Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

If your player characters have strong innate goals and objectives, you place situations around them with no expectation of how they play out, and at the end of that see what happens next - building the story of play together based on choices made and the rolls of the dice, sounds in keeping with the principle! Generally the principle is placed in opposition to the idea of plotting - the GM having determined that something will happen and just seeing how the players get there.

To use an example from the last big AP/Campaign I ran, when you play through Call of the Netherdeep the players must get a teleport gizmo and proceed to the desert city or the campaign ends. The objective of everything you do from the very start to the end is to have that final confrontation where you can press one of three buttons. As a GM, I must ensure the players have enough hooks and awareness to grab onto some mechanism for getting that teleport gizmo; for getting into the ruins beneath the city; for making it to the final confrontation.

In comparison, in my last Blades in the Dark game, I didn't even know how the next moment in a score was going to go after that engagement roll; much less what was going to happen in the wider world next! Turns out they burned down the Grey Cloak's establishment while making a whole bunch of corpses! Their heat skyrocketed, the Bluecloaks came calling in accordance with teh game's procedures; and the Grey Cloaks moved a step closer to open war. Ok...time to ask the table what we do next because I don't know until they say so! Although because I advance the Faction Relationship and we did some clocks in there, I know I need to have the Grey Cloaks do something proactive; and then the Spirit Wardens are going to come investigating due to that Devil's Bargain they took, and...

RenleyRenfield said:

Except again, you are not actually saying anything correct. (edit)

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Mod Note:

This & your other recent posts in this thread have been more confrontational in their rhetoric- especially some of your bolded phrases- and composition than is usually tolerated on ENWorld.

Find better ways of expressing yourself. For instance: “I disagree.” would be preferred over “You are wrong.”

Tone it down, please.

It's important, contextually, that "play to find out what happens" is in the MC Playbook. That being said I think Monsterhearts' "Keep the story feral" and Blades in the Dark's "be a curious explorer of the fiction" do a better job of laying out the mentality Vincent Baker is expecting Apocalypse World DM/MCs to take on. It's all about approaching play with curiosity over how things will snowball and being open to these characters not being who we think they are rather than having an agenda for how things will go or nudging players to have their characters take particular actions.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Mod Note:

This & your other recent posts in this thread have been more confrontational in their rhetoric- especially some of your bolded phrases- and composition than is usually tolerated on ENWorld.

Find better ways of expressing yourself. For instance: “I disagree.” would be preferred over “You are wrong.”

Tone it down, please.

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Will do, my apologies.

RenleyRenfield said:

Will do, my apologies.

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FYI, also don’t respond to moderation texts in-thread. That can get you moderated as well. A private message is preferred. Using the “like” button is usually acceptable.

(I understand why you did- did exactly that here myself YEARS ago, before I became a Mod.)

RenleyRenfield said:

Ehhh... None of this is Play to Find Out either... or at least, its not correctly addressing what my post said.

"Players should be given no guarantees they will find out every secret of the setting" = this has nothing at all to do with play to find out. And in and of its self, is not 'play to find out'.

I am not fully sure what you mean by "unless they are invulnerable to PC input" = I suppose this could a odd phrasing of "as long as the PCs can ad/edit/alter things." Which ok, yeah allowing PCs/Rolls/GM to append to or alter details is kinda closer... but in a real vague way.

Play to Find Out = has nothing at all to do with "secrets of the setting". And if there are secrets, then those secrets are preventing "play to find out" for sure! (again, unless that is an oddly vague way of saying 'things nobody not even the GM is aware of"... but I would never phrase that as secrets of the setting. Secrets imply factual and imposed truths that are just not known yet. And that is not play to find out.)

Folks, play to find out isnt about secrets...

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Most PbtA games, for example, use adventure fronts and various countdown equivalent, which are precisely things happening in the background that the players don't know about (or at least not all about). Those games also have pre-prepped NPCs, Monsters, and locations with abilities and secrets. None of that prevents those games from being play to find out. I feel like you are applying the phrase in a bit of an odd way.

SteveC said:

Pretty much this. There's a thing that's going to happen. Will it? Don't know, the ending isn't determined. If the players do nothing, it's going to happen. Will they do something? What? Stop the event? Agree with it and get onboard? Or figure some point out that's inbetween? Don't know.

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zakael19 said:

If your player characters have strong innate goals and objectives, you place situations around them with no expectation of how they play out, and at the end of that see what happens next - building the story of play together based on choices made and the rolls of the dice, sounds in keeping with the principle! Generally the principle is placed in opposition to the idea of plotting - the GM having determined that something will happen and just seeing how the players get there.

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Campbell said:

It's important, contextually, that "play to find out what happens" is in the MC Playbook.

<snip>

It's all about approaching play with curiosity over how things will snowball and being open to these characters not being who we think they are rather than having an agenda for how things will go or nudging players to have their characters take particular actions.

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Building on what @Campbell has said, and also what I posted upthread: if the principal focus of play - as far as story/theme is concerned - is the event or situation that the GM has authored, then I don't think we have "play to find out" in the Apocalypse World sense.

I mean, a classic D&D character can have goals and objectives - eg recover the vorpal sword from the demon pit on the 9th level of the dungeon - but in itself that doesn't give us play to find out, because we're not finding out what is happening to this character as a character.

As the AW rulebook puts it, "You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens . . .". The internal logic and causality of classic D&D is not driven by the players' characters; and the GM doesn't need to open themself to caring what happens.

And if the GM is setting up an event or situation or threat that they think is really cool, independently of the players' characters, then we might be playing to find out what happens to the GM's characters or the GM's situation. But I don't think that's what AW has in mind with the concept of "playing to find out".

So whilst I think "play to find out" is a confusing catchphrases as these forgey terms tend to be, but the concept it is pretty much the low prep, low myth play I was alluding to earlier. And I've been trying to think what sort of mechanics support that, and one thing I feel is counterproductive to it, yet often paired with is the clocks, or at least certain sort of use of them. (I am eager to once again hear how we are playing the Blades in the Dark wrong.) Like these games often have the structure which compel the GM to invent consequences on failure or partial success, and this is supposed to push the events forward instead of just being "nothing happens." But if that consequence is just being some abstract clock ticking forwards, then the situation at the moment still is "nothing happens." And if the clock is something that only matters for that score, then it merely encourages you to manage it until you've accomplished enough of your goals and then bail out before the it gets filled, and I doesn't think this creates particularly interesting gameplay. So in general I feel consequences that require you to react at the moment or recontextualise the situation are significantly better for producing compelling fiction and gameplay.

I think the issue might arise because these games ask the GM to invent consequences so often that it might become difficult for GM to make up something interesting constantly, so it is easy to just default to ticking "alarm will be raised" clock or some such. And this of course is a skill issue, and some GM's will be way better at this than others and will have no problems with coming up with cool consequences. But I think design-wise the designer should carefully consider how often the system prompts the GM to come up with such stuff, as I feel rarer, but more impactful consequences is better than frequent but boring ones.

There also could be some mechanics that would help the GM with coming up with this stuff, like, you'd have chart for random action scene consequences and social scene consequences and then you would roll and get "betrayal" and that would help you spin the fiction. Though personally I feel this would be way too mechanical and restricting, but I think as some sort of optional extra it might be something that could help some GMs.

How are people feeling about some sort of mechanics and aids for randomising story beats and events in RPGs? Like of course we randomise results in some way constantly and random encounter charts are a classic, but I am thinking on more conceptual level, randomising event, people, themes, and such. Do you know games that do this? Like the GM drawing cards for plot points and twists etc?

Crimson Longinus said:

How are people feeling about some sort of mechanics and aids for randomising story beats and events in RPGs? Like of course we randomise results in some way constantly and random encounter charts are a classic, but I am thinking on more conceptual level, randomising event, people, themes, and such. Do you know games that do this? Like the GM drawing cards for plot points and twists etc?

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I'm using several Clocks in our D&D campaign.
I do not know if I'm using them how BitD uses them, but I developed a system per my understanding about Clocks on Enworld.
The Clocks are player-facing with a frequency die rolled weekly/monthly (in-game time) depending and as the Clock progresses it becomes easier for the Clock to keep increasing.
PC actions can suspend a frequency die or stop the Clock all-together, but that costs Time which is pretty precious as the Campaign ramps up towards a major storyline conclusion.

I like the randomness of it all, specifically because I as DM am constrained to abide by the system.

Clocks without context are abstract, sure. Clocks in actual use aren't abstract at all but represent various long-term projects or longer-term situations (both are game elements that escape the scope of 'encounter' or scene'). Once you've adequately described the clock, it's actually quite specific. IDK if that helps any, but that's how they are used.