casts Ram. Blows the PC out the floor to ceiling windows. It's 70 stories to the street. GM does a little math, says that'll take about 7 seconds to fall, so he'll give us 2 rounds before dude hits ground. Manageable, we're prepared for this kind of thing, he'll just pop his emergency chute. Guards open up, it turns into a shootout. Next round, the old guy leans over and casts Control Thoughts. Orders the falling runner to just swan dive. Rest of the party is pinned down by heavy gunfire from the guards and now building security automation. Our sam manages to down two of the guards, so the adept takes off running to dive out and try to get in range to do something. Tackles the old dude on his way out, hucking him out of the building too. Round two, adept's essentially unable to do anything useful, is told if he doesn't pull his own chute he's going to have to soak the falling damage too. Next round, PC go splat. Takes sufficient damage that the result can only be described as 'messy'. Antagonist follows a round later, laughing the whole way. Rest of the team barely escapes, security hot on their heels. GM calls it a successful mission, because we managed to kill the guy we came to kill. Campaign totally derailed at this point, and a couple of players just peaced out. Now, this would not have been a terrible cap to that character's arc, had three things been true: 1. The player was aware that this was in the offing. Up until now, this was a very action-movie pink mohawk campaign. 2. The death had been the result of a player failure. The session was set up to effectively railroad us, and used the other PC who wasn't there to create an out of game pressure not to just have your buddy's PC die while they're at work. 3. The death had not been the result of negating previous preparation via abuse of a really, really badly written and overpowered spell. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 04:29
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Liquid Communism posted:Next round, the old guy leans over and casts Control Thoughts. Orders the falling runner to just swan dive. This is also a strong example of something unfortunate I see in a lot of stories about PCs dying: the kill-hungry antagonist with no self preservation. When a character takes the time to finish off or confirm the kill on an entirely incapacitated opponent while active combatants are still trying to kill them nearby, that character is either pessimistically certain of their own death and just trying to spitefully take someone out with them, or that character knows they're an expendable NPC in someone else's story that effectively stops existing after the encounter ends either way. Imagine a player acting that way. "I'm at 1 HP and a bunch of archers are lining up shots on me this round? Nah, I'm not going to run out the door and bar it behind me, gotta' get the coup de grace on this rando and get shot to death doing it, that'll show 'em." It wouldn't make any sense. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 04:50
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Glazius posted:The "forward" in "fail forward" means "motion", not "progress". A better statement is "don't make them roll for the same thing twice". If somebody's not on a critical plot path, bounce them off and point down the path; if somebody's on a critical plot path, give them a price to pay to keep going. I’m aware that’s the current meaning, but I’m not sure it was the original meaning. I believe it’s a Forge term and they were notoriously misused. Certainly Sorcerer and Sword contains rules for it, although they’re not called “fail forward” and they encourage it in fiction rather than system terms. One thing that is notable is that the original Sorcerer allowed players to succeed forward; any successes above the threshold on a roll could be banked and applied to any future roll where the earlier success may have been helpful. But unlike fail forward this mechanic seems to have been forgotten, except in FFG Star Wars.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:43
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Finishing off downed and incapacitated opponents makes sense in a world where a single HP worth of magical healing can instantly bring someone back into the fight, and magical healing can be deployed by anyone with a wand, scroll or potion. Sometimes killing a downed foe is self preservation. That doesn't make it the best tactical decision in every circumstance, especially if there are still attackers up and dealing damage. But there's definitely a reason to do it besides spite.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:46
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mellonbread posted:Finishing off downed and incapacitated opponents makes sense in a world where a single HP worth of magical healing can instantly bring someone back into the fight, and magical healing can be deployed by anyone with a wand, scroll or potion. Sometimes killing a downed foe is self preservation. That doesn't make it the best tactical decision in every circumstance, especially if there are still attackers up and dealing damage. But there's definitely a reason to do it besides spite. In the given example, the person being finished off was falling out of a skyscraper. In the one time I've experienced it first-hand, it involved a giant spider of spider-like intellect continuing to attack an unconscious person while three other people were actively hacking it to pieces. "The only hitpoint that matters is the last one" is absolutely some poor design that contributes to things like that, but it's still just game-y and unrealistic character behavior in nearly ever case I've seen. If you're really so worried about someone getting healed and standing up, maybe go spend some time stabbing the healers? Or the people with potions visible on their belts? Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 07:04
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Leperflesh posted:So, what I'm seeing now is more of an interesting focus on combat. Makes sense given the focus for many games. But what about noncombat? Sometimes a skill roll is crucial and sometimes it isn't. In a typical melee with three to five PCs against some bad guys, yes, the players probably know the outcome is a foregone conclusion - they're going to win - and the distance between the worst-case and best-case scenarios are perhaps a matter of some spent resources and a certain amount of attrition. I have a vague recollection that sometime in the 00's, it was already pretty common knowledge that having to succeed in a bunch of skill checks to get something done tanked your chances of actually doing that thing. It wasn't necessarily explicit advice in games, but people were quite happy to show the math for climbing a tall wall and demonstrate how incredibly difficult it could be if you had to roll multiple times. You got D&D supplements like Dungeonscape (2007), that iirc had some really solid advice on making traps a whole encounter instead of hanging some damage on a skill roll and calling it a day. Also in 2007, Robin Laws starts publishing Gumshoe games, and I think that system is still kind of pivotal for how we think of skill rolls and ~the plot~ today. Since then, asking questions like "does this need to be a skill roll?" and "what happens if the player flubs it?" has been normal. But meanwhile, I'm not sure if there ever was that kind of focus on combat. I do remember a lot of blogs were written about D&D 4E encounter design but, well, that game ended up being kinda divisive.  Unknown Armies has that famous page that asks whether you really want to resort to violence, because violence really sucks, but that never really addressed the metagamier question of what the combat scene would actually add to the game. I zoned out of the hobby pretty bad in the mid-10's, so I probably have missed a lot of cool games, but my impression is that mainstream RPGs still treat combat scenes as the meat of the game and are kind of stuck in this multiple round tactical map combat maneuver gun show extravaganza, and the main question isn't "why are we fighting?" or even "how does the fight change the story?" but simply "is the fighting fun?"**Apocalypse World came out way back in 2010 and blazed some very good trail on this front, but I've not really noticed its approach getting absorbed back into the mainstream like for instance Gumshoe has. Of course, the problem here might simply be that I think of "the mainstream" as "D&D and Vampire, both of which are about to turn 40 years old".
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Apr 2, 2021 08:21
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Siivola posted:my impression is that mainstream RPGs still treat combat scenes as the meat of the game and are kind of stuck in this multiple round tactical map combat maneuver gun show extravaganza, and the main question isn't "why are we fighting?" or even "how does the fight change the story?" but simply "is the fighting fun?"* Mainstream RPGs tend to treat combat as the primary option for a defined sandbox for PCs to play with their superpowers, and players looking for tactical systems tend to particularly value that.
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Apr 2, 2021 15:23
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hyphz posted:Mainstream RPGs tend to treat combat as the primary option for a defined sandbox for PCs to play with their superpowers, and players looking for tactical systems tend to particularly value that. What I'm fumbling towards here is, do game just... take this as given? Every game has some kind of GM advice chapter, but how many include a discussion about how to make good stakes for combat? Do premade adventures take PC death into account at all, or does the bad guy's plot just go through unopposed if the party cleric eats poo poo in the intro dungeon? Thanks to Gumshoe and other similar games, we've learned to make noncombat stuff pivotal in the sense that the game can go in various different directions depending on which way the dice fall. I'm not sure if combat works the same way in most games, and I'm wondering if that's an issue with the mechanics of combat, or an issue with how and why combat is used in games in general. And I emphasize that I've been out of the RPG loop for a number of years. For all I know, adventure modules actually do take this stuff into account explicitly and I just don't know it.
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Apr 2, 2021 19:40
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hyphz posted:I’m aware that’s the current meaning, but I’m not sure it was the original meaning. I believe it’s a Forge term and they were notoriously misused. Certainly Sorcerer and Sword contains rules for it, although they’re not called “fail forward” and they encourage it in fiction rather than system terms. I keep coming back to this system because it's the only one I'm playing right now, but: the player's Momentum pool in Modiphius D20 (called other names in other iterations) is exactly this, except even more flexible. You roll for successes against a Difficulty; extra successes can either be immediately spent in a variety of ways, or, banked in the party-shared pool. The pool drops by 1 every round of an action scene, or by 1 at the end of every non-action scene, so there is some pressure to hurry up and use your Momentum rather than just let it trickle away. But on the other hand, once it's in the pool it's just a generic resource and not tied back to the specific skill roll that generated it, so, your extra success at leaping from a balcony can lead to me buying an extra die to roll on an attempt to unlock a door, or stab someone, or find food, or whatever. In the Conan iteration of the system that I'm familiar with, the explicitly stated intention is to encourage action and boldness, in a game that is about action and boldness. When Conan himself is on a roll, plowing through the scenery and foiling the dastardly deeds of his antagonists, poo poo just comes together, you know? But meanwhile, the GM's pool may accumulate, signifying impending opposition... the tables may turn hard, when the GM has a lot more Doom tokens than the party has Momentum tokens and they decide to spend a pile of it to make a scene start snowballing into Serious Trouble. This is again a mechanic intended to produce a particular feeling in the game. Anyway: yeah, the succeed-forward mechanic is alive and well, in some form or another.
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Apr 2, 2021 20:04
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Liquid Communism posted:Matt Campbell talks about it in his rant on failure states. Basically the logic is never letting a failed roll derail the game. He does a great explanation of what it looks like using a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark as an illustration, check that out. gently caress me that video is going to ruin a lot of GMs.
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Apr 2, 2021 22:52
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The STA beta test adventure, which is also included in the back of the released book, uses the "jumping a ravine" example to teach you how the game's fail forward works. Here it is:The Ravine posted:Early in the trek to the science station, the crew comes to a deep but narrow ravine in the ground. On the far side of the ravine is a long piece of fallen wood that can be placed across the ravine. Crossing the ravine alone is a Fitness + Security Task with a Difficulty of 4 – difficult, but not impossible. Once across, characters can attempt to shift the wood into place as a makeshift bridge, requiring a Fitness + Security or Control + Science Task with a Difficulty of 3. Once the wood is in place, it requires only a Control + Security Task with a Difficulty of 1 for each remaining character to balance across the rock. Guess what the guy running the beta test for us four/five years ago way back when didn't read properly. Guess what he did instead. Guess what party spent 45 real life minutes of the intro adventure trying and repeatedly failing to pull a guy out of the ravine, including, and I poo poo you not, the whole "OK you found a root OK I guess the root was loose" bit. Guess who was the dumb fucker in the pit God I am so angry right now. Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 23:06
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Leperflesh posted:I keep coming back to this system because it's the only one I'm playing right now, but: the player's Momentum pool in Modiphius D20 (called other names in other iterations) is exactly this, except even more flexible. You roll for successes against a Difficulty; extra successes can either be immediately spent in a variety of ways, or, banked in the party-shared pool. The pool drops by 1 every round of an action scene, or by 1 at the end of every non-action scene, so there is some pressure to hurry up and use your Momentum rather than just let it trickle away. But on the other hand, once it's in the pool it's just a generic resource and not tied back to the specific skill roll that generated it, so, your extra success at leaping from a balcony can lead to me buying an extra die to roll on an attempt to unlock a door, or stab someone, or find food, or whatever. On a bog standard 2d20 roll the odds of rolling a complication are about 1:10. On DC 0 tasks my STA group are at like, 75% Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 23:13
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It's notable compared to that that the S&S example of Fail Forward wasn't about stopping the game coming to a halt; it was about seeing the roll as a component of a larger question. The example it uses is someone boarding up a door to trap a monster inside, and suggests that if the player rolls a failure then they do still board up the door but only weakly, because "the question isn't 'does the character put boards on the door?', but 'are the boards strong enough to hold?'" By that logic, if the question is "does Indy make it into the temple?" then if he fails to cross the ravine then.. he's just failed, and now the question has been answered, and hopefully the group was ready for either answer. A fail-forward of "but he drops something.." would be appropriate for a question if "does Indy get all his equipment into the temple?", or similar. There's some problems with that, but I think it's a bit better than the "..so the game doesn't get stuck.." argument which tends to lead to the Indy situation mentioned earlier, where the PC can ultimately never fail because the game would get stuck.
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Apr 2, 2021 23:44
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Splicer posted:There's a thing in STA called difficulty 0 tasks. It's something that the character will autosucceed at, but they can choose to roll anyway to generate momentum but at the risk of rolling complications. This also applies if your traits or situational advantages have reduced the difficulty to 0. Yes, exactly the same in Conan. There's tasks so trivial I'm not gonna let a player roll (I roll Acrobatics to pick up a fork off the floor, my TN is 18, let's get some free fuckin' Momentum up in here woo) but for example right now I have a player with an option to roll a D0 check to climb down a rope ladder hanging from a balcony. Normally D1, but they have a Talent that drops it by 1. Also the rope ladder may or may not exist, they have to decide if they want to spend a Fortune point to declare it into existence or not. If not, they could opt to just jump down from the balcony... a D1 Acrobatics check, for which their TN is lower and they don't have a handy talent, but costing no Fortune point. The key thing here of course is that the encounter doesn't hinge on whether or not this character gets down from this balcony in a cool swashbuckly way, or just goes down the back stairs and out the back door in the boring, safe way. The balcony is mostly there to give our party's archer a place to snipe from if he wants to, but I didn't assume someone would need to climb down and place a ladder there for them to use in advance. Actually, that's part of the deal with this system: add some flavorful description to the setting of a scene, but leave plenty of detail unmentioned, and that gives the PCs things to either investigate or improvise themselves using the game mechanics available. Even if the balcony was the only way forward: a failed skill check here just means a short, bruising fall, not a plummet 70 stories or a drop onto a bed of spikes! And a Complication won't be that hard to improvise, either. Splicer posted:gently caress me that video is going to ruin a lot of GMs. Eh, I think you're overstating it. He's discussing D&D in particular, which by default doesn't have fail forward in the rules at all. He does lead with the example that parallels what happens in the movie, but over the course of the whole video he discusses several other options, including an example of sneaking past guards in which each failure escalates the situation by some increment: guard becomes more alert, guard calls over a second guard, etc; without going straight from failed roll = entire castle turns out to kill the PCs immediately. I could wish he led with that example, and the option of "indy loses his gun", and then talked about the successive "dramatic effects" that had no actual mechanical penalty applied, but... that's what actually happens in the movie scene, so it's understandable to me. Anyway, at least he's telling people to do this at all. The concept hasn't even been introduced to countless GMs. It's a step forward. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 00:21
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Siivola posted:Yeah. Tthis seems to encourage having combat just for the sake of having combat instead of providing what Leperflesh called an "interesting pivot". Well, 5E adventures do often include a section on how the player characters get resurrected if they're too baby to have predictable access to that. Does that count? But in order to actually make combat a turning point, you need to have meaningful support for actions in combat that aren't killing or dying, and support for exits from combat that aren't killing or dying. Like: the Invincible Overlord bought all the food in your village with the Star Sapphire of the Sapphire Star and after the mayor gets over being blinded by opulence he tasks the PCs with obtaining a proportional amount of money and food for it by transporting it to a city big enough to have that, since his only real option for protecting this thing is refuge in obscurity. The fourth night out a goblin scouting party tries to do a smash and grab on your camp, not interested in killing, just in stealing what they can and fleeing into the night. How do you run that as a GM? (Bonus question: how do you run it when the PCs are the goblin scouting party?) Fate runs the stealing part as a contest/conflict hybrid, the robbers making skill rolls to get successes and the camp doing normal combat; if it gets to the escape part, the chase is a pure contest that may end in a conflict if the robbers are cornered. Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark just completely disclaim the idea of a separate combat system, you're just doing whatever you want whenever you want, and what happens as a result is what makes sense.
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Apr 3, 2021 01:12
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Well, that's going a step or three beyond what I had in mind, although it's definitely cool. I was thinking more along the lines of: in the dungeon crawl, the stirges in the cave room are really just there to (literally) suck some of the PC's blood. Defeating them, maybe you find a gemstone in a nest or something. But the adventure hasn't changed, nothing has been learned that redirects the characters to a new goal or on a different pathway to a current goal, no alliances were made or broken. Sure, even (or especially) in the earliest editions of the game, the players maybe didn't have to slay all the stirges. They could sneak past, or cast a Sleep spell on them, or something. But that also doesn't alter the adventure much, or any. In this sense, a skill check that's of the variety of "the locked door stands in your way" is the same; ok, you picked the lock, or kicked down the door, or whatever: you won't be discussing over the campfire later "but what did it mean" or be like "guys, that door... we need to re-think what the Invincible Overlord is up to... we've been going about this all wrong!" Put it another way: a lot of encounters in dungeon crawls are just filler. Maybe all of them, up until you get to the real enemy, the "boss." That can also be true for non-combat scenes, especially ones where the players roll a skill test to get past an obstacle, of course. But we've just been talking about systems that encourage the GM to avoid "filler" skill tests; something meaningful should be at stake, or the situation should be dramatic and interesting, or (my pivots) the story should shift here, with different possible outcomes or events or storylines possible depending on failure with cost/failure/failure forward/success forward/success/success at cost. You could maybe do the same with combat/action scenes; the outcome needn't be restricted to the usual "we kill them all" or the less common "we try to kill them all, but they're too much for us, so we flee", either way coming "at cost" of some resources, and possibly also gaining a little treasure and/or xp. Modules and GM guidelines could both do a lot better to push that idea.
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Apr 3, 2021 05:19
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I have some specific opinions on the craft and execution tableside for executing the storyteling of dungeons, but in the context of published adventures, encounters are there more or less for the purpose of getting into the way of the players until they get to whatever the goal is. If there are minimal stakes, then all encounters tend to lose meaning and feel like filler. That’s also part of the beef I have with published material that have a linear adventure (which is the nature of most published big budget adventures these days) - even ones which tout themselves as open world exploration things but have bizarre things that put you on track to a specific goal. This feels mostly a prerogative of the publisher - it moves units and has the broadest appeal. Dungeons in the context of games though have always been a thing of artifice - there is always a beginning and an ending, so there is always a clear goal. Megadungeons though tend to break this mold by presenting a constrained setting that is ripe for interactions where anything could surface at any time in that area you explore or elsewhere. However, since going directly to the goal is usually somewhat of a gimme, there needs to be something in dungeons to fill the time somehow, but whether or not that time is meaningful is table-specific. Resource depletion amplifies the stakes until resources are replenished, and if your characters are at danger of meaningful material loss like running out of HP or supplies, then the purpose, while basic, is clear. Moving towards a de-escalation state via the rules through means that the stakes are fundamentally altered. More thoughts on that analysis later though.
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Apr 3, 2021 07:33
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Leperflesh posted:Well, that's going a step or three beyond what I had in mind, although it's definitely cool. Oh! You mean the encounter has something to say about the dungeon? Like, if you were fighting the stirges in some goblin caves you could learn something if you plugged your nose and picked through the carrion afterwards. If you found a couple hapless goblins you'd know this was a more wild part of the dungeon where the goblins weren't really in control. If you found a rustled sheep with a goblin knife driven into its brain you'd know the goblins had effectively created guard stirges and maybe you take a second look at that gem or keep an eye out for other places the goblins are going to use cave fauna against you. (Running Dungeon World, people can just roll the dice and ask you "who's really in control here?" You get used to providing answers and the situation where the answers give people +1 forward.)
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Apr 3, 2021 21:06
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Yeah. I'm thinking about any entertainment product that tells a story, and is constructed well. Scenes have multiple purposes. Some of them are sort of "glue" - things like: reveal aspects of a character. Show what this setting is like. Give a sense of the passage of time or a shift in space. Help establish the mood. Some of them are about plot: the protagonist(s) discover they are in trouble. An antagonist raises the stakes. External events unfold in a way that shifts the characters' goals. Some scenes are about character arc: a scene showing a breakup, or a romance blooming, or a temptation, or the death of an ally. Some scenes are about pure entertainment for the audience: an exciting chase, a farcical slapstick accident, a brilliantly-choreographed kung fu battle. Many scenes do more than one of these things at once. An exciting chase scene, during which we see a previously cocky character realizing and internalizing that they're really not cut out for this poo poo, and also the actions of the police establish that in this setting, they are incompetent, which helps to explain why the crime families are so openly running things. A role-playing game isn't exactly like a movie or a book, of course, but we can still take cues and be mindful of purpose to each scene. A purely mechanical "use up some of the characters' hit points, arrows, healing potions, and daily powers" purpose may be important for the structure of the game, but for the entertainment factor, it's no more than spreadsheet management. Perhaps there's player engagement with a puzzle if there's choices to be made about which daily powers to use and which to preserve, etc. but that is pretty much aside from the "story" part of the game, and is dissimilar to how other story entertainment works. Sometimes we care that the hero only has one bullet left, of course... but that is always a contrivance intended to create a dramatic moment, and never the case of the storyteller giving the actor the option to preserve ammo during the earlier shootout scene. In fact, it's extremely difficult for a GM to intentionally create that moment, because the players rarely cooperate and show up at the dramatic moment with exactly one bolt left in the quiver; its the sort of trope best left out of a GM's plans in any game where the players have at least some amount of control over such things. And I think the RPGs generally do at least an OK job of handling this stuff through the mechanics. The GM is usually advised as to how many encounters per day are typical, if it matters. In many systems, it doesn't. Where a GM - and advice for the GM - could improve things, might be to explicitly choose storylike functions for each scene, whether it's a set piece fight, a skill challenge obstacle, or an RP-heavy social scene. And to continue with the stirges example, yes: there can easily be more to the cavern room than some deadly birds. A clue as to what's going on, especially if it changes the player's perception from a previous state. How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? Interpersonal drama is just one idea. I bet there's more.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:04
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One thing you do in RPGs but don't do in all those passive media you bring up is make choices and act on and with the environment. For example, you might be moving a character through a dungeon. That dungeon has a bunch of rooms that connect to each other in certain ways. Without giving these rooms interesting content, the characters and the players might get lost, get disoriented, get disinterested. But if you have an encounter with stirges in "That Room Over There", then "That Room Over There" becomes "The Room Where We Fought the Stirges". There's an emphatic meaning to this room, it has emotional content because there was a challenge there, and it's semantically relevant, an anchor in what is to start with an undifferentiated labyrinth. Build up a few more of these and you can start making meaningful statements like "wasn't there that weird puzzle in that room near where we fought the stirges?" "No, I think it might have been before that, in the other room, the elongated one where we snuck around the sleeping ogre." You have a semantic space superimposed and tied to a physical space that you can explore, because, again, you're in an interactive medium. There's more to it than just a minor depletion of resources, or trying to be sufficiently exciting to merit spending time on it in isolation.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:42
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I'd be defining fail forward as "the fiction has changed meaningfully and irreversibly". With the Indiana Jones example, if he loses his gun and then you don't challenge that then you've failed to make that aspect of the fiction meaningful. If you just let him grab a pistol off the nearest nazi then you've failed to make it irreversible. Obviously, this kind of logic works better in systems that let you lean more on improv but with a bit of thinking about the situation off-screen and some tables, I've known GMs who can get it working in something like D&D too. For anybody who isn't familiar with them, I think most Powered by the Apocalypse games do a bit of a masterclass on this with their GM moves. In the system, you have to do a GM move whenever the players fail a roll, hand you a golden opportunity or just look to you to say what happens. For Apocalypse World these are: quote:• Separate them.
I think also if the worst thing you can think to take from the characters is their lives then you need to get more creative. A little bit of directorial license opens up a world of things you can threaten. Macdoo fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 01:32
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Leperflesh posted:Where a GM - and advice for the GM - could improve things, might be to explicitly choose storylike functions for each scene, whether it's a set piece fight, a skill challenge obstacle, or an RP-heavy social scene. And to continue with the stirges example, yes: there can easily be more to the cavern room than some deadly birds. A clue as to what's going on, especially if it changes the player's perception from a previous state. How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? Well, when you're dealing with random initiative and an open battleground, you really don't have the option to put any kind of dramatic weight into combat, except accidentally as circumstances align. Any "scenes" you plan inside of it can be broken up by pretty much anybody else at any time. Your best bet is for using some kind of reflection system in the aftermath to pretend a scene actually existed. Just saying it flat out like that sounds a little mocking, but I'm being serious - there's a lot of value in recontextualizing a scene after you've played it out to help you think about it differently.
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Apr 4, 2021 02:55
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I'm sure that it's not really workable in some systems, no. At least not without some significant homebrewing.
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Apr 4, 2021 03:13
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Leperflesh posted:How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? The best design space for that is probably the "party sheet" or "crew sheet" which has been popping up in more and more games in the past little while. Fitd games use it to track the group's relationships with other factions, upgrades to their hideout or spaceship or whatever, and so on, but there's no reason it couldn't track things like interpersonal drama and incluide mechanics for it - like you can Push an ally without spending stress if you check "I am frustrated that they couldn't pull their poo poo together" on the crew sheet, which could then be used as an xp trigger (like trauma), or do something special when it got resolved during a scene, or whatever else. If you wanted to direct the fiction via mechanics, you could have different types of crew have different kinds of interpersonal drama reasons, triggers, and resolutions. Eg, smugglers aren't going to have all the same kinds of tension that revolutionaries would have.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:00
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Leperflesh posted:Where a GM - and advice for the GM - could improve things, might be to explicitly choose storylike functions for each scene, whether it's a set piece fight, a skill challenge obstacle, or an RP-heavy social scene. And to continue with the stirges example, yes: there can easily be more to the cavern room than some deadly birds. A clue as to what's going on, especially if it changes the player's perception from a previous state. How about some capability of characters to learn something about one another, during or even as a result of being in danger together? Could a game mechanically support that... I bet some do... you roll dice to shield an ally from an attack, and they feel grateful... or resentful... or frightened because of it. A character dominates this combat, doing at least half of all damage/felling half the foes... and this shifts the party dynamic. Are they proud of their performance? Or horrified at how capable they've become at killing? Or irritated that the other characters aren't holding up their part? Or afraid that one of them is in too much danger in these caverns, and probably shouldn't be here? Hillfolk does this by eschewing the traditional adventure model and going with player initiated scene-to-scene action in which each scene attempts to answer some kind of dramatic question. A procedural task in a scene can be specific or broad but also must have a clear purpose to the people at the table. As people change over time as a result of interactions, the push and pull of its economy (Drama tokens) allows a structured resource to force a dramatic concession to prevent characters and players from digging in endlessly to prevent their character having bad things happen to them. I recommend this as well as Hamlet's Hit Points for further analysis on deconstructing narratives into basic components that can then be useful to translate for other components. Some games challenge the need for narrative addition to a tactical situation. LANCER RPG discourages attempting to add narrative play into its mech combat system, as an example, and some other games likely make the same distinction (or do so by having a completely different rules engine for handling certain situations, like Shadowrun Matrix hacking or Rigging). Retroactively calling for a scene or preparation is a hallmark of Forged in the Dark. Rather than planning something, it is assumed your character is competent enough to have planned something, and leverages this by allowing for flashbacks during a scene rather than exhaustively making a plan. It is one of the core parts of its rules engine that carries over into hacks since it allows for smoother play and the type of experience it wants to encourage, which is risky behavior from competent cinematic heroes.
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Apr 4, 2021 04:45
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Macdoo posted:I'd be defining fail forward as "the fiction has changed meaningfully and irreversibly". With the Indiana Jones example, if he loses his gun and then you don't challenge that then you've failed to make that aspect of the fiction meaningful. If you just let him grab a pistol off the nearest nazi then you've failed to make it irreversible. But there’s a distinction here that’s often missed. If this was a story then both of those things are true. But in an RPG, Indy’s player did not know he was going to find a Nazi to knock out and steal another gun from. He did not know he was not going to turn a corner and be facing an entire patrol squad without his gun. If Indy decides to leave because he lost his gun, that would create a dull disappointing moment in a story, but in an RPG the player knows it’s a huge failure and significant decision. Losing his gun will already have made a difference to the player’s experience even if it’s never “challenged” in the fiction as it plays out. Which is why that kind of interpretation tends to bring the response “that’s not a fail forward, that’s a critical failure”.
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Apr 4, 2021 16:02
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hyphz posted:But there’s a distinction here that’s often missed. If this was a story then both of those things are true. But in an RPG, Indy’s player did not know he was going to find a Nazi to knock out and steal another gun from. He did not know he was not going to turn a corner and be facing an entire patrol squad without his gun. If Indy decides to leave because he lost his gun, that would create a dull disappointing moment in a story, but in an RPG the player knows it’s a huge failure and significant decision. Losing his gun will already have made a difference to the player’s experience even if it’s never “challenged” in the fiction as it plays out. It's only a critical failure if you fail to make it over the chasm and lose your gun. Losing your gun but making it across just means things are going to be trickier for a bit. I'd also disagree that letting the player get another gun off a Nazi renders the incident meaningless. They had to overcome another challenge to get that gun, ie. dealing with an armed Nazi.
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Apr 4, 2021 19:33
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Tsilkani posted:Losing your gun but making it across just means things are going to be trickier for a bit. "Trickier" in the sense that if Indy encounters an armed enemy who's out of whip range, he now has to flee, surrender or die. And the only way he can guarantee that won't happen is to flee right now. All of those are much more dramatic risks than failing one particular approach to the area.
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Apr 4, 2021 22:12
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hyphz posted:"Trickier" in the sense that if Indy encounters an armed enemy who's out of whip range, he now has to flee, surrender or die. And the only way he can guarantee that won't happen is to flee right now. All of those are much more dramatic risks than failing one particular approach to the area. Why would he, without his gun, encounter an armed enemy who's out of whip range? You have made up a scenario that would suck, yes. Don't do that.
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Apr 4, 2021 22:16
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We shouldn't get too hung up on the specific events of the movie. The important thing here is that he was making some kind of skill roll, whiffed on the roll, but instead of falling into a failstate that he can't get out of (the pit) or falling to his actual death (the previous post's 70-story fall, maybe) he still gets across the pit, but loses something important. That's "fail forward." The player knows Indy's gun is important. What happens next is variable. I In some systems, yes, having lost his gun, the GM and the player now have an obligation to make that matter soon. In others, they don't. It shouldn't be a trivial loss: if the GM says that Indy snags his shirt on something and loses a button, that's probably too minor to matter. It's very unlikely that that missing button will ever be a problem; but losing his gun probably will be. "Fail forward" just means failing the skill test doesn't halt the adventure; instead of blocking progress, the failed test costs something else. e. Also, if we're playing a game with "fail forward" then we can be sure that, even without his gun, Indy won't wind up in a no-win situation later, either! He'll choose a skill or an attack or something, and even if he fails it (maybe because his gun is gone), then he'll fail forward again, perhaps at the cost of another valuable thing. Like, I dunno, the golden idol. And then he'll get away, because in this game, we don't kill Indy just because he failed a roll. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 23:41
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Well, Indy did end up in no-win situations throughout the movie. First this idol he spent so much of his let's say "momentum" on gets taken by his rival. Then he fails several time in getting the Ark, including getting captured and put into a snake pit. Eventually, although the Nazis got it worse, he still essentially didn't win - the Ark is now in some random government warehouse instead of being amenable to display or study, as he would want. He lived to make it to another, even more culturally insensitive sequel. Assuming Raiders of the Lost Ark qualifies as an adventure report for a system that uses "fail forward", it's not "no win" that is being avoided here; it's "no exit".
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Apr 5, 2021 00:28
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Why would he, without his gun, encounter an armed enemy who's out of whip range? That's not really the question. The question is: does the player know that there is no chance of that encounter? If the answer is an unqualified yes, then the player knows that losing their gun is no cost at all. If the answer is no, the situation is scary for the player, even if they don't actually have the encounter. The trick is in not having the encounter without the player knowing that they weren't going to have the encounter.
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Apr 5, 2021 02:19
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hyphz posted:That's not really the question. The question is: does the player know that there is no chance of that encounter? The trick is understanding that the player also knows how fail-forward works and understands that whatever just happened is neither a brief stay of summary execution nor a complete lack of consequences.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:36
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This seems to be getting lost in the weeds, so an attempt to reiterate regarding fail forward: Regardless of the outcome of a roll, progress is being made to further the narrative. There is an agreement for all people at the table that checks which have a success or failure will alter the situation in some way and move the core narrative forward, even in the event of a failure (hence, fail forward). There may be options that become available and unavailable as a result of this, but because the core narrative is progressing, play continues as a result. Failing forward does not always necessarily require a roll though it is typically paired with some kind of check in a rules engine. Decisions made completely without dice rolls can cause a fail forward scenario, but most rules engines with fail forward mechanics structure it to follow that the majority of situations follow the fiction and create progress. If there is something to halt play as a result of a rules interaction in a rules engine which prominently features a fail forward system (or even ones that don't, since it's a philosophical approach) then there is a critical failing of the rules and table judgement. This would be what some people would consider to be your standard binary success/failure with no follow up or outsize punitive results for failing. Call it a 'hard failure'. Part of the prior criticisms of binary combat structures such as rolls to hit and saving throws do not produce any forward progression as a result of their failure of this type. From a table judgement perspective, it is generally the style and prerogative of referees to judge in a way that keeps the game moving and/or keep the game balanced through interpretation of the rules engine. Thus: - If a player does not have knowledge of an encounter (because it was dynamically generated due to a failure), they know that progress has happened as a result of their failed skill check. This should make sense in the constraints of the fiction (made a big noise while trying to avoid detection, guards are coming). - If a player does have knowledge of specific consequences of failure but attempts to do something anyway and fails, the failure itself is not a finality even if the character or player exits play. The core narrative continues to move forward but is likely changed in a major story beat. There is no major trick or artifice required to leverage this specific approach because it is done naturally in games, however there are techniques to ensure that play continues regardless of the situation. Understanding and developing what those techniques are can sometimes be informed by rules engines, but also require the intuition and participation of people at the table, including the referee, whose primary job is to describe the game world which changes as a result of a failure. If one cannot improvise based off of a failure in the fail forward style, it requires some more specific training that most rules engines will attempt to provide. Powered by the Apocalypse does this in a fairly succinct fashion. I won't describe specific examples or circumstances, but there are ways to leverage fail forward in a no win scenario. There are entire genres in which heroic sacrifice or tragedy is a core theme involving what happens before, during, and after such a failure. However, in all those contexts of a narrative be they found in games or other media, the narrative keeps moving forward regardless of how specific or how much failure there is.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:47
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