Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[loverdrive]

Just to clarify - your comment regarding interesting things will happen is that because GM moves via the results of the dice or because you have director stance within AW and her offspring?

Because of both GM and player moves being geared towards propelling the process of play towards, well, interesting things, more or less regardless of what you actually do. This is not by any means unique to PbtA, mind you, there are plenty of games that provide the same, uhm, safety net? I wasn't able to parse Burning Wheel, but I trust @pemerton 's opinion about it; my favorite MUJIK IS DEAD which doesn't even remotely resemble AW does that; and not to toot my own horn, but I myself largely moved on from PbtA in my own design and I think my games still retain this strength.

The issue I have with trad games, especially World of Darkness, is that because rules aren't concerned with things being interesting and only concerned with modeling the state of an imaginary world, it often ends up being dull unless the situation itself is extraordinary.

My character in this V:tM campaign wants to be just left alone and run his bar in peace. And that is... exactly what happens. He is left alone to run his bar in peace. Which is boring.

Well, OK, my whole spotlight in the first two sessions largely revolved around showing a vampire gang what happens when you mess with my guy, but still, by pursuing my character's goals I basically reduced my character to an NPC bartender.

The clunkiness of the system that dragged what would otherwise be an interesting moment when my guy broke the Masquerade to protect his human friend into a long boring overly detailed combat mini-game by the end of which I had to take a moment to return to my character's mindset didn't help either, I guess.

...which itself is also kind of irrelevant, because I made a conscious decision to use vampire magic mumbo-jumbo to beat the bastard into a bloody pulp instead of just threatening or shooting him in the head with a rifle my character keeps behind the counter, because that would have more interesting consequences. A decision that was both suboptimal and ran contrary to how I envisioned my character anyway.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The issue I have with trad games, especially World of Darkness, is that because rules aren't concerned with things being interesting and only concerned with modeling the state of an imaginary world, it often ends up being dull unless the situation itself is extraordinary.

I think you nailed the divide between the two systems with this sentence.

 

[pemerton]

There are a few general things we can say about agency across all TTRPGs. Probably the biggest of those things is "who gets the most consequential say over the nature and trajectory of play, players or GM, and how does system facilitate that?"

<snip>

I would say its a trivial observation, with endless supporting anecdotes stacked on top of each other through decades, that AD&D is extraordinarily low-agency Paladin play when it comes to (a) the general question I proposed at the top and (b) the specific question of a player & table discovering who a character authentically is as they "fight for what they believe in."

This actually reminded me of a Bard sub-class I recently read about (designed by Matt Mercer): The College of Tragedy.

Consider the 3rd level ability "Poetry in Misery":

At 3rd level, the bard who chooses the path of tragedy, "learns to harness the beauty in failure, finding inspiration in even the direst twists of fate". Whenever the College of Tragedy bard or an ally within 30 feet of them rolls a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, they can use their reaction to soliloquize and regain one expended use of the Bardic Inspiration feature.​

The flavour/colour of this ability is, ostensibly, that failure - a dire twist of fate - is the subject of soliloquy by the bard, who is thus inspired (regaining a use of Bardic Inspiration). But in fact the rolling of a 1 on a d20, in 5e D&D, does not mean "a dire twist of fate" and need not even be a failure - eg it is possible to roll a 1 on an attack and yet soundly defeat the foe being attacked (eg because other attack and damage rolls are quite successful; or because the opponent also misses their attack; or some combination of these possibilities).

So the colour is pure epiphenomenon: the character doesn't need to actually draw inspiration, in play, from tragedy - from their own suffering or the suffering or defeat of anyone else. The subclass ability is purely a mechanical device.

The faith and devotion of a D&D paladin are, by default, very similar to this. The flavour floats completely above the reality of play, which is deploying class abilities much the same as anyone else does, and - in some editions - making sure not to fall foul of GM-adjudicated behaviour limitations.

I don't want to say there is, of necessity, no agency here. But it has nothing to do with "fighting for what you believe" or "drawing inspiration from your and others' tragedy". Whatever say the player enjoys over the trajectory of play, it's about who wins and who loses; it's not about these thematic matters.

AW, DW, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer 2e - all are pretty different from the D&D default in this respect.

 

[pemerton]

Are consequences laid bare before the dice are rolled?

This varies across systems, and can vary within systems.

The "official" Burning Wheel rule is that the consequence is stated in advance of the roll - not to give the player a chance to back out, but to give the player sufficient context to decide how many resources to throw into the test. But Luke Crane, in his commentary in the Adventure Burner (reproduced for Gold edition in The Codex), talks about how, in his own play, he has relaxed this rule because often - even typically - the consequences are implicit in the situation, and so don't need to be spelled out to be known.

When I GM BW, and other RPGs using a similar approach (eg 4e D&D out of combat, Prince Valiant, and Torchbearer 2e) I use a similar method to what Crane describes in his commentary: I aspire for consequences to be implicit in the situation (because of its vibrancy, the players' sense of stakes, the overall trajectory of things); but sometimes its not. When its not, I will sometimes make consequences clear, but - especially in Torchbearer, which doesn't emphasise GM transparency quite as strongly - may spring a surprise on a failure. Even when it's a surprise, though, I want it to be retrospectively an evident result of the established fiction. (Like "Of course the GM hit me there - it's where my PC is vulnerable, given the fiction and my PC's goals/aspirations/orientation/trajectory.)

Apocalypse World doesn't have a rule about stating consequences, and doesn't use framing in the way BW does (eg it has no notion of "obstacle", which is key to BW and TB2e). But the soft/hard move structure picks up this slack - the hard moves drive home what the soft moves have set up. If no soft move has taken place, then there is not even the context for a player declaring an action that triggers a player-side move (eg there will be no pressure such that a PC is acting under fire) nor for the player otherwise handing the GM an opportunity on a plate (and thus licensing a hard move even if no dice have been rolled).

My view in any of these systems is that, if a consequence is experienced as having come out of the blue, even in retrospect, then that is a weakness of GMing. Not a fatal one - GMs make mistakes all the time; it's a tricky gig! - but something to try and avoid in future.

This might sound a bit like "telegraphing" in map-and-key, exploration-ish play. One difference is the methodology for establishing consequences (see @Manbearcat's post about paladins upthread, and my reply). Another is that, in map-and-key telegraph-y play, the players aim to identify possible consequences so they can avoid them. In Burning Wheel consequences can't be avoided, because every time something of thematic significance is at stake the dice must be rolled, and many of those rolls (in my experience half, even more perhaps) will fail. AW uses its 6-. 7-9, 10+ structure so failure rates can't be directly compared to BW, but it is still quite different from the idea, in exploration-ish play, of trying to minimise failure chances, avoid rolls with a high chance of failure, etc.

In BW, TB2e and DW this also gets linked to PC advancement: in DW, a 6- result awards XP; in BW, advancing abilities requires (inter alia) testing against near-impossible or literally impossible obstacles; in TB2e, advancing abilities requires failed as well as successful tests.

 

[Manbearcat]

This actually reminded me of a Bard sub-class I recently read about (designed by Matt Mercer): The College of Tragedy.

Consider the 3rd level ability "Poetry in Misery":

At 3rd level, the bard who chooses the path of tragedy, "learns to harness the beauty in failure, finding inspiration in even the direst twists of fate". Whenever the College of Tragedy bard or an ally within 30 feet of them rolls a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw, they can use their reaction to soliloquize and regain one expended use of the Bardic Inspiration feature.​

The flavour/colour of this ability is, ostensibly, that failure - a dire twist of fate - is the subject of soliloquy by the bard, who is thus inspired (regaining a use of Bardic Inspiration). But in fact the rolling of a 1 on a d20, in 5e D&D, does not mean "a dire twist of fate" and need not even be a failure - eg it is possible to roll a 1 on an attack and yet soundly defeat the foe being attacked (eg because other attack and damage rolls are quite successful; or because the opponent also misses their attack; or some combination of these possibilities).

So the colour is pure epiphenomenon: the character doesn't need to actually draw inspiration, in play, from tragedy - from their own suffering or the suffering or defeat of anyone else. The subclass ability is purely a mechanical device.

The faith and devotion of a D&D paladin are, by default, very similar to this. The flavour floats completely above the reality of play, which is deploying class abilities much the same as anyone else does, and - in some editions - making sure not to fall foul of GM-adjudicated behaviour limitations.

I don't want to say there is, of necessity, no agency here. But it has nothing to do with "fighting for what you believe" or "drawing inspiration from your and others' tragedy". Whatever say the player enjoys over the trajectory of play, it's about who wins and who loses; it's not about these thematic matters.

AW, DW, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer 2e - all are pretty different from the D&D default in this respect.

Let me make sure I'm reading you correctly here.

Take the thematically-rich 4e Fighter (relentless vanguard who dominates the melee, protecting comrades and punishing enemies at potential great cost with martial prowess), Avenger (burdened with divine cause, this relentless assassin chases their faith's enemies to the ends of the earth), and 5e Diviner (possessed of supernatural insight, this seer sees the future and uses those visions to thwart enemy and guide ally). It seems to me this Tragedy Bard makes use of kind of an obliquely reskinned 5e Diviner's Portent ability.

The features that work in concert for all of these PC archetypes create a thematically-rich portrait of a PC. However, thematically-rich play does not necessarily equal premise-driven play. Thematically-rich play can only be a bulwark of and facilitator of premise-driven play so long as (a) the player has means to assert that play be coherently goal-directed as it relates to PC theme and (b) the GM is obliged to oppose their thematic goals with consistent and potent antagonism. Without those means (however they might be instantiated in a given system), you have thematically-rich but premise-impotent play.

Of course, thematically-rich play where the GM or AP delivers invests play with a premise which doesn't engage with the questions embedded in, and related to, character theme might be plenty of player input at most tables out there (and indeed, my guess is this is the majority of play in the wild with a wide range of values for "thematically-rich").

EDIT - Eg a D&D 5e game where the Diviner player's game never comes close to touching questions about "the dangers of messing around with fate and becoming entangled with future possibilities/rewriting timeline" (or anything remotely kindred) but they sure do read the signs and employ that power and it feels and looks the part in the play!

 

[Aldarc]

I've bolded what seem to me to be the two key phrases.

DW leans heavily into D&D tropes, especially classic D&D - Halfling thieves, Dwarven fighters, righteous paladins, spell memorisation, etc. (In this respect there is some resemblance to Torchbearer 2e.)

This is the subject-matter resemblance.

But the process of play - "how they handle . . . situations" - is completely different. (And DW is in this respect also very different from TB2e.) DW is not D&D but with a simpler/smoother dice roll system, or a variant PC building system. The GM's authority is different; their role is different; their methodology for framing, for adjudication, for narrating consequences, is different.

I mean, this is the reason to pay DW (or TB2e) rather than B/X D&D.

I agree that the process is different, but I think that @Crimson Longinus's point here is that this "subject-matter resemblance" often results in players coming to Dungeon World expecting that it plays like D&D and approaching DW play in a similar manner as D&D, and then they often get frustrated from the incoherent play that results. Yes, they are different processes, but the nature of those differences are not always apparent to tabletop gamers. And part of the reason for that is the aformentioned "subject-matter resemblance." This is one reason why I have heard a fair number of PbtA and DW enthusiasts say that Dungeon World may have been better off had it NOT leaned so heavily into being D&D for PbtA. This is why Fantasy World was created to be a PbtA fantasy adventure game that leaned more heavily into PbtA.

 

[pemerton]

I agree that the process is different, but I think that @Crimson Longinus's point here is that this "subject-matter resemblance" often results in players coming to Dungeon World expecting that it plays like D&D and approaching DW play in a similar manner as D&D, and then they often get frustrated from the incoherent play that results.

This makes sense as a fact, but is puzzling nevertheless. If people are happy playing D&D, using its processes of play, why are they coming to Dungeon World?

Conversely, if they are wanting to try a new RPG, it seems - normatively, if not descriptively - that they should be open to leaning the different process of play that it uses.

Yes, they are different processes, but the nature of those differences are not always apparent to tabletop gamers. And part of the reason for that is the aformentioned "subject-matter resemblance."

I don't want to megalomaniacally exaggerate my capacity to influence RPG ideas - but this is one reason why, in my posting, I push back against all attempts to elide differences of process and technique; and also push back against attempts to equate "playstyle" in RPGing with subject matter.

 

[pemerton]

Let me make sure I'm reading you correctly here.

Take the thematically-rich 4e Fighter (relentless vanguard who dominates the melee, protecting comrades and punishing enemies at potential great cost with martial prowess), Avenger (burdened with divine cause, this relentless assassin chases their faith's enemies to the ends of the earth), and 5e Diviner (possessed of supernatural insight, this seer sees the future and uses those visions to thwart enemy and guide ally). It seems to me this Tragedy Bard makes use of kind of an obliquely reskinned 5e Diviner's Portent ability.

The features that work in concert for all of these PC archetypes create a thematically-rich portrait of a PC. However, thematically-rich play does not necessarily equal premise-driven play. Thematically-rich play can only be a bulwark of and facilitator of premise-driven play so long as (a) the player has means to assert that play be coherently goal-directed as it relates to PC theme and (b) the GM is obliged to oppose their thematic goals with consistent and potent antagonism.

I've trimmed your post at this point, because this is where I have something meaningful (I think) to say in response.

I agree with your contrast between thematically-rich play, and premise-driven/premise-addressing play. And have nothing to add to it, at least at this stage.

But I don't equate the tragedy bard to the 4e fighter.

The 4e fighter, in play, actually acts as a relentless vanguard who dominates melee and protects comrades. And we can flip that around - if there are no melees, if there are no threats, then the fighter's thematic content (at least in this respect) will not emerge.

Whereas it seems to me that the tragedy bard can fully do their thing even if there are no tragedies, no dire twists of fate, etc. It's purely boxes-to-boxes with not even a hint of clouds. I'm sure a player can play it skilfully, to some degree at least - looking for chances to regain their Inspiration in circumstances where lots of d20s are apt to be rolled, and hence 1s are more likely. But there's no need for tragedy to form any part of this.

Just like, in AD&D, I can play my paladin perfectly skilfully, fighting when necessary, using my lay on hands, etc; but with no need for divine inspiration or devotion to form any part of this - the one possible exception, I would say, being using my turn undead ability, which does directly introduce the paladin's divine inspiration/channelling into the play of the game.

 

[Aldarc]

This makes sense as a fact, but is puzzling nevertheless. If people are happy playing D&D, using its processes of play, why are they coming to Dungeon World?

Conversely, if they are wanting to try a new RPG, it seems - normatively, if not descriptively - that they should be open to leaning the different process of play that it uses.

It's not that puzzling at all IMO. Regardless of the why and wherefore that we come to play a particular TTRPG, we often smuggle into a game our own biases, habits, and assumptions based on past games that we have played, moreso if those games bare any sort of associative similiarity.

I couldn't figure out Fate when I first picked it up because I was trying to parse it through the lense of the d20 fantasy that I was accustomed to. And then when I first played Fate after "understanding" it, I realized that I was still trying to play and run it more like a d20 game because of those "d20 habits" that I had formed.

I likewise had a similar experience when running Dungeon World for the first time. I was probably calling for Moves that should not have been called, because I was arguably treating them more like d20 skills and attack rolls.

Understanding how a game works in theory is different from running it well in practice.

I've run into and talked with other people with similar experiences with transitioning between various tabletop games.

Edit: I would say that this is in some ways comparable to learning a new language. We bring in a lot of assumptions and modes of thinking when we learn a new language. We often look for shortcuts, such as cognates, that help us make mental connections with something we already know. Sometimes we are successful, but sometimes we stumble into "false friends." Sometimes we try to translate our ideas too directly from the phraseology or sentence composition of our native language rather than how we would more naturally express that idea in the other language.

 

[FrogReaver]

Well, since it’s a choice of blindly going left or blindly going right, what exactly is this choice you have been deprived of?

Who said anything about blindly going left or right? Not having full info doesn’t mean you have none.

If we're talking about some choice where the players are well-informed and the different options are things relevant to them, then we're both talking about the same thing, eh?

No. I don’t think well-informed fits either. There’s alot of middle ground for partially informed. Which is not talking about the same thing.

I mean, choices abound in Narrativist play, but they're choices like "do I save my best friend, or become the most powerful fighter in the kingdom?"

Yes, but never the choice to do both!