Tag: Failure

The very first campaign I ran was in 2016 – it was set in a homebrew world that had one important continent and was bordered by severe amounts of intellectual property infringement. (Truly, one of the main towns was just the Daggerford map by Mike Schley that I flipped and colored over digitally. It was called Warthford). The party went by “The Luters,” and we had so much fun that our campaign lasted 4 or 5 years – although we eventually just transitioned into playing within the standard D&D setting of Faerûn. This early campaign was a series of thinly veiled railroad tracks leading to (obviously) the party defeating the evil guy at the end (we will discuss railroads in a subsequent blog post). Here’s how play happened early on in this campaign:

Me the GM: “The door to the next room is locked and you can hear the guards footsteps down the hall, they are getting closer!

Llewelynn (played by my wife): ” … ok, I smash the lock!”

[Llewellyn makes a strength check and the total is 10. I shift uncomfortably in my chair because I was originally thinking a DC 15.]

Me the GM: “Yeah … that will do. You break through the door just time!”

Failure is scary, and the unknown is uncomfortable. In the example above, I didn’t know what I would have done if they didn’t get through that door. What would the guards have done? Is there a jail in this town? Are there NPCs within this jail? Where do the guards store prisoners’ weapons when imprisoned? So, I just decided to go with the path of least resistance and let them succeed since I knew what was behind the door they were trying to get through. Most of the time, I didn’t even set a DC before the check was made. I just let them roll, and I decided if the outcome was good or great based on how high they rolled.

Play continued this way until one unforgettable moment that made me realize what I wanted to strive for in every session – true emergent storytelling as a result of letting failures happen.

Most GMs fear failure, that it will derail THEIR story, devolve the whole session into chaos, or even make the GM look like they don’t know what they are doing (and let’s be real, looking incompetent while everyone is staring at you is truly the worst). But here is the twist: failure is the moment that a session becomes unforgettable. Back to my story –

My players were sneaking into an enemy base, and the druid (Edbert) wildshaped into a rat while some trolls were looking for him. I had the player roll a stealth check, and he failed. For the first time, instead of saying “ok … that’s good enough, you sneak away,” I decided to let the dice tell the story, and I had one of the trolls step on the rat cause it was hungry and wanted food! I can still remember the player’s shock at this happening. He literally panicked, and his character ran and hid. I let go of control, and the story was SO MUCH BETTER. In fact, here is a screenshot of a “bullet point history” of this campaign I wrote for my players a year or two after this happened:

“This was the first time I started to understand what makes DND interesting for players,” I wrote that in around 2019, three years after this campaign began. Failure makes tabletop RPG’s interesting for players.

Let’s dive into why failure is GREAT for your story and how you can embrace that failure in gaming.

Tension as a Tool

Imagine for a moment that you are driving home from work. It’s the exact same drive you’ve done for YEARS. You’ve got your music up, and you’ve zoned out, barely paying attention at all. Suddenly, a cop pulls out behind you. You start wondering, “Did I stop at that last stop sign?” You are incredibly tense as you pull up to the next stop sign, and you make sure that you fully stop and count to three before continuing on. In that split second of thinking you were going to get pulled over, you were suddenly back in the moment, paying full attention again. You were fully invested in your driving!

This is the same concept for tabletop roleplaying. When a session continues forward along a predictable storyline in which the characters cannot fail, the players are no longer invested. We need to shake things up, throw in something unexpected, and allowing for failure does just that.

Failure creates tension, tension creates investment, and investment creates the story.

When the players are worried that something bad is about to happen or they have to think quickly, they become tense. This tension suddenly brings EVERYONE back into the story, and this investment into the story changes things from words on paper that the GM is leading the players through to a truly emergent story that the group is writing together. Not to mention, as a GM, this unpredictability can be the adrenaline kick that suddenly helps you remember that tiny piece of lore that would be perfect to drop at this very moment.

The Three-Beat Failure Framework

We’ve established that failure helps create player investment and better emergent storytelling. But we’ve also established that allowing for failure can be scary. So, how can we feel more confident in allowing this failure to happen, and how can we use this failure to get back investment from our players? This is where the “Three-Beat” Failure framework comes into play.

The framework is three steps:

1. Establish immediate interesting consequences.
2. Introduce new or escalate the “threat.”
3. Emerging opportunity.

By using this framework during the session, GMs can reduce their immediate mental load and focus on what matters in the present.

Step 1 – Establish immediate consequences.

This means establishing 1 simple consequence to the failed action. That’s as far as you need to think for the moment. It’s designed to be simple and to guide the GM into the framework smoothly and resist immediate spiraling, all the while immediately showing the players that their failure matters and the world is reacting. Some of these immediate consequences may be:

• Guards or another enemy seeing you after a failed stealth roll
• Breaking a lockpick after a failed attempt to open a door
• An interrogated NPC suddenly recognizes the Player Character from their backstory events
• Falling a distance after a failed rooftop jump while chasing the big bad evil guy
• A wagon wheel snapped after a failed drive test

We’ve raised the tension by allowing failure with consequence (not just a roadblock), and now we need to provide a moment for the player to invest.

Step 2 – Introduce new or escalate the “threat”

After establishing that failure has consequences, we are going to either escalate the threat that we introduced in beat 1 or present a new threat. This choice depends on whether we hinted at an impending threat in beat 1 or if the immediate consequence was resolved, and we need a new threat to challenge the player – note that this should not just be another attempt at the same action without any sort of consequence! The purpose of this beat is to provide a decision point – something for the player to INVEST in through their decision-making. The goal of this beat would be to end the description of the threat with: “What do you do?” Continuing our examples from above, a GM could present the following situations:

• The NPC who spotted you after the failed Stealth roll yelling, “Stop right there,” with crossbows drawn. What do you do?
• Telling a player that the door’s lock looks to have been damaged from your last attempt, another failure might result in the lock being permanently jammed. What do you do?
• The NPC knows the crimes you committed in the past, and he seeks more than just persuasion to provide you with information. What do you do?
• A crowd surrounds you after you fall. Some provide medical attention while others shout for help from the guards. You see a group of the big bad evil guy’s thugs approaching, what do you do?
• The wagon tips on its side, and you hear the howls of wolves in the distance drawing near. What do you do?

Step 3 – Emerging opportunity

Lastly, we want to bring it all together by REWARDING the player’s investment (their choice) with a new opportunity that pushes the story forward. This is a good opportunity to re-center on the player’s original goal that they were trying to achieve when they first failed – but it is not necessary. Just as long as the story moves forward. But note that this new opportunity should be based on whatever the player decided to do next in the previous beat. This can be a little tricky, as the player may decide to do something in the previous step that requires a roll (meaning that we go back to step 1 if there is another failure). One way to get around this is to present the emerging opportunity after the player decides what they want to do in beat 2, but before any roll is made. That way, a player can see the opportunity before them, but they may just not be able to reach it yet. Some examples:

• [The player decides to convince the guards that the PC is not up to anything nefarious.] The guards get close as they listen to your plea, and you see one of them clearly has an expensive piece of jewelry belonging to the king sticking from their left pocket.
• [The player decides to inspect the wall for any loose stones that they can remove to peer into the room]. Up above the door, there is a panel that looks removable; it may provide passage into the next room, but it’s going to be a tight fit.
• [The player decides to answer the NPC’s request] The price requested is more than coin, it requires the Player character to commit a crime on the NPC’s behalf; however, following this lead naturally provides MORE information than the player could have learned simply through interrogation.
• [The player decides to run & hide from the approaching thugs] The character finds themselves in a dingy & dusty laboratory that obviously used to belong to the big bad evil guy.
• [The player decides to hide in a tree and wait for the nearby wolves to hopefully pass through]. The player climbs a tree and sees smoke emanating from a nearby house within the trees.

Hopefully, the examples above provide you with a good idea of how the “Three-Beat Failure” Framework works. We allow failure, which increases tension. Then, we present a decision point for a player to invest in. Finally, we want to reward the player for their choice & investment by providing an emerging opportunity. This should all feel like a “fail forward” mechanic while simultaneously allowing the failure to mean something. Sort of a “fail diagonally” concept.

I highly encourage everyone who is playing D&D to tell their players the DC in advance, or TRY A DIFFERENT GAME that puts the DCs on the character sheets (Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Vagabond, etc. …) Lastly, like anything, this requires practice to make it seamless. So I’ve put together a handout that should help GMs. Download below and make sure to subscribe! Enjoy!