Failure IS an option. Part 1 - DMs
At the heart of it Dungeons and Dragons is a game and as such we can fail or succeed. Here’s how to embrace the chaos of failure.
Sometimes your players are going to fail at a task that they are trying to do, do not be afraid of this! However you will need to be able to think on your feet or allow your story to be somewhat flexible. If the players fail at a necessary story beat then there will need to be a way for them to succeed in the future. It is also an important thing to realise that you shouldn’t put necessary plot development behind a skill check, if the players need to know/see/attain they shouldn’t have to roll for it. The build up to finding the Lich’s Phylactery should be full of skill checks and challenges but picking it up shouldn’t be an all or nothing dice roll; if the party fails then the Lich can’t be destroyed and therefore there won’t be a resolution to the story.
Not everything is winnable. As a Dungeon Master I’ve had to help my players realise that somethings are there not as an adventure hook but as window dressing or as a means of telling them that there are things out there that are not for them. A world is a vast array of options where inhabitants decide whether or not it is appropriate for them to interact with. As a person I know that Nuclear Reactors are a thing but as I don’t have the required expertise I will not interact with them, the same should go for a level three party and an Ancient Blue Dragon. It is also a good idea to show your players that there are ways of mitigating failure through magic items, preparation and planning. If the players have a game plan for drawing the enemy out of it’s lair or doing research to find out it’s weaknesses they know that they can turn a deadly encounter into a winnable one.
Another way to look at failure is through the characters’ story arcs. As your players progress through your story there needs to be opportunities to fail but also the probability of failure should vary from encounter to encounter. If we take combat as an example we do not want to make each encounter harder than the previous one, if we do then the players are drifting from one calamity to the next with little reward for them and their morale will be ground into the dirt. There will be little reason for them to continue on their path as they aren’t feeling any mechanical progression. The probability of the players failing needs to ebb and flow in order to give them comparable successes and a sense that they are better at something than they used to be. In one of my current games I like to set the players up against bandits on the road in the more remote areas of the island they are travelling around, the statistics of the bandits never changes but the size and composition of the band varies slightly. At the start of the campaign the players found the fight difficult, then they found it OK and now they dispatch them with ease; they test out their special moves and try to one up each other by dispatching them in the quickest or silliest way possible. If the party has had a difficult fight or even a loss it is good to show them that they are still extraordinary in the grand scheme of things. The inverse of this is true as well, if everything is too easy then there is no sense of achievement and you are all just going through the motions with no tension being built.
Sometimes the dice gods will look down on your party and frown, if this happens in the boss fight then it could spell doom for your plucky adventurers. Dealing with a character death can be bad but if you make it mean something then it can be a rewarding and worthwhile role playing experience. If a dreaded total party kill happens then you can use this as a story tool and carry on your campaign with new characters and the BBEG having defeated the meddling heroes and consolidating power. You don’t have to throw out your campaign setting and all of your work just progress your villain’s story along causing a fresh group of heroes to challenge them.
Finally, failure can be funny. I try to find a humorous way to describe how the character was unable to achieve their goal. My go to one is for stealth checks and it has become a running joke that if a player rolls badly they stand in a bucket and loudly stomp into the situation drawing massive attention to themselves. One character’s paranoid view is that he is magically summoning them somehow because it has happened to them so many times and in areas that should not contain buckets!
I hope that helps you build a more satisfying game, next week I’ll be talking about failure from the player’s point of view.
May you roll well!
