(Note, since last week’s post, Guy Milner of the excellent Burn After Running blog outlined why the Perception skill in traditional RPGs is a bit rubbish. It ties into a lot of what I said before, and is arguably a better working example of the ‘Library Use’ problem that I went over in Part 1.)
In my last post, I outlined some of the problems that failed dice rolls can cause in RPGs. I explained that a player attempting an action and failing it can potentially cause the plot to cease its forward motion. A common way to address this is by making failures interesting, but this is challenging, and can lead to problems of its own. Today I’m going to talk about failing forward, a particular tool that GMs can employ to make failure interesting, while avoiding some of the issues with it that I explored last week.
I’ll start by defining the term as I see it. I’m pretty sure that my definition isn’t wildly different to anyone else’s. There’s some debate about where the term originated in RPGs, Burning Wheel is commonly cited, but it's unlikely that Luke Crane first invented the term wholesale for his RPG. I imagine it was first used in some forgotten corner of the internet, and permeated from there.
Fail Forward (henceforth ‘FF’) means that when a player attempts an action and fails, they should still broadly achieve what they were aiming for, but with an intended cost or consequence. It might mean they don’t get their intended benefit in its ideal form; for example if a player attempts a skill check to calm a horse that they need to travel to the next part of the adventure, a fail forward might result in the horse being calm enough to be ridden, but still skittish and unpredictable. A FF could also mean that the player does get what they want, but with an additional cost. To continue our horse calming example, the result is that the horse is calm and reliable, but it takes the player character much longer to calm it than anticipated, and nightfall is already beginning to set in when they depart.
In practice, FF tends to manifest in games I’m running in the following way. A player attempts something that clearly requires a dice roll, either because they explicitly want to use a skill or ability, or because they’re doing something that clearly interacts with the game rules. I ask for a dice roll, and then, when that player fails, realise that it's not desirable for the player to not get what they want. There are a variety of reasons for this to happen; most likely they’re attempting an action that will drive the game forward in a fun way. A situation like this can also arise when they’re tackling a challenge that obviously needs to be addressed in our fictional situation, but isn’t particularly appealing to focus on. It makes sense that player characters would have to go to some effort to break into a haunted house, but you don’t want that to be a big part of the session. Once that fail comes up and I’ve realised that the player should get what they wanted, I start looking for ways for them to fail forward. I need ways to make the failure relevant and costly, but not too punishing for the player. In order to avoid the ‘this makes games much more difficult to GM’ problem I outlined in my last post, we need some straightforward tools to administer when we want to FF. Here are some that I use in games.
Look for the mechanisms that the game gives you. A game doesn’t need FF baked into its ruleset if you’re going to implement it. A straightforward way to make a failure meaningful in an RPG while still giving the player what they want is to have a mechanical consequence. An obvious example is a game that has a ‘fatigue’ or ‘stamina’ mechanic. If a player is attempting an action that requires physical exertion, but you want them to get what they’re aiming for, it could cost them fatigue to get that. Even if games don’t have such a mechanic, a tiny amount of HP or health damage can simulate it. The character successfully scrambles into the open haunted house window, but winds themselves in the climb.
In some cases, when I know I want to FF, I’ll look for a resource or mechanical cost first, and then come up with the fictional justification afterwards. For example, in a game of Rhapsody of Blood a player might be attempting to traverse a perilous room after a fight, and fail their dice roll to do so. I want them to get across the room so they can keep exploring, but I don’t want them to sustain injury while doing so because there’s just been a difficult fight and it will take the character too close to being out of action. I take a quick look at their character sheet, and see that they haven’t sustained much Contamination, the game’s way of measuring how characters are corrupted by the evil castle they’re exploring. Since Contamination hasn’t come up much yet, I decide the player should take a point of it as the cost for getting across the room. With this consequence decided, I describe how, as they struggle to ascend a mezzanine, one of the zombies they fought earlier grabs their leg with the last of its strength, failing to injure them but leaving a luminescent purple ichor stain on their ankle. Deciding an acceptable consequence first, and layering the fiction on top of that, is easier than trying to invent an interesting failure wholesale.
Look for costs and consequences in the scenario or adventure. This method can work whether you’re running something off the top of your head, running a scenario you’ve prewritten, or using something written by someone else. When looking for an opportunity to FF, take a second to assess the fictional situation, and find ways to make the failure affect it adversely for the players. The classic example here is time; if the players only have two days to investigate the Dagon cult before they claim their next victim, a failed Library Use roll taking the whole afternoon instead of an hour or so is costly. If the aim of a scenario is to protect townsfolk, failed dice rolls might result in said townsfolk distrusting the player characters, or being put into danger. You do need to take care to not effectively turn the player's action into the ‘nothing happens’ failure that you’re attempting to avoid when you do this. If a character is attempting to train townsfolk to fight off the impending bandit attack, and your FF consequence is several of the townsfolk becoming injured during training, you’re essentially letting the PC take one step forward and one step back.
You can plan for these consequences in advance of a session to make your life easier, but it’s not a requirement. If you’re struggling to come up with an interesting consequence, take a second to consider the broad, immediate goals that the PCs have, and describe a consequence that’s an obstacle to them. You should tend towards consequences that you can immediately show to the PCs in some way, so that the failure matters there and then. That is, unless you’re employing my next tip.
Sometimes, FF can generate blowback. In its GMing book ‘Run’, Unknown Armies 3rd Edition introduces the idea of ‘blowback’ when planning sessions. The concept is that if you want new complications or problems for the PCs to encounter, a good method is looking at ways they might have created problems for themselves with their previous actions. If they pissed off the bar owner when shaking down locals for information, blowback might mean that said bar owner begins turning locals against the player characters.
Making a note of a failed dice roll and introducing its consequence in another scene or session is a potential way to have the player FF. Using the example above, this is a good tool to use for failed social rolls. If a player needs to Persuade a cop that they’re innocent bystanders and should be allowed to go about their business but fails their roll, you might decide that they’re allowed to do so for now, but the cop will remember them and might investigate them in future. It keeps the action moving, but means the failure can introduce an interesting situation to be dealt with later. Dangerous situations that arise from past failed rolls are satisfying because player action feels meaningful if their current problem has been foreshadowed, instead of introduced out of left field. Most of the time you’re going to be using this in continuing campaigns, although you could make use of it in one shots and introduce the consequence in a future scene.
You should use this sparingly. If you’re constantly making notes for potential blowback, some of it won’t get the chance to manifest in the game, making that failed roll completely free of consequences. It also has potential to turn your game into a continuous series of consequences, without letting the game explore new territory. If I’ve got three pieces of ‘blowback potential’ arising from failed rolls in my notes, I tend to stop there. Of course, there will also be situations where you note blowback potential, and then PC action makes it meaningless. If you note ‘Kevin the cop is suspicious of the PCs’, and then Kevin dies at the end of the session, that opportunity is gone and the failed roll isn’t meaningful. I just roll with this. I think blowback is a useful enough tool that this problem is an acceptable risk.
Be careful to avoid ‘death spiral’. A potential problem with using FF is that it keeps up the game’s pace and allows PCs to progress, but everything else gets worse for them as they do so. The players push forward, but they’re shedding resources and generating new problems for themselves. Their mechanical consequences can combine to the point that they’re not able to achieve their ultimate goal in a satisfying and fictionally justified manner. Sometimes, it might be better to employ the old reliable ‘nothing happens’ and let the players come up with new solutions to their problems. Try to gauge when the players are too weighed down by the consequences of their failures, and look for a way to give them a breather.
In my third, and hopefully final post on this topic, I’ll explore some of the ways that the FF tool improves games, addresses more of the problems I explored in Part 1, and how I’d like it to be a bigger part of RPG design.
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