2017-06-07 : Failure in RPGs (by Paganini)

Quoth my old friend Paganini:

It used to be like this:

DM: The plot is behind that locked door.

Fighter: I pick the lock.

DM: Ye can't pick ye lock, you're a fighter. Bring a rogue next time.

Fighter: *goes and does something else, missing the plot*

- OR -

DM: Roll!

Rogue: *rolls 100 or so times over the course of the next 3 days, fighting off concomitant wondering monster attacks, until one of a few things happens:*

1. He finally rolls that 20

2. The party gives up and leaves, thus missing the plot

3. The wandering monsters wipe out the party

4. The DM gets bored and has his Precious Favorite NPC, Dios ab Mechanicos, briefly poke his head around the corner and wave his Wand O' Knockin' at the door, leaving the party wondering why good ol' Dios doesn't just finish the whole adventure for them.

It didn't take folks (at least, some folks) to decide this was stupid, so in the 80s and 90s, when I got into RPGs, we had lots of pithy Wisdom Slogans, like "don't hide the plot behind a locked door" and "don't make the players roll to cross the room or tie their shoes." I.e., if the mechanics are causing a problem, do an end run around them. "Use the mechanics when there's a reasonable chance of failure." Also known as "use the mechanics when you decide to use the mechanics." I guess this is what most gamers are still doing, since they mainly play Pathfinder, apparently.

So then (for me) was the Forge, System Matters, and lots of games that handled this one way or another, like Burning Wheel's "your roll is your best shot; you can't pick this lock until something changes, so go change something then come back and try again." Or your "only roll when there's a possibility of interesting failure." I think this became the default approach incorporated into basically every Forge game. So that is both reactionary in an understandable way ("whiffing is boring!"), and also good for story gaming in the sense that I take "interesting failure" to mean "some real person has feelings about that failure."

That, to me, was the real point of "conflict resolution." It wasn't, in the long run, about whether or not the plot got stuck behind the locked door, it was about whether or not the mechanics would occasionally force me to feel sad (or whatever) about what happened to a character so that when I felt happy (or whatever) about what happened to a character it was that much more real. That's what "In a Wicked Age" is about right? I'm my character's biggest fan, and the characters are set up so that the biggest fans of the other characters are going to screw with my character in a way I don't like, and we'll all naturally go straight to the dice, where I'll win (hah HAH) or lose (AUGH, MY POOR CHARACTER) and have feelings either way.

What I'm thinking about right now, though, is that in stories we consume - books, movies, whatever - characters do actually whiff. Sometimes Elric tries to summon Arioch, and he just can't get it up. I have a couple of thoughts about this that are basically questions.

First, maybe I'm just whistling in the dark. I don't totally understand those whiffing scenes and why authors include them, so maybe the're just *bad writing,* and it's good if we don't have them in our games.

Second, maybe emergent group-authored RPG stories are different in some way that disqualifies dead ends from being interesting. What is that way?

Third, maybe we can "rehabilitate the whiff." Maybe there's a way to make "meaningless failure" (from the character's perspective) into "meaningful failure" (from the player's perspective). That means I have to answer the question "why was it interesting for Elric to fail? - why did the author include that scene at all?" This seems usually to be something about cost, like "afterwards Elric is exhausted, so pushing through the next fight is that much more of a heroic effort." But sometimes it seems like it's just there for humanizing effect: "you couldn't manage that climb; you'll have to go around."

I put this idea into the sword & sorcery game I'm working on, but I'm not totally satisfied. I have "Obstacles," basically, unmotivated features of the universe that get in your way. Typical Sword & Sorcery stuff like chasms to cross, wizard towers to climb, deadly ice fields to trudge across, etc. You get a free shot at overcoming an obstacle. If you fail, you can just walk away. At the last second, the chasm was too wide, so you didn't jump after all. You made it part way up the tower, but your grip slipped and you fell off and landed on your feet. But if you can "double down" if you want; you can sacrifice some WILLPOWER to try again, and this time there's risk: if you fail again, there's some extended complication, depending on what you were trying to do. Either the GM gets to spring a bunch of nasty shit on you, or you can buy off the failure just by taking straight up damage. (You fell and twisted your ankle, or whatever.)

So this works, but it's not that much different from our old friends "no," and "no, and... ." Mainly, what it doesn't do, is make obstacles and straight failures do whatever it is that they do in literature. All that it does is give the player the opportunity to invest some game currency in a situation and trade for narrative currency.

Maybe I can summarize like this: I want to have these scenes, because without them what my game makes is less like what I'm trying to get (Sword & Sorcery fiction). But I'm not totally sure why those scenes are in the fiction, so I'm not sure how to make them work in a game except in a sort of "monkey see, monkey do pastiche" kind of way.

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marginalia This makes...

Pag go "I read about that..."*

*click in for more

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marginalia This makes...

JACN go "Man. This is fun and interesting."



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marginalia This makes...

Pag go "This reminds me of "*

*click in for more

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marginalia This makes...

JACN go "Consarn it, with forgetting to close the emphasis!"

VB go "Got it!"

JACN go "????"

Pag go "This ties into an idea I have about RPGs as distinct from fiction:"*

*click in for more

1. On 2017-06-07,said: 2. On 2017-06-07,said: 3. On 2017-06-07,said: 4. On 2017-06-07,said: 5. On 2017-06-07,said: 6. On 2017-06-07,said: 7. On 2017-06-07,said: 8. On 2017-06-07,said: 9. On 2017-06-07,said: 10. On 2017-06-07,said: 11. On 2017-06-07,said: 12. On 2017-06-08,said: 13. On 2017-06-08,said: 14. On 2017-06-08,said: 15. On 2017-06-08,said: 16. On 2017-06-09,said: 17. On 2017-06-10,said: 18. On 2017-06-15,said: 19. On 2017-06-19,said: 20. On 2017-06-19,said:

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