loverdrive
Prophet of the profane (She/Her)
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.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?
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.