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Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9632412" data-attributes="member: 7044099">This might be a "different brains work in different ways" thing, but to me because the Moves in the PBTAs I play are generally invoked by fiction, the narration for the entire failure/success with X/full success continuum is almost always very clear. There's a single move in the game I run the most that causes a lot of difficulty for people (Defy Danger or adjacent in the Dungeon World & etc games), and I struggled at first with it as well. The specific version I run already reframes things a bit (There's a lesser success, cost, consequence, and maybe the GM presents a choice between them); and John Harper's recent Threat Roll design helped me mentally adjust even further.Essentially, the clearer you are with the stakes of a Badness that you're tackling (the downside of the Conflict; many intentionally designed games move from beat by beat task resolution to a larger scale conflict resolution with obvious and up front consequences to failure), the easier it is to kinda dial it back. Like, if the character is attempting to dodge out of the way of a giant-like creature's massive tree-like club; the clear stake is "does it smack you for a ton of pain" and so depending on what they say in the fiction an easy step back can be "ok you dodge the worst of the swing but it clips you just enough to send you flying and you land winded with the terrible snapping together of your teeth - go ahead and mark dazed, as you try and pull yourself together...character 2, you see...." & etc.I used to struggle a lot when we hit Failure in D&D especially. People are always like "well wait, can I try instead?" or "well what happens now" and not having a system nudge of "ok go ahead and inflict what you've already established" meant I would often flail around.Plus I was always having to kinda pull the players forward, right? The direction of conversation tends to be players -> GM, GM states something, players think and confer maybe and then -> GM again. That was fatiguing (and worse because I was always running a module, which meant a plot, which meant having to kinda help steer people onwards or try and dangle objectives etc). In PBTAs, the questions tend to be inverted GM -> Player. You state a grabby situation, ask "What do you do?" or other similar things, because if a player is asking a question beyond something very surface you're often triggering that Read a Sitch or equivalent move which immediately plays back into the levels of success (on a 6-, you provoke a bad situation; on a 7-9 they get 1 Question; on a 10+ a handful) and then gives concrete avenues forward.Edit: the best way I've seen "levels of success" work in a d20 system is 4e's Skill Challenges, when run as an open ended fail-forward situation.</blockquote>

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