Failure week pt 2: Adding the fail painlessly

So how to we add the ever present risk of failure to our games? Without frustrating the players too much. The following suggestions can be stuffed into basically any game.


The first thing to do is bring up the topic of failure with the players. Let them know that failure is an option and that it isn't the end of the world. See if the players are even interested in upping the difficulty of the game, or if they think the campaign is doing just fine as it is. Odds are the players have never considered if they think the game is too easy or too hard. They may think that things are already too dangerous.

One thing that you can do is explicitly take player death off the table. If the characters can die or not should probably be discussed at the start of any game. For some players this will take all the tension out of the game, for others it can provide a sense of safety that will allow them to act more freely. Player death is probably a full topic in its own right.

Run a game where it is explicitly clear that the players are weaker than their foes and likely to fail. This works better in a sandbox world where the players are allowed to tackle challenges at their own pace. Aftermath. Cthulu. This solution isn't a good fit for everyone. It requires players to be ok with banging their head against the wall accepting failure, but getting the much bigger reward of defeating a truly superior foe. While I personally like that style of game I don't feel like most people would.

Make being defeated not the end of the world and especially not the end of the game. Enemies take the players prisoner, or leave them stuck in a death trap. Or even just win and leave the players unconscious. The one technique I would be careful about is having the bad guys steal the players special gear, players can become very invested in loot. Imagine instead the players are defeated by goblins in the big bads army. They take one of the pcs leaving the rest. The captured pc is taken to the big bad, who interrogate s the pc, and then throws her off a, cliff where she barely survives and is nursed back to health by blink dogs. Now the players have met the bad guy, have more reason to hate him, have learned stuff about his lair etc. Some players might consider this scenario a kind of rail roading, I consider it a natural consequence of player choices. Different players have differing tolerances for this kind of thing, so know your players. And if you are a player in this situation, roll with it and embrace it as an opportunity to have something interesting happen to your character.
Make negative consequences last as short as possible. Prison break movies are fun to watch, but in the context of most games spending every third session escaping from being taken prisoner would be really tedious. Escaping the goblin camp doesn't have to be a whole session. You can do it with just a few dice rolls for escape and stealth. Ten minutes is good enough. The quicker the players bounce back and get into the fun stuff the less they will hate taking a loss.

Make running away very effective. Let the players escape bad situations easily. Rather than having the bad guys shoot then in the back or ruthlessly hunt them, just let the players make a reasonable escape. It makes retreating a real option, so encounters can be more dangerous. The PCs shouldn't necessarily be in a good position when they do escape. The bad guys can still be hunting them, or they might be forced to retreat into a disease infested swamp, retreating shouldn't be fun, but it is nice to have it on the table. The big flaw with this idea is that players hate running away. It feels like the gm stacked the odds against them, and makes things feel adversarial.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I am curious what people think. Would you want an increased failure rate in your games?

Friday we will take a look at games that mechanically encourage failure.