Failure is often the most interesting outcome of conflict and driver of compelling narratives. So why punish failure and reward success?

I’ll admit upfront that I have a “thing” for risk/reward mechanics; rules where tactical choices are encouraged through consequences that are more meaningful than a simple “opportunity cost”. And if those mechanics can convey relatable ideals and values and say something interesting about the sort of person making those choices, well… I start getting excited.

In my current project, I’m applying this lens to pretty much every mechanic, which means the first thing I have to re-evaluate is the central resolution mechanic for all player actions. Should the possible outcomes be binary, ternary, quaternary? What distribution of outcomes would be exciting without being frustrating or predictable? How should players respond to the outcomes?

What do I want from players?

In thinking about what sort of engagement I would like from players, I realized that I wanted them to push themselves; to chase risk actively, rather than minimize or avoid it. Traditional hit point based systems do a great job of encouraging risk-averse behavior as there is absolutely no benefit from losing hit points: they are purely negative and ultimately lead to death. What a downer. So you end up with this anti-climactic system where the best and most powerful characters are the most boring; they are able to avoid failure entirely and are rewarded highly for efficiently bypassing all the dramatic stuff that makes conflict compelling. To compensate for this, such games necessitate throwing bigger and bigger numbers at them, solely to offset their increasing ability to avoid failure. But do bigger numbers make play more compelling? Is avoiding 500 damage more interesting than avoiding 5 damage if they both only represent 10% of your hit points?

What if in order to get the reward, you had to engage with failure? What if, like in real life, failure were the best way to progress? I mean, really, people don’t learn much from their successes; they learn from their failures. Failures occur when we push ourselves, try new things, and encounter unforeseen complications. The consequences of failure directly lead to new knowledge, insight, and experience which we can draw from in the future. But success? All we can learn from success is that our previous failures taught us enough.

But there’s also the problem of perception. Too often failure is equated with weakness, or of not being good enough. But is it really weakness to sustain a mortal wound while defending thousands of innocent townsfolk from a black dragon? If you attempt to run it through the heart, but instead are batted aside and impaled on thorny scales, is that ineptitude? Or is that outstanding courage and resolve? Is it more epic for you to fail and keep trying? Or to succeed first go? Which is a more inspiring outcome?

My goals for failure

Players should want to fail

Failure should be risky

Failure should be the primary path to progression

Failure should reinforce how awesome the character is

My solution to these goals was to dump any notion of hit points, wound levels, stress counters, or any of that stuff. I call my solution “Mettle”. It represents your courage, conviction, and heroism. It is how hard you are prepared to push yourself to achieve your goals. Every point in Mettle represents an endured hardship: pain, shock, wounds, torment, stress, doubt, fear, and shame. Every point of adversity, rejection, and suffering, is a badge demonstrating your stoic willpower and determination.

Fall seven times. Get up eight.

Mettle is represented as a track, and you use a token of some sort to track your Mettle gain. Every time you fail a roll, you take the difference and add it to Mettle. So if you roll a 4, and they roll a 7, you add 3 to your Mettle, by moving a token to the “3” on the track. This is what it roughly looks like on your character sheet:

Mettle: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [+] [+] [CRISIS]

As you might be able to see above, Mettle has three parts. The first part is called the “runway”, numbered [1] through [6]. If you have between 1 and 6 Mettle, then at any time, you can spend all your Mettle to add this amount as a bonus to your next roll. So if you have 5 Mettle, you can spend it all (resetting Mettle to 0) to gain a +5 bonus on your next roll. This represents a redoubling of your efforts in the face of adversity.

The second part is the “target”. It’s the little [+] signs. If you gain 7 or 8 Mettle, you immediately gain 1 “Potential”, and reset Mettle to 0. Potential is my character progression mechanic. It’s kind of like Experience Points in concept, but entirely different in function. The important point for now is that if you gain just the right amount of Mettle, you gain the potential to grow your character.

The third part is the consequence of pushing yourself too hard: “crisis”. If you gain 9+ Mettle, you enter a crisis, which is a really bad situation in the fiction, but mechanically, it takes you out of the situation until the crisis is resolved, and resolving it has a chance at setting your progression back. So you want to avoid this.

Now here’s the piece of the puzzle that holds this all together as a system of player empowerment and risk/reward; the player themselves chooses the difficulty of the conflict every time. No GM required, and no tables to look up. The player judges their effectiveness and odds of success against the dice, and chooses how many dice represent the challenge they are currently facing. If they want to gain more Mettle, they might increase the challenge difficulty, but if they are edging perilously close to the Mettle target (increasing the chance they’ll overshoot it and hit a crisis), they might choose to either lower the challenge difficulty, or spend their Mettle for a boost to their next roll.

Failing is the new winning

With Mettle, I feel I've developed a compelling mechanic for failing forward. Failure on the runway allows you to do better next time. Fail to the target and you can potentially grow your character. Fail to crisis and something dramatic happens within the story which itself has a number of outcomes (I may discuss crisis in another post).

At all times though, players want to fail; not too much, but just enough, because this is the only gateway to their overall progression. Which means loads of interesting and compelling outcomes within the fiction. The players are putting their characters in difficult positions, and narrating hardships, adversity, and drama. All of this comes for free by tying progression to failure instead of success, and by giving players the power to determine the difficulty of their characters actions themselves.

In my next article I’ll look at success, and explore how I think too much success might be a bad thing, and what I’m doing about it.