Help Me Get "Apocalypse World" and PbtA games in general.

[Manbearcat]

As I have noted before, some of your interpretation of PbtA seems to contradict what is actually written in the AW2E book. And that's fine. There is obviously a lot of room within the style. If I seem impatient it is just that your way just confuses me and takes me back to previous feelings that I just don't "get" PbtA games.

But let's leave that aside for a moment since it is more about the earlier prep conversation and less about the actual subject I wanted to talk about, which is GM moves. As I said, there seem to be a lot of them and a lot of categories of them in AW2E -- more than other games also considered more "pure" PbtA games like MotW, Masks and Thirsty Sword Lesbians (as opposed to Dungeon World, which seems to be considered an offshoot a little farther away from the core concepts).

With all these moves in AW2E, should a beginning GM focus on a few of them? I get that you are supposed to follow the principals of play to decide which ones to use in response to a 6- or threat or whatever, but are their "core" moves you want to lean on while learning the game and style?

I would say that you might still be looking at GM moves in a way that is a little bit 'off."

These are inspirational pithy words that focus your decision-space as a GM. They're not 1:1 things that happen in the fiction all the time. You still have to map them onto the fiction.

The best way for you to think about GM moves is as I wrote above in that Core Loop post.

Soft moves - provocative framing...threats that will "go boom" without player intercession.

Hard moves - The "go boom" above.

Or just look at Threat Moves as sub-headings for all of the Basic GM Moves. For instance:

AFFLICTION - Display the contents of its heart.

Let's say this AFFLICTION is an actual person and not a disease. Let's say its a Mutant with the Impulse: craves restitution, recompense.

Display the contents of its heart could be a hard move as a result of a 6- move by a player:

* Inflict harm - "The creature tears open its breastbone exposing its gunk-spewing ventricle and you're covered in the sizzling gore. Take x harm."

Display the contents of its heart could be a soft move that is provocative framing pulled from its Impulse:

* Offer an opportunity with or without cost - "The shambling is on its knees in the blasted badlands...rummaging through its collection of stuff...there is an urgency there...there might even be a tear welling up in its lone good eye...its looking for something...lost or taken who knows. Its head cranes your way like a mutated sad puppy pleading for help. it turns back to rummage as sizzling acidic saliva pours from its agape mouth onto the stuff its rummaging through."

---

As to Dungeon World...I fundamentally do not agree with either the premise that Dungeon World is deviant from Apocalypse World nor that it hews OSR in its actual play (like veneer-wise at a glance...ok...maybe?). I'll spoil this because its an aside.

Spoiler: Dungeon World Stuff

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Dungeon World is damn near the most completely ripped out of the pages of Apocalypse World as any PBtA game is (certainly amongst the ones you mentioned). I mean...its basically ripped almost word for word, structure for structure. Undertake a Perilous Journey and Carouse in DW is pulled directly from Custom Moves in AW. Impulses are Instincts. Front moves are Threat moves etc etc.

The only difference between the two games is:

• Genre
• Premise and how advancement/genre (and therefore focus of play) intersects with that
• HP instead of Harm
• The thematic potency of AW's stats vs DW's D&D derivatives (Cool vs Charisma)
• The intimacy and brutality of Hx vs the tropeyness of Bonds

Dungeon World is not an OSR game. Its not a logistical dungeon crawl. It takes BW's xp on a miss + Nixon's Shadow's of Yesterday's keys (Alignment as Oaths) and turns AW's Hx into more codified relationship tropes via Bonds. Then it focuses on the setting emerging ("Setting as Character" that we build through play) and basic D&D tropes of Monsters & Treasure.

Because of this, Dungeon World is basically a playbook/alignment/bond-contingent game that drifts towards Nixon's Shadow of Yesterday or Crane's Burning Wheel or in fullfilling the (unfulfilled) aspirations of Moldvay's Foreword (because Moldvay D&D is pawn stance dungeon crawling and not what the foreword says).

 

[hawkeyefan]

This doesn't answer the question of whether the door can be locked, though.

I don't think this is a question that has a yes or no answer in the way you'd like it to.

It's kind of like asking for an initiative roll.... there is no initiative in AW, so the question doesn't apply.

The way a locked door would come into play would either be as part of the MC framing the scene (much as @Manbearcat illustrated in his example with the search for Hosea above) or perhaps as an MC move in response to a miss. Maybe a character is attempting to flee the scene and rolls a 6- and runs headlong into a locked door. Something like that.

The idea that a scene would be presented where there's just a door and the PC would say I open it, and then the MC would say "it's locked" isn't really something that's likely to come up in play.

With all these moves in AW2E, should a beginning GM focus on a few of them? I get that you are supposed to follow the principals of play to decide which ones to use in response to a 6- or threat or whatever, but are their "core" moves you want to lean on while learning the game and style?

Yeah, probably. Some moves are more severe than others. Some are a bit more complex for the GM to handle in play. I think it would make sense to stick to the simpler ones, the more foundational ones like signaling danger as a soft move, and then following through as a hard move. So get used to the idea of the first move being to establish a threat (soft move), and then the next move to follow through (hard move). Stick to things like Inflict Harm or Put Someone In a Spot or Announce Future Badness.... these are likely easier than others until you get used to it, and they're likely the most obvious and/or common based on the fictional situation.

 

[Reynard]

The idea that a scene would be presented where there's just a door and the PC would say I open it, and then the MC would say "it's locked" isn't really something that's likely to come up in play.

Huh. Okay, is that because more happens in a "action declaration" (just to give it a name) than in a more trad game. What I mean is, in AW you wouldn't say that you enter the office then search it then try the back door and fine out it is locked, all as separate actions. Rather you would say that you go to the office and search it for the clue (or whatever) and if that triggers a roll which comes less than perfect the fact that the inner door is locked becomes a consequence of that less than perfect roll?

Yeah, probably. Some moves are more severe than others. Some are a bit more complex for the GM to handle in play. I think it would make sense to stick to the simpler ones, the more foundational ones like signaling danger as a soft move, and then following through as a hard move. So get used to the idea of the first move being to establish a threat (soft move), and then the next move to follow through (hard move). Stick to things like Inflict Harm or Put Someone In a Spot or Announce Future Badness.... these are likely easier than others until you get used to it, and they're likely the most obvious and/or common based on the fictional situation.

Thanks. that's what I kind of thought.

On the subject -- is it okay to try and run AW that way or should I be looking to a PbtA with an inherently slimmer move list as a game to learn PbtA? I only chose AW2E because it seemed most natural to go to the original first, but I don't actually know that is the case.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Maybe it'll help me if I get more specific about the door example, since this bit happened in the last session I ran of Brindlewood Bay. Again Brindlewood is much looser than AW with its moves and play loops, but it's still a PbtA game, so I think a lot of what's being discussed here applies:

-The PC has a move called Jim Rockford wherein at the beginning of any session (where it's appropriate) they get a message on their answering machine with a seemingly random mission. If they complete it, they get XP. There isn't really more guidance than that, except that the identity of the message-leaver should remain unknown, and the tasks should be weirder and creepier if the PC has marked off certain things.

-In this case I said the message involved retrieving a lens from an abandoned lighthouse. Waking just before dawn, the PC could see the lighthouse, but it was at the other end of town. So the player said he'd grab a bicycle laying on a lawn in this relatively affluent 1980's New Jersey suburb and bike over (I didn't call for a roll--seemed to fit with the fiction and, it wasn't risky).

-I described the abandoned lighthouse, with boarded windows and such—the lighthouses in the NJ town the session was set in are mostly house-like structures on the beach, with an extended bit up top for the lamp, as opposed to the more distinctive tower lighthouses.

-The player asked if the front door was locked. I said yes (!).

-He said he was picking the lock. I said this called for what Brindlewood Bay calls the Day Move, a general sort of move where the situation is risky or uncertain, and where the player says what they fear will happen on a miss (in this case that there'll be someone inside the abandoned lighthouse) and the GM either runs with that or provides something different. The roll was, in fact, a miss, and the PC was confronted by a suitably alarming, spooky, and unfriendly (but not immediately violent) occupant. He slammed the door after a brief interaction, and when she left, as is the style in Brindlewood, I narrated a moment of him watching her go from the top floor, muttering into his beard.


So that's the framing for one of these here locked-door questions. It wasn't necessarily the most charged situation, and it wasn't central to the current mystery in the game (this was all happening the morning before the campaign's next murder mystery unfolded), but my take on the game's answering-machine missions has been to present encounters that are require gumption or bravery or both, with most of the details determined by rolls. For example, the bearded lighthouse occupant didn't exist until the missed breaking-and-entering roll. But I did present the locked door as an open-ended obstacle. She could have climbed the outside of the house, or made her way through one of the boarded windows, or whatever else, all while possibly risking being spotted by early morning beachgoers. Mild stuff, maybe, but during a previous answering-machine mission in much more clearly dangerous circumstances she had been stabbed to death by a group of cultists (based also on a miss, but after clearly telegraphed danger, and misses on the Night Move in this game are always supposed to be worse) and the player had to spend metacurrency to get a different result.

All of which brings me back to that locked door. In this case the player actually asked "Is the door locked?" But if he had instead said "I open the door" and I had said "It's locked," I still don't get why that's a violation of PbtA principles. I mean I kind of do, in that the entire business of getting into the lighthouse could have been a roll, and the locked door a result of a complication, but that seems unnecessarily zoomed out and without context here.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Moved this around, with the part most helpful to the fore.

With all these moves in AW2E, should a beginning GM focus on a few of them? I get that you are supposed to follow the principals of play to decide which ones to use in response to a 6- or threat or whatever, but are their "core" moves you want to lean on while learning the game and style?

You really need to know the basics ones. That's your core. Everything else is going to be specific to the moment and what's been introduced. Like, you can look at a creature or threat you've made that has it's own move and then use that, but you're not missing anything at all if you only ever use the basic moves. Well, I mean, you're missing something, right, but it won't make the game not work or fail or not be fun at all. The custom moves are there to add specialness, not because they're required for play. Know the basic moves, keep them on a card nearby and re-read them to help keep you aware of all the ways you can go on a 6- and 7-9.

Under all of that, remember how the game builds in circles. At the core, you have the 2d6 roll. On a 10+, success to the player, narrate that. ON a 7-9, the player gets some success, but you also make a soft move. On a 6-, make as hard a move as you want. Again, soft moves are introducing badness but not yet paying it off, and hard moves are paying off badness and making it irrevocable -- that has happened, you don't get to do anything to unhappen it. This is the absolute core -- if you forget everything else but this and the principles of play, you're gold. Next circle out are the basic moves, the ones that provide more structure to the conversation and results above. This is both the GM and the player moves, and they add specific detail or results to the 2d6 roll. Finally, at the outside, you have the custom moves, the ones that are specific to class or monster or threat. These generally have specific outcomes for their rolls that take the place of the general soft/hard moves or constrain and direct the scope of the soft/hard moves. These all gracefully collapse inwards, such that if you forget the outside circle but manage one of the inside ones, play moves along just fine.


And now the rest:

As I have noted before, some of your interpretation of PbtA seems to contradict what is actually written in the AW2E book. And that's fine. There is obviously a lot of room within the style. If I seem impatient it is just that your way just confuses me and takes me back to previous feelings that I just don't "get" PbtA games.

Where is what I just said actually contradicted in the rules of AW? You've said this a few times, but it's always left as "it does" without showing where it does. If you're going to say this, please put up the receipts. I'll gladly change my mind if you can show where I'm actually doing this.

But let's leave that aside for a moment since it is more about the earlier prep conversation and less about the actual subject I wanted to talk about, which is GM moves. As I said, there seem to be a lot of them and a lot of categories of them in AW2E -- more than other games also considered more "pure" PbtA games like MotW, Masks and Thirsty Sword Lesbians (as opposed to Dungeon World, which seems to be considered an offshoot a little farther away from the core concepts).

I have no idea what you mean by "pure" here, especially given that AW is the source of PbtA as a whole -- it's the initial presentation of the core engine that hasn't really changed and is still the core for the hacks. MotW is an example of a PbtA game that's been heavily drifted away from AW and into a much more Trad approach to play, where the GM is creating the story and the hooks and doing much more traditional prep and execution in play and the PbtA engine is there to fill in the spaces left (and the game tells you how to leave these spaces). Masks is a really great game that does lots of great things with the PbtA engine, but I can't say if it's more or less "pure" than AW. Know nothing more than the elevator pitch for TSL.

But, there's zero point in even trying to compare these games to find out what's more "pure" or not, or even consider one in the light of the other with regard to moves. Each Hack is doing what it does for a reason, and there's no platonic ideal for that.

 

[Reynard]

You really need to know the basics ones. That's your core. Everything else is going to be specific to the moment and what's been introduced. Like, you can look at a creature or threat you've made that has it's own move and then use that, but you're not missing anything at all if you only ever use the basic moves. Well, I mean, you're missing something, right, but it won't make the game not work or fail or not be fun at all. The custom moves are there to add specialness, not because they're required for play. Know the basic moves, keep them on a card nearby and re-read them to help keep you aware of all the ways you can go on a 6- and 7-9.

Under all of that, remember how the game builds in circles. At the core, you have the 2d6 roll. On a 10+, success to the player, narrate that. ON a 7-9, the player gets some success, but you also make a soft move. On a 6-, make as hard a move as you want. Again, soft moves are introducing badness but not yet paying it off, and hard moves are paying off badness and making it irrevocable -- that has happened, you don't get to do anything to unhappen it. This is the absolute core -- if you forget everything else but this and the principles of play, you're gold. Next circle out are the basic moves, the ones that provide more structure to the conversation and results above. This is both the GM and the player moves, and they add specific detail or results to the 2d6 roll. Finally, at the outside, you have the custom moves, the ones that are specific to class or monster or threat. These generally have specific outcomes for their rolls that take the place of the general soft/hard moves or constrain and direct the scope of the soft/hard moves. These all gracefully collapse inwards, such that if you forget the outside circle but manage one of the inside ones, play moves along just fine.

That is a very helpful explanation. Thank you.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What do you make of this then?

In AW2 page 91, we have an example for Take away their stuff:


Let's pretend that your character was just having a conversation with Dremmer, in which your character could only pay half of the barter he owns to him, but promises to pay back the rest. You manipulate Dremmer by telling him that your loyalty towards his cause is worth the patience. You roll 7-9, so he asks for evidence or assurance. You try to give him some assurance but nothing you really say convinces anyone in the meeting, specially after what you did to Marie. You eventually give up with "Well, I guess you'll have to take my word" and then declare "I leave and head back to the sanctuary."

According to your line of reasoning, anything I should do in response to your expectant eyes involves granting you the full extent of your declaration and place you safely at the sanctuary.

Um, no. This is all kinds of turned around. I'm not at all clear how it's determined that your assurance isn't sufficient (this seems like the exact kind of blocking move by the GM I'm talking about) but you're explicitly talking about the fallout of a 7-9 move but putting in an action declaration between the resolution of that 7-9 (you failed to deal with the soft move, so a hard move should follow) and the situation.

That scene if framed in as the initial situation from a bit of free play -- you're asking what the player is doing because you want to frame in the consequence that they've earned. So you ask what they're doing, they tell you, and you frame in the scene. The PC 100% walks out to their car, and this this problem happens. This is not at all in the same class as what I'm talking about, which is that you frame the scene, the player declares actions, and then you block those actions by use of unrevealed fiction. Here, the player is 100% walking to the car, and can continue to do so, but there's a problem introduce that they need to deal with that's a direct result of prior play, and known that there's going to be a problem coming.

I counter by saying that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to instead say:

“You’re walking out to your car, right? One of Dremmer’s guys is naughty word standing on the roof, holding an assault rifle. Hison, maybe his name is. What do you do?”

It seems like you are bringing notions of "Roll dice or say yes" for AW2 given it is one of DitV's most important principles. I don't think there is textual evidence that suggests we should consider this principle as applicable to AW2 as you are making it seem.

"Say yes or roll the dice" is a nice shortcut. If we want to tease this out in AW, you need to consider the agenda of play and the principles and best practices for the GM. These all clearly point to not blocking actions using secret information, but only doing so through use of the mechanics. The door cannot be locked just because the GM has a note they haven't revealed. The door can only be locked if it's framed in as part of the situation and has stakes, or if it's part of another move that has a payoff consequence that the GM chooses to be the door being locked. Like an act under fire to scamper to safety through the door at the end of the room going to a 7-9 and the GM saying that you get to the door, but it's locked, and now you're in the open and the badguys are drawing down on you. Bad spot, hard to get out of, what do you do. There's no point in play of AW where the GM has the authority to just declare a thing blocks your action after you've declared it.

What you seem to confuse above is the GM asking questions and using answers, which is a different thing from action declaration. When the GM is asking questions, it can absolutely be used to determine the lead in to a new situation, which is what the example you present is doing. The player isn't declaring an action to go to their car in the face of a threat or situation, it's a stakeless action -- we're out of the normal loop already.

---

Apocalypse World collapses gracefully. Here's another article you might find interesting: anyway: Concentric Game Design.

Yup, this is what I'm referencing in my response to @Reynard.

 

[andreszarta]

Maybe it'll help me if I get more specific about the door example, since this bit happened in the last session I ran of Brindlewood Bay. Again Brindlewood is much looser than AW with its moves and play loops, but it's still a PbtA game, so I think a lot of what's being discussed here applies:

-The PC has a move called Jim Rockford wherein at the beginning of any session (where it's appropriate) they get a message on their answering machine with a seemingly random mission. If they complete it, they get XP. There isn't really more guidance than that, except that the identity of the message-leaver should remain unknown, and the tasks should be weirder and creepier if the PC has marked off certain things.

-In this case I said the message involved retrieving a lens from an abandoned lighthouse. Waking just before dawn, the PC could see the lighthouse, but it was at the other end of town. So the player said he'd grab a bicycle laying on a lawn in this relatively affluent 1980's New Jersey suburb and bike over (I didn't call for a roll--seemed to fit with the fiction and, it wasn't risky).

-I described the abandoned lighthouse, with boarded windows and such—the lighthouses in the NJ town the session was set in are mostly house-like structures on the beach, with an extended bit up top for the lamp, as opposed to the more distinctive tower lighthouses.

-The player asked if the front door was locked. I said yes (!).

-He said he was picking the lock. I said this called for what Brindlewood Bay calls the Day Move, a general sort of move where the situation is risky or uncertain, and where the player says what they fear will happen on a miss (in this case that there'll be someone inside the abandoned lighthouse) and the GM either runs with that or provides something different. The roll was, in fact, a miss, and the PC was confronted by a suitably alarming, spooky, and unfriendly (but not immediately violent) occupant. He slammed the door after a brief interaction, and when she left, as is the style in Brindlewood, I narrated a moment of him watching her go from the top floor, muttering into his beard.


So that's the framing for one of these here locked-door questions. It wasn't necessarily the most charged situation, and it wasn't central to the current mystery in the game (this was all happening the morning before the campaign's next murder mystery unfolded), but my take on the game's answering-machine missions has been to present encounters that are require gumption or bravery or both, with most of the details determined by rolls. For example, the bearded lighthouse occupant didn't exist until the missed breaking-and-entering roll. But I did present the locked door as an open-ended obstacle. She could have climbed the outside of the house, or made her way through one of the boarded windows, or whatever else, all while possibly risking being spotted by early morning beachgoers. Mild stuff, maybe, but during a previous answering-machine mission in much more clearly dangerous circumstances she had been stabbed to death by a group of cultists (based also on a miss, but after clearly telegraphed danger, and misses on the Night Move in this game are always supposed to be worse) and the player had to spend metacurrency to get a different result.

All of which brings me back to that locked door. In this case the player actually asked "Is the door locked?" But if he had instead said "I open the door" and I had said "It's locked," I still don't get why that's a violation of PbtA principles. I mean I kind of do, in that the entire business of getting into the lighthouse could have been a roll, and the locked door a result of a complication, but that seems unnecessarily zoomed out and without context here.

I have only read Brindlewood Bay's text so I'm not prepared to deeply answer your question.

Jason Cordova's unique brand of PbtA does not, necessarily, follow from every single PbtA principle laid out by other games. For instance it has Keeper Reactions instead of GM Moves, and those reactions are merely suggestions that should be added to all the logical reactions you could come up based on the situation. Apocalypse World GM Moves are more directive and provocative in that respect.

However, this is what it says about reactions:

Generally-speaking, a good reaction is one that complicates a Maven’s life in an interesting way and follows logically from the established fiction. If you can’t think of a natural reaction based on what’s happening in the fiction, choose a reaction from the list below, modifying as needed.

If you felt that your reaction of having the door be locked was interesting, I don't see how you are not playing by the rules. I also don't think you would be blocking or negating the player's intent if they were to just declare "I open the door". After all, their declaration implies the task of determining whether or not the door is locked. I spoke about why I think this is so on post #66.

How is this different from trad? In this particular case, not that much! Perhaps the difference is that a trad GM would say "It's locked" because it's prep notes say its locked, while the game clearly states your reactions should follow from your principles and you've decided this is what needs to happen next. This is why the door example is kind of pointless to me.

When I originally brought up this notion of player authority, it was more to help dispel this notion that the GM gets to decide "how much or how little of your action" does in fact occur like in more traditional games, and because of this players have been taught to ask "for permission" to have something happen. That doesn't mean, though, that I'm suggesting that player intent always has to be granted to the full extent of their declared action. If something in the world stands in the way of the full completion of their declaration, then of course play resumes only from that point on. You take what the player gives you and respond with a move that follows logically from what has been established: A door in a seemingly abandoned lighthouse, obviously locked.

What matters is that your response comes when it's your turn to say something (they look at you to tell them what happens) and it follows from what they've declared. Trad GM's could conceivably say: Right! But before you have a chance to open the door, you hear someone scream at the top of the lighthouse. That's a move that doesn't follow.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Reynard

The best advice you've gotten thus far is from @Ovinomancer and @andreszarta . Read the concentric collapsible design article for AW. Start with the most basic stuff.

1) Establish the premise of a scene by asking questions of your players and using the answers.

2) Frame the scene (soft move that provokes action and telegraphs/foregrounds a threat that will go off without PC intervention).

3) Converse until a basic move is triggered.

4) Resolve the basic move and change the fiction/gamestate accordingly.

5) Follow the snowballing action by rinsing/repeating (observing the agenda/principles) until the premise of the scene is resolved.

---

Keep practicing that general, initial layer of scene resolution until the light bulb goes off (the game can totally be played with just basic moves and the premise of a scene). Build out from there until you're ready for playbook stuff + xp triggers + advancement + threats and the rest.

 

[Manbearcat]

Maybe it'll help me if I get more specific about the door example, since this bit happened in the last session I ran of Brindlewood Bay. Again Brindlewood is much looser than AW with its moves and play loops, but it's still a PbtA game, so I think a lot of what's being discussed here applies:

-The PC has a move called Jim Rockford wherein at the beginning of any session (where it's appropriate) they get a message on their answering machine with a seemingly random mission. If they complete it, they get XP. There isn't really more guidance than that, except that the identity of the message-leaver should remain unknown, and the tasks should be weirder and creepier if the PC has marked off certain things.

-In this case I said the message involved retrieving a lens from an abandoned lighthouse. Waking just before dawn, the PC could see the lighthouse, but it was at the other end of town. So the player said he'd grab a bicycle laying on a lawn in this relatively affluent 1980's New Jersey suburb and bike over (I didn't call for a roll--seemed to fit with the fiction and, it wasn't risky).

-I described the abandoned lighthouse, with boarded windows and such—the lighthouses in the NJ town the session was set in are mostly house-like structures on the beach, with an extended bit up top for the lamp, as opposed to the more distinctive tower lighthouses.

-The player asked if the front door was locked. I said yes (!).

-He said he was picking the lock. I said this called for what Brindlewood Bay calls the Day Move, a general sort of move where the situation is risky or uncertain, and where the player says what they fear will happen on a miss (in this case that there'll be someone inside the abandoned lighthouse) and the GM either runs with that or provides something different. The roll was, in fact, a miss, and the PC was confronted by a suitably alarming, spooky, and unfriendly (but not immediately violent) occupant. He slammed the door after a brief interaction, and when she left, as is the style in Brindlewood, I narrated a moment of him watching her go from the top floor, muttering into his beard.


So that's the framing for one of these here locked-door questions. It wasn't necessarily the most charged situation, and it wasn't central to the current mystery in the game (this was all happening the morning before the campaign's next murder mystery unfolded), but my take on the game's answering-machine missions has been to present encounters that are require gumption or bravery or both, with most of the details determined by rolls. For example, the bearded lighthouse occupant didn't exist until the missed breaking-and-entering roll. But I did present the locked door as an open-ended obstacle. She could have climbed the outside of the house, or made her way through one of the boarded windows, or whatever else, all while possibly risking being spotted by early morning beachgoers. Mild stuff, maybe, but during a previous answering-machine mission in much more clearly dangerous circumstances she had been stabbed to death by a group of cultists (based also on a miss, but after clearly telegraphed danger, and misses on the Night Move in this game are always supposed to be worse) and the player had to spend metacurrency to get a different result.

All of which brings me back to that locked door. In this case the player actually asked "Is the door locked?" But if he had instead said "I open the door" and I had said "It's locked," I still don't get why that's a violation of PbtA principles. I mean I kind of do, in that the entire business of getting into the lighthouse could have been a roll, and the locked door a result of a complication, but that seems unnecessarily zoomed out and without context here.

@Grendel_Khan

I've GMed The Between (which is the same engine as BB I believe). Given your context here, what you're describing is no different than what I described above with Hosea and the barred basement door in Muck's garage in AW.

Why do you put obstacles (a barred door, an unruly mob, a rebuffing chamberlain, a terrible storm, a perilous locale) in a PBtA game? Because (a) they facilitate the particular game's premise/genre + (b) they intersect with xp triggers. You could have chosen a rebuffing lighthouse keeper or a rusted stairwell threatening to give or a BEWARE OF DOG sign and a terrifying growl or police tape and an ongoing investigation...or whatever.

The game has a premise (genre meets procedures meets xp triggers to be blunt) and the player has a goal/dramatic need. Cue conflict. Conflict means at least one obstacle whether its a barred door or threatening denizen or a internal crisis or an inhospitable environ. The best GMing will mean maximally deft use of obstacles (the follow the fiction, that personally oppose the PC and interact with the game's xp triggers). An investigator looking into an old lighthouse encountering "locked door as obstacle" (with what they want beyond) is absolutely on-point.

What is not on-point is extraneous locked doors barring the way to conflict/premise-neutral content.

Conflict/premise-neutral content and the presumption of some kind of logistical crawl and "the action organically emerging" is the problem...not the barrred the door.

The game's premise, the built PCs, the xp triggers, the game's procedures will define "the action." Go directly to "the action." Engage with "the action." Resolve "the action." Don't mess about with weak conflict/scene framing (that doesn't engage with premise) and opaque obstacles (like doors that may or may not have things behind them and may or may not be barring "the way" because we don't know of this is "the way") and hope "the action" somehow just happens.

TLDR - The play excerpt you've depicted in your post above is exactly appropriate GMing and obstacle use. Well done! This is why play excerpts are so much more helpful to conversation.

EDIT - There is another aspect to "locked door" obstacle framing that goes beyond "does it bar the way to the goal?"

Good conflict framing is multivariate in decision-space and consequence-space. Consider "the Hosea door" in my AW excerpt above. Yeah, its a locked door, but there is telegraphed crisis and active consequence space. Hosea might be dead or alive. There might be something terrible down there that you're letting out/interacting with. There is urgency and crisis. You better act quick and we will know what you prioritize by your action/approach. We'll know what you care about, what you do, and "how you do what you do." Whereas, a simple "locked door" with no urgency or crisis needs a little more teeth...little more meat on the bone.