Apocalypse World's problems minus the quantum bears.

[Neurosis]

oh, you guys

[Mistborn]

oh, you guys

Has the running gag finally become unbearable? If so you'll just have to grin and bear it because I have no intentions of letting this go.

[virgil]

Has the running gag finally become unbearable? If so you'll just have to grin and bear it because I have no intentions of letting this go.

Says the guy who got upset with my pony posts with that one guy who got banned.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

oh, you guys

Has the running gag finally become unbearable? If so you'll just have to grin and bear it because I have no intentions of letting this go.

I've nev ursine such a long-running dead horse beating.

[Mistborn]

I've nev ursine such a long-running dead horse beating.

I prefer to see it as a dead horse mauling. Anyways you guys rolled an 8, you convince Mistborn to withdraw his bear puns for now but an unwelcome truth is revealed! Mistborn will bring his puns to bear again at a later date, and they will still be just as bad.

[DSMatticus]

and they will still be just as bad.

One might even call them grizzly.

[CapnTthePirateG]

This is unbearable

[silva]

Sorry baby, but I dont love you anymore. From now on my heart belongs to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

This storygaming SJW Swine is moving on to Chuubo's, personally.

EDIT: forgot to capitalize Swine

[infected slut princess]

DwarF bitches have BEARds.

[ACOS]

Really, the only substantive thing that I've been able to take away from these "failing forward"-vs-"not" comparisons is that MCs just need to make interesting scenarios where the risk of failure is obvious - or at least intuitive and organic to the fiction.
E.g., nobody gives a shit about a simple obstacle negotiation scene (and trashing my gear for the lulz is just asinine); but a squad of trolls on your tail/rope bridge is on fire makes getting over that wall/bridge an urgently important task.


Does that sound about right?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Really, the only substantive thing that I've been able to take away from these "failing forward"-vs-"not" comparisons is that MCs just need to make interesting scenarios where the risk of failure is obvious - or at least intuitive and organic to the fiction.
E.g., nobody gives a shit about a simple obstacle negotiation scene (and trashing my gear for the lulz is just asinine); but a squad of trolls on your tail/rope bridge is on fire makes getting over that wall/bridge an urgently important task.


Does that sound about right?

With stakes properly established like in that case, what has started the arguments on the Den, since before this thread even, was the 7-9 result. If you succeed you escape the trolls and if you fail you get eaten. Chargen isn't long in this game, I'm not gonna cry. 7-9, however is a "partial hit". You escape the trolls and then they track you back to your stronghold where the entire party and all of their NPC support lives or somesuch. Essentially, making things a whole lot worse than had you just rolled a new guy, on a more common result than total success or total failure.

That's assuming GM dickery, though. What happens when Good GM Greg runs the game? Maybe you're still being chased by trolls, so you roll again. Or you get caught in a troll petard but they haven't found you yet, so you roll again. Or you take some damage and roll again to keep this from going on forever. Either way, everyone's going to get bored, because extended skill check minigames are boring, and Greg is going to look at the ideas he has written down.The "Fronts" the book told him to write. All of that zero-point energy is just floating around in local space, waiting for a bear-shaped hole to be torn open by an otherwise boring dice roll.

That said, I hate to play devil's advocate here [because silva], but AW: Dark Ages is going to work on a Failure, Success, Critical Success model instead, not have dumb names for moves, or sex moves (warning: I may have skimmed the sex moves), so the author may agree with some of the criticisms that have been leveled here.[/i]

[mean_liar]

most rolls will either be a failure, where something bad happens, or a "success with a cost" where something bad still happens. The fact that bad things can also be spun as successes ("At least you saw the bear!") doesn't help.

Yeah it bears repeating that the RNG throws up negative results shockingly often. An unmodified roll gives you a real success less than 20% of the time and characters only end up succeeding more than half the time at the bonus cap.

Touchstone with some choice moves, the mechanic playbook, and a +3 stat gets to +5. A few moves here and there and most of your checks are at +4, regardless of what you're attempting.

My main complaint about AW is what Frank pointed out - it lacks difficulty. I found the game simple and easy.

I think it'd be a very different experience without the Touchstone.

[ACOS]

@ Sakuya Izayoi:
Yeah, that's my point.
The goal of Failing Forward is lose the boring binary status of simple pass/fail; because nothing happens on a fail - failure is a non-result.
Which seems like a laudable goal. And that seems to mesh nicely with the AW directive of "say 'yes' or 'roll the dice'" (another idea with which I generally endorse); which means that you don't waste time adjudicating meaningless tasks, and meaningful tasks derive their meaning through the fact that failure is a thing that has results.

Alternatively: instead of Quantum Bears, you, as the MC, could just make sure that the stakes in a scenario are obvious and interesting. If a task has no meaningful consequences for failure, either the PCs can do it and just do it -or- it's not possible and they just can't do it (which is where I part ways with the "say 'yes' or 'roll the dice'" directive).


---------

And as I've been typing, something has just occurred to me:
Up until now, I've always thought of the "say 'yes' or 'roll'" as a reminder for MCs to not get in the way of players wanting to do stuff. But now I believe it to be nothing more than "dice=bears".
I'm sad now.

[ishy]

The goal of Failing Forward is lose the boring binary status of simple pass/fail; because nothing happens on a fail - failure is a non-result.
Which seems like a laudable goal. And that seems to mesh nicely with the AW directive of "say 'yes' or 'roll the dice'" (another idea with which I generally endorse); which means that you don't waste time adjudicating meaningless tasks, and meaningful tasks derive their meaning through the fact that failure is a thing that has results.

Quantum Bears don't make tasks meaningful.
Say if I fail to tie my shoes, my foot may be eaten by a bear. Is tying my shoes suddenly a meaningful task?

[ACOS]

The goal of Failing Forward is lose the boring binary status of simple pass/fail; because nothing happens on a fail - failure is a non-result.
Which seems like a laudable goal. And that seems to mesh nicely with the AW directive of "say 'yes' or 'roll the dice'" (another idea with which I generally endorse); which means that you don't waste time adjudicating meaningless tasks, and meaningful tasks derive their meaning through the fact that failure is a thing that has results.

Quantum Bears don't make tasks meaningful.
Say if I fail to tie my shoes, my foot may be eaten by a bear. Is tying my shoes suddenly a meaningful task?

Oh, I agree completely!
I just got a little rambley and meandering about it.

[TheFlatline]

@ Sakuya Izayoi:
Yeah, that's my point.
The goal of Failing Forward is lose the boring binary status of simple pass/fail; because nothing happens on a fail - failure is a non-result.

But is that something mechanical or just a mindset? I mean, in Paranoia the purpose of failing often is to shut the door on the easy, sane, or straightforward options.

I'd frequently (but not always) fail out lines of investigation that were routine and not particularly creative or would spoonfeed the players when running Dark Heresy (Actually instead of saying no I'd give them information after the time frame when it would have been useful, usually providing backstory). Eventually the players got into coming up with *really* creative lines of investigation which I then rewarded.

So is failing forward really something that needs a system dedicated to it or is it just a mindset Mister Cavern needs to get into?

[Mistborn]

Failing forward is just bad period. Even if you avoid the pitfall where failure states are some combination of opaque and MTP denying players the ability to make informed choices (aka Bear World), failing forward is still bad. Having failures fuck the player extra hard has a chilling effect on people trying creative and different things, because it punishes players for touching that dice any more than the bear minimum. It also means spamming whatever ability on your sheet has the highest bonus is even more incentivized .

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Failing Forward is generally how we'd run the DH/Rogue Trader/Only War too. We never really thought of it as being all that mechanically great. it was just the official Warhams RPG so we made it work, with a hammer if we had to, and failing forward was the kludge that suited our sense of humor. The books suggest monkeying with modifiers so that you have more realistic odds of succeeding within your wheelhouse, or to auto-succeed when there's no stakes; but we weren't having that kind of tea party when we could be narrating botched surgeries.

[ACOS]

As a system mechanic, Failing Forward doesn't amount to much more than mechanism to try to compensate for lazy/imaginative MCs.
The "need" for that kind of mechanic goes away if you simply create scenarios that warrant picking up the dice to begin with.

That being said, I am a fan of tasks having predefined success/failure states. But I don't see that there is any room for that whole "pull randumb lulz out of your ass, because fail" bullshit. I mean, it might have been fun a few times when I was 14y.o.; but I'm not, and any serious "game designer" should feel very bad about themselves if they try to make Fail Forward a centerpiece mechanic (well, I'm sure Steve Jackson could find a way to make it work; but I think that's the end of that list).

[Ice9]

While "fail forward" can mean introducing new complications out of nowhere, it doesn't have to. At the basics, it's just the idea that either result should change the current state of the game, which is generally a good thing. It's also orthagonal to whether you make stuff up on the fly - you can just as well have fail forward with predefined outcomes.

For example, in a duel, "nothing happened this round, because both people missed/were parried" is a boring result. Just skip it entirely, and set things up so either one person or the other (or both) get hit when they roll. Assuming the goal is actually winning, of course. If your goal is actually to stall for time, you should be rolling for that.

For something like climbing over a wall - if you failed, but nothing changed, why would you not simply repeat until you succeed? If the answer is "eventually guards would show up" or "it takes longer and now you're short on time", then you're kinda using fail forward already, just with fairly minor state changes.

This does, of course, run into the "critical failure" problem, which is that a number of GMs, when asked to think of a complication, aim way too high and turn rolls into deathtraps where they really shouldn't. So - the rules really need to at least give good guidelines for the magnitude of complication on a failure, if not specific outcomes.

[ACOS]

While "fail forward" can mean introducing new complications out of nowhere, it doesn't have to. At the basics, it's just the idea that either result should change the current state of the game, which is generally a good thing.

My bad, I should have been more specific - my above rant was through the prism of "as implemented by BearWorld".

So - the rules really need to at least give good guidelines for the magnitude of complication on a failure, if not specific outcomes.

Which, as previously discussed, is yet another aspect where BearWorld falls right the fuck down.

[silva]

We adopted Fail Forward for all our games. Last weekend with Marvel Heroic, for eg, we had the Black Widow doing a system search for tracking a subject and failing. If it was 10 years ago with Shadowrun, the player would be trying again till succeeding or the GM simply letting it succeed out of boredom. This time we arranged that the search was successful.... at the cost of herself being traced by the target. This not only kept the game moving, but generated an interesting twist in the story.

I think what's important for the concept to work, is to establish clear intention and stakes before the roll. This way you minimize arbitrariness or unfairness by the GM.

[...You Lost Me]

[Mistborn]