Embracing Failure

I've been playing tabletop RPGs for about fifteen years.  Most of that time has been spent playing under the paradigm that success is good and failure is bad.  Success means you defeat the monster.  Success means you find the treasure.  Success means you solve the puzzle.  Failure means losing, whether it's your life, the treasure, or worst of all, the plot.

RPGs might not have winners and losers in the same way as board games, but winning and losing are both things that can happen.  And that's felt pretty much the same whether we were playing D&D, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, Warhammer or Cyberpunk.

And then my gaming group slammed head first into Powered By The Apocalypse.

To say we didn't know what we were doing would be an understatement.  Initially the confusion seemed to be from the way PBTA comes with a pile of jargon, starting with calling the GM the MC, and continuing with forward and hold and clocks.  As we got to grips with that, however, the actual confusion started to surface: in PBTA games, failure isn't necessarily bad.

When I played Rapscallion, I failed almost every role I made.  And it didn't matter, because the GM took every failed role as an opportunity to make the story more interesting.

Whether you're the GM or a player, PBTA games require a different set of skills to play than more conventional RPGs.  Which isn't to say my group don't have those skills, but we certainly didn't know how to use them at that point.

One area where I think Forged in the Dark scores over PBTA is that it's a lot easier to get your head around how to work with a failed roll, especially from the GM chair.  Six months after our first abortive attempt at PBTA we started on Blades in the Dark.  With solid guidance on how to do consequences while still leaving room for creativity, we got into the swing of things a lot faster.  When I got in the chair myself to run Scum and Villainy I found exactly the same thing.

PBTA games tend to come with an agenda and principles the GM is supposed to follow.  They all tend to be written in the slightly weird style used in Apocalypse World, which I don't think we found particularly useful.  It's taken me a while and playing in a more experienced PBTA GM's games to start to really understand it.

My suggestion for an agenda for PBTA and similar style games would be 'make failure interesting'.

And perhaps we could translate that over into more conventional RPGs as well?  Just thinking of Lord of the Rings for a moment, there's moments like when Frodo fails his will save against the ring and suddenly the ring wraiths can find him, or when Galadriel gets a partial success and doesn't put the ring on but scares the hell out of everyone in the process...

No, perhaps it doesn't work so well in the more number-based games, where there's a solid pass/fail mechanic and failure tends to come with mechanical consequences.  There's no point trying to play Pathfinder like it's Dungeon World, when you could just play Dungeon World.  I'll continue to enjoy both games.  They just have to be enjoyed in different ways.  In the former case, enjoying it means understanding how my character and her abilities work and deploying them effectively.  And in the latter case, enjoying it means, amongst other things, embracing failure.