Failure in games

[toturi]

Well, in SOME cases, a middle ground is possible (DFRPG concessions are made for this).

I am curious as to how much character death shows up in the games you've run.

I'll be honest. I have never killed a character that the player did not want to be killed. (OK, fine. The characters did not die but fell to the Dark Side. It was a Star Wars game.)

EDIT: But the players chose the Corruption Destinies, not me.

[Vairelome]

I'll be honest. I have never killed a character that the player did not want to be killed. (OK, fine. The characters did not die but fell to the Dark Side. It was a Star Wars game.)

EDIT: But the players chose the Corruption Destinies, not me.

Well, the character death question was for Wordmaker.  I already figured out that character death wasn't something you liked. 

[Wordmaker]

Very little, actually. I've been gaming for close to 20 years and in that time I've only killed about 6 PCs, and 3 of those were in the climax of a campaign where they decided to stand their ground against an enemy they knew would kill them.

Defeat doesn't have to equal surrender. It's a great option for keeping PCs alive, though. If the villains won't offer the chance to surrender, that's the choice of the GM who created them.

But there are countless ways for defeat to mean something other than death. Not all confrontations with the villain will be a straight fight, and nor should they be. And the goal of every fight will not be to kill your opponent. Sometimes the villain wants something the heroes have. Sometimes the villain has a different target altogether. Sometimes it's a mass battle where the PCs are just one part of a larger conflict. Somtimes it's a chase, and the villain's goal is to escape rather than to kill anyone.

The assumption that death is always on the line is erroneous.

And as you said, DFRPG is great for this sort of thing, because if the player is worried about losing a conflict and doesn't want to take the chance of their character being killed, they can concede, accepting defeat but controlling how their character is defeated.

[crusher_bob]

If the characters never face the chance of losing, they do not face adversity and challenges. If they never face a major setback and basically win at everything they do not face adversity and challenges. What they're facing is boring. What they're facing is softball validation.

Adversity and challenges mean the characters have to work to beat them. Otherwise it's, to put it as bluntly as possible, one big circle jerk. Fanfiction is filled with this sort of "We're all awesome and nobody can beat us ever" stories, and except for the ones that are parody, they generally suck.
It's not about your character succeeding. It's about your character always succeeding without there being any chance of failure.

Part of the problem here is that the vast majority of game designers and GMs do not understand compound probability.

An example:
What base chance of success does the character need to have on any give roll to succeed at 8 rolls in a row with a 75% total probability?

More in depth coverage of the example: the adventure has 8 'critical points' the the PCs have to succeed at.  Everyone wants to PCs to succeed at adventures at least 75% of the time, or even higher, because the stakes of the adventure are often something like "and the city blows up if you fail".

So, what percent chance of success at an individual test would the characters need?
If the PCs succeed on an individual test 90% of the time, they'll succeed at the adventure only around 43% of the time.   To succeed at the adventures 75% of the time, the PCs would need a success rate on an individual test of around 96.5%.  But books and cinema tend to support the characters only succeeding by the narrowest margins.  And that's the feeling that game designers often try to emulate, which means that they set the expected PC success rate to maybe 67% and the whole adventure goes off the rails the first time the dice hit the table.

That's why most stealth systems in games are completely useless.  They ask you to succeed several times in a row to get anything done with stealth, and unless you've really cheesed out your stealth skill, you'll fail one of those rolls sooner rather than later.  Which means planning for succeeding in sneaking isn't something you do.  Sneaking is just something you plan to do to let you get as close as possible to the enemy before you switch to the combat engine.

[Lavecki121]

But the issue here isn't even 75% chance. It's the difference between any chance and complete and total success every time

[Mr. Death]

If he's doing it in a group and everyone's having fun, I think "masturbation" is not the right metaphor.  Surely we've moved on to sex, yes?

He's the one who started using it, I was just borrowing his terminology.

Winning is as much about having the best character stats as what you do with them. Having the best tools is no use if you do not know how to use them, but to have the best odds of success, you'd want to use the best tools. The characters nearly always face a chance of losing in DFRPG, no matter how good the character. This is a fact of a system with dice. Hence the characters do face adversity and challenges, just that a well built and optimised character reduces that to a mere possibility instead of failure being probable.

That's really not what you said, though. You said by building the character, you had already "earned" the right to win, and it was the GM's job to lob softballs at you so that the possibility of losing was remote at best--and that if the GM had been so callous as to make something that had a real chance of defeating you, they were doing it wrong.

"Adversity" and "challenge" implies the character has difficulty. Adversity is something that has to be overcome--i.e., you're starting out with some kind of disadvantage. Challenge implies the character is...well, challenged--not doing something that he's all but guaranteed to succeed at barring a freak accident of the dice...which you can mitigate or outright undo with a single fate point in a lot of cases.

I disagree. I like fan fiction. Most of the time, I do not think they suck. Well they may suck, but in a good, enjoyable and fun way. It's about your character always succeeding with there being a minimal chance of failure.

...To each their own, I guess. While I enjoy a character being awesome, it just feels flat if they don't have to work for it.

Hopefully, yes. No effort is good. No effort is fun. And this is one thing I like about DFRPG, and as you have pointed out yourself, you can build a good character with a little effort. But I think you are wrong. The character has to put in effort, but if I had built the character right, I do not.

If you're not putting in any effort, though...what's the point? Why show up? Why play? It just seems so...empty of the game's basically decided in your favor without you having to do anything.

How do any of your games last more than a session of there's nothing even slowing your characters down?

I mean, imagine this applying to...well, just about anything else, really. The Devils and the Rangers are playing, but statistically speaking, Martin Brodeur is one of the best goalies of all time. Therefore, the Devils win and the rest of the game's a formality? Granted, as a Devils fan I'd be largely in favor of that, but what's the point?

What if your character is eaten and there is no come back? Given the choice of utter defeat and total success, which would you choose?

I feel like a lot of people either forget about concessions or don't understand what they mean. A concession is a gameplay term and mechanic, not a plot term and mechanic. When someone takes a concession, that doesn't mean that the characters stop fighting to negotiate (in most cases), it means the players stop fighting and negotiate.

A Concession and a Taken Out might well be narrated in the exact same way. Going with the dragon example, the combat ends with the dragon smacking the character out a window, then leaving with the macguffin. If it's a Taken Out, then yes, maybe the dragon kills you. But if it's a concession, it might be that you landed in a tree which broke your fall. Or you grabbed something on the way out and didn't fall.

The most important thing to remember about resolving combat in Dresden is that not every fight is to the death. In fact, the vast majority aren't going to be. Concessions exist to give you an option to end combat beyond, "Everyone on one side or the other is dead."

Failure doesn't mean death in DFRPG. It might, but there are tons of other options.

Anything which ends the story prematurely should be avoided, if possible. An interesting, engaging defeat is not the end, no more than success should mean that there is never another challenge.

This needs to be highlighted, because I think it states my point well--I consider "We're awesome at everything and never face a real challenge" to be something that will end the story prematurely.

[crusher_bob]

The most important thing to remember about resolving combat in Dresden is that not every fight is to the death. In fact, the vast majority aren't going to be. Concessions exist to give you an option to end combat beyond, "Everyone on one side or the other is dead."

Failure doesn't mean death in DFRPG. It might, but there are tons of other options.
This needs to be highlighted, because I think it states my point well--I consider "We're awesome at everything and never face a real challenge" to be something that will end the story prematurely.

'Failure' that doesn't result in failure isn't failure. 

To expand:
If there isn't any point in the adventure where 'failure' will result in actual failure, then your chance of success at the adventure is 100%, and you are dressing up the narration of that 100%.  And if there are places where 'failure' then you need to look at how often they actually happen and what the PCs chance of avoiding them are.

Also, how well are the lines between them communicated?  Will losing this fight result in the city blowing up, or not?  If it will, I'd prefer not to lose.  Will losing this fight make it more likely that the city will blow up?  If yes, I'd still prefer not to lose because the city blowing up is such a bad result that even a small increase in likelyhood of it happening is a terribad result.

[Mr. Death]

I'd say, generally speaking, a good campaign should be mostly small failures leading up to one big success, with progress being made toward that success as they go along.

I mean, which sounds like a more interesting and satisfying campaign?

Campaign A:
The PCs fail to prevent a murder of a public official, but in the process are made aware there's some kind of plot to foil, and the public official was in on it.
The PCs, while gathering evidence, fail to apprehend one of the villain's goons, but in the process the type of goon--of what the goon was doing--gives them some kind of lead to look into.
The PCs outright lose a fight to the goons, and survive by the skin of their teeth, and have to stop and recover for a bit while the villains move ahead. The PCs learn some of their limitations, and now have to account for them in the future.
The PCs follow up on a lead, and mitigate some part of the villain's plan, but can't stop the villains from getting away.
After several days of cat and mouse, hit and miss, getting beaten but sticking with it, the PCs finally track down the villains right as their plans are coming to fruition, and have a knock-down, drag out fight to the finish to stop them.

Or, Campaign B:
The PCs stop the politician from being killed, and capture the goon. They beat both of them easily in social conflict, convincing them to spill the beans, everything they know.
The PCs know where the villains are, what they're planning, and what they need to do it. They easily beat the villains because they're just that good through their own natural talent. The PCs do not have to learn anything, and don't have to make any kind of meaningful sacrifice.

[Wordmaker]

So for you, failure where the characters have an opportunity to try again isn't really failure. That's okay, let's call those moments "setbacks" or "minor failures."

But there is a marked difference between that and a situation where the heroes win the first time, every time. Those temporary setbacks, minor failures, those are what make a story compelling and interesting. Seeing how the heroes have to rethink a plan or act on the fly when a situation goes from bad to worse.

What I understand of Toturi's position is that he doesn't want even those setbacks to happen. He wants to win, first time every time. And he would prefer if the same applied to books and tv shows. However I believe that to be a minority opinion.

In the Dresden Files books, Harry gets his ass handed to him constantly. Just about every conflict he goes into, he would be conceding his way out of them right to the end when he's finally able to beat the bad guy.

And I agree with Mr Death. Winning constantly is just as quick a way to end the story, and therefore the game, as is wiping the whole party out in a single battle. For players like Mr Death and myself, both would be examples of poor GMing, because we want the ups and downs. We want to take our knocks and come back fighting.

[crusher_bob]

And to make people 'able' to play in these sorts of games, you really need to do one of two things:

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Be able to explicitly communicate to the players that the loss in this encounter isn't really a loss, which very few games actually do. 

Were we to play a game 'naively' we'd have two things to guide us.  What the rules say, and what the game fiction says.  That is, if we get into a fight with people who want to kill us, we'd normally expect the consequences of losing that fight to be death.  And we'd expect the rules to model the winning or losing of that fight to agree with the fictional presentation of the fight. 

So, for example, if the dice say we won the fight, we'd also expect the fiction to say we won the fight.  Though it's possible to have, say, the fiction say that we lost of fight, were captured, and learned more about the villain's plans by listening to his henchmen talk before we made our daring escape.

I don't know any games that have meta rules that explicitly say things like: the stakes of this fight are a minor advance or setback.  So you probably don't want to spend too many of your metagame tokens on the outcome of the fight.  You want to save your metagame tokens to influence a more important conflict later.

[edit] whoops, Dogs does do this.

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Or two, separate the game fiction layer from the dice results.

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There are a few games that try this, I can think of Dogs in the Vineyard as an example.
Briefly: you roll the dice and describe what you do, but the success or failure of the dice roll doesn't need effect your description.  So, if you want, your character can actually always succeed in the vast majority of stuff that happens in the fictional layer.

Example: your character is in a struggle with one of the villains henchmen.  You want to  find out more about the villains plans. 
Sample story outcomes of a failure in the dice layer:
1. you manage to beat the henchmen down, but he has a poison capsule and you learn nothing.
2. you manage to beat the henchmen down, but "he'll never talk!" and your character won't use torture.
3. you manage to convince the henchmen of the moral superiority of your cause and he's about to tell you  everything, when another of the villains henchmen shoots him.

Sample wins in the dice layer:
1. you are defeated by the henchman and taken prisoner.  While you are tied up, you hear the henchmen talking about the villains plans.  Then you make a daring escape.
2. The henchmen gets away, but you use your investigative skills to deduce what the villains plan is.
3. You defeat the henchmen, and the threat of getting his remaining teeth knocked out is enough to get him to tell you everything he knows.
4. You convince the henchmen to be a proper and moral nihilist, like yourself.  In a fit of feeling for his fellow man, the former henchmen tells you everything.

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So we could have a loss in the fictional layer just be the 'interesting' way of narrating our victory in the dice layer.

But that takes some careful rules design and writing.  Notice how often the 'concessions are metagame constructs, not something that the in game players have to agree to' keep coming up.  The fact that you are in a fight with people that want to kill you, but a concession where you don't die is a perfectly valid result to end that fight seems to be something totally unexpected to a lot of people because the vast majority of game are driven by what happens in the fiction layer.

[Lavecki121]

That's not true. The difference with your second example being that all those things are concessions in fate, if the bad guy feels he is going to lose he can do any of those things as a concession. The main difference though is how concessions are handled in fate is by the group instead of by the GM

[crusher_bob]

No, because my 'stakes' or desired end condition of the fight was to learn more about the villains plans.  So any fight outcome where I don't learn about the villains plans is a loss for me.  So, even if the fiction layer has me 'winning' the fight, it the outcome is me not learning anything about the plans it's because I lost in the dice layer, and the fiction layer comes around with a description that matches that outcome.

And on the winning side, as long and the outcome is that I learn about the villains plans, the fiction layer can say whatever I think is most interesting about what the outcome of the 'fight' was.

Sample things this lets you do
play the incompetent protagonist, that somehow still succeeds in the end.
play the guy who brings words to a gun fight, and still 'wins'.

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Or, in a slightly humors example where I explained potential victories in Exalted shaping combat:
Your opponent stabs his sword though your heart.  But the beauty of your death poem and your obvious moral superiority have made him have a change of heart.  He abandons his old ways, and takes up your equipment and philosophy, trying to emulate you as best he can.  In fact, he plays you so well that all your friends and allies treat him as you.

Outcome: you win the fight, and your character is exactly the same as before; but if this were a television show, you'd now be played by a different actor.

[Lavecki121]

Right but the concession is a group decision so it stands to reason that whatever makes sense in the current scene is how the latter part will play out. Even if the guy kills himself he could have a pack of matches from the hotel he is staying at, or an address scrawled on a piece of paper (both these things being declarations in most cases) just because you failed to have him give you information directly does not mean you have failed to find anything out

[Vairelome]

Defeat doesn't have to equal surrender. It's a great option for keeping PCs alive, though. If the villains won't offer the chance to surrender, that's the choice of the GM who created them.

Ultimately, sure, but genre expectations also factor in.  For example, lethal combat is the rule in D&D.  There are very few instances where an enemy that the PCs are trying to kill should plausibly spare their lives unless he failed to read the Evil Overlord List and insists on monologuing, complicated James Bond death traps, etc.

The assumption that death is always on the line is erroneous.

And I certainly never made that assumption.  However, death is frequently on the line in rather a lot of games, so the assumption that death is rarely on the line is equally erroneous.

There's a good reason lethal combat is fairly typical in most game systems: drama.  As crusher_bob put it, "the city will blow up!"  If those are the stakes, then it's pretty easy to get a group of players pointed in the same direction and more or less working together.  You could also run a game where the goal is to have the local paper write a glowing review of the PCs' brand new restaurant, but I bet there would be less player interest because the stakes are lower (though if you botch badly enough, there's still the chance for explosions!).

[JDK002]

So for you, failure where the characters have an opportunity to try again isn't really failure. That's okay, let's call those moments "setbacks" or "minor failures."

But there is a marked difference between that and a situation where the heroes win the first time, every time. Those temporary setbacks, minor failures, those are what make a story compelling and interesting. Seeing how the heroes have to rethink a plan or act on the fly when a situation goes from bad to worse.

What I understand of Toturi's position is that he doesn't want even those setbacks to happen. He wants to win, first time every time. And he would prefer if the same applied to books and tv shows. However I believe that to be a minority opinion.

In the Dresden Files books, Harry gets his ass handed to him constantly. Just about every conflict he goes into, he would be conceding his way out of them right to the end when he's finally able to beat the bad guy.

And I agree with Mr Death. Winning constantly is just as quick a way to end the story, and therefore the game, as is wiping the whole party out in a single battle. For players like Mr Death and myself, both would be examples of poor GMing, because we want the ups and downs. We want to take our knocks and come back fighting.

Agree, agree, agree.  I keep coming back to tv shows I like.  I'm going to make a wild assumption that there's a lot of cross fandom between Dresden Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and use that as an example, since I've been watching it again recently.

In the very first season, what if Buffy had found and killed The Annointed?  This would of caused a chain reaction through the entire series.  She never would of fought The Master, so the entire giant battle at the end of the season would never have happened. 

It would of thrown the introduction of Spike of track in the next season, who ends up being a hugely important character throughout the series (as well as in the spinoff show Angel).

Kendra would have never become a Slayer, which means Faith would never have become a Slayer.  This would of totally derailed season 3 and 7 (as well as several episodes of Angel once again).

One little failure led to several events that ended up saving the world multiple times over.  It demonstrates that failure can be the road to success, and that by handing out success and never failing at anything ever you're drastically inhibiting what you can do with your story.  It's incredibly single minded, and you're basically railroading yourself.