Quote from: Opaopajr;686261That translates to "no, but."

So far, the explanations of Fail Forward seems "no, but" converts into "yes, but" as if they are interchangeable. And the justification seems "because its cool, otherwise the game's instant gratification (or worse, the plot) would come to a halt."

I'm not going to argue that some or even many people use that as their understanding of "fail forward".  I think a lot of that is:

1) The idea of a linear plot
2) The fact that some people can't handle losing, and a lot of them play RPGs

So, I think that both of those are kinda bullshit.  A game, any game, is about the decisions you make, and so a linear plot removes those decisions.  If you doubt my sincerity, go over to the railroad thread.

I also think that "not losing" is just as much bullshit.  If you can't "lose", you can't "win".  And I don't mean in the meta-RPG 'no winners' sense, but in the 'I should never fail at anything!' sense.

Again, I don't doubt that those people exist.  I think they're dumb.

To me, fail forward just means that the 'story' - the world, the situation - progresses in some way.  That doesn't mean linear, or towards some pre-defined idea of what the end "should" be.  It just means that there are consequences to your actions, even your failures.  The world evolves.  You don't just hit a brick wall and nothing happens.

It's really the opposite of railroading.  It says that failure should make things change, and that if you fail, it should be a different, far worse, result than if you succeeded.

That sure as hell doesn't mean that it takes away failure.  Done right, failing *is* moving forward.  When Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite - story goes forward.  When Luke loses his hand - story goes forward.  When Luke gets stuck in the cold wasteland of Hoth - story goes forward.

These aren't good things.  It's not that the characters never fail.  I have no interest in any game where success is guaranteed - I don't see the point.  It's just that the failure drives the game in new and interesting directions.  Preferably directions that maximize the character suffering involved.

BTW, I hate using the word "story" here, as it has a lot of implications about things like linearity and predetermined plot and all that shit.  If you really think that I'm arguing for that, please, go look at the railroad thread.  More than anything else, railroading is the one thing I can't stand in RPGs.  So if anyone *ever* thinks I'm advocating for railroads, there's a serious miscommunication.

I'm also not saying that this is some kind of grand new advice sent down from the heavens.  It's old hat to many people, especially here, I'm sure.

That's a whole lot of words to say one likes "no, but" and "no, and" but one just hates plain old "no."

Which, fine, whatever. But recognize that it is quite the comical artifice after a while. You fail with bennies or with zonkers, but you always fail with attention-seeking fireworks.

Sometimes the way the world, the situation, progresses is by having efforts to change it fail with no visible effect. It has progressed into the future with status quo intact -- unless timekeeping isn't kept (and we know what Uncle Gygax has to say about that). I don't understand the need to fail with sparklers, and its argument so far is less than convincing.

(edit: I should add, with timekeeping there's no such thing as "no" keeping the game state frozen, as it were. The world is in motion and actions have opportunity cost. Delay amid clockwork is just as real a change in the game state as pyrotechnics.)

Quote from: Opaopajr;686285That's a whole lot of words to say one likes "no, but" and "no, and" but one just hates plain old "no."

Wasn't really talking about "yes, but" here, so I'm not sure where the "no" thing comes from.

And it's not so much about "no, but".  "No, and..."... maybe.  So long as the "and" clause involves your character's life getting suckier, and you being further from your goals.

And there's times when the answer is just "no".  No, you can't sprout wings if you're playing a serious Vietnam game.  Sorry.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686285Which, fine, whatever. But recognize that it is quite the comical artifice after a while. You fail with bennies or with zonkers, but you always fail with attention-seeking fireworks.

Not sure what you mean by 'attention-seeking fireworks'.  But that's fine.  Again, in my view, it's not about "OMG, even though you lost, I'm going to tell you how awesome you are!"

It's about "you failed, and your life is now worse".  Doesn't have to be "sparklers" or anything of the sort.  You hit on the princess, and failed - and now her suitor wants satisfaction.

And sure, sometimes maybe it is just a flat failure.  But I think that in most cases there's a logical negative consequence of failure that's available.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686285Sometimes the way the world, the situation, progresses is by having efforts to change it fail with no visible effect. It has progressed into the future with status quo intact -- unless timekeeping isn't kept (and we know what Uncle Gygax has to say about that).

Timekeeping is a key part of old-school D&D, for many reasons.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686285I don't understand the need to fail with sparklers, and its argument so far is less than convincing.

Probably because you mostly play games where the costs of failure are baked into the system, I'd guess?

Old D&D is a better-designed game than people give it credit for.  While some mechanics may be clunky, the game really gets the basics down smoothly - risk, reward, opportunity cost, achievement-based goals, increasing tension, the whole nine yards.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686285(edit: I should add, with timekeeping there's no such thing as "no" keeping the game state frozen, as it were. The world is in motion and actions have opportunity cost. Delay amid clockwork is just as real a change in the game state as pyrotechnics.)

I agree.  You've lost the resources used to approach that encounter.  You're down hit points, healing spells, or potions.  It may take a while to rest up, and there's wandering monsters around on top of whichever goons just handed you your ass.

That sounds like progressing things in a negative way to me, so long as you're actually, you know, using the rules and not just tossing shit out because it's "not fun" and you know better than the designers.

And in a system that bakes in things like that, there's less need for the GM to add or even think about "failing forward".  The system just kind of does it naturally.

In so far as I understand the concept, it is something that I have naturally done as DM whenever it made sense in the action at hand.  However, when we tried out that new Star Wars Edge of Empire game, the rules required making up bullshit and/but things on every stinking roll of the dice whether it would make sense or not.  Having it a part of the mechanical rules made for a disjointed game  where we were just making up stuff because the dice said to make something up without regard to it making sense in the moment.

Quote from: Old One Eye;686293However, when we tried out that new Star Wars Edge of Empire game, the rules required making up bullshit and/but things on every stinking roll of the dice whether it would make sense or not.  Having it a part of the mechanical rules made for a disjointed game  where we were just making up stuff because the dice said to make something up without regard to it making sense in the moment.

Haven't played that, but I could see where it being baked into the dice mechanic like that could be potentially jarring, as opposed to the way that old versions of D&D "baked in" things, where it was a more emergent property rather than a direct mechanical lever.

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;686132How about "you fail now, but it doesn't go as badly as it could have been."

I prefer "you failed, and now you have these additional complications you have to deal with.  Sucks to be you."

I'm actually pretty much *against* the idea of removing failure from games.  I think RPGs have gone too far in that direction.

The multi-quoting is getting hard to read. Like oregano, a little goes a long way.

Quote from: robiswrong;686292Wasn't really talking about "yes, but" here, so I'm not sure where the "no" thing comes from.

And it's not so much about "no, but".  "No, and..."... maybe.  So long as the "and" clause involves your character's life getting suckier, and you being further from your goals.

And there's times when the answer is just "no".  No, you can't sprout wings if you're playing a serious Vietnam game.  Sorry.

Not sure what you mean by 'attention-seeking fireworks'.  But that's fine.  Again, in my view, it's not about "OMG, even though you lost, I'm going to tell you how awesome you are!"

*I* was talking about "yes, but" as the proposed explanation of fail forward. Your following post even starts acknowledging that there is a populace advocating this strain of "fail forward" argument. So how you got yourself lost I cannot fathom.

The latter half of that same post talks of Degree of Success attached to failure, except not wanting "just no" as it doesn't change the game state. So you refine that it means "no, and." (Which yes, going with the boolean expressions obviously means getting suckier.)

But if that's what you want, be it either only or predominantly, then constant Degree of Success becomes comical. By sidelining "just no" you are wanting the pyrotechnics of Degree of Success to dominate the setting context. The game state is continuously changing towards extremes. This is eventually exhausting, to both participants and setting context.

I know this because this has been a common issue with In Nomine SJG. The d666 roll provides a Degree of Success value for every roll. However the game explicitly states to incorporate such value only as it seems logical. Otherwise things become an unplayable mess as everything becomes an extreme; suddenly searching a desk for a receipt becomes fraught with portent or peril. It's an untenable state to maintain.

Quote from: robiswrong;686292It's about "you failed, and your life is now worse".  Doesn't have to be "sparklers" or anything of the sort.  You hit on the princess, and failed - and now her suitor wants satisfaction.

That's "no, and." Sparklers means it's beyond a regular consequence of a binary pass/fail test, a Degree of Success. "No, and" is structured in your ending paragraph sentence: task, failed result, and additional negative consequence.

Quote from: robiswrong;686292And sure, sometimes maybe it is just a flat failure.  But I think that in most cases there's a logical negative consequence of failure that's available.

That sounds like progressing things in a negative way to me...

... And in a system that bakes in things like that, there's less need for the GM to add or even think about "failing forward".  The system just kind of does it naturally.

I think you are conflating system with setting context. Setting provides the optional logical consequences of failure. All those random encounter tables, or NPC agendas, and PCs' finite resources are not something special to a particular system. Those are just automators, outlines, and accounting. The system is predominantly the stochastic methods and refinement of PC capacity.

The setting's logic provides an array of sensible results in most things. In pass/fail, GM judgment serves as the decider on degree. In Degree of Success, a stochastic method serves as decider on degree, however system determines how prevalent this is used.

In your "fail forward" a singular value, "no, and," is given favortism in an effort to simulate dynamism. I think it is needless restraint on your GM choice. And from experience of excessive Degree of Success reliance, I know that eventually it exhausts setting logic and makes things feel forced. This leaves me unconvinced of this technique's usefulness, but whatever makes your table happy, y'know.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686317The multi-quoting is getting hard to read. Like oregano, a little goes a long way.

Sorry, I'll try to block more stuff up.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686317*I* was talking about "yes, but" as the proposed explanation of fail forward. Your following post even starts acknowledging that there is a populace advocating this strain of "fail forward" argument. So how you got yourself lost I cannot fathom.

The latter half of that same post talks of Degree of Success attached to failure, except not wanting "just no" as it doesn't change the game state. So you refine that it means "no, and." (Which yes, going with the boolean expressions obviously means getting suckier.)

But if that's what you want, be it either only or predominantly, then constant Degree of Success becomes comical. By sidelining "just no" you are wanting the pyrotechnics of Degree of Success to dominate the setting context. The game state is continuously changing towards extremes. This is eventually exhausting, to both participants and setting context.

I know this because this has been a common issue with In Nomine SJG. The d666 roll provides a Degree of Success value for every roll. However the game explicitly states to incorporate such value only as it seems logical. Otherwise things become an unplayable mess as everything becomes an extreme; suddenly searching a desk for a receipt becomes fraught with portent or peril. It's an untenable state to maintain.

I'm not really interested in the people that use "fail forward" as a way to argue that they should never lose.  There are people that have abused every idea ever made.  I'm not going to discount an idea because some people portray it in the worst light, any more than I'm going to discount a religion because some members of it do horrible things in its name.

I do recognize that discussing the term can lead to problems because of the misuse of it that some people make.  All I can do is say that I'm utterly uninterested in that version of "fail forward".

Sometimes "just no" *does* change the game state.  If you fail on an attack, the game state is changed.  You accomplished nothing with your turn, and now the bad guys get to go.  That's changing the game state.

If you fail to open a door in (old) D&D, time ticks forward, with all the costs and risks associated with that in D&D.

Let me put it this way.  Let's get rid of degrees of success (I think that's even a poor framing of a lot of things, as I consider it to be "possible outcomes", without an assumption of linear arrangement, but that's okay).  Let's just say that there's a coin flip to determine if I'm successful or not.  And if I'm not successful, that nothing changes.

Why the hell wouldn't I keep flipping the coin until I was successful?  So if that's the case, then what's the point of even *having* the failure result?

In most cases, something will eventually happen (even if not immediately) that prevents you from continuing on the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-like quest to get a different coin flip.  So if the choice is really between that thing (whatever it is) and success, why not just roll the damn dice for that in the first place, and get rid of all the intermediate stuff?

In games like old D&D, every turn is a risk, and so every failure has a risk associated with it.  Since that's inherent, and failure isn't really 'neutral', there's no reason to add 'fireworks'.  It's already baked in.

I haven't played In Nomine, so I can't really comment on it.  But even so, "degree of success" has got to be relative to the task.  What's the worst that can really happen if you're searching a desk - it takes longer than you thought and you stub your finger?  Though, again, I'd go back to "what will eventually stop you from just keeping on trying", and push to just roll for that the first time, rather than rolling a hundred times until the terminal condition finally happens.

Now that I think about it, you could probably use degree of success as a way to guesstimate how long it takes, presuming that time is the key factor.

I mean, whatever terminal condition happens in your action, it's gotta be logical to the situation at hand.  I'd think a system that required you to come up with super-dramatic outcomes for mundane tasks was a bit weird.  If anything, I'd just skip over the mundane tasks anyway, if there's nothing really at stake.  I mean, yay, you bought breakfast.  Good for you.  I don't need a mechanic for that.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686317That's "no, and." Sparklers means it's beyond a regular consequence of a binary pass/fail test, a Degree of Success. "No, and" is structured in your ending paragraph sentence: task, failed result, and additional negative consequence.

Not quite.  It's just task, and failed result.  If there's already a failed result, why would you need to add an additional one?  If failure doesn't mean failure, but instead just means "nothing", then it's not really a failure, and you can just keep trying until you win.  If that's the case, why bother rolling?

It's kind of like a slot machine that doesn't take your coins.  Why wouldn't you just keep hitting the button until you get the jackpot?  Without the consequences/terminal condition (running out of the money you're willing to spend on the machine), there's really no point.  Unless you just like seeing bright flashy lights and having people tell you you're a winner and how awesome you are.

It's really just the inverse of making players roll stealth every five feet.  They're gonna fail eventually, it's just a matter of when.  So why not just set an appropriate difficulty and just roll once (until circumstances change, anyway).

Quote from: Opaopajr;686317I think you are conflating system with setting context.  Setting provides the optional logical consequences of failure. All those random encounter tables, or NPC agendas, and PCs' finite resources are not something special to a particular system. Those are just automators, outlines, and accounting. The system is predominantly the stochastic methods and refinement of PC capacity.

The setting's logic provides an array of sensible results in most things. In pass/fail, GM judgment serves as the decider on degree. In Degree of Success, a stochastic method serves as decider on degree, however system determines how prevalent this is used.

Well, that's an interesting point you bring up - what's the boundary between setting context and system?

Basic D&D says you roll for a random encounter every other turn, and find one on a 1 on a d6.  Is that system, or setting?  I'd argue it's system.  Ultimately, I think that a game design is more about the decision matrices that players have available to them, and less about the baseline individual resolution mechanic.

So how often you need food, random encounters, xp for gp, torch lifespans, all of these to me are part of the system of Basic D&D, because they have significant impact on the decisions that a player makes.

Without changing the baseline math model, you can significantly change the experience of the game, and change the inputs into a player's decision making process, by removing these factors.  So I personally think that qualifies as part of the system.

But regardless, we're doing a bit of semantics quibbling at that point.  I think we're both in agreement that in the case of early D&D versions, "the game" (by which I mean the combined system and the setting as expressed in rules, as opposed to particular maps) provides failure conditions beyond 'nothing happens' in the vast majority of cases, even if the core resolution mechanic does not.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686317In your "fail forward" a singular value, "no, and," is given favortism in an effort to simulate dynamism. I think it is needless restraint on your GM choice. And from experience of excessive Degree of Success reliance, I know that eventually it exhausts setting logic and makes things feel forced. This leaves me unconvinced of this technique's usefulness, but whatever makes your table happy, y'know.

It's only forced if you (in the general meaning, not you specifically) blow it out of proportion.  And a system that forces you to have crazy levels of OMGWTFBBQ stuff happening because you're searching a desk definitely feels a bit forced to me, under normal circumstances.  The actual terminal condition for a failed desk search is, of course, going to be dependent on the context of the scenario, so discussing it in isolation is a bit tough.  By my understanding, in In Nomine, it very well *could* be a demon knocking down your door, if what you're trying to do is find the info before the demon gets there.  But in general searching a desk doesn't result in demonic invasion.

It's slightly different from degree of success, as it's really about finding the terminal condition that prevents you from just trying and trying until you succeed, and driving to that rather than rolling dice over and over again for the same thing.

BTW - I've enjoyed this discussion.  Your questioning has really made me drill down to what I see as the core concept.

I find degree of success a generally useful thing, though, so long as the "degree" is generally considered to be relative to the task at hand, rather than absolute.  An absolute degree of success mechanic that must be applied regardless of the relative import of the task?  That strikes me as really weird and having a high potential for artificial and disjointed results.

But most tasks really do allow for some level of degree of success, just relative to what the task is.  If I'm searching a desk for something, and I understand that the terminal failure condition is either "I leave by a certain time period" or "the bad guys bust in on me", then a great success means I get the info I want and get away in time.  A scraping-by success means that I succeeded, but barely get out as the bad guys get in, maybe leading to a chase.  A bare failure might mean that I get out in time without the info, while a serious failure might mean I get so caught up in what I'm doing that I don't leave in time and the bad guys catch me with my hands in the cookie jar.

But even coming up with those cases becomes really difficult without drilling down into what the failure conditions for the task really are.

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;678667I actually like the concept of "failing forward" in an RPG.

The term "failing forward" seems to cover a number of techniques.

The version of the technique I find valuable is also referred to as a "simple success test" in Eclipse Phase: It's an action where we accept that the character is going to succeed. The only question is how long it takes them or how good their success is.

IME, a lot of GMs simply don't utilize this particular category of actions often enough or broadly enough. This often results in highly skilled characters suffering abject failures that don't make a lot of sense.

Similarly, I think there's a lot of mileage to be had in using margin of failure and defining a chunk of the "failure" range as being "you got what you wanted, but with consequences". (This is the "failing your Jump check by two points doesn't necessarily mean you plunged into the abyss; it may mean you came up just short and are now clinging to the ledge on the opposite side" option.)

With that being said, however, the term "failing forward" seems to be far more typically applied to GMs who need to keep the PCs on their railroad. In fact, this seems to be the origin of the term: "Forward" being the direction the pre-planned plot is supposed to be going.

So I think there's a body of useful techniques in the vague vicinity of "failing forward", but I think the term itself is pretty heavily loaded with undesirable baggage.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686351The version of the technique I find valuable is also referred to as a "simple success test" in Eclipse Phase: It's an action where we accept that the character is going to succeed. The only question is how long it takes them or how good their success is.

In many ways, this is similar to my 'what's the terminal condition' question, except one step removed - the time is determined, and then that's compared against the time actually available.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686351Similarly, I think there's a lot of mileage to be had in using margin of failure and defining a chunk of the "failure" range as being "you got what you wanted, but with consequences". (This is the "failing your Jump check by two points doesn't necessarily mean you plunged into the abyss; it may mean you came up just short and are now clinging to the ledge on the opposite side" option.)

I think it's interesting how conditioned we are to think of rolls as 'success' and 'failure'.  Really, rolling the dice means "hrm, there's a bunch of things that could happen here, and a number of them could make sense.  Let's randomly pick one!"  The idea that there are *exactly* two possibilities is kind of limiting, as well as what seems to be a lot of assumptions about what the 'negative'/failure case is.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686351With that being said, however, the term "failing forward" seems to be far more typically applied to GMs who need to keep the PCs on their railroad. In fact, this seems to be the origin of the term: "Forward" being the direction the pre-planned plot is supposed to be going.

I think it was actually originally a motivational-speaker-go-get-em kinda thing.  Go forward, and even if you fail, then the knowledge and experience you got from that failure is value and moves you closer to your end goal, even if indirectly.

I also think that the RPG use came from closer to the storygame side of things - I think Burning Wheel was one of the first games to really push the idea.  And while storygames are contentious in and of themselves here, they're generally pretty anti-railroad.

That said, I don't doubt that a lot of train aficionados use the term to mean exactly what you describe - if you're coming from a 'plot = railroad' viewpoint, the term 'fail forward' does suggest that you get to advance even if you fail.  And that idea has got to be like crack to the "I hate losing" crowd.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686351So I think there's a body of useful techniques in the vague vicinity of "failing forward", but I think the term itself is pretty heavily loaded with undesirable baggage.

Clearly.

I absolutely loved the dice mechanic from the WHFRPG 3rd edition, though I only used it once in play before returning to my default percent-based system for two reasons...1, since the difficulty of a roll is determined by adding specific dice to the player's dice pool, players always knew how difficult any action was and if they succeeded (which doesn't sound like a problem except that my games tend to be mysteries, with a lot of clues to find. When players searched a room and I gave them 3 purple dice to roll, they'd instantly know something was there to find, and the game took on an aspect of pixel-bashing. If I have no difficulty dice, players wouldn't even sweat failure as they would assume there's nothing to find).

Second, what is actually relevant to the thread, is that often times I WANTED a simple "yes/no" answer from the dice, and they simply don't provide that except by mostly ignoring the results (and thus making the dice pool procedure overall unnecessary). So, yeah, I don't mind systems that provide a "failing forward" or other options ( yes,but; no,and;etc ), but I don't want that as the sole mechanic applied to every roll. And for myself, personally, I find I can do all that on my own w/o help from the system anyways.

I don't see failing forward as a bad thing, if it is used to create interesting events or to add color to the game.

I can. however, see it being bad if it prevents actual failure, or bestows too great of a reward for failing.


I think my gm style embraces failure as real possibility.

Failing forward is not intuitive to me.

Quote from: Opaopajr;686261That translates to "no, but."

So far, the explanations of Fail Forward seems "no, but" converts into "yes, but" as if they are interchangeable. And the justification seems "because its cool, otherwise the game's instant gratification (or worse, the plot) would come to a halt."

Yeah.

"Yes / no, but" becoming widely used is one of the most interesting things in vaguely recent gaming.

Of course they can be used badly, any mechanic can, but it doesn't make sense to reject them entirely because of that. If people want to use them badly, fine, you're never going to be able to stop them without ruining it for the people who want to use them properly... and "was that done well or badly" is a decision that only the individual table concerned can make.

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I am going to have to comb through this thread to see if someone coherently and succinctly explains what "failing forwards" even means. But if it means what I think it means, then I have objections to it, ethical and moral objections. Failures should always be punished. Success does not have to be rewarded, but failure should be punished.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;686431Failures should always be punished. Success does not have to be rewarded, but failure should be punished.

I agree.