Wow, do I hate this question.
Lots of other people have lots of other stories that take some sort of "critical fail" roll and turn into a really hilarious or moving story where everything pivots on a dime and everyone has a great time and everyone thinks 'yeah, that's why random dice rolls are so cool!' I'm glad that there are lots of people who have had those experiences, and I'm sure they've really enjoyed the ways that they've made stuff happen in interesting directions.
I have no stories like that. Failure, to me, has always been both disappointing and pedestrian. I have no game stories where the "one" roll really made things turn out to be brilliant in the end. In the games that I've played, a failed roll almost universally meant that my character lost agency somehow, or was ineffective, or otherwise managed to completely waste everyone's time. In games that I run, I try to make sure that failure only happens if it's truly narratively appropriate; I want to make sure that a 'fail' roll actually ends up being 'success, but with some sort of complication'.
And I just realized that in the game I ran on Saturday, I failed to make sure that was happening at my table for several different players.
So yeah, my failures are failures. If they were amazing, they wouldn't be failures. Ugh.
Lots of other people have lots of other stories that take some sort of "critical fail" roll and turn into a really hilarious or moving story where everything pivots on a dime and everyone has a great time and everyone thinks 'yeah, that's why random dice rolls are so cool!' I'm glad that there are lots of people who have had those experiences, and I'm sure they've really enjoyed the ways that they've made stuff happen in interesting directions.
I have no stories like that. Failure, to me, has always been both disappointing and pedestrian. I have no game stories where the "one" roll really made things turn out to be brilliant in the end. In the games that I've played, a failed roll almost universally meant that my character lost agency somehow, or was ineffective, or otherwise managed to completely waste everyone's time. In games that I run, I try to make sure that failure only happens if it's truly narratively appropriate; I want to make sure that a 'fail' roll actually ends up being 'success, but with some sort of complication'.
And I just realized that in the game I ran on Saturday, I failed to make sure that was happening at my table for several different players.
So yeah, my failures are failures. If they were amazing, they wouldn't be failures. Ugh.
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