GM Advice for Failing Forward

#1

Nell Raban has some advice on failing forward that I found useful, so I’m sharing it here. Enjoy!

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#2

I’d love to hear more about what you found useful about it. Any thoughts about how you will bring this advice to your table?

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#3

this is really good stuff. I never formulated concretely this advice, but this really gets to failing forward.

Injecting that conflict rather than shutting someone down is great and all, but how do you choose? How do you pick that poison? Not “oh no do I have a poison?” but my issue is that at any given gaming moment I probably have like a half-dozen to a baker’s dozen of poisons to choose! picking one is hard! How do you know of those 13 is the perfect one?

That issue, generating the most interesting conflict for any particular moment, is precisely what separates good MCs from great ones, imo.

Thank you for sharing.

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#4

I think choosing the perfect poison can be a bit overrated sometimes. Gaming is a cooperative endeavor, not just a virtuoso performance by the MC, so what’s more important is how your players will respond to the move you make. And anything you don’t use right now can always be saved for later.

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#5

Yeah! I’ve mostly played trad games my whole life so I have to unlearn some GM instincts when I’m story gaming. Re-framing the failure result as ‘insert conflict’ result helps to get me thinking away from, Okay, you take damage, or lose equipment, or the bad guy gains a tactical advantage. It’s an easy reminder that ‘nothing happens’ isn’t the case. Something is going down, and if it twists the character and the story instead of just draining resources, that can be a cooler option. Sometimes sure, take damage and keep moving. But even if you have a good poison ready, as @EricVulgaris says, it can be hard to choose the right one.

In those situations when you have a couple different ways to twist the knife, I like to choose the one that is going to keep the player interested. That’s usually pretty easy to do with my groups by going with just spite. That thing you wanted? Well, you didn’t get it, and the guy who you really doesn’t like actually has it now. Revenge was easy motivation for my old group. That probably doesn’t fit to all gaming groups though, so I guess the broad answer would be to know what keeps your players interested in the game, and lean your moves in that direction.

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#6

I’ve used 6- for a few things outside the immediate scene.

  • Your spouse/cousin gets caught up in a cult who were one of your previous enemies.
  • Something falls deep down into the earth, setting off a chain reaction that causes an earthquake or volcano to erupt. It might take an hour before the effects are noticed, but it’s coming.
  • This whole quest is a diversion, the main bad guy force is attacking the town you were born in.
  • Dopplegangers are happily robbing people while looking like your party.

Meantime back in the scene the PC does what they intended with no frills. Let them wonder what is happening.

So while it does not immediately effect them, it does reiterate the setting/tone and cause an ongoing complication (new threat clock) for them to deal with.

#7

I like it when the 6- is when they get exactly what they want, but more so. “You feel the fire building inside of you, your clothes start smoking, you feel great as the fireball lets out what sound like a sweet sigh as the it launches out of you. Damn, that’s the hugest fireball you’ve ever cast, it’s like a small sun, crap it’s too big it’s going to blow up the whole room including the treasure what-was-I-thinking!!!?”

Or when they want to read a person, and you tell them everything they feared is true and then some…

As Kate Bullock says, it’s all about consequences, be they good or bad. Because even good consequences can lead to bigger problems in the long-run.

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#8

I love the option of adding complications instead of narrating failures. You do the thing, but just as you finish, the stone guardians awaken, or a drunken watchman stumbles in and cries out in alarm at your presence, or an elder hero appears and calls you out for perceived misdeeds, or the spirit you summoned brought friends, and none of them seem like they’re interested in what you’re proposing, or maybe they want more than you thought you were willing to give for their service.

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