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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7374430" data-attributes="member: 42582">I thought I'd post a practical example of what I'm comfortable with as a GM and group buy in. Unfortunately it's a Cortex+ Heroic example, not a PbtA/DW example, but hopefully it's still helpful.As best I can recall, I've GMed about 10 sessions of Cortex+ Heroic (some Marvel, some Fantasy). A key mechanic in this system is the doom pool - which is the GM's resource for doing stuff (a bit like how misses in DW allow the GM to make moves). And a key principle is that everything significant that happens to the PCs or the NPCs follows from making a check to establish an effect.In the first couple of sessions I was just trying to learn how to manage the doom pool, as it serves not only as the GM's resource but also as the opposition for player checks when there is no opposing PC or NPC.Once I got the hang of that, I started being a bit more adventurous in how I used it, being more relaxed about spending it down and getting a better handle on how it would build up again, and what that would mean. Over this time I also read multiple published scenarios, and saw the sorts of things they suggested doing with the doom pool which weren't mentioned in the rules; and the sorts of things they said about giving PCs benefits or imposing penalties that weren't mentioned in the rules either!More recently I've started using those techniques myself: so when one of the PCs ended a scene having tricked the drow out of their gold, he started the next scene with an asset (a d8 Bag of Gold) that he didn't have to create in the normal way, and that lasts longer than a normal asset. When the PCs all got teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing, they started the next scene all suffering a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication because that followed from the fiction, even though I hadn't made the normal check required to impose a complication on a PC. In our session on the weekend, one of the PCs got drunk/stoned on vodka and a witch's herbs (the player made this choice because he wanted to earn XP for indulging in pleasure) and I imposed a consequence of d6 Mental Stress even though no check had been made. And also in that session, when one of the PCs who was trying to rescue some villagers decided he would impose discipline on them by revealing his werewolf form and terrorising them into obedience, I stepped up the doom pool (on the grounds that that is clearly the sort of thing that makes the situation more risky and dangerous for the PCs) even though the normal rules for growing the doom pool hadn't been triggered.In each of these cases, the players accepted the ruling because they could see how it fitted the relationship between the system and the fiction we are all developing together. But it couldn't have worked the same way in the first session, when we were all still finding our feet and getting a hang of how the game works. And it's easy to imagine that for a different group a different set of expectations would emerge out of their play experience.Personally, I see this sort of thing as another aspect of playing to find out. Even if you start a bit cautiously at first, while you're all getting a feel for the system, I would hope that over a few sessions and as the rhythms of play and the mechanics start to become more familiar, some organic sense of what an "animal move" should look like will start to emerge.</blockquote>

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