(Image credit: Raw Fury, Christoffer Bodegård)

One thing that really impressed me with our running RPG of the year, Esoteric Ebb , is how it handles failure and save scumming , the practice of abusing a game's save/load feature just to get your desired result at every turn⁠—we all do it, at least sometimes, and we all feel guilty about it.

Save scumming risks ruining the stakes of a story and making me feel invincible⁠—or at least like I'm bowling with bumpers⁠—but sometimes I'll just feel railroaded into having no other option in a dice rolling RPG like this. Other times, I'll get a one-in-a-million failure rolling a skill I've put a ton of points into, and that just feels terrible.

Esoteric Ebb does a genuinely good job of showing its players interesting, cool things when they fail ⁠, scenes that I wanted to remain part of my story, and not erased via metagaming intervention.…