I finally realized what makes Disco Elysium so good. It’s the use of failure as a storytelling mechanic.

One of the best things about tabletop RPGs, and a thing that video game RPGs have really struggled to recreate, is the centrality of failure to both storytelling and a sense of fun.

In most tabletop RPGs, nearly every action that has narrative stakes is subject to a dice roll that is then modified by a skill. No matter how skilled you are at something, you can still fail it. So any time you want to do anything *even slightly important* you can fuck it up.

What’s fun is that you, the player, know you have fucked it up. So does everyone else around the table. You then get to imagine how you fucked it up and what the consequences are together. This is the *most* delightful when it’s interpersonal stuff or deductive reasoning.

“I want to know if this wealthy transylvanian baron with the bloodstain on his shirt is lying”
“roll insight”
“Uh oh shit I roll a 1”
“you definitely think he’s telling the truth”
“Hey guys! We can trust this man who is inviting us into his basement! He never drinks... wine!”

In most video game RPGs, failure has *consequences* but (a) it trains you to avoid them and try not to fail and (b) it doesn’t really feel like it’s shaping the narrative. But DE makes failure deeply enjoyable because it just leads to a different, often much funnier, story.

You might, as a police officer, fail a check to see if someone is lying, become convinced that they’re telling the truth, and then have to help them in their criminal enterprise. Or try to come up with a witty rebuttal and fail, saying something incredibly dumb as a result.

As @GrahamReznick points out, key to this is that the game lets you see the dice roll (literally, it shows you two rolling 6-sided dice), so it creates in that moment a little gap between player and character, which in turn lets you realize that it’s all just narrative.

Anyway, I am loving this game, and it is, I think, the first computer RPG I’ve ever played that captures this feeling with such intensity.

But as other tweeters have pointed out, there is a trend of using failure very deliberately in the construction of video games... Rimworld and Don’t Starve are great examples, as is Dark Souls and its ilk. But those aren’t really trying to be RPGs in the tabletop sense.

I wonder if this is simply because we’ve reached a moment of greater narrative sophistication in game writing, or if this is psychic fallout of the global recession in 08 or what.