Faolyn
(she/her)
Right. Same with investigators or occultists or explorers or nobles.Telling the players they are going to play a criminal gang isn't telling them what they will do or what their goals are. It's a genre specification.
Since AW indicates that the MC sets up things like groups of opposition, rival gangs, and other stuff like that in a sandbox-y type of way, I would imagine that it would be perfectly in-game for me to say "this noble is having a masquerade tomorrow night, there's been a rash of muggings on this other street, there's been reports of demons on such-and-such a street, the glow-in-the-dark fungus farms are mysteriously failing, and you all have personal issues you said you want to deal with--so what do you want to do now?"
I'm having a hard time seeing this. Unless you're saying that the GM doesn't actually set up anything, including the area's NPCs, until the players decide they exist? If otherwise, then AW should just say that it's a sandbox game.The second thing sets a goal for the player's action declarations. And seems also to suggest that a big chunk of play will be learning hitherto-unrevealed backstory.
They're very different games, to my eye. And the second looks to me like it will default to highly GM-driven.
OK, well that's good to know. If that's in the book, I missed it.Here's Vincent Baker on this point:
You know the rule in Apocalypse World that everyone has to choose a different playbook? You might be interested to know, as a point of trivia, that the reason for this isn’t niche protection or whatever, it’s just so the MC doesn’t have to show up to the first session with multiple copies of every playbook.
I like options. I like knowing that I can play what I want to play. To me, having race/class limitations written on the character sheet and saying that everyone has to have a different playbook are both unnecessary out-of-setting restrictions. If race doesn't matter, then each class should be open to all races. The game is making it so it does matter, if only as a homage to Gygax who wanted D&D to be humanocentric.Like the race/class issue, I don't think this is a very big deal.
This is why I also hate how these games list names and physical appearances on the sheet, and in Blades there's a list of who you know, pick one, and they're all named. I am fully aware I can ignore those and make my own, but their appearance on the sheet feels wrong to me.
It looks to me like the MC is railroading this: Keeler will walk by the armory and she will not only hear people in there but will automatically go inside and find out what they're doing. Now, this could very well be shorthand, because the writer didn't want to spend 4+ sentences establishing that Keeler said she wanted to walk to the armory, have the MC say she hears noises, have Keeler say she wants to go in, and have the MC describe the scene, when one sentence would do for the example. If that's the case, that's absolutely fine, no prob.So here we learn how Keeler knows it - the GM establishes framing (ie that Keeler is passing by her armoury and hears her three gang members in there, arming themselves) - and then Keeler's player asks them what's going on. That's not an action declaration that triggers a move, so the GM responds with free narration in accordance with the principles: in this case, the GM continues to announce future badness consistently with what prep and honesty demand:
But if the MC is actually expected to just tell PCs where they're going, what they're doing, and also that they know info that they couldn't possibly know, because this allows the MC to ramp up the tension, then I think they're doing it wrong. Or at least in a way that discourages me from wanting to play.
I'm also a bit confused about this line, because it's making it sound like Keeler has an existence independent of her player. But I'm going to chalk this up to unclear writing. Maybe this is a "it's what my character would do" moment, but as I said, unclear.If Keeler lets me, that is. Keeler thinks about imposing her will upon her gang to stop them, her player thinks about it too. She twists her mouth around, thinking about it.
Yeah, that might be another issue as well. Not a huge fan of inter-party conflict, or TV shows where everyone is backstabbing each other.That sort of interweaving of the action is pretty central to any GMing of a non-party-based game. In my own case, it's a technique that I've used in Cthuhu Dark and Wuthering Heights one-shots, and use fairly often in my Classic Traveller and Burning Wheel campaigns.
And that line there really makes me not want to play AW. The only options that require roles are both manipulative (and one of them I am not interested in doing at all), and the lack of a persuasion-type move makes everything both arbitrary and dependent on aggressive activity. If the MC decides one thing, then there's nothing the player can try to accomplish peacefully.Asking someone straight to do something isn’t trying to seduce or manipulate them. . . . Absent leverage, they’re just talking, and you should have your NPCs agree or accede, decline or refuse, according to their own self-interests.
That's another bit that's confusing. It's an RPG. Everything is fiction. Why not say "as established in a previous session"?What would count as a perfect opportunity on a golden plate, in the context of a PC looking around in a non-charged situation? I don't think it's easy to come up with an example out of context. But suppose that the PC is visiting their savvyhead friend's workshop, and their friend (as established by some prior fiction)
Yeah, I read that. It makes it sound very GM vs. PC to me. "I want to hurt the PCs, but I'm not allowed to do it unless I have a good in-game reason." I'm sure that's not what's intended, but the writing is so unclear that's what's coming across.When you have posted that there might be a consequence of failure even if the situation the PC is examining is not charged with potential danger you have failed to misdirect yourself! You've supposed that the function of the dice roll is to model some "possibility space" within the fiction. But it's not. Here's the explanation from the AW rulebook (pp 110-11):
Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. . . . Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible. . . .
OK, so how is this different from a typical RPG?AW has no random determination of the fiction. At every point someone has the job of deciding what the fiction is: either a player is saying what their PC does, or the GM is announcing backstory, or framing, or consequences.
Which is weird, because all of the examples the game provides are filled with game terminology. So if the goal is to ditch real-world language, it fails.The point of misdirection is that the GM is not to speak in the (real world) language of decision-making. They are to speak in the fictional language of (imaginary) cause-and-effect.
I haven't played Traveller so I can't speak to that (although I looked it up and the SRD lists Carouse, Investigation, Streetwise, Social Sciences (Psychology), and Tactics, all of which could be used to read a situation). And it has a Diplomat and Persuasion skill.The places where a RPG obliges a GM to do this sort of thing help tell us what the RPG cares about. (Classic Traveller cares about doing tricky manoeuvres in space suits. It doesn't really care about charged situations, though, unless they're about to explode into violence, and so while it does have encounter surprise and evasion rules, it doesn't have any subsystem comparable to read a (charged) sitch.)
But I know that other games do have rules that let you read a situation. If I'm running D&D, the player can ask "what's the general mood like" or "who's the baddest mofo in the room," and I can tell them to roll Insight. Or I can tell them to roll Insight as soon as they enter, or just use passive Insight. If the player asks if there are any exits, I can have them roll Perception, use passive Per, or for that matter, simply tell them there's another exit as soon as they need to escape out of one. Or if one of them says "Is there a back door? If there is, I'm going out it," then I can either say there is one, say no, or invent a back door right there and then. Ditto for GURPS, Fate, Cypher, and other systems I've played.