Degree of Failure?

[JohnE]

I'm curious about:
1) whether people consider the margin of failure when setting consequences.
2) How do do this interpretation.

Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples.
Example 1:
A character is on an upper floor of a burning building and wants to jump to safety. The rest of the party is outside and will try and catch him.

Leaving aside establishing the exact task, who will test, and ob, I see three possible outcomes:

a) PC is caught
b) PC is mostly caught but there are minor injuries (maybe a superficial wound - think sprains and the like.)
c) PC is not caught (more serious injuries - broken bones)

I'm tempted to interpret the roll as follows:
Meet Ob: Outcome 'a'
Fail by 1: Outcome 'b'
Fail by more: Outcome 'c'

Is this reasonable? Not advised? Merely a matter of style?

Example 2:
A Character is trying to decipher a book of prophecies, say with the intent of finding where Great Big Sword (tm) can be found. I see several options:
a) She succeeds in the test and gets her intent.
b) Can't make any sense out of the prophecy at all. Realizes that she needs help.
c) Studies for several weeks, gets the gist of most of the book, but misses something critical.

If you agree that you can use the margin of failure to help guide the selection of consequence, then which of 'b' or 'c' is the near failure? 'b' may be better in some ways since you know quickly that you have to try something else, but in some ways 'c' is closer to to succeeding (She's done some of what she was trying to do?)

Should this just be decided by the demands of the narrative and not by reading too much into the dice results?

Or should this test just be framed as an open test. I.e.
1-Success - Yes, this book is about the sword
2-Successes - Where it will be found
3-Successes - Oblique warning about the guardian
etc.

[Berandor]

My first inclination would be to choose the kind of failure that enhances drama or conflict, and going with the margin of error might be a straight-jacket that almost penalizes narrow failures because nothing "cool" happens.

Also, keep in mind that you're advised to present the consequences of failure to the player before the roll, so the stakes are clear. That further narrows down the amount of situations that might be fruitful.

So I don't know whether I personally would need (or want) such a rule.

[Z-Dog]

Maybe this will help? (http://burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5413) Scroll down a bit for my solution.

hmm, but degree of failure?

maybe look at two things:

1. how much the player is asking for...the more they ask, the more the failure is going to be complicated

2. the task itself: some things are going to get you in more trouble than others

[Z-Dog]

OK, taking my method:

"A character is on an upper floor of a burning building and wants to jump to safety. The rest of the party is outside and will try and catch him."

He falls to a lower level of the building that's still on fire.
He jumps, lands in their arms, but now he's on fire and the party members could take damage.
Someone else catches him.
He jumps but his coat gets caught on a hanging pole. He's hanging there and the fire gets closer.


"Decipher a book of prophecies, say with the intent of finding where Great Big Sword (tm) can be found"

You find out where the Great Big Neckless is instead (and it's cursed!)
You find out where the sword is, but neglect to decipher a part that says its cursed.
It takes longer than you anticipated.


-----

I guess, personally, I feel like the more the player asks for, the greater the degree of failure.

If he wants to land in their arms executing a perfect swan dive, he's going to get hurt a bit more than if he just wants to land alive.

[Mel White]

I'm curious about:
1) whether people consider the margin of failure when setting consequences.


Thinking about the games I've played, I'm pretty sure we don't actually consider the margin of failure. Intent is set before the roll, success means success. The picture is a little less clear with open ended-tests, but even in that case, a single success is 'success', and more successes means even better results for the actor.

In your examples, where the test is a single character rolling against an obstacle set by the GM, the same principle holds. If the character meets the obstacle, she achieves her intent--whether by one success or by ten. Failure is usually laid out beforehand, and it's not just 'you don't achieve your intent'. Failure would lead to some further complication that, again, would not vary regardless of how bad the roll was--because the consequences of failure are most likely set out before the roll.

Mel
PS That's not to say a group couldn't use margin of success/failure as a guide to the narrative. It's just not the way we do it, and I don't think it's written into Burning Wheel the way it is in a game like Passages, for example.

[Dwight]

Thinking about the games I've played, I'm pretty sure we don't actually consider the margin of failure. Intent is set before the roll, success means success.
That pretty much sums it up. I do use margin of failure in some other games, especially die pool. I also prefer it. But with BW I find:
1) It already happens in places where it's easy (DoW, Fight!, R&C, etc.)
2) It becomes somewhat labourous to add where it isn't and keep the you know how good/how bad it'll be going into the roll.
3) It isn't usally required from a mechanics POV
4) You can use it as a guideline for a bit of colour
5) A lot of OB are low enough that there isn't much room to distinguish anyway

One thing I suppose you could do is handle each roll like a DoW result, and give a little compromise if they are close but not quite. But in BW in play this actually seems to dilute the intensity.

[luke]

One thing I suppose you could do is handle each roll like a DoW result, and give a little compromise if they are close but not quite. But in BW in play this actually seems to dilute the intensity.

RIGHT!

The "compromise" in single tests comes from their iteration. Each test by itself is not the cosmic-ultimate-important-circumstance, but by making tests in series, we build up to a situation where each test becomes more important than the last.

[JohnE]

Thanks for your thoughts. Let me clarify a few points. I'm not looking for iron-clad rules (i.e. "You must consider the failure margin..."), merely wondering whether GMs/Players do consider how much a test is failed by when deciding on a consequence.

As I see it, if it serves to make the narrative interesting and dramatic, there's no need to temper the complications. However, one can always look at how close a player was to success in deciding how close they came to getting their intent (or how complicated to make matters).

In my burning building example, the character was inside the building, rescuing a child. He threw the child out the window to the party down below and just met the ob that had been set. He then chose to follow the child out the window. This seemed like a 'let it ride' case, but catching a full-grown man is more difficult than a child (i.e. the ob would be one higher now). So now the test fails (barely), but since it wasn't by much, I didn't feel like complicating things too much.

Mel mentions that he doesn't think margin of success/failure is written into BW, but I would say that it is (i.e. diligent work).

Now regarding my second example (reading the prophecies), I have another question. There seems to be a contradiction in the time consequences of failure. Pg 38 of BWR "Time and Failure" seems to contradict the summary points on pg 41. The former says total failure means they can give up right away, but a near success takes the whole time. The latter entry says the opposite. Forgive me if I've missed the ruling. I've poked around the errata threads, but I may have missed it.

(In a sense, this is using the margin of failure to guide the results)

[Mel White]

Well,
I will backtrack a little bit on my earlier comment. On p.33 "Intent and Success" the rules indicate "The degree of success determines how much of that intent is translated into play. Had the player rolled three extra successes, the effect of his intent would have been more pronounced..."

So, there is room for the margin of success to increase the level of success. But what's also clear from the rules is that "Characters who are successful complete actions in a manner described by the player...The GM may only embellish on or reinforce a successful ability test" (p.32).

In the burning building example, unless the results of failure were decided before the dice roll, then it's perfectly fine to determine the results based on how close to success the roll actually was.

Mel

[JohnE]

Mel, you're right, if we've agreed on a particular consequence, then we have limited room to alter things after the roll. If the consequences haven't been spelled out, than I don't think it unreasonable to take some inspiration from what the dice tell you.

I agree with blakkie, too much obsession over the cryptic meaning of missing by 1 vs, missing by 2 will break the intensity, but looking for big failure/small failure seems to add colour. If you ask me, a definitive dice failure (i.e. no successes after spending tons of artha, help and FORKS) is just asking for definitive way of not getting one's intent. OTOH, 5 out of 6 successes might suggest an outcome closer to what was intended (but still complicated, of course).

You didn't kill the demon. Instead you released it and it ran off into the middle of town (0 vs ob 6).
You did kill the demon, but it manged to curse you, and now you're slowly growing scales... (5 vs. ob 6)

[luke]

I have to admit, we revel in the instances of play when someone rolls a handful of dice and they all come up 1s and 2s. We call it "The Black Word" and while I can't speak for Thor, Pete, Alexander or Anthony, I know that I throw in some extra bad stuff!

[Azral]

I've found that really small or really big margins of failure/success affect the mood of the table. If some comes "this close" to succeeding, the whole table feels just how close they came to succeeding. Or, if someone gets "maximum failure," the whole table groans and laughs in recognition of just how badly they flubbed the roll.

So it's only natural for the outcome to play into this mood. Of course, it never affects the fundamental outcome of the test, in terms of basic intent.

Same goes for success. Early on, our holy warrior prayed for a +1 VA to her sword for the duration of the fight. Ob 5, I said.

She got 9 successes on her B5 Faith test, and the entire table was awed by it! So we poured on the awesomesauce.

"OK," I said, "The light from your sword illuminates the entire glade. You've got yourself a grey-shade weapon!"

(Looking back, I should have asked her to narrate it.)

[Thanuir]

If there is an intuitive way to do it, yes. Like, if someone is getting injured (by falling or drowning or eating poisonous mushrooms), MoF is good for determining how significant the injury is.