failure
So, welcome back, dear reader. Between work, stress, and various projects I’m exhausted at the moment, but I’m pushing through to get this issue out. I’m not failing at life, but sometimes it can feel like I’m right on the edge. And anyway its not like you can fail at life: you can fail in life, but no life amounts to a failure.
A keen reader such as yourself will probably sense that I’m not just talking philosophy for the sake of it here. For the most part, in modern stories, the protagonists are always on the edge of failure, without quite crashing and burning. Imagine all the potential failure points in an epic saga like Starwars that could have caused any of the protagonists to die in a stray blaster bolt, or suffocate in the cold void of space.
In the modern day it seems like we consume stories where the protagonists are always successful in the end. This isn’t necessarily because the protagonists have “plot armour”, but instead because, as an audience, we choose to read and write stories where the protagonists eventually succeed. They might have to make sacrifices or compromises, or really knuckle down when the going gets tough, but in the end they pull through.
Failure in TTRPGS
So how does this idea translate into ttrpg culture? Well it either really does, or it really doesn’t. And it all depends on the culture of play at the table:
Cultures of High Stakes. Some games and tables are brutal, and the systems they play reinforce it. Games with small health pools, high likelihoods for failure, or drastic consequences on said failure really reinforce the idea of high stakes, and push adventurers right up against failure, and they wave it in the player’s face. And yes, they can fail, and yes it’s brutal. There’s no assumption that your characters will survive the day.
Cultures of Assumed Success. In modern ttrpg culture most people typically expect that players create one character at the start of the game and play them through an entire campaign. In games of epic heroism like D&D characters fight in brutal combats, but at the end of the day they come out on top.
When traditional media has massive stakes, we typically see an interesting outcome where the protagonists are eventually successful. In TTRPGS however we have to let the dice determine what happens when adventurers are up against risks. So any massive risk has the very real possibility of failing in a catastrophic way that you wouldn’t see in traditional media.
So can you have your failure and eat it too?
Or in other words, can TTRPGS have real stakes of failure, and keep the traditional assumption that the adventurer’s are successful in the end? Maybe? So thought experiment: lets look at a few answers to the question and see what comes of it?
Answer one: Stupid question, let’s try and keep both.
This is what happens more often than not in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Players fight so many monsters, and get into so many deadly scenarios. The systems and players are in the “real stakes mode”: a dragon realistically could focus fire the wizard and scorch it to pieces, and the system supports it.
But the modern media bias towards success asks the GM to soften hard blows and move the story in a convenient direction. Its a lot of work to introduce a new character, so its easier for the dragon to divide its attacks so everyone is gets low on health. You could even knock out a character if you feel spicy. Do whatever you need to to keep the illusion of stakes for the players while moving the story forwards.
Is this actually effective? I’m not sure. But I personally find the idea of “real stakes” and “assumed success” clash in a pretty major way: it’s difficult for me to enjoy the illusion of stakes. But it all comes down to execution from the GM, which puts a lot of pressure on their shoulders
Answer two: No we can’t have both, but we’ll keep the real stakes.
With this answer, you need to challenge the way we traditionally consume media. If you use the Starwars example, you have to accept the fact that you might be in the timeline where young Anakin Skywalker crashes his podracer into a rock wall and explodes a cloud of fire. That’s the end of the Skywalker Saga.
Realistically, having stakes means a lot of work for the GM, and it means players have to be prepared for plots to grind to a halt, or go wildly wrong, and they have to be willing to grapple with the consequences. With this answer we revel in failure, and how it makes the story interesting, playing in the domain of the “No, and” more than anything else.
Answer three: No we can’t have both, but we’ll keep the assumed success.
Lets throw out the stakes, but how can we make the successes interesting if there’s no real risk of failure? If we just assume everything is successful why even roll the dice? With this answer its all about the how. What does it take to for an adventurer to achieve their goal? In most of any given adventure this can work, and we play in the domain of the “yes, but” more than any other.
But then what happens when there is a high stakes scenario? Can the table grapple with being presented with high stakes, knowing it’ll all work out? Will it make players unrealistically rash? If there’s a bottomless pit in the way, what’s stopping a player from trusting the bias for success and just trying to vault it? Can the “but” in “yes, but” support massive stakes?
Answer four: maybe, we’ll try and design for both.
Once again I find myself turning to Blades in the Dark, which uses “positions” as a way to switch from “assumed success” with a controlled position, to “real stakes” with the desperate position. This is definitely a way to design for both. But the player’s and GM still need to be willing to accept the implications of drastic failure on a desperate check, and that might not work for every table, especially those who enjoy characterization and roleplay more than the risk of death.
So why am I even asking this question?
Well it really dictates how to design your systems and subsystems in a game. And at the end of the day you have to make choices: If, like me, you enjoy games that focus on characters, do you really want the system you design to threaten them with drastic stakes? If try to design a system that only looks like it has stakes, or a system that relies on the GM to work towards success behinds the scenes we have to ask, “does that even lead to a good experience?“ And then we ask, “even if it does, will making a choice either way make a better experience?”
If we value character and roleplay, maybe start with the assumption that the adventurers will be successful, especially in combat where most games try and present real stakes. And how can we design a combat system that always moves the scene towards success and makes it interesting? For me we can make it interesting by asking:
How much are the players and characters willing to sacrifice in order to succeed?
For drastic scenes, how much are they willing to sacrifice for a chance to succeed?
And what happens when they aren’t willing to sacrifice what its going to take to succeed? Is that a failure?
To extrapolate, if we’re asking questions about sacrifice, how can we make sacrifice interesting and fun? I’m sorry gaming culture, I don’t really think “health, gold , and spell slots” is going to cut it. Here are a few more interesting questions you can ask?
How much extra time will you take to succeed?
How many resources will you spend?
What future opportunities will you sacrifice?
What risks are you willing to take ?
What morals are you willing to challenge?
What relationships are you willing to damage?
And how much energy or stress are you willing to put in?
Anyway, that’s it for now. This issue has been a bit different, but failure is a question I’ve been pondering recently, and its a design problem I haven’t solved, I don’t think you can solve it. More coming next month, but bye for now. WAIT I have a website I’m working on, fingers crossed it will go live some time relatively soon at felixgreenhill.com. For realsies though,
Bye for now
Felix