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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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Unless you’re aiming for a specific path (when replaying, for example), I do find it’s much more satisfying when an RPG allows you to fail and then follow through with the consequences, without just hitting a hard stop or making you feel like you got a lesser experience as a result.
But it does rely on trust - I need to trust that a game is designed to do that before I commit to playing in a way where I don’t immediately reload a save when I fail a skill check.
I very much agree on the trust part. I don't want to muss out on an important companion over a dialogue fail
Even BG3 failed at this. A few times I had to navigate a minefield using a guide for something I didn’t want to miss out on. It’s more fun to just blast through without loading, but sometimes the consequences are dire for messing up some little detail and I can’t bring myself to just not have good endings.
On my first playthrough I did the game blind. It was really fun, but I missed out on 5 companies (!) It was like I played a different game than my friends
I love doing this in my TRPGs. Nine out of ten times an event was memorable was because of a horrible failure rather than a successful win. My table eats it up. I wish more games did this too
Tabletop games are good because you can trust your DM to guide the failures in an interesting way. Unless it’s a bad DM and you can’t.
I had a DM who believed strongly that failure was what made it interesting, he loved to say “The characters in Star Wars failed almost every time and that’s why it was good!” But actually watching the movies, failures bad enough to result in grievous bodily harm are relatively rare.
One time during our first session of a new game we were somewhere dark and a creature was there. He had me roll athletics with no explanation and I rolled high. Then he had me roll acrobatics, high again. Athletics again, high. Constitution check, high. Athletics 11. Then he cackled and eagerly described how a dragon cut off my arm.
My character was built entirely around two handed weapons, this made me borderline useless. Based off of his comments, he didn’t have any plans to provide a way for my character to recover his limb, he just thought it would be cool to mutilate me and decided to force me to roll until I failed.
Needless to say I didn’t go back.