Theme: Failure as growth.

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Ttrpgs that reward failure with some form of experience points MY BELOVED

@theresattrpgforthat

Any further recommendations?

Hello friend, this post consists of two parts!

A lot of Powered by the Apocalypse Games reward failure with a point of XP. I think this both provides a mechanical incentive to try things that might not work, and also rewards players with growth, indicating that failure is part of how you get better. Let’s start with a few PbtA games that do this, and then move on to other games.

Masks: A New Generation by Magpie Games.

A giant robot is pounding down Main Street. Your best friend tried to kiss you. Your mom thinks your grades need to improve. Your counselor thinks your team is putting you down. Oh, and your costume is ripped.

Just a day in Halcyon City.

Masks: A New Generation is an ENnie award winning superhero role-playing game in which a team of young heroes fight villains, save lives and try to figure out who they are: noble role models? Dark Avengers? Or just kids? All against the backdrop of Halcyon City, the greatest city in the world.

Teenage superheroes are a pretty easy genre to pick up, given all the references in today’s media, from SpidermanUnpleasant Teen Titansto the Young Justice LeagueThe core themes are about adolescence and identity – struggling with who you are, the responsibilities your powers bring, and what that means for your future. In MASKSEveryone is looking at you to see who you’ll become, and that can be a lot of pressure for a young superhero. Luckily, you don’t have to go it alone—you have other teenage superheroes fighting by your side. Will you support each other? Or will you judge too harshly?

Comrades, by WM Akers.

Comrades is a tabletop RPG about life in the revolutionary underground. Based on the Apocalypse World engine, pitting players against a corrupt government and forced to fight from the shadows to free the people from their chains.

You play as characters such as the Soldier, the Student, the Propagandist and the Worker. Your comrades organize meetings, stage coups, evade the secret police and fight fascist villains. A campaign of Comrades can take place in any setting the players can imagine – modern or historical, real or fictional – giving them the chance to create their own revolution.

Comrades is setting-agnostic, meaning you can play this game in a revolution from the past, a revolution in another world, or a revolution in a speculative future. As you play, your revolution slowly grows stronger, which is one of the reasons I think XP is used to grow your character. What I think is unique about Comrades is the Pathways to Revolution, which outlines an endgame for the group: you don’t have to push all the paths to their end, you only have to fulfill one. But which path will your group take? Will the revolution come by force? Will your organization keep you effective? Or will your Fellowship see you all the way to the bitter end?

Thirsty Sword Lesbiansby April Kit Walsh.

Love, swords and adventure.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians fight against the Lady of Chains as her enforcers march down from the icy north. They shoot through the stars to protect diplomats who are ending a generations-old conflict. Even when swords are crossed, they seek peace with their opponent—and sometimes they make a connection deeper than anyone expects.

A sword duel can end in a kiss, a witch can gain her power by helping others find love, and an entire campaign can be built around itinerant matchmakers flying from system to system.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a roleplaying game to tell queer stories with friends. If you like angsty disaster lesbians with swords, you’ve come to the right place.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians embraces drama, queerness, and romance in a fun adventure through community and teamwork. Each playbook revolves around different themes that can inform and expand the queer experience, with room for trans stories, neurodivergent experiences, and stories from colonized peoples and racial minorities. The game is also setting-agnostic, so you can play as cyberpunk biker lesbians, werewolf paladins on the run, or even gay nuns in space!

Chronicles of Darknessby Onyx Path.

Keep walking.

The eyes are directed straight ahead.

Don’t look back.

In the shadows and between the cracks of our daily lives hide the Chronicles of Darkness. Here lurk creatures from ancient myths and urban legends. Here lie the tombs of angels and the bunkers of secret government programs. Here is every deformed horror you’ve ever seen out of the corner of your eye. And they’ve seen you.

Chronicles of Darkness used a d10 dice pool resolution system: you add your pips from a relevant attribute to your pips in a relevant skill, and roll that many d10. To succeed, you must roll an 8 or higher, and sometimes you need to generate more than one success to get what you want. No 8, 9, or 10? Well, that’s a fail. However, it’s not as bad as rolling a critical fail, which happens when you don’t roll a success And you roll a 1. To soften the blow, CofD rewards characters with an XP point. And to make it even more exciting, the player can choose to turn a regular fail into a critical fail, for some sweet XP.

Nibiru, by Araukana Media.

Nibiru is a science fiction role-playing game about lost memories. Players take on the role of Vagabonds: amnesiacs lost in a vast space station, home to millions of people, where stories of drama and struggle are written every day.

Nibiru is a special beast of a book, because the main way to progress as a character is by writing memories. Your memories are collected as you play, and provide reasons why you’re good at certain things and bad at others. To write a positive memory, you’ll need to spend memory points, but those can be hard to come by – they only come at the end of a session and by tracking your character’s motivations.

There is a third, interesting option that generates Memory Points though: negative memories. If you choose to tell a bad memory and assign a negative modifier to a skill of some kind, you will generate Memory Points, which you can use to write better skills for yourself in the future. In a way, I guess Nibiru encourages players to create weaknesses for themselves that will lead to failure in the long run, so they can still get things they are good at.

The Cypher Systemby Monte Cook Games.

The Cypher System iis the critically acclaimed game engine that powers every campaign in every genre. You may have heard of it as the system that powers the award-winning role-playing game Numenera. Praised for its elegance, ease of use, flexibility, and narrative focus, the Cypher system encourages the creativity of GMs and players with intuitive character creation, fast-paced gameplay, and unique GM-friendly design.

The Cypher System is easy for beginners to learn, yet offers all the depth, nuance, and complexity you could want. Some call it a “rules-light” system, but it has the power and sophistication of games that are much more mechanically demanding – yet it is significantly more flexible. GMs find it easy to set up and play – it frees up the GM’s attention, during set-up and at the table, to focus on cool, creative ideas rather than numbers, mechanics, and “crunch.”

The Cypher System doesn’t exactly reward failure in itselfbut it follows the same ethos. The game uses something called a GM Intrusion, where the GM offers an XP point to a player in exchange for allowing them to make something terrible or inconvenient happen to the player character. The player can choose to accept or reject it if they don’t like the proposed turn of events.

The player doesn’t necessarily fail either – the gamemaster might introduce a new obstacle that the character must now overcome, but I like this mechanic because it softens the blows the gamemaster wants to add to the story – rocks fall down and you can’t get out of the cave this way, but at least you have some XP to chew on!

Knives in the darkby John Harper.

Knives in the dark is a tabletop role-playing game about a group of brave rogues seeking fortune in the haunted streets of an industrial fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes and, above all, riches to be had – if you are brave enough to seize them.

You and your fledgling crew must thrive amidst the threats of rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful spirits, the Bluecoats of the City Watch, and the siren song of your villain’s own vices. Will you rise to power in the criminal underworld? What are you willing to do to reach the top?

Knives in the dark (and many of its children) doesn’t necessarily reward you with XP for failing, but it does reward you for embracing the possibility of failure. If you want to jazz up your (potential) success, you can do something called Trade Position For Effect. This means that you make your Position (and thus your potential failure) much worse, in exchange for making your Effect (your potential success) much better. Go big or go home!