@acceleration Many storytellers do handle failures and dramatic failures as story opportunities... but many players view them as dead ends and scene enders. Rather than making lemons out of lemonade they throw up their hands and cry about everything being sour. As an ST, I'm not going to give the players rainbows and butterflies when they dramatically fail. It is, by definition, a fail. And it is a dramatic fail. Is there a way out and to overcome? Yes. Is it easy to do? No. Is it going to come without some bumps and bruises? Probably not.
Dealing with dramatic failures sometimes require humbling ones character to the scene. And for some people, they just can't have fun unless they are the bestest ever alltimes. They view humbling one's character the same as humbling one's self and that isn't fun for them. As an ST you might hear something like, "you're just trying to humiliate me!" because the player's self image is attached so closely, if not entirely, to their character.
The problem becomes the uncertainty in how an ST is going to handle something. When you know and trust your ST you're much more likely to have fun. If you're playing in a scene with someone you don't know as an ST, sometimes people get this fear that their character is going to be killed - even on games where a PC has never been killed by an NPC. So people sometimes err on the side of pessimism and develop the viewpoint of 'this is a scene ender because chancing anything further could get me killed so I turn around and go home'.
The same can be said of players. If you join a +event, the 'fun' of what happens is sometimes tempered by the unfamiliarity of the other players involved. This is why storylines with friends are usually much more full and engaging, because things can go sideways without the apprehension that someone is gonna break the scene down the middle with some crazy character choices. If I choose to take a dramatic failure because it can create a fun opportunity, is the guy next to me gonna choose to frenzy and kill my character because he thinks that's a fun opportunity that was created? I was having great fun with a gaming group on one particular MU* and I made a character choice to go off on his own and handle an IC situation away from the rest of the group. Many others in the group took it as I, the player, didn't want to play with them anymore and they shut me out completely OOCly. They wanted to know OOCly what I was doing in order not to freak out. I wanted to keep things IC. It ended poorly.
The bottom line for me is that whenever I've had a bad experience in a scene it is usually because I'm not familiar with or used to the style of either the ST or the other players I'm with. Not everyone views the game (or gaming in general) the same way I do and that presents for very different outcomes in story and in satisfaction with a scene. I get the feeling it is like that a lot and many of the views and preferences we carry clash with others we encounter on games from both a player side and an ST side.
