Mixed Success - Winning and Losing in Tabletop Roleplaying Games - Extra Credits 

Do you have any epic "yes/no, and/but" stories from your tabletop RPG experiences? We want to read them!

"I don't know how, but you used the wrong formula and got the correct answer" "task failed successfully"

Playing DnD. My friend was a thief and disguised themselves as royalty. They had to open a door by some guards and pretend to have the key. They utterly failed the lock picking, but did an amazing job at the bluff when the guard saw this happen. So the story turned out with the guard going "do you need help?" and unlocked the door for them. I would count this as a "No, but".

Best moment in a recent Pathfinder session: the bard of the party successfully convinced a group of goblins who were minions to a barghest that was using them to steal food and treasure (and incidentally hoarding both for itself) that he was a union negotiator and got them to lead him to their lair, and then stand back while he and his team "negotiated" with their boss. After the barghest was killed, he informed the goblins that the negotiations broke down, but that the boss had left and so they could have all the food they wanted now. He then talked them into paying his service fee of 700 GP. And people say bards are useless.

Was playing an elf Assassin, and was with my friend as paladin to claim the bounty for killing a monster. His 15 charisma somehow does not pan out as he rolls two consecutive fails, and the mayor kicks us out. With my dismal 6 charisma I roll 3 successes, one of which Nat 20, to start a peasant revolt that eventually takes over the city

You want to read a yes and story? Here we go: (D&D 5e) The group is in a giant cave, needing to cross a 25 feet chasm. player one: I want to bind the rope to the javelin and throw the javelin into the roof. I let him roll intelligence - acrobatics for the knot, it's a 12 in total, the knot holds tight, then a strength - athletes check for the javelin throw, it's a 19 so it's stuck up there. Player 1 does the Tarzan move and lands on the other side, players 2 and 3 follow, but then comes the paladin, wich a a big weapon and armor hoarding type, he grabs the rope, jumps and all players are shocked when they see the rope fall of the javelin. Player 1 jumps to grab the rope, and does so but is now above the chasm mid air, player 2 jumps and grabs player 1s feet and player 3 grabs his feet, barely hanging on to them. Player 4 crashes into the wall and starts climbing. In the end player 4 and 3 drag player 1 and 2 up. Then the group looked at me and said (out of character) "even though this was awesome, don't you dare pull these cartoon moves on us again!"

"That's grim, Eddy" - words which have been said before and will be said again.

Those are some freaking adorable doggos. Good job, artist!

I might be showing my age here, but the "no-but" was always the GM's job

I've had more than a few "Yes/but" moments with my play group. My favorite one is when they nailed a concert but their costume choice seduced a serial killer.

Well you can loose in theory,but in practice actually win:When i played total war shogun 2,i was involved in a defensive siege against a 2k army with my 500,even tho i lost the castle, i managed to get 1.3k soldiers and their general, destroying the enemies army and basically finishing the war after that battle.

In HOI4, you can win some and lose some. Along the way, you learn more about what it's like to take control of militaries and make decisions as leader

In a game I used to play, we had the concept of 'Overshoot' which was a version if 'yes, but...' Where you successfully do something, but do so in the most excessive way possible. Eg: casting a fireball to toast the enemy, killing the enemy, but now the room's on fire

The Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG handles the "yes/no, and/but" approach really well, I feel. Their dice use combinations of success, failure, advantage, and threat to create really interesting outcomes much like what the video describes. Definitely one of my favorite tabletop systems.

5:41 Isn't that called, you know, the GM not wanting to end the campaign there? I wouldnt' call that recent.

Please caption your videos. You use a script, so that should be easy. 5 minutes of work on your end will make your videos SO much more accessible.

skyrim and similar games could use more of that. In skyrim its usually win/reload

Tabletop games, Magic the Gathering... you guys are talking about some of my favorite stuff. :D It's great!

I love that tabletop games have these ultra-varied options. Some video games have attempted to follow through on interesting losses, but they often fail to move stories forward at all, or because of natural player abilities (rather than character statistics), just result in consistently terrible outcomes; like a dice weighted against your favor. I actually had the idea for a very basic, textual, story video game in which you have a hero clearly on a journey, but rather than controlling the hero's choices, you basically just control each of their successes and failures. Something players would learn is that the least interesting outcomes are when they continually select one pre-chosen option (Success / Fail); often not even the one they'd want - and that the most interesting outcomes would arise from picking a general mix, embracing some level of loss and destruction, and handing over those comebacks at crucial moments.

I know your focus was on game rules, BUT framing an RPG in terms of 'winning' and 'losing' can be a double edged sword. If players believe that there is a 'win' to D&D like in other board games that can make an adversarial environment where the Player Characters might see the Game Master as the opposing player. Going back to the poker analogy, you want to win against and compete against the other players now the Player Characters want to win against the Game Master and vice versa and that can cause a game to slowly become less and less fun.

Yes you did save the town, BUT THE VILLAN WAS YOUR FATHER! And you killed him! Too much?

I think one of the best systems I have ever seen involving this concept is the Fantasy Flight Star Wars/Genesys system where dice have symbols to interpret that can basically correlate to "Yes and", "Yes but", "No and", "No but", as well as adding in critical symbols that could be looked at as "heck" as in "Heck Yes!" or "Heck No!"

2 D&D party members: "we got some big guys comming". A Tiny Kobald (Me), and my familiar walk up, overhear this, and bow. Thats what i talk about.

I love the Dramatic failure system from Chronicles of Darkness. When you roll a failure, you can either *choose to have it be a normal failure (the simple "no", or a "no, but", or you can make it a dramatic failure where something really bad happens, but you get xp. This makes a failure into an interesting choice where it's between "should I complicate the mission even more for that sweet sweet xp?" And can even create sessions where the players are like "damn it! Everything went according to plans! We didn't take enough risk!"

My favorite lose+win is when a player is a point or two away from succeeding a lockpicking attempt. "The door is unlocked... with a loud THUNK! And everyone knows who did it. Roll for initiative."

the Genesys System from fantasy flight games which they also use in their starwars RPG works exacly like this since instead of number dice, you have a range of falure and disadvantage dice as well as success and advantage dice. And some dice have triumphs and others disasters on them, just for good measure (rolling a disaster and a triumph at the same time is when the real fun starts!)

Losing in a table top game is drunkly casting fireball in a pub and having to roll to see how many civilians you killed, then once you roll you find out you killed 69 people. Then you get the wave of disappointment when the dm tells you that no xp was gained.

We had one moment from my Dark Heresy group that immediately went from "No, and the daemon prince has just possessed the fresh corpse of your team mate" to "Yes, and Ernst (our cleric) has successfully grappled the now manifest daemon, beaten its obnoxious Unnatural Strength modifier, and bodily thrown it into a plasma reactor. Start running, you don't want to be around when reality decides what it's supposed to do next". Ernst was a walking manifestation of such moments. There was also the time we went from "... and the crowd you're in has turned into a panicked stampede in response to the attempted assassination of the Duke" to "Ernst somehow rolls well enough to try to clear a path through the crowd that they've collectively had a brief vision of a vast golden armoured figure stood over him and fallen to their knees in awe". For the record, that was the *second* time he turned a rioting mob into a pious congregation. ~~~~~ On a more general level, this got me thinking about the general point of "No, but" and "No, and", which fundamentally are about making losing fun... or at least entertaining. In that respect, the less common PvP-type RPGs can actually do pretty well if you've got players with the right mindset (the "I'm here to play my characters" rather than the "I'm here to win") and players aren't penalised too much for losing. I've got some very fond memories of games of "Inquisitor" (GW's part-skirmish/part-RPG offering from 2001) that I technically lost - when it's not an omniscient and omnipotent GM defeating you, you can far more marvel at the creative strategies the other players use. (For similar reasons, I also love GMing for Inquisitor, as the players working against each other makes it far more unpredictable, rather than the going into the game with the knowledge that it's probably going to turn out roughly as your notes say. The 13-player game I once ran managed to end with the characters turning two of the four tables into slag, and I'm still not entirely sure how).

Powered by the Apocalypse engine games THRIVE on this for rules-lite story-based games. I got to work with artists, improvisers, theatre kids, and other creatives with these games and a time spectacular compared to standard D&D circles.

Reminds me of Genesys RPG. In that system, in addition to symbols that help you succeed or fail, there are also symbols that determine advantages or threats, creating yes/no-buts all the time. What's interesting is that because there's never more than 2 symbols on any given side a good roll for success is less likely to give you a yes-and or a no-and than an or roll.

One learns from failures more than successes and the little wins keep you going to make more of both. Leave the world a better place than you found it and cherish both wins and losses.

In our D&D session, we had a "No, and" moment. My character wanted to look around in a tavern whether she could see her other team members, but I rolled a 1. So, she stared at and into the bread that was on a nearby table, and decided that it was the most beautiful bread she had ever seen. Now, my character wants to become a baker, in order to make even better bread than in the tavern, and steals every bakery recipe in sight xD

I think one of my favorite thing in "Madoka Magica : The RPG" is that, if one of your players got turned into a witch, you can, as a game master, force said player to control the witch to make their actions more hurtful, instead of taking direct control. It may not be related to the video, but it's a feature that I find very interesting since it can had more drama in your story, if that makes sense.

These 6 outcomes aren't the only factor to consider. One thing I appreciate about dnd 3.x is the fact that check results tell you how good you did regardless of success or failure, and that can be used in narrating the outcome. For example, if the number you need to beat is 25, but you only got a 21, that is still good enough to be a truly masterful display of skill despite not being good enough to succeed. I know I'm in the minority here, but I really do love that dnd does this.

My most favorite Choice of Games titles are like this, even if you fail your stat checks, the story doesn’t end and it doesn’t beat you to the ground with devastating consequences

Failing forward is one of the most important concepts in tabletop RPGs, and people coming from video games tend to not expect or understand it at first. In a video game like XCOM or Divinity Original Sin (or related CRPGs), I often feel like I almost HAVE to save-scum out of lethal errors to keep from experiencing total disaster (game over, lost character, etc). It's so ingrained in players like me, games like Darkest Dungeon have to perform internal save-deletion shenanigans to keep players from doing this so they experience the game the devs intended (doing so also gives you *permission* to experience the full brutal game and eat failures, rather than feel like we're playing suboptimally by not save-scumming). But you cannot -- and should not feel like you'd have to -- save scum in a tabletop RPG, nor should the game shut down because of random chance or slight mistake not favoring the players. Ideally unless you've outright died or suffered an equally permanent failure (which should take some doing), you should always have a way forward. Degrees of Success and Failure modulate the outcome; you don't necessarily get everything you want, but you still get to continue somehow from a failure. Having to get out of the jail cell after getting caught is a great example! That didn't go the way you'd planned, and things are complicated now, BUT the game isn't over. You're being challenged instead of harshly punished or completely ejected; the game isn't over, it's just getting interesting. Likewise, degrees of success reward cleverness and the odd natural 20, giving you more exciting results, or special options in the future. This means players are given explicit permission by the game master and the game itself to play the game *in a fun way*. Think carefully, BUT take risks, make mistakes, enjoy the fruits of your labor and always keep moving forward. A game shouldn't feel like depression; it should feel like leaving depression behind and being who you want to be. With Fail Forward, I particularly like when I can reward creativity, resiliency, and fun attitudes with fail-but and succeed-and results, because that rewards deeper engagement. That player who wants to be strategic? He can enjoy a higher reward for success, or a moderated failure. The player who wants to take an ill-planned but creative risk? Fail-but can reward his creative solution even if the idea was hazardous or the dice betray him. And when someone is feeling down or disengaged, that fail-but gives them one or more options to pursue despite their setbacks and discouragement. Whether the game is overall relaxed, or brutal like Darkest Dungeon, I like to have fail-forward be a part of it. Worth noting that despite its brutality, it's impossible to lose at Darkest Dungeon -- you might lose your favorite heroes, lose the trinkets they were carrying, experience damage in the towns etc, but those are all merely setbacks. You can keep moving forward from there. There's no "you had to get this one right or the game is over" state; you just keep trying. Loss means losing a bit of work, reassessing, and building back up; you don't start over from scratch with a new town. Though you do have to moderate all of this with real consequences, or else the game feels weightless. I particularly hate discovering that we're so railroaded we can't even die or fail no matter what, because the GM needs us to get through this segment for his campaign to move forward. (very common in one-hour campaigns at conventions) It all feels so empty; any roleplay or strategy we pick amounts to nothing in that case; it's all just window-dressing for the railroad. There need to be real consequences, good and bad, to look forward to and work toward, to fear and hedge against, for it all to legitimately feel like it matters. I wouldn't put especially harsh fail states entirely in the hands of luck, or make them easy to hit accidentally, but they should never be removed entirely. Darkest Dungeon wouldn't be the same game if your characters didn't die from a massive failure -- you can move forward, but it still stings! And it must. Pure positive reinforcement is numbing; you need danger and failure too.

I will say some of the most fun and memorable moments in D&D and other tabletop games I've played happened when one character failed in a spectacular manner. This isn't always due to dice rolls, though bad rolling can certainly exacerbate bad decisions. I find this works best when the character is then put in a position that they or the rest of the party have to really step up their game to solve. Though also one of my favorite moments was still in a Pathfinder game where I punched out a soldier who, while surprised to see us, was not on guard, immediately after I uttered the line "You know, I really should have come up with a plan."

This reminds me of how Dale Friesen runs his "Dice Friends" campaigns. In fact, he gives his players options on the outcomes.

Edge of empire system. Success advantage disadvantage failure triumph. Its great

In Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPG systems, they use a six result scenario and it's built right into the custom dice, which have symbols for success, failure, advantage, and disadvantage using a dice pool system. Thus, in aggregate, you can end up with a success+advantage, success, success+disadvantage, failure+advantage, failure, and failture+disadvantage and the players are encouraged to come up with their advantages. I really enjoy this system because it encourages players to join in on the storytelling interpretation of dice. There's also a triumph and despair result possible on two dice, which are exactly what they sound like.

This is all advice good storytellers teach others, and I so love the systems that have these tricks built in. In addition, Remember - if someone comes to you with an idea the "yes, but" is your best answer!

No by name mention of FF Star Wars or Burning Wheel's mixed successes surprised me

53 seconds in but I have to say this: If your always-bored paladin is getting exasperated at your hyperactive bard's obsession with picking up rocks, then you're winning.

This is the very same concept I put into and use with my core system "Go Beyond". A great example of a "Yes but" is when my players snuck into the capital of the country there faction was at war with to assassinate it's leader. For this assassination attempt, they used a magical staff they procured from a lesser god in an earlier adventure. This staff, when used, turned anything it was shot at into another random entity (heavily based on the wabbajack from the elder scroll's games). When they used it, I would do two dice roll's. One roll determined if the entity would be stronger or weaker then the original one the spell was cast on. The other roll would determine how much stronger or weaker this new entity was compared to the original. They decided to use the staff on a guard patrolling the wall's of the palace where there target was located. They planned to do this until either they got a monster strong enough to destroy the palace/kill there target, or until they were discovered and would be forced to flee. On the first attempt I rolled an 18 for the first roll and a 20 for the second roll. They started laughing and cheering. seeing only success in there mission and assuming the monster summoned would be plenty strong to complete there mission for them. They were right but... they didn't know I had a rule for this item. If the first roll was an 18 or over and the second roll was a 20 then they would summon atleast one of the four cataclysms. The cataclysms, in my worlds lore, were gigantic monsters that had brought about full societal collapse twice before in the worlds history. They were, to pull from my world lore, “Apa’s The Devour” a great maw of teeth and many tentacles for tongues with thousands of small legs that tower over even the colossus of Rhoads’s.“Teras The Night Maker” a great black dragon with rotting flesh whose wings block out the very sun and whose breath removes the souls of mortals. “Masakh The Maddening” a beast the size of a mountain in the shape of a man covered in grey wrappings. Set in his torso is a great eye as large as Vatican square and all who fall beneath its gaze set upon each-other in fits of murderous rage. Finally, “Daryaye The Air Shatterer” A mix between a giant lizard and a kraken. It’s Roar can be heard on the other side of the world and it bellows from the gills on its sides. My players had the misfortune of summoning Masakh the Maddening on top of the palace of the emperor they were trying to kill; Which, by the way, was in the middle of the most heavily populated city on the planet. When Masakh opened his great eye everyone in the city excluding my players (they had a cursed amulet that protected them) turned on each other with horrible murderous intent. The streets ran with blood and my players had to fight there way out of a city which was tearing itself apart and trying to tear them apart. They made it out, but just barely, and as they ran away from the city they saw Apas the Devour rise from the earth and begin devouring the city. I then informed them that when one cataclysm awakens so do the others in due time, and that when all are awakened they begin the process of a "collapse" which is the matriculate destruction of organized society via the destruction of cities and massive amounts of the population. Basically the end of the world. So, my players succeeded in assassinating there target, but they inadvertently started the apocalypse. If that's not a "Yes, but..." moment I don't know what is. Also, if your wondering, my players did succeed in saving the world. Though that's a story for another time.

this is the concept that makes me like tabletop rpgs so much cause life is much the same way it isn't just victory or defeat you can have a victory not be as good or feel bad depending how you get there and defeat can still yield a good result or an unexpected one that turns out to be better than if you had gotten that victory

No, but: DnD, we accidentally stumbled into a den of harpies when they were out. While fumbling about looking for loot, they came back. At first I thought we'll have to fight them, but then we managed to convince them to let us go if they get to "play" with one of our party members.

My ongoing D&D campaign with friends had a situation like this. We ran into a mummy lord in a crypt at low levels during a small quest and had the choice of running, or attempting to incapacitate it. I, the Monk, managed to shove it down a well since the mummy lord rolled very low on the save, and we later found out the well is a straight drop to the underdark and the mummy lord survived the fall, and the mummy lord was a previous lord of netheril and had somehow been unsealed and awakened from his tomb. It was very bad news despite the personal victory of surviving against a mummy lord at such low levels, and our entire campaign has changed due to that one moment. Our entire party has been tasked by several gods, deities, liches, and other very powerful people and creatures to prevent the mummy lord from enacting his plan. Our personal victory became an issue that we only have a limited amount of time to finish before the mummy lord succeeds on his plans and kills many, many people in the process of bringing his kingdom back.

I had a very funny and memorable "No, but..." moment in Breath of the Wild. I needed to cross a ravine but my max stamina was too low to glide down and climb back up. I put a remote bomb at the edge and took a running start, detonating it behind me to blow myself across...it failed spectacularly and sent me flying sideways instead of forward and bringing my health bar to half a heart. BUT...the blast just so happened to knock down a nearby tree which fell PERFECTLY across the gap creating a bridge over the ravine I had just tried to Ziggs my way past.

What I got from this video was that there are 6 outcomes, but two outcomes when it comes to the dice. The die may still be a passing or failing roll but there are three courses of events for either outcome, The And, The But, and The Standard.

The one system among dozens I tried over the years got the "Yes/No/Yes, and/Yes, but/No, and/No, but" concept the best, while also adding 'also, great news' and 'also, awful news' to the mix was Genesys RPG by Fantasy Flight Games, and the Star Wars FFG line of games they did previously. Yes, it uses those weird proprietary dice with icons on thems instead of numbers. But the way story comes out of every single roll is superb; the dice are true MVP of this game. A player in my recent game tried looting some guns from the fallen enemies without the party noticing. He rolled a 'success with disadvantage' result on his dice, stealing a high-caliber revolver unnoticed... But stuck it into his boot in a way that made the gun trigger when pulled out, shooting himself in the foot when trying to sell the stolen stuff. On the other hand, another player was disassembling a shield-projecting alien drone they managed to secure during the operation, trying to repurpose all of it's internals for use in their tech. He rolled 'Failure, Advantage and Ruin' result... So the drone exploded once the shield generator was taken out. Poor guy got some burns, and not much was left of the drone... But hey, he got a shield generator! Or, in a social encounter at a local nobility gathering, one of the PCs got into a verbal duel with the host. Trying to get the host distracted, while some members of the party were sneaking behind the curtain, he went into a rant about issues he personally took with the reception; rolled 'sucess with advantage' - and as a result, not only captured the host's attention, but found one of their weaknesses - poor ability to handle critique, which he immediately used to manipulate them and defame the host in front of other guests, before making their escape with the stolen goods. Yeah, Genesys made my life as a GM, especially making memorable encounters with unique results, super-duper easy.

I have a bunch. One of my friends even has a dice with those six options on it for his otherwise diceless games. Some of my favourites though: In a whitewolf game, the NPC Werewolf hunter got a big Fail-And. He scored so badly that the GM decreed that the only way he would ever be able to recognize my character as a werewolf was if he literally saw her change Another whitewolf was a Yes-But, which was purely GM spite. He hadn't wanted the party to stay exploring an area, so when we kept at it, he spawned an NPC who was going to "tell" us something before getting attacked by the big bad, so we were motivated to follow the enemy. The enemy infected the guy with a virus starting in his arm and eating its' way up. The party tried to treat him, but the first player who tried Failed-And'd it, using the future-tech machine and having it mangle the NPC's arm rather than remove the infection. We were all gearing up that the NPC was just going to die when someone raised the point that we were right by a mourge… The first player didn't want to try using their medical skill again after the botch, so I stepped in. Against GM protests I rolled. I got such a critical success he had to grudgingly say that yes, I had successfully exorcised the infection, and reattached a new limb to replace the mangled one… BUT the arm we were able to grab was a big muscled black-skinned one, on a tiny white dude. The NPC was so shocked he wouldn't stop screaming despite the fact he wouldn't be dying anymore, and eventually passed out - no more information from him! And last, but not least, or even mine, we must consider the tale of Mr. Bearington. The D&D character who was simply a bear with max in Bluff and a manservant. The only character to perceive the bear was considered to be a madman, as he ran around screaming that the gruff, charming gentleman was just an ordinary bear.

In addition to "no, but" and "no, and", you can also have "no, and...but", where you failed, and it had further consequences, but something good came out as well, and the same applies to "yes".

The Powered by The Apocalypse system really tackles the narrative structure of success and failure in tabletop roleplaying games very very well, and I think the system really deserves a nice good look as less of a new creation, and more of a codification of best practices that good GMs have been doing for a long time

The Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight has it in their basic mechanics where you can succeed with threat or fail with advantage. Because the dice cancel out each other but only with certain symbols. Success-Failure, Advantage-Threat. Success and Failure controls the actual check, like if you jump a chasm. Advantage and Threat control other effects. Succeed the jump with threat and you make it but sprain your ankle. Fail the jump with advantage and you fail the jump but catch the cliff wall on the way down. So this mechanic has already been really well explored with the game. It's a shame that so few people ignore the game and its system. The system with no setting is the Genesys system.

I'm amazed he used Vampire as an example of a botched roll (which most TTRPGs have) and not for it's gradual success system. In VtM, you roll several d10s, and each who meets or exceeds the target number is a success. 1 success is marginal (you didn't accomplish the whole task, but didn't fail), 3 successes are a win (you did accomplish what you wanted), and more successes add to your win with more effects (5 successes might mean you did it so well that you finished what you had to do before anyone ever noticing you). As a Narrator (GM), I really like this mechanic, since it gives you more degrees of succes than just did it or didn't. Another mechanic I really like is the Cypher System (for Numenera and others), in which the GM never adds things to the story beyond describing the situation at hand for the players and handling the consequences for their actions. However, the GM can make an intrusion (like on a successful attack, saying "actually, you hit it, but your sword broke and didn't do any damage") by giving the affected player 2xp (1xp for her and the other for the player to chose somebody else to give it). Then the player might pay 1 of her own XP ro reject the intrusion and return the 2xp awarded (i.e. "ha! It broke down buf his armor too, and since it was part of his body, it also counts as the damage of the attack"). The interesting part of this mechanic is that the GM only gets to interfere in the story through intrusions, which means giving more XP to the player who then can use them to reject future intrusions (or making her character stronger). But any roll on 1 means, instead of a botch or a critical fumble, that the GM gets one free intrusion. This is, the GM is allowed to say that anything bad happens without giving the player the XP for it. This also means that the player might use 1 of her own XP to reject the 1 and roll again.

Recently had a one off Pathfinder session where we were graduating dragon hunters on our way to bag each our first kill. After some bumbling around on the way, with some standard encounters and a clever talk out of getting us selves into a tough midway battle, we finally reached the layer. We surveyed our surroundings engaged our young unfortunate prey, had a tough, even close fight and it was all a success. But the town who hired us had stated one dragon menace and we killed 4 young ones... Hey, even after the town was iced halfway to oblivion by the raging mother, we did manage to sort off sort out a sub plot evolving some corrupt bards guild who had managed to use the dragon. Oh and as we ended we all decided our heroes would go clear out the layer for abandoned loot in pursuit of the mother and then go correct our failure, by gaining some levels and getting that mother.

I've had a No And (or possibly No But, though it definitely looked like we were screwed), become a Yes And. It's my favorite D&D story.

Our bard once missed a a fleeing bandit with a molotov cocktail, which just so happened to hit the mayor's home. Every attempt at extinguishing the spreading fire just made it worse, such as using his acid breath to try to destroy the flaming parts. The mayor came outside, so of course he blamed the bandits. Natural 1, but he luckily had one Inspiration left to reroll the dice. "They went too far this time", the mayor yelled as he lead the town to revolt against the remaining bandits. The town then held a party for our help.

The Edge of Empire (Genesys) system is great for this. They build the whole system around success and failure, with but/ands. I find it much more narratively dynamic

I am the dungeon master, so I don't have any experiences I remember, but I do have one that was part of the story. So the characters were hunting down a rebel agent in an alley. Yes, they caught him and were able to get some information out of him, but the rebel then managed to trick them to his side and then sent them out on a mercenary expedition for which they won't get any pay and possibly be captured.

Ultimately, whether or not the players win on the whole is determined by two factors: 1. How much fun did everyone have 2. How good was the story which was told

Rogue managed to climb his way into an antimagic tower, so he could open the door for the party from the inside. He opened the door, then walked through it so the door closed behind him...setting the party right back to sqaure 1.

You guys should talk about Blades in the Dark system's "success with cost" (yes but) or Fantasy flights Boost/threat + triumph/catastrophe system that run parallel to its successful system for checks

Something I have liked to do, particularly to try and break players of the "I can just take 10 and succeed" mentality, is to use "No, but..." as a way to give the players additional rewards. This is often in the form of information they might be able to use at some future point in the story, but it could also be some minor rewards for adding much needed comedic relief to a game. EG: By falling into the moat while attempting to scale an outside wall, the player learns there is a passageway the party could use as an alternative entrance/exit point.

Also in Fate: you are actively rewarded for having things go wrong with the fuel necessary to make things go epicly right later.

I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

That's why I like systems where different mechanisms are used to calculate success and fumble. Shadowrun for example determines positive outcomes by number of 5s and 6s, You'd roll and negative by 1s.

Shadowrun has multiple states, like mentioned here. In Shadowrun there are "Success", "Fail", "Glitch", and "Critical Glitch". You can succeed. IE: You pick the lock. You can succeed and still glitch. IE: You pick the lock but set off the alarm. A neutral outcome. IE: You failed to pick the lock. And finally, A critical glitch. IE: You fail to pick the lock and set off the alarm.

This is less "quest objective" and more "random messing around", but a few of our party members were trying to get the dolphins by their ship to help them fish by playing a "game" where the dolphins flipped fish into the air and the wizard caught it with Mage Hand. The first time they did this the wizard rolled a natural one, and without missing a beat the DM said, "the dolphin snatches the fish out of the air and says, 'I got it first, I win!'" Not sure if that's a "no, but" or a "no, and" but it turned a fishing experiment into a friendly wizard-dolphin fish-catching competition (the dolphin won two out of three and was very proud of itself)

Had a situation that counts as both a win and a loss in my books just last Sunday. We'd called it quits on our previous session just as a planar incursion happened - a bunch of random things of varying strengths - weird tentacle-headed chimera, a couple of displacer beasts, one of Eberron (or was it Ravnica?)'s unique monsters, a pair of nothics, and finally an Illithid introducing itself as the Explorer. However, because of our previous encounter and because of our warlock, he's No-moustache-man. I proceeded to spend the entire session baiting this illithid, taunting it with intelligence and wisdom save spells, and generally mouthing off to it in character, playing hard to get and staying just out of range.. First time provoked a Telekinesis spell...which had me a little worried because I'm only saving against that on a natural 20. (My bard has 3 respectable stats, 2 decent ones...and the one that telikinesis requires to resist. He drags me over to about 10 feet away from him, but he's out of movement. Next turn was my mistake. As an eladrin, I have a modified version of misty step, which teleports me 30 feet away. I teleported away, then cast Tasha's hideous laughter. (Knew it wasn't going to work, it was just more bait at this point, since the guy had run out of reinforcements and had 5 other people busy disrupting his planar portal or coming to chop him up.) What I should have done was readied my action to cast dimension door if he got within X feet. But I didn't. The illithid, a beefed up version of the arcanist type, uses telekinesis again to drag me back to him, and proceeds to use one of the modified abilities, and tries to eat my brain. (Normally this action takes a whole turn aside from movement, but the DM is tweaking monsters because 6 man parties have a lot more action economy to fight against.) It succeeded. The only reason my character isn't dead (short of being reincarnated as a female mountain dwarf, since the DM rolled that d100 for the sake of interest) is because the DM is merciful when he sees a joke available, and decided that the headband of intellect (which sets intelligence to 19) is keeping me from having no mind. At least, that's one option - he let me use inspiration (the DM granted kind, not the bardic kind) to survive with 1hp, and is giving that as a possible in world explanation for my survival (to the player who offered to transfer inspiration over to me to do that, thank you again!) So win: I kept a pretty powerful boss monster from noticing the battle happening around him until we managed to collapse his planar portal (with the force of a small nuclear bomb). Lose: my characters brain was atomized with the rest of his stomach contents.

Roleplaying games, letting you when and lose at the same time. Certainly leads to some memorable outcomes.

I remember running an impromptu one shot with a few friends and the two things everyone remembers is that they accidentally burned the million dollars they were supposed to find and one of them ending up in jail and died trying to escape lol

Doom and Destiny, an indie RPG Maker game on Steam/was on the Xbox 360's indie store place back when that was a thing took this in an interesting way. The premise is 4 guys being drawn into a fantasy world, and having to eventually confront a man named Destiny, who had challenged Death to a game of DnD, with him as the dungeon master. Of course, the 4 guys's own dungeon master, who'd been drawn into the world before them, told Death, when Destiny claimed he could not be beaten at the game, and thus would never die, that winning at DnD is something players do the moment they enjoyed it, and Death did enjoy the game. A fun, simple little game if you ever want to check it out sometime.

This is where the more advanced and perceptive viewers get to combine this idea with the imagination of last week's episode and realize that winning and losing can be interpreted in video games too. Yes, you won over the heart of that pretty boi on the other side of the chasm of floating platforms, but the best friend character hates you for it, possibly all expressed entirely in happy or sad faces on the characters. Also, what about "ironic yes" and "ironic no"? You slip past the guard successfully, which was all part of the villain's plan as he turns up smiling on the other side of the door. Or you get caught while opening the door, only for the surprise to startle you into smacking the door into their face.

Blades in the Dark, a steampunk crime game, has an built-in mechanic for a "mixed success" which can lead to harm, reduced effect, or an added complication. At one point it lead one of the players I was running to angle a lightning pylon at a giant sea monster closing in on their ship, by conducting the current through his own frickin' body!

There was a similar idea to 'lose, but' in Changeling: The Lost, where an critical success sometimes was worse then a critical failure. Like, you use a spell, and it takes such deep root that the Brothers Grimm would wince about it. Or you activate the old fey wardrobe so well that instead of dust & shadow that last only a day, you get a real dress/tux, and it's so sublime you have eyes (& rumors) on you for weeks on pure looks alone. Even in that system it's an optional rule, though, and the book outright warns that both GM & player needs to be OK with those type of things happening *occasionally*, or it's just asking for bad vibes at the table. Always struck me as a fun way of keeping some unintended consequences in the story without it being pure GM fiat.

I think that as described, failing forward can undermine the illusion of player choice. If you can't properly *fail* the main adventure plot, or if you can only do so once 99% of it has been experienced and you're facing the final boss, it lowers the stakes for the entire rest of the plot. A good GM will be able to maintain the illusion of player choice while keeping the plot more or less on the rails, but there must come a point where the players have screwed up so magnificently that the GM tells everyone to roll new characters.

Not finished with the video yet, but the contemporary rpg “Wolf of Dew” is basically based around intentionally failing forward and succeeding backwards which I think is really interesting.

Failing forward is one of my favorite DMing techniques. I find players tend to enjoy a success so much more when something bad happens first, and then they overcome it.

Zoe makes the best assistant when it comes to playing out examples.

I've only had one D&D experience and it was everyone including the GM's first time playing D&D. Our 2 man party arrived at a town and we went to a local elderly shopkeeper to get information. She wanted a job done in exchange for the information and I wanted to skip that job by strong-arming her into telling me because she was elderly and I was a morally flexible rogue. Turned out she was actually extremely strong and chopped my hand off. This created a new priority of getting money so the shopkeeper could heal my hand. We went looking for work and found a scientist who needed test subjects in exchange for money. We then intentionally walked down an alley intent on getting ambushed and capturing someone. We were ambushed by a group of goblins which we defended against. After some fighting a giant goblin showed up to back up its friends. I, not wanting to fight him as I was low level, convinced the giant goblin kill his friends in exchange for some money and the promise of more once he was done. With the little goblins killed, we took the giant goblin to the scientist, who paid us extra because the goblin was big and told the goblin he'd be paid after being experimented on. The goblin didn't ask for the money for killing his friends and we were certain the goblin was going to be a corpse by the time the scientist was done so we walked off significantly richer and my hand was healed.

I really like the art in this episode.

"Failing forward" just seems like a description of my life

I had this d and d session where I had to stop a group of bad guys, so I throw an explosive at them, but it collapses the floor, I kill the targets but also innocents, now I am marked as a terrorist in this campaign.

When you play Scion: Hero, you are encouraged to take a stunt. If you describe and incredible action you get bonus dice to make your action.

During a D&D session yesterday we beat this giant robot wyvern. It was great

Quite a neat concept! It's really good to see a larger granularity of success / failure states being used in RPGs. A lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games seem to go for "Success, but", but mostly framing those as "Success at a cost".

I really like all of the table top episodes! Hopefully, a lot more are in the pipeline.

Failing forwards is great. I've said this before, but most games don't actually allow you to fail. Instead you either win or you get to watch a loading screen for a bit. I love the idea of my noble Knight getting the snot kicked out of him by a group of bandits and having to trek back to the village he boasted through earlier. Maybe a kind farmer tended to this poor battered tincan-man and when the bandits come back to plague the village, the newly humbled Knight manages to stand up to them with the newfound Humble Resolve (Defense +20%). By adding failing forwards you create a world where winning matters. Just killing the character is boring, but punishing them with a hint of potential redemption is so delicious.

Sounds like a great metaphor for the game we call life.

Titansgrave has a similar system. If you crit, you can basically do anything you want as long as the GM feels that it fits. You're given license to be cinematic and awesome.

It would be great to have a dedicated space of tabletop and RPG in the show, I really like this kind of videos.

Outward is one of the few video game RPGs I've ever seen take the "no, but/and" design fully to heart.

As it turns out the real winning was the friends we made along the way

Um, typically in Poker, you can only bet the amount of money you already have at the table. If you get more money and come back, you typically are starting a new game.

DM/GM: "no, you did not convince your black dragon cousin to lend you a ride, BUT you got your 14th and final draconic sorcerer level by killing a random rat annoying your cousin! now you earn... DRAGON WINGS!?!? huh... cool" the character was a black Dragonborn fighter 6/sorcerer 14

The drawing at 2:39 is t-shirt material!

I'm ashamed to admit that as a non-gamer I never knew how table top RPGs really work 😆 but after watching this video I have gained some insights (althought still very little) and it made me wanna try some RPGs (be it table-top or digital games) 😆 thanks a lot Extra Credit!

4:05 FFG's narative dice system(Star Wars/Legend of the Five Rings) not only fits all 6, it is literally *MADE* of the stuff. It's my go-to system for when story is paramount, BUT I still want dice rolls to count.

In a pen & paper rpg a personal failure can also mean a new adventure for the party. It is all up to the gms wits & whims.