Complications are the best.

Mitigated success is ok, but success with complications? Just so much better. https://twitter.com/gnomestew/status/1355162151124668416

OK, DEEP nerd time:

What is the difference between:
* Success with Complications
* Mitigated Success
* Success at a Cost

?

It would be reasonable to consider them synonyms, but naturally, I do not.

I could sidebar her with a whole thing about "what even is success", but let's just rely on the baseline. You rolled ok. You can do the thing. Yay! So what about all the varieties?

Success With Complications means the success itself goes off. You do the thing. However, things will not unfold as expected - things go off track, most often because of unintended consequences, but you succeeded!

Mitigated Success is a bit fuzzier. Sometimes it means incomplete success or success for lesser effect, and I generally shorthand it at "Success, BUT". The things that makes this tricky at the table is reinforcing that it *is* a success (wrt character competency) despite results

That is, Mitigated success should still respect character expertise. If your swordsman's attack does negligible damage, the fiction should reflect that there were mitigating circumstances, not that your swordsman abruptly sucked.

Success at a cost is "You *can* succeed if you are willing to pay the price." The price might be mechanical, or it might be fictional. To muddy waters further, the price might be Mitigated Success or Success with Complications.

What's kind of critical is that there's an element of choice to this. You *could* fail, if the price is too high. (If there's no choice, it's not a cost, it's the complication or mitigation that results). This can be very powerful, or very distracting.

If you wanted to really shorthand them, it would be something like:
* Success and...
* Success but...
* Success if...

Arguably, this is all a pretty fine distinction, but I like to make it because each of these solves a different sort of problem in play.

Success with Complications excels as a SCENE DRIVER. The complications can push the scene forward with new elements or interesting escalations. When I need to ramp action, complications are a go to.

Mitigation, on the other hand, is great when I want to stretch things out. I want to respect expertise, but I don't want to push onto the next thing. Mitigation is also a great way to signal difficulty without saying "no"

Costs, for me, are character moments. Unless it's a purely mechanical exercise, I want to introduce a cost when the choice is an INTERESTING one. Petty costs - the kind that the player is just going to go "of course" to, slow down play with no interesting return.

But *hard*, *Interesting* costs? Those ABSOLUTELY deserve a few moments of spotlight.

Now, I picked these three because there's kind of top of head. This topic is one that can be sliced VERY finely if one is so inclined, so please don't take these as comprehensive. They absolutely are not.