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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8936994" data-attributes="member: 42582">A post from [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] in the "theory thread" thread prompted some reflections from me that I'll drop in here.They're also relevant to map-and-key resolution.The thoughts are about the "evaluative orientation" or "normativity" of the fiction. By this I'm not meaning "Is it good or bad from an objective moral sense?" (eg paladins vs assassins). I'm meaning its orientation towards protagonist goals and desires.I'll come into this topic by referring back to "reading a person" in Apocalypse World. As I pointed out, that move allows asking questions which the controller of the read character has to answer. Here's a bit more rules text (all quoted from p 201 of the rulebook):you might already know the answers to these questions, you might not. Either way, once you’ve said them you’ve committed to them and they’re true. . . . “Dude, sorry, no way” is a legit answer to “how could I get your character to __?”Now let's look at that last one. For whom is it a legit answer? It's fine for one player, playing their PC, to respond to another player who is playing their PC in this way. But is it fine for the GM?When the GM answers a "read a person' question, they're making a move. And unless the player has failed a roll (ie 6 down), which if they're asking a "read a person" question they haven't; or unless the player has handed the GM a golden opportunity on a plate, which if their PC is just talking to a guard who has come up to ask them their business, they havn't; then the GM's move should be soft, not hard.Now what makes a move soft or hard is context-sensitive, but "Dude, sorry, no way I can help you get into the warehouse unannounced" looks like it could be pretty hard as a move, because given what we already know the player is hoping to achieve it's an irrevocable shutting off of one avenue of possibility.The general point here is that what is an acceptable thing for the GM to say about the fiction, in AW, is conditioned by how it bears upon what the players want for their PCs. This is express in some of the labels for GM moves ("Announce future badness", "Put them in a spot", etc) but is also implicit in the whole contrast between soft and hard moves - a hard move is irrevocable (p 117), but what counts as salient irrevocability is obviously relevant to what the players want for their PCs.This is what I mean by the "evaluative" or "normative" orientation of the fiction. AW isn't the only RPG in which this is a thing - eg it's also a thing in Burning Wheel, although the technical devices that are used are different. Likewise in HeroWars/Quest. And in other RPGs too.Map and key play, on the other hand, is most naturally suited to "neutral" fiction - because so much framing and consequence, in map-and-key play, is settled by decisions made ahead of time (ie when the map is drawn and the key written).Torchbearer is an interesting hybrid in this respect, because it uses map-and-key as a type of base or foundation, but the method of "twists" for failure is where the GM is able to respond to what the players want for their PCs by introducing non-neutral stuff.</blockquote>

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