Fiasco, and Defining Success

Fiasco is an RPG, though it certainly doesn’t look much like one compared to the old RPGs of yesteryear. There are no stats, no challenge rolls, no character sheets beyond a single note-card. There are scenes, yes, and players act out their roles to advance a shared narrative, but no one ever rolls a die to see if they succeed at charming their way past a guard or pushing past a bouncer into the club.

If you know about Fiasco, you probably found out about it because of Wil Wheaton and his tabletop videos. Fiasco is about a group of characters making a right mess of things. The story is made by rolling dice and using the results to select relationships, important locations, and items that will be important in the story. These same dice are then used to dictate whether the individual characters will succeed or fail in their narrative goals.

How do players succeed in RPGs?

Now you might say “What are you talking about? These rules clearly state that the GM sets a difficulty, you roll your die, and if you roll a number higher than the difficulty number than you succeed. What is so complicated about that?”

Well, in Fiasco, once the setting is…well…set, play begins by establishing and acting out scenes where two characters meet, talk, and try to get things to go their way. The scene will only wrap up after one of the other players hands one of the acting players a die, either white or black. This is, in essence, a verdict on whether this scene will “go well” for the character or not.

But if you watch the videos you see something interesting. Sometimes, a scene going poorly for a character means they don’t get what they want. Other times, a scene going poorly means they do get what they want with implications that things will turn out bad for them later on.

Much like Blades in the Dark, Fiasco is very narrative focused, and what is “good” or “bad” is always a little up to interpretation. What does it mean when you roll a success? The obvious answer is that the character does what they were trying to do, but even that simple answer can get a little dodgy.

Perhaps a concrete example is in order: Swiftfoot is creeping through a dark house while its wealthy occupant slumbers, and comes across a sleeping guard at the end of the hall. The player gets an idea: “Okay, I sneak up to the guard and tap them on the shoulder. Ha! I succeeded on my stealth check!”

The GM thinks for a moment and says; “Okay, you get up to the guard without waking them, and you touch their shoulder. They give a snort, wake up, and grab your arm while bellowing “sound the alarm! Intruder!”

Now one group of people might view this as the player being foolish. “Don’t push a sleeping guard when you’re trying to be quiet,” they mutter. “Shoving a guard isn’t being stealthy! Of course the guard woke up, what did they think was going to happen?”

Another group of players might say “obviously the goal wasn’t to wake the guard, it was to see if the guard was sleeping lightly or heavily. People gently poke sleeping guards who don’t wake up all the time in movies. If they failed the roll, then the guard should have woken up.”

Both groups are begging the same question: does “success” focus purely on the action, or does it also apply to the consequences?

If a success is solely whether or not the character does what they’re trying to do, then the results are easy to manage. Did they want to cut a rope? The rope is now cut. They want to seduce a duchess? Her heart skips a beat. They want to intimidate the ogre? Done and done.

What this does not impact, necessarily, are the consequences of said action. Maybe the duchess is now less likely to give the player what they want, because they think its too dangerous for their love to leave her side. Maybe Ogres are known more for attacking what frightens them than running away. A character can succeed at a roll and that success can make things worse.

This might irritate some players. “If a success on a roll-to-hit means I hit the goblin, that doesn’t mean I take damage. If I succeed on a roll-to-charm, that doesn’t mean I am limited. A success is a success, and that means I advance the story in the direction I want it to go.”

But in some cases, consequences are naturally hidden. Maybe goblins have acid blood and you do take damage. If a character rolls to move a stuck lever, then their success doesn’t mean the trap connected to the lever doesn’t spring. If they successfully translate a coded letter, that doesn’t mean they automatically know whether what is written in code is also a lie, or part of an elaborate trap.

And there is merit to this even in more narrative games. If there is information that the players don’t have that could be useful, not having it might turn their earnestly intended successes into setbacks. They really thought that the lever would deactivate the killer-robot, not activate the other two. They earnestly didn’t know the Duchess was a vampire, and thought getting her attention would be an asset, not a danger.

The fundamentalist view of this kind of GMing is that the players are only responsible for the character’s actions. Rolling may not even enter into it: a character’s actions cause results, and the GM is responsible for the consequences, whatever they may be. Rolling a success promises nothing.

At the same time, there are rolls that cannot work this way. If a character rolls to make a potion, then having the potion fail to work is only justifiable on a failure, not a success. If a character succeeds on a roll to hit, they hit. No matter what.

So we should accept that players can expect a success to provide some benefit. Rolling a success is not just succeeding in an effort, it is succeeding at progressing. Even if the player comes up with a strange or foolish idea, if they roll a success it somehow works. The duchess is so enamored that they can’t bear to say no to such a cute face. The Ogre second guesses its desire for a fight. The natural world bends around the dice and provides the players with a path forward.

You can even twist this the other direction, and say that characters always “succeed,” but failure on the die roll applies to the consequences too. Perhaps failing on a roll to seduce the duchess results in her smothering infatuation and locking her new beloved in the tower. Maybe failure to intimidate a guard results in a manhunt for the dangerous killer who threatens the town. Maybe the players decide what the characters do, and the dice decide how the world reacts.

Ultimately, the question of success in an RPG is more complicated than simply deciding whether the die roll is above or below the target number. In some systems it might not make a difference, but in others it is everything; especially when the consequences of a roll are not clearly established.

Most of the problems resulting from this uncertainty comes from a mirrored uncertainty in the role of a GM. Is the GM supposed to dictate the world like a self-assured Zoltar machine, eating your actions and spitting out consequences? Or is the GM an equal player in the game, with the responsibility to figure out player intent before suggesting results? More and more systems — Blades in the Dark or King is Dead, for example — are mandating that the players agree on any given action’s risks and rewards, clarifying limits on possible outcomes for failures and successes. This helps players understand the stakes of a given action and gives them more agency to make interesting choices.

A lot of it boils down to whether or not you consider the GM to be an ally in the act of telling a story, or an antagonist whose only goal is to challenge your mettle. Some people might like needing to find all the puzzle pieces to be sure of the right answer, while others may prefer knowing their success isn’t resting entirely on their own shoulders.