"Fail Forward" experiment

[SangoProduction]

You know the "Yes and" principle in improvisation? Yeah, and I've been attempting to do much the same dice rolls, where failing a roll didn't just stop the story. It's a continuation with consequences... Where it made reasonable sense, but did not make explicit attempts to put this everywhere.
For example, when failing to pick the lock on the door, it still opens... but that's because the ogre was heading out for groceries.

But I think I'm about to run an experimental game where every roll gets that treatment, including combat. Misses still grazing or striking fear into the enemy and so on.

Are there any issues you can foresee?

[Jay R]

It can work well in combat. Here are two versions I've used.

1. If the PC's attack "misses", but wouldn't have missed if the enemy hadn't been wearing armor, then I say, "Well, you hit him, but his armor deflected the blow." Or if the enemy has a very high DEX bonus, "Oh, you nearly had him, but he skipped to the side just in time."

2. I had some gnolls running up stairs, attacking the party on a landing. One player said, "I want to jump over them to the landing below, to attack them from behind., opening up a new front." Unfortunately, he then rolled a 1. I thought for a second and said, "You twist an ankle hitting the landing below. You can lean against the wall and continue to fight, but you can't move until the fight is over and you get it bandaged."

One warning: Like any other rule, this needs to be monitored for reasonability. [And since it hasn't been play-tested, it needs to be monitored even more carefully than most other rules.] It's still the DM's responsibility to make a judgment call each time. Does this rule make sense in this exact situation?

[Emberlily]

the main downside I can see is that in my experience some players take time to warm up to (or just will never mesh with) setups that assume failed rolls are going to be common and part of the flow. depending on the players in question and how situations tend to be adjudicated, it can make some people feel as if everything is sort of just arbitrary and not reliant on what their character is/is doing

that's my experience trying out pbta-inspired setups with players who haven't done that sort of play before, though, and in my experience D&D is set up for a lot more fully successful rolls (because it's set up, as mentioned, where failure is often "you accomplish nothing"). if this is becomes an issue with your players, or you forsee it being an issue, you can use it more judiciously in a case by case basis where you want to avoid specific uninteresting/boring outcomes? and try to rely specifically on ideas that don't make things feel out of the players or characters' hands too much or are particularly fun so they don't mind regardless? but unfortunately I don't have much advice on how to make those calls or such, which is the hard part...

edit: to clarify, I think fail forward kind of design is a great basis to build around; I just know it has had some friction with other people I've played with sometimes, and want to make sure you know about that possibility in advance

[Zanos]

Dunno how helpful this is, but the FFG Star Wars line had special dice with Success/Failure and Advantage/Threat. A roll with more successes than failures achieved what you were trying to do, such as shooting someone, and advantage and threat could be spent by the player(advantage) or dm(threat) for special effects. So you might be able to miss a guy but spend advantage to hit his radio so he can't call for backup, or hit a guy but the DM spends threat to jam your gun.

[Crake]

Have a read of the fate core rulebook, one of it’s core principles is this exact notion, success at a cost instead of failure, and its got lots of DM advice on the topic

[SangoProduction]

Have a read of the fate core rulebook, one of it’s core principles is this exact notion, success at a cost instead of failure, and its got lots of DM advice on the topic

Yeah. I went on a FATE binge for a good several years. Pretty much for the same reason I've been on this Spheres binge for even longer. You get to play just about anything your mind can think, as long as what you're thinking of is based on style rather than power. Spheres just has more of a mechanical bite to it. GURPS just tried way too hard, and it manages to be both convoluted, and as utterly generic as its name implies.

But yeah, that was where I initially adopted the idea. This campaign experiment is going to be for everything, with as few exceptions as possible. Maybe setting a limit of DC-15 for the check, so that, in trying to toss the planet into the sun, and ending the campaign... actually, that would be kind of funny.