Failure Week Pt 1: Why you always win at D&D

Welcome to Failure week at Fezflip. How is that different than any other week here? Well this time I intend to fail. Or talk about failure anyway. So put on your chainfail, harpoon a humpback fail, get on the failboat, listen to some nine inch fails, visit your criminal friend in the failhouse, endure the failforce winds, get pelted by the failstorm, and enjoy some blogposts delivered by the failman.

Failure in Table top RPGS

Roleplaying games are designed strangely from a narrative standpoint.

Good stories tend to have victories and set backs for the main characters. Roleplaying games from their dungeons and dragons dna tend to run on design of players win an increasingly difficult series of challenges, until beating the boss in an epic battle. Players start out strong, and get whittled down to win by the skin of their teeth, but they never really take a loss along the way.

The back story of most rpgs is that the players are a small band of heroes, going up against a powerful enemy with vast resources or power. The players are underdogs up against impossible odds. But mechanically games encounters are designed with the conceit that the players will come out triumphant. So the real narrative of rpgs is the players are a small band of super powerful people, up against a giant army of crappy guys who will fight them one at a time until they are all dead.
This design is awesome, it perfectly fulfills player fantasy, they feel like underdogs the whole time, but they get to win win win as well. At the end of the night the players get to feel awesome. This style of story works excellently in the fantasy dungeon crawler. Videogames grabbed onto that model as well, so it feels comfortable to most players.

But, when you listen to people's favorite game stories, they are rarely about the time they coasted through a dungeon and defeated a Dragon with 5 hit points left. Favorite gaming stories are about epic deaths, terrible rolls, hilarious mistakes, and I will add in clever ways of defeating genuinely superior enemies. So apparently people enjoy failing! Or at least enjoy telling stories about failure.
But let's say I designed a d&d dungeon with the typical five to eight encounters, but instead of having a 95 percent chance of winning, the players only had a 50 percent chance of winning each encounter. Players would get frustrated at the constant failure, and the game likely wouldn't progress very far. They game would just feel wrong if the main villain showed up and murdered the players in the second encounter as well.

In books and movies the main villain is often directly intertwined in a story, interacting with characters. In rpgs often exposing a big bad to the party early on just results in a final battle early on. So villains tend to hide behind waves of minions. Role playing games work in a wide variety of genres and tell all kinds of stories. Many of them don't fit into the win win win paradigm. Super hero stories are normally a series of defeats, leading to a victory, the same goes with sports stories. Detective stories all all about dead ends, close calls, back alley goon beating and the like. Action movies often have the protagonists getting abused and chased for the majority of the movie. There are tons of rpgs in these genres but they still often are built on the win win win engine.


Next time we will look at things that GM's and players can do to add the sweet taste of bitter defeat to their games.