Failure in games

[Wordmaker]

This seemed to be something of a crux issue in another thread, so I thought I'd see what people generally thought about their characters failing in games.

Now, by failure I don't mean the whole group being wiped out or anything that might result in the campaign having to end. Anything that stops the campaign stops the story, and that's no fun.

I mean minor and major setbacks. A beloved NPC being killed. Maybe even a PC dying. Or just losing a conflict, or an enemy escaping.

Personally, I love moments like these, because they're an opportunity for interesting roleplaying and storyline that might not have otherwise happened. They also raise the stakes and make eventual victory not only more urgent, but also more satisfying. I find I get very bored very quickly if the players just succeed constantly, overcoming any threat as soon as it appears, resorting to immediate conflict and removing an opponent from play before they've even had a chance to play a part in the story.

This goes for whether I'm a player or a GM. I love the rise and fall of characters, seeing them at their lowest before their comeback and final victory.

One of the reasons I love FATE, and DFRPG, so much is that the system not only compensates failure by awarding Fate Points when the players lose a conflict or accept a compel, but the fact the players can use these moments of failure and weakness to build up their strength before the final act means the system encourages varying levels of success throughout the game. For me, that's essential to a good story.

What do others think?

[JDK002]

I tend to agree.  As I inferred in that other thread, I feel players who go I into a game expecting to succeed at everything and be an untouchable godling aren't actually interested in playing the game.  They are more interested in playing some kind of power fantasy.

That being said, sometimes you need to let your players feel like bad asses.  Getting screwed over at every turn is no fun.  I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and how boring the shows would be if things didn't go wrong at the worst possible times. 

[Wordmaker]

Yup, I try and plan my games in the same manner. The players should always have agency and influence over events, and even when they fail, that failure should lead to an opportunity to find another solution.

And yes, they absolutely need to kick some ass regularly!

[narphoenix]

The secret is to do what Jim does: make the situation so bad that you have to pull as much creative badass as possible to succeed.

Sue comes to mind.

[InFerrumVeritas]

For my players, the mere fact that they survived the situation is the badass part. 

[toturi]

When I play a game, I want my character to be able to succeed in his goal and anything that interferes with his reaching that goal detracts from the fun. I keep it simple, success is fun, failure is not. In DFRPG, however, failure before success seems to be the central idea. I find myself being disgruntled when setbacks happen. If I can finish the run, the adventure, the module in a certain length of time, I do not need my GM to throw the party for a loop and we have to overcome the setback and the game ending later.

I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and one chief gripe I have is how the shows often have things go wrong at the worst time and the characters manage to overcome the huge gulf or climb up out of the deep valley and succeed. I find that quite silly. If the characters could have gotten their badass on and overcome the major setback, then they could have simply got their badass on before the setback and avoided all the bullshit the writers feel that they needed to put in to justify their paycheck. In fact, to my view, if the characters got their badass on and succeeded all the time, I could watch more episodes worth of badass asskicking in the same time I watched a single normal (setback to be overcome) episode.

To me, Sue could have happened anyway and it would have been awesome even if the situation wasn't so bad.

Chocolate is good. I do not need additives to "enhance" the flavor. Being the simple person that I am, ass kicking is good, I do not need setbacks to kick ass.

[narphoenix]

That would be boring. I mean, part of the fun of plots is that the characters succeed despite the setbacks, despite the odds, despite their failings. It's boring to see success without work.

[Wordmaker]

I think seeing failure and setbacks as "additives" might be looking at it the wrong way. For a lot of people, especially when it comes to fiction, that failure is part of the fun. And believe me, when it comes to making something marketable, constant success, with no setback, no escalation of threat, that's a gamble.

You enjoy success, Toturi, and that's fine. If you've earned that success, you'd rather win, and you want to see your heroes win too. But I think a lot of people like that element of danger. The chance that their heroes can lose it all. Those people find it exciting to see characters up against the ropes, pushed to the edge. The characters get their badass on not just because they can, but because they have to. Because if they don't, they could lose everything that matters to them.

That right there, that's drama. That's conflict. And for me, that's fun.

[Vairelome]

On a meta level, "failure" in an RPG is when the game stops being fun for those involved.  "Fun" is highly context-dependent; there is no single definition that will apply to all gaming groups.  For instance, most tabletop games are fundamentally cooperative--the game is structured around a mutually-supportive group of PCs that are trying to accomplish the same general goal.  Conflict is supposed to happen between the PCs on one side (maybe with some NPC allies) and NPCs on the other; while some amount of in-group tension may exist, PvP is definitely a failure.  On the other hand, nearly all LARPs operate on exactly the reverse principle--PvP (often social) is the primary conflict type, so when it happens, it's not failure.  (Failure in LARPs is more commonly the result of rule-breaking and/or biased adjudication.)

Individually, no two individual gamers are going to have exactly the same definition of fun.  A successful game relies on getting a group together that has sufficiently similar definitions, and then running a game that lives within the overlapping space as much as possible.

Problems often arise on the internet (where people are frequently wrong) when a gamer with a successful career in one type of group meets a gamer from a very different and incompatible group, and at least one of the gamers insist that their own way is "correct" and the other guy is "doing it wrong."  Even beyond the arrogance of the message conveyed, it is typical for "explanations" like "you're immature" or "you're incompetent" to follow along as part of the "you're doing it wrong" argument.

So long as everyone in the other guy's group is having fun, who cares?  They may not be doing things the way you would, but that's not important--if you aren't part of the relevant gaming group, your definition of fun is not relevant to that group's collective definition of fun.

Now, if one or more people in that group is not having fun, yeah, someone is "doing it wrong."  But here it's very important not to let your own preconceptions of "if I was in that group, then..." override.  One of three things needs to happen: either the game needs to move into a more fully shared definition of fun, the people not having fun need to leave the game, or there needs to be some sort of payoff that convinces the people not having fun to suck it up and continue anyway.  (I think the last option happens more frequently than I'd like, and I think it's inherently socially unstable--causing resentment--in the long run, but people have a LOT of reasons to pick it anyway, most commonly out-of-game friendships.)

Going to dinner with friends, I may have more to say later....

Edit: And I see my comments are immediately relevant while I was typing this up!  Who knew. 

[Wordmaker]

This post, right here, this is wisdom.

My original post was addressing the idea of characters in a game facing setbacks and failure, whether planned or at random through the fall of the dice.

But yes, absolutely, the only truly failure in roleplaying games is when people aren't having fun.

[Haru]

Well said, Vairelome. Hear! Hear!

If we stay inside the game, I don't necessarily think that failure is the right word though. Or maybe it's just how you look at things. This is not supposed to be a "this is right, this is wrong" sermon, if it sounds like this, please remember this sentence.

There are two ways to look at this, and I think those are the main issue in the other thread. For the one side, a character is a tool to overcome obstacles and reach goals. If you don't overcome the obstacle, therefore not reach your goal, that is regarded as a failure. On the other side, there are people who consider a character to be a vehicle for the story. If the character fails and it contributes to the story, it is a success in their eyes, the character's failure is secondary to this.
tutori and Wordmaker make the cases for each side pretty well. I myself like to go for the drama approach lately, but I still enjoy the occasional Shadowrun game that we tend to play by the goals approach.

Regardless of the approach, I think failure should be a matter of choice. I've been playing a bought TDE adventure lately, and there are some things happening in there that are disguised as choices, but the players are actually forced into acting a certain way, no matter if they actually want to or not. Failing like that, without even having a say in the matter is what usually bothers me most. Even if that say is only a little one.
Though a question appears, especially to tutori, since he's the only representative at the moment. Let's say there is a fight and you fail. For simplicities sake, let's say that the dice just fell incredibly unlucky for you, and you are defeated (your views on "the opposition was just too strong" would be interesting as well). What happens now? What would be your thoughts about the fight as a whole? Generally: If success is the only option, how do you handle failure, if it does happen?

[toturi]

Though a question appears, especially to tutori, since he's the only representative at the moment. Let's say there is a fight and you fail. For simplicities sake, let's say that the dice just fell incredibly unlucky for you, and you are defeated (your views on "the opposition was just too strong" would be interesting as well). What happens now? What would be your thoughts about the fight as a whole? Generally: If success is the only option, how do you handle failure, if it does happen?

The dice happened. And the dice will happen. That is why it is so important that the GM low balls the opposition so that failure is minimised. If, in spite of the GM cooperation in a collaborative effort to have a fun game, the dice happened, then I will be more willing to write off the bad experience to a fluke and I continue with the game and continue to work towards the objective.

If the opposition was genuinely too strong, then I expect to lose. And I would question why the opposition is too strong. If it is inexperience with the game system, then this is one reason to err on the side of caution and select opposition that the GM did not think was a challenge.

Quite often, it is this dogma that the GM has to provide a challenge to the players and it is not fun without a challenge; if the players don't work for the win, then they won't appreciate win. Perhaps. Perhaps not, take a look at the character sheets. Min-maxed/optimised (in this case, I think either term may be used interchangeable, provided you do not attribute degoratory intent) characters? Yes? Good. Then the players have already worked for the win. The players have already worked to shape their characters, they have hone the characters to a fine edge. If the GM looks at the character sheets and selects his opposition to match, then I think this is where things go wrong. The GM is invalidating the hard work the players have put in pre-game. Prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. In the case where the GM feels that he needs to challenge his players in spite of his players doing their homework so to speak, the prior preparation not only is invalidated, it may well be the cause of failure.

[Lavecki121]

So basically you are saying if you are on par with the level of a dragon, you shouldn't face it because you could lose? It would be better for you to face a rabbit because you could beat that?

Edit: I'm not trying to be insensitive; I'm just trying to grasp what you feel an appropriate challenge is. If you are sent on a recovery mission and the item gets stolen while you are on your way to get it is this a bad thing? What if it is stolen on the way back while the PC s are sleeping?

It just seems like you don't like conflict in which case I don't understand what the motivation is.

[Mr. Death]

I always think of my favorite TV shows and how awesome the characters are, and one chief gripe I have is how the shows often have things go wrong at the worst time and the characters manage to overcome the huge gulf or climb up out of the deep valley and succeed. I find that quite silly. If the characters could have gotten their badass on and overcome the major setback, then they could have simply got their badass on before the setback and avoided all the bullshit the writers feel that they needed to put in to justify their paycheck. In fact, to my view, if the characters got their badass on and succeeded all the time, I could watch more episodes worth of badass asskicking in the same time I watched a single normal (setback to be overcome) episode.

Except that would mean you get one episode. Because heroes who always win without difficulty are incredibly boring unless they're just being a straight up parody of themselves. Being an unstoppable badass that nobody can challenge is fine for the first five minutes of the episode, but the drama and entertainment for the rest of the hour is about the challenges the characters face.

If the characters are badass and avoid setbacks, there is no plot. Then you're just watching someone's power fantasy about how awesome their character is, and that gets really irritating really quickly.

For a lot of us, gaming is about some kind of accomplishment. It's not an accomplishment if you didn't have to work for it, and really, no, just statting the character out isn't working.

Why have dice at all then, if you think that you've already "earned it" just by filling out the character sheet? If you think the GM is doing something wrong by making losing even a possibility?

Winning's fun, but it's more satisfying to earn it. It sounds like you don't really want to play, so much as you want to win.

[toturi]

So basically you are saying if you are on par with the level of a dragon, you shouldn't face it because you could lose? It would be better for you to face a rabbit because you could beat that?

If given the choice between a dragon and a rabbit, all other factors remaining the same, yes.