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I'm prepping SoT book 5 right now as a GM and also had an encounter last night as a player in Spore War that really hit this home: PF2 has a lot of "you fail to do a thing, nothing interesting happens, try again" mechanics and situations in it.
The spoiler-free version of the ritual is "you must succeed at this ritual to advance the plot." Failure has some minor negative consequences but there's no real time pressure at this point, so you can just treat it or wait it out. Running this RAW, PCs will continue attempting it until they succeed. Given how stacked ritual DCs are against PCs when secondary casters are involved, "try again" is the most likely outcome.
Last night's spoiler-free situation was roughly "complex trap like situation needs exorcizing and only one PC has the skill to do it effectively." That led to everyone else spamming aid or getting out of the way because attempting it themselves wasn't worth it due to the critical failure chance being higher than the success chance, while a failure just did nothing. It took a couple of hours and it wasn't very fun.
Picking a lock is a more basic example of the same problem: you might need 3 successes and a failure does nothing. If you're not time pressured, this is just making a bunch of rolls until you either succeed or get enough critical failures to run out of lockpicks.
These are all cases where the game would be improved by using a fail forward design. For those who haven't heard of that, it's a game design where the story advances no matter what the result, it just might come with complications or not be the outcome you wanted. So "failure does nothing" is not a thing. In the case of the ritual? The plot advancing outcome happens even if you fail, but there's complications or consequences as a part of that. You won't have a situation where you have to keep doing it until you get over a 13 on the dice.
For the other two situations I mentioned and as a more general guideline, an easy way to handle this is to change failure to do both success and a complication. Like with the hazard, a failure doing both success and critical failure (the complication is bad stuff happening) is a lot more interesting of an encounter than "nothing happens" is, because the encounter advances faster and a PC who isn't great at the skill has a much higher chance to push things forward at the risk of causing problems. It beats the hell out of "I don't really know how to help because 3 PCs can't Aid the 1 PC actually good at this" isn't fun.
The real goal here is to keep the game moving instead of having it bog down on repeating checks until you get enough successes to allow the plot to happen.
Now, an experienced GM can recognize these situations and change things. That's what I intend to do with the ritual (along with my ritual DC house rule). But I think it'd help newer GMs if the system and APs embraced this more themselves so it wouldn't tell you to do things that create these kind of "keep rolling until you succeed" situations.
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I don't know that I care too much for the idea that PCs can just fail their way to victory.
That's not failure. That's coddling. That's not an adventure with trials. That's watching a movie until you get to the end.
I do agree that something should be done about those time wasting failed just to repeat situations. Unless there's a time constraint of some kind, they're just not interesting.
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I agree that this is simply a limitation of pre-written adventure design like the APs. The book doesn't have enough room to have multiple outcomes for challenges creating a web-like path to campaign completion.
The option of 'failure results in campaign restart' isn't very good at all.
The option of 'failure results in retry' at least keeps the campaign going.
The option of 'failure results in GM homebrewing side quests needed to get the campaign back on track' is probably the best, but that requires an experienced GM. Which isn't something that an AP author can rely on having.
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One thing I do with rituals is that I like to integrate lower or higher DCs for phases of the moon, usually with the one night of a new moon or a full moon being the best for the party. That gives a lot of time between meaningful retries for the party to retrain or buy items or do research that can help them do the ritual better next time and it gives me more time to introduce little side quests and just let them have down time.
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I don't know that I care too much for the idea that PCs can just fail their way to victory.
That's not failure. That's coddling. That's not an adventure with trials. That's watching a movie until you get to the end.
I do agree that something should be done about those time wasting failed just to repeat situations. Unless there's a time constraint of some kind, they're just not interesting.
"Failing their way to victory" is exactly what happens now, though. They must succeed at the ritual for the plot of that AP to advance. They can do it an infinite number of times until they succeed. Failure doesn't matter. Success is mandatory. When you can just keep rolling forever until you succeed and take a break in between to clear any failure effects before trying again, failure has no consequences at all. Which seems to be what you're decrying, except that happens more often now than it does in what I'm describing.
If you have the ritual's failure outcome instead be "success, except with the bad stuff caused by a critical failure", you've now advanced the plot and caused them problems as a consequence of failure that they have to deal with. Which is much more interesting than a zero-consequence failure 6 times in a row followed by a success.
Likewise, if that door is on the main plot path, they must unlock it. They can try a near-infinite number of times (carrying replacement picks is really not a problem for even a level 2 party), and failure doesn't matter. Ditto with our exorcism situation. That only ends one of three ways:
1. We succeed and the AP continues, having taken damage in proportion to how long it took us to do. (It was literally over 2 hours of our game night and was super tedious after the first 20 minutes.)
2. We abandon it, in which case the AP effectively ends and the GM is now fully winging it as this is not a situation that can be failed without drastic consequences.
3. We TPK, in which case the campaign effectively ends because very few groups are going to pick up with new characters at level 17 to go attempt the same thing again.
The trap wasn't dangerous enough for a TPK to be very likely, so we could keep banging our heads against it until we got it done and the AP could advance or we decided we had to retreat.
The linear nature of APs works against the idea of what you're saying: for most of what you're doing in it, failure isn't actually an option. That's why they let you cast the ritual an infinite number of times.
The only change with what I'm proposing is that you only cast it once. If you do badly the plot necessary effect still happens, except bad stuff happens at the same time and you now have to deal with that along with the next part of the plot.
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I agree that this is simply a limitation of pre-written adventure design like the APs. The book doesn't have enough room to have multiple outcomes for challenges creating a web-like path to campaign completion.
The option of 'failure results in campaign restart' isn't very good at all.
The option of 'failure results in retry' at least keeps the campaign going.
The option of 'failure results in GM homebrewing side quests needed to get the campaign back on track' is probably the best, but that requires an experienced GM. Which isn't something that an AP author can rely on having.
It's actually pretty easy in a lot of cases. The ritual in question has a critical failure condition. If failure does both success AND that, the plot advances and the PCs now have a problem to solve that wouldn't happen if they succeed. That's literally already in the book and you're changing one line: the failure outcome of the ritual.
Something bad happened as a consequence for the failure (that actually matters, unlike a normal failure) and they don't have to retry 7 times until they succeed.
A lot of cases where failure does nothing can be changed over to make failure both advance the thing like a success and also trigger a bad outcome like a critical failure. Disable traps is a good example: failure does nothing. So you try again until you don't get that. Instead, have failure trigger the trap and also disarm it right after it triggers. That's a lot more interesting than "I'll roll again until I either get a success or a nat 1." It's also really easy because everything to do it is already in the rules.
You don't have to actually do anything super elaborate a lot of the time, because the main case this comes up is usually just in cases where the most likely outcome on the dice is "nothing interesting happens, try again".
Any case where that doesn't happen is fine as is. Like if you fail to convince the people to join you via diplomacy and they turn hostile instead, there's no reason to change anything there. The plot is already moving forward no matter the outcome.
Fundamentally: If a player is rolling a check to do something to advance the plot, the result should not be "nothing happens, try again."
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Exactly! As a DM, what I prep is the broad stroke of what's happening. Players are going from A to B. The smoke and mirrors of being a DM (the real magic that makes it all worthwhile) is the audibles and rejiggers to add or reflavor content in such a way as to convince the players there was ever a C destination to begin with (even though it's really just B with a different hat). Being a DM is just like The Prestige. I fully support failure effects being written into APs!
To do otherwise is just to run a freeform sandbox.....which is completely valid! But not the type of story I like to run, nor the type of story that Paizo makes for their APs.
Sounds more like a bottleneck or choke point, where there should be multiple paths to success or ways to contribute. Though yeah, SoT rituals came up in another thread where despite being magical students the rituals are at-level thus difficult for the party. Yet necessary, thus boring as one waits to bypass them. I've seen the same thing when the hacker needs to play their sub-game in a cyber RPG, or a thief needs to go thievin', or even when a face gets schmoozing and the ornery PCs need to hush up. (Whether they should or do or whatnot is it's own issue.)
It's really tough to keep the spotlight broad and inclusive when players operate as part of a party. The designer makes a series of interesting, thematic obstacles that (would) tell an intriguing story and maybe the party can't tackle some of those. Oh, my, how does one compensate for that? Paizo long ago advocated for including multiple paths so they've been including them fairly consistently (a principle those SoT rituals explicitly defy!) So now the developer has to develop alternate solutions for even straightforward obstacles? A lot of PFS2 scenarios do this, what with the many skill challenges, yet still there will be idle players with their perhaps too plain or too exotic PCs missing those secondary skills & abilities too. So PFS2 stresses alternate solutions & creativity, yet still some players falter. Oy, how much more can one do on the dev side even with GM support?
So there are multiple factors: how many paths? how long will the spotlight focus on fewer PCs? Is the party/specific PC well-rounded or did they hamstring themselves from the start, lacking key "fantasy hero/A-Team" skills? Moreover did session zero prepare the players, put them in the right mindset when building?
Heck, I had a session zero (different RPG) where players were told to make PCs who could do X and had at least one way to contribute to social encounters. One guy (the former GM at that!), made his ideal PC for that game...except he couldn't help with X at all. And most of the players invested in the ability to insult others as their social aspect...so one player did most of that labor until the others could invest into more civility. I had a faux "interview for the job" session 0.5, where I nearly said (and maybe should've said) "not hired" for the former GM's PC.
Which is to ask, how many PCs end up just being bodyguards? How does one write complex stories suitable for commando units and Leverage con artists, as well as the A-Team? I do like that PFS2 has lots of repeatable scenarios that stress a breadth of skills so players can see that maybe they'll need to rebuild their 1st level PCs.
At first I was hesitant when PFS changed its chase scenes from individual to party-level, but OMG I was delighted after seeing how much more smoothly chases went when nobody lagged and we could use the breadth of the party's abilities to bypass specific hurdles our own PC might struggle with.
But still there will be snags. Maybe nobody thought to focus on Thievery in the forest AP. Maybe there's too much Survival and not enough Arcana. I'm unsure how much can be shouldered by devs (again stressing that those rituals count as a mistake IMO). Even with GM help, the party might just suck, as terrible as it can be to judge. How far can one go with neutering obstacles before they're no longer obstacles, just plot points one observes? How many paths & options before it's too difficult to tell a linear story without railroading? And so forth.
Which is all to say, the burden's on all three; devs, GMs, & players, who hopefully can find synergy during session zero. And it takes some finesse to navigate toward fail forward, yet away from neutering the threat of actual failure.
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Tridus: Fundamentally: If a player is rolling a check to do something to advance the plot, the result should not be "nothing happens, try again."
Completely agree, and so does Jacobs who's said that if there aren't stakes and the PCs can simply try until they succeed then just let them succeed and move on, i.e. climbing over a wall when nothing's pressuring them. So at least a major voice at Paizo agrees, though yeah, Paizo's an ensemble. Maybe they need tighter editing? Perhaps they could draw out the adventure like a flow chart so they could detect bottlenecks, dead ends, and so forth (and whether the party has earned its loss/setback/etc.)?
ETA: Heck, maybe Paizo could include flow charts so the GM can more easily visualize the story's flow, see where their particular party might have issues so they can prep & adjust beforehand.
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Definitely have seen this problem in multiple pf2e APs/adventures.
Putting a check on something required to proceed, without having a fail state beyond “try, try again”, is bad design. Really pulls the players out of the scenario.
If I spot one in advance, I’ll add a fail state (easiest/laziest one is that the different levels of success costs varying amounts of time), but it is a negative any time I see one.
Yea, I Completely agree there should be a rule for that..
Oh wait there is Failing Forward in the GM core.
Failing Forward - Unexpected failure can bring the game to a halt, particularly during exploration. “Failing forward” means finding a way to progress the story instead of saying, “That didn't work.” This doesn't mean the group can't fail, or that the PCs should get what they wanted despite failing. Rather, it means that a failure might still impart more information, reveal a way to improve their chances next time, or even cause unforeseen difficulties. Doing so means the player's choice to attempt a check mattered, even if the results weren't what they wanted. Allowing the PCs to fail forward means fewer dead ends and perfunctory checks. It's important, however, not to put unnecessary pressure on yourself to do so all the time. Sometimes you won't know immediately how a PC can fail forward, and in those cases, it's usually best to just move on.
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Yea, I Completely agree there should be a rule for that..
Oh wait there is Failing Forward in the GM core.
Failing Forward - Unexpected failure can bring the game to a halt, particularly during exploration. “Failing forward” means finding a way to progress the story instead of saying, “That didn't work.” This doesn't mean the group can't fail, or that the PCs should get what they wanted despite failing. Rather, it means that a failure might still impart more information, reveal a way to improve their chances next time, or even cause unforeseen difficulties. Doing so means the player's choice to attempt a check mattered, even if the results weren't what they wanted. Allowing the PCs to fail forward means fewer dead ends and perfunctory checks. It's important, however, not to put unnecessary pressure on yourself to do so all the time. Sometimes you won't know immediately how a PC can fail forward, and in those cases, it's usually best to just move on.
I mean, it's great that they have that in the book. But they don't follow this advice in their own material. That's what prompted the thread. The examples I mentioned do not do any of this.
That's what I mean by wanting them to embrace it: I want them to do what this says we should do.
Its the same with the general advice they give of fights are generally more fun with similar number of combatants that they give, while still leaning very heavily on PL+2 solo encounters in a lot of AP.
The thing is, there so many best practices, and so many constraints on a published product that I understand why often something isn't as good as we'd like.
I can't remember the module/AP but there was one that spent about 2 pages on all the needed fail-foward stuff, for a relatively straight-forward situation and one that honestly felt like would be successful 75%+. But as a result GMs post asking what they're missing -- because so much page space was spent on the failure side, people expected to fail, even when success was more likely.
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Sounds more like a bottleneck or choke point, where there should be multiple paths to success or ways to contribute. Though yeah, SoT rituals came up in another thread where despite being magical students the rituals are at-level thus difficult for the party. Yet necessary, thus boring as one waits to bypass them. I've seen the same thing when the hacker needs to play their sub-game in a cyber RPG, or a thief needs to go thievin', or even when a face gets schmoozing and the ornery PCs need to hush up. (Whether they should or do or whatnot is it's own issue.)
That "other thread" was also me, heh. That was the early rituals which are technically optional, but the AP wants players to try them and since its a magical school, it makes sense they should get to utilize this stuff. Though when I made the thread, I knew the mandatory one was coming.
The book does give another option: have an NPC be the primary caster for them. Which solves the problem if the PCs flat out don't have the skills to do it, but is also pretty unsatisfying if they leaned into the magic school trope of the AP.
It's really tough to keep the spotlight broad and inclusive when players operate as part of a party. The designer makes a series of interesting, thematic obstacles that (would) tell an intriguing story and maybe the party can't tackle some of those. Oh, my, how does one compensate for that? Paizo long ago advocated for including multiple paths so they've been including them fairly consistently (a principle those SoT rituals explicitly defy!) So now the developer has to develop alternate solutions for even straightforward obstacles? A lot of PFS2 scenarios do this, what with the many skill challenges, yet still there will be idle players with their perhaps too plain or too exotic PCs missing those secondary skills & abilities too. So PFS2 stresses alternate solutions & creativity, yet still some players falter. Oy, how much more can one do on the dev side even with GM support?
Having multiple skill options can help this some, along with creative players that come up with ways to use other skills (and GMs willing to accept that). Now and then there's going to be a scene where someone has the right skillset and takes center stage. So long as those moments are spread around and don't last for the entire game night, that's generally fine I think.
If literally no one can do it, then that's a problem that needs solving. Either by creative use of the tools they do have, or failure /refusal to attempt it causing the plot to advance in some other way, probably with consequences the PCs now have to deal with.
The AP writers can't do everything. That's just the nature of printed material. But they can avoid writing "keep rolling this until they get a success" situations.
At first I was hesitant when PFS changed its chase scenes from individual to party-level, but OMG I was delighted after seeing how much more smoothly chases went when nobody lagged and we could use the breadth of the party's abilities to bypass specific hurdles our own PC might struggle with.
Chase scenes are great! We backported that into our PF1 campaign because of how well it works.
But still there will be snags. Maybe nobody thought to focus on Thievery in the forest AP. Maybe there's too much Survival and not enough Arcana. I'm unsure how much can be shouldered by devs (again stressing that those rituals count as a mistake IMO). Even with GM help, the party might just suck, as terrible as it can be to judge. How far can one go with neutering obstacles before they're no longer obstacles, just plot points one observes? How many paths & options before it's too difficult to tell a linear story without railroading? And so forth.
Some of it can't. Like in our Spore War game, we lack Survival. No one took it. In fact we have no WIS based classes at all. We were told it would come up (the players guide mentions it, though the players guide for this one has a LOT of skills as strongly recommended for a party of 4 without a Rogue/Investigator). When we got to the part where that mattered? Well, we're bad at it.
But we haven't hit a "keep rolling Survival until you succeed" situation. When we do badly, it means we get lost for a while, take a long time getting where we're going, and may run into problematic encounters. That's totally fine, IMO. That's a consequence for doing poorly while the narrative still moves forward. (Luckily my Oracle has Gnome Obsession and Dreaming Potential so I can pick a Lore pretty quickly to help with some of this, too.)
Usually if a party lacks Thievery, it takes some options off the table. You're picking locks using the "hit it real hard" method and dealing with the consequences. That's also fine.
Which is all to say, the burden's on all three; devs, GMs, & players, who hopefully can find synergy during session zero. And it takes some finesse to navigate toward fail forward, yet away from neutering the threat of actual failure.
For sure. Players need to build characters that can function in whatever campaign they're trying to do. GMs need to be flexible for this to work. Paizo can't give an answer to every potential situation in the book.
Paizo can avoid the ritual situation, though.
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If you have the ritual's failure outcome instead be "success, except with the bad stuff caused by a critical failure", you've now advanced the plot and caused them problems as a consequence of failure that they have to deal with. Which is much more interesting than a zero-consequence failure 6 times in a row followed by a success.
Just want to shout out that the first book of Myth-Speaker, The Acropolis Pyre, ends with a plot-crucial Ritual that works in exactly this way: every result has the plot-crucial thing happen, but failure and critical failure result in durable penalties to the party, while critical success gives them a durable buff. I think it's a great way to design rituals for APs.
EDIT: Ritual's not on AoN (perhaps because it's in-line in the AP book rather than in the appendix), but here it is on Demiplane.
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I don't know that I care too much for the idea that PCs can just fail their way to victory.
That's not what failing forward means, though. Failing forward is about failures advancing the adventure, even if it means bad stuff happening. Rather than "you fail to pick the lock, try again," this can mean "as you try to pick the lock, you're spotted by a guard, who is about to run and raise the alarm. What do you do?" The basic idea of failing forward is that failure means progress as much as success, so you're never stagnating: progress doesn't mean victory, though, and failures in systems that do have a concept of failing forward tend to complicate things for the player characters in ways they have to deal with in interesting ways.
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I think "fail forward" is a great GM skill to develop, but I also think that interpreting it to mean that every failure rolled on the dice has to move the adventure plot as far forward as every success is a recipe for rushing players through campaigns and discouraging interaction with the world by never giving them the opportunity to take a step back and look around for their own better path forward.
With a locked door or chest, there are so many work arounds that it is perfectly fine for failure to just result in "no you didn't unlock it." Maybe if there is no logical reason for there to be gaurds or wandering monsters in the area (which I do think can work very well for having some fun tension that gives failure meaning) and it doesn't feel right to you as a GM just to handwave rolling (which is also perfectly fine), you can just decide that the lock itself breaks after a certain number of failures or critical failures (as long as you foreshadow that to your PCs when they get halfway there). Once the lock breaks, the party has to force open the door/chest, or break it down, or leave a treasure behind, or use a consumable resource to bypass the situation or just go a different route.
For the ritual, I think the "failure = success and critical success" route can be fine every once in a while for a ritual that can't be repeated easily and there is some kind of time crunch in the world, but I would not want that to be a regular result of rituals failing. If for no other reason than many of the critical failure results are relatively easy to mitigate and then the ritual is auto success. Because rituals take so long, I actually like that they slow down the pace of the game in world, and if a party is trying to complete a narrative focal point ritual that they knew about in advance and only have one player ready to contribute to the challenge, I think they deserve more negative consequences than just a critical failure result and moving along. Like that is a party for whom just failure is probably a lucky result and maybe an NPC points that out to them after the first failure and they have to spend some time and resources retraining and buying equipment that might help, creating an active cost to their failure.
Creative Director
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Feedback like this is super helpful; thank you! We're always working on improving our adventures, and getting feedback is one of the best ways to do so.
That said, to help increase chances of us seeing the feedback, it's best to post this sort of feedback for adventures in the Adventure Path or Adventure section of the forums, rather than in General Discussion. It's REALLY helpful to post it in the form of reviews or in a thread devoted to the adventure or Adventure Path in question. And it's also REALLY helpful to get feedback on more recent adventures—feedback on older things like Strength of Thousands is helpful, but sometimes that feedback is pre-outdated, with us already having taken steps to address the issue. (Not saying that's the case here, but the older a product is, the more likely it isn't as useful for us today to implement on adventures we're pubishing later in the year or beyond.)
One thing I make sure to do as well whenever I compile an old adventure or Adventure Path is to scour the boards for feedback just like this, but the boards are big and I don't look much beyond the actual adventure forums themselves, just to manage my own workflow, so a post like this in General Discussion would very likely be missed.
Again, thanks for all the feedback! Just trying to help direct it a bit more so it's more noticeable to us on the Narrative team.
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Creative Director
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And THAT said: it's also worth noting that the Fail Forward section in the GM Core is important, and it's a skill all GMs should develop. We can't anticipate every potential pain point a group has, and have to assume that most groups will be well-rounded when it comes to presenting adventures. If your group does something like has no representation for a specific skill or an entire category of ability-related skills, you as the GM need to adjust the adventure as appropriate so that it doesn't soft-lock your group out of progression as a result of their unexpected choices.
This is a big reason why we take the time to produce the free Players' Guides for Adventure Paths—we want to help players (and GMs!) to build characters that will fit in with the campaign they're about to start. Taking the mention above about Survival in Spore War—this skill is very important in that game (which has large sections that take place in the wild), which is why we listed it as "Strongly Recommended" in the list of skills for PCs on page 11 of the Player's Guide to that Adventure Path. While these are called "Player's Guides" the GM should read them as well to make sure that if they notice their players are, say, building characters that leave a gap in their expected abilities, the GM can step in during character generation to bring attention to this. Or if you're worried about spoilers or curtailing player freedom of choice, take note yourself to adjust the adventures before hand.
We really do want you all to have fun playing our adventures, and the Players' Guides are one of the best tools we have to try to ensure fun!
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Regarding chases: I think we actually regressed a bit on this, compared to PFS1.
See, PF1 chases originally were individual. The paladin might get stuck trying to climb a garden wall because he didn't have Climb and his full plate gave a big penalty. Forever stuck there.
Then in PFS1 they came up with a different chase mechanic, first shown in Kaava Quarry. The whole party is running, and every round there's an obstacle. Everyone makes checks, and every check except the best one counts as Aid towards the best result. If the best result is high enough, it's a victory point for that round. And then the party moves on to the next obstacle, regardless of the result. At the end of the chase, the party gets rewarded/punished based on whether they got a high victory point total or not. A side effect of this though is that the chase doesn't end early when you catch up to a prey, or that the prey can get away from you. It's basically set in stone that whatever is necessary for the plot to happen will happen, the challenge is about if you do it nicely. For example, if the next scene is a fight with the person you're pursuing, a poor result might have you start the combat with some damage or conditions already. Or if you did really well, you get more choice in where you set up the party on the battlefield, or the enemy didn't get to prebuff.
PF2 chases are a bit different. You don't get to move to the next obstacle until the party has dealt with the current one. It's still better than the original PF1 version because individual characters don't get stuck. But it's happened that an obstacle wants for example "Survival or Nature" to get past, and nobody has those. (Notice they're both based on the same ability score too.) And the chase stalls there.
I don't think this was necessary. I think PF2 chases could be more "fail forward" if you just move to the next obstacle regardless, like in the PFS1 version. If you want to make it so you can end it early, you can also say it ends early when you have X times the number of VP as the number of obstacles passed so far.
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And THAT said: it's also worth noting that the Fail Forward section in the GM Core is important, and it's a skill all GMs should develop.
I do think the point being made in this thread though is that failing forward isn't just a skill, it's a game design element. GMs need to develop the skill of making the party fail forward in part because that element is often missing from the checks that are being made, which is why stagnation sometimes happens. Picking a Lock is an example of a check that does not always fail the party forward on a regular failure: if the party's exploring, they can just keep trying until they either succeed or critically fail. This is one of those few situations where it's up to the GM to pick up the slack that that particular design element leaves, in a system that otherwise does a very good job of making sure it works just by following the rules.
Just to give an example of a different methodology, the tabletop game Heart has different degrees of success where you can either succeed or fail, but failure always has you take stress, which can make increasingly bad stuff happen to your character and is costly to remove. A character could keep doing the same thing, and they could progress the adventure positively if they succeed, but every attempt otherwise pushes them closer to death or something even worse. In a similar vein, Blades in the Dark uses a mechanic of clocks, such that time is always ticking with every action you perform, and when some of those clocks run out, bad stuff happens. Although Pathfinder doesn't have stress or clocks as core mechanics, those would still be possible to implement as subsystems at the very least, which would equip GMs with the tools to keep adventures moving forward.
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Might be derailing a bit, but following up on the Chase (and I've seen similar problems in infiltration, less so in influence/research), is players and GMs often have a harder time narrating their action choice/success in a way that makes sense for continued attempts at the same obstacle _on success_. The feeling of successfully leaping over a barricade and being ready to continue the chase, only to need to spend another round at the same obstacle helping other people over. So I can see where the Kaava Quarry style (or honestly the default PF2 ritual rules effectively) allow for a non-iterated resolution at each obstacle. And I think that brings up back on topic -- non-iterated resolution using fail-forward is often a better fit for a lot of longer skill challenges. Something is always happening (good or bad), not simply a lack of progress and repeat.
I know PFS2 (at least early seasons, I haven't be playing/running recent ones), often had non-chase, chains of obstacles. Everyone rolls, but with individual damage/debuffs on fails, and possibly global debuffs/opponent buffs if fewer than half succeeded. This did show the fail-forward design in action, and I think often was a better solution --it kept the intensity up.
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I think GM Core does mention it here and there that if players can just try something over and over, you probably should waive the check.
Lock-picking is an interesting case. I think those rules were meant more for an encounter-time amount of time pressure. Can you get the lock open in the middle of a fight, or fast enough to stage an escape for the party? Then those rules really work.
But outside combat? They work poorly. You can argue that it's a statistical given that you'll get the lock open eventually. If there's no time pressure, you could just waive the roll. GM Core does mention something like that.
But especially for locks that's kinda unsatisfactory; it can also mean that unless a lock is absurdly high DC you can argue that "well, it'll cost a hundred replacement picks, but statistically we'll get through it in two hours so no need to roll". Sometimes you should just be able to say "well, you can't pick this lock, you need to come up with another plan". Or, maybe finding the key was actually intended to be a plot point this time while last time the lock was really just a lock that could be brute-forced.
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This is great, but I think this demands a fundamental change: you need much more free-form and improvisational system for this. You need a way to invent and introduce a lot of things easily and on the spot. It may be easier for some and it may be easier for a home campaign, but APs (and also especially PFS) go very much against this.
PF2 maybe is not terrible for this, but you at least need the instruments (quick number tables for NPCs and hazards) at hand and being in the right frame of mind.
I lost track of how difficult this is, because after 14 years of gamemastering improvisation has become routine for me. (I started GMing in 2011 but took some breaks.) I have a social contract with my players: I give them free rein to alter the plot provided that they restrain themselves enough that future modules do not become irrelevant. So having a door slam shut in their face due to a failed ritual means that they will find a new path on their own, and I just have to lay down the flagstones in that path one step ahead of them. As Hilary Moon Murphy said in my thread Common Sense Versus The Plot, comment #2, "I view the plots of APs as guidelines."
I have not looked over the 5th module, Doorway to the Red Star, of Strength of Thousands in detail yet, because we are still in the 2nd half of the 3rd module, Hurricane's Howl. But if the ritual in the Contemplative Magic section on page 77 fails, I know of three alternatives already established in my connected campaigns. For example, I had the party visit the Convocation of Six Academies featured in Lost Omens Rival Academies and meet Moonrider, a 20th-level lyrakien bard who serves as an interplanar and interstellar emissary of Desna, who can provide an alternative. Moonrider had been a player character in Rise of the Runelords. If I were working from scratch, I would allow a partial success for the ritual that would require more questing to make it a full success. And because my players are quite ingenious, we might have an out-of-character discussion about which form of partial success would be the most fun.
As advice for beginner GMs, simply throw in a consequence. Maybe a failed ritual summons a monster. Maybe they need to replace some rare reagents in order to attempt the ritual again. Maybe they should return to the Magaambya Academy and conduct extensive research on the ritual. Maybe the ritual can be attempted only once a year, so give them a low-xp side quest to pass the time. Serious players like consequences so much they will even enjoy an adverse consequence.
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These are all cases where the game would be improved by using a fail forward design. For those who haven't heard of that, it's a game design where the story advances no matter what the result, it just might come with complications or not be the outcome you wanted. So "failure does nothing" is not a thing. In the case of the ritual? The plot advancing outcome happens even if you fail, but there's complications or consequences as a part of that. You won't have a situation where you have to keep doing it until you get over a 13 on the dice.
IMO, the examples you mentioned are not so much a game/system design issue as an adventure design issue.
I am a big fan of using the Three Clue Rule to reduce the number of bottlenecks ("chokepoints") in an adventure or campaign. Some of this is already implemented in APs, but space considerations and not knowing what characters will be used at a given table mean the GM will still often need to prepare alternate ways to advance suited to their specific PCs.
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Just want to shout out that the first book of Myth-Speaker, The Acropolis Pyre, ends with a plot-crucial Ritual that works in exactly this way: every result has the plot-crucial thing happen, but failure and critical failure result in durable penalties to the party, while critical success gives them a durable buff. I think it's a great way to design rituals for APs.
** spoiler omitted **
EDIT: Ritual's not on AoN (perhaps because it's in-line in the AP book rather than in the appendix), but here it is on Demiplane.
Great find! That's a perfect example of how I'd like to see things work. You're only doing that ritual once, and stuff happens based on how your attempt goes.
Great to see that in a newer AP.
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I don't know that I care too much for the idea that PCs can just fail their way to victory.That's not what failing forward means, though. Failing forward is about failures advancing the adventure, even if it means bad stuff happening. Rather than "you fail to pick the lock, try again," this can mean "as you try to pick the lock, you're spotted by a guard, who is about to run and raise the alarm. What do you do?" The basic idea of failing forward is that failure means progress as much as success, so you're never stagnating: progress doesn't mean victory, though, and failures in systems that do have a concept of failing forward tend to complicate things for the player characters in ways they have to deal with in interesting ways.
Well we need to be clear in our implications here.
Failure should provide information, failure should have consequences. Failure should result in a retry or a plan B.
So suggestions from an adventure writer about some possible fallback options for the GM to divert the players on to is great. If this is what you mean by "Failing Forward" then I'm with you.
However while the GM and adventure writer set up the scenario, I like the players to have agency, I also like the dice to rule. The outcome of actions has to be meaningful and have consequence - including potentially real failure - or else there is no real tension.
I do find attack/skill roll then miss can get a bit boring for players. Which is why I still try to create richer scenarios so that there are other options. Every character should be able to do something more than Strike. I think PF2 is better at supporting these other options with mechanics than most. Personally I like players taking Seek actions and Recall Knowledge type actions to gain a hint from the GM about when they realise they are stuck.
Well we need to be clear in our implications here.
Failure should provide information, failure should have consequences. Failure should result in a retry or a plan B.
So suggestions from an adventure writer about some possible fallback options for the GM to divert the players on to is great. If this is what you mean by "Failing Forward" then I'm with you.However while the GM and adventure writer set up the scenario, I like the players to have agency, I also like the dice to rule. The outcome of actions has to be meaningful and have consequence - including potentially real failure - or else there is no real tension.
Right, which is why the concept applies to both -- failing forward is an important approach for a GM to have in mind, especially when they're improvising, but it's also an important approach to design. Failing forward should, ideally, be baked into checks and the general pacing of play, not necessarily in really prescriptive ways, but at least in substantial enough a way that things will move forward one way or the other. The criticism being made here is that there is currently a gap: failing forward isn't simply an expectation on the GM when improvising, it is also an expectation when adjudicating the basic functionality of certain checks in order to make sure the party doesn't just brute-force the same check a bunch of times until they succeed. The GM is being expected to pick up the slack in the design of certain mechanics here, which is something PF2e generally tries to avoid.
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Fall forward might mislead folks. Maybe "fall with momentum" as in keep the plot moving, but due to failure maybe not in the direction PCs had intended/desired. I've seen both, where PC agency hardly matters (looking at you classic Deadlands modules!) or others where PCs get rerouted or difficulties ensue. Effectively the challenge worsened, but if the party didn't invest in the abilities to bypass the obstacle, then one would think they'd have invested elsewhere, like combat.
There's a tension here. I recall one PC who'd invested a ridiculous amount into thief skills, so when he finally found a trapped/locked door in the Runelord's lair, the player was ecstatic. Yay! Except what if no PC had invested so? If there's a generic alternative, would his investment have been warranted? How many alternatives can there be before the obstacle loses its distinctiveness (or in this case purpose, since a Runelord should've accounted for capable intruders!). Hard to write for that. And how low does the hurdle go, how many failure tangents before seeing it's just a poorly made party who can't tackle obstacles competently? I want APs to require competence, less so for modules, and hold my hand for Beginner Box material. Except we learned in the PF2 playtest that many players get insulted by "easy mode" even when that's exactly what they're asking for.
Which is to say, specialists love basking in their limelight, yet table time and party randomness make that difficult to write for. Plus of course poor rolling, or even lucky rolling which has twisted at least two of my plots. But since they were mine I could adjust in ways that published material would have difficulty doing. GMs who rely on APs to do most of the labor, often due to real life time constraints, kinda need flexibility built into the APs. This might include variant obstacles to use or discard to fit the context, even on the main plot path.
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Fail Forward in discussions often gets mistaken for "the party can't fail" or even "failure has no consequences" but in my experience other TTRPGs, the main purpose of Fail Forward is to build appropriate consequences into failure that might not otherwise exist.
Not every locked door needs to embrace Fail Forward--some can just be locked doors that aren't directly relevant to the plot. If you fail the roll, the door doesn't open and you just have to try again or do something else. But if we were to consider an example that embraces consequences for failure, perhaps what happens on a "failure" is that our thief does manage to trip the lock, but with a hideously loud thunk that immediately alerts the guards around the corner. Had our intrepid picklock succeeded, perhaps they would have handled the lock more deftly and prevented the noise.
It may seem strange to some that our picklock 'failed' a skill test to unlock the door, but still succeeded in getting it open. On the other hand, while PF2e now has up to 4 degrees of success, it's a bit weird that most rolls are still harshly binary in the success/failure. Fail Forward takes a failed roll that would otherwise have nothing interesting come of it and offers the suggestion of a partial success--the results when you were just good enough to succeed at part of the task (getting through the door) but not enough to get away with it clean (slipping the latch and causing a noise)
A common principle in games that use Fail Forward (and which I have seen cropping up in PF spaces) is that a roll where failure wouldn't be interesting shouldn't be a roll at all. If the party needs to pass a check to succeed, then either the GM (or the adventure design) needs something interesting to happen on failure besides "try again" (and let's be real, a token amount of damage isn't interesting) or the party should just bypass the obstacle without a roll--or even the obstacle shouldn't be there in the first place.
The main function of Fail Forward isn't to coddle the party against the chance that they might not get what they want, it's to prevent scenarios where the game grinds to a halt because there's already no consequences for failure except rolling the dice until the numbers agree to let the adventure continue.
It's not always easy to come up with good Fail Forward scenarios, but personally I'm a big fan of "you only get some of what you wanted," and, "you get what you wanted, but with consequences." Sometimes this "partial success" can show a character's skill investment better than binary pass/failure. A binary pass/fail may need a specialist just to get through the obstacle, but with partial success it might be that anybody can get through, while only the specialist can get through without encountering a hitch.
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I guess one of my issues with encouraging “fail forward” to mean that failure results in success with a consequence is that it makes failure not feel like failure when it transparent to the players what happened.
Like instead of failure equals “the party opens the door, but loudly.” Failure could just be “the party fails to open the door AND suddenly the sound of gentle conversation on the other side of the door has gone silent.” If it is a door with other ways around it (maybe that the players haven’t found yet) then maybe the door never opens but eventually scouts come around one of those other ways to spy, and the encounter behind the door is now prepared and waiting with a trap set up now. Or they go and get some nasty reinforcements and then open the door themselves.
Functionally, this accomplishes the same thing as some of the examples of failing forward, but it doesn’t ever feel to the party like they are being handwaved through something that they came to unprepared (which can even include having one person specialized, but no one ready to help out, or no one stopping to think, “this feels like a really important door, maybe it’s worth taking precautions like someone casting silence first.” In which case even a couple of failures can happen with no consequence and that is a reward, rather than a sign of stagnation.
I think it is important that fail forward should not look like success to the party, and it is probably worth occasionally running into situations as a GM where the party tries something, fails, and then you as GM realize there really is no fun or interesting complication to add that would make sense and not just feel the same as hand waving, and so you let them try again and they fail again, and just transparently hand waving it with a brief “after an embarrassingly long time and x material consequence, you finally get the door open with a combination of picking and brute force that has certainly alerted anyone even close to the room ahead.” Like it is better, imo, for “fail forward” in most cases to look like blatant failure that went as badly as possible, than for the first failure after trying to open a lock to result in success but consequence.
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I guess one of my issues with encouraging “fail forward” to mean that failure results in success with a consequence is that it makes failure not feel like failure when it transparent to the players what happened.
Does failure always need to feel like complete failure, though? We already have cases in Pathfinder where spells in particular still do something on a failure or when an enemy succeeds on their save, so "success at a cost" wouldn't really be a stretch to apply to certain failures.
There will be exceptions and times to try different things, and GMs shouldn’t feel bad about advancing the story when the situation calls for/the party is frustrated…but a lock that opens 95% of the time (or even 75%) isn’t a hard lock to pick. If anything, most locks should probably have a “x number of failures jams the lock and now it must be forced open instead.”
Rituals often have a material cost. Having to pay that multiple times and waste in game days while the enemy builds up forces is not “nothing happens on a failure.” If the party take 5 tries to complete a ritual, then that is significant and actionable on the narrative, especially if there is an extra consequence for critical failure. Letting the party attempt a check with consequences over and over again (paying material costs each time) is not stagnation, unless the consequences were not real consequences to begin with, in which case, triggering them once and giving away success is just giving away success to begin with. If it take seven time for a party to complete a ritual, all without ever critically failing, maybe, as GM you remind a player that they could have taken a week to retrain some skills and saved half or more of the gold they spent treating the ritual like something the GM was obligated to give them eventually.
Mission critical, timed chains of events might justify occasional special circumstances, but a result labeled failure should generally feel like failure, not partial success or you’ve just moved the game into a mode of play that makes skills and planning and spending resources in advance to improve success results to be bad strategic play.
There will be exceptions and times to try different things, and GMs shouldn’t feel bad about advancing the story when the situation calls for/the party is frustrated…but a lock that opens 95% of the time (or even 75%) isn’t a hard lock to pick. If anything, most locks should probably have a “x number of failures jams the lock and now it must be forced open instead.”
Rituals often have a material cost. Having to pay that multiple times and waste in game days while the enemy builds up forces is not “nothing happens on a failure.”
I feel this is veering away from the point. If the cases you mention are extremely unlikely to fail at all or don't incur the stagnation being criticized here, how are they relevant to this discussion? Clearly, there are cases where stagnation does occur, like Picking a Lock that isn't trivially easy to pick during exploration and potentially attempting the same check many times until it eventually opens.
Then that is a door in the dungeon that didn’t need to be locked in the first place. Just hand waive it with no consequence if the consequence of failure is meaningless at that point.
Maybe the lock had potential to be meaningful if the party went a different way first, but, because of their choices, it is now meaningless, then you, as GM, can just handwave the roll. Meaningless checks never require the party to fail forward to proceed.
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Like instead of failure equals “the party opens the door, but loudly.” Failure could just be “the party fails to open the door AND suddenly the sound of gentle conversation on the other side of the door has gone silent.” If it is a door with other ways around it (maybe that the players haven’t found yet) then maybe the door never opens but eventually scouts come around one of those other ways to spy, and the encounter behind the door is now prepared and waiting with a trap set up now. Or they go and get some nasty reinforcements and then open the door themselves.
Isn't having an additional penalty for failure the domain of Critical Failures? Unless the players rolled a natural one or something, many of the suggestions given might seem unnecessarily punitive to many players.
Even on a Critical Failure, adding additional problems to the existing problem (of a broken lock pick, for example) might seem unnecessarily punitive to many players.
I'd advise everyone to think carefully about how such things might be perceived from the other side of the table.
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Then that is a door in the dungeon that didn’t need to be locked in the first place. Just hand waive it with no consequence if the consequence of failure is meaningless at that point.
Right, but isn't it a design problem when a locked door may as well be unlocked in a certain phase of play? As Ascalaphus mentions above, trying to Pick a Lock in an encounter is meaningful, because you're spending most of your turn doing that while your opponents are using actions of their own, but in exploration, you can Pick a Lock at least a hundred times in the time it would take a party member to Refocus or Treat Wounds. This is different from certain other tabletop systems, where it is still meaningful to try to unlock a door while skulking around in a dungeon due to advancing time or incurring some other cost. In some cases, the check simply cannot be attempted again until the party changes the situation enough in some other way, and sometimes it can't be reattempted at all. All of these are ways of moving the adventure forward in a way that doesn't involve just unlocking every door in a dungeon during exploration.
Quite right Ravingdork. Failures rarely need to be more than failures in the course of regular game play because time will generally work itself in as a resource that has consequences for spending. Any task difficult enough to cause a party to fail repeatedly will eventually result in a critical failure or enough successes to progress. These are more just ideas for situations where a GM might feel inclined to have the lock open on a failure with an extra consequence. All I was saying is that the party doesn’t need to be the one to open the lock on a failed result that results in a consequence. If the party is taking too long, the consequence can just happen and it doesn’t have to make the failure into a success. Stories can move along without the party opening a door themselves or being the one to complete a ritual themselves. If NPCs do it the next day because it has to be done by then, then the party probably loses XP and possibly a reward. Maybe the NPC uses an item that was going to be treasure to complete the task and decides to keep it. There can be extra monsters in an encounter later to make up the story XP and an encounter a few rooms later can have a little more treasure. In APs that is almost always the case anyway, even if the GM doesn’t move xp or treasure around.
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Ran into an example of the design problem last night in Kingmaker. Staying spoiler free, there's an iterated skill check that needs to get ~7 successes before one fail. Pure binary ( no crit successes/crit failure states). On failure you have to start over, so time is the only penalty, but no real ticking clock. The PCs are likely to only attempt this after they've cleared the location. The DC is high enough that even with buffs it's not trivial, so 7 before 1 is a very rare outcome, but still feels like the assumed outcome
Then that is a door in the dungeon that didn’t need to be locked in the first place. Just hand waive it with no consequence if the consequence of failure is meaningless at that point.Right, but isn't it a design problem when a locked door may as well be unlocked in a certain phase of play? As Ascalaphus mentions above, trying to Pick a Lock in an encounter is meaningful, because you're spending most of your turn doing that while your opponents are using actions of their own, but in exploration, you can Pick a Lock at least a hundred times in the time it would take a party member to Refocus or Treat Wounds. This is different from certain other tabletop systems, where it is still meaningful to try to unlock a door while skulking around in a dungeon due to advancing time or incurring some other cost. In some cases, the check simply cannot be attempted again until the party changes the situation enough in some other way, and sometimes it can't be reattempted at all. All of these are ways of moving the adventure forward in a way that doesn't involve just unlocking every door in a dungeon during exploration.
How is it a design problem to allow doors to be locked that may or may not be narratively important to the course of an adventure based upon the actions of the party? At the point in the adventure where it makes no narrative difference if the door is locked or not, the rule of the game already suggest not to require a roll and just say, “after some (narratively meaningless) amount of time, the party opens the door.” I am not going to value judge one way or another, but neither situation is even a fail forward scenario and attaching an artificial condition to failure to justify letting that failure be a success instead of a failure doesn’t move the story forward any faster.
Now certainly a GM might not realize the door is meaningless right away, and so they might ask for a roll, a player tries it, fails, and now the GM realizes that there is no narratively reasonable consequence to this check being repeated indefinitely. Their options at that point are to either acknowledge it and just hand wave it anyway, or to make up a consequence on the spot to make failure meaningful.
The complication here is whether or not the GM is going to allow picking a lock to be an activity that can be performed while the party is trying to avoid notice or not, because if not, than success or failure, the near by enemies should be alert to something going on, and that has nothing to do with success or failure on the thievery check.
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Ran into an example of the design problem last night in Kingmaker. Staying spoiler free, there's an iterated skill check that needs to get ~7 successes before one fail. Pure binary ( no crit successes/crit failure states). On failure you have to start over, so time is the only penalty, but no real ticking clock. The PCs are likely to only attempt this after they've cleared the location. The DC is high enough that even with buffs it's not trivial, so 7 before 1 is a very rare outcome, but still feels like the assumed outcome
This is the kind of thing that is really annoying and really bad design and usually shows an author with absolutely no knowledge of probability
At least on a VTT you can just do
/r 100d20 and quickly see how long it took to get 7 successes in a row
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The difference between PF2 and systems that have more of a fail forward philosophy is not as large as you might think. In PBTA games for example, if you fail an action during combat, the enemy might make a move on you. Well, guess what happens in Pathfinder if you fail your strikes during combat?
What I think is the problem is that Pathfinder is too combat-oriented. The rules and guidelines for what should happen if you fail to pick a lock or if you fail to climb a wall are almost non-existent compared to what enemies can do during combat. Really, it would be better if there were some rules for exactly such a situation. Of course, you can put a lock or climbable wall in an encounter, or turn it into a victory point system or whatever, but these are not always suitable: maybe an environmental enemy is more suitable than a monster, or you want your players to actually use their cool feats while the victory point system only has some guidelines but no hard rules for that.
Treating combat so different from any other situation that could happen in a magical fantasy world feels really outdated and American to me. At the same time, I appreciate the detailed rules that I lack in other games: it really stresses me out if in other RPGs I need to come up with fail forward situations all the time because there are no clear rules there.
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How is it a design problem to allow doors to be locked that may or may not be narratively important to the course of an adventure based upon the actions of the party?
You mean, the doors that might as well stop being locked during exploration mode, simply because there’s nothing to stop the party from repeating the same check ad nauseam on a simple failure during that time? The doors that very much still could challenge the party and incur some meaningful cost or consequence for failure, so that the party doesn’t just kill all the monsters first and brute-force the doors every time? Do you genuinely believe there is nothing that could change for the better in this respect?
I think it is pretty important for fail forward to remain a narrative tool, not a mechanical one in PF2. Exploration mode challenges of significance happen more as VP situations than by following the encounter mode rules for them, or even probably the rules for things like coercion or make a request, which are more for one off, smaller stakes/ quick resolution situations. Like it is generally a really bad idea to represent a challenge like “climb the cliff face of a mountain” as a series f climb checks to move up or down 5/10ft at a time.
VP types of encounters do need fairly mechanical fail forward options, but they aren’t about one bad roll or even a couple of them, and APs that design them should provide those options. Skill challenges that resolve with one player likely making one or a small handful of rolls really need to handle failure narratively, and what I object to as a player and a GM is when any tension is built up about rolls where the outcome of the roll doesn’t really matter. I don’t want to be stuck behind a door my character can’t open, but if there is really no other way to proceed than to open that door, then I should have hints of that in advance enough to have brought back up plans, and the rest of the party should also not be expecting my character to handle it alone. That’s be like saying, our fighter is solid, my rogue is just going to wait outside the room to see if she wins this fight or not.
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I think it is pretty important for fail forward to remain a narrative tool, not a mechanical one in PF2. Exploration mode challenges of significance happen more as VP situations than by following the encounter mode rules for them, or even probably the rules for things like coercion or make a request, which are more for one off, smaller stakes/ quick resolution situations.
This claim is patently untrue, and many failures in exploration can move the adventure forward by mechanical means. If you fail to Track a creature, you lose their trail and can't try again for a time. If you fail to Sense Direction, you get lost. This is a mechanical effect baked into the check. On top of this, I don't see why this false dichotomy would be important to have to begin with: why wouldn't a GM benefit from narrative prompts to fail the party forward baked into the game's mechanics?
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I think an issue being overlooked here is the reasons adventures use stuff like the basic lockpicking and climbing mechanics is because they save page space. The writer can just say "This is a 100 foot high cliff (Climb DC 15)" or "The door has a good lock on it". Then they let the climbing/lockpicking rules take over and instead of spending a section of their word count on a VP minigame, they now have space they can use to put in art of a bad guy or throw in a new stat block to an encounter.
If you improve the base mechanic to include options for handling these things in exploration mode, which may include failing forward, that saves the writer page space and GM time spent learning to handwave these things or learn the new custom minigame.
I get the argument that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Its okay to fail to open something when its a side room, or to not climb up that cliff or even fall off it while checking out the cave halfway up. But often the only time being meaningfully wasted is your time rolling a bunch of dice in real life, not the game.
To me the core issue is these systems exist the way they are to create tension in combat. Picking a lock works the way it does to build tension while the rest of the party is fighting off guards. The way climbing works is to have a cool fight on the side of the cliff. The problem is almost every lock I've seen in a game was picked out of combat. And I've only climbed one or two cliffs while fighting enemies. So the systems are used regularly while designed around rare situations. I don't know how to fix that, the immediate idea is what if you split the rules based on mode, but I'm sure that raises a whole other can of worms.