Elsewhere I’ve written briefly about one of the great virtues of Apocalypse World design is that it bins moves in one of 3 buckets:
* Know/establish stuff
* Offense
* Defense
Then you bring in the basic outcome scheme:
10+ you get what you want
7-9 you get what you want but it’s complicated/there is a cost (which may be reduced effect; you get
some of what you want)
6- GM makes a move as hard as they like (constrained by all of the rest of system/fiction)
The way AW’s matrix (including the rest of the system) undermines a situation like has been discussed in this thread is that a Background Trait like
@hawkeyefan ’s PC possessed falls into one of those bins above and then dice are rolled to determine the the narration constraints upon move resolution.
So, it seems to me that the Folk Hero’s move was the equivalent of the below move from The Fox (Rogue) playbook of Stonetop:
THE PRODIGAL RETURNED
You left long ago, travelling far and living by your wits. Why did you leave? What deeds do you boast of, and which do you regret?
You always longed to return to Stonetop, and return you have. You’re a bit of a celebrity now, and you’ve got friends (or close enough) strewn about the known world.
When you declare that you know someone outside of Stonetop, someone who can help, name them and roll +CHA: on a 10+, yeah, they can help (tell us why they’re willing); on a 7-9, they can help but pick 1 from the list below; on a 6-, the GM chooses 1 and then some.
- They still hold a grudge
- They’re going to need something from you first
- They swore off this sort of thing long ago
- You can’t exactly, y’know, trust them
The following should be clear when evaluating the situation:
* The help that
@hawkeyefan was looking for was Defense (
hide us away in this barn to foil our pursuit).
* If this situation was in a game of Stonetop, on a 10+ (a) the player gets their (Defense) intent realized and then (b) gets to establish stuff about both the setting, the characters, and the situation.
* On a 7-9, they have narrational rights on the constraints over how their situation is complicated meaning
they get what they want with reduced effect or strings attached or a differently oriented conflicted situation (player’s call).
This is before even getting into all the constraints that the GM persists under when running the game. So if you’re making a move that Establishes Stuff (which you’ll then use for Offense or Defense after), then the stuff is established (now put it to use). If you’re making a move that Defends you from threat/trouble, the threat/trouble doesn’t come to bear upon you. If you’re making a move to go on the Offense against a threat/trouble, then you change the situation positively (which could be removing HP, establishing a controlling effect, or enticing an NPC toward your sought end). Now in each of these, there are going to be constraints/prerequisites (eg Establishing Stuff can’t violate already established stuff, you can’t Persuade someone without leverage/addressing their Instinct, you can’t Defend someone without being there to intercept the blow…etc), but these constraints aren’t gated behind GM-facing extrapolation of backstory/ecology/mythology/complex physical & social systems colliding in myriad ways. They’re table-facing and/or trivially knowable to the table.
So I would hope that the disparity between what happened in hawkeyefan’s game draws a stark and easy contrast. Hawkeyefan thought he was using
THE PRODIGAL RETURNED and that it was a 10+ result. His GM turned the player-perceived 10+ result (by either GM-facing extrapolation or by GM Force because he wanted the conflict with the guard) into a 6- result OR the 7-9 result and THEN chose the complication for the player;
You can’t exactly, y’know, trust them (he got a rest out of it, but didn’t get the full “escape from pursuit” that he would have gotten on either a 10+ or any 7-9 result that isn’t complicated by
You can’t exactly, y’know, trust them.
That is a huge difference in
MMI-itude.