Failure is boring!
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Perrin, I was inspired by the comment you left last week. I was talking about death in games but I think you got to the deeper issue, which is about failure. My experience in published 4e D&D adventures (and I’m including the free to download Living Forgotten Realms adventures) is that there really is no interesting options for failure.
Now, part of this can be accounted for in the format of a published adventure. Unlike a DM who is crafting their own home-brew campaign, the authors of published adventures are writing for a wide, general audience and can’t really take into account individual groups.
I once had a campaign I was running where the characters took on the ruler of an underground community of much higher level than they were and he responded to their attacks, after he grew bored, of teleporting them thousands of miles away. Okay, he was trying to teleport them to hell, but his spell was disrupted but that’s another story entirely. My point is that no published adventure can account for the characters so violently altering the plot through their actions.
Given all of this, though, I still think there exists more options than have been explored for meaningful and interesting failure in published adventures. To narrow the topic to discuss in this blog posting I will address skill challenges in Living Forgotten Realms adventures. I’ve have read Wizards of the Coast (Wotc) employees advise that failing skill challenges should not lead to dead ends and thus successful completion of a skill challenge should not hinge on the story of an adventure moving forward. In fact, some of their writings talk about how failure at skill challenges should be interesting.
However, most of the skill challenges I see in LFR games impose only receiving ½ xp for failure, the loss of healing surges and a tougher fight for the heroes, or some combination of these. None of that appeals to me as interesting. In fact, it often, in my experience, drives the players to their skill lists and begins a mechanical discussion of who should make what skill check in order to achieve success.
I have also heard that the DCs of skill challenges are set that only about 5-10% of skill challenges are actually failed in LFR adventures. So, the point being made is why change skill challenges to offer meaningful failure for such a small percentage of the audience.
If this is the case, why even call them challenges? In fact, why not just make these interludes role-playing encounters. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the introduction of the skill challenge mechanic into 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, but I don’t think it’s being given enough attention or focus on backing up the intention of making failure interesting.
I have posted comments elsewhere with the idea that failure of a skill challenge could lead to a different encounter in the adventure, change the plot, even if temporarily before coming back to the finale conclusion. It has been pointed out that devising a new encounter in an adventure for the 5-10% who failure isn’t feasible. If that is the case, then perhaps skill challenges could be made more challenging so there is a higher failure rate. If interesting things happened perhaps more players wouldn’t mind failing, or might even want to play the same adventure again with a different character to see what a different outcome might look like.
What about you? Any ideas on what could constitute interesting failure? Do you have any examples to share from a game where failure changed the course of things, turning out to be at least as interesting as success?
I have ideas for interesting failures, but I haven't tested many of them (because I don't have much play or DM experience, and because my PCs usually succeed) and I doubt they'd meet the strictures of a Living Forgotten Realms game. I mean, I'd like to run or play in a game in which the PCs failed to stop the Big Bad from opening a portal to another plane and enslaving the world. I could see the PCs surviving this failure and having to live in that world. As I understand it, the game setting of Midnight Chronicles is such a world.
Don't get too hung up on skill challenges needing to be "challenging", and more than "solos" should be expected to take on a prepared party "solo". If a skill challenge has DCs in line with what the updated DMG recommends, there's a good chance that a skill challenge on its own won't be all that "challenging". If it's a social encounter the party "face" may well be able to walk straight across the challenge, so long as he doesn't repeatedly use Intimidate where it's not appropriate. But he still has to make the rolls and (at least in my games) give a little description of what he says and how he acts. In turn, the DM has the NPCs respond to the actions (and inactions) of the PCs. There's give and take, back and forth, and even if the PC is succeeding masterfully, the NPC doesn't have to truly indicate this. The DM can treat the encounter as just a role-playing ecounter with built in "beats". I've had some experience with it, and it works well. And at the end, there's a clear amount of XP to be provided.
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