8.Complicate Dont Terminate
8. Complicate, Not Terminate (Failure Severity Guidance) (new)
This is table philosophy, not an official rule — worth saying plainly instead of letting it pass as settled fact. The core rules only promise Failing Forward: “every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way… there is no such thing as a roll where ’nothing happens.’” That’s real, official text — but it stops there. It doesn’t say the change has to match the size of what was actually being risked.
The guiding rule for this supplement: failure should make the current story harder. It shouldn’t end it and swap in a new one. A failed roll should raise the tension that’s already there. It should feed back into systems already in play. It shouldn’t, by itself, turn a quiet break-in into a firefight, or a negotiation into a chase. Do that only if the player’s actual gamble was big enough to justify that kind of swing.
Weigh how bad a Failure with Fear should be against the size of the bet. Don’t just look at which die came up higher. A Failure with Fear on a small, supporting roll (dressing a room, scouting a detail) shouldn’t cost as much as a Failure with Fear on the scene’s main action. Ask what was really being risked before reaching for the core rules’ harsher consequences (“immediate danger… focus of multiple adversaries”). Those fit failures on the roll a scene actually hinges on — not every roll that happens to land with Fear.
Use the core rules’ own Soft/Hard Move idea on purpose, not by default. Soft moves “give the party new information and an opportunity to react to it.” They’re genuinely worse for the party, but still theirs to solve. Hard moves take that choice away outright. Reach for hard moves when the story has earned it — repeated failures, a big gamble, a player-declared big swing. Don’t reach for them automatically, just because Fear happened to land on a die that wasn’t carrying much weight to begin with.
Example: The bard rolls Failure with Fear while scouting a side passage for loot. That’s a small, supporting action. Springing an ambush would be a hard move — it would hijack the scene, so the GM avoids it. Instead, the GM plays a soft move: the passage is a dead end. But from here, the bard can hear the scouts’ patrol pattern through the rock. That’s worse news, but the party can act on it. Now compare that to a Failure with Fear on the party’s actual attempt to smuggle the egg past the pass. That roll is the scene’s main action. That’s exactly the kind of roll where a hard move — “the patrol spots you, now” — is earned.