Some Games Are About Failure
Failing catastrophically in a safe space - what's more TTRPG than that?
If you, as a player, are not ready and eager to fail, then some games might not be for you.
The heroic fantasy - the dream of fulfilling the role of the hero, of changing the world, of asserting your will over evil or tyranny - is only one small, narrow form of entertainment. There’s failure involved in those stories, to be sure, but it’s usually managed, handled gently, something to work around and circumvent and get through and on to the next successes.
How are GMs advised to handle failure? “Fail Forward!” There’s a level at which that is the best strategy - you fail forward so that the adventure doesn’t come to a screeching halt. If failure would make your players say “Well, I’m out of ideas”, you should fail in a direction that doesn’t lead into the brick wall.
But what if failure is the point of the game?
I bet you didn’t see that coming. Or, wait - you must have, cause of the title of the blog. I don’t bet. I rescind any bets.
It’s no big mystery that the Mothership RPG takes its cues from the Alien film franchise. If you haven’t seen it (I hadn’t until recently), I have to recommend that you stop reading and go watch it. Aside from being a world class film, it is likely the pinnacle of the sci-fi horror genre, and unequivocally sets the tone for the Mothership RPG, establishes the precedent for the genre, and is just super damn cool.
Fail Cascade Like You Mean It
Mothership distills the Alien formula into a game. It results in a core gameplay loop that looks like this:
Do things.
Fail. You’re going to fail a lot - just math. You fail >50% of the time on skill checks and saves in Mothership. Get used to it, and start rewiring your brain. Fail hard, fail fast, fail spectacularly, fail dramatically.
Accumulate Stress, and then Panic. Failing means you get stressed out. You’re in a hostile environment, everything, including the universe itself, is out to get you. Every minor failure you bungle is another point of Stress, another psychological trauma, one step closer to the abyss.
Fail Cascade. In horror movies, you start off with one death. Wow. Just terrible. Then two people die. Oh no, that’s not good. Then ten people die. Then everyone’s dead except you. You’re going to die, it’s a foregone conclusion. Cascade through failure after failure until the end.
Survive, Save, Solve. Pick one. One is the default answer, and you’re going to have to claw that out of the disgusting, carnivorous hands of the thing threatening you and your crew. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, you might be able to get a tiny bit of a second option - maybe you save a pet bird or something. Probably not.
Does that seem fun to you? It’s a blast, it’s some of the most fun you can have at the table, if you start to embrace the failure and do your best to fail in interesting and novel ways.
Shift Perspective - It’s Inevitable
Some criticism has been levelled at Mothership, namely around its core gameplay loop. A generally good bit of advice has been assumed to be correct for Mothership as well - that if your characters have skills, and they try to do things with those skills, they should generally succeed. If your scientist has some hacking skills, and comes across a working terminal, they should be able to use it to do what they want, because they invested metacurrency into hacking during character creation.
This is simply wrong.
It’s a bold statement to say that everyone’s wrong, yet here I am, making bold statements to the very few of you who will read this.
In space, in hostile alien environments, on derelict stations, in the slums of an oxygen deprived orbital colony, nothing is guaranteed. No amount of skill will guarantee that what you want to do is successful. That’s why Mothership gives numeric values to skill levels. If you automatically succeed cause you have hacking, what’s the point of having a +10 to your roll for hacking?
There are exceptions to every rule, of course. If you’re not in a hostile environment, your players can just succeed, sure. But I assume that goes without saying for those of you invested enough in RPG design to be reading this.
When you do allow your players to simply succeed in situations where they shouldn’t, you circumvent the core gameplay loop of failure. You don’t accumulate Stress, which means you don’t reach higher entries on the Panic tables, which means interesting failure cascades don’t begin. There's a reason the Mothership system is Stress, Panic, Wounds, and Death, instead of… inspiration, vigor, healing, and ascension to heroic godhood.
The game has told you what it’s about through it’s selection of the rules. It’s given you the instructions, told you how to drive this car off the cliff. If you choose to turn it around towards safe ground, you’re not making use of the system, you’re circumventing it.
The game wants you to fail. Lean in and do it in a blaze of glory. After all, if Dallas and Ripley and the crew just locked Kane out of the ship and quarantined him, and then ejected the alien into space, and the ship went home and everyone lived happily ever after, nobody would remember that movie. It never would have been made.