While working up a first adventure for Starfinder, I'm considering failure states. For myself, both as a player and a GM, failure tends to be extremely rare in our games.
While RPGs are not wargames, I fail all the time in wargaming. I'm now at the point where I'm a pretty good X-Wing Miniatures player, if I do say so myself (3-1 win-loss at my last store championship) and I paid for that with lots of practice. And it doesn't make the game any less fun. On the contrary, working out how to improve my game over the past year has been very fun and interesting.

I'm writing up this adventure with an eye towards making is lose-able, and not just by wiping out the party in combat (that's dirt easy) but failing the scenario objectives. What's your take on the subject?

As often as they deserve to. Usually due to poor planning and bad decisions. Often due to reliance on luck. I don't  really understand the question,  though, as the rate of failure isn't  in the hands of the GM. Or shouldn't be.

Quote from: Dumarest;991288As often as they deserve to. Usually due to poor planning and bad decisions. Often due to reliance on luck. I don't  really understand the question,  though, as the rate of failure isn't  in the hands of the GM. Or shouldn't be.

I can invent or put in place opponents who are much weaker than the PCs (e.g. all stormtroopers only have 2D stats and the minimum skill levels) and play those opponents as more foolish than might otherwise seem reasonable (e.g. opponents always use poor tactics, never use combined actions, and they always pause for a round standing flat-footed in the open when moving from cover to cover and they always fall for every trick the PCs use).

But I guess that's part of what you mean by it "shouldn't be."

Quote from: Dumarest;991288As often as they deserve to. Usually due to poor planning and bad decisions. Often due to reliance on luck. I don't  really understand the question,  though, as the rate of failure isn't  in the hands of the GM. Or shouldn't be.

As a GM I can design a very straightforward scenario that is very difficult to fail, or a scenario that is very easy to fail, if the players (characters) aren't on the ball.

For example, my introductory Dark Sun adventure that I wanted to be very difficult, I set it up, keeping in mind water availability. The players were competent enough to take survival proficiencies that allowed them to make it through even though I had intentionally made water very scarce. I could have made the adventure even tougher by taking out some of the opportunities to get more water, and putting in more encounters that have the concequence of them losing water. (I am gong to do that if I ever run the adventure in the future, I think the adventure could be more difficult.)

So yeah, the rate of failure is in the hands of the players, but that's in reaction to the scenario as set up by the GM.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;991270While working up a first adventure for Starfinder, I'm considering failure states. For myself, both as a player and a GM, failure tends to be extremely rare in our games.
While RPGs are not wargames, I fail all the time in wargaming. I'm now at the point where I'm a pretty good X-Wing Miniatures player, if I do say so myself (3-1 win-loss at my last store championship) and I paid for that with lots of practice. And it doesn't make the game any less fun. On the contrary, working out how to improve my game over the past year has been very fun and interesting.

I'm writing up this adventure with an eye towards making is lose-able, and not just by wiping out the party in combat (that's dirt easy) but failing the scenario objectives. What's your take on the subject?

The first two modules in the Dragonlance set were set up such that the party could through action or inaction actually crash and burn the setting.

There are so many ways players can fail, and fail badly. Negotiation. Rescue. Being tricked. Being too suspicious. Not being suspicious enough, and so many more. Insulting an important NPC. Attacking an important NPC. Failing to secure some item. and many many more.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;991270I'm writing up this adventure with an eye towards making is lose-able, and not just by wiping out the party in combat (that's dirt easy) but failing the scenario objectives. What's your take on the subject?

Anything can happen in a sandbox.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;991270While working up a first adventure for Starfinder, I'm considering failure states. For myself, both as a player and a GM, failure tends to be extremely rare in our games.
While RPGs are not wargames, I fail all the time in wargaming. I'm now at the point where I'm a pretty good X-Wing Miniatures player, if I do say so myself (3-1 win-loss at my last store championship) and I paid for that with lots of practice. And it doesn't make the game any less fun. On the contrary, working out how to improve my game over the past year has been very fun and interesting.

I'm writing up this adventure with an eye towards making is lose-able, and not just by wiping out the party in combat (that's dirt easy) but failing the scenario objectives. What's your take on the subject?

Their failure rate depends on what they are trying to do, how challenging/dangerous that is, how appropriate their plans and execution are, their capabilities, and what someone considers failure, so there's no one measure.

My players rarely get wiped out. They also tend to do something other than fight to the death when confronted with something that's more dangerous than they are. But sometimes they fail to accomplish things, get killed, maimed, defeated, run away, give up, decide to do something else, etc.

Most situation can end in failure or disaster, unless they're really easy or safe, and the risk level is almost always determined by what the players choose to take on, and how smart or foolish they are about how they go about it.

When I think about and prepare for the situation around the players, I try to be ready to support a wide range of possibilities including players changing what they're doing, what they're trying to do, where they're going, etc. I try to make it their responsibility to choose what to do, to approach the problem in effective ways, so they are responsible for what they get. If I catch myself thinking of the situation as an expected "adventure" or series of predictable events, and me trying to manage how survivable or fail-able that is, alarms go off and I re-think of it instead as a situation which can go various ways, and what info and details I should prepare about it so players can explore the situation and make informed decisions about risks and rewards. For example, if they have signed on for some dangerous adventure, I will set up the situation so it has moving parts and ways to detect and mitigate the risks and/or bail out along the way. And/or what/who else is going on nearby in time and space, that they might get involved in. I'm not preparing one main path and how I expect it to go and tailoring the risk, but if they are heading a certain way towards danger, I will be thinking about what chances there are for them to get info and make choices.

I think for me it varies a lot by campaign. Some campaigns are harder than others, some players are more competent, some rules systems are easier by default. Failure is usually more likely in a status quo sandbox than in a tailored linear campaign - with a sandbox PCs can run away and go try something else whereas in a linear game they often have to overcome specific obstacles or campaign ends.

Failure in my games is pretty common. And failure isn't always death.

But that's part of CoC and Warhammer. The Big Bads don't go down easy and sometimes "victory" is just escaping to survive.

I find that in gaming overall, failure is interesting when it gives you something or forces some interesting choice that opens new possibilities, instead of being a pure end-of-line. In other words, Fail Forward.

The problem with RPGs is that most adventures are created only with success in mind. Maybe a heirloom of storytelling where the protagonist usually wins in the end? Certainly in my experience that was the norm - the vast majority of adventures were "won" by our group, even if we had some failures in the process. I think other kinds of games like warfames and videogames deal better with failure, historically.

Failure is a critical part of my games... I don't like killing off characters but failure is easy depending on how it's played.

It also motivates them to try again! But sometimes they manage just escape with their lives. Failure is fun too, and often changes the entire game (which I like as a GM).

Quote from: Ratman_tf;991270
I'm writing up this adventure with an eye towards making is lose-able, and not just by wiping out the party in combat (that's dirt easy) but failing the scenario objectives. What's your take on the subject?

The simplest way to make any adventure "lose-able" without TPK, is to make the problem be something that can't necessarily be solved by force. My players are working through B1. Theoretically, their only goal is to find a book on the second level. But I populated the top level with feuding orcs and goblins. My players are trying to resolve the feud by hooking up the son and daughter of the leaders and by getting proof someone else is the one actually attacking each group.

They are doing this because I made it obvious that help from one or both tribes would help them in their quest. (Also, my players love dealing with sapient NPCs and monsters. One of the two tribes had the remote control to lower the magic force shield around the third area. (There was also a secret passage that they missed.)

Now, I guess violence could "solve" the problem--you could kill all of one or both tribes, or take over and rule both tribes. In the former case, if you've missed the secret passage, you might not be able to find the remote control to get into the third area. In the latter case, you end up with other problems related to ruling the tribes and still might not find the remote control.

I tend to write my adventures such that:

A. There are multiple levels of success/failure possible.  Such as, it's relatively easy to stop the bad guy, but he or some of his allies get away, unless the players are really on the ball.

B. There are almost mutually exclusive objectives.  Individually, many of the objectives are easy if the players care to attempt them, but they can't do everything.  Things that aren't attempted become temporary failures, and the situation gets worse, but can still be addressed if not put off indefinitely.  

The consequence is that there is nearly always some failure and some success in just about everything the players do.  Every now and then they totally blow it, for complete failure, or they get inspired and dedicated and manage to succeed at everything.

A lot if it is just dependent upon attitude and perspective.

I've mentioned a few times, I tend to take the Adventurer-as-Entrepreneur view. They operate in a realm of uncertainty.

It's entirely possible for there to be some adventures that just aren't winnable at all in any way. This extreme seems beyond the pale for most of the gaming community. I raise this worst case to point out that the only failure there is in assessment of the risk/reward and the decision to take up the adventure in the first place. Once your on the adventure, though, making the best of what you got can certainly feel like a win. That's one end of the spectrum.

Something I'd expect to be more the norm for entrepreneur-adventurers is that they develop a risk management strategy that limits their losses to something they can stomach while positioning themselves for limitless gains. Generally to get this sort of profile, the odds are going to likely be against you.

To try to illustrate this with numbers, suppose there's a huge treasure at the end of a dangerous dungeon. Suppose the conditions are such that a typical expedition is 25% likely to end up in a TPK, 25% likely to end up taking a minor loss (-20%), 25% likely to break even, and 25% likely to score big and become 3 times richer. (Note that even these conditions are probably more "cruel" than a typical adventure, but this is what I'm using to represent somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.) I expect entrepreneur-adventurers to have some sort of stop-loss in place so they'll bail and cut their losses sooner to all but eliminate the worst case scenario (TPK) but it also makes them less likely to get the big score. So when they carry out the same adventure, their TPK is 1% likely, if that, 60% likely of taking a minor loss (say, stop loss at 10%), 25% likely to break even, and 14% likely to 2.92x their wealth (the .08 is a deduction of additional precaution taken in this adventure.)

You can do the math and find that the "expected outcome" in each case averages out to a 20% gain, all things considered. So over the course of 10 adventures, the "expected outcome" is about a 6x gain. The difference is, the first party is only 5-6% likely to survive long enough to see 10 adventures, while the 2nd group is 90% likely to do so. Same stats. Same challenges. Same difficulty checks. Same resources. Same tactics. The difference only difference is in how each group views wins and losses. The second group makes peace with a 10% loss. Taking a minor loss, then, is likely to be seen as a win, or at least a draw. "Hey, it was a lot harder than we thought, we got our asses whooped, but we STILL managed to stay within our mission specs." They only lose 1% of the time. The first group, having a different attitude, are 50% likely to take at least some loss.

So when you get to the easy end of the spectrum--where "losing" is defined only as failure to meet an objective; not to suffer any actual loss--the adventurers-as-entrepreneurs who have their minds right just don't lose. Period. If the risk/reward profile looks like: 33% no success, 33% partial success, and 33% total success, a typical group may still only enjoy a 33% success rate, even though they will actually out-perform the adventurer-as-entrepreneur mindset as the latter are investing resources in hedging against catastrophes that the GM will never allow to happen.

Well, the type and degrees of failure my player characters experience varies from one campaign to another. Letting PCs fail is an important part of Old-School play, and that's most of what I run, so in general yes, players fail frequently. And with consequences.