When failure isn’t important in narrative games
Brief answer: when the story can absorb it.
In a traditional game, there is winning and losing. Good strategies and luck lead to winning, bad strategies and luck lead to losing. Many roleplaying games are the same: you have a goal your characters are trying to accomplish and as players you want them to accomplish it. Achieving the goal through tactics, luck and grandstanding is deemed a success. In roleplaying, this is then mirrored in the perceptions of the randomisers used to mimic the uncertainty of the universe; success on a dice roll is a stride towards achieving the goal, failure on a dice roll sets it back.
So we have a set up in roleplaying where success is good, failure is bad.
But in narrative games you can separate your character goals from your player goals. Achieving your character goals may give you a buzz, but that’s not why you are playing. I would suggest you are playing for the story that took you to a goal. And that’s why I always treat my games like a movie.
Different directions
Movies would be boring if your characters went straight through the plot without any real hiccups or personal stakes. You want the characters to have setbacks. Actually, you want the characters to have meaningful conversations and to do things which are tactically stupid but emotionally important - and which make the movie more colourful.
In narrative games, failed rolls and poor decisions are what make you care for the characters more. So you get pwned at a social event, piss off your family or lose the fight. So now you find new friends in the same position, become more self-reliant or you have to escape from where you have been taken prisoner. Because failure just takes the story in a different direction.
And for me, this is the key. Whether you succeed or fail doesn’t matter because whichever way you go there is always more story to tell.
John Wick explicitly talks about good dice rolls giving you narrative control rather than the character succeeding. He’s saying “it’s not about success or failure; you have the opportunity to say how this story goes”. (And I admit I’m guilty of not understanding this properly when I read Houses of the Blooded for the first time.)
And whilst I write this for narrative games, none of this needs to stay within narrative rules systems. There is no reason that having a setback and having to regroup in a more crunchy game has to be a negative, but rather an opportunity to try a different approach.
When failure is important
You may notice that the title of this post is “WHEN failure isn’t important..”. I try not to make anything absolute, and there are definitely situations where failure isn’t good. The most obvious: humans are bad when everything keeps going wrong. We need some light in our lives. And then there are players who don’t want heightened emotions, they want some light escapism. They want a game that is safe because it’s familiar without the risk of emotional upset. Sometimes the stakes are so high that failure changes the game to the point it’s unplayable. And lesser versions of all of these. I won’t deny these cases exist. It’s not always fair to say that failure isn’t important.
(Although I like that FATE points and other bennies mean that at least sometimes you can choose to succeed.)
Embrace failure
If I have a point, it’s this. I want players to embrace their characters’ failures more. And for rules systems to stop caring so much about the black and white of success or failure, as opposed to the narrative potential of the same. And many do.
My goal for my games is that the players get a wide range of emotions. I want them to have highs when they resolve something, grief for a favourite character who died in a properly tragic way, excitement when they get something they want.
And I want their characters to succeed. I really do. It’s just not as important as this other stuff.