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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7070783" data-attributes="member: 16586">One of the ways that Apocalypse World and its close cousins make GM manipulation of outcomes, consequences, and the fiction more apparent is ironically by giving them much more latitude than is typical in most mainstream games. You do not get to hide behind mechanisms like attack and damage rolls or little procedural bits like health regen per day. In Apocalypse World you deliver harm (as established) and decide how long it takes to recover from harm. In Masks the GM gets to declare an NPC has Influence over you or has made you Angry. In Monsterhearts the GM can declare an NPC has a String, a bit of emotional leverage, on you or that you Become Your Darkest Self. There are no real stats for NPCs, only the fiction. No action economy either. You never roll the dice. Their moves, your prep, and the fiction as established always apply to you. They form very real constraints on your play.Combined with having your agenda and principles laid bare, an overt expectation of honestly conveying the fictional world, very low system cognitive overhead for the player, and being true to your prep it creates an environment where it is easy to see when a GM is taking it easy on you or or pushing for things to go a certain way. You gain an intuitive grasp of what soft moves and hard moves look like pretty quickly. You can tell when you are being screwed with.Another feature of play that limits this is that we are following these characters around as they live their daily lives, not generally going off on adventures or exploring unknown dungeons. Obviously this is somewhat different for Dungeon World. Players' characters are assumed to really belong in the milieu, like emphatically belong. They get to really know your NPCs, the things that drive them, what they really want and are after. When you are not a fish out of water it is easy to get a bad smell off an NPC. Additionally, on a system level, there are player moves like Read A Charged Sitch, Read A Person, and Open Your Brain to the World’s Psychic Maelstrom that if successful oblige you to give players real information they can use to make decisions. There's always a risk involved, but that's the fun part. These moves were designed to allow GMs to quickly transition to referee mode.</blockquote>

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