“Push” results: When there are no successes OR failures.
I think one of the coolest things about the narrative dice system is when you get a push result. In this case, the character has neither succeeded nor failed, and it gives the GM a great deal of leeway to interpret the result in a way that moves the story forward in an interesting way. This is a case where you can really get a lot of mileage out of advantage and threat.
Generally speaking, I look at these results as a work in progress with the final outcome still teetering in the balance. Advantage means the scales are tipped in favor of the characters, while threat leans them in the opposite way.
This is pretty straightforward when to comes to tasks that are process oriented - persuading someone, doing something when there is no urgent time limit, etc. In these cases, the player can opt to succeed but with a cost. I like to give the players some options, and let them choose their preferred outcome. For example, when picking a lock or disarming a trap, I might tell them:
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“You are making progress, but it is slower going than you thought it would be. You’re sure you can get it eventually, but will take some time, increasing the risk that you’ll be discovered. Do you want to leave it, or take the risk?”
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Or, “You’re making progress when the tool gets jammed in the mechanism. You can force it open, but if you do the tool will break and get stuck, and anyone who looks at it will be able to see its been tampered with. What do you want to do?”
In other words, a push gives them the opportunity to succeed if they want to, as long as they are willing to pay a price, with the size and severity of the price scaling to the amount of advantage or threat. More advantage, smaller price; more threat, the price goes up.
But how do you use this with tasks where the outcomes are typically more black and white, like jumping across a chasm or trying to catch a glass vial before it hits the floor, filling the room with poison gas? This is where you get a chance to be really creative.
Using the leaping across a chasm example, a push means the character hasn’t definitively succeeded or failed, so they neither cleared the gap nor splattered on the ground below. What’s in between those two results?
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With some advantage, they might have missed the leap but grabbed onto the edge and are now hanging on for dear life. Or perhaps they crashed against the far side and fell a small distance before grabbing onto a ledge or some roots. In either case, the story moves forward and necessitates further action by the characters (and/or opens the door for NPC’s to complicate things...).
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With neither advantage or threat, the outcome would be similar to the above, BUT there’s a price. Some equipment was damaged or lost, or the character suffers strain or some kind of temporary injury that will hamper them for a bit (like a sprained ankle, which will give them a setback die to mobility for a limited period of time).
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With a little threat, the character might have saved themself from falling by grabbing onto something, but they’ve taken some wound damage in the process. More threat might increase the distance of the fall, the damage suffered, result in lost or damaged gear, or some combination of the above based on the amount of threat.
The “catching the vial” example works similarly. What’s in between catching it and dropping it? Some result where the outcome is still up in the air - in this case, literally.
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In one possible reading, the character bobbles the catch and ends up launching the vial back into the air. With advantage, it might fly towards a friendly character who can try to snag it (possibly with one or more boost dice). With neither advantage or threat, someone will have to make a maneuver to grab it, maybe in a contested roll with an NPC. With threat, the task gets tougher, and one or more setback dice can be used scaling with the degree of the threat.
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Another possibility is that the character manages to bat the vial some distance away, giving the party a greater or lesser chance of escaping its effects depending on advantage or threat.
In all these cases, the push outcome provides an alternative to the binary pass/fail mechanic, and creates a new set of circumstances the characters have to deal with. Advantage and threat then come into play in terms of influencing how challenging those circumstances are to overcome.
I like having a third option, and the fact that you can get a result that has neither successes or failures gives you an easy way to do that.