I’m finding that I really like having failure mechanics in my games. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the idea is that players gain a token or dice when they fail a roll they can ‘cash in’ later for a bonus on rolls when they really need it. DM Scotty’s Luck Dice rules and the rules of EZD6 are the best examples of these kind of rules I can think of.
In my opinion it adds a really interesting dimension to games. Rolling hot still feels great - but failure becomes more of a choice when you can spend resources. Failing a roll also stings less when you know you are getting a bonus you can use down the road. Instead of just trying to build the most mathematically optimal character, it becomes important to manage your resources as well.
Going from EZD6 to playing a low-level 5e game gave me a bit of whiplash. It definitely doesn’t feel good to know you have about a 50% chance of hitting an enemy or essentially wasting your turn. Nothing is more disappointing than waiting 10 minutes for your turn in combat for it to end in 20 seconds after missing your single attack per turn.
Recently I’ve been playing a lot of EZd6, and I’m planning on adding DM Scotty’s Luck Dice mechanics to a game of Vaults of Vaarn I’m planning as well. I think I’d like to add some kind of failure mechanic to all of my games going forward.
What do y’all think about failure mechanics? Is it something you also play with? Are you curious about it? Or do you have negative feelings or experiences with failure mechanics? Let me know!
Standard combat in D&D is based off of an old system where the tension comes from a survival-horror “will I die before I escape with the loots?” feeling, which means combat is supposed to be dangerous, punishing, and generally a bad idea. Most people today don’t enjoy that style of gameplay and are more interested in the narrative side of play. This makes combat a chore because it drags the players out of making interesting choices narratively and doesn’t replace it with anything. Combat doesn’t have that cloak of survival surrounding it, making it feel hollow and tacked-on.
The biggest thing for me to counteract that is giving people the ability to “fail forward.” Not an original idea by any means, but I get the feeling that most people play D&D with a, “I roll to hit, miss, whoops that’s my turn” sort of vibe. Admittedly there’s no mechanic in a regular D&D game to facilitate this, but I like borrowing from Blades in the Dark with their clock system. Instead of failing to hit, the player hits, but it initiates some kind of countdown timer for something else happening in the fight or elsewhere. This gives me the ability to build tension in the fight while also giving me reasonable control over the length of the fights as well.
I like your implementation of Luck Dice; it seems to balance out some of the feel-bads while giving players options. I don’t know if it addresses the core problem of misses in combat, but at least players won’t feel like they’re not going anywhere with a string of bad rolls. It also neatly fits into the heroic fantasy aspect of characters being better than most people and nothing can truly keep them down. It might be interesting to give your big bads Luck Dice too to make them feel more scary instead of doing lair/legendary actions. Let us know how it goes when you run your game!
You make a really good point! My table doesn’t like 5e or pathfinder because, as you said, combat drags on a lot, there’s a lot of ways to just avoid problems via spells, and there isn’t a lot of tension. We went pure OSR systems and it went the other way, players were so focused on problem solving out of combat the planning phases would drag on - instead of having cool tense moments, they were agonizing over making the correct decision so their character wouldn’t die after one or two bad rolls. EZd6 feels like an excellent middle ground - as long as they players have karma, they feel empowered to make mistakes and try things. Once it runs out, death is only one or two bad rolls away and they need to strategize.
Your idea of giving big bads Luck Dice rocks! I might even test having decisions the players make add or subtract from their luck dice pool - the longer they take to kill the big bad, the more luck die they have, for example, or the more magic items they take from the tomb the angrier and more powerful the guardian mummy becomes. Thanks for the idea!
I play in a pretty straightforward 5e campaign, and my DM keeps it simple. If we roll a Nat 1, he gives us an inspiration token that we can spend to re-roll any d20 check. You can’t hoard them, though.
We’ve always managed to eke out of combat, and he rewards us for getting creative with our problem-solving. It’s one of the reasons I’m playing as a spell caster this time around.
In Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games like Dungeon World and Monster of the Week, if the player fails a challenge, in addition to the usual consequences, they gain XP.
This makes players feel like their efforts aren’t wasted, but it also sets up a cool dynamic: if you only gain XP through failure, then your character will stagnate unless they seek out challenges they could realistically fail.
That’s true, I really love the rules for a lot of PbtA games! I think my personal GMing style doesn’t mesh well with them though, something about how much rigid narrative control the moves have trips me up. I’ve run Monster of the week, The Sprawl, Dungeon World, and some space PBtA that I forget the name of, and they are pretty good for a few sessions but by session 3 my table usually wants to play something else.
I really like this system as well. It also makes more narrative sense, in that, you “learn from experience”, and you learn more when things don’t go exactly how you expected them. It does seem odd at first that players are essentially rewarded for failing, but the fact they’ve put themselves in a position where failure is possible means they can’t just rest in their laurels (or seek out numerous easy challenges to “grind” xp).
I like it, but it can make the players whine when it fails to save them.
If I’m DM’ing I try to keep notion that its my responsibility to get them to the goal regardless of the choices or events that happen. Its my job to figure out how to interpret random numbers. I use those bad rolls for my enjoyment as well as getting the characters to the goal.
As an example.
Player: I attack.
Me: The orc or the bugbear?
Player: The bugbear
Me: Roll to hit.
Player: <Rolls a natural 1> Me: When you stopped to poop in the bushes an hour ago, you knew you were going to have explosive diarrhea from eating that cajun eel porridge. What you didn’t know was that you had accidentally sprayed poo all over your swords hilt. As you pull it from the scabbard to attack, the weight of your shitty sword causes it to launch right out of your grip. It arcs elegantly across the scrubland for several yards, slightly rifling and glinting in the sunlight. It strikes the orc in the front right quadrant. The sword penetrates his vital cavity blade first and it doesn’t stop until the hilt of the weapon slams into his ribcage, the blade protruding just behind and below its left armpit. It’s mouth agape with confusion, shock and repulsion from the scent of your human filth still all over the hilt, the orc collapses slowly under the growing weight of gravity. Sadly, you’ll never know how extremely impressed he was with your advanced combat technique.
Now the player lives but at the cost of kinda becoming the butt of a joke that’s worth remembering for years to come. And honestly, as an adult, when I’m hanging out with old dnd friends and the topic comes up, it’s those moments that we always remember and laugh about.
Hehe, butt.
I like it a lot! I don’t have experience using such mechanics in TTRPGs, though I feel the same way about the disappointment of rolling low. However there’s a few boardgames that come to mind that use similar mechanics, which are great. In Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood you have lots of tokens that you can use to buff your rolls/draws, but if you fail you get back everything you spent and you get to pick a new one on top of that. It actually has an extra sort of luck mitigation on top of that; random results are determined by custom dice, but all dice have a deck of cards equivalent that has all dice sides 3 times. You don’t shuffle them in between draws, so as you go the results get more and more predictable. Would really enjoy having more games with such (bad) luck mitigating mechanics!
That sounds cool, I might check them out! I think it’s hard to draw a balance between randomization and making games feel like luck isn’t a huge factor. I love betrayal at house on the hill, but it definitely feels like luck is a huge part of the game. I really like King of Tokyo and Wingspan because they have a lot of randomization, but it always feels like you’re given enough choices that the randomness doesn’t matter as much.
