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As an aside I wouldn't mind if some hard tasks were auto-success if the PC has the proficiency, i.e. Expert in Thievery can automatically open this lock (in a 3rd-4th level scenario where being Expert is quite significant). Then Master from 7th-8th, maybe even 10th or 12th since generic PCs still only have two Master skills. Same for decoding religious or arcane text, gaining entry into a ball, etc. I don't mean as a default rule, but when poor rolling means too little or perhaps too much. I get the feeling a lot of the multiple-success challenges intend to weed out dabblers, but it'll also favor the lucky and punish the unlucky in rather dull ways...unless of course the dev has created something special or the GM can adapt. Again, a side thought, a possible tool in the kit.
ETA: I have seen this with Trained Proficiency in PFS, where anybody Trained can simply do X without problem. Unsure/forget how plot relevant those instances had been.
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I realize I have had a Fail Forward houserule about Recall Knowledge since I began running Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I like when my players use the information from Recall Knowledge to design tactics. But the Additional Knowledge rule in the GM Core shuts this down too often.
Additional Knowledge
Sometimes a character might want to follow up on a check to Recall Knowledge, rolling another check to discover more information. After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can yield more information, but you should adjust the difficulty to be higher for each attempt. Once a character has attempted an incredibly hard check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless—the character has recalled everything they know about the subject.
My houserule is that learning further information the hard way resets Recall Knowledge to provide more information. For example, suppose the party is fighting a basilisk and the two party members trained in Nature flubbed their Recall Knowledge rolls. They think it is only a 300-pound lizard. Then one of them is slowed by the basilisk's Petrifying Glance, a preliminary step before the basilisk's Petrifying Gaze turns the character to stone. I allow a fresh Recall Knowledge about the Petrifying Glance, in the hope that the PCs become forewarned about the danger. That makes the fight more exciting.
As for picking locks, I would houserule a limit on the number of tries. Part of the Thievery check is to determine whether the lockpicking character kept their hand steady enough and listened to the tumblers clearly enough to succeed in that single try. Yet the other party of the Thievery check is whether they know how to pick that kind of lock. After too many failures, the answer to the second part becomes no. Then they have to try something to refresh their chances, such as consulting with the other party members for advice (Aid action). Or let the barbarian Force Open the door. With this houserule I do not need to design locks that require 7 successes in a row.
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?
Because not every check will resolve the same way, so at most we are talking about a list of potential consequences that the GM has to look through, and some times the failure effect of an activity is enough, even when it is not significant.
To keep to the locked door in a dungeon example. The party doesn't know if there are creatures behind the door, or if the room emptied out several encounters back and is now just an empty room with no features of note except maybe some treasure that can be found obviously after the dungeon has been cleared. At the point there are creatures on the other side of the door, it might matter if it takes 3 checks to succeed or 7. The game changes significantly if every time I try a check and fail, a consequence of significance must occur. Why would I even try to unlock doors until there are no more doors that I can go in without unlocking one?
When picking the lock on the door doesn't really matter anymore, that is when the GM already has permission to just let the door open without a roll or to let the player roll and then make up an arbitrary number for time spent on the task, as long as that is not arbitrarily long. Many times I have seen GMs think that then needed everything to be rolls and so made the players roll for things like searching a room that has no risks anywhere near it for something like a secret door and then spring something like "an hour later you find x" when the party gets upset because they didn't agree to search that long to begin with, when the GM could just say "searching this room thoroughly is going to take an hour," and then the party can decide if they want to do that or not and the results can be automatic. The thing is that the GM needs to stay flexible and not decide every check always is going to resolve the same way or else that is how we ended up here in the first place where players think "because I am doing this thing, I have to roll" and then the GM thinks "because they rolled, there has to be a consequence for not meeting a DC that was set for potentially a different imagined circumstance than the one where the players actually encountered it at.
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Because not every check will resolve the same way
Yes, they do. If you fail your Strike, you miss. If you fail to Track a creature, you lose the trail. If you currently fail to Pick a Lock, nothing happens. That is how degrees of success work for checks in this game. This does not prevent the GM from having immense freedom over how to move things forward, even in the case of very clear-cut checks, so I question why that would be different if we made more failure effects incur some non-prescriptive consequence that helps move the game forward. All that would do is offer a more solid baseline, so that the GM doesn’t have to keep inventing the same result each time.
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Fail forward is something they seem to do with chases. Rarely does failing a chase scene in an AP bring then entire thing crashing down. Aside from that, yes, there are too many things in AP's that can cause the party to get 'locked' out of the rest of the AP.
I've run Outlaws of Alkenstar with around 6 different groups, and there is a hazard very early on doesn't really fit the themes of the AP in a way that 5 out of the 6 groups had significant trouble with it, and one of those groups didn't have a single skill of the 2 or 3 that could be used to resolve the hazard. Further the party is trapped in an area and cant leave to get help and come back, and making checks on the thing puts them in significant risk of taking major damage. If a party member has the right skill, this hazard is trivial, if not...we'll I've seen the hazard completely lock the party down.
I've played through Abomination Vaults, half of Extinction Curse, and Agents of Edgewatch, and I've DM'd Strength of Thousands and Bloodlords multiple times, and those are full of situations where players can get stuck with seemingly no way forward. There are too many 'this one way is the only way to progress' situations.
Now, I'm a seasoned DM so this isn't really a problem for me, but for a new DM that is getting these AP's and depending on them, there are an awful lot of fail states in these AP's and no written help about what they should do if the party gets stuck.
I understand one can't write for every eventuality, but one can write an AP that doesn't depend on someone to be able to make one specific check, and one can also write in some 'escape hatches' for the DM to use if they need to move the party along.
If they dont adopt 'fail forward' in more of their AP designs, they could at least take more care in making sure there are some alternative paths though difficult situations.
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I think PFS2 really does Chases well. Most of the time there is enough of a variety of skills to use that everybody can participate.
This discussion also brings to mind one of my favorite 1st Ed PFS scenarios, "The Waking Rune" from the end of season 4. There are a series of Runes that the party can disable, to make the rest of the adventure easier, but, while failure has consequences, it didn't stop story momentum.
Another option for pivotal plot points is PCs spend a Hero Point, not simply to reroll, but to bypass the obstacle. Yes, it's meta, but the GM (and maybe the players) likely recognize the meta of that chokepoint anyway. There'd be table variation on Hero Point distribution, etc., and it might have to remain homebrew, but not that I think about it, I'd likely pause a session if approaching a chokepoint w/o enough Hero Points around to help alleviate poor rolling. I see that as a flaw in chokepoints of course, but some seem inevitable. Hmm.
For the lockpicking thing, I would homebrew that a critical failure adds a cumulative +5 to the DC in addition to the current consequences.
I don't think this would matter at all. If you have infinite time and infinite tries, it means you have infinite chances to roll a nat 20. Does the DC increase so much that not even a nat 20 is enough? Then someone else tries instead. Even if that other PC doesn't focus in Thievery, they should arguably be able to benefit from Follow the Expert from the PC that does. Those rules only require "an ally attempting a recurring skill check" and "must be willing to provide assistance".
Because not every check will resolve the same wayYes, they do. If you fail your Strike, you miss. If you fail to Track a creature, you lose the trail. If you currently fail to Pick a Lock, nothing happens. That is how degrees of success work for checks in this game. This does not prevent the GM from having immense freedom over how to move things forward, even in the case of very clear-cut checks, so I question why that would be different if we made more failure effects incur some non-prescriptive consequence that helps move the game forward. All that would do is offer a more solid baseline, so that the GM doesn’t have to keep inventing the same result each time.
Yes this is how the game works now. It is not how it would work if the fail forward mechanic was integrated more into every skill check, as you acknowledge in this post. Narrative FF is, ok , mechanically you have failed, what happens next in the story as a result of that failure. Mechanically fixing fail forward over every role means complicating that when often failure alone is fine
Yes this is how the game works now. It is not how it would work if the fail forward mechanic was integrated more into every skill check, as you acknowledge in this post. Narrative FF is, ok , mechanically you have failed, what happens next in the story as a result of that failure. Mechanically fixing fail forward over every role means complicating that when often failure alone is fine
I cited several examples of mechanics that could help with failing forward and would be consistent, and never asked for varying results on the same degree of success, so I'm curious to know how you came to a different conclusion. As noted in the examples I cited, the consequences need not be complicated at all either; that is your own invention based on... what evidence, remind me?
Can you remind me of a specific example. The only one I remember is a general idea about adding “ failure effects [that] incur some non-prescriptive consequence that helps move the game forward.” Which does not sound at all like a game mechanic but a demand that the GM always be ready for every failure to move the story along by itself. Which is a fine thing for a GM to be able to do, but they don’t need a rule to do that when it makes sense for failing a skill check to have an additional consequence that makes sense to the specific circumstances it happens in.
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So this thread blew up while I was busy with work, and I'm glad to see it. I don't know if I can reply to everyone. :)
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.
I think the thing you're missing is that this is literally failing forward. The narrative advanced.
"Fail forward" does not equal "whatever the PCs were trying to do worked", though that case will happen a fair bit. What it really means is "the PCs did something and the narrative advanced because of it."
"You were noticed and the other room suddenly goes silent" has advanced the narrative. That's totally within the bounds of a fail forward design.
What's not is "you fail, nothing happens, but you can just try again because there's no real pressure" which comes up a LOT in PF2. The actual check there is functionally meaningless because the PCs can just keep doing it and the narrative doesn't advance until they succeed.
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.
Right. The end result of actions should be advancing the narrative of the game. It doesn't mean that it goes the players way every time.
It may have to in an AP if it's a plot critical thing and the entire rest of the book depends on it, in which case you need to add complications on failures instead of just hard stopping. That's just how APs work. But lots of stuff isn't "this must happen" and in that case?
Failure is absolutely an option. They could try to unlock the chest, fail, and the contents are destroyed by a trap. That didn't go the players way and did advance the narrative, as opposed to "you failed, RAW that means nothing happens, so you can just try again", which is how Disable Device works in the rules.
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.
This sounds a lot like handwaving, which is also a useful GM tool when rolling checks is a waste of time. I do it all the time with Treat Wounds. If they get to a safe spot and aren't under threat or time pressure, rolling Medicine is pointless. So I don't. I just estimate how long it'd likely take and say "if you take 30 minutes you're recovered", and we move on.
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Can you remind me of a specific example. The only one I remember is a general idea about adding “ failure effects [that] incur some non-prescriptive consequence that helps move the game forward.” Which does not sound at all like a game mechanic but a demand that the GM always be ready for every failure to move the story along by itself. Which is a fine thing for a GM to be able to do, but they don’t need a rule to do that when it makes sense for failing a skill check to have an additional consequence that makes sense to the specific circumstances it happens in.
Gladly! You can find them in this post, specifically:
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.
Stress and clocks are concrete examples, and the concepts they represent exist already in Pathfinder in the form of lasting conditions and time pressure. The complete lack of the latter by default in exploration is a major reason why there's a lack of failing forward then, as it takes away the most basic cost of attempting to do something.
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Fail forward is something they seem to do with chases. Rarely does failing a chase scene in an AP bring then entire thing crashing down. Aside from that, yes, there are too many things in AP's that can cause the party to get 'locked' out of the rest of the AP.
Chases are great in PF2. Aside from usually having a wide skill spread so there's multiple ways to do things and a PC should have some way to contribute, the fail outcome is baked in: you get caught/the thing you're chasing gets away.
It's one of PF2's best subsystems, to the point that we backported it into our PF1 campaign.
I've run Outlaws of Alkenstar with around 6 different groups, and there is a hazard very early on doesn't really fit the themes of the AP in a way that 5 out of the 6 groups had significant trouble with it, and one of those groups didn't have a single skill of the 2 or 3 that could be used to resolve the hazard. Further the party is trapped in an area and cant leave to get help and come back, and making checks on the thing puts them in significant risk of taking major damage. If a party member has the right skill, this hazard is trivial, if not...we'll I've seen the hazard completely lock the party down.
This was the situation we ran into in Spore War: the hazard must be dealt with, only has two skills to do so, and they're both WIS based. We have no WIS based classes in our party. This is high level, so trained skills are just as likely to crit fail as they are to succeed, if not more likely. Only one person in the party had a decent chance of succeess, and we needed a total of 9 successes. It took 2 hours.
It's one of the things that prompted this post because for 3/4 of the party, "you fail and nothing happens" was by far the most likely outcome of attempting it, with the next outcome being "you crit fail and bad stuff happens". So we were pretty stuck until the one character that could do it managed to get through it all and it was pretty clear the others were frustrated with how little they could really do.
As an aside I wouldn't mind if some hard tasks were auto-success if the PC has the proficiency, i.e. Expert in Thievery can automatically open this lock (in a 3rd-4th level scenario where being Expert is quite significant). Then Master from 7th-8th, maybe even 10th or 12th since generic PCs still only have two Master skills. Same for decoding religious or arcane text, gaining entry into a ball, etc. I don't mean as a default rule, but when poor rolling means too little or perhaps too much. I get the feeling a lot of the multiple-success challenges intend to weed out dabblers, but it'll also favor the lucky and punish the unlucky in rather dull ways...unless of course the dev has created something special or the GM can adapt. Again, a side thought, a possible tool in the kit.
ETA: I have seen this with Trained Proficiency in PFS, where anybody Trained can simply do X without problem. Unsure/forget how plot relevant those instances had been.
Yeah I do this with some things. Particularly knowledge. You're a Master of Religion? I don't need a roll for you to identify holy symbols/iconography/etc. But it works for anything, like an expert in Athletics shouldn't need a check to climb a rope without extenuating circumstances making it harder.
Technically it can happen at high level if the DC is low enough as you can reach a point where failure is literally impossible, but that almost never happens in normal play. It is easy for a GM to simply handwave things that should be straightforward for people who are very skilled. Technically it's stepping on Assurance's toes to do that, but nobody is taking Assurance in Religion in the event a trivial task comes up, so I don't consider it a problem. YMMV.
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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.
The base mechanic is one of the things I'm taking issue with, on those. Locks that require 4 successes and where a failure does nothing are not interesting. If you're skilled at the task you're probably going to have to make 5-6 rolls where nothing really goes wrong unless you get a nat 1. That's not interesting, and the failure case is exceptionally dull because it's literally "nothing happens". That's just what's in the rulebook.
That could instead be a single check with a base time requirement of X and the following outcomes:
Critical Success: You unlock it in X / 2 time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed by any creatures on the other side.
Success: You unlock it in X time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed unless a creature is observing the lock or specifically checks.
Failure: You unlock it in X * 4 time. That someone is tampering with the lock is easily noticed by creatures on the other side.
Critical Failure: You break your lockpicks and any creature on the other side is likely to notice someone as tampering with the lock.
That's still a generic rule that can fit in the rulebook, except it's now one check that advances the narrative immediately in one way or another unless it's literally a lock to an empty room, in which case there's no real need to call for a roll at all.
As opposed to the current "make ~6 checks and eventually you'll get enough success points that something happens."
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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.
Yeah, great point. Lots of spells still do stuff on a "failure" (aka: enemy success). Slow and Synesthesia are so valued specifically because they're still great even in their "fail" states.
"Failure" on a skill check doesn't have to actually mean that the thing was a total failure. It can mean "you managed to muddle through" and come with a complication.
Like picking locks? A failure could still open the lock, but it can take longer/be loud/break your lockpick. Depending on the situation that's a thing you likely don't want so success is better, but it also progressed the narrative and kept the game moving.
It also means a party where no one is especially skilled at it can at least attempt it because the odds of it accomplishing something are a lot better, even if it's still not a great outcome. Right now in PF2 situations like this lead to a lot of "I have the skill but it's a waste of time to even attempt it."
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!
Yeah the players guide does call it out, and in the case of survival it's also a situation where it doesn't get us "stuck": when we failed it, we still eventually got to where we were going, but we got lost for a while, it took forever, and the random encounter chance went up, etc.
I think that worked pretty well because it was clear that having it would make things better for us, but not having it didn't stop the game. I later used Gnome Obsession and Dreaming Potential to pick up Tanglebriar Lore and the GM let me use that to navigate Tanglebriar. So that was cool. :)
The specific case we got stuck on was later into it (which I explained in my review thread but won't here to avoid spoilers), but the only skills were both WIS based (Religion and Nature). Our party has no WIS based classes, so that was rough.
One thing I will say about the Spore War players guide is that a LOT of skills are strongly recommended. It's hard for a party of 4 with no Rogue/Investigator to be good at all of them, especially if players have a concept they want to play or a class that relies on something else (like Crafting is not on that list but an INT based class or someone who relies heavily on Shield Block may want it anyway).
But we've only had the one case where we actually felt stuck due to skill selection. In other cases we found an alternative or muddled through with difficulty, and I think that outcome is totally fine because it still advanced the plot but it was clear to us that someone who was good at X would have been great.
I think the AP overall does a good job of this. Though as a player in it I can't always tell if my GM is changing stuff for us. :)
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.
Seeing how much this thread exploded since last night, I regret not extending my example just a bit further. Failing to open the door while also alerting guards was exactly something I was thinking of for an example of a fail-forward critical failure. Id been leaving it ambiguous whether the guards were on the inside or outside, but in the case of a fail forward where the door doesn't open right away, one imagines the approaching guards might themselves have a key. Meanwhile taking out (or stealthily robbing) the guards would always have been a secondary option to get in for the party with no thievery skills.
And of course "fail forward means the door must open" is for the scenario of a door thay must be bypassed to continue the adventure.
I might have more thoughts but its supper time and im sure theres lots more mileage to be gained in this thread before I get back.
(PS - I did see RD's comment that alerting the guards on a crit fail might be too much punishment on top of breaking a pick, but I feel like breaking a pick is a token penalty anyway, and the point of alerting the guards is that it creates an immediate situation thats not standing around trying again. The guards dont need to be alerted at every door, but something need to happen besides standing around trying again - I kind of like the idea that there's a maximum number of tries at a door before it jams up entirely)
(PS - I did see RD's comment that alerting the guards on a crit fail might be too much punishment on top of breaking a pick, but I feel like breaking a pick is a token penalty anyway, and the point of alerting the guards is that it creates an immediate situation thats not standing around trying again. The guards dont need to be alerted at every door, but something need to happen besides standing around trying again - I kind of like the idea that there's a maximum number of tries at a door before it jams up entirely)
Yeah breaking a pick is a token problem at best. They're so cheap that carrying a handful of extra ones isn't a burden at level 2, let alone later in the game. Breaking one is so rare if you're any good at this (and that's usually the only person attempting it) that you can buy 10 early on and never use them all.
It's only a problem if you run out mid-dungeon and can't just leave to get more.
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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.
The base mechanic is one of the things I'm taking issue with, on those. Locks that require 4 successes and where a failure does nothing are not interesting. If you're skilled at the task you're probably going to have to make 5-6 rolls where nothing really goes wrong unless you get a nat 1. That's not interesting, and the failure case is exceptionally dull because it's literally "nothing happens". That's just what's in the rulebook.
That could instead be a single check with a base time requirement of X and the following outcomes:
Critical Success: You unlock it in X / 2 time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed by any creatures on the other side.
Success: You unlock it in X time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed unless a creature is observing the lock or specifically checks.
Failure: You unlock it in X * 4 time. That someone is tampering with the lock is easily noticed by creatures on the other side.
Critical Failure: You break your lockpicks and any creature on the other side is likely to notice someone as tampering with the lock.That's still a generic rule that can fit in the rulebook, except it's now one check that advances the narrative immediately in one way or another unless it's literally a lock to an empty room,...
Total agreement there, and a great start for how to improve lockpicking. I was mainly responding to the people under you getting into the weeds arguing.
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(PS - I did see RD's comment that alerting the guards on a crit fail might be too much punishment on top of breaking a pick, but I feel like breaking a pick is a token penalty anyway, and the point of alerting the guards is that it creates an immediate situation thats not standing around trying again. The guards dont need to be alerted at every door, but something need to happen besides standing around trying again - I kind of like the idea that there's a maximum number of tries at a door before it jams up entirely)
Yeah breaking a pick is a token problem at best. They're so cheap that carrying a handful of extra ones isn't a burden at level 2, let alone later in the game. Breaking one is so rare if you're any good at this (and that's usually the only person attempting it) that you can buy 10 early on and never use them all.
It's only a problem if you run out mid-dungeon and can't just leave to get more.
Pretty sure there is no rule saying you can't repair a broken lockpick using the Craft skill either.
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Can you remind me of a specific example. The only one I remember is a general idea about adding “ failure effects [that] incur some non-prescriptive consequence that helps move the game forward.” Which does not sound at all like a game mechanic but a demand that the GM always be ready for every failure to move the story along by itself. Which is a fine thing for a GM to be able to do, but they don’t need a rule to do that when it makes sense for failing a skill check to have an additional consequence that makes sense to the specific circumstances it happens in.Gladly! You can find them in this post, specifically:
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.Stress and clocks are concrete examples, and the concepts they represent exist already in Pathfinder in the form of lasting conditions and time pressure. The complete lack of the latter by default in exploration is a major reason why there's a lack of failing forward then, as it takes away the most basic cost of attempting to do something.
thank you for pointing me at the correct post. I think there are a lot of games that do use various kinds of mechanics like this (which really, mechanically, kind of boil down to victory points, albeit sometimes VPs with additional consequences) for handling base line challenges. My own game design experiences have involved a lot of that kind of stuff too. So I am not opposed to that in principle and in 3rd edition-type threads I often advocate for better integration of VP systems into exploration mode, including having a lot more skill feats interact with them in better thought out ways than just +1s here or there. I think it would have been a lot easier on James Jacobs (and all the other adventure writers and designers) if the influence subsystem, the chase subsystem and the infiltration subsystems (and possibly others) were the expected way of handling these kinds of situations from the beginning, rather that kind of clunky one off “near-encounter mode” activities like make a request/coercion, and most of the other noncombat skill activities. It would be a lot easier on GMs if it didn’t feel so arbitrary about when picking a lock is an encounter mode time-scale activity and when it is part of an infiltration, and when it is just an arbitrary skill check not really tied to any narrative challenge, but is more just set dressing (which are the ones that are probably supposed to act more as a gate and sign post “this area of the dungeon is too scary for you right now.”) I agree with that.
But as much as I like those VP systems, a lot of tables like to be able to completely ignore them and run everything in encounter mode scale, with the players having no idea if 1 turn matters or 1 minute or 1 day, and VP systems do tend to break that veil of realism by making it transparent to the players “we are not operating in combat encounter mode right now.” It is only within the last couple of years that I have seen APs really take a stab at infiltration mode for example for exploring dungeons and have more written in flexibility for where creatures will be encountered. It is so different that some players are going to hate it on principle and some are going to think they hate it on principle because the super dynamic dungeon in a rules heavy TTRPG that is so focused on combat that the concept of encounter mode breaks down when applied to noncombat encounters, is pretty new and still going through growing pains. As long as PF2 is still trying to support adventures where static dungeons are explored fully in combat scale encounter mode, with just some arbitrary opportunities for GMs to fast forward slow bits with exploration mode (which is kind of the original PF2 base line), I fear that trying to impose gamey VP tokens (like stress or clocks) is going to feel very artificial to very many players.
Pretty sure there is no rule saying you can't repair a broken lockpick using the Craft skill either.(PS - I did see RD's comment that alerting the guards on a crit fail might be too much punishment on top of breaking a pick, but I feel like breaking a pick is a token penalty anyway, and the point of alerting the guards is that it creates an immediate situation thats not standing around trying again. The guards dont need to be alerted at every door, but something need to happen besides standing around trying again - I kind of like the idea that there's a maximum number of tries at a door before it jams up entirely)
Yeah breaking a pick is a token problem at best. They're so cheap that carrying a handful of extra ones isn't a burden at level 2, let alone later in the game. Breaking one is so rare if you're any good at this (and that's usually the only person attempting it) that you can buy 10 early on and never use them all.
It's only a problem if you run out mid-dungeon and can't just leave to get more.
Not only is there no rule against it, its explicitly called out as an option in the rules for Picking a Lock. "Fixing a broken toolkit requires using Crafting to Repair it or else swapping in replacement picks (costing 3 sp, or 3 gp for an infiltrator thieves' toolkit)."
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I think "enemies open the door from the other side and attack" is a decent way to get the party unstuck if it becomes clear they can't open the door. It should be obvious that this fight is then harder than it would have been if the players were able to quietly infiltrate and pick off guards one by one.
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But as much as I like those VP systems, a lot of tables like to be able to completely ignore them and run everything in encounter mode scale, with the players having no idea if 1 turn matters or 1 minute or 1 day, and VP systems do tend to break that veil of realism by making it transparent to the players “we are not operating in combat encounter mode right now.”
Although I can agree with a lot of your post, I feel this is getting lost in the weeds again. If some players don’t like VPs, that’s fine, but also adjacent to the basic notion of making sure every action that involves a check is incurring consequences of some kind with every result. If players want everything run like encounter mode, great, that’s what clocks achieve in Blades in the Dark by having an easy way of parcelling out the party’s actions along a timeline. So long as the basic principle is respected where failure doesn’t leave you in the same state as before you attempted the check, all is well.
I think "enemies open the door from the other side and attack" is a decent way to get the party unstuck if it becomes clear they can't open the door. It should be obvious that this fight is then harder than it would have been if the players were able to quietly infiltrate and pick off guards one by one.
The trick, which is now GM skill, is to figure out when and under what circumstances the enemy opens the door. With dynamic dungeon design, it is pretty easy to treat this door like one challenge in an infiltration subsystem, and limit the total outcomes to 2-4 based on number of points earned in x turns. With a static dungeon, the GM has a lot of leeway in deciding for themselves things like, has the party been relatively quiet to this point? Is the dungeon on high alert for some reason? Will they go and get allies before opening the door? Move traps? Etc. but that is only after deciding an arbitrary number for how long the party has before it gets noticed. With the number of feats and spells that could apply to change that circumstance, it is really hard to provide set numbers for this stuff in adventure writing. I very much do not want one failure picking a lock to always mean the guards are alerted. That would be bad design for a dynamic dungeon as well.
Not only is there no rule against it, its explicitly called out as an option in the rules for Picking a Lock. "Fixing a broken toolkit requires using Crafting to Repair it or else swapping in replacement picks (costing 3 sp, or 3 gp for an infiltrator thieves' toolkit)."Pretty sure there is no rule saying you can't repair a broken lockpick using the Craft skill either.(PS - I did see RD's comment that alerting the guards on a crit fail might be too much punishment on top of breaking a pick, but I feel like breaking a pick is a token penalty anyway, and the point of alerting the guards is that it creates an immediate situation thats not standing around trying again. The guards dont need to be alerted at every door, but something need to happen besides standing around trying again - I kind of like the idea that there's a maximum number of tries at a door before it jams up entirely)
Yeah breaking a pick is a token problem at best. They're so cheap that carrying a handful of extra ones isn't a burden at level 2, let alone later in the game. Breaking one is so rare if you're any good at this (and that's usually the only person attempting it) that you can buy 10 early on and never use them all.
It's only a problem if you run out mid-dungeon and can't just leave to get more.
The funny thing is that a Legendary Crafter with Quick Repair can repair it in one action, so it doesn't even slow down their lockpicking lol.
I think "enemies open the door from the other side and attack" is a decent way to get the party unstuck if it becomes clear they can't open the door. It should be obvious that this fight is then harder than it would have been if the players were able to quietly infiltrate and pick off guards one by one.
For sure, that's a great way to handle it. Party would have been better off with success, but the narrative is moving.
If there's no enemies in there, another option is "you can't get it open via lockpicking" and encourage creative solutions (or brute force ones). Players being told they can't get past a door tend to REALLY want to find a way through in my experience because there might be cool treasure!
That'd be funny if somebody took Craft & Quick Repair so they didn't have to be so proficient in Thievery.
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The base mechanic is one of the things I'm taking issue with, on those. Locks that require 4 successes and where a failure does nothing are not interesting. If you're skilled at the task you're probably going to have to make 5-6 rolls where nothing really goes wrong unless you get a nat 1. That's not interesting, and the failure case is exceptionally dull because it's literally "nothing happens". That's just what's in the rulebook.
That could instead be a single check with a base time requirement of X and the following outcomes:
Critical Success: You unlock it in X / 2 time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed by any creatures on the other side.
Success: You unlock it in X time. That you have unlocked it is unnoticed unless a creature is observing the lock or specifically checks.
Failure: You unlock it in X * 4 time. That someone is tampering with the lock is easily noticed by creatures on the other side.
Critical Failure: You break your lockpicks and any creature on the other side is likely to notice someone as tampering with the lock.That's still a generic rule that can fit in the rulebook, except it's now one check that advances the narrative immediately in one way or another unless it's literally a lock to an empty room.
A couple of issues here.
Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.
Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?
This is a different game. There are games that do this and they are valid and have their place. Go play those, don't destroy the uniqueness of this one by destroying it's core.
Why do we need to spoon feed our players and make it so easy for them. Failure sometimes is OK. Force them to think and adapt to challenges.
Personally, I don’t think every single skill check needs to resolve an entire challenge by itself. Especially in encounter mode, failing to pick a lock is two actions down the drain, and I don’t think standardizing the amount of time it takes to pick all locks (even around 4 results) makes sense. A lock that takes seven successes without a critical failure, is a very intense challenge if it is going on in encounter mode. In exploration mode, the time scale of the activity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as far as affecting the story, and that is why I think more locks could have a hard set “this locks gets jammed after x number of critical failures and can no longer be picked,” with GMs needing to think through narratively how reactive the dungeon is going to be to sounds like lock picking. Lock picking is not really an activity that can be done while avoiding notice (which is a grey area in the game) so the question of when will someone notice it is very subjective. I think a little bit of advice in adventures telling GMs just to hand wave locked doors that wouldn’t attract attention even if they were broken down would avoid most of the truly “no consequence” situations being described in this thread.
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That's still a generic rule that can fit in the rulebook, except it's now one check that advances the narrative immediately in one way or another unless it's literally a lock to an empty room.A couple of issues here.
Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.
You are, of course, correct, however this issue was not introduced in Tridus' example. In the case of no time pressure and a locked door which will eventually open, it doesn't really matter if a Fail result means "it takes you longer to open the door" or just "cross your fingers and roll the die again". If Tridus' version is doing anything, it's reducing the number of times you need to roll the d20 before you're allowed to continue.
Now, keying the result of Pick a Lock to a time penalty isn't the version I would personally advocate for, but it's no worse than what we have and if nothing else, it at least creates a concrete unit of time rather than a random number of rounds. If you have to gauge how long before guards show up, it's simpler to weigh the difference between two windows (say, 3 rounds on success, 1 minute on failure) than to pick an arbitrary number of rounds and wait to see if they will fail enough times to hit the number.
Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?
Gentle reminder that Pick a Lock is still a trained-only skill. There is no particular reason why a cleric of Lao Shu Po should be much less capable of cracking a locked door than a rogue, save for differences in manual dexterity given that both would be skilled in the task. The difference between +2 and +4 in this scenario is negligible without time pressure, which is already how it is.
Further, this line of thinking continues to ignore the fundamental premise of Fail Forward by assuming it would cause a fail result to become identical to a success, and even somehow imagining that it would necessarily apply to every roll made, or less, a majority (wrestling?).
If offering interesting consequences for a failed roll is "spoon-feeding", perhaps I should wonder what we're doing with all these soup bowls? Fail Forward is a useful tool for situations where "You fail, nothing happens" and there's no damage to be done to the game by employing it where it suits.
There is nothing particularly unique about a game where "you fail, nothing happens... try again?" grinds play to a halt. Why be afraid to let failure carry consequences which don't stop play sometimes? Please understand that, Fail Forward does not say "you failed, I guess I have to open the door for you anyway so you don't have to find a different path forward", it says "sometimes failure can be made more interesting if something happens, including but not limited to, succeeding with meaningful consequences, finding a clue about a different path forward, or even just the situation changing in a way that renders this course of action untenable, do something else."
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A couple of issues here.
Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.
Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?
This is a different game. There are games that do this and they are valid and have their place. Go play those, don't destroy the uniqueness of this one by destroying it's core.
Why do we need to spoon feed our players and make it so easy for them. Failure sometimes is OK. Force them to think and adapt to challenges.
Kept to its simplest, the premise of this thread is that if a roll of the dice resolves as "you have no effect, but you can keep trying if you want. What do you do next?" then this is considered a substantially less interesting outcome than something happening in the narrative being told. Can you explain how this is avoiding failure? If failing to pick the lock results in the door's lock being broken and unable to be opened from this side no matter what, how is that less punishing than just asking someone to roll another 19 d20s until they succeed enough? Failing forward often - almost always if that's the tone the table wants, in my experience actually - can be more punishing to the characters than the more stagnant alternative, but it is more interesting for the players (unless they respond really badly to characters not always succeeding). I feel that's a much more interesting situation than nothing happening.
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A couple of issues here.Often the difference between Success and Failure just doesn't matter. There are many situations where time is not important. So as a generic rule it is problematic.
That's literally how it is right now. Failure does nothing. You can just keep trying until you succeed.
Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not. So suddenly the wizard can become good enough at wrestling and the cleric at lock picking. What is the difference between a +2 and a +4 in this scenario? Are stats really that important anymore?
That's also how it is right now. You can fail to pick a lock 15 times in a row and still successfully open the lock on subsequent attempts. RAW, you can critically fail it 15 times in a row and still successfully open the lock on attempt 16+ if you have enough spare picks or just repair them (which as we already established can be done very quickly with Quick Repair).
This is a different game. There are games that do this and they are valid and have their place. Go play those, don't destroy the uniqueness of this one by destroying it's core.
No it's not. It's the exact same game except without rolling the same check 20 times before you brute force past it.
Why do we need to spoon feed our players and make it so easy for them. Failure sometimes is OK. Force them to think and adapt to challenges.
... do you not know how the Pick a Lock action works now? Because this is absolutely not a thing that exists RAW. Failure does nothing and critical failure is trivially easy to deal with. You can retry an infinite number of times unless there's a trap or an external force stops you.
You're literally changing the rules and then using that as an argument to claim that changing the rules would make it "a different game".
This isn’t really about picking locks though, this is about activities that seem written about working in one specific mode of game play because it centers around time, but that is often done in a different mode of play.
Picking locks works in encounter mode. Most parties don’t pick locks in encounter mode, they wait until encounter mode is over and pick locks mostly in exploration mode.
Squeezing is written to pretty much not work in encounter mode at all…except it is possible to take feats that allow one character to squeeze much more quickly. This often just created more problems than it can ever solve, and at the scale of time used in exploration, time is again the only constraint.
Climbing assumes a combat encounter mode time scale that breaks down when the party can take an hour or more to set up ropes and safety procedures that make no sense in combat.
Even most social interaction activities happen at a scale of minutes most of the time but some times not.
The larger issue is that exploration mode doesn’t have enough crunch to it for incredibly crunchy activities to have really specific units of time attached to it that don’t necessarily matter. Like is this a 1 minute activity? 10? An hour? All of those could be the individual units of time of a skill challenge encounter that resolves around exploration mode activities. This is why most of the skill challenges in published adventures work better as VP challenges. James Jacobs tries really hard to use the non combat mechanics of PF2 in the adventures that they write/design, but it is a system fighting itself.
In VP encounters it is perfectly fine for failure to just mean nothing happens because it is understood that time is being measured in a fashion that matters in that specific situation. The problem with designing activities around that is that those units of time are not standardized, but if they were, a lot of players would hate that things that feel like they should take one minute take 5 or 10, and a climbing challenge that might take an hour might have 60 noncombat encounter rounds to it.
Because you can succeed on a failure suddenly your ability with the skill is not that important. It is perhaps whether you have the skill or not.Gentle reminder that Pick a Lock is still a trained-only skill.
It is pretty common for people to make simple logic mistakes. Less so when directly quoting text.
I think it was very obvious I was aware it was a trained skill.
In the case of no time pressure and a locked door which will eventually open, it doesn't really matter if a Fail result means "it takes you longer to open the door" or just "cross your fingers and roll the die again". If Tridus' version is doing anything, it's reducing the number of times you need to roll the d20 before you're allowed to continue.
It might matter when you consider the critical failure chance.
Now, keying the result of Pick a Lock to a time penalty isn't the version I would personally advocate for
Of course there are other options, it is probably best if the rules provide some options and the GM applies some judgement about what is appropriate for the situation.
Fail Forward does not say "you failed, I guess I have to open the door for you anyway so you don't have to find a different path forward", it says "sometimes failure can be made more interesting if something happens, including but not limited to, succeeding with meaningful consequences, finding a clue about a different path forward, or even just the situation changing in a way that renders this course of action untenable, do something else."
That part of fail forward is fine as I said at the start. I'm very happy to get more information and have options. So don't keep repeating it please. My concern here is that sometimes a good choice is just to say no and accept that a fail is a fail.
I don't want failure eliminated.
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The larger issue is that exploration mode doesn’t have enough crunch to it
Yes the rules have a significant gap there and it is up to the GM to fill it.
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The larger issue is that exploration mode doesn’t have enough crunch to itYes the rules have a significant gap there and it is up to the GM to fill it.
And to be clear, I would rather get “we leave this to GM discretion” than a bunch of rules to codify exploration mode that make no sense or prescriptively decide that you could pick a lock in under a minute if it was happening in combat, but now that it is not, it is always going to take either exactly 10 minutes or 30 minutes if you fail.
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There appears to be a lot of arguing along the lines of "if things were implemented in this highly specific way that currently doesn't exist, that would be bad," which to me can only earn the response of "then don't use that highly specific implementation." Inventing a special case to argue against isn't an indictment of failing forward as a concept, and numerous examples have been brought up already of how that can be implemented in ways that aren't overly prescriptive. In fact, for all the hair-splitting, there doesn't seem to be much opposition to the concept itself, so I think it's worth trying to start from common ground here instead of jumping to debatable implementations nobody else appears to be endorsing.
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But I do oppose “every roll has to significantly change the narrative” on principle, and I especially oppose PF2 trying to mechanically codify all exploration activities around trying to make every single result of every single check have to be more important than “that doesn’t work and time passes.”
As I am trying to point out, the issue is that “how much time passing does it take for a failed result to matter?” is a question subjective to the situation it is happening in. At best, these decisions would need to happen at the adventure writing level, not the default activity results level, and that it is ok to have situations where no amount of time is going to matter and then we can just skip the roll, rather than have to invent a consequence just because someone chose to roll.
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Who said anything about significantly changing the narrative? That's the exact kind of invention I'm talking about here.
If the consequence doesn’t need to be significant, than “time passes” always is a consequence.
The rules text of failing forward in PF2 says, “ 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 highlighted the part at the end because I think it is important as a GM to give yourself grace and not over think the parts of the game where your creative energy is better spent going elsewhere.
If some door that is locked could have been significant earlier in the adventure, and isn’t now, trying to make it significant now is an example of a GM misplacing energy.
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As I am trying to point out, the issue is that “how much time passes” does it take for a failed result to matter is subjective to the situation it is happening in. At best, these decisions would need to happen at the adventure writing level, not the default activity results level, and that it is ok to have situations where no amount of time is going to matter and then we can just skip the roll, rather than have to invent a consequence just because someone chose to roll.
I do think that if the PF3 - as this is far too big a change to really meaningfully try to include in PF2, outside of tweaking the failure conditions on a few standout offenders and trying to change adventure design - design wants to continue with the current style, at the very least the game should make it far more obvious when some mechanics are designed to be only relevant under encounter-mode time pressure, and that you should skip it if you're not in encounter mode. I think this would risk alienating quite a few people who find out that the game isn't designed to allow there to be an interesting consequence from picking the lock of a door in an infiltration without a guard being ~30 seconds away from you, but it's better than that being hidden and just leading to boring gameplay.
But while I do broadly disagree with your perspective, where I do think you are correct is that it is quite difficult to codify this into the rules of a game like PF2. Failing forward is very much dependent on the narrative. For the picklocking a door example, a consequence of failure could be:
- The obvious one - your lockpicking is unsuccessful, and you need more time to see if you can pull it off. This is only an interesting consequence when the time pressure applied to you is significant enough that you care about this.
- Something like the lock breaking and you being unable to get in this way without someone opening it from the other side. It's a fairly strong failure in response to the dice roll, but can be very fun - but if it's the centerpiece of the entire plan, it's going to disrupt things way more than you'd otherwise expect. If bluffing is a plausible way in, or there are other ways you could sneak in, or if you can afford to go loud but just don't want extra risk, it's an interesting consequence.
- Something like you opening the door, but leaving behind obvious evidence of specifically who broke in. It's a completely boring consequence if you're planning on an action that doesn't require anonymity, but if you're relying on it then it might be more interestingly harsh of a consequence than most other possibilities.
- You make enough noise that someone on the other side of the door comes to investigate. Interesting in many situations, but completely inappropriate in others - like if you're trying to pick a lock into a location that is uninhabited, but you're still being sneaky to avoid being seen getting into the location.
- You damage the lock, and you get through the door, but when the door closes behind you it jams shut, and you can't get back out the same way you came in without a massive amount of noise. An interesting consequence in a situation where you care about stealth on the way out!
I could go on for much longer, but I fear I'm belabouring my point. The point is that all of these are interesting, appropriate consequences to a failed attempt to pick the lock on a door. All of them have situations where they are either completely inappropriate or incredibly boring too. I think the game would be much more interesting if an appropriate choice from the above list was selected every time you failed to pick a lock. In a game where you can just say "on a failure, the attempt goes wrong, and the GM will tell you precisely what happens. On a critical failure, it goes really badly wrong." it's simple (though it relies on good GMing advice and improvisational GM skill to generate those interesting possibilities). How would you handle that in a game as mechanically specific as PF2? I don't think PF2 players would be super into the concept of the consequence being fully undefined and left to the GM. I'd be interested in the response to the failure being something like "you need more time to pick the lock, you damage the lock, you alert a nearby creature to your presence, or a similar outcome as determined by your GM". But the fundamental issue here is that failing forward requires narrative responsivity in the failure, which cannot be easily done with single set-in-stone consequences for a failed action, as PF2 currently does.
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If the consequence doesn’t need to be significant, than “time passes” always is a consequence.
This strikes me as a rather disingenuous manipulation of ambiguous language. The opposite of "significant," as in major, is not always insignificant, as in trivial. It is possible to have consequences that are of some significance without being major, as highlighted by several people using concrete examples.
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My entire point is that the significance of time passing is subjective to the adventure and the context of the challenge. I think the locking pick example springs to many players minds because the mechanics of the activity are written for the significance of failure to correlate to a combat encounter where getting an enemy to waste 2 actions is incredibly significant…but the frequency of lock picking encounters happening in combat encounters is rare compared to parties choosing not to try to pick locks in combat unless they absolutely have to. So the very significant consequence of wasting two actions in an encounter round don’t port over to exploration.
If the decision is “well, picking locks doesn’t happen often in the scale of encounter mode, let’s increase the time to be significant there,” then picking locks in combat is taken away as a plot option, or at least reduced to something that requires x skill feats to be possible, and that is what we have with most of the skill activities in the game like squeezing and coercion and all that stuff. Climbing also falls into the “scaled for combat and not super great in exploration encounters” type of activities so there are multiple examples of all of these.
It is really difficult to broadly establish consequences that scale well between combat and encounter mode, but treating those two things as completely different, with different consequences for having tried it in a combat vs in exploration mode is a very easy way to alienate players who want consistency.
Part of the overall issue of making exploration mode challenges have consequences as heavy as combat encounter consequences is that people take their time when they can to make less serious mistakes, especially professionally trained people. Picking locks in combat probably is a lot harder than picking locks when you can relax. It isn’t really a problem to me if checks get handwaved where parties are playing the game in a very natural way to minimize the risk of negative consequences as often as possible.
Like with the locking picking example, it is pretty foolish to try to pick locks before you’ve figured out whether any of those locks actually need to be picked to most easily accomplish your task. It’s kind of like making parties search each room of a dungeon immediately after clearing it, not just for threats or obvious and useable exploits, and then not letting them carefully search the whole dungeon after exploring if time permits.
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My entire point is that the significance of time passing is subjective to the adventure and the context of the challenge.
That's not the point at all, though: you were challenged to provide even a single example of a person on this thread asking for every failure to have major gameplay consequences, which by your own admission was the crux of your opposition, and now here we are, two and a half tangents later. This is very much illustrating the point I've made about people inventing reasons to argue.
As for establishing consistent consequences, I'm again not seeing why you are inventing straw men instead of addressing the actual examples people have given: I brought up clocks from Blades in the Dark, which are used when the party does things like pick locks in that game, and Tridus listed an example of how a failure on a check to Pick a Lock could work as a success with a tradeoff. If a failure to Pick a Lock worked as a success, for instance, but left obvious damage as with a critical failure, that would work as failing forward in a way that could give the GM a hook if they wanted to, including a guard getting alerted, without being prescriptive. Thus, all these claims of how difficult it is to come up with these kinds of failure effects in a game replete with them strike me as a rather flimsy argument from incredulity.
The system I helped design (which never went into publication) handled this by letting PCs decide how long to spend doing activities and for DCs to be very hard, but scaling down based upon how much time was spent doing something. If you got interrupted, you’d have to start over, so it would be on the players to create the tension by trying to pick as much time as they thought they could get away with picking a lock, searching a room, etc.
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That’s a fun concept, I like that. Time as a resource is an excellent way of making sure every action taken does something no matter what, and thus helps fail the game forward. Establishing a sliding scale of time costs versus risk is a good way of letting the party choose what to focus on as well.