Fucking failing forward

You do not even know what you are talking about, what you described is not falling forward. Falling forward means avoiding situations in which players are led to a dead end by dice rolls. Example.
>players must get into the innermost part of the castle of EvilMcBaddie, the resident villain
>they however fail in sneaking in the front door, as the lock won't budge. Not only, but a patrol of guards finds them
>they kill the patrol, avoiding getting their presence known to the rest of the guards, and on the dy of one of them find a key which opens, as they will figure out on their own, a passage from the stables to the part of the castle they need to reach, a door they noticed earlier while sneaking around.
There. The characters failed, got things rougher for them and are forced to take anoher route, however their failure didn't lead to a dead end in which they aimlessly sit on their thumbs for 30 minutes trying to think of a solution that is not "the wizard casts X" because you gave them no other inputs.

Captain's Log, stardate 201607071227.22. Today, OP was a stupid faggot, and Veeky Forums laughed at him. When will the OPs learn?

"Failing Forward" basically sprung up out of Dungeon World. Essentially, instead of a pass/fail binary it turns things into a pass spectrum where you theoretically always succeed on rolls but depending on how badly you rolled you can still get screwed.

You are a retard.

Failing forward doesn't mean "advancing one's agenda despite failing".

Failing forward means maintaining a smooth flow of narrative. Failing forward means having a plot hook ready in case you fail. It means that there's always SOMETHING to do in case you fail at going down the railroad.

Whoops, didn't kill the BBEG in time? Well, you can try thwart his plans instead.
Whoops, didn't manage to thwart them? Well, you can try to limit its destruction potential.
Whoops, didn't manage to limit its destruction potential? You can try to ensure that there will be heroes that will come after your death and try to fix your shit.

Failing forward is necessary. It just means that failure doesn't grind things to a halt.
>boohoo sometimes you can't win
That's fine. Punish the players however you want. Inflict harsh consequences on them. Just don't shut things down because players failed a roll.

Thank fucking God Veeky Forums isn't retarded.

OP, go fuck yourself.

I prefer Fate's terminology, "Succeed, at a cost." It's what heist movies do all the time.

You botch a roll to crack a safe, say. Instead of, "No, you can't open it" or "Go ahead and try again" it can be, "You realize the safe you expected has been replaced with the latest model. You can crack it, but it's going to take twice as long as the guards are making their rounds! How do you improvise?"

Any competent GM will recognize this as, "That thing I do already."

That's likely because people bitch about shit that doesn't matter on here, and overblow things to make them sound far worse then they are.

Nah. This isn't a real problem. Just run a good campaign, and no one will give a shit.

Failing Forward is a catchy term for a basic game master technique developed long ago known as "defining failure". Only difference is that it is now hailed as a revolutionary narrative tool that has nothing to do with those cruddy oldschool trash games.

>Any competent GM will recognize this as, "That thing I do already."
I would phrase it as advice from experienced GMs to inexperienced GMs.

It is a thing that good experienced GMs have learned to do, but letting others benefit from your experience isn't a bad thing.

Yeah. I've been playing since 2nd edition and it's never been like this Internet nightmare Veeky Forums fears

90% of the time it's a thing, either a good idea or realistic problem, taken to an extreme and said stupidly.
Either by Veeky Forums or by the people Veeky Forums is reacting to, and then Veeky Forums reacts by either only considering the extreme case or making extremes in return.

Veeky Forums doesn't play games.

More news at eleven.

There is a difference between "grind to a halt" and having to come up with a new plan. It forces players to think on their feet, sometimes make snap decisions when a portion of a larger plan doesn't work out. It adds interest and tension to the narrative.

Well, it's been around in the indie circle longer than that, but DW popularized it, as it appealed to a much wider audience than Apocalypse World.

Yeah, that's what failing forward actually is.

and there is a difference between 'secretly benefiting the player', and 'advancing the story rather than causing the players to attempt the same problem again'.

The second thing has actually been a problem in a campaign I'm currently in. It's overall a good campaign, but sometimes the dice have fucked us, and that's okay, but the GM has typically had it just result in a reset with one possible solution crossed off.
Which has been okay sometimes, but has lead to some serious frustration sometimes. Too the point that the GM has recognized that a section wasn't very good because we felt stuck and railroaded.
And in that case was actually solved by 'failing forward', because he introduced another quest we needed to do just to recover, during the course of which we met an npc we could ally with who could provide us a new option which could let us advance to the next part of the previous quest.

This took time, which meant the bad stuff advanced, set us off course which means we lost that thread of the main quest, and in other ways set us back overall, but it got us out of being stuck, which was the problem as a game.

>Doing so sets off an alarm

Except that doesn't happen every time, faggot. Sometimes the door just doesn't open and the PCs can try something else. Not everything needs to be a goddamn high octane adventure. This is the problem that all the Call of Duty games my little cousin plays, has. I watched him play for 15 minutes and fucking nothing happens that isn't immediately followed by a goddamn explosion and firefight.

>You do not even know what you are talking about, what you described is not falling forward.

I know that, mongloid, I am talking about the definition that Reddit and Veeky Forums have skewed it to, which is "rule of cool suck the players' dicks"

You go fuck yourself, you present no counterargument.

>but DW popularized it, as it appealed to a much wider audience than Apocalypse World.

You mean the audience of cancer that won't play anything that isn't high fantasy degenerate garbage, and dismisses AW because it has sex in it? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Jesus Christ, THIS.
What kind of fucking pussy can't just tell a problem player and problem GM to just fuck off to somewhere else so the reasonable people can stay and have fun?

>Veeky Forums have skewed it to, which is "rule of cool suck the players' dicks"
when did this happen outside of people complaining that it's a terrible thing because they didn't understand it and took it to extremes?

>IIT:
>OP bitches about a GMing technique incompatible with sandbox games but utterly necessary in railroad games
>All of Veeky Forums, assuming railroad is how to RPG, descends on OP and cries faggot

TIL Veeky Forums doesn't know how to Veeky Forums.

>TIL

What did he mean by this?

>You mean the audience of cancer that won't play anything that isn't high fantasy degenerate garbage, and dismisses AW because it has sex in it?

Yeah, I suppose you could phrase it that way, if you were super butthurt.
The authors said they intended to make D&D for the indie crowd, but wound up with Apocalypse World for the D&D crowd.

>Failing forward
>railroading

Those are two entirely separate things. In the example of * World games, the GM is explicitly instructed NOT to "build a plot" or railroad anything.

>OP bitches about a GMing technique incompatible with sandbox games

What. Both AW and DW are built for sandbox and expressly state that they are not good if you just "want to tell your story".

>What kind of fucking pussy can't just tell a problem player and problem GM to just fuck off to somewhere else so the reasonable people can stay and have fun?

Because sometimes that person does not have the social capital required to eject the person from the group, or real life friendships are involved, or the group agrees with the that guy even though that guy is still fucking them over. Either way, none of that has anything to do with OP's statement.

>I am talking about the definition that Reddit and Veeky Forums have skewed it to, which is "rule of cool suck the players' dicks"
Looking at nearly every response in this thread it seems like Veeky Forums hasn't skewed in the direction of you internet boogeyman at all and you're grasping at straws looking for reasons to be mad.

>when did this happen outside of people complaining that it's a terrible thing because they didn't understand it and took it to extremes?

That is exactly my complaint, that people skewed it to extremes and now shill it as the best way to play.

>The authors said they intended to make D&D for the indie crowd, but wound up with Apocalypse World for the D&D crowd.

D&D for the indie crowd would be like Burning Wheel or Warrior Rogue and Mage. Apocalypse World isn't a fucking indie game in terms of hipsters, it was obscure as fuck and that was fine. It was only once hipsters started shoving Dungeon World into our faces and complaining about literally everything about roleplaying games that they didn't understand, and starting fucking blogs with their patreons attached to whine about roleplaying being done wrong.

90% of this shit is a strawman against D&D 3.5 which no one even plays anymore. All of the reasons to play Dungeon World ignore every other game out there. The PbtA mechanics contribute nothing; plebs just see it as a "rules-light" alternative to D&D and thus they don't even scratch the surface of what makes Apocalypse World good.

>You go fuck yourself, you present no counterargument.
He's agreeing with the people saying you're full of shit.

>IIT:
What did he mean by this?

You just went full virt, OP.

> that people skewed it to extremes and now shill it as the best way to play.
and what I'm saying is that the only times I've seen it skewed to the extreme has been by critics, not proponents.

And stop using the term shill to refer to people who aren't being payed, but just buy into something as good. No matter how foolish their buy in is.

>What did he mean by this?

What did he mean by this?

Are other people ruining your hobby, OP?

In This Thread.
It's a commonly used term. TIL isn't.

>>What did he mean by this?
>What did he mean by this?
What did he mean by this?

Oooooooooh "ITT", not IIT!

Is this the way people ask for a concept to be explained now? They shout angrily about a vague notion they only know a little bit about, knowing that the masses of Veeky Forums will angrily correct them and educated them in the process?

I would love to implement failing forward, but I play dnd. There are so many combat rolls that the players miss, I would be advised of bias if I tried to introduce fumbles

Everybody knows that in order to be taken seriously you've got to prove that you're the angriest gamer on the internet.

Either that or it's just bait. Who knows?

Generally failing forward would come into play with non-combat rolls. It's not like you can let your party keep hammering away on a door they need to get through or you might as well have not put it there in the first place, so instead you make an extra but less advantageous path. The only way this concept applies to combat is after it has ended and they have not won (or failed some objective within the combat like protecting an NPC). Rather than killing them or hitting them with an irl "game over" screen you find some alternative path that puts them at a disadvantage for failing.

Fumbles are an entirely separate concept.

Removing my namefagging right after this post...

Why have rolls that literally don't have any effect? When I fail at something, there's often an outcome either way.

Heck, I am playing Star Wars Saga one of my houserules is that characters can aim for something else than a 10 to help out. 10 gives a +2 on a success. 15 > +3, 20 > +4 and so on. If you aim for anything over 10, failing by 5 means you hinder instead of helping.

In the same way, a lot of rolls have "miss by 5+: negative effect" and "hit by 5+: positive effect". A binary hit/miss is really boring.

Today I Learned

IIT is probably supposed to be ITT.

What's a fumble?

Crit fails, botches, natural 1s, that kind of thing.

The worst thing about modern gaming is that you're not allowed to fail, because failing would kill the story the GM has created. Unless failing was what was supposed to happen all along, then you can't win.

Also, fuck being kept alive by GM fiat over and over.

>modern gaming

Bad DMs have been doing that since the 80s. That has nothing to do with modern gaming, it's just plain old railroading.

Like the other poster said they're the consequences for critical failures during attack rolls. They can range from dropping your weapon or falling prone all the way up to sudden death by accidentally falling on your sword. My DM is a shit head who likes to use crit tables so combat has become annoyingly deadly thanks to fumbles. He wonders why we don't like role playing in the game when he kills off our characters like a smug fuck every time we enter combat.

In addition to what said, who plays with randoms enough that anything you're complaining about actually becomes a problem? Do you people complaining about this shit seriously not have a group of friends or regular players that you actually enjoy gaming with?

An interesting variant of this is "not winning combat hard enough". For example, you may have won, but you took too long and the evil vizier got away because you were trying to play it safe. Depending on how safe you played it, he may have had time to empty his coffers, and/or leave a nasty surprise. Alerting and drawing in other enemies is another classic.

No, they do not.
At most, they get into a group, disrupt it or are generally not terribly fun to play with and are dumped.

>Are other people ruining your hobby, OP?

Yes. And it is my fervent hope that they die in car accidents post haste.

>Also, fuck being kept alive by GM fiat over and over.

This. It happens at the Adventurer's League game I play. I literally do retarded shit so that I can die over and over and get new 'dark gifts" to make myself more powerful. Dying is literally a good strategy.

Does Roll20 count? Because if so, I do.

>who plays with randoms enough that anything you're complaining about actually becomes a problem? Do you people complaining about this shit seriously not have a group of friends or regular players that you actually enjoy gaming with?
You have to remember that most of the complaint threads on Veeky Forums are made in the hypothetical, by people who have either never played an RPG in the presence of other humans, or by people who have been shunned by other players and responded by assuring themselves that everyone else is the problem.

The internet has worked in this way for quite a while.

play games that don't reward retarded shit.

Adventurer's League is pure cancer, it's no wonder OP plays that. One of the rules is that you can't get kicked out of a game, so it's a haven for retarded That Guys like him who would be thrown out of anywhere else.
AL is an attempt to recreate the kind of multi-DM world thing that Gygax and Arneson and friends used to run back in the early days, but it's all corporate and terrible. You KNOW Gygax would kick a motherfucker out for being an asshole.

Aggressively using failing forward is terrible, but this isn't why.

It's bad because it cuts many elements of planning and risk assessment out of the game. For a player who doesn't think actions through or a DM who puts a pass/fail skill check right in the middle of a progress bottleneck, it's a really useful tool. But for a player who plans and carefully thinks about the actions of his consequences, it's incredibly confining and feels like railroading.

>But for a player who plans and carefully thinks about the actions of his consequences, it's incredibly confining and feels like railroading.

I don't get it. If you're trying to crack the evil mastermind's warehouse door's security and succeed, you get inside and do an investigation session looking for clues. If you fail, some security guys come around the corner and shine flashlights in your eyes, and now it's an escape from the local police chase session.
How is that like railroading?

Because a smart player checks for nearby guards before he tries to open the door. And checks for alarms. And then the GM, with his failing forward philosophy, pulls some other bullshit out of his ass anyways.

It's a big red narrative override button that the GM is encouraged to press as often as possible. Too bad the players' agency in the game is limited to the logic of cause and effect. Which the GM promptly ignores.

In a fully narrative game like FATE, the players also get a narrative override button, so balance is restored. Failing forward is a mechanic that belongs in this type of game; you can't just randomly drop it into D&D.

So what should the do in the case you described?
Say they failed, nothing happens, try again?
Say they failed, no trying again, mission over?

>pulls some other bullshit out of his ass anyways.

Yes, if you carefully eliminate every possible failure state you can think of, you're forcing the GM to come up with one you didn't think of. Solutions: (A) don't minmax the situation so damn hard, leave the GM some wiggle room to do something interesting (B) convince the GM you shouldn't be rolling now because there's no danger left.
(C) Whine about how this is somehow railroading

"You weren't able to jimmy the door open, but you do see a slot for some kind of electronic key card..."

There's always an alternative solution.

That's just
>Say they failed, nothing happens, try again?

It's not interesting or exciting, it's just rolling again, with a little window dressing.

The reason people invented 'failing forward' is so that games don't grind to a halt because a player flubbed a roll necessary to advance the campaign.

It seems to me that you're somehow trying to reverse-railroad the GM into letting you declare that there will be no negative consequences for a failed roll, and then getting mad that he doesn't cooperate.

It's not minmaxing though, it's the way the game is actually intended to be played. Look, the game is supposed to be a collaboration between the GM, the players, and the dice. Failing forward reduces that to just the GM and the dice.

With failing forward: you rolled low -> you suffer negative consequences

Without: you rolled low -> you fail to complete the task -> the consequences for failure depend on the situation, and can be very dire or irrelevant

Then the goal of the players is to rig the situation so that they're only taking low risk, high reward actions. Things get interesting when the players have to make decisions with limited information, or naturally find themselves in a bind where even their best bet is a big risk.

Of course not. It's a quest to sneakily find the matching card in a security office of some kind, or relieve the head guard of his copy.

>or irrelevant

But if the price of failure is irrelevant, then in a fail forward system, YOU DON'T ROLL FOR THAT.
In fact, you don't roll for that in any system unless your GM just likes wasting time.

Yeah, I guess you could do that. In which case it becomes a valid "fail forward" response by the GM.
But I was thinking that a player just pulls out his hacking gear and starts rolling to trick the card slot.

That's wrong. The GM has ample opportunity to respond, "Yes, there is an alarm. If you fail, the whole place will know you're here." Or "The guards are closing in. You can try it now, but you'll only have one shot." But to have the guards be closer BECAUSE of the player's bad lockpicking roll is preposterous and disingenuous -- especially if the player has taken the time to scout out the guards in advance.

There is literally a policy for kicking someone. It's on page 9 of the Adventurers League Players Guide. I don't understand how you can be so illiterate and still type.

inb4 "Adventurers League is pure cancer because the fuckin' pussy-ass faggots can't take a joke with their table nazi policies"

Completely unrelated: Why Mountain Dew? I'm not american and I can't help to see mountain dew everywhere regarding nerds/geeks/rpg players/vydia/MTG/whatever. What is even that shit? Soda?

>In which case it becomes a valid "fail forward" response by the GM.
Personally, I wouldn't call this failing forward. If you want to though, this leaves us with two kinds of failing forward that are very different.
1) The kind that ignores the logical cause and effect of the situation that the players may have taken into consideration. This is the bad kind.
2) The kind where the GM elaborates on the situation to offer new possibilities, but also respect the laws of cause and effect. This is the most vital tool in the GM's toolbox, pretty much regardless of game.

It's more like "failing sideways".

>The GM has ample opportunity to respond,
>But to have the guards be closer BECAUSE of the player's bad lockpicking roll is preposterous and disingenuous

Then your problem isn't with fail forward, it's with your GM's misuse of it. You've solved your own problem, user.

Respecting the laws of cause and effect is part of failing forward, too. Type 1 is just bad GMing.

It's a really high sugar content soda that, for some reason, has become associated with nerds in general and videogames in particular.

It doesn't really taste like anything other than itself, in the same way as coke just tastes like... coke.

Its an addicting beverage made from orange juice waste by-products, sugar and caffeine.

Basically, it was Energy Drink before the invention of Energy Drink.

>Respecting the laws of cause and effect is part of failing forward, too. Type 1 is just bad GMing.
In that case, many of the loudest proponents for failing forward on Veeky Forums are very bad GMs. More personally, my opinion and yours are similar, but we've experienced confusion over terminology. Sound fair?

Ah...

ITT: OP is a giant faggot who fundamentally fails to understand what failing forward means, and thinks that everyone shares his fucked up view of it. OP may or not be virtualoptim.

Failing forward just moves the story forward, end of. It doesn't mean 'coddle the players.'

>In that case, many of the loudest proponents for failing forward on Veeky Forums are very bad GMs.

The loudest voices on Veeky Forums are almost always That Guys, so it kind of goes without saying.

>>OP bitches about a GMing technique incompatible with sandbox games but utterly necessary in railroad games
>>All of Veeky Forums, assuming railroad is how to RPG, descends on OP and cries faggot
>Veeky Forums doesn't know how to Veeky Forums.
I respectfully disagree.

I don't understand what you're saying. So the PCs decided to climb a wall. They fail. And somehow they still climb the wall? Is that what youre getting on here? I gues I need to start listening to random podcasts and reading random blogs. I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

The PCs decide to climb a wall, fail, and are offered an alternate path. As opposed to shoving their thumbs up their butts and waiting until they can try again.

This

Irrelevant was the wrong choice of words, sorry. I meant that you won't get burned for failure, but you will have to find a different solution.

>They fail. And somehow they still climb the wall?
Maybe. Perhaps they reach the top of the wall only to realize they stand out clearly against the horizon and the guards are coming, or that the other side is covered in barbed wire with decaying planks filled with rusty nails at the bottom should they try to drop down around here, or as they reach the top of the wooden fence, the rotted posts give way and the thing starts crashing down, anything that moves the game forward while still acknowledging that things did not go according to plan.
In most systems this can be a fun way of dealing with a botch or thrown in at either appropriate or periodic times rather than on all rolls.

Well, isn't always like that? What the hell OP is about?