Thats like saying AW doesn't have Moves. They are literally all Yes, And mechanics.
No they're not! If the roll is 6-, the GM is entitled to make as hard and direct a move as they like.
Here's an example, from the AW rulebook (pp 155-56):
“So, Marie: at home, pacing, armed, locked in, yeah? They arrive suddenly at your door with a solid kick, your whole door rattles.
You hear Whackoff’s voice: ‘she’s expecting us I guess.’” I’m announcing future badness.
“I go to the peep hole,” she says. “There are three of them?”
“Yep,” I say. “Whackoff on your left, Plover and Church Head are doing something on your right, Plover’s back’s to you — and you
hear a cough-cough-rrrrar sound and Plover’s at the door with a chainsaw. What do you do?” I’m putting her in a spot.
“I read the situation. What’s my best escape route?” She rolls+sharp and — <oops> — misses. “Oh no,” she says.
I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. The brutes’ threat move I like for this is make a coordinated attack with a coherent
objective, so here it comes.
“You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all
the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space. The door’s creaking and snapping at
the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this—” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand,
like whacking a croquet ball.
“I dive for—”
Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection.
“Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?”
“1-armor.”
“Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3-harm.” She marks it on her character sheet. “Make the harm move. Roll+3.”
She hits the roll with a 9. I get to choose from the move’s 7–9 list, and I decide that she loses her footing.
“For a minute you can’t tell what’s wrong, and you have this sensation, it seems absurd now but I guess it makes sense, that you hit the ceiling. Maybe you tripped on something and fell, and hit it that way? Then gradually you get your senses back, and that noise you thought was your skull cracking is actually your door splitting and splintering down, and that noise you thought was your blood is their chainsaw. What do you do?”
The GM does not say "yes" to Marie's player's declaration about looking for a way out.
pemerton said:
by saying what one's PC does in the fiction; and by establishing goals, wants, hates, hopes, etc for one's PC, such that the MC can announce badness, put you in a spot, offer opportunities and the like.
You can describe any RPG with this.
No you can't!
The idea of
announcing future badness is not part of (for instance) Moldvay Basic. The ideal for the referee in classic D&D is
neutrality: to present the situation extrapolated from the dungeon key as fairly as possible. This is nothing like the approach of the AW MC (beyond the fact that they are both ways of adjudicating a RPG).
It is when you as proxy for the designer have spent 24 pages trying to assert how much better AW is than whatever else.
I've made no such assertion. I have asserted that Vincent Baker has a lot of intelligent stuff to say about RPG design. The game I have praised the highest in this thread is Burning Wheel.
You seem to mistake admiration for Baker as a designer and an analyst/critic, and the rebuttal of mistaken claims about AW coming from you and others, as
assertions that AW is better than anything else. To me, that seems like some sort of projection.
We remember the stories of the Miracle On Ice and the Red Sox breaking the Curse of the Bambino. We remember Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura doing the Bongcloud opening against each other. We remember zzirgrizz introducing a bunch of millenials to the idea of using a .50 cal Sniper Rifle as a shotgun. We remember getting a nat20 on the bbeg, or getting at Nat 1 at the impossibly worst time.
All of these stories are valid and compelling. The value judgements you're making that these aren't dramatic or compelling is unwarranted.
I'm sure someone, somewhere, thinks there is no difference to be drawn - in terms of storytelling, drama, etc - between the time they leaped up in excitement, having finally solved the last clue on the crossword they were solving, and (say) Casablanca, or Nine Days, or a novel like The Quiet American.
I am not that person. I don't play RPGs so that I can have fond memories of lucky dice rolls. I am looking for something different, and more immediately dramatic and compelling, when I play a RPG.
But that isn't what everyone wants. Some of us would rather play games that speak to their own genres
Knock yourselves out!
That just because you say you have related experience to given subject doesn't actually make you an expert in it.
The reason I'm an expert in the fields in which I am expert in because of my years of work in them, my engagement with my peers (and my superiors), my work in relation to teaching, etc. It is attested by my qualifications, my publications, my prizes and my students.