The question "Who is in control here?" contains an implicit component of "now."
Why? Says who?
I'll repost the rules text, plus some of the commentary that follows it:
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?
. . .
Discerning realities isn’t just about noticing a detail, it’s about figuring out the bigger picture. The GM always describes what the player characters experience honestly, so during a fight the GM will say that the kobold mage stays at the other end of the hall. Discerning realities could reveal the reason behind that: the kobold’s motions reveal that he’s actually pulling energy from the room behind him, he can’t come any closer.
Just like spout lore [another player-side move], the answers you get are always honest ones. Even if the GM has to figure it out on the spot. Once they answer, it’s set in stone.
The +1 forward when acting on the answer isn't arbitrary, either. It correlates to the fictional state of affairs that the PC has learned something about the situation.
This notion that
success in action resolution stands isn't confined to DW of AW. Burning Wheel states it as "Let it Ride". One of the 4e designers/developers had a blog about the same thing on the WotC website some time around 10 years ago. The MHRP rules have a discussion about how long assets and resources that the players have generated for their PCs stick around.
No one thinks that fiction can't evolve. But if it is "set in stone" then, in order for the GM to legitimately change it,
the players have to put it in issue. This can happen in different ways: the MHRP rules give the example of the Thing's player (I think that's right - anyway, a "strong guy") establishing a car as an asset, which is then used to hit the villain over the head. If the player keeps doing this, eventually the car is going to break up and the GM is entitled to declare that the asset has come to an end. Burning Wheel has a long discussion of principles and examples of when Let it Ride ceases to apply. I gave the example upthread of the players having their PCs push Pup around, and the GM flagging the signs of this as muttering and dirty looks from the followers. If the players keep pushing Pup around, well now they've put the allegiance of the followers to the test.
Of course these are all matters of judgement. As a GM you can generally tell you've been unfair if the players start muttering and giving you dirty looks! The point is that the GM is not just free to change the fiction in a way that negates the players' successes.
once the PCs succeed at something, that's part of the established fiction, and what happens next has to be consistent with that.
Consistency is not a very strong constraint, because nearly everything can be consistent with what's gone before if enough backstory is introduced to explain why. I mean, maybe the followers have sworn an oath to abandon Pup should (s)he ever yield to another! In which case it would be consistent for the players to work out who's in control, take control of that person, and then have the whole gang of followers turn on them straight away. But that would not honour their success in action resolution.
That's not to say that there can never be cases of followers who have sworn such oaths. Just that, if the GM wants to introduce them, doing so as a response to successfully Discerning Realities about who's really in control is not the right time.
I'll admit that's the cause for part of my distaste for those games, combined with the fact I interpret "success with complications" as "partial failure." The fact that putatively competent characters seem to fail so routinely ... bothers me.
To me this sits very oddly with the post I've replied to just above.
You lament the incidence of "partial failure" yet want to reserve the right for the GM to narrate matters so that notional successes turn out to be full or partial failures!
I also suspect that you are working with a much narrower notion of how failure is to be narrated than the authors of BitD, AW, Burning Wheel etc intend. I'll give an example or two below in this post.
This is where I run aground to some extent: the inferred disallowance of unforeseen consequences or knock-on effects irregardless of the success-failure state of any given action: the GM isn't allowed to weave a behind-the-scenes backstory into things such as to explain what happens within the PCs' awareness.
<snip>
But other times, there's going to be unseen effects no matter what you do; the only difference perhaps being what those unseen effects will consist of. These are the purview of the GM. Problem is, in a situation where there is no backstory or setting she can't factor these sort of unforeseen things in (or if she tries it risks being awkward or unwieldy) because she doesn't yet know what they might be. It also works against any kind of mystery-solving game.
"I talk to the Baroness to see if she knows anything about the missing jewels". In a simple situation, either she knows something or she doesn't, regardless of whether this is pre-known through prep or determined on the spot by action resolution. But the advantage of a pre-prepped setting is that if the GM has in her background notes that the Baroness is a spy for a local Thieves' guild, an unforeseen consequence of the PCs speaking to her here (and successfully determining that she legitimately has no knowledge of the missing jewels) is that if she didn't know about the missing jewels before she does now, and can report that to her guild
<snip>
even outright successes ought to be able to lead to headaches later. For example, a party of thief-y PCs plans a theft and executes it flawlessly - successes all round, not a failure to be seen. Does this mean there may never be consequences later, particularly in a game world with any kind of reliable divination magics? I sure hope not...
If the PCs speak to the Baroness or flawlessly execute the theft
and then the campaign comes to its end, the issue of subsequent consequences is moot. What happened to De Niro's character after the events of the film
Ronin? Any fan is free to make up answers in his/her imagination; but the canonical answer must be
there is no answer. That story hasn't been written or told yet.
Conversely,
if the campaign keeps going then there will be subsequent action declarations. And some of these will fail, or will succeed with complications mandated. And the GM is then able to introduce "unforeseen consequences" or "knock-on effects". There are also moments when there is no obvious answer, at the table, to
what happens next, and so everyone will look at the GM (who, in a conventional TTRPG, has a special responsibility in this regard) and the GM can then signal a possible unforeseen consequence or knock-on effect.
Consider a downstream Discern Realities -
what here is not what it appears to be? The player succeeds. The GM narrates,
The servant cowering in the corner steps forward. She flashes a small medallion hidden in the cloth wrapped about her waist - you recognise it as the mark of the <insert sinister guild or organisation here>. "Do not think you can prevail here," she says. "For you are marked by my masters."
In any RPG, if there is play taking place then the GM should have ample opportunity to do this sort of thing without having to manipulate fiction behind the scenes so as to thwart or undercut players' successes.
My group played a BitD variant last night. One of the players declared his PC was going to take out a guard. He rolled a 4. He took the guard out with one action, but in doing so, his weapon jammed. I would think that someone who looked at that as a failure is either aggressively pessimistic, or maybe your reading of what Success with Complication means is giving you a very narrow idea of what it may actually be.
<snip>
The result of 4-5 is what drives the game forward. It propels the fiction and creates a sense of rising action and pacing to the events. It’s what keeps the game from devolving into everyone taking turns punching each other until everyone on one side is down.
I agree. I also think "partial failure" or "success with complications" can go further than this. (I suspect you agree.)
For instance,
the guard goes down with one punch, and his mask falls off. It's your brother-in-law! Or,
the guard goes down with one punch, dropping his truncheon. It clatters down the stairs - all twenty of them - and the sound echoes through the alleyway. Anyone within a block or two has probably heard it!
And of course, in any particular context, there's stuff of more ambitious scope that might suggest itself.
