@arkandel said in How can we incentivize IC failure?:
One of the issues plaguing this hobby since its inception has to do with perceived unfairness - usually by staff. Someone succeeds because of favoritism. another is defeated because one person cheated to get ahead.
This is a little different than incentivizing IC failure. In this situation, success is determined not only in a manner outside of a player's control but also as a result of someone else's influence. The only way to incentivize anything is to give a player agency over their character's fate.
Even though these types of allegations will likely never go away, it strikes me that one of their underlying causes is that IC failure is often perceived as OOC failure, too. And I wanted to see if - and how - we can do better systemically to better distinguish between the two and ultimately incentivize conflict more than its resolution.
The Chronicles of Darkness, aka New World of Darkness 2.0, does this very well by providing a character with extra experience if they suffer a set back or choose to surrender. In other games, I have incentivized failure by providing some sort of reward if the player chooses failure; for instance, in a stressful situation in a Werewolf game, I let my players choose to voluntarily fail a frenzy roll in exchange for an XP reward (if I feel it isn't too disruptive to the game or if I think the outcome would be very funny to me).
In a way, FFG does the same with its intriguing dice system, which seems similar to Blood Bowl to me. In that case, the stats determine what you roll and who gets to choose the result form the roll, where each face gives you a certain outcome. Sometimes, choosing "Success, but with a drawback" is not as appealing as "Failure, but with a boon," or however it goes. But either way, the focus should be on giving the affected player a choice. And if given the choice, if there's a reward for failure, it may be taken strategically.
