The Cost of Failure
Try or do not try, that is your choice
“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”Songwriters: Geddy Lee / Alex Lifeson / Neil Peart
Freewill lyrics © Core Music Publishing, Ole Core Music Publishing, Anthem Core Music Publishing
I love that song. I love that it reminds that that no matter how I spend my day - I chose to do so. In the words of another poet, my brother once told me, “Jon, you are here because you walked here.”
You know how much I love to philosophize about dice games. Dice provides that bit of chance in success or failure and depending on the number - the variety of those two outcomes. Because in life, it is rare that we completely fail or succeed at anything.
I like my games to reflect that. Heads up to my players - 5th edition games provide very little consequence for failure, but according to my homebrew rules that’s all about to change.
I had one player with a teleportation staff he could use 1 time a day. It got ridiculous how often he could just jet out of a situation. It got me thinking - what could go wrong with teleportation.
An old Star Trek episode came to mind and a week later I had produced this - The Cost of Failure: A table for Spellcasting Failures
I am proud of it. Mostly because during the process, my brain was asking a lot of questions, such as what happens if I try something new? What are the possible outcomes of my attempts? I determined rarely anything would be a smashing success - there would always be a hint of something lost and maybe introduce a new problem. The universe is loopy that way.
Casting magic in the world can be problematic and wildly rewarding at the same time. And while doing absolutely nothing can sometimes be the right answer, it is rarely without consequence. You still have chosen that path.
The cost of failure is still less than doing nothing at all. Hmm…I wonder if I can make a random table for the consequences of doing nothing…
Thank you for reading! And thank you for sharing your support by purchasing my products! If you like storytelling podcasts with characters who are a friend of failure (and success) visit Sojourners Awake! podcast today.
Excellent point. I’ve often wondered as a DM what to do about this phenomena. I like the idea of implementing a spell outcome table
I never even realized this, D&D magic is incredibly boring because it's so reliable. Dungeon Crawl Classics is the only d20 game has complex spell outcomes that I can think of.