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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8939577" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER] This post is in response to your bakc-and-forth with [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER].As you may recall, here are the posts I made about the warehouse stakeout scenario in the context of AW:So what sorts of things would contribute to the mood of the table, what is going on in the rest of the fiction, what trajectories and expectations have been built up, etc?These might include questions from the GM to the player(s), consistent with what [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] posted upthread. These might also include previous bits of narration, especially previous soft moves made by the GM.I'm not as familiar with the text of DW as I am with AW, but like the latter I believe the former relies on the key principle "If you do it, you do it." And a flipside of that is that a player is not obliged to do it. A player can deliberately declare an action that does not trigger a player-side move, and hence that leaves the GM free to make a move of their own (typically a soft move). Baker gives examples of exactly this in the AW rulebook, when he discusses an example of not going aggro (p 12), and when he contrasts Seduce/Manipulate with one character just asking another character for a favour (pp 198-9).In AW, if a player tries to (eg) scout out a warehouse without being noticed by its guards, that would probably be Acting Under Fire, which would trigger a player-side move:When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7–9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. . . . On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure.If the player fails the roll, the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like. Perhaps a guard notices the skulker and alerts the other guards, who all descend on the PC (putting the PC in a spot).If the player makes the roll on a 7 to 9, perhaps the GM offers an opportunity with a cost - the only way you can get close without being seen is to hide behind the pile of burning tyres, and you'll take 1-harm (ap) from breathing in that acrid smoke for the couple of hours it'll take you to scope out the place.However it unfolds, by choosing to do something under fire, the player has opened up a different suite of possibilities than by choosing not to trigger a move of their own. And in the latter case, they've deliberately left it open to the GM to make a move. Which was the example that I gave, in which it is not illegitimate for the GM to have a guard approach the PC and ask them what their business is.I will add: this is a repeated source of frustration that I experience in discussing a variety of non-D&D-like RPGs. Posters such as [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER], instead of saying (eg) "That's interesting that the GM gets to make that move with no roll being made - why is that? Is that an opportunity that the player has given to them" just assume that the GM enjoys D&D-like permissions to grant or withhold saving throws (or hide checks, etc) more or less at will, and posits "illegitimate" GMing.There is no real attempt to take seriously that the game does not allocate authority in the same way that D&D and D&D-like games do.</blockquote>

Verification