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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.
If a roll has no consequence on the narrative, why are you rolling?
I mean that as a serious question. I don't understand how it makes sense to call for a roll, resolve it, have the outcome be "nothing happened but you can roll again if you want", and consider that a good outcome.
I think we've all seen this play out at some point where that situation results in making the same check multiple times until the dice come up high enough that it's a success (or a critical failure), which results in something happening.
"Something happening" is the key phrase. "Something" is very broad. But just repeatedly rolling dice until the dice give a certain result that makes something happen is a waste of time, since something should be happening on every result.
(This isn't really an issue in combat because "you lost time" is an outcome in combat. Missing an attack isn't "nothing happened" because you used those actions and they didn't work. You can dress that up narratively in lots of ways but even in its most basic form, something happened as a result of that in that you used the actions.
In exploration mode that's often meaningless and so the whole way this gets handled RAW doesn't really work.)
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The lock picking example is complicated because it is written to resolve in a combat encounter time scale, because it has to be for it to ever be possible to pick a prisoner’s manacles (or other narrative complication to combat) in combat, but under the vast majority of circumstances players don’t pick locks at that pace AND picking a lock not under duress should not be as stressful and difficult as doing it in combat so either the DCs should change or the consequences have to be less severe.
Honestly, in PF2 as it is currently written, I don’t think GMs should make players roll to pick locks for doors or containers that could be forced open or destroyed with no narrative consequence, like after a dungeon has been mostly cleared. Sometimes the GM will not realize that until after a roll happens though and in those situations it is still better for nothing to happen than a contrived consequence to pop up just because a roll happened.
But between picking locks in combat and opening everything at the end of a dungeon crawl just to see if anything was missed is a lot of gray area that has to be adaptive to the adventure’s narrative. This is currently a GM skill and I think the question of this thread is “does it have to fall on the GM’s shoulder’s to arbitrate this, or can the default results of activities do more of that heavy lifting.
I am on the fence about that question, with heavy reservations about trying to make changes that force GMs to enact consequences over situations where “just try again a couple of times until a more interesting result happens or I decide enough time has passed for the situation to change” is a good enogh narrative result.
One reason I feel this way is that things like clocks and automatic “success and bad consequence” make the threat level of the action incredibly transparent to the players. Sometimes this can be good, but it can also be very immersion breaking. Do the players need to know whether picking this lock will be significant or not? Either way, it will change how they approach the door and what resources they may employ in trying to open it. That has both positive and negative consequences that different players will have different feelings about.
A second issue I have is that it is very difficult to decide for GMs what the right scale and scope of negative consequences for failing one lock picking check in exploration mode should be. Trying to include everything about how noticeable the activity is, how much it might damage the lock, how people react to noticing it, how much time is appropriate to spend with the activity, etc. into the results will likely lead to rules lawyering squabbles in play or confusion when those ideas don’t match the circumstances.
I think the ask here, especially into codifying it into game mechanics is a much bigger ask than just suggesting more possible ways for GMs to do this better at their tables, while acknowledging that skill activities designed around combat encounters are difficult to port out to exploration without switching to a VP system.
If a roll has no consequence on the narrative, why are you rolling?
I mean that as a serious question. I don't understand how it makes sense to call for a roll, resolve it, have the outcome be "nothing happened but you can roll again if you want", and consider that a good outcome. ...
Teridax talks of time as a resource.
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.
But I tap into a more powerful resource: theme.
Currently, my players in Strength of Thousands are playing as Magaambya mages. They see their actions as creating the reputation of the Magaambya. They don't just want to win. They want to generate respect and earn a reputation for helping people.
It they run into a locked door that the rogue Roshan cannot pick, then the wizard Idris is going to cast Magic Passage (formerly known as Passwall). Because a locked door is not going to stop Magaambya mages. If necessary, they will burn the door to ashes and not care how many enemies come running.
And that would be the purpose of the locked door: not to stop the party due to bad luck, but to demonstrate how they persevere despite bad luck.
In all my campaigns my players create stories. And those stories have successes and failures and getting up from the failures. A cozy story of nothing but straight successes would not be as fun as bypassing around stubborn obstacles into new options.
The 1st module, Trail of the Hunted, in Ironfang Invasion has the party and several townsfolk run out of their town by an invasion, so they start with a failure. They had to hide in the forest, finding food and shelter, to make up for that failure and turn it into the beginning of a success. In Hurricane's Howl, 3rd module of Strength of Thousands they spent effort rebuilding the buildings and the economy of the village Kiutu and they will do the same with the economy of Jula, even though the rules of Pathfinder avoid economic simulation. The economic failure of the towns is not the fault of the towns nor the party, but the party will accept this stubborn challenge to achieve victory by Magaambyan standards.
Fail forward does not mean that success comes from trying again and again the same way. It means that the story does not stop. For some players, the GM will have to provide clues that lead to an alternative. Other players, like mine, will figure out something else on their own, and the GM's job is to improvise the new path.
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If a roll has no consequence on the narrative, why are you rolling?
I mean that as a serious question. I don't understand how it makes sense to call for a roll, resolve it, have the outcome be "nothing happened but you can roll again if you want", and consider that a good outcome. ...
Teridax talks of time as a resource.
Yeah, and that works just as well with a "well you rolled a 3, so it takes 10 minutes to get past this lock" as it does with "well you rolled a 3, so nothing happens and you need to reroll" approach.
But I tap into a more powerful resource: theme.
Currently, my players in Strength of Thousands are playing as Magaambya mages. They see their actions as creating the reputation of the Magaambya. They don't just want to win. They want to generate respect and earn a reputation for helping people.
It they run into a locked door that the rogue Roshan cannot pick, then the wizard Idris is going to cast Magic Passage (formerly known as Passwall). Because a locked door is not going to stop Magaambya mages. If necessary, they will burn the door to ashes and not care how many enemies come running.
And that would be the purpose of the locked door: not to stop the party due to bad luck, but to demonstrate how they persevere despite bad luck.
In all my campaigns my players create stories. And those stories have successes and failures and getting up from the failures. A cozy story of nothing but straight successes would not be as fun as bypassing around stubborn obstacles into new options.
The 1st module, Trail of the Hunted, in Ironfang Invasion has the party and several townsfolk run out of their town by an invasion, so they start with a failure. They had to hide in the forest, finding food and shelter, to make up for that failure and turn it into the beginning of a success. In Hurricane's Howl, 3rd module of Strength of Thousands they spent effort rebuilding the buildings and the economy of the village Kiutu and they will do the same with the economy of Jula, even though the rules of Pathfinder avoid economic simulation. The economic failure of the towns is not the fault of the towns nor the party, but the party will accept this stubborn challenge to achieve victory by Magaambyan standards.
Fail forward does not mean that success comes from trying again and again the same way. It means that the story does not stop. For some players, the GM will have to provide clues that lead to an alternative. Other players, like mine, will figure out something else on their own, and the GM's job is to improvise the new path.
I'm GMing this AP as well right now, which is why the "book 5 plot required ritual" is one of my examples. :)
These are good examples. My players are similar. They'll find a way if they want to do it. That's why I'm okay with saying "you can't pick the lock", rather than "you failed but can keep rolling infinitely until you succeed."
"You tried and figured out this approach won't work" is a more fail-forward approach than RAW. It tells them to try something else. It doesn't mean they auto-succeed. Quite the opposite since I actually just flat out failed them in that case. But it does mean something happened.
Players are very creative if you give them a reason to be. :) And in this case, saying "you can't pick the lock this way" is a more interesting outcome than "nothing happens, reroll".
Time as a resource works well when it's a limited resource in universe. But ticking clocks come with their own issues.
without knowing what the DC is in advance, I think punitive results from a single failure trying to pick a lock is a bit harsh. Like, if a party comes to a room with 2 doors, one of which is locked and the other leads back out into a long hall with other doors still unexplored, and the party listens carefully at the door and hears nothing, I don't think it is a big problem for the first attempt to pick the lock to just end in a failure or a critical failure with a broken pick, and for the party to then talk about whether it is worth trying to keep at this task or go a different direction. If they decide to go with this door, and keep rolling, then it is probably time for the GM to think about whether there is a fun, logical consequence to have happen after a certain number of rolls, or if there really isn't and it is time to just say, "you keep at it for several minutes and finally get the lock open." But if the party has buffs that only last a minute or even 10, then it might be worth keeping track of rolls because trying to furiously pick a lock as fast as you can for a minute would probably be some what tiring, and might justify adding a fort save every 10 rolls with a DC related to the level of the lock, or else the player gets fatigue. But if they only do one or two checks a minute then they don't have to roll.
These kinds of things feel best as suggested ideas in a GM resource guide, not a default for the skill activity as a whole because there will be times that they would just add needless complexity to a situation and not fun tension. THis is why I continue to argue that "failing forward" in PF2 is usually best done as a narrative device on the part of the GM or adventure writer, and not a mechanic that to be built into the skill activities themselves. Not for PF2. I agree there are games that do it well in their own world and game space, but that PF2 is too open ended as far a tone and yet such a ridgid game play style that working these kind of things into activities that happen in combat encounters and in exploration mode is more trouble than it is worth with the existing system.
Changing the way that all of these multimodal skill activities work to build in fail forward would just be a herculean task.
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I wish hero points had a fail-forward mechanic to them. Too often, spending a hero point is a disappointment. Wish there was something like if you spend a hero point and roll lower, you still use the lower result but learn from your failure, giving you a +1 next time you make the same type of roll.
To clarify, "time as a resource" I think only works if time is a limited resource, and specifically limited enough for individual attempts to matter. Even a 10-minute activity is not going to be very meaningful if the party has all day to do the dungeon. and there aren't enough things to do in it for there to be any real time pressure. This is why Blades in the Dark has a clock system to mark how many activities you get to do overall before bad stuff happens. The system also establishes a difference between "soft moves," i.e. minor bad stuff the GM uses mostly to introduce complications or signal to the party that they need to get moving, and "hard moves," i.e. full-blown negative consequences, so it's not like failing a check has to always result in catastrophe either.
With all of that said, though, I don't think clocks necessarily ought to be the solution in Pathfinder: putting aside how it would require implementing a new subsystem (which is fine) and mandating it for exploration (which is less fine), not every exploration includes time pressure: Blades in the Dark is a game about heists, which are time-sensitive, so it makes sense for the party to be on a clock, but exploration in Pathfinder can also be much less limited by time constraints, and that's okay. For this reason, I think the solution more adapted to PF2e might be to bake failing forward directly into degrees of success: the failure effect needn't be severe or even that bad at all, so long as it moves things along. If failing to Pick a Lock still counts as successes towards unlocking the thing, but leaves visible traces of tampering, whereas the success no longer leaves those traces, that means you still get to open the door as you would by brute-forcing the check, but the GM gets a more tangible hook to work with as well if they want to introduce a complication later down the line. In the situation where the party's cleared the floor of monsters and is trying to unlock the doors, that kind of failure effect would have the same net consequences as now, only the party wouldn't need to repeat the same check over and over again.
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I wish hero points had a fail-forward mechanic to them. Too often, spending a hero point is a disappointment. Wish there was something like if you spend a hero point and roll lower, you still use the lower result but learn from your failure, giving you a +1 next time you make the same type of roll.
We run with a house rule in local games around me where if this happens, you get the hero point back. This doesn't take away the sting of things going wrong, but does mean you at least didn't also lose the hero point.
(Specifically if you use a hero point on a failure/critical failure and the result doesn't improve, you get it back. If you try to crit fish when you're already succeeding, you don't get it back.)
I've also seen house rules where instead of rerolling, hero points just bump the degree of success by 1. I don't like this one as much personally because it removes the risk of things getting worse, but it has the advantage of using a hero point always feels impactful.
YMMV. :)
I have two stories about very weird time deadlines. My players exceed deadlines so far in advance that I have to rewrite plots.
I was running the 2nd module of Ironfang Invasion and reading ahead to the 3rd module, Assault on Longshadow. I saw in Assault on Longshadow that the Ironfang Legion had conquered the village of Radya's Hollow already and wiped out most of the residents. The party had to rescue the survivors. That story would be especially sad for the player character Zinfandel. The player had chosen Radya's Hollow from a map as Zinfandel's home town, and the events would mean that his family was wiped out.
Except that the party was weeks ahead of the schedule laid out in the adventure path. They had acomplished in days what the 1st module said would take weeks. Technically, Radya's Hollow had not yet been conquered. Therefore, I altered the plot. The party encountered some refugees who said that an Ironfang army was marching toward Radya's Hollow. The party rushed there in time to find the village beseiged. And they defeated the army to save the town and Zinfandel's parents and brother. And the party taking out an army much bigger than them was awesome combat.
In Hurricane's Howl, 3rd module of Strength of Thousands, the party had to chase a bandit gang cross country. In the module, they do not catch up to the bandit raiding party, since the bandits had a one-day head start, so they would go all the way to bandit headquarters in Jula. But I knew how fast the party is. The raiding party was afoot. The party routinely summoned Marvelous Mounts. The bard Jinx had just learned Umbral Journey and Sending. Jinx could cast Sending to ask one of the villagers kidnapped by the bandits about their location and catch up to them at high speed on their Marvelous Mounts. The party would never reach Jula.
Therefore, I rewrote the plot. The bandits were riding giant frogs for speed (the frogs showed up later in the module). Other bandits stole a boat and were taking it down the river. The party quickly caught up to the bandits in the boat and fought them in a riverside ambush. That delayed the party a day. Then they got word via Sending that some captives had escaped--this was in the module--so they rescued those escapees who had gotten into other trouble. That delayed them another day. Then the Magaambya Academy sent them a care package of upgraded gear to a Magaambyan contact in Jula, so they went to Jula first via Umbral Journey. With the help of Jula local Kittyhawk they traveled backwards along the bandit raiding party's route to ambush them at a mountain bridge.
They are proceeding through the latter chapters of Hurricane's Howl so quickly that they will return to the Magaambya in time for their summer classes. But I accomplished the goal of getting them to Jula before they caught the bandit raiders. They will return to Jula to deal with bandit headquarters.
Putting my player characters under the time limit of a deadline would be tough when the deadline clock says, "You are two weeks early." On the other hand, I have fun letting them take advantage of their extra time.
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Regarding clocks:
I agree that they can be a great GM tool, but that PF2 covers too many different tones and styles of play to bake them into the game mechanically. GMs probably should have some kind of notes about time and approximately what it means for the story for time to pass, but I don’t think it is a good idea to dial that in too strictly to adventure writing.
Like that works well for video games and for games where complete failure is common or expected, but standardizing play around time too strictly dials up the extent to which optimization around speed running the game defines game difficulty, and PF2 itself is not really built to require that. Many tables do approach it that way anyway, but I think a lot of players who hate using consumables or limited resources would rage-rebel when time becomes a more valuable resource than wealth. It is one of those things where GMs can add timers (secret or revealed to the players) to increase difficulty more easily than GMs will know how to remove them or dial them back if they are tough to lead to campaign ending results.
One of the most brutal and successful things I ever did as a GM was when I was running the first book of Wrath of the Righteous in PF1. There is a large dungeon in that book that I turned into a gauntlet with a little real horde of demons rushing back to defend a mcguffin. So my visible clock to the PCs was an army of low level (non teleporting) demons that surrounded the dungeon and started streaming in through every possible entrance. The entire dungeon basically ran as 105 round unending encounter. The pcs just barely got through it by the skin of their teeth, but the players were hyper optimizers and things had gotten too easy up to that point so they loved the feeling of the gloves coming off and feeling like the fate of the world (or at least worldwound) hung in the balance of every action.
You just cannot write APs for PF1 or 2 to start off at that level of intensity. It has to be a dial that GMs are able to play with and adjust as they lean their players, the characters and the tone of the specific table.
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This is a pretty good discussion, the idea of failing forward clearly has a lot of nuance to it. After all this my thinking stands like this:
* Failing on something and the adventure grinding to a full stop is bad.
* Failing on something and having to just try again and again until you succeed is also bad. Even if there's no cost/consequence to it.
"Failing forward" is trying to avoid either of those (somewhat opposite) extremes.
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Thinking about lock picking, we've established the mechanic works okay at the time pressure of an encounter. The rogue getting a potential ally out of manacles while the fighter keeps enemies busy, that's fine. If you fail too many checks, it'll take longer and be a harder fight, or you might have to flee and leave them behind.
Or maybe the room is filling with lava and you need to rescue someone chained to the wall. If you can't pick the lock in time, you can... try to melt the chains? But that's gonna leave some burn scars. Or (grisly) chop off their hand to get them loose. Or maybe the lava weakens the wall (but everyone takes fire damage). If rescuing this person is required for the plot you can still fail forward here.
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Now we wanna move the lockpicking to an exploration scene. We'd be using a better lock that's harder to crack than the one we chose for the encounter scene of course. We're not in "every second counts" territory and breaking a pick isn't severe enough to stop you. So you could roll a few hundred checks and get it open. Or maybe calculate the probabilities and how many checks on average it would take. But those aren't really fun solutions.
What we need are interesting stakes, and a few checks. The stakes could be for example, "do they PCs get the lock open before the next patrol comes by?" And say every check takes 2 minutes, and the next patrol is gonna swing by in 10 minutes. On a success, the PCs open the lock and slip into the next room undetected. On a failure, they have to deal with the patrol. If the patrol doesn't report back, the facility will go on high alert ten minutes later. However, once you've defeated the patrol and your quiet infiltration is busted anyway, you might as well just kick in the door and leave heavy traces. So the adventure continues.
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last night we did a big boss encounter where the boss spent a lot of the 10 rounds it took to down them doing a specific mechanic. The consequences of this is that it makes it harder/take longer to find the plot device (on top of making the fight slightly harder). As far as we know time isn't an issue so this seems rather pointless.
As others have pointed out, the situation of fail a roll until you succeed with nothing else happening comes up a LOT in APs.
It only needs to come up once and it can be one of the things that you always remember about that adventure.
Whenever a roll is important to the plot, or needed to move forward, something should happen no matter the result of the roll. It should be written into the situation in the AP that things happen and fit into that specific situation.
Just failing and rolling over and over is wasting your players time. If they will eventually succeed and nothing else is happening then the rolls don't need to happen. You can roll once for the activity and tell them how long it takes and why.
It's even worse when the roll is for dealing with a haunt or hazard that you NEED to turn off to continue, like in FotRP. Having your highest roller need a 17+ to succeed while other bad stuff is happening isn't fun. At the very least these things should be about the speed you can get them done before the bad thing overwhelms you, not IF you can ever do it.
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IMO, "fail forward" is one area which PF1e handled better than PF2e does. With the "take-10" and "take-20" mechanics: average difficulty task, "take-10" and treat the result as if you rolled a 10 (useable in most situations); no pressure or penalty for failure, "take-20" and spend time as if making twenty checks with a result as if you rolled each number from 1 to 20 once.
The Assurance feat doesn't (again, IMO) provide the same narrative "assurance" for a "fail forward" mechanic. Except for a handful of use cases that are not usually adventure- or plot-related. I understand the "four degrees of success" paradigm in PF2e would make Assurance a "must have" feat if it worked like the old "take-10," but there should be some more effort to reduce and mitigate adventure "choke-points" that rely on getting a specific result on a check.
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* Failing on something and the adventure grinding to a full stop is bad.
Yes and no. Failing and having to try something else is fine. The real problem here is if the adventure or the GM have set the scenario so that there is only one way through. Unfortunately that is the simplest way to write adventures. A better adventure will have multiple ways through. Maybe the players fail and the lock is inpenetrable, but perhaps you can physically bypass it, maybe there is a key to find, maybe an NPC has information about a code or a weakness. I like to give the players options and to explore. This way the players and the dice have agency.
To me that is the heart of traditional RPGs. If you take it away you have a different mostly narrative game. They have their place too and can be great games but they are not the same.
Just allowing the party to proceed on a failure is in a sense cheating. It is bad adventure design. I guess it is acceptable on occassion if you find yourself in a corner as a GM, but not as the default rule.
* Failing on something and having to just try again and again until you succeed is also bad. Even if there's no cost/consequence to it.
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Thinking about lock picking, we've established the mechanic works okay at the time pressure of an encounter. The rogue getting a potential ally out of manacles while the fighter keeps enemies busy, that's fine. If you fail too many checks, it'll take longer and be a harder fight, or you might have to flee and leave them behind.
For sure in combat the loss of time and actions is often a penalty enough in itself. The issue is out of combat the time pressure is often not there. So a rule to cover both is more complex.
I prefer to use a principle from IT called exponential backoff. Basically if you allow a retry then it takes a lot more time. So if you fail it as an action a retry takes a minute, if you fail it as a minute then a retry is going to take you most of the day. Kicking it from in encounter, to exploration, then to downtime and keeping the total number of retrys finite and sane but not making the result inevitable. As a GM it is easy enough to arrange for consequences to each of these results.
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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.
Ach, for some reason I misread 'ability' in the general sense of your character's capabilities, and not the much more obvious game mechanical 'ability/attribute score' sense. In that case, yes, it was obvious you were assuming two equally trained characters... I remain unconvinced that the distinction between a high and low attribute is meaningfully threatened by greater implementation of fail-forward mechanics (even accounting for needing to repair one of your picks), but I'll not rehash that bit.
I appreciate that you don't want (simple) failure to be eliminated, but I suspect I must have missed where any of the recommendations here or in the Fail Forward entry in the GM Core suggest that this was ever in consideration. The most stringent advocate for Fail Forward here doesn't seem to want to eliminate failure--not even simple failure. It's clear that some adventures would profit from thinking of success/failure not as 'did the thing happen' but 'how badly did doing the thing go?' and also that a well-written adventure may include both those types of check and the type where failure merely remind or enlightens you about other ways into the building that you might not have believed possible.
On this we seem largely to agree, failure should not be eliminated.
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On that note, I do think that exponential backoff can be an excellent solution to checks where there logically must be an obstacle but which would generate nigh-meaningless rerolls until it was gone. And it's easy to explain why in the lockpick example the second check might take longer than the first--each failure jams or damages the mechanism just enough (or even set off an internal protection) that the job just got more complicated (if not more difficult) and time consuming to pull off.
I wonder if there are other checks which could benefit from this? Treat Wounds already does to an extent (lockout for 1 hour instead of takes 1 hour, but it doesn't seem productive to escalate beyond that).
Incidentally, this thread could probably profit from some extra examples of scenarios where Fail Forward might help (and how) aside from the evergreen locked door. There's a reason why that one in particular shows up in every description of Fail Forward mechanics, but it might be useful to illustrate other ways to improve on narrative outcomes.
There's of course the ritual examples that brought Tridus here, albeit that example as well as at least one other AP ritual I know of are basically magical equivalents of locked doors that lead to the rest of the adventure. The second of these rituals actually includes Fail Forward mechanics--on a failure, you succeed in doing what you need to do, but suffer a magical backlash that impairs you for a while after.
Realistically, Fail Forward is a valuable tool to add consequences to any narratively significant skill use for which failure would normally end the story. If letting the players roll no longer means the encounter automatically fails with one die toss, you can afford to allow skill expression in even high stakes scenarios.
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"When you have to make a roll, something should always change" is a good concept. Even when it's a bit indirect.
Now, a lot of mechanics are on the basis of "success - something happens; failure - nothing happens; critical failure - go backward". That seems to conflict with this idea.
But often, it works fine:
- In combat, you're trying to Disable Device a complex hazard and fail. Nothing happens directly, but the hazard gets another turn to attack you. So indirectly, there was a consequence.
- In a skill challenge, if you fail, you don't get a VP for your action. Which matters, because you usually only have X rounds to get Y points. Call it a "clock" like Teridax if you will.
Both of those mechanisms work quite well. It's the kind of loose, unstructured exploration mode checks where it can break down. You need to get through this door, so you need to pick the lock. It's a hard check but it takes only 2 actions and you have an hour, so you can try 600 times.
Or: you need to Track the BBEG for the adventure to continue. You fail. But the adventure absolutely requires it to be successful. So... now you just get to try again? Or a lame NPC comes to rescue you?
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I don't think we can really solve these just with a standard rule to follow in all cases. It's more about teaching the pattern and showing the GM a variety of tools to pick from to handle a situation. It's more about somewhat abstract styles of "how do we go on from this impasse?" than that the outcome of for example failing to pick a lock always has to be the same.
If the PCs fail to overcome a challenge, the adventure can move on by...
- paying a cost; they need to use an expensive scroll to passwall
- losing out on a reward; the GM says "eventually you get through, but by now they've evacuated some of their treasury"
- losing an advantage: the party had to noisily break down the door, so now the enemies heard them coming
- gaining a disadvantage: the party didn't get through the jungle well, so they start out sickened in the first fight afterward
- losing a strategic choice: because the PCs can't open this door, they have to explore the other corridor first and hope they find a key there
- losing time; they get a round less in the next skill challenge
... and many more. All of these do fail "wish we did better there" without causing the adventure to crash.
Incidentally, this thread could probably profit from some extra examples of scenarios where Fail Forward might help (and how) aside from the evergreen locked door. There's a reason why that one in particular shows up in every description of Fail Forward mechanics, but it might be useful to illustrate other ways to improve on narrative outcomes.
Every example of a must-succeed bottleneck in an adventure path that I know could be matched with 20 examples of where my players took their own path in the adventure and I had to improvise everything. Thus, they do not stand out. But I remember a few.
In Siege of Stone in the Ironfang Invasion adventure path, the PCs were on a side quest to learn about the Obsidian Key that the Ironfang Legion used to create portals called Stone Roads to move their armies quickly. Their investigation took them to the Dwarven Sky Citadel Kraggodan, where the Obsidian Key had once been stored in an ancient dwarven reliquary. They needed the permission of the Evenhanded Synod, a governing body in Kraggodan, to gain legitimate access to the reliquary. The module spends 3 pages describing an Influence Point system by which the party can persuade the Evenhanded Synod. They could earn up to 12 successes. And the module writer planned for a possible failure.
0–4 Successes: The PCs utterly fail to convince enough of the Evenhanded Synod of their noble intentions, or even the veracity of their tale. The dwarves instead believe the PCs are neither evil nor well-intentioned; they likely see the PCs as delusional, incompetent, or more likely, both. The dwarves agree to allow the PCs one final night to rest and settle any remaining business they might have in the city, but the next day, they are to be escorted out of the city, either through a surface exit (safely delivered to Molthune, if they chose) or back into the Darklands tunnels (before that path is sealed). See One Last Chance at the beginning of Part 4 for more details on how to proceed with this dire outcome.
The One Last Chance is that an ally in Kraggodan will sneak them into the reliquary that night, which means they have no additional resources and no chance to exit the reliquary to rest and recuperate, which my party had to do.
Or: you need to Track the BBEG for the adventure to continue. You fail. But the adventure absolutely requires it to be successful. So... now you just get to try again? Or a lame NPC comes to rescue you?
NPC Cirieo Thessaddin was literally lame. A dragon had bitten off one leg a few weeks before. The PCs in Fangs of War, 2nd module of Ironfang Invasion, were looking for the Chernasardo Rangers, the official protectors of that corner of Nirmathas, and visiting their three secret forts to find them. But none of the party's allies knew the locations of the forts. Fort Ristin was nearby and the PCs were expected to find it simply by searching and asking friendly inhabitants of the Fangwood Forest. Cirieo was the last surviving Chernasardo Ranger from Fort Ristin, locked up in its dungeon. The party was supposed to rescue him and he would guide them to the other two forts.
The module does not mention how the PCs would find the other two forts if they did not rescue Cirieo. I guess they would keep searching and have many random encounters with hostile fey in the Fangwood Forest as they searched. In my own game, two more players joined the campaign at the 2nd fort, one of whom was my younger daughter. She played a leshy fey-bloodline sorcerer who was born in the Fangwood Forest, so she also knew the locations of all three forts.
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Here is what I am taking away from this thread:
1. Time is always a resource that matters, but when it is being measured at a scale that feels irrelevant to the mode of play the game is currently in, it can feel meaningless to track, in the same way that tracking economic resources at a scale irrelevant to the party’s current level can feel like a waste of time to players. PF2 engages in a fair number of these “carefully track resources” mechanics in activities that only really work at certain levels or in certain modes of the game (encounter, for example with picking locks). Players don’t usually mind them that much except when it feels like they frequently encounter these activities outside of the game mode they were designed for.
2. The value of locked doors in dungeons has changed over decades and edition changes. They are practically more of an aesthetic at this point in PF2, but an asthetic that can be made relevant fairly easily in a couple of different ways, but usually either by: the GM having a lot of experience, tools, and skill at reading the table and knowing when to move on; or the adventure writer has to have plans for every locked door that will make sure that it is being handled at the mode of play that it will be encountered at. pF2 assumes this to be encounter mode and locks don’t really need any modifications at that mode, but currently the only mechanical way that PF2 has to make lock picking interesting at exploration mode is to employ some kind of VP/clock system, whether that is transparent to the players or not; Or I guess maybe a third, really limit the party’s access to extra picks or the ability to repair theirs. That last one is probably bad for adventure writers to try to do outside of very contrived scenarios like the party has been captured and has limited resources until they find their gear. Otherwise it kinda has to be a party by party equation best handled by the GM.
3. People have different ideas about what fail forward means, and I think that is ok. Broadly, a. everyone seems to understand that it means that it is not good when the game stops because the party cannot accomplish a task. There is a significant block here that also feels that b. failing forward means that it should not just apply to the campaign significant beats of the adventure, but to any challenge on the game that calls for die rolls.
I would argue that the mechanics of PF2 are generally pretty good a part A. In order for a locked door to stop the party from continuing the campaign, there would have to be no other way to bypass the door or the lock, and the ability to pick the lock would have to be impossible for the party. Having the activities that interact with doors have no significant failure consequence at the mode of play the party encounters the challenge at means the locked door will never actually stop forward progress and it is up to the players (including the GM) to create the story of how the door eventually opens. To me, this is a feature as it is pretty easy as a GM to utilize tools to keep multiple checks interesting, but it is a skill that requires practice and development to dial in. In this context, the principle of “failing forward” is a GM tool to use to keep the story moving forward even as some checks fail to accomplish the task they were performed to accomplish.
Part B of 3 seems to be what people are asking for more of when they are asking for “fail forward” to be integrated into the mechanics of the game. Others here have explained this position in plenty detail and more clearly than I will be able to recap, because I am skeptical of this being a good idea at the game development level, and a little less skeptical at the adventure design level. I agree there are games that do this, so it is not mechanically impossible, but it clashes with moderately crunchy design of PF2. I am concerned it will lead to activities getting needlessly prescriptive for how GMs should handle challenges, and likely result in every challenge kind of feeling the same mechanically. I think adventure writers choosing when to use tools to shift the mode of play to best match the challenge they are creating can work much better at avoiding both pitfalls, but covering the consequence of every scenario where the party might stumble into the challenge can be impossible or waste a lot of page space for situations that might only be relevant to 50 or even 25% of tables that play the adventure. It is better when GMs are expected to have some tools at hand and adventure writers can just point GMs at those tools rather than formalizing how they should be employed in every challenge.
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Not sure if this is related, but I feel it kind of fits in. I had a player who felt like they were not contributing to the party, because every time they aided another PC, they felt they wasted their action because the PCs receiving the bonus to their roll either failed despite the bonus or succeeded on their own, not needing the bonus. I guess this is more aiding forward than failing forward, but there is a lot of overlap. This can happen with aiding another, guidance, or other ability or spell that gives a bonus to a roll.
I kind of feel that succeding to only do nothing at times, can feel, worse than failing to do something. I'm wondering if something like using guidance to help someone with a strike, but when they roll high enough on their own, instead of that +1 to hit being meaningless to strike, it would then be applied as a +1 to damage instead, would help.
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Not sure if this is related, but I feel it kind of fits in. I had a player who felt like they were not contributing to the party, because every time they aided another PC, they felt they wasted their action because the PCs receiving the bonus to their roll either failed despite the bonus or succeeded on their own, not needing the bonus. I guess this is more aiding forward than failing forward, but there is a lot of overlap. This can happen with aiding another, guidance, or other ability or spell that gives a bonus to a roll.
I kind of feel that succeding to only do nothing at times, can feel, worse than failing to do something. I'm wondering if something like using guidance to help someone with a strike, but when they roll high enough on their own, instead of that +1 to hit being meaningless to strike, it would then be applied as a +1 to damage instead, would help.
It's the math. When Aid gives a +1 circumstance bonus, then successful Aid will matter only 2 time out of 20, 10% of the d20 rolls. The other 90% of the time, Aid will have no effect. The 2 times are rolling a failure that is 1 short of a success and rolling a success that is 1 short of a critical success. Aid is a weak action.
My players stopped using Aid during combat at low levels during pre-Remaster PF2, because success required rolling against DC 20. Now they use Aid only during exploration mode when Aid is better than sitting around doing nothing while the most skilled character performs an activity.
However, our bard regularly uses Courageous Anthem during combat, even though it costs her one action per turn. Its boost to attack rolls is only +1, which has no effect 90% of the time, and the +1 to damage is trivial when the damage rolls average around 25 damage. But we had around 30 attack rolls in our game session yesterday, and Courageous Anthem twice converted a regular hit into a critical hit. Courageous Anthem is stronger than Aid, because it affects all allies, not just one.
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My players stopped using Aid during combat at low levels during pre-Remaster PF2
For those who might not otherwise be aware, I just wanted to point out that the Aid action is insanely good in combat at high levels, where it can grant as much as a +4 bonus with almost no effort.
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+1 to an attack adds about +1/6 damage vs. typical enemies. (A dev demonstrated the math in the first playtest when 3.X/PF1 players grumbled.) At low levels that's about 2 damage for an action & Reaction, which means your PC should have something better to do during combat (eventually for both). +1 to actions w/o a critical/2x success fare even worse. As mentioned, it's still helpful when you're doing nothing, but hopefully you've built a PC who seldom has to do nothing. Moving into flanking, using Demoralize, or casting/Raising a shield have more impact. As RD said, the return & certainty on Aid rises a lot at higher levels, yet your actions & Reactions should've become more valuable too. This makes choosing interesting rather than must-do/don't.
And asking for a bonus even when your PC doesn't actually help does tie into the OP's premise; shouldn't PCs progress even when they fail? In broader plot strokes that involve the players'/table's momentum, I'd say mostly. Keep the narrative flowing, even if diverted. But in specific combat action? No, no more than a missed Strike should automatically have impact. Like said by Mathmuse, Aid is a weak action, at least in combat. Plus faulty actions in combat don't derail the narrative or pause the game itself; the ebb and flow of combat's necessary IMO so there's tension, which an action-fantasy narrative requires.
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Not sure if this is related, but I feel it kind of fits in. I had a player who felt like they were not contributing to the party, because every time they aided another PC, they felt they wasted their action because the PCs receiving the bonus to their roll either failed despite the bonus or succeeded on their own, not needing the bonus. I guess this is more aiding forward than failing forward, but there is a lot of overlap. This can happen with aiding another, guidance, or other ability or spell that gives a bonus to a roll.
This is a bit of a different thing, since sometimes a bonus won't make a difference. You can't know that ahead of time (usually). Aid for +1 isn't great in general because it often won't do anything and you should have something better to do. That can change in skill challenges where maybe for whatever reason only one person can attempt it, in which case someone else doing aid to give them a bonus is basically all upside.
Of course when it does matter, it matters a lot. Courageous Anthem is +1 but it's pretty good. The key thing there is to make sure players know when that +1 does swing an outcome. It feels great when you turn a miss into a hit or a hit into a crit, but only if you know that happened. Foundry has a module to automate it, but it should be pointed out in person as well.
As for guidance... well, one of the reasons I like Amp Guidance so much is that you know it works because you can only use it when it would change the outcome. It's never wasted. Also it's +2 at level 11.
I kind of feel that succeding to only do nothing at times, can feel, worse than failing to do something. I'm wondering if something like using guidance to help someone with a strike, but when they roll high enough on their own, instead of that +1 to hit being meaningless to strike, it would then be applied as a +1 to damage instead, would help.
I feel like in a situation like this the answer is "get yourself something better to do with that action". That character should have something they can do themselves to help win the fight rather than trying to spam Aid for a +1 to hit. "Add attack and damage for 1 action" is literally what Courageous Anthem does, after all, and that's a class ability so probably shouldn't be something everyone just gets.
We quite like foundry in that respect. Not just for Guidance, but all the bonuses - it tells you when they made a difference. Definitely pleasing to see it pop up that your off-guard guidance demoralize turned a miss into a hit. Our GM likes it too, and he regularly points out when this happens.
100% those callouts make characters doing those things get their moment in the spotlight. I had a player once who didn't feel like it was that effective until I pointed out "that creature's attack would have been a crit, but it's a hit thanks to X."
I have to say, though, that in our group nobody really complains about Guidance being wasted. It's true that most of the time it doesn't make a difference. But I think everyone in our group is cool with the idea that it could, and is sometimes more relevant than the alternative uses of that action. You are buying improved possibility for an action, and both our martials and casters like that. Our GM is a bit of a stickler on what counts as Aid though, so that may be a factor at our table which improves it's relative value for us - Guidance just works, no descriptive acrobatics needed to justify the bonus and no GM "no", which ultimately means more rounds and scenes per hour of game time and less time rules haggling.
Yeah, same. I think Guidance is fine. You use it when you want to try to get an extra edge. It does its thing without fuss.
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Not sure if this is related, but I feel it kind of fits in. I had a player who felt like they were not contributing to the party, because every time they aided another PC, they felt they wasted their action because the PCs receiving the bonus to their roll either failed despite the bonus or succeeded on their own, not needing the bonus. I guess this is more aiding forward than failing forward, but there is a lot of overlap. This can happen with aiding another, guidance, or other ability or spell that gives a bonus to a roll.I feel like in a situation like this the answer is "get yourself something better to do with that action". That character should have something they can do themselves to help win the fight rather than trying to spam Aid for a +1 to hit. "Add attack and damage for 1 action" is literally what Courageous Anthem does, after all, and that's a class ability so probably shouldn't be something everyone just gets.
This came up in a scenario I was running, the subsystem used was one where one of the PCs' only real choices was aid, and a custom 2-action inspire that was basically a + 2 aid, that could help more than one PC on a Crit, repeat for 5 rounds. It stood out to me because it's the first time I saw someone frustrated with both failing and succeeding at their dice rolls. If they had been able to succeed when succeeding, or failing forward, I thought it would help. I mostly see this in subsystems when a player doesn't engage with it; often, it's a character without social skills in an influence of other complex social encounters. It's odd I've seen players miss most of their attack rolls and be disappointed but not frustrated with it, but get frustrated at missing or even making skill checks in a social encounter. Just seems like a good situation for some kind of fail-forward mechanism.
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I feel the above argument only works if the consequence is specifically combat, and even then, the issue is simply that the failure is incurring something that's rewarding, not that failing forward as a concept is flawed. If the bad outcome to failing forward turns out to be a good outcome, then the issue is that the outcome was not valued appropriately in design.
Just to give an example of how picking a lock could be handled to fail forward: if the current success was the failure effect instead, and succeeding left no trace of tampering, then in the vast majority of cases, all you'd be doing is shortening the number of checks it would take to pick a lock, as nearly every outcome would lead to opening it. However, failing would still leave a GM hook to do something about it later on: perhaps the local merchant whose vault you raided could send assassins, but they could also just spread rumors about you that would make the local settlement less helpful towards the party, and that would incur consequences the party might want to avoid. If the GM wants to do nothing about it, then this wouldn't require them to either.
Why not add a trap to that door? That'd be something the party wouldn't want added to their combat.
Or give the enemies something useful to do when they prep, like cast buff spells, move tables as barriers, equip themselves, maybe even send a runner for reinforcements.
Or the benefit to themselves of timing their own buffs instead of burning them waiting for the door, choosing the frontline instead of having enemies come around an unexpected direction, giving them more time to rest afterward because no alarm's been raised.
That's simple stuff to add that's been intrinsic to RPGs/dungeon design from day one, and I'm sure more could be imagined given devs get paid for this and (should) have a better sense of the scenario & environs.
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I have said most of what I have to say about why I don’t think Fail forward should be a mechanic built into skill actions, however, I do want to point out that GMs don’t have to XP for combat encounters that are not really an essential part of the story, and this comes up in APs with some frequency. If the party was going to receive a story award for getting to a place via skills, it is perfectly fine to cap the combat xp award at the story award, or to add the encounter XP value to the story reward for getting by without combat.
Not every skill check earns XP. Not every creature killed earns XP, and XP can and should be awarded where it feels like that kind of reward make sense. GMs should not be afraid of using fail forward as a narrative mechanic because of giving the party too much xp. Borrow the XP from somewhere else or add more to the scene just for funsies, and not just to accommodate for more combat than anticipated.
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These days it's also not unusual to use Milestone leveling instead of XP, at which point random fights with guards aren't really rewarding anymore.
But if that doesn't feel Failure enough - showing that the players missed treasure is a decent fail state. Maybe the players being noisy triggered the enemies disposing of evidence, running away with loot, drinking potions etc.
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My players stopped using Aid during combat at low levels during pre-Remaster PF2For those who might not otherwise be aware, I just wanted to point out that the Aid action is insanely good in combat at high levels, where it can grant as much as a +4 bonus with almost no effort.
I wouldn’t say insanely good, it looks strong in a vacuum but by that point an action and reaction (and positioning) is a steep cost with many competitors. It needs to be pretty good to be worth doing in those conditions.
It kind of has to be, no? Otherwise you just move one "you simply didn't open the door" into the next such obstacle - e.g., you fall into a pit that puts you in the dungeon and are now, instead, behind another locked door. "Here's another skill check that you can still fail in the same way." The only definitive way past this roadblock is with an obstacle that can be absolutely and universally bested by any class in the game, which is, definitively, combat.
That really isn't the only option, though? Like I said, the consequences can be that subsequent challenges become harder, not simply that you encounter another challenge that you resolve in the same way.
And the issue of the value of the outcome is kind of inherent to the philosophy of "Fail Forward," no? The whole point is to be able to improvise solutions to stop stonewall moments, or to build them into the adventure, which then brings up the complaints in the later paragraphs of my post.
I really don't think so, no. If I go to the party and say "you failed this check, so you get a million gold," that's not a problem with failing forward, that's a problem with me misidentifying positive and negative consequences. It is technically an error any GM can make, but you identified the problem and, as Unicore points out, that encounter does not need to award XP, so the GM has all the tools at their disposal to not make the wrong call.
The first sounds like "bypassing the door but sending combat as a reward for failing" with extra steps.
Yes, that is the point. The consequences can be combat, whether now or later, that much is fine so long as you don't just turn it into free additional XP.
The latter is interesting, but I also see that being perceived as BS by the players at my table. I'll have to think on it more.
Why would that be perceived as BS?
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While I like the idea of Fail Forward Design, I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I think a major concern I have with it, at least as I understand it, is that you may stop incentivizing specialization.
When the players catch on that they're in a "Fail Forward" game, they may start to push against success, especially if failing is more rewarding - which it inherently is because of reduced investments needed to fail vs succeed.
In the oft-cited example presented so far in these threads:
Jim tries to pick the lock. He fails. This alerts the guards on the other side (who may not have previously been there and were added to accommodate failing forward.) These guards open the door and initiate combat. This seems like some Fail-Forward-Positive design, since they continue to move past the plot-necessary door despite failing the thievery check to unlock it.
What this fails to consider is that combat is a desirable thing in Pathfinder. Whereas a generous GM might make a lock a slight hazard that rewards a pittance of experience (if any at all), a combat comes with the promise of more experience entirely based on the difficulty of the encounter.
Once the players catch on to this consistent design, they start to want to fail. They stop having Jim pick locks, and instead knock loudly on the door to intentionally initiate combat to get experience while still accomplishing the goal of "unlocking" the door. The players learn to gamify Fail Forward design. This further incentivizes combat skills, since you don't need to invest in non-combat skills (since you'll always Fail Forward.)
There are several options aside from "failing to pick a lock creates a combat the players want":
1. Failing to pick the lock causes a fail safe to go off, and the door is magically sealed. Players cannot pick the lock.
2. Failing to pick a lock starts a combat, but the players are in a time sensitive situation and can't retreat without consequences, so meaningless combat is draining them of time and spells they need to complete the dungeon. aka: initiating this combat is actively harmful.
This can also work if if the lock summons in creatuers every time they fail, since there's no treasure in that and it doesn't even remove enemies from the dungeon.
3. The lock is trapped and the trap goes off.
A consistent thing I see people doing in this thread is taking one example of how to handle something in one specific situation and using that to say the whole idea doesn't work, while giving a pass to the cases where the current rules don't work.
Also, deliberately being bad at a skill to get the fail effect stops working real fast as soon as you hit a situation where failing has bigger consequences and you really want to succeed. If failing is better than success, either it's an odd set of circumstances or someone has set the outcomes up incorrectly to create such a situation. Like, failing to pick the lock doesn't have to result in the lock opening at all. If it instead results in "you can't pick the lock" now you need another way to get past that door and this whole clever gaming by the players falls apart.
This is why the game is run by a person and not a script: after all. While highwaymen might not have any other defenses besides a mundane lock, the Elder Lich almost certainly does.
Remember: the point is "the narrative state should change due to the results of the roll." Not "the players get what they want no matter what they roll."
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RE: not giving xp for unnecessary combats:
1. It is a bad precedent to set that anything your players kill should give them XP. Getting into fights unnecessarily shouldn’t be rewarded. Don’t let your party fight city guards just for more xp.
2. Do the inverse. Give the extra XP for the combat to the party that bypasses the combat. PF2 APs do this all the time. It can help cut down needless combats else where in the campaign and can really make boss encounters challenging if the party doesn’t find a noncombat way to enter the room.
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It is, once you extrapolate the system you're suggesting.
It's a branching, binary tree:
1) If success, bypass obstacle.
2) If fail, either:
2a) Bypass obstacle, combat ensues.
2b) Substitute obstacle. Go to 1.
No, it's not. As I am pointing out to you, there is also outcome 2c) Bypass obstacle, subsequent challenges in the adventure become more difficult. I have indicated this possibility to you several times at this stage, such that I'm not sure how I can communicate this any more clearly.
Now, let's implement what you said here about just ratcheting the difficult. Apply the same loop before, but append "ratchet difficulty" to both 2a and 2b. It results in 2b instead turning into the same roadblock of before, except now it becomes more and more hopeless, or it results in 2a quickly becomes a death encounter, stonewalling progress in the same way. You have reinvented a problem that Failing Forward was supposed to solve.
This reasoning is inconsistent. If failing forward is applied to these outcomes, then the party will always fail forward, including in those more difficult challenges. Your argument is also an oversimplification of what I've stated, as increasing the difficulty can mean introducing additional complications that don't just boil down to an increased DC, such as additional spells and countermeasures to deal with, loss of access to options that are normally taken for granted, and other effects that would make life more difficult for the party.
Good thing that kind of hyperbole isn't what I'm arguing for :)
You've missed the point entirely. The intentionally ridiculous example I picked is fundamentally the same as that of the combat you cited that grants bonus XP, because in both cases a reward is being misidentified as a negative outcome. The moral of the story in both cases is: don't give the party a reward when you're intending to apply a penalty.
For something story-important, like a ritual, you make the check easy enough that your player will, statistically, beat it. (There's a reason Rituals don't have an explicitly-defined DC tied to them!!!)
Uh, yes they do. Primary checks by default have a very hard DC for a level that's twice the ritual's rank, and secondary checks have a standard DC. I also think the above suggestion makes little sense: if the party absolutely has to succeed at a check or else be completely unable to progress, then there should be no check to begin with; the thing should just happen. Making the DC easier still allows for the possibility of failure, and therefore leaving the party stuck, so it does not fundamentally address the problem at hand.
That's not a great option when your players are expecting it. The expectation is that they win combat, they get XP.
Consider setting appropriate expectations for your party, then. A simple, small combat encounter that gives no XP ought to do it, especially if it results from a failed check.
Maybe it's our particular table dealing with the issue of people not really being able to trust past GM's, but I predict that my players would just feel like I was being vindictive/sadistic. Long-lasting social consequences that feel disconnected from the skill check they failed, just for failing a skill check asked for by the story, probably wouldn't go over well.
I don't know your players, but you don't have to be sadistic about it. So long as the challenge is interesting, proportionate, and tied to something identifiable (e.g. "the party left traces of their heist"), then that ought to enhance the roleplaying. If the fundamental issue is just that the party will not accept any negative outcome resulting from their own actions, then your table is dealing with another problem entirely.
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I feel that Ajaxius' concerns are a realistic trap that a GM can run into while misapplying Fail Forward principles, but ultimately I agree with the others - if it seems like you're rewarding a failed check, you're not really doing "Fail Forward" (unless, I guess, you consider "ability to keep playing the game and having fun" a reward, in which case Fail Forward may fundamentally disagree with your GM style).
If a plot-significant obstacle carries a chance of combat, there is a rich tradition of awarding story XP equal to the encounter level for bypassing it even without combat. I don't feel like it's any stretch to say that the combat and the obstacle can't carry the same XP reward - whether you decide that's 0 XP for the combat or combat XP for succeeding at the pick lock.
And of course, as has been pointed out many times already, you can just redesign the dungeon so that players' progression is never blocked by a locked door - that works too. But FF design is for addressing situations where there is an obstacle that could shut down play without just ignoring or removing it entirely. You don't need to resort to FF if you never use that kind of obstacle, which I think is where a lot of people get the idea that FF means never making your players' lives difficult
Incidentally, rituals do indeed have a set DC for both primary and secondary checks. You're allowed to adjust it for circumstances, but you're allowed to do that with all DCs so that doesnt make it different.
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RE: not giving xp for unnecessary combats:
1. It is a bad precedent to set that anything your players kill should give them XP. Getting into fights unnecessarily shouldn’t be rewarded. Don’t let your party fight city guards just for more xp.
Any game with milestone levelling doesn't have XP at all and it's a non-issue. Your goal becomes accomplishing things, not finding random encounters to farm XP.
Quite a few APs flat out work better this way because the design expects PCs to be a set level by a certain point, and if they're not it wildly warps the difficulty, which in one direction makes things trivial and in the other can make things super lethal. That's why APs often tell you things like "if your PCs aren't level X, give them random encounters until they are."
2. Do the inverse. Give the extra XP for the combat to the party that bypasses the combat. PF2 APs do this all the time. It can help cut down needless combats else where in the campaign and can really make boss encounters challenging if the party doesn’t find a noncombat way to enter the room.
This is how things are intended to be run and how every AP does it. Bypassing an encounter counts as defeating it for XP, as it should. Any encounter you can solve via Diplomacy or some other means is still solved despite there being no swords.
Honestly I don't think XP should be tied to creatures at all. It's best to think of it as tied to a scene. If you clear the scene, you get the XP for the scene. How you do that should not be relevant.
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I personally am a fan of XP and even of running APs on the slow XP Track so I can add a lot of side quests and story awards without jumping my party ahead too much. I even try to keep throwing treasure at them at the same rate per encounter even if they hit 3 to 5 more encounters (or 1 to 2 collapsed mega encounters) just to make sure I am not shorting them out on resources.
When I have been a player in milestone games, I find that we tend to speed rush dungeons just to level up faster and that has often resulted in not getting as much treasure as we should, and as a table that uses a lot of consumables, ABP doesn’t really help us (or casters generally).
I personally am a fan of XP and even of running APs on the slow XP Track so I can add a lot of side quests and story awards without jumping my party ahead too much. I even try to keep throwing treasure at them at the same rate per encounter even if they hit 3 to 5 more encounters (or 1 to 2 collapsed mega encounters) just to make sure I am not shorting them out on resources.
I often run oversized parties; for example, my current campaign has 7 players. This dilutes the XP earned by my players in combat (unless I add more enemies), so I add side quests. Most of the side quests are invented by my players, whose characters express a desire to help in a crisis not directly in the main plot. In contrast, I give full story awards to the party, without shrinking it due to party size, so they are better rewarded for finishing missions that for defeating enemies.
The side quests make milestones difficult to identify, so I use XP rather than milestone leveling.
As for treasure, my players dislike looting and often give treasure to villagers who need it. For example, in Ironfang Invasion whenever they defeated an Ironfang patrol, they would give the weapons and armor to the villagers they protected, saying, "You need to be equipped to protect yourselves after we move on." I am experimenting in Strength of Thousands by having the Magaambya Academy that employs them equip them for free.
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I personally am a fan of XP and even of running APs on the slow XP Track so I can add a lot of side quests and story awards without jumping my party ahead too much. I even try to keep throwing treasure at them at the same rate per encounter even if they hit 3 to 5 more encounters (or 1 to 2 collapsed mega encounters) just to make sure I am not shorting them out on resources.
If it works, it works, but this illustrates the whole problem with XP in a nutshell: you have to constantly manipulate it so that players wind up where you need them to be. "XP doesn't work when I add stuff so I have to slow it down" is an example, just like the APs saying "add encounters until you get to the right number" are an example.
XP in PF2 is a constant game of manipulation to get it to where its supposed to be. Not having it eliminates all that math.
When I have been a player in milestone games, I find that we tend to speed rush dungeons just to level up faster and that has often resulted in not getting as much treasure as we should, and as a table that uses a lot of consumables, ABP doesn’t really help us (or casters generally).
This is a problem I've honestly never understood. Are players playing to actually experience the story? Or are they playing to speedrun levels? If a side quest is interesting, I've never needed any motivation to do it other than that.
Like it makes no sense to me that people will skip it unless there is an XP carrot hanging off it, but they're okay with you deliberately slowing the XP progression in order to dangle that carrot to get them back to where they should have been had you not done that.
The end result in either case is exactly the same except with more steps.