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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9008647" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Certainly; it always was a dead end. The problem is, under its auspices, one side simply wins, and thus has no reason to let it go.Convention. Which is why discussion thereof almost always descends into "don't you TRUST your GM???" and "obviously just don't play with bad GMs" (and yet frequently still quite comfortable using bad player behavior examples)--because the power is now solely rooted in convention, as the limits on said power are also rooted in convention.Technically, I have played PbtA (Dungeon World and Masks) with five groups. Three in which I was a player, two in which I was the GM (one of which is ongoing; next session on Tuesday.) The problem is, the answer to your question is "it's more complicated than that."The rules themselves do, in fact, say that that is what should happen, at least in Dungeon World (and I'm fairly sure Masks is the same.) That is, these are the three reasons given for making a move in the "Gamemastering" section:So, when a player declares their intent to do something and everyone looks to the GM in response, that's time for making a move (usually a soft one.) This isn't, strictly speaking, about resolving anything--that's what the moves themselves are for. Instead, GM moves are usually about advancing the state of play. Adding new complications, threatening the player characters or things they value, revealing something the players would rather not be true, etc. Moves prompted by the first bullet point are all about scene-framing.Tradition, convention, same thing--when it comes to 5e. Dungeon World? Nah. Because the thing you just cited is explicitly what the rules instruct you to do. It is not simply the result of...let's call it "para-game" traditions or conventions. It's explicitly one of the core jobs of the GM to do that thing, and when they do so, to have the Agendas, Principles, and other best-practices advice at the forefront for shaping how and why they do it.These questions are still worth answering, at least in the context of D&D. IMO, the answer to the first one at least is:This is where my "theoretically vast, practically small" argument comes in. Theoretically this authority allows for almost anything, but in practice the limits have to be self-enforced and pretty strongly so. It's hard to push the envelope and take risks, because the players cannot give or deny consent. It is like trying to have a "dominant/submissive" relationship with no concept of a "safeword" and no ability for the submissive partner to respond to concerns except by breaking off the relationship entirely: in theory the dominant partner could do anything they want, but in practice, they must tread exceedingly carefully to not spook the submissive partner. By comparison, with developed techniques of communicating consent/refusal and actually putting some structure into such a relationship, it becomes infinitely easier to test limits and be adventuresome with one's efforts, because both sides participate in the setup thereof, and the submissive partner is given tools to address missteps before they become harm.That isn't considered a relevant aspect of the rules of the game. That is, the game presumes you already know what the result of a roll is once it is rolled. If you don't, it is not the job (nor the intent) of any PbtA system to tell you how to do that.And, perhaps more relevantly, DW is not designed for tournament play. That's simply not something it is meant to handle. It's much more personal than that.</blockquote>

Verification