Summary
Partial success is a resolution outcome in which a character achieves what they attempted, but the success is incomplete, costly, or accompanied by a complication. It occupies the space between unqualified success and failure, allowing an action to change the fiction in more than one direction at once.
Design Purpose
Partial success keeps play moving while introducing consequences, compromises, and difficult choices. It replaces binary pass-or-fail resolution with outcomes that preserve accomplishment and generate new problems.
Problems Solved
- Prevents a single poor result from stopping the fiction.
- Makes uncertain actions consequential without making them futile.
- Produces complications directly from resolution.
- Gives facilitators guidance for mixed outcomes.
- Creates escalating situations rather than repeated attempts at the same task.
Core Loop
A player takes an uncertain action and resolves it using the game's normal procedure. On a partial-success result, the character achieves their immediate intent, but suffers a consequence, receives a reduced effect, or must make a difficult choice. The group incorporates both parts of the result into the fiction and play continues from the changed situation.
Player Decision
What cost, compromise, or new danger am I willing to accept in order to get what I want?
Narrative Effect
Partial success creates stories in which characters remain capable but rarely remain in control. Victories accumulate consequences, plans develop complications, and each resolved problem can create the next source of pressure.
Strengths
- Maintains narrative momentum.
- Produces nuanced and surprising outcomes.
- Makes every roll capable of changing the situation.
- Supports competent characters without removing danger.
- Encourages consequences tailored to the fiction.
Weaknesses
- Repeated complications can make success feel exhausting.
- Vague consequences place a heavy interpretive burden on the facilitator.
- Costs can feel arbitrary if stakes were not established beforehand.
- Poorly calibrated consequences can negate the success they accompany.
Variations
- Success with a consequence.
- Reduced or limited effect.
- Success that requires a cost or difficult choice.
- A prescribed list of complications attached to a move.
- Several consequences determined by the severity of the situation.
Related Patterns
- Moves
- Actions
- Position and Effect
- Resistance Rolls
- Fail Forward
- Consequence Escalation
Examples
- Apocalypse World
- Dungeon World
- Monsterhearts
- Masks
- Blades in the Dark
- Scum and Villainy
- Brindlewood Bay
- The Between
Pattern Definition
A Partial Success is a resolution outcome in which an action accomplishes its immediate purpose while also producing a cost, complication, reduced effect, or difficult choice that changes the fiction.