How do you handle failures that take place during flashbacks?
With a regular action roll that isn’t during a flashback, it’s fairly clear how a failure or a complication affects you immediately.
With a flashback, though, you’re in the funny position that you want a complication from the flashback to come back and bite you now.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it certainly seems more difficult.
If you flashback to getting some buddies to show up and lay in ambush for your enemies, but you fail the roll, then it’s not enough for them to have refused you then – you need something bad to happen now.
If you went planting pistols up on the roof last night, but failed, you can’t have fallen and broken your leg, because you haven’t been playing with a broken leg for the past hour.
…and so on.
I’m not saying there’s no good solutions – maybe your friends have betrayed you; maybe you thought you’d plated the pistols but somebody else has stolen them. But it seems that failures-in-flashback are rather harder to come up with, and they also seem like they might be prone to a somewhat repetitive failure mode of “you thought you had that thing ready but now it turns out you don’t.”
Any suggestions or advice for handling this well?
For a failure-of-flashback, I always start with the presumption that the setup was perfect, but the execution is lacking. This flows from the principle of being true to the fiction. If I were relying on a hidden brace of pistols for my plan, and I failed to plant the pistols, I wouldn’t just breeze on as if nothing went wrong, correct? Therefore, I must have actually planted the pistols. So the failure must arrive between when I planted the pistols and when I go to find them.
Once I fence in the available fictional space, that helps my creativity touch on something.
Using your examples:
“If you flashback to getting some buddies to show up and lay in ambush for your enemies, but you fail the roll, then it’s not enough for them to have refused you then – you need something bad to happen now.”
– Your buddies get jumpy and charge around the corner before the enemies arrive, rather than as the enemies arrive. So instead of an ambush, it’s a chaotic brawl.
– Your buddies are lying in wait at the wrong intersection and ambush the wrong party.
– Your enemies have infiltrated your buddies, knew of the ambush, and sprung a counter-ambush on them.
“If you went planting pistols up on the roof last night, but failed, you can’t have fallen and broken your leg, because you haven’t been playing with a broken leg for the past hour.”
– The pistols are there, but they got rained on. The powder won’t spark!
– The pistols are there, but a plague-ridden razorcrow is sleeping atop the bag. You can try to shoo it off and hope it doesn’t peck you with its scabrous beak, or leave it be and abandon the pistols.
– The pistols are there, but as you grab them, the bag shifts and goes sliding down the eaves. It lodges against a gargoyle at the corner of the roof. Go after them? Too risky?
(I realize I restated your problem as much as I provided an attempted solution, which may not be very helpful. But I’ve never had more difficulty coming up with flashback failures vs. failures in the moment)
I know for the injury one, it has previously been suggested that you just act as if the injury was always there but the player has only just now let it show that it’s affecting them (e.g. Your player who fell off the roof and broke his leg stops to adjust the makeshift brace he has been using which has started to come loose).
As for failures, perhaps sometimes the roll could represent something other than the binary placement vs non-placement of an object. Rolls should only be for things that players could not have reasonably been expected to succeed without any trouble. Maybe instead of whether the gun is placed, tge roll could be for getting to the rooftop unseen (failure maybe allowing the guns to be placed but at the cost of increased guard presence), finding a sheltered spot (failure could mean the guns are stolen, wet and malfunctioning or have slipped off the roof in to the bushes below) or the roll could represent the quality of the guns you were able to get.
Just some ideas. I get your confusion though. Harder to avoid some repetition in flashbacks than normal play.
Harm does seem to be an odd one for flashback consequences. I agree w/ others though, my usual go to is some sort of “timing mishap” in which either the carriage/cohort/package they wanted delivered either shows up later than expected or not at all. Additionally, when dealing with other factions, an easy “complication” is to have the Faction remember this and either add it into the entanglement roll later or next time they ask for help – maybe it’s a no, or they expect more payment.
Also, as I was typing this I remembered, another great way to help with flashback consequences is advancing negative clocks in the scene. It could be you were noticed before hand, or you had been making telegraphing looks at your pistol stash this whole time, or something similar that accelerates the mood currently in the scene for the guards noticing the crew, or the target acting on their suspicions. There’s a few ways to play with it there depending what clocks are already around (or starting one based on that failure!)
GL either way! 🙂
John Perich
“For a failure-of-flashback, I always start with the presumption that the setup was perfect, but the execution is lacking.”
That’s really helpful! I think I can make that work.
It’s a little counterintuitive. If I Consorted or Swayed somebody to help me, but failed, then this doesn’t mean I failed to convince them – just that they messed up, that something in the set-up went wrong.
But that certainly works mechanically and narratively, which is really nice. And I liked your examples a lot 🙂
I’ve had people get into a fight in a flashback and lose armor in the present heist, for example. Or try to bribe a guard and it didn’t work out and the guard got suspicious, which increases difficulty when we return to the present.
Part of the responsibility lies with the player. If the player can choose between a broken leg (which is tough to fix in retroactive continuity) then the player should consider taking the hit on armor or resisting with stress for the sake of the story everyone is sharing.
What would you even roll in a flash back to place guns in strategic locations? There’s no roll for that. Fortune roll? Seems strange…
Antimatter : Depends what makes it difficult. However you get access to the place, if it’s difficult to reach. How you avoid detection, or having the guns found afterwards…
If you’re asking “how do I know exactly where I’ll need a gun,” I’d say that whatever location you plant a gun at, suddenly becomes extremely strategic 🙂 So then you can say you’ve been angling to set yourself in exactly the right spot.
Since the players usually pay stress to generate flashback scenes, I default to fortune rolls in them more than action rolls unless there is fiction which says that isn’t okay going into it (ie: I tend to avoid injecting twists and turns into a flashback once it begins)
When there is an action roll, most of the time my goto consequences are whatever makes sense, plus lost opportunity, added heat, or ticks on a score-relevant failure clock.
Mark Cleveland Massengale : That’s an interesting approach!
It definitely addresses what I was saying about the counterintuitiveness of “Failed Flashback Action Roll == The action was awesome, but something screwed up since then.”
On the other hand, it seems to be a departure from the system “as intended.” It’s really placing flashbacks as something different than “I do X, but yesterday”… which I’m worried might undermine the principle of “Don’t plan; start the score – if anything’s missing, you’ve got flashbacks”.
What do you base the fortune roll on? Do you allow for influence of spending stress, or taking devil’s bargains?
You can make a fortune roll using any trait, including a PC’s action ratings. Make a fortune roll when you need to know how well something goes. Make an action roll when there’s a dangerous obstacle that threatens bad consequences.
A player can choose to push themselves, or take a devil’s bargain, or use teamwork, as usual during a flashback.
John Harper: I didn’t quite understand what you’re saying there.
First, just so that we’re entirely clear: Fortune rolls don’t allow for pushing yourself, for teamwork, or for devil’s bargains — right? Those are action-roll only.
You can’t take a devil’s bargain for “How well did this uncertain event play out.” At best, you can do stuff to improve your situation and odds before the fortune roll (including by making action rolls, where you can take devil’s bargains, etc.).
Right?
So let’s just use a random example:
Let’s say my crew is breaking in somewhere, and I declare a flashback, wherein my character sabotages the telegraph line that my mark might use to signal for help.
Using John Perich’s approach, this would be, say, a Tinker action roll. But if the action roll fails, that doesn’t mean I failed to cut the wire. It means, for example, that the sabotage has already been detected and repaired; or that my mark moves to red alert on a communication blackout.
Which is great, narrative-wise, but it seems nonintuitive — if I were sabotaging something now, a failure would mean “you didn’t manage to sabotage the thing.”
(It gets weirder when you start considering position – for example, the position of sabotaging a telegraph wire somewhere along its length is probably Controlled, but the position of “We are in the middle of hostile territory and we need that wire down” is definitely not.)
What Mark Cleveland Massengale suggests is different: that the sabotage itself is easy, and the interesting question is whether it panned out the way I expected it to. Hence: Fortune roll.
(Would you say that the question “How well did the sabotage pan out?” would be based on my Tinker ability? I wouldn’t; it sounds like I’d base it on the tier and capabilities of the target – how quickly they detect the sabotage and address it.)
But those are two very, very different results. For one thing, the Fortune roll sounds much riskier. And for another, as I said, an Action roll gives you spending options that a Fortune roll doesn’t.
How would you handle this kind of scenario?
Maybe a quick way to restate things is this:
If the default for flashbacks is that the challenge is “How well did it pan out” rather than “Did you succeed at doing the thing,” and you take that to mean fortune rolls rather than action rolls, then flashbacks become an extremely risky proposition.
I think the idea is that we’re using a “Did you do the thing” roll as a proxy for the “How well did it pan out” question. Which is good, because it makes relying on flashbacks possible (and cool!). But that tension, I guess, is precisely what’s bothering me.
Going over the examples in the 7.1 Quick Start, I’m seeing that “failure” in an action roll really isn’t taken as “the character being insufficiently good,” but can just as easily be “the obstacle turns out to be extra-difficult.”
That certainly addresses a lot of my questions here; I need to keep that principle in mind.
it is a good principle, one I’ve struggled with in the past sometimes. It’s a pretty good explanation in 7.1 about that topic though!
Re: Pushing yourself, teamwork, etc.
Yes, you can push yourself and use teamwork on a Fortune roll — if you’re in a position to do so in the fiction.
“If the default for flashbacks is that the challenge is”
There’s no default. Deal with the situation at hand. There’s a reason why the game gives you a selection of tools: you’re meant to make selections, not assume defaults.
Sometimes a flashback will entail an Action roll, because there’s a dangerous obstacle involved. Sometimes a flashback will entail a Fortune roll, because we just need to find out how well (or how much, or how long, etc.). Sometimes a flashback won’t call for a roll at all because you can just pay the stress and it’s accomplished.
They way you make these judgment calls and the way you apply the mechanics is a matter of creative expression on your part (and the game group’s). Don’t try to avoid this opportunity! You have a point of view about sabotaging the wiring at the target house — use the application of the mechanics to bring your point of view into the game. Talk to the players about it. “This is a fortune roll, because…”
Examples will help new players figure this stuff out better, and you haven’t seen good examples (they’re not in the Quick Start), so it’s totally normal if you’re a bit confused. But trust yourself. Try it out, make judgment calls, revise things if you didn’t like the way you did it.
If a given outcome from a flashback feels weird, don’t use it! Don’t inflict harm if the players can’t imagine how that could make sense. Give them extra Heat instead. Or make up a new clock for “The Sparkwrights Ire” and tick it 3 times because you shouldn’t go around messing with the city’s wiring or else.
Hope that helps.
Here’s another flashback technique, from an example in the book:
————-
“I want to have a flashback to earlier that night, where I sneak into the stables and feed Fireweed to all their goats so they’ll go berserk and create a distraction for our infiltration.”
“Ha! Nice. Okay, that’s seems a bit tricky, dealing with ornery goats and all… 1 stress.”
“What do I roll?”
“You don’t need to roll. Their goat stable security amounts to a stable boy who is usually asleep anyway. You can easily avoid their notice.”
“So it just works?”
“Eh… not so fast. When you want the distraction to hit, let’s make a Fortune roll to see how crazy the Fireweed Goat Maneuver gets. Three dice.”
————-
So, you basically do a thing in the past, and then hold the roll until you’re back in the present moment when everyone actually learns how it turns out. This can work for things like placing traps and such, too.
“In the past, you did it to the best of your ability. Looks good to you! When the trap is sprung, we’ll roll your Tinker to see what happens.”
Again, this isn’t a default flashback method. This is one of many methods.
Thanks, John! That was comprehensive, and extremely extremely helpful 🙂
Glad to hear it!
Ziv Wities re: “placing flashbacks as something different than ‘I do X but yesterday'”
Well, they are slightly different than that. They are what you say, but also “I didn’t know my character needed to do that before, but now I do, so my character would’ve planned for this and here is how”
Fortune rolls can get dice from Devil’s Bargains and Pushing, but usually players don’t choose to do that because the lack of risk means there is not a big incentive to do it. This is as it should be imo: possible to do if it make sense, but also not highly incentivized.
re: “That the sabotage itself is easy” I think what I said got received different than I really intended. I was making a bit of a softer distinction; that we don’t always need an action roll for a flashback, just like with other narrations – not that flashbacks should always be easier than other types of action. Then tend to be because of their nature though, and John’s comment above illustrates an example. A fortune roll using Tinker as the basis, adjusted for the factors like the opposition’s preparedness and tier, might work just fine instead of an action roll. So too could the wires be cut without a roll if risks are non-existent/unimportant
In other words, the distinction I was making was more like: I would not add that guards are there and a high rise platform to traverse, I would remind them (if it was so) and charge 2 or more stress as appropriate. I tend to avoid adding obstacles in the framing of the flashback for the sake of the flashback. I certainly don’t remove any obstacles we know should be there.