Exchange of Realities

If you’ve gotten this far, you may be in a situation where you can’t see any choice but to make the players fail for plot reasons. It’s a tricky balance you’re working with, but there are ways to lean more to the side of the “good” failure.

This is the part where mitigation becomes a vital element in keeping things fun. Fortunately, this is also the part where you can plan ahead on mitigating the failure. One important place to start is familiarizing yourself with the types of metagame fun and figuring out how they interact with your players’ styles. If you can find a way to incorporate a group-appropriate type of metagame fun, it’ll soften the blow and keep the group entertained and even excited. Sure, you’re not going to be getting much by way of fiero, but alea and catharsis may will probably be involved, and if you make a point of making the trouble they get into interesting, the kairosis and kenosis-dominant players are likely to have a field day.

Another important thing to remember is to make it possible for the group to have some sort of effect, even if they can’t change the main event. Perhaps they can’t win this fight, but at least they can make the antagonist wish she hadn’t tangled with them. Or they don’t see the betrayal coming, but they manage to get the word out well enough that the traitor’s finding complications from people they expected to just slip past. This maintains the feeling of agency that a lot of people are in the game for—particularly if you’ve got a group that’s pretty overwhelmed in real life and looking for something they can change.

If at all possible, being able to do something about the situation later can help. The logical version of this (at least, if the Grand Failure involves a fight) is the whole running, healing and coming back with more gear and a better plan thing; it’s popular for a reason. Or maybe that NPC the villain made an example of isn’t quite dead yet, and the group has a chance of saving him. If the failure had to do with the breaking of an artifact, is there any reason why the group couldn’t be responsible for fixing it?

And what’s to say you can’t do combinations of the above? One of my best GMs did something like this in a game he was running a while back, when a plan to reveal a powerful NPC’s collusion with demonic forces went pear-shaped. The result? One epic battle. Half the group fleeing, half getting captured after a dramatic last stand. The latter subset of the group (both heavily kairosis/kenosis dominant) got to interact with a rather nasty antagonist and attempt to sabotage her with the very little power they had under the circumstances, while the former made and executed rescue plans—and the end result, when they came back and took out the antagonist, was nothing short of epic.

In sum, if you’re going to insist on failing, fail well!