I recently got quite an insight into player psychology, and it took me a while to unpick.
In a recent Cthulhu game I was running, I was talking with some players in the aftermath and they were talking about how they’d failed to get a piece of information via a mode of investigation. The method they tried had lead to a failed dice roll and now they couldn’t get it. And I asked them why they didn’t just find a different way around. Rather than just trying to talk the answer out of the villains, maybe follow them or go to a different place to search for paperwork.
The response floored me. ‘That’s not how this works, right? We failed the roll, so the information is locked off’. I was totally baffled. It confused the hell out of me for some time. After an intense discussion about playstyles, it occurred to me that there’s a issue of game design that I hadn’t understood properly before.
So We All Know About ‘Fail Forward’ Right?
Everybody knows this, right? Fail forward is a term that is used to remind GMs that even when the players fail, it needs to move the story forward, either by presenting a new opportunity of changing the focus of action.
It seems so obvious to me that we should be doing this that it always surprised me when someone else writes an article about this idea like it is a fresh new thing they’ve only just discovered. Surely, most of us have been doing this for years. So why did my players feel like one roll shut down the options. Well, I’d neglected a few things in my approach. The first was that I had neglected to tell my players. The second is that they’d come off of high level D&D. Let’s deal with the latter of those first because we need to understand how fundamentally a mechanical shift can affect storytelling before we understand the heart of the matter.
When We Don’t Fail Any More
Anyone played high level D&D? It’s an odd game. The stakes are massive and some times you basically have to throw sentient planet-level threats at the players in order to cause a threat. In this situation, ‘fail-forward’ stops meaning the same thing.
In order to deliver the bombast the sort of numbers you throw around at that level and to have any sense of threat, you’re in constant ‘Avengers/Blockbuster Movie’ mode. Failing should have consequences, cities should be stake. D&D is a fantasy action game after all. If the players don’t act, the bad guys will. You can fail the story forward at a crucial moment and make real bad bad stuff happen.
What’s more, if heroes fail a roll and miss a thing you can hit them with 70 hit points worth of consequence, and they feel like the danger is real, but truth is, they have 140+ hit points and can sleep it off. They can afford to fail. They can afford to not get information through a dice roll because they probably have read thoughts/scry/talk with dead prepared which adds to their ability to gather information even if they fail that crucial roll.
The D&D ruleset wants to get out of our way as quickly as possible outside of combat. ‘Roll a dice, fail or succeed, keep moving’. Don’t roll lots of checks, don’t go back and think about the roll or discuss outcomes. Roll and go. And it’s the combination of these elements that trains players to be like ‘We didn’t get that, abandon the course of action, find a spell or blast our way through without correct information and rely on our skill, abilities and HP to get us through’. And the game is tilted to reward that style of play.
Compare this for a second to Call Of Cthulhu. Handing out this pace would be wildly off except at the conclusion of story chapter. Handing out that level of consequence will kill off the entire party straight away. They don’t have the equivalent of 70 HP worth of damage absorption in the Entire Group. If a city dies in front of them, they go mad. So the level of just locking off a course of action rather than just introducing an interesting set back they have to work around is not really a option. The stakes are high but the fail state is less desperate. Because the game is about gathering enough information to be informed. If they go in uniformed, then they’ll die.
But the enemies my group are facing are also human and written as so. They make mistakes, have to work within a system in order to get things done and hit roadblocks the players can exploit. But only if the players believe they can do these things. And D&D had trained them to think in a certain way. Turn up, quip with the bad guys, get a plan, maybe talk our way out and if not fight our way clear. This is not a universal experience and they’d struggled with this. I’d trained them to think of all RPGs like D&D.
My Oversight
When we look at a system change we need to really go back to basics and restart, even if we know what we want, it’s not clear to players. We need examine Player Bias. Where a previous game colours a player’s experience, even if that game was also run by you.
You see, I explained that Cthulhu goes to great pains in its latest edition to have a number of different fails states and the most basic barely ever closes off a chance, instead opening the door to progress at a later date, with more time.
If you push it right then and there, it gets harder to try again, but mostly it the game is mechanically saying ‘hard luck, but it’s only a bad dice roll, maybe change the narrative in your favour again and then we’ll see’. Fail forward exists, but the form it takes is far move passive and tied to the mechanic over the dramatic narrative. So you’d think that it’d be ok right?
Well players fixated on the fact they when they push it, it can kill the chance. So we’d had players just feeling lost and forlorn. I was banging my head against the brick wall being like ‘Why don’t they just [X]’? but they just couldn’t see a game they’d heard was unforgiving and deadly would allow that.
Fixing Through Play
After the discussion, I realised what I needed to do. I needed to show the principles of the game in action. I was busy creating a sense of dread and I hadn’t take time to show them I wasn’t moving forward like a freight train right away. I needed to openly deliver that in play.
During their next social interaction with a key NPC, Professor Armitage, I showed that the basic failure meant he needed more evidence. He wasn’t throwing them out, he was just asking for them to prove their claims to him to gain access to the books he had. As I explained this in the meta of the game before offering the chance to push and they chose to leave and come back with more evidence, you could see the lights go on for them. Backing this up next time when they visited to say Armitage they’d aroused suspicion and he’d blocked their enemies from also getting access to the books to be sure, it felt like they’d suddenly found out how the game differed from their bias, they Got it.
In summary, failure in different games looks different and so does ‘failing forward’, which is in fact several different fail states all coming under the same banner that we need as a community to learn to define better.
If you’re experiencing this sort of unconscious player bias, you first need to have a discussion. Then you need to they back this up with demonstrating in game that things have changed. The way the narrative unfolds is different, you’ve changed along with the campaign. Make some encounters and ideas that highlight how things have changed, don’t just assume they’ll get it. Because that’s what I did and now I’ve had to fail forward myself in order to get through it. Until next time!
Creative Commons art credit: “The King in Yellow” by JakubJagoda, “A giant Lovecraftian monster emerging from” by MHoltsmeier, and “Spider Cult” by Snugglestab.
