Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 122 - Failing Forward

Episode Date: April 24, 2022

Players, do you get disheartened when your character fails their acrobatics check and slips off the ice into the freezing river?  DMs, do you worry that your PCs may not be able to make it past a point in your adventure because they could fail the skill check, ability roll, or saving throw?  In this episode, we talk about both situations and describe the design concept of failing forward when it comes to adventures.

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Players should get that feeling when things go awry because it might mean they miss out on treasure or further adventure or they may anger the empress that hired them. Let failures happen and give the players leeway to come up with a creative solution to the problems in front of them. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 122 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week, all about failing forward. This week's sponsor, wireless charging.

Did you know the company who manufactures wireless charging pads for your phone requires employees to wear glasses? They want to keep things contactless. If you're new to the podcast, hello and welcome. If you've listened for 121 episodes now, hello and welcome. If you like this episode, please help spread the word. Post to social media, tell your friends or your local game store or gaming groups about it. I'd love to continue seeing this podcast grow, evolve, and improve. Now, before I get started, I've gotten a couple of emails about Paizo announcing that they're converting the Abomination Vault's adventure path to 5th edition. I've even read

that this is a harbinger of Paizo's failure with Pathfinder 2e, and they'll only be making 5e content in the future. Let me preface this by saying I have no inside information on this, but I would seriously doubt Paizo's abandoning the Pathfinder game system. Yes, 5e is a powerhouse and is easily the most popular game system out there. Wizards of the Coast and D&D 5e have years of precedence and version history behind them. I think Paizo is smart to convert existing pre-established adventures to 5e. They've done 95% of the design work already, now all they have to do is a simple conversion by people who know both systems. Actually, if you look at pictures of the proposed product,

and I'll grant you that the art is probably placeholder, the word Pathfinder dwarfs the size of the game system 5e on the label. Rather than a sign that they're leaving 2e behind, I think this is a way for Paizo to introduce the Pathfinder 2E game system to existing 5E players. I'm not much on RPG version wars. Play what you want to play and play what you enjoy. Will I purchase it and read it through? Absolutely. Will I do a side-by-side comparison of the 2E version to hopefully make me a better DM in both systems? Most assuredly. Thanks for listening to my rambling. Now on with the show. So what the heck do I mean by failing forward? Failing forward means that a person embraces failing as a stepping stone for future success. To fail forward means that you have chosen to

value every failure for the lessons that it can teach you and then apply those lessons to your future efforts, even if those efforts might also result in failure. This is the classic definition of failing forward. It's the athlete's definition, the academic's definition, the researcher's definition, the thespian's definition. For anyone who strives for something more, greater, harder, failure is inevitable. You will finish last in the track meet. You will get an F on that exam. You will flub your line sometimes. Defecation occurs to every single one of us. Look, I'm an executive at work and I want the staff that report to me to fail sometimes. That means they're trying something new and learning along the way. I was first exposed to the formal concept of failing

forward in so many words in the book by the same name, by John Maxwell. These concepts were reinforced to me by my former improv coach, Eugene, and various other improv veterans I've worked with through the years, David Hitt, Fred Sayers, Mathis Sneed, and other incredible improvisers who are extremely talented. When you're on a stage performing improv, there's no script. You have no idea what the audience is's no script. You have no idea what the audience is going to suggest. You have no idea what your scene partner is going to say. Being in an improv troupe really does a great job of removing some of the conditioning we all come out of high school with. The paralyzing fear of failure. What if I don't do well? What if it's not

perfect? Here's a hint. It's not going to be perfect. Your character won't be perfect. Your campaign won't be perfect. Your interactions with an NPC won't be perfect. And when you have to give voice to an NPC, guess what? It's not going to be perfect. That's okay. Your friends around the table do not expect perfection, and thank goodness for that. Even for the most talented and experienced of humans out there, there's no question if we'll fail. It's just a matter of when, and does it bring everything to a halt? Now, there's two perspectives I want to bring to this episode. One from the player's perspective of failing forward, and the other from the GM. I want to start with players, since I spent most of my time on DMs just about every single episode. So, players, your characters are going to fail. They are going to miss attacks,

they are going to slip off that bridge, they will fail to seduce the queen. You know, horny bards are going to horny, what can you do? Most RPGs are built around some degree of randomness though. 5e and both versions of Pathfinder and Starfinder and just about every other game system I can think of, they all have a degree of randomness. It's just what dice do you roll. 5th edition and both versions of Pathfinder and Starfinder are D20 systems. Dune, Dishonored, and Fallout are two D20 systems, which are slightly different. There are also D100 systems like Delta Green and After Zombies AZ. There's also D6 systems. There was a Star Wars D6 back in the day. There's D10 systems and so forth. So there's

randomness built into just about every single game. If you have any sort of randomness in your game though, there's the possibility of failure by very definition. The rogue didn't pick the lock. No one spots the tripwire across the jungle path. The character's honeyed words fail to convince the guard to let you into town. She's unmoved by their lie that they must get in to see their sick auntie. Yes, randomness can cause failure. But the harder thing to hear is that sometimes failure has little to do with the randomness of the game. Sometimes it's not your characters that fail,

it's you as players. You will choose the harder road when faced with a decision. You'll forget a key piece of information or clue that the DM told you last session. You'll charge ahead when more investigation would have netted you more benefit. Conversely, you might spend too much time gathering information and the escaping big bad gets farther away and now it's going to be harder to catch. You and your fellow players will choose a tactic on the battle map that fails spectacularly and results in characters being captured or maybe worse. You and your fellow players may make that wrong choice for whatever reason and it might detrimentally affect your game in some way. Listen to me. You in in your car or on the train right now, beating yourself up over a bad decision either in your life or at the gaming table.

It's okay to make mistakes. Everyone fails. The question is, what do you do now? This isn't about to be some rah-rah, dust yourself off and keep trying speech. Yes, that's important. Tenaciousness will get you far professionally. But I'm asking you to take the time to reflect on your failure and learn what you did wrong and apply that lesson to the next attempt. Use today's failures to prepare you for tomorrow. So players, if you make a bad call

and a character takes a dirt nap because of it, learn from your mistake and be better next time. Even if a failure isn't your fault and it was a bad die roll, take responsibility for your future success. The only way to make failure useful is to learn from it. Thomas Edison once said when he was trying to invent the light bulb, I haven't failed, I've just found 10,000 solutions that don't work. Forgive yourself and others for mistakes. That's how you keep failures from becoming the end of the line, and that's how you improve as players in this hobby that we love.

Now, there's a second definition of failing forward with more of a DM focus. As a DM, failing forward means that when your players inevitably fail to progress the story due to bad die rolls, bad choices, or just rotten luck, you need to have a path forward. Failing forward for you as a GM begins with the design of the adventure. As you're designing your adventure, the layouts, the plot points, and everything that comes along with it, avoid single points of failure in the design of your adventure. It's best to always have multiple possible paths to keep the adventure moving along. To give credit where credit is due, the game series Fallout, all the way from the oldest Fallout 1 all the way up to the modern

version, they are great at this. Locked doors can be picked, or maybe electronically unlocked, or forced with brute strength. All of them are options. Yes, there were times when you completely crap the bed and fail a check enough times that one of those avenues is closed to you temporarily or maybe even permanently, but there's always another way to accomplish your mission and goal. If you're writing an adventure, or if you are putting an adventure path together, or designing a dungeon, start asking yourself, what do I do if the characters fail this persuasion role, trap check, fly skill, or whatever they're doing that could have consequences? If the answer is, I'm not sure, then you need to think about alternate ways to achieve the same outcome.

Suppose the check you're reviewing is a blocked cave mouth. What if the party doesn't have the strength to move all the boulders? Could someone with stone cunning find a way to cleverly use leverage to move boulders easier? Could they dig their way around it, break up the boulder? All those are possibilities. Remember, you as the DM should be presenting situations to the players and the players should be creatively improvising a solution to the situation. Then you as the DM determine what check or checks need to be made. If the players repeatedly fail their primary solution to a situation, there's nothing wrong with your suggesting alternatives even from behind the screen. What if they get trapped? What if the water gets above their heads? What if they can't

find the glyph that drains the room? You'd know better even though you're sitting behind the screen. You're the one that designed the room to begin with or read the adventure. Another thing to consider is that sometimes players and characters have different stats. I will role play characters with very high intelligence even if I don't have it. So you may have somebody who's sitting at your table who, bless their heart, may not have an 18 intelligence in real life, but they're playing a character who does. There's nothing wrong with saying your character would know that blank, whatever blank happens to be, to give the characters a nudge to go towards the right direction to moving the adventure forward. But you do have to have alternatives ready,

and the best time to think about those alternatives is when you're designing the adventure or preparing for the next session and reading the pre-existing adventure. Another important tip, failure must be an option. Failing forward as a concept is often taken to mean I will never let the players fail at a task. No, really it means I will never let player failure grind the game to a halt. If all you ever do is keep the player characters from failing, they're going to try anything and everything, and when it works, they're going to try it again, but this time it's going to be crazier. The bridge is falling apart around me.

I'm going to walk up the falling stones to keep from plummeting to my death. All right, Legolas, make me an athletics role, even though that's not how physics works, kids. I know, I know. We play games with long swords and lasers, and our characters survive machine gun barrages that would kill normal people, but damn it, sometimes something is a bridge too far, and walking on falling rocks was just bullshit. I apologize, that came out more viscerally than I expected. rocks was just bullshit. I apologize, that came out more viscerally than I expected. You shouldn't prevent failure as a DM. If they break a pick inside the lock, then they broke a pick inside the lock. You hear a metallic snap and the gears lock up. You pull half your lock

pick out and the other half is caught up in the mechanism. That's not coming out without disassembling the lock. What do you do now? That failure should trigger the oh shit second in a player's mind. The oh shit second is that instant regret that you feel when you've made a mistake or chosen something really bad. Players should get that feeling when things go awry because it might mean they miss out on treasure or further adventure, or they may anger the empress that hired them. Let failures happen and give the players leeway to come up with a creative solution to the problems in front of them. Not only must failure be an option, but failure must mean something. It takes away the magic of the game when the player fails a roll to perform a

skill check and the DM just says a variant of, oh it's okay, you just succeed anyway. If you're going to give them a success anyway, why the fuck are you asking for a roll? If failed rolls mean nothing, then why are they rolling? I should do like a philosophy of die rolling episode. I'm going to work on that later. But if failure means nothing, what you've basically told the players, even if it's unconsciously, that the players cannot fail, that their characters will not fail no matter what they try. It takes away the stakes of the game and honestly erodes the fun of the game. Part of the reason we enjoy RPGs is the chance that our characters can fail.

These heroes are meant to succeed against all odds, but there have to be odds to succeed against. It's part of the main appeal of RPGs. We want to be big damn heroes. So characters must be allowed to fail, and that failure must mean something. There must be a little bit of an ouchie associated with it, even if it's just a delay of the story, and even if behind the scenes and behind the screen, you're just rearranging the Lego pieces so that things happen in a different order. Even if characters fail, the story must progress. You shouldn't say, well, I've spent 17 hours preparing this six-book adventure path, but since you can't unlock the outer fucking door, let's just go play MechWarrior. No, there has to be a way forward. The first and best advice I can give you is turn failures into new opportunities.

Failures can point players towards resources that they need or even better choices they could make. The characters are trying to open a lock and it's just so far past their skill level there will be no way they can ever open it. Allow the players to realize that the characters don't have to pick the lock. They could melt it with acid, take the door off its hinges, bust through a wall. There are other options. If they fail roles at one type of skill, remind them that, hey, the physics of that world, even though there's magic and lasers, still works like the ones here on Earth. So encourage them to be creative about the solutions that they could have about getting around this evil, evil door.

Another example. Maybe your characters failed convincing the crime lord to give them the peace they need to complete their magical staff of exploding spleens or whatever. They made their checks with all their modifiers and bonuses, but they still failed the roll. They didn't hit the difficulty class or DC. Yes, let them know they failed, but maybe have the crime lords say what the characters could

do to earn it, like a job that they could complete for the crime syndicate. I know you need the crystal from the Sanders crossing to complete your staff. I need something as well. I want you to insert name of quest here, kill this person, take this thing, get this information. See episode 57 where I talk about good quest design to kind of give you a path forward. Also, failures could unite enemies against a common foe. The characters stomp out of the crime lord's secret base

seemingly out of options. They didn't get the crystal they need and they don't know what to do. Maybe they're at a tavern and they're approached by a mysterious stranger who asks the players to meet with a benefactor who turns out to be the head of a rival syndicate. She will help the players get the crystal in exchange for something or someone. Failures may be because the players have forgotten something. We're human. Note, players have forgotten it, not characters. The prison guard won't open the cell so they can talk to their friend,

and they fail bluff and intimidate into diplomacy and bribery checks. They're ready to leave when you, the GM, remind Poe the wizard that he has charm person memorized, and that might work. Now, you may be sitting there thinking, oh, you'll never have to remind players of something like this. You'd be wrong. Players, myself included, many times become focused on a particular solution and don't think about the other tools in their arsenal. We become myopic because we had one idea and it's a good idea and we get stuck and committed to that one idea.

We pull out a damn hammer and think everything is a nail at that point. Also, some groups of players just don't take good notes. You may have to remind them that the characters learn that this particular guard is well-known to accept bribes of rare spices because he loves to cook. Reminding them of this fact doesn't take away their agency. It just reminds them of something that your characters would probably remember, but even if the players don't.

No matter what as a DM, though, try to avoid railroading to force the story to progress. Remember one of my core DM rules. Give the characters options and opportunities and let them take the story where they'd like. For more about that, see episode 7, where I discuss railroading and sandboxes on my shitty-ass old mic. Hinting at something? Great idea. Suggesting a course of action for the characters? No problem. Taking the choice away from the players because that's not what you had planned? That's an issue. If you know the characters need to discover a body to keep the

story moving, put the body where the characters will go if it makes a modicum of sense. You'd planned on their finding the body at the NPC's home, but if they go to the NPC's work instead, have the police there interviewing suspects, have workers distraught over what they found. Hell, have the characters find the body if it's after hours and they sneak in. Improvise and adapt the adventure to meet your player characters where they are. That will keep a single failure or bad choice from grinding everything to a halt. But what happens when you have no good options for your players and they must succeed at this one thing in order to progress the story? You have no idea how else to keep the story moving. They have to stop this bust. They

must open the vault door. They cannot fail to convince the Pirate Queen that her assistant is trying to kill her. In these cases, you still have options. You can always give the characters who fail at a role success at a cost. The Fate Core system has this mechanic built in and I love it. The idea that success and failure isn't a toggle, they're not quantum states that either you are unqualified success or abject failure and nothing in between. The Fate Core system says there are degrees of success and failure. So what does that look like practically in a game? Let's say a player is trying to open a locked door.

They fail the roll, and maybe your game system would say, well, they can just try again. Well, okay, yeah, you can certainly run it that way. But as we discussed, if you go that route, you've removed failure as an option for the game. They can just sit there rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling until they eventually succeed. What's the point of even having the players roll for it? Now, if the players have to succeed at this in order to progress the story, give them a success, but there is a cost associated with it. You tell them that the door opens, but they snap a small tool they were using,

like a lockpick, thieves tools, or whatever your game system calls them. And they can't pick any more locks or disable any more traps unless they have another set of tools or acquire replacement sets. They succeeded at opening the door, but the failure in this case

is that they didn't fail to open the door. They broke the tools they were using. It costs them something to do it. Contrast that with a failure that jams up the lock and the door now cannot be opened no matter what. If you don't have any other way for them to get in, you are now boned as the DM. You've got to depend on your players and their characters to come up with a creative way to somehow get past this door because you haven't designed another way around it. By having success at a cost, they can progress the story, but they lose something dire, or it costs something more, or it increases the risk of something else that's going on.

Maybe they open the door so they succeeded even though they roll a failure, but they're discovered by patrolling guards. Now they have to deal with the guards. Do they rush in and barricade themselves in behind the locked door, trapping themselves in? Do they fight the guards or do they flee for now and come back later when things have calmed down? They succeeded, but there's a complication or a difficulty or a cost associated with it. So you have options.

As a player, bad rolls are going to happen. You're going to roll a natural one that might reflex save. You're going to miss that attack roll against a prone enemy. You're going to lose that opposed strength check roll against a size small creature. Embrace the failure as a story beat, narratively describe it as a bad set of circumstances, and move on. DMs, when you're designing your adventures, avoid single points of failure if at all possible.

Think about what would happen if the characters would fail these particular saves or skill checks as you're preparing to run the adventure that night and designing the adventure, and have alternate paths that they could take, alternate solutions that maybe they could come up with. Remind them of information they may have forgotten along the way that could help them. Bring back enemies of enemies that could be temporary allies, consider adding success as a cost, or keep the story progressing some way and you and your table, I promise, will have fun doing it. If you like this podcast, please consider helping me spread the word about it. Tell your friends, share a story on Insta, retweet something of mine, I would greatly appreciate it. Tune in next week when

I'm going to interview professional DM Paul Lazaro about how to DM for younger players. Should be really, really interesting. I know he has some great perspectives because we've talked a couple times already. Before I go, though, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Wireless Charging. I think wireless charging companies would be a good investment in the future. At least, that's what I've induced. This has been episode 122 all about failing forward. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.