Learn to DM: Failing Forward

[Charon]

Ok, let's have a chat about failing forward.

It's easy to get tripped up as a new DM. The 3.5e DMG is pretty good, the 5e one kinda terrible, and while the former will give you a lot of useful advice, there are a few things that it doesn't cover. The biggest one is the concept of failing forward.

The simplest way to explain this is to look at its opposite, deadlocking. Deadlocking is where you place something critical behind a skill check and when the players fail, they can't proceed. The game stalls and the adventure is potentially over.

Let's look at an example to illustrate this.

The PCs are on the trail of a kidnapped girl, stolen away by a secretive cult and due to be sacrificed in the next day or two. Their investigations have revealed rumours that the mayor was blackmailed by the same cult and snuck out of town last night to meet with them in secret.
The PCs have decided to watch the mayor's house and break in when he leaves in order to rummage through his stuff in the hope of finding some clues. You as the DM have hidden such a clue in the house. A note from the cultists confirming the meeting place and time, the abandoned church on the road to the village of Wably, a half hour's horse ride out of town. As might be expected, the note is hidden and you have placed a search check there in order to find it. The players can't take 20 as they don't know when someone might return so there's a time constraint.

DnD is a game where things the PCs do often have a chance of failure. It is this potential to fail that makes the game dramatic and fun. But in our example we set out, what happens if the PCs fail? Even if you set the DC low, like DC 10, thinking there's no way the players don't hit that. What do you do if they do? What if the players don't have many ranks in search. What if the results come in, 3, 4, 2, -1.

The PCs fail the search check. The note goes unfound. The girl dies. The adventure ends on a low note. The players' motivation suffers.
Or you panic. You fudge it. "You guys find the note!". On a 4? Yeah the players know you fudged it and now your credibility as a DM suffers and the players feel bad that they had to be bailed out.

What we need to do is redefine the failure. Fail forward. On a fail, instead of not finding the note, the players succeed... but with a penalty. Some complication that they otherwise wouldn't have had. Let's brainstorm some ideas how this could be failed forward.

1. The players find the note, but it's in code. Now their time consideration is exacerbated.

2. The players find two notes, naming different meeting locations. It seems the mayor was blackmailed twice and there's no way to know which was the more recent note.

3. The players find the note but as they do, they hear a key turning in the lock. The mayor's home!

4. The players find the note and make it out. Only when they are walking down the street does the party's rogue realise he left his glove behind. Evidence, pointing back to the PCs.

5. If you're on the spot and don't improvise too well, an easy way out is to simply move the object. Ok, you guys search his study, no sign of the note. (it's now in the next room they search). Increasing the number of checks increases their chances of finding it. It's not great, but it works in an emergency.

6. The players find the note but it doesn't explicitly state the location. "Meet us at the place your mother was buried". Now the PCs have to ask around their contacts and see if they can locate the place.

7. The players find the note but trigger a trap as they take it. The umbrella stand comes to life and attacks them.

These are just a few ideas to illustrate the point and now that you've seen it in action, you can probably employ the technique yourself. The best advice is to try and catch these things before they go through. If the note is so vital to find, you should already be prepared, knowing that a fail will still find the note so the game can continue regardless. And when it catches you by surprise, when something happens you weren't prepared for and you need to fail forward just think of logical complications that could arise from the success.

There is another way this can be used. Failing forward in combat. I've said many a time that a TPK is not a desirable outcome. Sure, there are those groups of players that would revel in a glorious TPK as a memory to be cherished. I'm one of them. But most players don't want their character to die. They hate it. And though it can happen sometimes, killing the whole party just puts these people off playing altogether. It's a sour experience rather than a golden opportunity to roll up a new PC. However, failing in combat doesn't have to equal death.
Yes, you can fail forward a combat encounter to the same end. The Stargate SG1 D20 conversion has good advice about this, pointing out that in Stargate TV logic, the main characters never get killed. If defeated in combat, the Goa'uld would capture SG1 and place them in some sort of prison that they can ultimately escape, perhaps providing them with new opportunities to gain intel or allies along the way.
The same can hold true here. If the PCs die to the boss's minions, the minions don't outright kill them. They capture them and take them to the dungeons so their boss can gloat over them and kill them at his leisure. Of course, if they die facing Count Strahd or Vecna himself then it might be too late, but get creative with it. I have another example, from a game played on this very forum.

A party of two, facing a sea hag in a dungeon. I hadn't considered that they would fail to defeat her. On paper the fight seemed straightforward enough. Until they failed all their saves against her horrific aura and her evil eye and got stuck in a doom spiral that I quickly realised was going to kill them. In the last room of the dungeon. After all that effort.

So I thought, how could I fail this forward? And I put myself in the shoes of this hag. She's arrived here in this dungeon looking to make a new home for herself in this area. She's a sea hag, so can't venture far from the lake where this dungeon is located. These PCs blunder in and attack her but they're clearly outmatched. She could kill them easily. Or...
She's a hag. Why not use them? Hags love a deal and this is a laughably one sided one. Do the hag's bidding and in return you get to live. It's win-win for the hag. The PCs now have to go put themselves at risk to accomplish her goals. It wasn't too difficult to write out a subplot of a task the hag wanted doing that she couldn't do herself. And to avoid the PCs simply cheesing it, she implants one of them with a hag's eye so she can see what they're up to. It's true, they have free will. They could have agreed, left the dungeon and never gone back. But you can guarantee the hag will find some way to get back at them. The hag is pleased as she has just solved one of her problems. The PCs are alive and get to continue the game, now with an additional sidequest, a sidequest they won't even be rewarded for. It's a punishment almost, but a kinda fun one.

TPK averted. Game rescued. The hag character took on new life, becoming less a faceless monster and more a pain in their side with a fleshed out personality and backstory and who knows, potentially a recurring character. As an enemy or an ally is up to the PCs.

Well there you go. You've become aware of the concept of deadlocking and how it can be countered by failing forward. You've seen it in action in a skill check situation and used to avoid a potential TPK. Another tool in your DM toolbox.