DB

Narration. We can control how the world sounds, looks, and is through our words both as a player and a GM. As a GM however, there are certain things that are typically within our control: dice rolls.

When you ask a player for a dice roll, it is typically in response to something that they wish to accomplish or do. They want to hit someone in the face, they want to find clues, they want to jump over a chasm. Sometimes, I will ask for rolls before a character necessarily knows what they’re looking for or doing. This is a bit of a misdirect and a little bit of railroading…there’s a balance to that, which is a discussion for another time.

In either case, after a roll is resolved, it is your duty as the GM at the table to describe what the success or failure looks like. In the case of a PbtA game, the player will know whether they miss, have a weak hit, or a strong hit. The Cypher System also in most cases explicitly sets the number a player is looking to roll in their levels of difficulty and target numbers. In D&D and in other TTRPGs, players may not know whether they pass or fail until you narrate what happens.

When you do, success is always exciting. Who doesn’t love to succeed? Who doesn’t love a flourish of a blade, an expert jump into a sick looking combat roll, or the cleverness needed to piece together clues to find novel answers? Everybody loves success.

Failure can be messy. People don’t like failure…but not necessarily because of what happened. People don’t enjoy the cognitive dissonance that occurs when a failure does not line up with their image of their character. It feels like Superman losing in a strength contest. It feels like Luke giving up on his loved ones. It is a result and a reality that is at conflict with your player’s understanding of their characters…which is unsatisfying.

Failure in the GM’s Hands

When handling PC failure as a GM, there are plenty of ways to go about it. Is it a weak hit? In the case of a PbtA game, there is much to learn from it that can be transferred into D&D games. Weak hits are results that are mixed successes. The PC gets the result that they want, but something else goes badly. It is the classic Indiana Jones scenario of claiming the treasure, but setting off the traps, and then having to escape them with quickness and ingenuity.

You can get some mileage out of mixed successes, or multiple fail states, as mentioned in a Matt Colville video on the subject. However, there will be times, like in combat, where a player rolls an attack roll or tries to hit a bad guy, and they will not hit.

What does that look like for that character? Instead of just saying that they miss, perhaps it is the competency of their enemy. The PC is good, but their enemy is an expert–someone who is more studied than they are. It doesn’t undermine the player’s perception of their character, but it does elevate the threat in front of them, which is much more exciting.

Perhaps you can lean into some of the issues that the PC could reasonably have. As Brennan Lee Mulligan mentioned on this issue, perhaps it is a barbarian overextending themselves with their rage. In another case, perhaps a cognizant character is distracted by unwanted emotions…an old memory resurfacing, or a recent event affecting their psyche. Failure can inspire or imply drama, which is more exciting than just…missing.

Failure in the Player’s Hands

When in doubt however, you can easily give narration rights of a PCs failure to their player. Let the player tell you how they fail. If Matt Mercer can allow players to do it for their successes with their “How do you want to do this?”, it should follow that a player should be able to narrate what their actions, including their failures, could look like.

If you don’t want to walk over their character fantasy, or if you want to include them in that narration part of the game and let them have fun in the action, it’s lots of fun. Of course, this is something to discuss with your players perhaps at a session 0, or at the start of combat, if that is something they’re interested in. People don’t like being put on the spot, including me!

Last Considerations

Failure doesn’t have to be in a game at all. Some games don’t have player character death. Perhaps some games have no conflicts. Perhaps even, the game is GMless and you’re not the sole authority on whether something fails or succeeds. There are lots of tools you can use in telling stories in your TTRPGs, but always make sure that everyone is having fun!

This means knowing how much collaboration people are open to, whether you can bestow information upon your PCs, and what sort of failures your players are open to. Not many people want slapstick humor in their games, so that type of failure is definitely good to figure out with your players in a session 0, and when defining things like genre.

Anyway, happy gaming!