I imagine that I'm not unusual among gamers in that my first exposure to roleplaying games featured binary conflict. By this, I mean that everything was measured in terms of success or failure--a "win" or "lose" option for each tension point that helped determine how the story moved forward.

Certainly, these games included room for improvisation--sometimes the decision between "win" (kill the orc) or "lose" (be killed by the orc) could be rejected, and replaced with the surprising "reason with the orc" or "run from the orc." Furthermore, the "win" option was often a series of options--stab the orc, shoot the orc with a magic missile, enchant the orc, etc.

However, if the "win" option represented dozens of very dark-hued shades of gray, the "lose" option was a devastatingly blank white. Your attack misses, you don't pick the lock, you accidentally scry on yourself instead of your foe, etc.  In many of these binary success games I've played, the core mechanic comes down to "If the player wins the roll, she describes how she succeeds; if the player loses the roll, the GM describes how she fails."

Lately, Team Intwischa has been playing Houses of the Blooded, which turns this on its head. Following are observations of adjusting to a radically different play style, and advice on "how to fail" -and how failure can make a more interesting story.