What if we could fail writs?

[Cataclysm of Iron]

I have no idea whether this would be a good outcome or not, but it just struck me while adventuring on writs.

What would be the impact of being able to fail writs? E.g., if you die (or probably "if you respawn", so your party can raise you and go on to complete it) while a writ is on your ledger (and/or a certain amount of time passes since you accepted the writ without progressing on an objective?), you fail it - no active penalty, but you don't have it as an active writ any more and you count as having "done" it so can't pick it up again for full value.

I mean the obvious outcome would be less XP, but probably not that much less - and it might add a sense of jeopardy to doing them and make them feel a bit... idk... less of a game mechanic and more of a story-based quest?

It would be generous to call this even a half-baked idea, so let me know what y'all think it would do to the game?

[Amateur Hour]

Three thoughts come to mind:

• I talked about this in another thread: a "writ" is official permission from some authority to do a thing. It doesn't make sense that you could fail having permission.

• It strongly disincentivizes telling certain stories because you get no reward for completing them. Who here doesn't love a story where the hero fails, has to rethink things, then tries again and succeeds?

• Anything that incentivizes circle grinding is, in my mind, a bad idea - it's rarely interactive, it rarely has an IC justification, and it tends to funnel people to the same small number of locations on the server. If people can fail writs, then they're missing out on that XP forever, and that means they're going to circle grind to make up for that.

[Eyeliner]

This is a game where you don't really get sufficient clues how to beat a monster or an area until you try it, often until you fail at it, and then once you figure out how to win that battle you never have to fail again. So I'd say this is would be pretty punishing to new players and veterans could disregard.

Plus think how many times you're in level 2 of a 3 level dungeon and the DM says "5 minutes to reset". That's like twice a week for me it seems.

That said, sure, it could be a cool idea in some form, though maybe we'd need more writs to compensate so if you aren't a veteran and a powerbuild you can have some freedom to fail.

[Cataclysm of Iron]

This is a game where you don't really get sufficient clues how to beat a monster or an area until you try it, often until you fail at it, and then once you figure out how to win that battle you never have to fail again. So I'd say this is would be pretty punishing to new players and veterans could disregard.

Plus think how many times you're in level 2 of a 3 level dungeon and the DM says "5 minutes to reset". That's like twice a week for me it seems.

That said, sure, it could be a cool idea in some form, though maybe we'd need more writs to compensate so if you aren't a veteran and a powerbuild you can have some freedom to fail.

My impression - perhaps wrong, because my levelling journey on my current PC has been an odd and nonstandard one - is that there are comfortably surplus writs to the XP everyone needs to get to Lv25+. If that's not the case then yeah I 100% agree it's way too punishing.

Also the criticism that it would disproportionately hit new players is a very fair one.

[Amateur Hour]

Plus think how many times you're in level 2 of a 3 level dungeon and the DM says "5 minutes to reset". That's like twice a week for me it seems.

This is a really good point.

It's absolutely amazing how stable Arelith is considering the age of the game and the amount Arelith stretches the framework of NWN, but there are crashes, desyncs, and necessary downtime (as well as player-side internet disconnections) with little warning that can cause you to die mid-writ through absolutely no fault of your own. There's really no narrative benefit to be gleaned from deaths for those reasons because your character doesn't really have a lesson to learn.