Failing Forward on a Critical Failure

Because “Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies” Should Be Your Exit Strategy to a Bad Game, and Not a Regular Event.

My view of table RPGs is that they’re an event where a group of people get together to entertain themselves, some playing the role of specific characters within a world, and one playing the entire rest of the world itself, in whatever bits of that world are immediately apparent. There’s nothing necessarily adversarial about this foundation, though there’s room for it to be if that what the people want- people want to play what they want to play, which I guess is why people play GURPS.

So it’s with that in mind that I find myself precariously attached to the concept of the critical failure. I say attached, because I think critical failures are hilarious when they’re causing doofus PMC cowbros to forget ‘FRONT TOWARD ENEMY’ and get blown up by their own mines, or causing aspirant demiliches to bobble a relic of ancient power and be consumed in by a many-mawed flesh pillar that emerges from the shards. I say precariously, because this happening to any of the actual players at the table kinda defeats the purpose of the game in the first place. Reason is, unless your entire table is populated by “the guy who loves to get owned and be dead,” there’s going to be some degree of non-fun had by a person being witness to their character, lovingly crafted, having their last words be “of course I tied my boots” before they tripped on their bootlaces and took a header into a vat of Grey Goo to forever become one with ＴＨＥ ＭＡＣＨＩＮＥ ＧＡＬＡＸＹ．

At this point, we should all be reminded of Mel Brooks’ definition of comedy:

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

But in our case, the “I” is the people at the table, and the “you” is NPCs. So then, when you’re the sort of gamemaster that prefers to fail your players forward, how do you keep your definitions straight?

Well, here’s a couple ways you could angle your shot.

THE SCENARIO:

There is a strong wall held by the adversary you are portraying that your players have decided must be a door. In order to do this, they’re using a bomb. Problem is, on the check you’ve laid on planting and setting the bomb, the player rolled a critical failure. Now what?

The Control Group: The bomb explodes as the character is putting the finishing touches on, the concussive thud of the detonation turning their skeleton to pie dough and secondary projectiles causing various regions of their anatomy to take separate vacations. Wait, what, no. You just killed a player because dice were rolled to a very bad result, thus not bringing fun to the table, but a reminder of the precariousness of mortality. Congratulations, did you know that people have died trying to do home repair on their Macintosh Plus, let alone trying to set a bomb? Did you know that you could die from a sufficiently large hailstone to the dome? Have you ever had an existential crisis at the table? Asking for a friend.

What I’m saying is, don’t do this, this is the control group.

Well, That Could Have Gone Better: Unbeknownst to the player planting the bomb, the device’s casing or satcheling (or whatever) was damaged in transport, causing its compound to come unpacked and spill. When it blows, it’s ineffective, causing very bright and very noisy superficial damage and nothing else. It may even have burned in a bright trail back to where the party was hidden in the bushes. This is a bad thing that happened. It’s not the worst thing that could have happened, though, because it’s bad in workable ways. The expectation was that the party was going to be through the wall and in business; instead, they’re right where they started, only they’ve made a bright light, a big noise, and are short a bomb. This is a big misstep, but it can be failed forward.

They could retreat and count it as a feint. Remember the value of counterintelligence. As a gamemaster, if you’re playing the sort of adversary that can raise a wall big and strong enough that someone’s got to plant a bomb to get through to you, there’s some points in your portrayal you might not have considered, but should in handling this: 

• 1. That you have numerous enemies that could possibly have done this, and that all you know is that someone came in the night and threw a bomb at your wall that barely did anything. In the words of Malcom Tucker upon receiving a cake iced with ‘Happy Birthday You C*nt,’ “This could have come from anyone.” You’ve probably got a lot of folks that’d try blowing you up with a bomb that didn’t work.
•  2. That you have some degree of power, and as we know, any degree of power held is enough to breed arrogance, laziness and ignorance in sufficiently mediocre people. The big bad may not be this person. But chances are good that your big bad isn’t Grand Sovereign of Walls and Other Simple Free Standing Structures, and therefore has underlings to deal with the minor act of terror your players’ strike turned out to be. As anyone who has ever participated in a movement knows, no matter your intentions, professional, noble, criminal, your call to rally to a cause will attract one or more individuals who has that rancid mix of “seeks authority” and “is indecisive about whether own ass or hole in the ground.” Stupid people will comprise a part of your adversary if it is made of numbers, and stupid people take the path of least resistance, because easy is all they have the tools to handle. When given a choice between acting and not acting, people who think they’ve got the power (and don’t know they don’t have the wisdom) will not act, and instead bleat about how they’re superior and unassailable. And then probably go toddle off somewhere and not read a book, ever. 

Either is enough reason to give your players room to fall back and rethink matters, at the very least. In fact, particularly canny or ruthless players could be rewarded for spinning the situation to their advantage. Something blew up, and that does not happen every day; people are first going to investigate, and then when they don’t find what they want, they’re going to get frustrated and start pointing fingers. That’s what people do when things explode but culprits are nowhere to be found. The party could immediately decide to break and find some means to attack from another angle that wasn’t apparent at first. They could also booby trap their old positions and wait for enemy bodies to come find them. Or they could simply turn to fog and vanish in the night, live to make a better, more durable bomb for an elegant, more refined age, safely within the thickening air of “no, seriously, who the fuck just did that?” All of these are viable.

Good But Not Enough: The bomb goes off with shock and thunder, blowing a massive welt in the wall. Potential hostiles lose their footing and pitch over the side, or are shredded by secondaries as the wall’s face flies apart. But when the smoke clears, the through-and-through channel in the wall is only enough to fit a head an arm through, not a group of adventurers. The bomb did what it could, it just wasn’t enough, despite all indications otherwise. Good but not enough is a scenario that can make stomachs turn in a number of professions- fittingly, actual demolition is one of them, as who wants to have to go into a building damaged by explosives and possibly containing unexploded charges to take another run at knocking it down -and so could absolutely count as a critical failure. Good but not enough means the plan is going ahead, but not as planned, and in fact, the works is all gumming up and backing up on itself. A plan moving but not executing is a plan where people are, figuratively or quite literally, standing around and waiting to be killed. But it’s also a situation where victory can be pulled free.

“It’s Okay, We Only Needed It Softened Up.” This is a phrase uttered by people who know that rocket launchers and magic fireballs tend to be things found in roleplaying games. These are things that folks like to preserve as a resource, but expend when given a viable target, especially so when given something interesting to shoot or throw them at, something that can be turned from big numbers in a routine encounter into something that moves the plot forward. So in this case, give them this chance- the wall’s not down, but it’s cracked so hit it harder. Same deal if the party planned some sort of vehicular ingress- there’s no brakes on this crunk bus, only guts, so let’s make ourselves a drivethru, that sort of thing. Just let your players smash on through if they’ve got the extra resources on hand.

Then there's also the feinting movement like above, because what resulted here was also an error-stymied act of terror, only less minor and more… medium-style in this case. The wall’s not scuffed, it’s cracked, and there’s a bodycount involved, but the fact remains, if the players have it in them to make themselves scarce, their attack can be delayed while the heat dies and suspicions in the enemy ranks rise. Nobody likes getting blown up; it tends to rattle people, so start acting rattled as the adversary and having the roles you're playing start pointing fingers at some of the other roles you're playing.

CHAOS REIGNS: The bomb goes off just as planned. It happens to also blow clean through to the wall opposing it on the other side… right into a powder magazine. Or a repository of magical fire syrup. Or a bunch of natural gas cylinders. Or a fusion reactor. The point is, that wasn’t supposed to blow that big. That wasn’t supposed to blow anywhere near that big. From your party’s position, now lying on their backs despite being hundreds of meters away, they can see that the wall is largely gone. So is much of what was behind the wall. What remains is on fire, including things that don’t typically burn. Also, it’s now raining stones, some of which are also on fire. There’s a lot fire is the point. This is what could be considered an optimal fail forward, at least by people that like to kick doors and make big numbers occur. Some might say that it is, in fact, not a failure at all, but the optimal result- bonus, we not only broke the wall, we blew up a bunch of other stuff, too! Thing is, maintaining control in a situation is always a concern, because if a situation is not in your hands, whose hands is it in? That the party caused so much mayhem before they had actually even got started, the whole thing has slipped from their control before they even had a chance to solidify their grip. Not to mention the fact that there may have been stuff on the other side of that wall the party needed intact, like hostages. Both of those could be where the failure lies in this permutation. But again, it can be spun to an advantage, even if it doesn't look so.

When nobody has control, everyone has equal footing. This expression of a critical failure has turned what should have been a breaching action into a raid into a fiery hell of the players’ own making. So it’s a good thing that, for as hard as the sudden blast rung the bells of the party, it’s whatever that was on the other side of the wall that took the actual hit. That’s sort of the thing about staging a fight inside of a burning house- yeah, everything’s on fire, but at least who cares if the other guy has the high ground? They’re the ones feeling the worst heat. In this, bold and adaptable players can be make the most of a terrible situation, failing forward through the volatile combination of poor intel and explosives to take advantage of a bad situation they had some idea they had coming, just not to the degree that it did. Sure, having to make their way through fire, smashed buildings, and the newly tinnitus-afflicted and pissed enemies on the other side is hardly a reward, but there’s fewer than there would be they hadn’t all been vaporized. More to the point, consider the long term ramifications of what just happened. That wall didn’t just blow up, someone wiped it off the map; remember what I said about the adversary you’re playing, and how they probably have enemies? Those same enemies saw that too, or at least will hear about it. That something like someone blowing up something that belongs to the adversary you’re playing so spectacularly, while that adversary is apparently in control, is a huge shock to the status quo and could change the arc of where things are headed. In other words, regardless of what happens in the minutes after the bomb went off, the days, weeks and months after will be a time of blood in water, and so if it’s important to the game you’re putting on for your players, reflect that and make it a factor in this forward failure.

At the end of the day, it’s always up to what the people at want in terms of play and consequence. In a lot of cases, that means discarding someone else’s rules about what happens when the General Worst Roll Possible comes up, because they’re either flat and boilerplate, or the kind of draconian shit that makes the hearts of Killer DMs everywhere flutter. But bigtime critical failures don’t intrinsically have to be a hard stop, a blown tire in the desert, where everything is terrible and everyone is hating everything. They can instead be organic situations that spiral out of control, and from them, opportunity can be seized to keep the game moving forward. We’re here to have fun, right? Let’s learn to make fun out of bad situations.