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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9146783" data-attributes="member: 82106">As a general thing, PbtA (AW) was designed to be a 'pressure cooker', something is going to blow because there are always these consequences stacking up, creating more pressure, pushing the situation from status quo to some kind of explosion. You cook dinner for the boys and there's no more meat. They start to make trouble, the boss got meat, by gosh we're going to get some too! Your perfectly fine little hard hold is now a powder keg (I rolled an 8 on a hold event resolution move). This design can also be refined to razor sharpness by a good designer. There are potentially 'special moves' and in any case the standard &quot;something goes slightly wrong&quot; 7-9 result can be tweaked for any given move to have specific repercussions in a given milieu. If you Volley in DW and get a 7, well, maybe you break your weapon, or run out of ammo, or find yourself in a bad tactical spot. You hit, but the sense of combat as chaos and sucking you into its inherent uncertainty is a feature of the way these moves work.I haven't done a 'light hearted' PbtA game, so I'm not sure how this sort of design works out there, but I heavily suspect that absent some heavy tweaking, these games are going to 'snowball' pretty easily. PbtA games are not aimed at depicting mundane situations and a kind of equilibrium state of affairs. Instead the core system is engineered to make all hell break loose reliably and soon, so you can stop fiddling around in the market place and get to the 'dungeon', or else!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9146783, member: 82106"] As a general thing, PbtA (AW) was designed to be a 'pressure cooker', something is going to blow because there are always these consequences stacking up, creating more pressure, pushing the situation from status quo to some kind of explosion. You cook dinner for the boys and there's no more meat. They start to make trouble, the boss got meat, by gosh we're going to get some too! Your perfectly fine little hard hold is now a powder keg (I rolled an 8 on a hold event resolution move). This design can also be refined to razor sharpness by a good designer. There are potentially 'special moves' and in any case the standard "something goes slightly wrong" 7-9 result can be tweaked for any given move to have specific repercussions in a given milieu. If you Volley in DW and get a 7, well, maybe you break your weapon, or run out of ammo, or find yourself in a bad tactical spot. You hit, but the sense of combat as chaos and sucking you into its inherent uncertainty is a feature of the way these moves work. I haven't done a 'light hearted' PbtA game, so I'm not sure how this sort of design works out there, but I heavily suspect that absent some heavy tweaking, these games are going to 'snowball' pretty easily. PbtA games are not aimed at depicting mundane situations and a kind of equilibrium state of affairs. Instead the core system is engineered to make all hell break loose reliably and soon, so you can stop fiddling around in the market place and get to the 'dungeon', or else! [/QUOTE]

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