One of the elegant beauties of roleplaying games is the possibility of ‘failing forward’. To clear up any misconceptions: ‘Failing forward’ does not mean that the PC’s will always get what they want no matter the results of die rolls or other mechanics, nor does it mean that failures should feel immaterial or trivial. ‘Failing forward’ merely means that failures can, and should, help generate new situations and conditions that can be tackled and explored the same way situations generated by success could.

We see this all the time in other media. Setbacks and high-stakes failures are everywhere in drama. In pop cultural terms, The Empire Strikes Back is one of the most perfect examples of a ‘failing forward’ scenario ever put to film. The heroes fail. In fact, they all but lose. Han is captured and frozen in carbonite, Luke loses his hand and has got some parental drama to deal with, the Rebellion is in tatters… Yet, these failures help move the story ahead, and they are not presented as results of mere foolishness nor avoidable mistakes on the part of our protagonists. Almost everything the heroes in Empire Strikes Back set out to do turns out poorly. And the story is better for it.

These principles apply to games in different ways. In emergent-narrative games like Dwarf Fortress or Crusader Kings, failing forward is delightful. The spanner in the works and the unexpected upset is part of what keeps the game state fresh and engaging, and part of what produces the type of tales these games are uniquely suited for. Their mechanics and their gameplay anticipates and accommodates the twists and turns produced by the engine. A game of Dwarf Fortress with complete linear progressive structure would be, well, quite dull. It would be a sequence of the player masterfully executing a sequence of systems to produce a perfect result, and perfection tends to be pretty boring and un-storyable.

The Dwarf Fortress community knows this. It is with good reason that they’ve proudly adopted the infamous LOSING IS FUN as their motto. And losing really is fun in Dwarf Fortress, in Crusader Kings, in Caves of Qud, and their ilk. Losing tends to make for the most entertaining, nail-biting, heart-wrenching, edge-of-your-seat moments.

What does that mean for RPG’s? Some games are designed explicitly around failing forward principles. Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark and so on all have sophisticated ways of incorporating genre-typical modes of drama and failures into their gameplay loops. Crucially, their systems do not rely on linear progressive structures. The systems governing character stats, traits, and so on are designed with a mind to characters that’ll get battered up and that’ll, sooner or later, experience harsh and cruel failure. By anticipating these potential outcomes from the beginning, these games can present gameplay structures that allow for meaningful failure – and for characters to meaningfully rebound from these failures.

Games with more explicitly linear systems of progressions struggle with this. The secret sauce of ‘failing forward’ lies in the promise that this failure can be dealt with, can be rectified, that things can be made right once more. Games, be it roleplaying games or video games or board games, sometimes present systems that appear to allow for failing forward, but does not deliver on the promise of that crucial return to success. It’s something I find a lot of computer RPG’s struggle immensely with. On the one hand, they want an immersive, rich world where failure is a possibility, and where you are encouraged to play things out Ironman mode and roll with the punches. But in a system where you’re expected to always and strictly adhere to linear progression model, that is hard to do.

Much as I love games like Darkest Dungeon and Battle Brothers, these games struggle immensely with this conundrum. Death spirals are common in these types of games. Most insidiously, you can enter one without knowing because you think (in no small part because the game explicitly tells you) that you can persevere through this one setback. In truth, that apparently small setback has in fact ruined every chance of long-term success. You can’t roll with the punches if every punch is, effectively, a knock-out blow.

So again, what does that mean for RPG’s? Well, for one, that they too are vulnerable to death spirals, but are also uniquely situated to recontextualize and refocus the game to accommodate failures. Failure does not need to mean ending, nor does it need to mean the closing of future directions. Make your failures feel like Empire Strikes Back rather than a knock-out blow. Don’t be afraid to fail forward, but keep in mind that failing forward is only impactful if the possibility of resurgence and renewal exists.