Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7801529" data-attributes="member: 16586">Telegraphing is a way to tell players what is at stake in the situation. It makes the consequences clear so you do not need to make up consequences on a failed result. It should be obvious what happens if they fail to overcome the adversity before them or do not engage with it.Think of a telegraph as a threat that you intend to make good on. This creates an environment where the GM does not need to pull punches. It actually pressures the GM to follow through with their threats because it becomes blatantly obvious when you are pulling your punches.Apocalypse World calls these soft moves and hard moves. A soft move implies what may happen. A hard move means there is an irrevocable change to the fiction. You use soft moves to set the scene and show players what may happen. You go to hard moves when they have either acted or failed to act to show the repercussions of what they did - both positive and negative. Hard moves do not necessarily have to be bad things.I would not use telegraphing for conflict neutral dungeon exploration. At the very least any sort of telegraphing would be at a higher level like "There are a lot of kobolds - Expect traps". I think the sort of exploration rules seen in B/X or Pathfinder 2 are better for that. I think largely when you go from just approach to goal and approach it is important for the changes in the fiction to reflect on the goal. Otherwise you really do not care about what the goal is. It's not really an input into resolution. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where we deeply care about what the character wants that is conflict neutral. Just by going there, inside their head, conflict is bound to arise naturally.</blockquote>

Verification