PCs fail all the time in my campaign, and when I play I've screwed the pooch quite a few times too. Nothing gets my competitive impulses going quite like being on the receiving end an ass-kicking.

It's a very hard question to answer, since more than a few people have said on various forums, including this one, that "whiffing" -- missing with ANY attack -- is an unacceptable failure.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;992120It's a very hard question to answer, since more than a few people have said on various forums, including this one, that "whiffing" -- missing with ANY attack -- is an unacceptable failure.

Please tell me you're being ironical and making that up.

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I wish.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;992135I wish.

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One of the problems I'm having with newer games is that failure can simply be negated with Hero Points. I started noticing this with True 20 (published 2005).

Quote from: True 20Heroes start out with 3 points of Conviction at 1st level and gain a point of Conviction every two levels thereafter... One Conviction point allows you to re-roll any die roll you make and take the better of the two rolls. On a result of 1 through 10 on the second roll, add 10 to the result; an 11 or higher remains as-is (so the second roll is always a result of 11-20).

At first I thought it was a cool idea, but then I noticed that the PC's never failed. The games started feeling unexciting. Then I read this, from Hero System (1984, probably earlier):

QuoteThis (i.e, failure) means he can't perform the chosen action or receives no benefit from the Skill until the situation changes in his favor...

I think this encourages creative thinking. Instead of "I failed, big deal, I spend a CP to roll again" it becomes "I failed... what other approaches can I think of to solve the problem?"

• Can I get a better tool?
• Can my friends assist?
• Is there something in the environment that might help?
• Can I take more time and get it right? (if I have the time to spend...)
• Can I use another complimentary skill to help out?

I think that's Old School-- at least it's how we used to play. If a character failed a roll, there was a tension, and everyone started thinking on how to improve the situation. If it worked, it felt like we accomplished something.  

Now we're just lazy.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;992120It's a very hard question to answer, since more than a few people have said on various forums, including this one, that "whiffing" -- missing with ANY attack -- is an unacceptable failure.

I call bullshit. I have seen arguments against whiffing, but as I've seen it, it is that people would prefer for fights to always progress. i.e. They find it tedious to have a long progression of miss - miss - miss - hit - miss - hit - miss - miss. By this argument, what they prefer isn't always succeeding - it's always (or almost always) having a progressive change. This can be done like in Tunnels & Trolls or Dungeon World, where every turn somebody wins and does damage.

It's not a huge deal for me, but I can see the point. I personally dislike repetitive rolls, and find that combat in a number of systems can become a drag by a bunch of misses.

The point is that some people want to fail and always have consequences, not just fail and have nothing happen (i.e. a "whiff").

Quote from: Aglondir;992153One of the problems I'm having with newer games is that failure can simply be negated with Hero Points. I started noticing this with True 20 (published 2005).
(...)
At first I thought it was a cool idea, but then I noticed that the PC's never failed. The games started feeling unexciting. Then I read this, from Hero System (1984, probably earlier):
(...)
I think this encourages creative thinking. Instead of "I failed, big deal, I spend a CP to roll again" it becomes "I failed... what other approaches can I think of to solve the problem?"
(...)
I think that's Old School-- at least it's how we used to play.

For me, a big part of my old school experience was from the excellent James Bond 007 RPG (1983). JB007 had Hero Points, and gave them out far more frequently than in True20. But that didn't mean that players never failed - because in JB007, they were constantly being called upon to do the impossible, and had to fight off two vans full of thugs with assault rifles while chasing through the city and trying to defuse the bomb in their car.

My experience was roughly the same with Blue Rose (which uses True20). If the players have conviction points, it just means that they could face tougher oppositions. I actually found that in True20, players almost always accepted failure and saved their conviction points for when they were badly hit, because rerolling a poor damage save was one of the best things to be done with conviction. I felt like that was a minor flaw in the system.

Quote from: jhkim;992199I call bullshit. I have seen arguments against whiffing, but as I've seen it, it is that people would prefer for fights to always progress. i.e. They find it tedious to have a long progression of miss - miss - miss - hit - miss - hit - miss - miss. By this argument, what they prefer isn't always succeeding - it's always (or almost always) having a progressive change. This can be done like in Tunnels & Trolls or Dungeon World, where every turn somebody wins and does damage.

It's not a huge deal for me, but I can see the point. I personally dislike repetitive rolls, and find that combat in a number of systems can become a drag by a bunch of misses.

The point is that some people want to fail and always have consequences, not just fail and have nothing happen (i.e. a "whiff").

Yeah I remember some montonous and overlong fights that suffered from this.

Quote from: jhkim;992199The point is that some people want to fail and always have consequences, not just fail and have nothing happen (i.e. a "whiff").

This argument has always failed because missing does have a consequence, you've failed to end the fight or defeat that opponent...the consequence is, that opponent now gets to try and end you.  Rather large consequence.  The fight that you wanted to be over in one or two rounds has taken 5 or 6?  There goes your plan, here comes reinforcements, etc...consequences galore.

Unfortunately, the failure to realize this has it's own dire consequence, ideas like "Fail Forward".

The feeling of meaningful consequence for missing an attack depends on the game, for me. In HERO, attacks have a noteworthy chance to stun, entangle, or drain them of their strongest power. Using a slow but powerful haymaker, or switching to area effects to deal with that speedster who zips by all your blows, the chance to miss can force some interesting decision making.

Missing attacks in something like D&D 4e on the other hand, just feels like playing a slot machine. Pull the lever until someone's HP has been grinded down to zero. The house has already calculated how often they want you to miss to keep you at your seat, and there's not much you can do about it but to keep feeding the machine quarters.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;992120It's a very hard question to answer, since more than a few people have said on various forums, including this one, that "whiffing" -- missing with ANY attack -- is an unacceptable failure.

Mhmm. Is there a politically correct way to say I think that's an approach so far from representing actual combat that I consider it a different type of game, and one I don't want to play, without being accused of "one-true-way-ism" or badwrongfunning?

Quote from: CRKrueger;992218This argument has always failed because missing does have a consequence, you've failed to end the fight or defeat that opponent...the consequence is, that opponent now gets to try and end you.  Rather large consequence.  The fight that you wanted to be over in one or two rounds has taken 5 or 6?  There goes your plan, here comes reinforcements, etc...consequences galore.

Unfortunately, the failure to realize this has it's own dire consequence, ideas like "Fail Forward".

Eh. I think it's a matter of taste, and I'm not particularly interested in pushing the argument.

My point is, though, that people who make this argument against whiffing aren't saying that PCs should always succeed, as Gronan implies. They still want failure, just failures with more impact for a given roll.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;992120It's a very hard question to answer, since more than a few people have said on various forums, including this one, that "whiffing" -- missing with ANY attack -- is an unacceptable failure.

Quote from: jhkim;992199I call bullshit. I have seen arguments against whiffing, but as I've seen it, it is that people would prefer for fights to always progress. i.e. They find it tedious to have a long progression of miss - miss - miss - hit - miss - hit - miss - miss. By this argument, what they prefer isn't always succeeding - it's always (or almost always) having a progressive change. This can be done like in Tunnels & Trolls or Dungeon World, where every turn somebody wins and does damage.

It's not a huge deal for me, but I can see the point. I personally dislike repetitive rolls, and find that combat in a number of systems can become a drag by a bunch of misses.

The point is that some people want to fail and always have consequences, not just fail and have nothing happen (i.e. a "whiff").

I too, am going to call BS, but only on the 'more than a few' bit. The idea that there are large swaths of people out there who really don't want to be challenged at all and only want the illusion that the outcome of their eventual victory is any way in question is a boogeyman that only serves self-congratulatory wank for not being in that category.

Quote from: CRKrueger;992218This argument has always failed because missing does have a consequence, you've failed to end the fight or defeat that opponent...the consequence is, that opponent now gets to try and end you.  Rather large consequence.  The fight that you wanted to be over in one or two rounds has taken 5 or 6?  There goes your plan, here comes reinforcements, etc...consequences galore.

Unfortunately, the failure to realize this has it's own dire consequence, ideas like "Fail Forward".

The argument might fail, but he's likely right that they are complaining about the pacing and sense of progress, not that they actually might fail at something.

To the OP, it really depends on what you consider failure. If you have a group of bright, cagy, genre-savvy players, it's entirely possible that they will eventually prevail almost all the time, particularly in the case where they get to scope out the relative likelihood of victory with a relative degree of accuracy and choose their endeavors. In other words, cautious, intelligent players rarely choose adventures they can't win. The structures of the game will have some influence. Some games (or playing of games in a given way) have more of a "you did everything right, but the dice didn't fall your way" factor than others.

Still, again, what is failure? If something that results in the GM saying, "that did not work, you'll have to try something else" is failure, then it should happen pretty much every game session. Players should have to make meaningful decisions, sometimes without all the knowledge available to know ahead of time which one will work (or even if there is an option that will work).

Depends. Fairly often on a task level. Less often on a conflict level. Seldom on a mission level. Almost never on a campaign level.