Give players choice when they FF. In Part 2 I looked at ways that a failed dice roll can cost the player characters in an RPG without grinding the game to a halt. I often combine these options and offer them back as a choice to the player after they’ve failed a roll. Once it's clear to the table that an attempted action is a fail, I can offer the player an ‘or’ choice. For example, if a player is attempting to climb a sheer rock face and their Climb roll fails, I might say “the rock face is particularly treacherous, and you’re still feeling tired after your long journey. You can either shed some of your gear in the attempt, or push on and injure yourself as you pull muscles.” The action continues forward; the player gets to experience whatever interesting thing is at the top of the cliff face without plummeting to their death, but their failure means they have to give something up.
Making these kind of tough choices is one of the fun things about RPGs, so taking a point where a player should be rebuffed by the dice and turning it into an opportunity to exercise some agency takes away some of the feel bad of bum rolls. Situations like this are also a mainstay of action or adventure fiction, a hero giving something up to get what they really need. This approach also mitigates one of the bad parts about failure that I outlined in Part 1; namely that they take fictional control away from the player when they tried to exert some. While the choice between FF options is still decided and presented by the GM, it ultimately hands the choice about what the action looks like back to the player. A failed roll doesn’t say “you don’t get to direct the action for the moment”, which is one of the primary ways that I think a string of failures switches some players off from a game they’re in. I consider this one of the primary upsides of the FF approach, and I recommend employing it whenever you can. If a player isn’t supported by their dice and you immediately come up with multiple ways they could FF, stop deliberating and turn that choice back on the player.
As a quick side note, you can also offer the player a choice between the FF option you’ve come up with, and the more traditional “you don’t do the thing” outcome of failed rolls. To return to the Library Use example I’ve used throughout this series, you might respond to a failure to research by saying “The local library is poorly organised and it's not obvious where you should start. You can still find the information you need, but it's going to take you the rest of the day, and you only have two more days before the strange festival that the cultists seemed so excited about. Do you want to research anyway?” This approach still hands agency back to the player as outlined above, and lets them decide how much they care about their chosen course of action. It might be that they had lots of ideas about how to investigate, and they’re happy to abandon their library plans for now. If the player didn’t really have any other ideas for what they wanted to do, they can stick with their Library Use approach. I still recommend only doing this if you have ideas for where the game can go if the player chooses the ‘nothing happens’ approach. They might be immediately repulsed by the idea of giving up resources, and reject that option despite having no other back up plans.
You can let players choose to escalate to solve problems. This is another approach to FF that can fuel drama. Particularly if a player is attempting an action that concerns GMCs or NPCs, you can offer them the option of getting what they wanted if they’re willing to do something that they’d ideally prefer to avoid. An obvious example concerns failed social rolls. If a player is attempting to intimidate someone, and they fail, you might say “they don’t seem to feel threatened by you. You’re pretty sure that if you pulled a weapon, that would do the trick.” This approach will likely result in the opposite of the “nothing happens” outcome that we often want to avoid, and it also addresses the issue of the player not getting to have any agency. Just be prepared to have the outcome of the failed roll completely change the direction of your session, because I find that players will tend towards embracing escalation when given the option. In situations where things are already very dramatic and charged, you can also have the NPCs do the escalating in response to the failure (“they take your threats very seriously and draw their sword!”) but for the most part I’d offer this back as a choice to the player.
The methods above, and outlined in Part 2, cover my broad approach to the FF mechanic. I’d like to quickly assess my problems with ‘interesting failure’ as outlined in Part 1, and examine whether my approach addresses them. To recap, these were:
Interesting failure often contradicts rules as written
‘Make failure as interesting as success’ makes GMing harder
Not rolling when non interesting failure is off the table means some character archetypes will roll less often
‘Interesting failure’ might not be all that interesting for the player
Parts 2 & 3 of this series have addressed points 2, 3 and 4. Having a set of tools to employ makes GMing this aspect of RPGs easier. If properly employed, the FF tools will give you enough options that you should be able to let characters roll whenever they want to use something on their character sheet. We’ve kept things interesting for players by having lots of ways that we can let them make choices when they fail.
There’s less I can do to approach point 1, and this was part of my motivation for writing this series in the first place. I still don’t see as much attention given to FF in the RPG rulebooks that I read and run with, and I think it's to the detriment of the hobby. The excellent 3rd edition of Unknown Armies is chock full of good GMing advice and tools, but doesn’t dedicate any time to explaining and advocating for FF. This is particularly galling to me, because the premise of the game (obsessed weirdos using strange forces to change the world) is absolutely ideal for a FF approach to running. The D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is roughly 300 pages and, presumably, the most read GM tip book in the hobby, but also doesn’t dedicate page space to helping GMs adjudicate failed rolls in a fun way. I’d like to see RPG rulebooks present FF in the main rules of their game, but at the least it ought to command more space in GM advice sections. I’ve written this series in an attempt to continue the permeation of this invaluable tool.
So go forth, and Fail Forward.
Art credit
Seek the Wilds from Magic the Gathering by Anna Steinbauer
Apocryphal Research from Arkham Horror by Aleksander Karcz
Dogs in the Vineyard Series by Dylan Meconis
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