Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs

[pemerton]

Sounds like you would be breaking the rules

How so?

 

[FrogReaver]

OK, so here is Discern Realities:

When you closely study a situation or person, roll+Wis. ✴On a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below. ✴On a 7–9, ask 1.​

Either way, take +1 forward when acting on the answers.​

​

• What happened here recently?​

• What is about to happen?​

• What should I be on the lookout for?​

• What here is useful or valuable to me?​

• Who’s really in control here?​

• What here is not what it appears to be?​

Now you asked
As @AbdulAlhazred posted, there is no When you search for secret doors move.

Suppose the player has their PC closely study a situation, and the dice are rolled for Discern Realities. And it is as hit rather than a miss. The player gets to ask a question - maybe they ask "What here is useful or valuable to me?"

And maybe the GM responds by asking them, "Well, what would you find useful?" and they reply "A secret door!" And so the GM says, "As you study the wall closely, you notice hairline cracks, and a small bump that you're sure is the "latch" for this secret door."

But there are a millions and one other ways that this might go: the player asks a different question; the GM doesn't ask the player a question, or asks a different question; the GM responds with something different that might be valuable or useful.

So the answer to the question if a character searches for a secret door and the roll succeeds, there then is one is either No, or else The question doesn't quite make sense, because there is no "search for secret doors"move.

So if I understand, this would be player describes action that is not a move (looking for secret doors), player looks to a dm to say something, the dm then makes a move that doesn’t even have to be about secret doors at all?

 

[FrogReaver]

My understanding of it is: if my prep says that something in the world is a certain way, and it has not yet been established in play, I cannot use my prep to determine the success or failure of a PC action. To pull a random example out of nowhere, If I determined that a particular NPC was not susceptible to bribery, but the party had not yet determined this through play, a PC attempt to bribe said NPC cannot be thwarted by the GM using their prep. Cannot be; they get to try, and the GM to abide by the results.

I’m not as certain on this. Depending on the exact structure of the player moves the GM might could make extensive use of prep. Maybe that’s against principles or what not but it seems technically achievable. It’s just prep that may conflict with moves needs to be avoided, but certainly not all prep does this!

 

[pemerton]

So if I understand, this would be player describes action that is not a move (looking for secret doors), player looks to a dm to say something, the dm then makes a move that doesn’t even have to be about secret doors at all?

If a player describes their PC closely studying a situation, then they are Discerning Realities: if you do it, you do it.

If a player just says "I look around - do I notice any secret doors?" and looks to the GM, then the GM makes a soft move which, as you say, may or may not relate to secret doors depending on what the GM takes principles, the fiction etc to demand.

 

[FrogReaver]

If a player describes their PC closely studying a situation, then they are Discerning Realities: if you do it, you do it.

If a player just says "I look around - do I notice any secret doors?" and looks to the GM, then the GM makes a soft move which, as you say, may or may not relate to secret doors depending on what the GM takes principles, the fiction etc to demand.

I see. I wasn’t sure looking for secret doors by tapping on the walls or whatever would count as closely studying the situation. Especially since the discern realities questions don’t really seem all that applicable to that activity.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

On a completely unrelated note, if I wanted to take a closer look at PbtA and not stray too far from D&D themes, is Dungeon World or Stonetop the better choice?

May I submit Freebooters on the Frontier? Although it's the 2nd edition that really is coming together, the first edition's a bit stripped down. It's still a PbtA; but is also very recognizably an homage to earlier D&D - mostly AD&D I'd say. You can get access to the 2nd edition playtest by joining the Discord server (7 day invite)

Edited to add - 1e requires you to own DW; 2e is a standalone game in its own right

 

[thefutilist]

GMing a "no myth", "story now" RPG requires being able to make stuff up fairly quickly, drawing on what has already been said by everyone. In AW, it also means keeping in mind your prep, which should be a help and not a hindrance in being able to think of things! (Like in my Torchbearer 2e game, when a roll of a camp event turned up a Dire Wolf, I had my prep of the Moathouse to lean on, and so instead of having to make up, from scratch, where this Dire Wolf came from, I was able to present it as a scout from the Moathouse.)

But it's not rocket science. To paraphrase something Gygax said, I don't think RPGers in general have a shortage of imagination!

This might be the wrong thread for it but I see story now and no myth as pretty much directly opposed. Now I hate no myth personally but if that’s what people enjoy then that’s fine by me. As a lover of Narrativism though it does kind of pain me to see them conflated, especially given that the style of Narrativism I enjoy (bang driven in Ron Edwards terms, situational play in mine) is basically at deaths door because of the influx of no-myth enjoyers.

If you weren’t conflating them then I misunderstood you and you can ignore my post.

 

[Lanefan]

Given the fiction invokes the rule, how can they be in conflict?

When the rule that's invoked by said fiction doesn't make sense with said fiction, they're in conflict.

This is a good example of what I've called a broken chain of justification. There are two ways to understand this.

Character in a soaring skyship justifies taking a lethal plunge justifies a rule for plunges that aren't lethal justifies further fiction​

One way to understand this is that our fictional action is "lethal plunge" which our rule does not handle. Therefore do not invoke that rule. Say something else instead. "You die", could feel appropriate.

Another way to understand this is that we helped ourselves to a resolution - "lethal" - that wasn't justified by facts about our game world. Plunges aren't lethal for high-level characters. Corrected, we should have

Character in a soaring skyship justifies taking a plunge justifies a rule for plunges that aren't lethal for high level characters justifies character sticks the landing​

Building the result we think should happen into our action - i.e. "lethal" - was jumping the gun. To see this, picture that the character was not quite so high-level, so had a 50% probability of dying. We ought not jump the gun and pronounce them dead at the point of the action declaration.

I'm not sold that your chains of justification are as clear cut as all that, largely because of the middle step in the last one "justtifies a rule for plunges" when that rule is clearly not able to produce a reasonable outcome in the fiction, thus leaving the GM in a position she should never find herself: having to justify and-or rationalize something she shouldn't have to.

I think "justifes changing the rule" needs to be in there somewhere, for (ideally, rare) situations like this.

But how should we decide which to choose? In both cases, fiction takes priority.

Either our world is one in which high-level characters don't die from falls, in which case we're not entitled to help ourselves to the result "dies from the fall"... and certainly not at the point of action declaration without running it through the mechanic.​

​

Or our world is one in which falls from a sufficient height are always lethal for characters, in which case, we ought not to invoke a rule that doesn't deal with that. Given we're now in my third category - it's not covered by a rule - it's turned over to GM. (This is similar to the case I raised up thread, where the action very nearly but does not exactly fit the Assess a Situation rule. The same principle applies.)​

AW manages it with rigourous rules. Some other games manage it with adroit GMing.

What happens in practice (at least in D&D) is you tend to end up with, in effect, "Our world is based on reality except when it isn't". And while it's often intuitive where "when it isn't" is going to apply (e.g. pretty much anything involving either magic or fantastic creatures), sometimes - like with this example - it's anything but intuitive. And when it's not intuitive, it really has a look of rules superceding fiction.

 

[Faolyn]

My understanding of it is: if my prep says that something in the world is a certain way, and it has not yet been established in play, I cannot use my prep to determine the success or failure of a PC action. To pull a random example out of nowhere, If I determined that a particular NPC was not susceptible to bribery, but the party had not yet determined this through play, a PC attempt to bribe said NPC cannot be thwarted by the GM using their prep. Cannot be; they get to try, and the GM to abide by the results.

I don't think I've ever seen that actual rule anywhere in any PbtA game. Especially since you can establish that the person can't be bribed simply by having them tell the PCs this when they try.

But, assuming this is the case... Going back to Monster of the Week, which has a Manipulate Someone move. On a 10+, then they’ll do it for the reason you gave them. If you asked too much, they’ll tell you the minimum it would take for them to do it (or if there’s no way they’d do it). See, this move right here says that they can, in fact, say there's no way they'll do it. But with this good a roll, they probably won't arrest you on the spot.

However, there's another way to do bribery. You have an NPC who won't take bribes. When the PCs try to bribe them, they say no. That doesn't trigger a move, so no dice are rolled. Now let's say the PCs decide to threaten the PC. That's very likely a move right there--Manipulate Someone in MotW, Finish Them in Fellowship, Go Aggro in Apocalypse World, Parley in Dungeon World, etc.

There's a third way as well. If it's so incredibly important for this person to not be bribable, and it's so incredibly important that the PCs deal with them and are likely to try to bribe them, create a custom move. If the PCs try to bribe them, they roll +Whatever. On a 10+, the person tells them they can't be bribed and hints bad things will happen if they try again. On a 7-9, as above, and the person also tells their friends/coworkers/superiors that the PCs tried to bribe them. On a 6 or less, the person immediately throws them out, calls for the guards, arrests them, whatever, and the PCs lose any hope of gaining access to whatever it is they wanted.

And it's OK to improvise these custom moves, if you need to.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, unless your campaign is Cliff-World, would this be an issue?

I mean, falling damage in most of my games is almost always for much smaller falls, of the 10 to 30 feet range. Anything more than that tends to be very rare.

It's rare in my game because I've put in rules that make falling any more than about 40 feet far more dangerous than as-written.

But if you're running a scenario like in Game of Thrones where the Wildlings are climbing the Wall of Ice, it's nowhere near as tense if everyone meta-knows most of the characters will survive no matter how far they fall.