Do you know why tabletop roleplaying games use dice? Every game designer ever will lie about the reason. The reason cited is to create randomness or to create moments of excitement or whatever, but none of that is true. The reason is that with dice, sometimes your character is going to fail, and you can’t argue about it too much because that’s what the dice indicated. It’s going to happen, sorry!
Designers and players have not really come up with a good solution in MMORPG roleplaying over all the years that we’ve been trying it. A lot of roleplayers will use a fairly simple set of rolling challenges when necessary, often just deploying a random dice roll to either beat a target number or see who rolls higher. But my goal here is not to explain how to make these systems work because people have their own preferences. Rather, my goal here is to talk about not just accepting the results of failure but making failure into its own interesting outcome.
The thing about roleplaying characters is that they are characters we invest time and emotion into. We care about our characters. How much you invest yourself into the characters can vary a great deal, but at the end of the day these are characters you like and want to succeed, and that makes writing about losing much more of a challenge.
It’s not really alien when you think about it; even in childhood play we have a certain impulse to say that the failures which otherwise humble us “don’t count” or we should get a do-over. Playing with pretend guns that fire nothing earn back-and-forth arguments of one kid saying, “Ha, I got you,” while the other shouts, “Nuh-uh!” and it descends into actual scuffles with farcical regularity. This isn’t some kind of original sin; we want to succeed, and barring any actual skill test, we would happily just succeed over and over.
As adults, we know this isn’t the case, and in roleplaying we are aware that sometimes you are going to fail. But there’s an urge to lessen it, to soften the blow somehow, to declare our own mulligans on the regular wherein no, I didn’t fail, I merely did something which looked like failure. I really succeeded.
Now, it would be nice to say that you just need to get over yourself and learn to fail, but the reality is that if you know how to rewire your instincts and be totally cool when a badly flubbed roll means the enemy absolutely bodies you, you are a better person than me. My goal here is not to ask you to suddenly have a perspective with which I myself can struggle; rather, it’s about how to learn to embrace failure when it happens in a way that makes things more exciting in roleplaying instead of frustrating. And a good portion of that is making failure an active choice.
Let’s say that your character is someone cool, collected, not prone to showboating. You attack an opponent. Your roll indicates that you fail. You might argue that your character shouldn’t fail at such a simple attack… but what if it’s a result of a decision? Sure, it’d be one thing if your character underestimated the opposition, but you can just as easily say that your character chose to pull the punch, drew back, or otherwise flinched.
Why? Maybe someone else was winding up. Maybe at the last minute it became clear the opponent would get too much information from that first attack. Maybe a lot of things. The point is that you are still framing the action as a failure, but a deliberate one. You would rather fail and not be in a bad position than succeed and overextend.
This can even extend to a larger scene. Imagine that your character starts off holding back. The first attack misses, while the opponent strikes back effectively. Second attack is blocked. Third miss. Fourth miss. What’s going on? You can actually narrate that your character is having a problem where each successive miss is driving a loop of anger, leading to wilder attacks in frustration. Or each time it’s a feeling of confusion, that as each successive attack misses there’s a greater sense of “what is going on” leading to more doubt, more hesitation.
In fact, not only does this allow you to explain away a sequence of failures, it actually suggests further roleplaying as your character deals with failing at what should have been an easy task. Or even just the catharsis as you finally succeed and can pour a lot of satisfaction into that, into getting your footing back.
And all of this is in situations where you think your character should succeed easily triumph. We haven’t even talked about scenarios wherein failure or ambiguous success would be entirely in order.
You may have already noticed the theme I’m going for here, but let’s be transparent: The point is that failure is not a negative consequence. That’s the big reframing to embrace. Instead of treating success as a given and failure as a penalty, you should be treating failure as a chance to tell a more engaging story with more twists and turns. Because in basically every narrative characters failing at things isn’t just a thing that happens, it’s actually the norm.
Characters who just win are boring. In most narratives, the whole point is that the protagonists can’t quite succeed at their ultimate goals until the very end, since otherwise the narrative would be over. They succeed at smaller goals, but they also have some big failures along the way, enough to make you afraid there’s a very real chance that these characters could utterly fail even if you know full well that the author is actually in charge of everything.
Nobody tells stories about the times we thought we would triumph easily and then did. It’s the uncertainty that makes it memorable. It’s recalling the times that through setbacks and challenges we managed to claw together a success. It’s being able to say “just when it looked like all was lost” and follow it up with how things weren’t lost after all.
Or, alternatively, to show how close someone came to success before it tragically slipped away again, but if you’re roleplaying open-form tragedies, the problem you have isn’t getting characters to fail but getting them to succeed – which is not what we’re talking about today.
The key, then, is to stop looking at failure as if it’s the thing you want to avoid at all costs. Obviously that’s something the character you’re playing wants, but as the audience for the prospective story, do you want a story wherein the protagonist effortlessly passes every challenge and never has so much as a moment of doubt or self-reflection? Or do you want to see your character go up against steep odds, fail and struggle, but ultimately come out on top through a combination of skill, grit, and the power of friendship/this gun you found?
I know which one sounds more entertaining to me, at least.
If you’re an old hand at roleplaying in MMOs, you can look to Eliot Lefebvre’s Storyboard as an irregular column addressing the common peaks and pitfalls possible in this specialized art of interaction. If you’ve never tried it before, you can look at it as a peek into how the other half lives. That’s something everyone can enjoy, just like roleplaying itself.
