3 Reasons Why 'DMs Should Never Say No' is Bad D&D Advice

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[MalakyoftheOSR]

"I'm lowering this now that my cat is gone."
The RPGPundit know the real reason why we watch his videos.

[simo]

We badly need more opposing voices like yours in rpgs.

[TheManBehindtheScreen]

The idea of never saying no to your players has always baffled me, partly because a much younger me experienced the glaring problems with this first hand. I still think it's good to try to say yes to them as often as one reasonably can - emphasis on reasonably - but a DM/GM should NEVER be afraid to say no.

[Hedgehobbit]

The excuse for fail forward that I'm always seeing goes something like "What if the players fail the roll to find the key to open the door to the hideout so they can defeat the bad guy? Then entire campaign would be ruined!"

Fail forward is the result of bad (and lazy) linear adventure writing.

[raystinsky]

"No, but you can try something that isn't totally stupid."

I can follow this rule

[MikeDiBaggio]

There's an episode of the old Twilight Zone where a gangster wakes up in a world where he keeps getting everything he wants all the time. He always wins at gambling, the hot chicks always want to sleep with him, Etc. By the end of the episode, he finds out he's in hell.

[LibraGamesUnlimited]

Failing Forward (or failing up) is what SJWs in comics have been doing since they got first got their feet in the doors. They get an A-list character and either emasculate them or kill them off and replace them with a version that is more to their liking (female, non-white, gay/lesbian), then totally fail at selling comics until they had no choice but cancel it.

Then they get to come back in a month or two with the same character, the same team and a new number one.


That's why they love the concept, it keeps them employed.

[Dwarin]

Failing forward is not presenting a "success in failure", it's about presenting a failure but then there's a shift in the situation/fiction, and the story proceeds from there. It prevents the players from rolling the same thing over and over again until they succeed. It doesn't mean they automatically succed, it just means there's a shift in the story and they must now think of a different approach for their problem.
Having said this, saying "no" to your players can also work sometimes.

[artemiswyrm]

Found your channel through minds. Trying to get on the D&D vlog game myself. Wish me luck, man.

[TheGenericavatar]

'Failing Forward' was the subject of a Twilight Zone episode before it was even a phrase.

[DM_Bluddworth]

Failing Forward is similar to “New Math”. In New Math, 2+2 = 5 is more correct than 2+2 = 3, because the answer of 5 is still a greater sum than the two parts. A student would get credit for the wrong answer as long as the concept was correct.

In RPGs I’ve seen this concept as “Player Consent”, where the player must agree with any major situation or consequence that their character experiences.

[kylefout]

I think that there's a type of fail forward that makes sense in certain games. When you take out time keeping, random monsters and other procedural parts of the game a failed roll is just a boring waste of time. With "fail forward" it might mean you were able to open the rusty gate, but it was covered in metal eating mites. Or maybe you didn't find the contact that you were looking for, but you did find a serial killer who claims to be the contact and he's guiding you back to his lair.

If it just means that good things always happen, that's lame. But something happening to develop the action (moving the story forward) can be useful when procedures are gone and you're relying a lot on rolls, as is often the case.

And, depending how your badguys are statted, I think that you can defend doing 1 damage on a miss. Fiction-wise it represents the extra strain of avoiding the attacks of failing party member. Mechanically it puts a theoretical limit on the number of rounds a fight can go. Feels-wise it let's players know that they were at the combat. Missing every round in a fight that the party wins feels more like being benched than losing. The important thing for tension is that the party can lose and that characters can die. 1 point of damage won't ruin that.

Again, not something that I do but a case can be made for it.

[silvershitposts]

I dont even play d&d (yet) but I like the aestethic of your videos

[DonKalinich]

The DM in Nobilis is called ""Hollyhock God".

[chaddickhaut]

I'm not averse to telling players no, but I much prefer saying "Are you *sure* you want to do that?" and cackling evilly. 😉

[geekybugle]

Only version of this (if you could call it that) I've seen that I could be okey with goes like this:
You fail and something bad happens (fumble)
You fail but nothing else happens
You succeed but something bad happens
You succeed and something good happens (crit)

[jesusperez-osnd]

The best way to destroy inmersion as a player is being able to change virtual reality within the game with your mere saying, instead of by your facts and decision within that world

[Charlotte_WilliamsFYTG]

12:30 Kind of reminds me of something Mr. Smith said in The Matrix. When they first made the virtual world they're trapped in, they tried to make it a perfect paradise world but their brains kept trying to wake up. Something like that.

[shinrafugitives]

Part of me still wants to still use the yes-and method and just let the player's dumb idea fail regularly. Saying no outright eventually begets the same result as failing forward because the character didn't even try it.

[ahabicher]

I always take "never say no" as "they can try anything and I will never say 'you can't try that'", so I took your title with a "wh000t? Never say No is centrally important to rpg player agency!"
Turns out we are talking about different kinds of No.