Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[zakael19]

If your player characters have strong innate goals and objectives, you place situations around them with no expectation of how they play out, and at the end of that see what happens next - building the story of play together based on choices made and the rolls of the dice, sounds in keeping with the principle! Generally the principle is placed in opposition to the idea of plotting - the GM having determined that something will happen and just seeing how the players get there.

To use an example from the last big AP/Campaign I ran, when you play through Call of the Netherdeep the players must get a teleport gizmo and proceed to the desert city or the campaign ends. The objective of everything you do from the very start to the end is to have that final confrontation where you can press one of three buttons. As a GM, I must ensure the players have enough hooks and awareness to grab onto some mechanism for getting that teleport gizmo; for getting into the ruins beneath the city; for making it to the final confrontation.

In comparison, in my last Blades in the Dark game, I didn't even know how the next moment in a score was going to go after that engagement roll; much less what was going to happen in the wider world next! Turns out they burned down the Grey Cloak's establishment while making a whole bunch of corpses! Their heat skyrocketed, the Bluecloaks came calling in accordance with teh game's procedures; and the Grey Cloaks moved a step closer to open war. Ok...time to ask the table what we do next because I don't know until they say so! Although because I advance the Faction Relationship and we did some clocks in there, I know I need to have the Grey Cloaks do something proactive; and then the Spirit Wardens are going to come investigating due to that Devil's Bargain they took, and...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Except again, you are not actually saying anything correct. (edit)

Mod Note:

This & your other recent posts in this thread have been more confrontational in their rhetoric- especially some of your bolded phrases- and composition than is usually tolerated on ENWorld.

Find better ways of expressing yourself. For instance: “I disagree.” would be preferred over “You are wrong.”

Tone it down, please.

 

[Campbell]

It's important, contextually, that "play to find out what happens" is in the MC Playbook. That being said I think Monsterhearts' "Keep the story feral" and Blades in the Dark's "be a curious explorer of the fiction" do a better job of laying out the mentality Vincent Baker is expecting Apocalypse World DM/MCs to take on. It's all about approaching play with curiosity over how things will snowball and being open to these characters not being who we think they are rather than having an agenda for how things will go or nudging players to have their characters take particular actions.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

Mod Note:

This & your other recent posts in this thread have been more confrontational in their rhetoric- especially some of your bolded phrases- and composition than is usually tolerated on ENWorld.

Find better ways of expressing yourself. For instance: “I disagree.” would be preferred over “You are wrong.”

Tone it down, please.

Will do, my apologies.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Will do, my apologies.

FYI, also don’t respond to moderation texts in-thread. That can get you moderated as well. A private message is preferred. Using the “like” button is usually acceptable.

(I understand why you did- did exactly that here myself YEARS ago, before I became a Mod.)

 

[Fenris-77]

Ehhh... None of this is Play to Find Out either... or at least, its not correctly addressing what my post said.

"Players should be given no guarantees they will find out every secret of the setting" = this has nothing at all to do with play to find out. And in and of its self, is not 'play to find out'.

I am not fully sure what you mean by "unless they are invulnerable to PC input" = I suppose this could a odd phrasing of "as long as the PCs can ad/edit/alter things." Which ok, yeah allowing PCs/Rolls/GM to append to or alter details is kinda closer... but in a real vague way.

Play to Find Out = has nothing at all to do with "secrets of the setting". And if there are secrets, then those secrets are preventing "play to find out" for sure! (again, unless that is an oddly vague way of saying 'things nobody not even the GM is aware of"... but I would never phrase that as secrets of the setting. Secrets imply factual and imposed truths that are just not known yet. And that is not play to find out.)

Folks, play to find out isnt about secrets...

Most PbtA games, for example, use adventure fronts and various countdown equivalent, which are precisely things happening in the background that the players don't know about (or at least not all about). Those games also have pre-prepped NPCs, Monsters, and locations with abilities and secrets. None of that prevents those games from being play to find out. I feel like you are applying the phrase in a bit of an odd way.