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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8132581" data-attributes="member: 42582">I really don't see any evidence for this.In Apocalypse World, part of the GM's job can be to decide what happens if the PCs don't do anything. This is approached through the idea of fronts, each of which includes one or more threats (AW, pp 136, 143):The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your fronts, playing your threats, but that doesn’t mean anything mechanical. It means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do. . . . A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’. When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created. . . . As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments. Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out. For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit: “if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.” Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not [fooling] around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to.Notice that the point of this is to give the GM interesting things to say. It's to support the collective creation of a certain sort of fiction.In my Cortex+ Vikings game, it's implicit that if the PCs don't act successfully the Ragnarok will come. But I don't have clocks for that. I just make stuff up as we go along.In my Prince Valiant and Classic Traveller games, there is no overarching threat in the "fronts" sense. In Traveller there have been. At one point the starship-owning PC had his ship mortgaged, meaning that he had periodic repayments to make. (He's since upgraded to a ship owned free-and-clear.) And at one point there was a bioweapons conspiracy that the PCs were (mostly) unwitting participants in, and then became opponents of, but this was never specified with the sort of detail and clocks that characterise an AW front.But there are no paths, let alone paths leading to the same place. In those games, I (as GM) am not the sole or even principal decider of what happens next. That is determined via action declarations and action resolution.The mechanism that you are positing seems to pertain to a game that lacks robust action resolution mechanics: you refer to the PCs acting in ways to change the fiction, and then you posit that it is the GM who reacts to those actions with the first thing that comes to mind. But where are the players' action declarations? If those actions are being declared, and they succeed, why is the GM getting to make up whatever fiction s/he likes?This is actually very consistent with what I posted upthread:I don't know what systems you are familiar with besides D&D, but it seems - on the strength of what I've quoted - that you're not all that familiar with systems with robust action resolution.To give a concrete example, from a pretty well-known RPG, namely, Classic Traveller c 1977: if the players declare that their starship is jumping from planet X to planet Y, then there is a completely robust rules procedure to work out what happens: check they have the appropriate software on the ship computer, check their ship has the appropriate fuel, check they have the appropriate crew skills, make the misjump and drive failure checks, etc. If all the hurdles are satisfied, and if the checks are successful, then in the fiction, the PCs's starship has arrived at Y with them in it after a week in jumpspace. If there is a misjump, then they arrive at a random place 1d6(1d6) parsecs away.There simply isn't scope, in that resolution subsystem, for the GM to decide that the story results of success look like the story results of failure.The game has many other subsystems that are similarly robust (an escape/evasion subsystem; a use of vacc suit subystem; various social subystems, including one for dealing with police, customs officials and other bureaucrats; a collection of interstellare commerce and trade subystem; etc). These subystems take the players' action declarations as input, and produce outputs that establish clear differences between success and failure.That's not a strong advertisement for the utility or importance of GM prep!</blockquote>

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