Why do RPGs have rules?

This might be the first time we've agreed on anything this whole thread. :)

To wit, when faced with a pacing problem where it's unclear how the players will do things and in what granularity (as opposed to a question about what the characters will do), asking the players to declare a tentative result like "We leave the dome and find the enemies' hideout then knock on the door" works pretty well. The GM can always override that and say "when you leave the dome, you have several choices about which direction to search...". But having the players lead with that tentative result helps the GM avoid playing out in detail things that GM and players both are uninterested in spending table time on.

I get the impression that when you say about Dungeon World, (paraphrased from memory) "when the players declare a move, it happens unless the GM makes a GM move," the ability to avoid pacing problems is one of the things you like about that procedure, and if so I agree--pacing problems are annoying. Up until now it wasn't clear at all to me what sentences like that were trying to say but now maybe I get where you're coming from.
Pacing is a thing that I think DW and similar games handle well.

But that's not the main point I've been making.

I apologise for pedantry that you are likely to find annoying, but the difference between your "when the players declare a move, it happens unless the GM makes a GM move" and what I have said about DW is significant. What I have said is "when a player says what their PC does, either it triggers a player-side move (under the principle "if you do it, you do it") which is then resolved, or else the GM makes a move in response, typically a soft move but under limited conditions (that are spelled out) a hard move)".

The varieties of permitted soft moves are spelled out (not in terms of fictional details, but in terms of abstract narrative types). Roughly speaking, they all involve increasing the tension ("rising action") without thwarting the aspiration that lies behind the action declared by the player for their PC.

So if the players declare "We leave the dome looking for the enemy's installation" and - for the sake of the example - that does not trigger a player-side move, then the GM makes a soft move. Two examples I think of straight away are "As you cross the barren terrain, the horizon turns from a dull yellow to a deep red: it looks like a dust storm is rising" (this is an example of announcing future badness) and "You can see the installation in the distance. It's built into a rocky outcropping, and the entrance is covered by a pillbox sitting on another bit of rock opposite it" (this is an example of providing an opportunity, with a cost). (The second one is, roughly, what I ended up doing in Traveller when I worked out the published game rules weren't going to help me.)

The game continues in this vein until either a hard move is made by the GM or a player-side move is triggered. A GM hard move permits the GM to narrate new stuff that makes the PCs' situation concretely worse here-and-now: suppose, for instance, that - following the second example I gave - the player declares "I walk up to the entrance and knock on it", that counts as handing the GM an opportunity on a plate, which is one condition permitting a hard move. So the GM might respond: "A rifle shot is fired from the pillbox. Your vacc-suit blunts much of its force, but you still take 1 harm, and there's a hole in your suit. What do you do?"

In my Traveller game, what actually happened was that the PCs sneaked up on the pillbox, edging along the rocks. And this is something for which Classic Traveller does have a rule - there is a nice little subsystem for resolving manoeuvring in vacc suits, which is highly analogous to a DW player-side move. So I called for an appropriate check, and the player failed, and so (to use DW terminology, which is not out of place in Classic Traveller for the reason I just gave) and so I made the move that the rule told me to, namely a "harder" but not maximally hard move: "One of the hoses on your suit has become snared on a protrusion of rock: what do you do?" Exactly the same sort of dynamic would play out in DW (the player side move would be Defy Danger; or, in Apocalypse World it would be Acting Under Fire - the name of that move is metaphorical, with "fire" encompassing any risk or threat or situation which makes it hard for the character to keep their cool.

There's never a point in AW (or DW) play in which the rules don't stipulate who is licensed to add to the fiction, within what constraints: players say what their PCs do, and the GM does everything else making either soft or hard moves as the rules dictate. As @clearstream has pointed out, many times the rules take as their input the state of the fiction (eg see my example just above of acting under fire), and the technique for settling that fiction, if it's unclear, is a series of consensus-building tools, the most fundamental of which is the GM asking questions of the players.

There are two reasons why the players do not always want to hedge and downplay the fiction so as to avoid triggering player-side moves: (i) basic principles of sincerity and pleasure in the unfolding events, but also and importantly (ii) sometimes they want to achieve decisive results for their PCs, rather than simply have the escalation of soft moves by the GM, and hence need to trigger player-sie moves.
 

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I apologise for pedantry that you are likely to find annoying, but the difference between your "when the players declare a move, it happens unless the GM makes a GM move" and what I have said about DW is significant. What I have said is "when a player says what their PC does, either it triggers a player-side move (under the principle "if you do it, you do it") which is then resolved, or else the GM makes a move in response, typically a soft move but under limited conditions (that are spelled out) a hard move)". Snip

I don't find the above pedantic, but unfortunately it's not intelligible to me because it relies on unfamiliar jargon like "soft move" and "the principle, 'if you do it, you do it.'" I have purchased a copy of Dungeon World and perhaps after I read it I will come back and understand your post, but for now unfortunately I cannot.
 

Okay, I read the rules for Dungeon World, and I love them. They are very similar to Monster Hearts, though much more extensive, though that makes sense as both have origins in PBtA, yeah?
Yep.

I don't know much about Monster Hearts, but DW is very close to being just a reprint of Apocalypse World but with different playbooks (D&D instead of Mad Max meets Total Recall), different fronts (ditto), and slightly rejigged stats and basic moves. And a harm system that uses slight different numbers, dice rolls, and calls itself hit points.

In reference to D&D, because that is the common touchstone, I would characterize them as having relatively high completeness and relatively low complexity.
Agreed.

It is kind of lousy in terms of tactical miniatures-based play
Yes. It's not a tactical minis game at all. I mean, you can draw maps to help represent where different people are, and this will help give "heft" in everyone's imagination to what the threats and opportunities are; but there's no action economy, no movement rules, no list of actions to choose from and optimise, etc.

One thing that I think the rules (intentionally) lack is a lot of the crunch of a game like D&D, Pathfinder, etc. This is interesting to me because I think that increased complexity creates opportunities for logical problem solving that DW avoids in favour of narrative problem solving.
Agreed. To use some Vincent Baker terminology (which I think is permissible when discussing AW/DW!), it has very little "boxes to boxes" - that is, almost all the reasoning that players engage in is reasoning about the fiction, or about how to trigger the opportunity to change the fiction (say, by making a move). But there is very little reasoning about the rules/mechanics as a self-contained system, as happens, say, in optimising spell point usage when playing a mage in Rolemaster, or working out how to avoid attacks of opportunity in modern grid-based D&D play, or working through the interaction of a feat with a spell with a rule for weapon damage, which is also pretty typical in modern D&D play.

I would summarise this by saying that DW has very little boardgame in it.

My initial takeaway is that, if we go back to the original genesis of RPGs in a kind of half-baked fusion of miniature wargaming and fantastical storytelling, DW's rules lean heavily into the latter at the expense of the former.
100%. This is what I was getting at, upthread, when I posted this:

Dungeon World (and many other RPGs) don't even pretend to be oriented towards the first sort of thing, and set out procedures of play and rules that are designed from the ground up to achieve the second sort of thing. This is how they become complete rule sets for open play.

In particular, the move system is a really great way of building narrative in terms of shared storytelling and RPing.

<snip>

One thing that it keeps from D&D is GM control of the environment - the GM remains the more or less omniscient God of the game world. So it is not shared storytelling in the mode of, say, Fiasco, but more or less a traditional RPG in that sense. The big difference seems to be that the GM is no longer a referee to anything like the extent of a D&D game.
I am SO GLAD that you noticed this, because the description of DW as a game with "narrative mechanics" or "cooperative stortyelling" is one of my biggest bugbears on these boards!

At the heart of AW and DW, in my view, is the principle that the GM always makes a soft move unless the rules call for a hard one. It seems simple, but its implications for RPGing (if we are mostly familiar with more-or-less trad D&D, CoC, GURPS, etc RPGing) are so profound as to be virtually revolutionary. To me, it seems that everything else - the different role played by GM prep in DW/AW compared to trad D&D; the purpose and hence design of player-side moves; when and how to use custom moves; etc - follows from this core.
 

One way is via (say) a Wises check (this would be the BW approach, if the GM doens't just say "yes"), or via a PP expenditure to generate a Resource (this is the default approach in MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic), or via Streetwise check (this is the default approach in Classic Traveller).
Circles is more likely than wises, tho' the correct wise is a FoRK for said circles check. A shop is, after all, only of value if it's staffed or you're a crook.

Note that circles difficulty is based upon utility, not likelyhood; wises difficulty is seldom used.
 

I don't find the above pedantic, but unfortunately it's not intelligible to me because it relies on unfamiliar jargon like "soft move" and "the principle, 'if you do it, you do it.'" I have purchased a copy of Dungeon World and perhaps after I read it I will come back and understand your post, but for now unfortunately I cannot.
A "soft move" is the GM introducing new stuff into the fiction that steps up the risk/theat/foreboding/"rising action" but doesn't thwart the aspiration of the player in having their PC do something. A hard move is the GM introducing stuff into the fiction that concretely thwarts, at least to some degree, here-and-now.

A slightly boring example, but one that I think can make the point, is this: in Moldvay Basic D&D play, if a player says "I search for secret doors" with the aspiration of finding one, it would be a hard move to say "You don't find any". It would also be a hard move to say "You find one, but when you open it a thoul leaps out from the hidden cavity and attacks you." Under the rules of Moldvay Basic, the GM can make those sorts of hard moves regardless of the state of the rising action, and regardless of what the player rolls on their dice, by reference to their notes (eg if the notes say "no secret doors" then none will be found even on a roll of 1 on a d6; if the notes say "a thoul is behind the secret door and attacks anyone who opens it" then the thoul attack is legitimate regardless of what the player rolled).

In DW/AW, the GM does not make hard moves based on reference to their notes. The rules that tell them when to make hard moves, and that set out what counts as permissible hard moves ("You don't find any secret doors" isn't, without more, a permissible hard move), take as their inputs not the content of GM notes but the state of the rising action and the result of player dice rolls.
 


Not certain which you're referring to...
Ironsworn: Ironsworn - Shawn Tomkin | DriveThruRPG.com

Vaults and Vows: Vaults & Vows Assets (found from the link on Mythweavers)

I don't have Ironsworn Delve, but it's also on DTRPG

Was referring to Stonetop, not Ironsworn. Stonetop isn't available on DTRPG yet.

My Ironsworn needs are well taken care of. :) 😄

is-res.jpeg
 

A "soft move" is the GM introducing new stuff into the fiction that steps up the risk/theat/foreboding/"rising action" but doesn't thwart the aspiration of the player in having their PC do something. A hard move is the GM introducing stuff into the fiction that concretely thwarts, at least to some degree, here-and-now.

A slightly boring example, but one that I think can make the point, is this: in Moldvay Basic D&D play, if a player says "I search for secret doors" with the aspiration of finding one, it would be a hard move to say "You don't find any". It would also be a hard move to say "You find one, but when you open it a thoul leaps out from the hidden cavity and attacks you."

This doesn't seem to match the definition on Dungeon World pg. 165.

"A soft move is one without immediate, irrevocable consequences."

Not finding a door (yet) can be revoked by finding a door eventually, implying that it's a soft move.
 

This doesn't seem to match the definition on Dungeon World pg. 165.

"A soft move is one without immediate, irrevocable consequences."

Not finding a door (yet) can be revoked by finding a door eventually, implying that it's a soft move.
Not finding a door has an immediate, irrevocable consequence: there's no discovered door here!

It's worth adding that "irrevocable consequence" is a normative/evaluative notion. Likewise "opportunity", "threat/badness", "cost" and similar words used to describe GM moves. In other words, a DW/AW GM can't make moves without knowing what the players value in their play of their PCs. And in presenting the door example, I'm making an assumption that it is the discovery of the door here and now that is what the player values. We could probably construct an imagined example of play in which looking for the secret door takes place, but what the player actually values is something different, and this might make the "hardness" of non-discovery of a door different from what I assumed in my example.
 

Apropos of nothing: when I ran 5E, there were a lot of rules I didn't have a strong opinion on and was willing to let the table vote on. E.g. (1) when you cast Animate Dead on goblin skeletons, do you get the DMG stat mods for goblins on the skeletons, or do they somehow become vanilla MM skeletons? Do shortbows and armor scraps materialize out of thin air for them? (2) If you wildshape into an Earth Elemental and then Misty Step above someone's head, do they have a chance to dodge and how detailed do we want to get about computing falling damage to both sides?

In these cases I viewed my role as a facilitator of rule discussions, proposing rule options and helping players choose one that felt right to them.

In other cases, there is only one rule variant I'm willing to use, and I will leave the table before using any other because it would break my suspension of disbelief. No, you may not use Inured To Undeath (10th level Necromancer feature which says your max HP cannot be reduced) as an excuse to permanently increase your HP total via the Aid spell. If you want to do that, DM yourself, I refuse to do it for you.

Did letting players have input on many rules count as a "houserule" w/rt 5E's attitude toward DMing? Beats me, but it's how I did things regardless. (And how I still do things, just not in 5E.)
Without rendering judgment on anyone, it feels darn arrogant for one participant in a game (of any sort) to say "my way or the highway." I'm guessing if a player recounted to you the IDENTICAL same policy with regard to some other rule(s) your response would be 'shove off'.
 

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