D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Lanefan]

Think of it like in D&D: On a failed roll to search for traps, they might trigger the trap... which may be a trap that only activates a bit later on or in another location (e.g., the trap causes a pit in the next room to be unlocked or rings an alarm elsewhere in the dungeon). You've "saved" the consequences of that failed roll for later on, and it could be that the only thing that appears to have happened is that the PC heard a very faint click from the trap being activated.

OK; that's fine for D&D. My question was around games where a hard move must be preceded by a soft move; at what point if ever does that soft move's statue of limitations run out, or put another way is there any limit on how long can pass between the soft move and the hard move?

An example: a situation arises where the GM is able to make a threatening move, which manifests as an NPC saying something like "One day, just when you think you're safe, that's when I will kill you" to a PC. The PC dismissively says "Yeah, whatever, dude" and walks away, thus giving the GM licence to turn that threat into something bigger.

Can the resulting hard move be that six months later (in both real and game time) that same NPC shoots the unsuspecting PC from a rooftop without further warning?

I don't see why it's an over-reaction. It created a new way to play that has proven to be very popular. The only problem with it is in reprogramming one's mind to accept the new way over the traditional way.

I mean, we've had decades of books saying "no roll without reason" and saying the PCs have to explain what the character is doing... and we still have GMs asking for rolls without reason (or saying that "no change" is still a good reason to roll) and PCs saying what they're rolling but not why or how. So why not try something new?

I should have clarified: No Roll Without Reason only applies to players. The GM asking you to roll, even without explanation, counts as a valid reason. (I get my players to roll all the time without saying why; sometimes to avoid giving the player info the character wouldn't know unless the roll succeeds, other times to disguise meaningful rolls e.g. I might get three players to roll but really only need a roll from one of them) But a player can't roll without a reason or rationale. Saying "I roll perception" without saying what it is you're trying to perceive or (in some cases) what steps you're taking in order to best look/listen/whatever ain't gonna fly.

And rolling where "no change" is one of the possible outcomes is not a problem, provided at least one other possible outcome has (potential) significance.

 

[Lanefan]

Game systems that allow players to sit around with nothing happening are boring to me. I'm glad your experience is different!

Should such a situation arise, whose responsibility is it to make something happen?

Hint: the answer isn't "the GM".

 

[Lanefan]

Considering they still seem to think that the GM has to pick a move from a list, that indicates they haven't really looked into it.

Seems an odd thing to say in the post immediately following your posting of just such a list....

 

[Lanefan]

Who chooses what the rumours are, and what they point to? And what do they have regard to in making those choices? Who decides who the NPCs are, what they want, and how they respond?

I know that some people who build words and prepare adventures make all those choices, as GM, more-or-less independently of the players and their play of their PCs.

I regard that as railroading.

Regard it as you will.

Don't expect many people to agree with you, though, given that you're taking the great majority of RPG groups out there and applying a usually-derogatory term to how they create/run/play their games and settings.

The GM establishing and controlling the setting is in itself not a railroad, end of story.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Seems an odd thing to say in the post immediately following your posting of just such a list....

That there is a list of moves does not, in the slightest, mean you are supposed to look at that list, determine which one you want to use, and then spindle, fold, and mutilate the story until that move comes to pass.

Honestly, I sometimes think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many old-school players playing newfangled games. They see moves and somehow think "Ah, these are the ONLY things I'm allowed to do."

If you see your character has Thief skills, do you think that the only things you're allowed to do are Hide in Shadows, Move Silently, Find & Remove Traps, Hear Noise, Climb Sheer Surface, etc.? Or do you think that those are things you definitely can do, but if you want to try something else, you just ask?

(Incidentally, this page on the subject shows what I was talking about with the "roll something on d6, talking about how humanoids have a base 2 in 6 chance of hearing a noise.)

I can't speak for Monster of the Week because I haven't played it, but the GM moves for Dungeon World are really abstract and comprehensive. "Deal damage" is a move--meaning, literally any reason you might have for doing damage, you're using that move. "Reveal an unwelcome truth" is likewise...literally any time you get to relish telling the players something is true that they wish wasn't. (E.g., you've always known that the cult they're fighting is doing human sacrifices. Revealing an unwelcome truth is that they finally get into the ritual chamber...which no longer has any cultists, but has plenty of dead bodies.) "Show signs of an approaching threat" is exactly what it says on the tin. Etc., etc. These things are incredibly structural, which is why you (as GM) shouldn't speak the names of your moves. It would be the equivalent of the director shouting "EXIT STAGE LEFT/RIGHT" every time a character leaves a scene or "CLOSEUP TIME!" every time the camera zooms in on a character's face. Yes, you could do that, but why in God's name would you?!

It's not--at all--that you stare at a list of moves to pick one and then force that move to happen. You keep yourself completely immersed in whatever is going on in the story--the PCs assault a lair, interrupt a ritual, have an audience with the Queen, whatever--and when they "turn to you to find out what happens," these are pretty much all of the things you'd want to do.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah, don't really care for jazz either to be honest. To each their own.

I wasn't asking anyone about their opinions on jazz nor was I telling people that they should like jazz. I was making an analogy about the challenges of going from one set of training skills to another: i.e., a classically-trained musician going from classical music to jazz.

That said, my opinions towards jazz changed from the hostile to enthusiastic about 15 years ago. To avoid getting into to too much detail, I was fishing for the best rock albums of the 50s-70s, but I also caught other albums from other genres in my nets, including jazz albums. I tried giving them all an earnest listen with an open mind. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed music outside of my usual range. So much so that I went out of my way to look up more jazz artists and albums, all while learning about the genre as well as what I preferred. Now it's one of my favorite genres of music.

I don't mind in the least if you dislike jazz. I know that I like it and that's good enough for me. As you say, to each their own. As long as you aren't toxic to others about your opinions, then I'm fine.

Well then I suppose I really don't like them codified. Makes me feel trapped as a GM.

If you feel trapped, then you feel trapped. However, I don't think that a list of GM Moves are there to trap you any more than randomized GM tables, dungeon-crawling procedures, or guidance for building dungeons in old school games are. Can't think of anything to do? Roll and consult the appropriate randomized table.

The list of GM moves are not trying to trap you. They're there to help you. They are meant to provide some guidance, particularly for new GMs, for GM Moves rather than drop you into the deep end of the pool and assume that you can figure out how to swim. As I quoted earlier:

Each move is something that occurs in the fiction of the game—they aren’t code words or special terms. “Use up their resources” literally means to expend the resources of the characters, for example.

The moves are a broad list of generic ways to help you fill your PCs' lives with danger, and what you choose to do in a GM Move really is about "what makes sense for the scenario."

This is absolutely the stumbling block. It's given such emphasis that these moves are the way the GM responds, so I want to do right by them, and therefore I am caught trying to make sure my honest/fiction-respecting reaction maps to one, while trying not to leave dead air in response to the players declarations as I feel each second ticking by. My instincts are probably better than I give them credit for, and I could retroactively find a way that my response does fulfill one of the GM moves.

However, there are times where a move is warranted by the rules, but there is no change that feels obviously warranted by the fiction, especially in response to a lack of action, and so I desperately scan the list for inspiration on how to respond, and it feels wildly artificial, and it takes even longer to come up with something, especially with the criticisms of failing the game ringing in my head. I do know that practice and just getting out and doing it would help build these muscles, but I also don't want to subject people to a poor experience, especially if it's one of their first.

Much like how reading the Book of Hanz helped me "grok" what Fate was asking me to do, I found reading The Dungeon World Guide helpeful for my initial understanding DW. It may be worth a read. There is a bit in there where the author talks about making moves.

I do think that there is better advice out there for DW with better versions of the game, but Stonetop isn't released yet. Stonetop, in particular, goes into the principles, agenda, and moves in greater detail. It really does read like it was written for someone who has never touched a PbtA game in their life rather than assume that you already know Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, or how to run PbtA games.

Lampblack's Freebooters on the Frontier and The Perlious Wilds supplement are. And many PbtA fans will also point to books with better advice as well. Magpie Games has so much experience with PbtA games - Masks, Root, Urban Shadows, Avatar Legends - they are almost the unofficial flagship for the system now.

As I write this, I think it might be that there's a bigger, or underlying, problem: I'm falling into that position in the first place by not crafting scenes that are full of appropriate danger/pressure which fundamentally demand a response and leave open opportunities for things like an unwelcome truth, approaching threat, etc.

That may be. If it helps, it may be useful to come up with some "light prep" for scenarios. The players announce that they are going to the abandoned dwarven stronghold of Moria (i.e., a dungeon). Cool. What are some of the threats that you think could be there? Write those down. Where is the dungeon environment like? Think about what sort of challenges that could present the players. Write that down. How could things turn back on them there? Just because you are being asked to "improv" doesn't mean that you can't have tricks to fall back on.

 

[Lanefan]

Not sure I'll get to all of this in one go...

Interesting--though if you've been using both "player plays multiple PCs" and (to use your less-pejorative term) "Adventuring NPCs" (ANPCs) then I think you're really pretty close to playing the game as "intended." E.g. if there's a beefy Fighter ANPC, and the player is playing both a cunning sneak-Thief and a well-prepared Magic-User, and they occasionally hire the services of a local Cleric when they do delving they expect to be particularly dangerous, then you've basically just run the game as-is, just with the DM playing one character, the player playing two characters, and more or less the two of them splitting the responsibilities for the third. (That is, player giving orders and probably handling much of the ordinary interaction for the hireling, but DM presumably keeping tabs on whether the player has gone too far, upset them, or the like.) Hence, rebuilding the basic method of play, but both participants taking on significantly more responsibility than they normally would--a meaningful effort to "make it work."

Yep, that's pretty much what we do. One other odd thing that happens now and then is when she wants to have a conversation between her two characters I'll sometimes briefly take on the persona of one of them as a foil for the other to talk to.

More or less, I think we can agree that if both you and your wife had tried to play it completely unchanged--no multiple PCs, no ANPCs, no hireling coordination, etc.--that there probably would have been a lot of difficulties and the experience would have been less enjoyable for you than with the tweaks you've gone for, even if they are not as deep or complex as other tweaks could be.

Now here I can speak from the other side: as a player I've done some solo play with a one character "party" as a spy/saboteur behind enemy lines; and for a while it went pretty well and was quite enjoyable.

In hindsight, I should have stayed as a one-character party. After learning some useful things and causing some mayhem, I was directed by an underground resistance group to someone who could in theory help me. I found and linked up with that person (an NPC), and we ran together for a while until she turned on me - she was a double agent all along. So much for that.

Alright. My issue, then, is that the variance between "subsystems," to use a common albeit loose bit of jargon, can be absolutely wild, which makes the average rating across the entire system not particularly helpful. Doubly so if it's solely meant as a personal "eyeballing it" metric, since (as I'll discuss more below) a lot of that can depend on someone actually having rejected significant portions of one system (due to familiarity and comfort) while evaluating the absolute and thoroughgoing entirety of another. Such evaluations will then be really unhelpfully biased, since we kind of run into a Ship of Theseus problem of how much removal is "too much" vs "completely acceptable."

Doesn't matter, really, if you're only looking at the system at a particular point in time and as modified by a particular group.

Interesting--not a theory I'd heard before, but a solid one, I'll definitely be keeping that in mind gong forward. My only issue with this (at least thus far, since I'm splitting your thoughts here) is that this seems like a non sequitur. That is, for the purpose of this discussion only, I don't necessarily care why one thing got lots of mechanical detail and another got almost none. I only care that they got different levels of detail, and thus glossing over it as "it's on the low end for mechanics" seems unhelpful when several important parts, intended to be commonly used (even if people chose not to), were in fact extremely detailed and finicky.

Giving an average of "moderately finicky", I guess.

The point I'm getting at, I think, is that (and this will sound odd but bear with me) there's no need for rules when there's no need for rules.

By that I mean that if an element of play doesn't need to be abstracted in order to function at the table (e.g. social interaction, particularly between PCs) and thus doesn't need rules, then why go to the effort of creating rules for it?

I mean, realistically, the GM in Dungeon World (or any PbtA game) does know a good deal about what could happen. That's what prep is for; indeed (not to go too deep into DW stuff), that's explicitly how Fronts are constructed. TL;DR, avoiding DW jargon: for both campaigns as a whole and for sessions (usually 1-3 at a time), you're supposed to come up with dangerous/threatening things, a Really Bad Thing that will happen if a given danger/threat isn't prevented/stopped/forestalled/etc., and various alerting events (signs, symbols, calamities, etc.) that will happen before the Really Bad Thing unless it's prevented/etc. (In jargon terms, every Front has 2-3 Dangers, each Danger has an Impending Doom, and every Impending Doom has 1-3 Grim Portents if it's an adventure Front, or 3-5 Grim Portents if it's a campaign front. Examples are given for what Dangers, Impending Dooms, and Grim Portents can be like, but it's best to come up with your own.)

This way, you reap the best of both worlds: as play advances, new Fronts may emerge (again, the analogy of "Fighting on multiple fronts" really does apply extremely well here), whether because of player choices or simply because they make sense to become real threats; and yet at the same time, there's still a sense of the world existing, as there are real threats that the GM knows will be a problem...unless those meddling heroes get their noses all up into it. Improvisation and recognition of the players pushing the story forward is central, but there are still known things.

After all, you can't "draw maps, leave blanks" if there isn't enough world to draw maps about, y'know? It just means that there's the known stuff, and yet also ʜɪᴄ ꜱᴜɴᴛ ᴅʀᴀᴄᴏɴᴇꜱ. Likewise, you can't "think offscreen too" if there's nothing that ever happens unless it's on the proverbial screen.

Which all sounds good, but seems to run aground on the concept of "no myth" which I understand some of these games promote; as from what I understand in no-myth there is no offscreen or maps or anything else.

Well, that's sort of the thing. You don't! You (as GM) know what would happen if the PCs just up and disappeared one day--and that it would (generally) be pretty bad.*

Obviously you'll never cover all the bases, but having in mind what comes after the most likely next moves is a good start.

Sure. This is why class design is challenging. Generally, you avoid this by not doing what beans, potatoes, and rice do--namely, each of them covers lots of things and is only really deficient in one or two areas. (Ironically, in this sense, potatoes are actually mostly worse than other staple products, being weak but not quite deficient in three different amino acids, as opposed to genuinely deficient in just one, so you still have to pair them with something else--sometimes two things!)

Instead, with class design, you make it so each class only brings (by default) a small set. If there are ten things that every adventuring party should really be doing, then no class should bring more than (say) three of them. Even if a character expends resources in order to get better at more things, they should never cover more than about half--and the opportunity cost of their choice is that they don't become absolute masters of whatever they started out being good at. For this purely "positive" design, opportunity cost is the primary drive.

Yeah, I agree here. With the beans-and-rice analogy we only had two classes, each good at one thing out of two and bad at the other. Obviously, there'll be both more classes and more things to be better/worse at in a typical game system.

Alright, but this would seem to be conceding the core point: there are broad swathes of game design, at least as far as D&D-like games are concerned, where it would be genuinely impossible to think of designing those things in an exclusively "absolutely every single beneficial thing MUST be matched with a detrimental thing." Instead, you can have differential access to abilities, such that Class A starts off with abilities 1 and 2, class B starts off with 3 and 4, class C with 5 and 6, etc. Then other classes can mix things up, bringing 1 and 6 or 2 and 4 or whatever. And as characters grow, they can become 1++++ and 2, or 1++ and 2++, or 1++ and 2+ and pick up 3, etc. Again, these things are purely "positive" in the technical sense that they only add more things, but because you're limited in how much you can add, you can't get everything.

If each class, balanced against each other, starts out with zero '+' add-ons and at every second level-up accrues one '+', then provided the different things that represent a '+' are vaguely balanced against each other it remains a balanced system.

But if someone has an idea to give a particular class an extra '+' right at the start, then either that class also needs to pick up a '-' to cancel it out or you've got a balance issue. And if fixing the imbalance means giving all the other classes an extra '+' as well, then you've got a power creep issue.

Personally, I'm more concerned about power creep than balance.

One could extend a classic phrase: It is not just that "no man is an island," it's also that no man is a continent either. Even if you manage to claim another nearby island, it's never going to be enough on its own. You need your allies. There can never be a "potato class" as you've described, because you don't make classes that do "everything bean-class does, and also three other things."

Ideally, this is true. In practice, there seems to be an awful lot of time spent on making characters who can do everything, at least to a point; and niche protection gets further eroded with every new release.

*In my home game, a black dragon would take over the city; an assassin-cult would finish its civil war with the "yes we really do just want to murder when we like" faction winning and making a major decapitating strike against the main religious authorities that have spurned them; a cult, semi-unknowingly worshiping an elder orb beholder, would do horrendous damage to the planet in order to allow said elder orb to escape to the cosmos beyond; and a heretical sect of death-worshipping druids would begin transforming the region into a fetid swamp where their mushroom-hive-mind could live forever and become incredibly powerful.

Sounds like your PCs have a lot on their plate.

If they have stupendous amounts of money they might consider contracting that assassin-cult to wipe out the death-druids and hope for mutual annihilation (or the PCs just mop up what's left of the winner). That leaves them with the black dragon and the elder-orb cult. No problem. Right?

 

[Aldarc]

OK; that's fine for D&D. My question was around games where a hard move must be preceded by a soft move; at what point if ever does that soft move's statue of limitations run out, or put another way is there any limit on how long can pass between the soft move and the hard move?

It's about what makes sense in the fiction. However, the game rules must still be followed. If I lob a soft move that the goblins shoot a lob of arrows at the party, then I can't just reserve the hard move for a goblin assassin to knive them in a few months, because I'm setting up the fiction of goblins shooting arrows and that's what the PCs have to react to. Your question is a bit like asking if you could make an attack roll in combat in D&D for a goblin against the PC and then decide several months before it actually deals damage to the PC. Or a bit like declaring that the PC takes damage from the archer and then you roll your attack roll for the goblin to see if the arrow hits. It misunderstands and messes up the play procedures.

An example: a situation arises where the GM is able to make a threatening move, which manifests as an NPC saying something like "One day, just when you think you're safe, that's when I will kill you" to a PC. The PC dismissively says "Yeah, whatever, dude" and walks away, thus giving the GM licence to turn that threat into something bigger.

Can the resulting hard move be that six months later (in both real and game time) that same NPC shoots the unsuspecting PC from a rooftop without further warning?

There is an episode in the US Office where Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) is in an improv class. He has one trick and one trick only that he constantly uses to the great annoyance of his fellow improv group: he pulls out a gun. It's starting to feel that way for me with you pulling out the sniper who shoots your PCs without warning.

The answer to your last question is "no," because you forgetting the fundamental part of PbtA play procedures. You have to give the players something to react to. You can't just hard move them without first setting it up.

[The GM] shouldn't make a hard GM move unless the PC has knowingly ignored some source of trouble, or they've triggered a move and the result involved a bad thing happening.

I don't think that your sniper qualifies regardless of how hard you want that square peg to fit the round hole.

You can re-introduce the sniper as a threat. You can set up an additional soft move, "A sniper takes a shot at you. What do you do?" or "You get the feeling that there is a target on your back. What do you do?" But as a GM you can't just declare "you take 6 damage from a sniper" without first setting that threat up or giving the PCs something to react to first. And I think that your sniper scenario puts the cart before the horse and breaks the rules of play as a GM.

 

[Lanefan]

That there is a list of moves does not, in the slightest, mean you are supposed to look at that list, determine which one you want to use, and then spindle, fold, and mutilate the story until that move comes to pass.

Honestly, I sometimes think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for many old-school players playing newfangled games. They see moves and somehow think "Ah, these are the ONLY things I'm allowed to do."

Obviously.

If they didn't want to limit me to a list of specifics they wouldn't have put the list in there; rather, there would be more general guidelines as to how to respond to a PC action.

If you see your character has Thief skills, do you think that the only things you're allowed to do are Hide in Shadows, Move Silently, Find & Remove Traps, Hear Noise, Climb Sheer Surface, etc.? Or do you think that those are things you definitely can do, but if you want to try something else, you just ask?

As a Thief, those are things I can (try to) do, knowing I'm far better at them than an average guy in the street. But I'm not a Ranger, meaning I'm pretty much out of luck when it comes to Tracking and Herbcraft. And while I can Find and Remove Traps there's nothing saying I have any extra ability to Construct Traps, so that's out too. And I'm sure the hell no good at Scribing Scrolls or Turning Undead.

(Incidentally, this page on the subject shows what I was talking about with the "roll something on d6, talking about how humanoids have a base 2 in 6 chance of hearing a noise.)

Yes, there's some places where a d6 is used - surprise is one, opening stuck doors is another, listening (for a non-Thief) is another.

I can't speak for Monster of the Week because I haven't played it, but the GM moves for Dungeon World are really abstract and comprehensive. "Deal damage" is a move--meaning, literally any reason you might have for doing damage, you're using that move. "Reveal an unwelcome truth" is likewise...literally any time you get to relish telling the players something is true that they wish wasn't. (E.g., you've always known that the cult they're fighting is doing human sacrifices. Revealing an unwelcome truth is that they finally get into the ritual chamber...which no longer has any cultists, but has plenty of dead bodies.) "Show signs of an approaching threat" is exactly what it says on the tin. Etc., etc. These things are incredibly structural, which is why you (as GM) shouldn't speak the names of your moves. It would be the equivalent of the director shouting "EXIT STAGE LEFT/RIGHT" every time a character leaves a scene or "CLOSEUP TIME!" every time the camera zooms in on a character's face. Yes, you could do that, but why in God's name would you?!

It's not--at all--that you stare at a list of moves to pick one and then force that move to happen. You keep yourself completely immersed in whatever is going on in the story--the PCs assault a lair, interrupt a ritual, have an audience with the Queen, whatever--and when they "turn to you to find out what happens," these are pretty much all of the things you'd want to do.

Then why give me a list of moves when it's presence only going to serve as an added step (that being, making sure what I'm doing conforms to a "legal" move) in a thought process that's otherwise natural?

 

[Lanefan]

It's about what makes sense in the fiction. However, the game rules must still be followed. If I lob a soft move that the goblins shoot a lob of arrows at the party, then I can't just reserve the hard move for a goblin assassin to knive them in a few months, because I'm setting up the fiction of goblins shooting arrows and that's what the PCs have to react to. Your question is a bit like asking if you could make an attack roll in combat in D&D for a goblin against the PC and then decide several months before it actually deals damage to the PC. Or a bit like declaring that the PC takes damage from the archer and then you roll your attack roll for the goblin to see if the arrow hits. It misunderstands and messes up the play procedures.

Clearly.

My point is around situations where the threat and follow-up are disconnected in time.

There is an episode in the US Office where Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) is in an improv class. He has one trick and one trick only that he constantly uses to the great annoyance of his fellow improv group: he pulls out a gun. It's starting to feel that way for me with you pulling out the sniper who shoots your PCs without warning.

I use it as a simple example of a hard move that's disconnected in time from the associated soft move but which still follows logically in the fiction.

The answer to your last question is "no," because you forgetting the fundamental part of PbtA play procedures. You have to give the players something to react to. You can't just hard move them without first setting it up.

I don't think that your sniper qualifies regardless of how hard you want that square peg to fit the round hole.

You can re-introduce the sniper as a threat. You can set up an additional soft move, "A sniper takes a shot at you. What do you do?" or "You get the feeling that there is a target on your back. What do you do?" But as a GM you can't just declare "you take 6 damage from a sniper" without first setting that threat up or giving the PCs something to react to first. And I think that your sniper scenario puts the cart before the horse and breaks the rules of play as a GM.

So you've answered my question (thanks for that!) but, sadly, it's the answer I kind of expected but didn't want to see: I can't ever truly ambush or even surprise the PCs - they always get a warning.

But, I'd guess the PCs can take steps to ambush their NPC foes and, if lucky, drop those foes before they even knew trouble was upon them. So how is that fair, in terms of in-fiction consistency?