NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9242266" data-attributes="member: 42582">This detour through "play to find out" is surprising to me.The phrase, used in the context of RPGing, has an origin: Vincent Baker uses it to describe a core element of the MC's agenda in Apocalypse World.From p 102, under the heading "Setting Expectations":I’m not out to get you. If I were, you could just pack it in right now, right? I’d just be like “there’s an earthquake. You all take 10-harm and die. The end.” No, I’m here to find out what’s going to happen with all your cool, hot, . . . kick-ass characters. Same as you!Then from p 108, elucidating the instruction, to the MC, to Play to find out what happens:It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not [mess]ing around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out. Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. 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, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside. The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline. When you find something you genuinely care about - a question about what will happen that you genuinely want to find out - letting the game’s fiction decide it is uniquely satisfying.The repudiation of pre-planned storylines straight away marks the difference from APs, from most D&D modules since DL, from any planning that says "After the PCs do <such-and-such>, then <this> happens" or "If the PCs attempt <such-and-such>, then <this> happens". If someone (eg [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]) wants to argue that, in the play of Dead Gods, there is also "finding out" (eg finding out whether or not the PCs make it all the way to the end of the adventure; or finding out whether it is PC X or PC Y who delivers the killing blow to such-and-such an opponent) well that's their prerogative, but what does it achieve? All that means is that we need to find some new terminology to state Baker's point.The fact that the focus is on the characters, and on things that the participants care about, marks the difference from gamist play. Certainly from WPM or B2, where the characters are irrelevant and interchangeable as play pieces, defined - as Gygax tells us in his PHB - by their distinctive class functions. But from any gamist play, where - as [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has posted - win conditions are established at the outset, as that towards which the players aim in the play of their PCs.And AW is not purist-for-system sim either, for reasons that become obvious upon looking at how the game works.</blockquote>

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