Thread by @rdonoghue

I am thinking about this way more than I should because it’s kind of true but then I think more and it’s totally not but now I want to figure out what it would take to actually make it true.

https://twitter.com/MWStuff/status/1095852357064089600

Like, we’re really talking something that is very close to ADRPG in experience, where things are mostly made of fail but critically have a handful of hard points which must be respected for everyone to actually have fun with it.

Not that ADRPG was perfect, since there was a lot of jerk move stuff in the mix, but it ended up (maybe accidentally, but I grow less sure with time) very good at what I would call respectful failure. You failed a lot, but never because your character was less than you thought.

Part of the reason I am less sure about the accidental part was because the reason you failed was because the GM was a jerk.

That seems really dysfunctional on the surface, and it’s always puzzled me how incredibly functional it proved in practice, and I have suspicions.

Like, specifically, but *FRAMING* the GM as an antagonist, but the GM actually wanting awesome thing while wearing an evil mustache, it created a space for lots of failure, but failure which drove you forward and left you wanting more.

This required dicelessness because that kind of nuance *demands* a human’s sense of pacing and drama (and a good one at that) but if that’s *all* you have, then the game is everyone’s friend, and it’s just theater (which is fine, but not what I thrived on)

And the nuance evolves as players buy into it, and the MEANING of failure has so much buy in but at the same time can neither be totally capricious nor can it be entirely handwaved because it’s sharp edges give it form.

Ok, that’s pretty abstract, but to take it back to the example, you can *DO* the “failure 90% of the time” game and have it rock but ONLY IF you can do failure AWESOMELY and right now, no game can do that.

No. None.
Not that one.
Not that one either.

Which is not to say it’s impossible, but it would be hard. Game design is at this point only decent at success and still kind of getting it’s feet under it for more complicated results. Even our most dictatorial system shunt failure off on the human machine.

Which maybe tells us something about systems or humans, but that’s an aside.

Now, in my gut, i think the real secret sauce is terrible successes.

These are a little bit like complicated successes, but turned up to 11, so to speak. You don’t see these a lot in partial success systems because the math is that a lesser result —> a lesser success

And I admit, when I GM PBTA games and their ilk, the terrible success is my go to move for failure results. That is, the result of the action is exactly as intended, but the knock on effects are SO MUCH WORSE.

Rolled a 3? Oh, yeah, you totally elude the guards and slip into the Viceroy’s study. problem. He’s there. Second problem. There’s a knife in his chest. THird problem: THat’s the alarm going off.

This is not a hard move, it is a jerk move. Rather than using the system to deliver a failure, it uses it to grant the GM permission to be arbitrary with player buy in because they are on board with consequences.

This is a technique, not a rule, and will not suit all tables.

But what it *does* do as a technique is empower the GM incredibly to - as the wise man says - be a fan of the characters.

But it reflects a philosophy of intent - a desire to explicitly push characters to their space of awesomeness on the shared understanding that bad things are opportunities, and more opportunities is always better.

But it demands taste.

Without that, if you write an all failure game, then it will quickly become a comedy. And that will be a lot of fun.

But it will not be Magicians, which is a game that is only going to be fun for people looking for VERY PERSONAL PAIN.

Generic pain is easy. Even dramatic pain can be mechanized.

Artisanal pain still requires an annoying amount of hand crafting.

So, very literally, if you run a PBTA game with 1d6, then that would be an interesting game where the best results are not good. That’s cool, but you would need to do things with the 6- space to give it more breathing room than in any designs I’ve seen.

But, counterintuitively, you would also have to assume success MUCH more often.

Yes, that sounds weird, but bear with me. The system is going to grind to a halt (or into slapstick) if 80% of everything important becomes a roll with a 75-100% chance of failure.

When failure if the most likely outcome of rolls, calling for a roll signals something VERY DIFFERENT than it does in most other games.

It might, for example, actually signal “You’re screwed, but here is a *chance* to pull it off”

But the *frequency* of rolls has meaning when rolls are *opinionated*.

You actually can see this in a lot of systems, with the two axes of opinion and severity.

If a system skews towards failure, rolls can seem punishing. They have an opinion, and it’s an unkind one. In D&D, Saving throws are opinionated because the outcomes are never better than not having to make the roll in the first place.

D&D attack rolls, on the other hand, are neutral to positive - depending on edition - but also don’t have a lot of consequence, so just roll a TON of those.

So our hypothetical heavy failure system actually ends up being more suitably for epic tragedy (like, say, Moorcock) because we can presume great success *most* of the time, and call out the dice as a flag for “yeah, but this is going to SUUUUUUCK”

That’s super useful, but still a step removed from the Magicians where the pain is more choices and consequences, and the dice aren’t helping us much there.

(All that is the longer version of “that works, no wait it doesn’t, but could it?”)