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Nope. They are, in effect, the same thing, because the meaning of the runes was not established ahead of time. If you, the GM, had decided that the runes meant "exit thataway -->" and a PC said "boy I hope that these runes will show us the way out," then rolled well enough to translate the...

There have been lots of people who have said, or effectively said, that it's wrong, stupid, railroading, pointless, "quantum", to play games the way we like, and have been incredibly dismissive of our entire preferred method. Strange that you didn't think any of that was insulting.

...All that takes is practice to get the balance right.

No matter what you might claim, "what the player hoped for" and "what the player decided" is, in this case using these rules, exactly the same thing. Because--by the rules of the game--your "fun and interesting" runes that otherwise had no meaning turned out to be exactly what the PC wanted them...

Oh, for--! Are you doing this thing again? We are all aware that the game takes place in an imaginary state.

But it's only because of the failure to drive. As were all the other consequences I posted. It's not independent; it's a direct result.

As someone who doesn't drive for medical reasons... this is ridiculous. Without the ability to drive, you get cut off from so many things. You have to shell out more money in order to get necessities delivered. If you need to get places, you have to hope you can get rides. You have to hope you...

But if nothing happens when you fail to open the jar--there are no consequences, nothing interesting that happens if they fail--why bother rolling? It's a waste of time. It's dull.

Why shouldn't the GM try to make their game more interesting and less likely to grind to a halt due to a bad roll?

But there's also no negative consequences for not opening the jar other than not opening the jar. Which means that, in a game, there's really no point to call for a roll to open the jar. Just look at the character's Strength score and make a judgement call. It's only if something will happen...

It's not the character development I'm taking about. I'm talking about the game's base expectations. As I said, there's the psychic maelstrom, which is baked into the game via the playbooks via the Weird stat, as well as in various moves. You can't play AW without it, unless you rewrite the...

This is very incorrect. The GM does not have to introduce anything that changes what the scene is about, and if they do introduce something, it does not have to go against what the players were intending. It's perfectly acceptable for the complication to be simply "this takes extra time" or even...

Right. So. Absolutely none of this address what I was talking about, though. The farrier is a normal feature in a medieval settlement; it makes sense that there would be one, so having the GM--or even a player--create on the fly doesn't bother people. It would be weirder if the location didn't...

There's an implied setting created by a combination of the psychic maelstrom, the playbook types, the Hot and Weird stats, the sex moves... it's the type of apocalypse where sexy people kill and/or have sex with one another while psychic weirdness abounds. It would be kind of hard to turn that...

Because in many cases, that preference is based on an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the rules. Look at all the people still bringing up the idea of the screaming cook and treating it as the way all these games work, based on one person's blog--not even rules from an actual PbtA game...

Well, if you can't align on X but can on Y, Z, A, B, C, etc., then play those other games. If you can't align on most of those games, or if the players deliberately won't stop misaligning--not can't, but won't, then maybe stop playing with them.

There's a difference between a farrier and the runes, though. With the farrier, they're part of normal life in a typical settlement. It's just that the GM didn't think to, or forgot to, include one when they prepped the village (assuming the village wasn't improvised to begin with). The farrier...

Especially when nobody complains that the fighter somehow magically got a new combat-oriented ability or feat out of nowhere without showing how they learned them.

Maybe because you're friends, everyone feels comfortable doing their own thing, even if that means not aligning with the tone.

They used plastic all over the place. They just didn't have plastic bottles and bags. And they used plenty of toxic chemicals and materials as well (lead, asbestos, coal, DDT--which they even sprayed on kids), threw trash all over the place, and so on, all of which caused horrific pollution that...