Players Making Failure Interesting

So we had a TPK on Saturday.

The party came across the guardian to a gate we had to open. In the first round, the fighter won initiative, charged, and did 75 points of damage in one hit, dropping the enemy to about 20% health. The DM, seeing the writing on the wall, had an ally show up. But then the PCs went on a string of back luck: the fighter started missing, the rogue didn’t have the speed to flank with him, the wizard’s touch attacks were foiled by deflection bonuses, and the healer wasn’t at the session. In the end, the NPC fairy had to open the gate while the surviving guardian was futilely chasing the PC fairy around the room (it makes no more sense in context).

It wasn’t really anybody’s fault, just one of those things that happened. It’s hard to predict a string of bad rolls, it’s hard to work around the unexepected limitations of the characters, it’s hard to balance an encounter on the fly, and it’s hard to do anything when players aren’t available.

The thing it, the failure made the story better. The campaign has two sets of PCs: the A-Team (A for Awesome) and the B-Team (B for Bad). The A-Team is fledgling gods, the B-Team is comic relief. Ending an encounter in one hit is for awesome players, not comedy relief. It was much more appropriate and cinematic for the B-Team to muster their forces, approach a challenge, fail miserably, and get saved by somebody more competent.

There’s a lot of talk around the DM’s responsibility to make failure interesting, and it’s not inaccurate. A failure of “You jump the cliff, but drop your backpack” is more interesting than “You fail to jump the cliff and die”. Just Google the phrase “making failure interesting” for a fairly complete view of it. I think the whole idea is incomplete, short-sighted, and, unless handled by a DM far smarter than the concept expects, designed for a bad play experience. But that’s not what this post is about.

Instead, I’d like to put some of the onus on the players for making failure interesting, something that I couldn’t find any reference to in my research. It’s not solely the DM’s job to keep things fun, it’s everyone’s (Law #0 + Law #4). The DM can try to keep things interesting, but if the players are having none of it than the game won’t work at all.

Take our TPK. (Please! Ha, I kill me.) The DM was none too thrilled by it, but the players treated the whole thing like an excellent story for the PCs. It reinforces our role as the underdogs of the setting and keeps us in character. If we can slaughter our enemies, then we’re heroes, not the B-Team. If we signed up to be the campaign’s comic relief, then it’s our job to maintain that as much as it’s the DM’s.

If a DM isn’t making failure interesting, the players can. If a player fails to pick a lock and the DM decides that they don’t get through the door, I’ve seen too many DMs explicitly state that this is bad DMing. By that logic, the player who tries again, or the player who shrugs and forgets about it, is a bad player. A good player would see the failure, acknowledge it as learning, and try something else. A good player would break down the door, or use acid on the lock, or break out their magical lockpicks, or look for another way in.

Failure isn’t uninteresting in and of itself. Failure is uninteresting when it doesn’t advance the game state. If a player then uses the failure as a chance to advance the game state, then the failure is interesting. DMs are there to explain how the world reacts to the players. The players get to decide how they react to the world, and even “nothing happens” is an opportunity to react.