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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8289358" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can see what you're saying here, and I think there's a degree of truth to it. But I also think that there is more to it than what you've said here.For instance, one pair of principles in Apocalypse World is the following (AW pp 110-11):Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” — this was the PC’s move — “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible. Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there? These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect. Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players . . .Now there are limits on this. For instance, in the example of play on pp 152-58 we see examples of the MC (= GM) misdirecting and never speaking the name of the move made, but we also see the following (p 156):"Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?” “1-armor.” “Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3-harm.”That's coming pretty close to the GM announcing inflict harm as a move. But D&D requires much more of this sort of thing: for instance, the GM has to ask the player his/her AC, and possibly mention the attacker's to hit roll, and certainly has to announce damage results which then get applied to the hp tally. D&D makes it really quite hard to adhere to these principles in the context of combat resolution: the real-world reasons for doing various things are rubbed in our faces all the time, and it's hard to present them as having fictional causes and fictional effects.I also think that D&D makes some other AW moves quite hard to put into effect, because of its tendency to granularity in action resolution. I'm thinking especially of separating them and taking away their stuff, but there are probably other examples too.The flip-side is that AW is designed so that its mechanics permit a high degree of operationalisation of its principles, and of its GM-side moves. And a number of those features differentiate it from D&D and D&D-adjacent games.This quickly gets into thorny territory in the context of D&D play!Here's an example, from AW (p 114) of what it means to be a fan of the player's characters:The worst way there is to make a character’s life more interesting is to take away the things that made the character cool to begin with. The gunlugger’s guns, but also the gunlugger’s collection of ancient photographs — what makes the character match our expectations and also what makes the character rise above them. Don’t take those away.This thread has already had a discussion about taking away high-level D&D character's teleport and similar abilities. There's a long tradition of the treating the wizard's spellbook as a point of vulnerability.More subtly, but something which for me as a RPGer is very important, is the way the structure of play encourages or suppresses the manifestation of core PC capabilities. For instance, in discussions of the 5e rest economy I've seen posters who say that a good feature of an unpredictable but predictably large-ish number encounters between rests is that it encourages players to conserve resources, which in turn helps manage nova-ing and related issues. But the result of this sort of incentive structure is that much of the time we don't see the PCs being what they're best at, at least not the PCs who are powered by limited resources.So again in the context of D&D I think it can actually be quite challenging to operationalise the "be a fan" principle. Because once again the principle is sensitive to details of mechanical design.</blockquote>

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