I wish Paizo would embrace Fail Forward game design


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion


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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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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.

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