Interesting Failure

"Interesting failure" doesn't mean "no failure," it means failure everyone is "interested in." "Interested in" means "entertained by the occurrence of" and "willing to continue playing despite," among other things. "Everyone" means the players (including the GM, if any) at the table. It does not mean the characters. Characters can hate and rail against failure that everyone at the table is interested in. Edit: and that might be part of what makes it interesting. You can tell when players are "interested in" a failure, when they willingly enter into or bring about situations in which that failure is a recognized possibility, and when that failure looms they will limit their mitigation or avoidance of it to reasonable in-game responses and techniques, rather than complaints and rules lawyering. Not all failures are interesting, and not all situations lend themselves to interesting failure. Coming up with failure everyone is interested in can require a good deal of conversation, both up-front and in the moment. Avoiding situations that lend themselves so heavily boring failure (failure that isn't interesting) that success is the only interesting option can require some forethought and effort, but is quite doable. Sometimes it's okay for success to be the only option, and to be honest about there being no possibility of failure. Sometimes failure is so interesting that no one at the table is interested in success. Character death can be interesting, and it can even be more interesting for everyone than survival would be, but it often is not. Find out what kind of failure interests the people at your table.

Great advice for GMs in any game system. Many modern game systems already embrace this as part of their design.

Sometimes it leads to interesting conversations "What do you mean you want to mess up the throw with the dynamite stick?!"

The Question said: Sometimes it leads to interesting conversations "What do you mean you want to mess up the throw with the dynamite stick?!" Yes, if that question is asked in good faith, in order to clarify, rather than to call out a course of action as "stupid" or "foolish."

Paul U. said: The Question said: Sometimes it leads to interesting conversations "What do you mean you want to mess up the throw with the dynamite stick?!" Yes, if that question is asked in good faith, in order to clarify, rather than to call out a course of action as "stupid" or "foolish." He explained why he wanted to, it was actually pretty clever all things considering he was messing with highly explosive material.

The Question said: Paul U. said: The Question said: Sometimes it leads to interesting conversations "What do you mean you want to mess up the throw with the dynamite stick?!" Yes, if that question is asked in good faith, in order to clarify, rather than to call out a course of action as "stupid" or "foolish." He explained why he wanted to, it was actually pretty clever all things considering he was messing with highly explosive material. One approach is to default to assuming that ideas offered in good faith are "pretty clever" and then to make them so. That doesn't mean they'll always work, or work as intended, but once a GM is on the side of the players' ideas, ideas stop being stupid and consequences start being interesting.

The botches exist as a narrative tool to add more flavor or fun. In some systems, catastrophic failure would be happening an unreasonable portion of the time if you actually played it straight. Kids in Michigan would be dead every winter. And driving would be impossible.

The botches exist as a narrative tool to add more flavor or fun. Which works if everyone at the table is on the same page about "fun." One person might find shooting themselves in the foot flavorful and fun, and the person next to them might find it ridiculous and deprotagonizing. In some systems, catastrophic failure would be happening an unreasonable portion of the time if you actually played it straight. Kids in Michigan would be dead every winter. And driving would be impossible. For some people, an accurate (or at least plausible) simulation is inherently interesting. If a car crash can happen at any time, then that's checked for, even if a car crash is entirely beside the point of whatever game is being played, and would not, in and of itself, be fun to deal with. Other people see that it's plausible for a car crash not to happen at a particular junction, and wouldn't be fun to deal with, and so it doesn't. Or, see that it's plausible for a car crash to happen at a particular junction, and would be fun to deal with, so it does.