Any games where you're encouraged to fail or where failure is made much more interesting via mechanics?
THEME: Interesting Failure
Hello! I've got a tangentially related recommendation post that you might find interesting, one with Failure As Growth as the theme.
Let's see what else is out there!
Fiendgazer, by tremor.pings.
You are a nobody somewhere in rural America.
And you are a Gazer. Haunted. Changed.
You see the things others deny.
Your Gaze is your weapon and your doom.
Only you can push back the Beyond.
FIENDGAZER is a tabletop roleplaying game about small-town freaks defending their community from supernatural threats. You learn about a presence through twisted signs and horrors, and you are the only ones who can protect bystanders from it. As you delve deeper to understand the dark intentions behind the haunting, you will be forced to reckon with the Beyond.
Failure doesn't always look like failure in Fiendgazer. Death is inevitable should you choose to attack the Fiend that is terrorizing your home, but you have a chance to buy time for your friends. You can always improve a dice roll in order to get a more desirable outcome, but doing so requires you to erase a truth about what you've discovered so far - two steps forward, and one step back. This is what I'd expect from many a horror game!
You are operatives colloquially known as SLEEPRUNNERS: expert cranial infiltrators who work through their targets’ dreams. You’re an elite, scrappy Crew traveling the world on the dime of your Employer, but that’s not important right now. What is important is your new Target and the wealth of information/untapped impetus they’ve got roiling inside that little head of theirs.
Inspired by Inception, I think SLEEPRUNNERS is interesting in the way failure shows up in the game. Because you are pulling off a heist inside someone's dreams, failure isn't a brutal death, nor is it a gradual transformation into an antagonist, but rather a sort of drowning; getting lost in dreams and never waking up. The game mechanizes this by using clocks attached to dream layers; the deeper you go, the harder it is for you to wake up. Conceptually, I think it's a little hard to wrap your head around, but I think it has the potential to really amp up the tension - especially if one Sleeprunner sacrifices themself in the hopes of achieving victory for the rest of the crew.
Depths of Reality, by Devil Whale Games
Depths of Reality is a game of tragic horror where you portray the crew of a submarine, diving ever deeper in the black ocean to fulfil their final mission. It will be a desperate race against time, as oxygen reserves dwindle, the increasing pressure cracks the outer hull, and even reality itself starts to break down.
As time passes, it won’t just be your vessel getting torn apart by the currents, but your very person as well. Can you hold on to who you are, or will your psyche be torn apart by the depths?
Depths of Reality tears away who you are every time you fail, but rather than attacking hit points or mental health, failure tears away pieces of your ship. Every time something is damaged or destroyed, a new consequence changes the scene. For example, damaging the Bridge will also destroy group cohesion: fights break out, mutiny festers, and protocol vanishes. Failure is expected, and is an integral part of the story. If you want a tragic game, consider Depths of Reality.
Terminal Plasticity, by Urizenic.
Terminal Plasticity is a lightweight, fast-paced, versatile RPG of over-the-top action in a trans-/posthuman superfuture. The system lets players get creative without encumbering anyone with a bunch of fiddly mechanics. The DM is free to focus on narration and plot, creating an escalating violencefest that keeps everyone on their toes.
Use XP to purchase any augments and equipment you can dream up during character creation or at any time during play.
You have two stats, subterfuge and violence, and roll d6 pools based on relevant augments and equipment, your specialty, and doing things that grind your teammates’ gears.
What happens when you fail in Terminal Plasticity might feel pretty standard, but it's how you fail that feels interesting to me. You have two stats, and one number that is relevant to both, similar to Lasers & Feelings. Rolling above your number is good for Violence, below is good for Subterfuge. What's different from L & F is that you can use dice pools and some rolls have success thresholds. If you roll too many failures, you have to add a die to a die stack. Failure only really affects you if the stack falls. You can choose to knock over your dice stack prematurely for a chance to succeed at a cost, but if your roll results in nothing but failures, you not only add dice to your stack, but you also lose access to a mod, tool, or piece of equipment.
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is a tabletop role playing game that features investigation mechanics that let players take initiative, use their characters' unique strengths to find clues, and deduce conclusions themselves rather than just walk into a room and roll Investigate.
Play as mystery-solving detectives - amateur or professional - who use their different sets of knowledge, personalities, and unique gameplay mechanics to sleuth their way through a challenging but rewarding world. Roleplay and mechanics are tightly bound together, and your character's personality and traits will ensure a totally different gameplay experience from your fellow players'.
Eureka approaches mysteries with the philosophy that every effort to unravel the mystery is not wasted, even if it is rife with failure. Failing a role allows your character accumulate a resource that culminates in a Eureka! moment - a flash of insight that gives you a key piece of information, an aha! moment that makes your information re-arrange itself into the next piece of the puzzle. The designers of Eureka stand behind their mechanics and how they inform roleplay, so you might find something new and interesting in their thesis of play.
OddFolk is a modular game. At its core, its a series of actions that players (including the GM) can use to introduce unexpected narrative developments into the fiction they are co-creating. The game is organized into kits (a collection of actions) to help you choose what kind of stories you want to tell and what kind of flavour you want to focus on. Kits are contained bundles of mechanical support connected by a theme.
A Game of compounding consequences.
In Oddfolk, success and failure is not what’s at stake when you roll. Each time a player rolls, they select one or more options from a picklist, depending on the result. Rolling a 1 is often the best/simplest result, as only one choice is needed. Beyond that the results become incrementally more complicated as more details are added.
I like the idea that failure is a choice in this game, although it's not necessarily a choice you can avoid. When you roll a die, the number you get is the number of consequences that happen on any given action. This means that the higher number that you roll, the more complications are possible. What kinds of complications arise in your game depend on the kits you choose to play with; as a modular game, you don't need to use everything provided in the rulebook, but rather only what works for you. If you really treasure customization and difficult choices, you might like OddFolk.
Wizardman: Queer and Chaos, by [Ante's Company]().
You’re here because the universe has wronged you. You’ve felt helpless against its laws, and are here for revenge. Understandable. Commendable, even. But be warned: truth does not simply submit when faced with opposition. It rears its head with fury. But you want magic, don’t you? To you, it’s worth any cost. You’d be willing to lose anything. Everything.
Wizardman: Queer and Chaos RPG is the struggle of tragedy made physical; it is the greatest strengths of humanity’s irrationality and emotion coming head-to-head with the bucking horns of truth, and about the struggle of people to define themselves as stronger than the forces which rule them. It is a game about killing the Gods which seek to contain us, and breaking our chains off in rage. But it is also a game about consequences, and about the understanding that you cannot win forever.
In some ways, failure in Wizardman is fairly standard: fail an attack roll and you take damage, plain and simple. The interesting part of failure exists in the lore, particularly in how that lore affects the magic in this game. Because magic ability in this game is tied to trauma, your emotions are enough to ensure that any spell you cast succeeds. What you chance is actually your character's connection to the world around them - fail something called a Denial check, and truth eats away at your magic, taking away the thing that makes you powerful. You can choose to fight this, but fighting the loss threatens your soul, and therefore also threatens your life.
This game asks you to play hurt and angry characters, and gives you a way to play self-destructively, leaning into power in a way that eats away at the core of how you define yourself. It's great for folks who want to play something terribly tragic.
Nuclear Angels: The Wasted World, by Riley Clark
You live in the Wasted World. The Wastes. The Once-Green-World.
Whatever you call it, it'll be gone soon.
Radiation has spread across the Wastes and threatens everything with its poison. Mortals die quick, and they have yet to find a permanent cure, if any at all. Angels are the result of genetic mutation caused by radiation. It also sort of altered their brain chemistry-they used to be Mortals too, afterall-but now they can't seem to bring themselves to care about much of anything. They just sit and watch the world burn.
*So I guess it's up to you and your friends, a gang of not-quite-Mortals and not-yet-Angels to take the spotlight! Will you escape, survive, or destroy the Wasted World?
Nuclear Angels balances failure with success by pitting your two natures against each-other. You start with a d4 in mortality and a d4 in divinity, and pit the two against each-other every time you face adversity. Rolling higher with divinity grants you success, but increases your mortality dice. Rolling higher with mortality makes something go wrong, but your divinity increases. Should you increase a die to a d12 and succeed with it, you gain a new mutation and reset your die down to a d4. As your angel wrestles, they become stranger and stranger; less interested in mortals. Become too strange, and your character ceases to be helpful to anyone around them.
If you like the strange ways mutation can change your character's trajectory, you are likely to enjoy Nuclear Angels.
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