Continuing in my persona as
the man from 15 months ago:
What occured to me when I read this was that player perception of their situation is probably already coloured by the fact they know whether their outcome is controlled, risky or desperate.
There's an interesting idea that you could (as an experiment) frame three different groups into identical situations - but one thinking it is 'controlled', one 'risky' and one 'desperate' and see how they play out. It's conceivable the desperate group might be in the mindset that they are moments away from being spotted by the lackey, while the controlled would see an opportunity to gather intel from an easy mark.
So I'm intrigued by the idea that the engagement roll becomes, in a certain way, self-fulfilling as it bleeds into the player's assessment of risk as the scene opens.
This was interesting, both in general and because I'm trying to get myself into the mindset to GM Dungeon World next year.
I don't know BitD outside of this thread and a few other posts about it, so my thinking/question will be framed in (what I take to be) DW-ish terms. And also BW-ish terms.
It seems to me that this issue of whether the description is "controlled", "risky" or "desperate" isn't just about the fiction the GM narrates (and whether s/he adds the lullaby, or the approaching hounds, as were flagged upthread); but also about what
permissions s/he enjoys to introduce consequences of various degrees of severity.
For instance, if the situation is
controlled then the consequence of the lantern rolling out into the corridor - hence making things
risky - seems permitted. But a consequence of the lantern setting fire to the building, hence riksing the life of the NPC the PCs are there to rescue, would seem excessive.
Whereas if the situation is already established as risky, and then a roll is made that directs the GM to escalate, escalating to that sort of situation is more likely permissible.
Upthread, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] posted some back-and-forth from another thread, or a series of PMs, where [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] mentioned sometimes needing to take time, in AW, to establish the proper consequence; and I talked about having a similar experience from time to time when GMing BW (and I could say now that I've also had it once or twice GMing Prince Valiant, though in that game everything is a bit less gritty than in AW, BW, BitD, etc). I see this demand on the GM resulting from the fact that what is implicit in a situation is not always self-evident, and it can take real interpretive effort to bring out the appropriate thing. And it seems that part of what makes a thing
appropriately implicit in the scene is precisely whether, at the table, we agree that the scene is controlled, risky or desperate.
The Attune action is the Blades equivalent of Open Your Mind in Apoc World. And in my experience, Opening Your Mind is the most gonzo, unpredictable - and frankly - difficult of the basic moves to interpret on a fail or a 7-9. It's heavily dependent on how the group has approached the psychic maelstrom, how it's interpreted, what powers or effects are viewed by the group as plausible. So it takes some feel and negotiation with the group to establish what can happen.
For example, one of my group announced they were going to Open their Mind to the maelstrom to see a particular location they knew really well (they were in a bind away from the hardhold) and then announced they were going to step through the maelstrom to return there... some tables would be 'no way, that's not happening..' My table was 'That's so cool, I hope for your sake you make the roll, man...'
This post pushed my thoughts in a slightly different direction - not about what
consequences are implicit in a situation, but rather what
possibilities (for the protagonists) are implicit. Some (relatively) recent D&D threads, about how to adjudicate jumping in 5e, and the "problem" with 4e martial PCs being "supernatural, have reminded me that at some tables, at least, the conception of
possibility can be very narrow if there is no explicit game move permitting whatever it is the player is hoping to have his/her PC do.
Whereas I do my best to work with a permissive notion of possibility, and to use the game system rather than GM veto as the rationing device. This is where a fairly robust resolution system comes in handy - especially because if the resolution system is robust, then the game won't break just because the fiction changes in some dramatic or unexpected way!
The actual example, of tapping into a psychic maelstrom to teleport to a location, reminded me of
a somewhat similar thing that happened in my 4e game (improvised Arcana was the mechanical framework).
(As a footnote to this: the more "sim" the system, the more the system itself will impose constraints on this sort of thing. Of the systems I'm currently GMing, I would regard BW and Classic Traveller as more towards that "sim" end of the spectrum, hence having fewer of these "open ended" moves within them.)
I think I've talked about my regular group - we've played plenty of AW and other stuff (from HeroWars to Fiasco to Fate) but they'll easily slip back into waiting for the GMs plot if they're getting those signals.
So maybe it's just my group, but one of those signals would be premade setting, pre-described map, pre-determined factions... and therefore I need to take care with how I introduce that (or not).
<snip>
A sort of benchmark for me is - at the start of play can a player or players start enacting something relevant, dramatic, interesting in the setting without reference to the GM. In other words, do they start the game in motion, active and driven, ready to act and not needing anyone's permission?
<snip>
For example, I'm currently considering the idea of making a bigger version of the Duskwall map and in the first session - after character and crew set-up - giving everyone five sticky labels. I'll let them write a key location or faction name or point of interest on each sticky note to put in different districts. So straight away it's adding a layer of ownership which the players can use to build their own ideas for feuds and nemises and locations they want to see the action in.
I'm the long-time GM for my group, and I tend also to be the "setting guy" in virtue of being the one who has the shelf full of setting books from 30+ years of RPGing.
So my approach to the issue that chaochou describes here is to proceed in three steps. First, we establish genre: eg default 4e; default BW lifepaths; Classic Traveller with its worlds and imperial navy and nobles et al; Dark Sun - swords and planet, psionics, sorcerer-kings, gladiatorial arenas; etc. (PC build rules are obviously important here.)
Second, the players establish whatever it is they want to about PC backstory - eg (in BW)
my 6 years as an arcane devotee were spent with my brother in our hilltop tower, accompanied by an awesome emailed photo of an old Indian hill fort in semi-arid country; or, in Classic Traveller having just rolled up a noble with gambling skill, a yacht, and a shortened second term due to a near-miss survival roll,
I won a yacht gambling, but the previous owners beat the sh*t out of me in the carpark afterwords, and I've just come out of hospital - where another PC, with skill Medic-1, hapens to have been working; or, in 4e,
I'm one of the surviving refugees of Entekash, a city that was sacked by humanoid - hence why I hate goblins, orcs and the like, and why I'm going to restore civilisation to the world as a devotee of Erathis.
Third, I will then take lead responsibility for locating these elements on the (pre-given) map, or fitting it into the bigger picture. So the wizard brothers' tower (now ruined, having been sacked by orcs as part of the backstory) is in the Abor-Alz on the GH map; Entekash was a city to the north of the mountains on the B11 inside cover map (ie off the map), and that whole area to the north has been rendered wild and unihabitable since its sacking - and yes, the patron looking to recruit your for your first adventure
did know your uncle so-and-so the trader; the Marine patron we just rolled up on the patron encounter table knows the medic PC from his time in the navy, and she is interested to learn that he's been nursing the guy who won the yacht gambling, because the former owners were meant to be using it as part of her smuggling operation and now she'll need to recruit it's new owner!
Sometimes there isn't a pre-established setting, and then the players can contribute as freely as I do: it was a player who decided that our starting world for Traveller (that I rolled up after they rolled their PCs) was a gas giant moon; and in our Cortex+ Heroic game, after the players voted for vikings over Japan (I'd designed pre-gens who could work as either) they esablished the backstory to kick things off (but that game doesn't involve a map any more complicated than "north, snow, glacier, mountains; south, fields, villages that need to be kept safe").
And in our Prince Valiant game we worked out our starting location was the south of Britain because I was using a scenario from the Episode Book, and the NPC was Lady Joan of Kent, and the action was taking place fairly close to her castle. We use the map of Britain on the Pendragon inside cover, but - like the GH maps in our BW game - it's just a narrative prop. It doesn't actually play any role in action resolution.
I don't know BitD well enough to know whether it lends itself to my 1-2-3 approach ie are the pre-authored backstory elements so obviously consonant with the genre that you can let the players set up their backstory and then just map that onto the labels/narrative props provided by the game? GH is good for this because it is such a generic-swords-and-sorcery-a-la-the-Hyborean-Age-with-added-elves-and-dwarves-and-orcs world; Glorantha (to pick a contrasting example) I would think not so much, as it has its own distinctive vision and details. BitD seems like its setting might be intermediate between these two examples.
