Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8613287" data-attributes="member: 70468">Fair enough. I’ll assume no ill intent, but it does recontextualize the discussion, and I would have framed my initial responses differently.My presumption is that the game means what it says in the text. My experience with having run it (or, rather, Dungeon World) without taking that seriously is it doesn’t work very well. The game will fight against you, and you’ll undermine your agenda. I’ve also seen the same happen in Scum and Villainy when the GM was mostly interested in episode, mission-based play. We ended up drifting the game into neotrad even though I don’t think that was the intent, and it sort of messed up how it was supposed to work (e.g., we could more or less assume we would always succeed at a mission, which should not be the case).To put it another way, consider an OSR style of play. If you try to run an adventure for Old-School Essentials, it will advise you that the encounters are not balanced with the PCs’ capabilities in mind. You should take that seriously because otherwise it will break the game. Why? The PCs will die if they think they should fight and defeat everything. The expectation is they are trying to avoid and subvert encounters rather than engage them directly. You could fudge things, but then you’re arguably not doing OSR-style play anymore. Anyway, while that is a much harsher failure state than PbtA, the effect is still the same: you don’t get the experience the game was designed to provide.I suppose it’s possible for a PbtA game to say that, but that’s not how I read Apocalypse World. There is even an example of a player calling out their move, asking if they were “doing it under fire”. That’s the trigger for a move (act under fire, AW2e p. 136). The way I read it is you can ask if your fictional declaration matches your intent, and the GM is supposed to help you reconcile those, but you’re not just supposed to call out that you’re “acting under fire” because there is nothing in the fiction to trigger it.I’ve run Dungeon World a few times and played Scum and Villainy. If someone called out they wanted to “defy danger”, I’d ask them what they were doing in the fiction to trigger it. That strikes me as in-line with the examples from Apocalypse World and the conversational nature of play. FitD is a bit different in that you can declare which action you can use, but you still need to establish in the fiction how you are doing it. I think the difference between the two approaches is FitD uses an action list that looks superficially like a skill system, and you have a lot more flexibility in how you go about using them than you do with moves.That a certain activity would be unprincipled in a PbtA game doesn’t make it unprincipled in other games. I already gave the example of a traditional D&D game, so I would presume likewise for Diplomacy. I also have this as part of the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/campaign-structural-paradigms.685649/post-8527642" target="_blank">agenda in my game</a> even though I’m not trying to do a PbtA game either.The issue I have is with PbtA games specifically. I don’t see how it would result in principled play if the GM decides the outcome of a move. You’d lose the chance of being surprised by the outcome of a situation if you decided it was impossible. I think that’s the reason why Dungeon World includes “Draw maps, leave blanks” in its principles. The temptation with having a map would be to squash anything that went outside the lines, but finding those unexpected places is what you’re supposed to be playing to do.That’s not the argument I’m making. That some agendas may require it doesn’t mean all agendas do, nor that some’s not requiring it mean that none do. For what PbtA is doing, I think it’s necessary. The mechanics are very intentioned in what they set out to do, and the use of a fortune is constrained and determined by the players (triggered by the things they do in the fiction).While I agree the referee gets to put their touch on things via moves, you’re still constrained by the existing fiction (and having to follow it), the outcome the move prescribes (and what the player chose), and your principles.Look at it this way. You’re running Dungeon World, and you have a map that says the room ahead is empty. If someone triggers Discern Realities, should you cut them off and say there’s nothing there? I’d posit not. You’re supposed to be leaving blanks on your map and be a fan of the characters. According to those principles, I feel like one should make that roll (and not just because I should always say what the rules demand) because it is an opportunity to learn something new that not even I (the GM) had expected to see.</blockquote>

Verification