The Forge Archives

I don't see what is so bad about characters who don't succeed, even if it's considered a horrible thing on these forums.  The only time that it seems innapropriate are when characters are larger than life.  I've even heard people complaining about the wiff factor in Unknown Armies, which is a game about fuck ups.

Why the fear of failure?

For me (can't speak for anyone else), it's not a fear of failure--I love it when my characters fail, & I often play fuck-ups. It's a dislike of my character looking like a dick at the wrong moment. If I'm playing a badass detective, I don't want to roll a "critical miss" & have him accidently shoot the client he's protecting instead of the main henchman--it's dramatically unsatisfying (because it doesn't involve any particular conflict, it's just my bad luck of the roll) & makes the character look stupid.

If you're playing Buffy, Willow doesn't fail research rolls, because that's her schtick. Xander fails combat rolls all the time, but he doesn't fail at heart-to-heart talks, because that's his schtick. Buffy fails combat rolls, but only when there's some conflict involved--she's distracted by heartache or self-doubt.

Failure is great when it's dramatically appropriate--it reveals stuff about the character, opens up for drama, & maybe provides some comic relief. But "whiffing" is a random thing & doesn't do anything except make your character looking clumsy & inept (even if only for a second).

I was going to answer this, but someone already gave exactly the right answer.  

So simply,  what joshua said.

Hello,

Having recently re-read The Lord of the Rings, this time out loud, I found myself with lots of room to consider success and failure of actions, and the nature of a "heroic character."

My comments pertain specifically to the books, as one of the examples is one of the few discrepancies between book and film.

Aragorn makes a couple of real nasty blunders during the story. The first is failing truly to lead the party following their departure from Lorien, and to decide whether to go to Gondor or to Mordor. This culminates in him being unable to rally everyone against the Uruk-hai's attack, in Boromir being able to confront Frodo privately, in much bloodshed, and in the disintegration of the Fellowship.

OK, fine. This is "plot" if you want to look at it that way, given that Tolkien is writing a novel and not running a game with Aragorn run by a player. My point is that all of us have had a Really Fucking Bad Day before, and when Aragorn stops for a moment in this sequence, at one point of running back and forth and not accomplishing anything, and says, with no humor at all, "Everything I do today goes amiss," I felt for him. I said, "I've had days like that."

The second is much less grandly involved in the overall plot, but it struck me similarly - at Helm's Deep, Aragorn fights a rearguard action on a staircase, and stays a bit too long. He realizes this, does a bit of an "oh shit" doubletake, and bolts up the stairs, a horde of orcs etc shrieking after him a few steps below.

He trips. Yes, Elessar, the Elfstone, son of Arathorn, last scion of Numenor, heir of Elendil, blahdy-blah, trips on a little step and falls flat on his face (ouch! stone steps). He scrambles up in time and with the help of arrows shot by his friends on the wall, he makes it to safety.

You know something? I think I like that scene. I like it because it brings home the uncertainty and danger of fighting, because it invokes not one but two sudden adrenalin rushes, and because ... well, because Aragorn is easier to identify with when he is tired, desperate, and determined.

[After this point, as far as I can tell, Aragorn can Do No Wrong, and frankly becomes much less interesting as a character. By the end of the story, he's practically a faded image on a tapestry, with most of his "guy in a story" status leached away.]

So here's my part regarding role-playing, to protagonists in Narrativist play, and success or failure of specific actions.

In the first scene, the conflict at hand fails. In (say) Hero Wars terms, Aragorn's player has rolled mighty badly and screwed the pooch, despite all Action Point lending and all Hero Point expenditure. The good news is that we still have "stuff to do" because the failure has not blocked our story but rather set up specific conflicts. Again, still in gaming terms, Boromir's attempt to nab the Ring is a "Bang" in the GM's (or whoever's) bandolier. In this case, instead of reserving that Bang for their arrival at Gondor (where it might very well be expected to happen), the Big-Ass Failure of Aragorn to lead at Rauros permits it to happen now. No problem. A Bang is a Bang, and earlier is even better than later if it makes sense.

In that second scene, the conflict at hand succeeds (whether we are talking about Aragorn's safety, defense of the wall in general, or the entire Helm's Deep battle may vary, depending on what system we are using). The point is that a failed roll in the middle of it - in Hero Wars terms, it would be a failed Exchange in an Extended Contest, compensated for by Action Points donated by other players - is not a "stone wall," or worse, "oops, you die, buh-bye," but an opportunity for identification.

I have been playing Hero Wars for almost a year and a half now, steadily, and I state unequivocally that its system permits "failures" of either type (failed-conflict vs. action-within-successful-conflict) to become meat for story, rather than story-stoppers or sorry-player-loses. It is not the only system which permits this effect, but it is the only one I know of that absolutely formalizes all the distinctions possible among the outcomes, in strict goal/story terms.

After so many years of playing systems with strong "whiff" potential, the distinction between failures in those games and the failures in Hero Wars is so profound that I can only shrug and point, and say, "Play and see for yourself." A "whiff" failure is not only a failed task, but a failed conflict, as in these systems, conflicts are only resolved as an accumulation of task-checks. It is also a direct penalty/punishment to the player, in terms of character competency, later effectiveness during play, and even survival. Finally, as reward systems always generate value systems, it inevitably results in social judgment of the player among members of the group, insofar as if you roll badly, you suck.

Discontent with whiffing is not discontent with task-failure or even with conflict-failure. It is discontent with dysfunctional play.

Best,
Ron

As an addendum to Joshua's post, I would add the following.

Part of the problem with failure is often how it is interpreted.  I read somewhere (Sword?) a suggestion that failure with, say, a sword strike need not always mean missing.

So, your mighty barbarian hero strikes at his goblin foe and rolls a fail.  Does  that mean he misses?  Not necessarily, he's not really the kind of guy in concept who misses that kind of thing.  So what does it mean?  Well, maybe it means he hits but another goblin not previously seen takes the place of the one he struck down.  Game mechanically the effect is the same, he has failed to improve his situation, but in terms of character perception he has not acted outside his concept.  He has not suddenly become incompetent.

This sudden incompetence is worst in percentile based games I think, where one time in ten your master swordsman who is basically as good as a human can be just misses his foe.  It doesn't feel right.  That is why it can be a problem.

Having said that, the concept of my character Harvey Finklebaum III in an OtE pbem is that he is massively outclassed and his areas of competence are wholly irrelevant to the arena he finds himself in.  Harvey almost never succeeds in anything, which is good, because his concept is that of the guy in over his head barely scraping by.

Whiffing is bad where it derails the character concept, or put another way, I agree with Joshua.

This is a fairly interesting topic since it illustrates one of the major differences between RPGs that have gone before and what those of us on the Forge are trying to make/have made.

I mean, in the Aragorn tripping on the steps in Helm's Deep example, in another RPG that would have been a botch, probably in any RPG that would've been a botch.  A failed Dex check, or whatever is similar.  The GM would probably then make Aragorn's player make another check and another failure would mean the orcs overtake him and it's time to roll up a new character, as likely as not.

I think John Wick said (and I believe he was quoting someone.  I forget) that failure is bad enough.  This was a comment about why there are no critical failure rules in Orkworld.  I tend to agree.  The way I roll, if I were Aragorn's player, he not only would've tripped on the steps but he would have hit himself with his own sword for damage.  There's a difference between identifying with your character and thinking your character is just plain pathetic (and that's mostly due to the dice rolling)

This is an important development since it shifts that whole paradigm for "failure is bad enough" to "failure is a good thing."  It requires setting the system up so that failure is not a roadblock, but something that moves things along as much as a success, perhaps even moreso.

No wonder some people turn their nose up at games like Hero Wars.  They just don't get that it's not the pass/fail one-false-move-and-your-dead dungeon crawl (to use the lowest common denominator) they're used to.

A small, and hardly required addendum, but these are the components of bad Whiff that really strike home for me. I wondered if you were felt failure was the lone result of whiffy systems?

Whiffy systems tend to create a lot of out-of-character humor which can be disruptive. A character botches an attack roll, and briefly forgets which end of the sword to hold. A character botches a telepathy roll and smacks a target with a stroke. The ace doctor character fails a simple roll, and screws up a basic bandage. Everybody giggles.

Whiff, for me, is also mostly a product of mechanics that concern themselves with very specific actions. As a GM, I'm usually too busy to think much beyond two possible results of a roll: success or failure. If a character fails a handguns roll, then I'll generally just have a sense of them hitting, or missing. If we instead concentrate on 'attacks' rather than rolling for specific pulls of a gun's trigger, then I start thinking about all the other possible results.

Oh, one more thing. Whiff doesn't have to be about failure. Huge successes can be problematic. If a character describes a particular nifty attack, rolls and gets a super-duper-ultra-success, he is as deprotagonised by successful roll as with a botch. Ever had a character roll superbly well on an average stat and felt the result was slightly out of character...?

Non-whiffy systems allow the player to describe *whatever* they want, to the limit of their successes/failures rolled. If you roll 3 successes, then you might buy 2 points of damage and a point of out-maneuvering. A 2 point failure might mean you give 2 yards, or lose a 2-point weapon, etc.

Scattershot has some examples of this sort of approach, IIRC?

Joe.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)
Oh, one more thing. Whiff doesn't have to be about failure. Huge successes can be problematic. If a character describes a particular nifty attack, rolls and gets a super-duper-ultra-success, he is as deprotagonised by successful roll as with a botch. Ever had a character roll superbly well on an average stat and felt the result was slightly out of character...?
Joe.

Some good points here, particularly the one about Whiffy successes which is true but rarely raised.  If Harvey (my OtE character) gets in a fight I expect him to lose.  If he got an amazing roll and kicked some goon's ass that would be a whiff too, why?  Because Harvey get's his ass kicked, he does not kick ass himself.  That is not his concept.

So, good point.

Quote from: The Balbinator
Some good points here, particularly the one about Whiffy successes which is true but rarely raised.  If Harvey (my OtE character) gets in a fight I expect him to lose.  If he got an amazing roll and kicked some goon's ass that would be a whiff too, why?  Because Harvey get's his ass kicked, he does not kick ass himself.  That is not his concept.

And that's the difference between game systems that model the characters relationship with the world and ones that model the players relationship to the character.

Great observation: the whiff as a form of undesired success. "Roll well, describe what happens" systems really handle this nicely, as the player who rolls the ebst possible result can still decide to have his character flub up.

Quote from: Joe Murphy (Broin)Scattershot has some examples of this sort of approach?

You are quite correct.  As a matter of fact, the sensation of Whiff Factor (before I'd ever heard of such) was the initial impetus for the Critical Juncture mechanics.  Through judicious use of Experience Dice (which are not limited to what one has on hand), and the Critical Juncture, one can easily keep potential 'whiffs' from being these deprotagonizing circumstances.  (But don't tell anyone, it supposed to be a secret.)

Fang Langford