Having just run a legwork phase that wound up being more circuitous than I would have liked, I reread the rule book in search of an “only roll of failure is interesting” principle a la FATE.
I didn’t exactly find it, but I did spot something similar in ch. 1, when the book covers die rolls more generally:
6 or lower (abbreviated as 6-) is a miss; something goes wrong. You might get what you want anyway, but it’ll definitely have strings attached. The MC will make a move which will complicate the situation and make your lives more difficult.
I thought this was very helpful and thought I’d point it out. it has certainly helped me rethink how to formulate meaningful misses, particularly since hits are so clearly defined mechanically.
Making an MC move on a miss is a very important thing to do. If you don’t make MC moves, you aren’t complicating the characters’ lives, and they have nothing to react to.
PbtA games don’t have rules like “only roll when failure is interesting” because the moves in PbtA generate interesting developments through MC moves and player-chosen 7-9s. In other words, there are no “whiffs” in PbtA; every time you roll the dice, you change the fiction.
I think the trick for me was understanding that 7-9 results are not the only way to impose “success with a cost”.
For example, on a missed hit the street requesting information, the player perhaps gets the answer they are looking for anyway – but the contact may have a conflicting interest, loose lips, or they may have taken too long to reach a reliable contact, and the corp has taken actions that render the information partially obsolete.
Yep. It could also mean that the info is true but makes a later part of the mission harder.
Oh man, I had not at all thought of giving them “this is the answer you don’t want to hear”
Giving the player/character exactly what they wanted it, but in such a way that they no longer want it is a favorite MC move. 😀
Yep. A miss when trying to establish the strength of target defenses doesn’t mean you fail to assess the defences – it may instead be that you successfully establish that the defences are much stronger than expected.
To my mind, there’s a reason it’s called a “miss” rather than “failure”… “failure” implies your action was unsuccessful, whereas “miss” speaks only to the die roll.
I absolutely agree with you Simon Geard. I am very wary of PbtA hacks that describe 6- as a “fail” and not a “miss”.
Plus, it’s the only way you can say “oooo, that’s a bad miss” whenever they roll a 6-.
Adam Bloom – “Yep, that’s a bad miss. You start counting the guards… but quickly realise you’re going to be counting all afternoon. Looks like an entire battalion of troops setting up outside the building.” 🙂