Saturday, January 18, 2014

Failure improves your skills?

It should, shouldn't it? That is unless your character is trying to disarm a nuke.

How do you handle skill failure in your game? I've been giving this some thought and realized a great deal of times we as GMs grant XP for success and bonuses for being great and successful, but what about failures and retries?

I've talked about tracer rounds in modern combat and their benefit in "walking" the fire onto the target. You miss? No problem! Next round you get a bonus from the tracer bullets. That is, if you survive! Remember those things work both ways!

What about an archer? The first arrow falls short and the subsequent ones get a bonus. What about picking locks? Does the character just fail and that's the end of it? Or does the rogue get a retry with a bonus? Spells? Cryptography? What about combat? Feeling your enemy, getting to know the moves, predicting what the opponent is going to do, which way the sword is going to swing, which side does the opponent cover most?

How relevant is failure to character improvement in your game?

No comments: