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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8698886" data-attributes="member: 7028554">Maybe it'll help me if I get more specific about the door example, since this bit happened in the last session I ran of Brindlewood Bay. Again Brindlewood is much looser than AW with its moves and play loops, but it's still a PbtA game, so I think a lot of what's being discussed here applies:-The PC has a move called Jim Rockford wherein at the beginning of any session (where it's appropriate) they get a message on their answering machine with a seemingly random mission. If they complete it, they get XP. There isn't really more guidance than that, except that the identity of the message-leaver should remain unknown, and the tasks should be weirder and creepier if the PC has marked off certain things.-In this case I said the message involved retrieving a lens from an abandoned lighthouse. Waking just before dawn, the PC could see the lighthouse, but it was at the other end of town. So the player said he'd grab a bicycle laying on a lawn in this relatively affluent 1980's New Jersey suburb and bike over (I didn't call for a roll--seemed to fit with the fiction and, it wasn't risky).-I described the abandoned lighthouse, with boarded windows and such—the lighthouses in the NJ town the session was set in are mostly house-like structures on the beach, with an extended bit up top for the lamp, as opposed to the more distinctive tower lighthouses.-The player asked if the front door was locked. I said yes (!).-He said he was picking the lock. I said this called for what Brindlewood Bay calls the Day Move, a general sort of move where the situation is risky or uncertain, and where the player says what they fear will happen on a miss (in this case that there'll be someone inside the abandoned lighthouse) and the GM either runs with that or provides something different. The roll was, in fact, a miss, and the PC was confronted by a suitably alarming, spooky, and unfriendly (but not immediately violent) occupant. He slammed the door after a brief interaction, and when she left, as is the style in Brindlewood, I narrated a moment of him watching her go from the top floor, muttering into his beard.So that's the framing for one of these here locked-door questions. It wasn't necessarily the most charged situation, and it wasn't central to the current mystery in the game (this was all happening the morning before the campaign's next murder mystery unfolded), but my take on the game's answering-machine missions has been to present encounters that are require gumption or bravery or both, with most of the details determined by rolls. For example, the bearded lighthouse occupant didn't exist until the missed breaking-and-entering roll. But I did present the locked door as an open-ended obstacle. She could have climbed the outside of the house, or made her way through one of the boarded windows, or whatever else, all while possibly risking being spotted by early morning beachgoers. Mild stuff, maybe, but during a previous answering-machine mission in much more clearly dangerous circumstances she had been stabbed to death by a group of cultists (based also on a miss, but after clearly telegraphed danger, and misses on the Night Move in this game are always supposed to be worse) and the player had to spend metacurrency to get a different result.All of which brings me back to that locked door. In this case the player actually asked "Is the door locked?" But if he had instead said "I open the door" and I had said "It's locked," I still don't get why that's a violation of PbtA principles. I mean I kind of do, in that the entire business of getting into the lighthouse could have been a roll, and the locked door a result of a complication, but that seems unnecessarily zoomed out and without context here.</blockquote>

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