I tend to prefer (but rarely get any more) about a six player group because it makes it less likely that certain areas will not be covered adequately.
As to the question of multiple characters per player, I've seen players who are fine doing it, and ones it makes exceedingly uncomfortable. I've GMed so many years its second nature to me (of course I rarely play immersively if there are other people physically present or even present in voice, as it tends to pull me out, though I'll still do strong-IC sometimes).
Inhabitation of character is (it seems to me) a type of imaginative projection, and a concomitant internalisation of certain concerns, emotions, etc that have external origins (ie someone has written a story about them).
It's a state that is cultivated by conjuring up, in imagination, that suite of mental states; and focusing on what is imagined. It can be assisted and reinforced by what other participants in the social context are doing: eg are they describing things that make those states salient, that invite you to respond from their persepctive, etc. @Campbell can probably talk about this more coherently than I can! - but in the context of my RPGing, I don't think this state is one that takes hours or even 10s of minutes to enter into or to exit.
Personally I would find constantly hopping between the heads of two characters super jarring and damaging for immersion. If two characters are having a deep heartfelt conversation or a witty repartee, portraying them both would feel more like writing fiction that roleplaying. If it doesn't affect you that way that's great I guess!
We obviously see this very differently. That's fine. The GM role will differ from game to game.
A GM certainly needs to do more compartmentalization (scene framing/rules adjudication/playing the setting) than a typical player needs to do, but I want them to be immersed in the fictional situation and the characters they are responsible for. For me it's important that they are playing NPCs based entirely on their motivations and the fictional situation with as little contrivance as possible. I want those moments when I'm having a tense conversation with an NPC to be as real as possible.
Generally as a GM I view the role of scenario design/scene framing as a necessary evil so we can all start playing. I design scenarios that place a focus on the player characters, but once things are in motion I just want to really think hard about how NPCs would respond and just go with that. Having to do anything else would be an undue burden from my perspective.
I had assumed things of this nature were lumped in for the bargain--it feels rather a lot like an "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens" approach to this. But if this is valid, then fine....it just seems to have literally been merely a verbal workaround that changes literally nothing about the situation. "You would know that practicing priests customarily refuse to eat meat on Fridays, unless they're dying of starvation or the like" sounds exactly the same to me as "By the way, practicing priests customarily refuse to eat meat on Fridays, unless they're dying of starvation or the like," with literally only the wording being different; either way, you're warning the player with information the player doesn't have but that the character should.
I think it gets a bit more complicated in that different games are set up a bit differently. If its a ZERO MYTH game, like Dungeon World is designed to be, then the situation should never arise where the GM has a reason to say something like that. The only time they would in DW is literally as a hard or soft move, or possibly in scene framing. In the later case it would be presented more as an 'environmental' thing, in line with how I was presenting it. That is "You notice that oddly the friars are serving meat, and it is Friday." or that might come in response to a DR move by the player. Otherwise if the player doesn't come out with it, there's no 'myth' that exists which informs us such a thing must be true, no such backstory is predetermined. If the GM wants to present it as an 'Unwelcome Truth' or something similar, that works too.
Now, there are Story Games that operate in other modes. Some are very much fixed on GM structured environment, or on a milieu that is extremely well-defined, like playing Marvel Super Heroes, where we know what the ethos of an X-Man is supposed to be. We know who they are associated with, their history, etc. Its far from Zero Myth, the opposite really. I think in that case the discussion is more on the lines of what people think is canonical for that specific milieu. The processes inherent in the system in use and its agenda would be quite important, and only @pemerton, for example, could say which such games he's got a taste for. I'm not a lot of help here, because I'll honestly play in most games, and I'm more of a gamer and stuff like that generally tends to just get a shrug from me, unless it starts wrecking my agenda.
Unfortunately I'm not taking any other players at this time (just brought back in a player on hiatus and have the potential for another hiatus'd player to reappear any day).
That's fair, but it does feel like the conversation has had a bit of a bait-and-switch, since any time I brought up anything I had authored it was presented as axiomatically Force, with player-authorship being presented as the focus. Now it's not really player-authorship either, it's some third thing. It's already a struggle when many of these terms seem painfully fluid in meaning, this makes it worse.
Well, I may not always be completely consistent in how I label things. I mean, at a very high level of discussion I'm OK with the statement "DW players make up a lot of the fiction, usually well beyond just stating their character's actions." When we get down to the technical nitty gritty of what is going on in the process, then it gets a bit more important to talk about HOW it happens. My feeling is that PbtA games take the Czege Principle very seriously and that's why SL and DR and such don't let the player speak their preferred fiction outright in that way. Instead players speak their fiction as responses to questions, or description of personality and relationships involving their character. Those are GRIST for use in generating conflict, but they are not the conflict itself. So the game can exist in a state where the GM presents the 'business end' of the story to the players, what it is they are going to conflict with and what the parameters of that are, but the players determine the topic and what things to focus on. If they want zombie apocalypse with a theme of "how do you face inevitable defeat?" then by gosh it is up to the GM to present exactly that, and not hare off into some other theme entirely, nor even sneak in some deus ex machina which negates doom! (now, DW specifically isn't geared towards a 'doomed character' theme, though you could certainly pull it off, but other PbtAs are, and they work very similarly).
Alright. The characters in my party have these as their motives (some shared, some individual):
Learn about my family history and what this leads to (two characters not related by blood both have this motive)
Sate deep personal curiosity about the world and its cultures, fauna, and locations (also shared by two characters)
Uncover the true secrets of spirits and the various traditions of magic
Explore the possibilities of my personal art and find new students (shared by multiple characters)
Liberate the oppressed, particularly those beholden by magic
Earn the loyalty of my clan and found my own nation (a player on hiatus)
Go forth and destroy darkness wherever it takes root (shared by multiple characters)
Protect the interests of my liege-lady, wherever my travels take me
Help anyone who cannot help themselves (shared by all: the party is basically all Good)
Few of these have been explicitly written out (e.g. the Spellslinger has a variation of "explore my art" as her alignment, but it's also a motive of the Battlemaster, who has really gone in for the "tactical teacher" angle (player draws inspiration from Fire Emblem).
Those seem like reasonable goals. I would, as a DW GM, perhaps use those as a starting point and dig. So you want to learn about your family history? What if it isn't quite what you expected? How determined are you to discover the skeletons in the closet, and are you going to want to set ancient sins right? Even if it means harming family members, including yourself?
How far will your desire to see the world take you? What happens when other people get hurt helping you achieve your dream? What if the knowledge you gain isn't so much interesting as terrifying? Even thinking about real-world explorers, they often confronted some serious moral dilemmas and tough choices.
I think 'Uncover the secrets of magic' can generate similar conflicts, it is just an academic form of exploring.
Liberate the oppressed, well who's the oppressor, and what worse things will happen if people are liberated? How far are you willing to go? Is death better than slavery?
What cost is acceptable in founding a nation and what does it cost to earn your clan's loyalty?
Which side is really darkness? If you are willing to go to any length, at what point do you become the same as the bad guys? Is it really all that black and white? What sacrifice are you willing to make to get the job done?
Is your liege lady worthy of this sort of loyalty? What if she asks you to do things you find unacceptable?
Aid the helpless. Who deserves this aid? Only people you deem to be 'worthy'? What if your enemy is helpless?
So, in my play of DW (or 4e for that matter) these are the sorts of questions that are going to arise. I'm going to ask ALL of those sorts of questions, and they will be posed in the form of situations which the PCs must resolve! Your liege lady IS going to ask you to do something you may not find acceptable. Why? Are you going to do it? What happens if you refuse? Nothing about any of these agendas will remain theoretical, but at the same time the players are going to generate the questions, and often come up with the material that will feed into the situations where the moves needed to put the PCs between a rock and a hard place can happen. Exploration in DW is not "satisfying curiosity" in just a touristy sense. Its "your fundamental beliefs and ideals, and/or your family/society/religion/whatever you value is under direct assault, and you need to make a hard choice here..." It will ALWAYS play out that way, too! It is guaranteed by the structure of the system. It might even be a good exercise to see how each agenda item and DW mechanism come together to achieve that in detail.
Many of the Fronts directly associate with these shared themes of Heroism, Discovery, Liberation, Politics, and Hidden Secrets. The Shadow Druids, for example, use a fungus that turns dead bodies into fungal zombies ("shroombies" as the players call them), or if infected in the blood of a living person, absorbs that person into a dark hive-mind. How this works is not yet clear, but the party is working to uncover how, and has dealt telling blows to the group in the past, making them much less of a threat now.
OK, but why do these Shadow Druids exist? What relation do they have to the PCs? Are they carrying out this program for a reason? Even if they are just 'there' and 'existing', who decides that the PCs have a right to wipe them out? I can think of many ways to tie this back to the list of agendas you've stated. How does the PC's family history link up with this group? Is such destructive magic something which should be known or is it 'knowledge man should not have', and if you are a researcher into magic, what is your responsibility here? I can go on obviously, almost any agenda could link in here to a degree. Now, this group might be more aimed at certain characters, but there should be situations that address all of them.
The Raven-Shadow assassin-cult heretics also have deep secrets, revealing much information about the ancient days, and the party has discovered how devilish forces have apparently manipulated these folks for a very long time; this gives the party both reasons to feel bad for them (they can't help that devils have deceived them for over a thousand years!) and to oppose them (they're an assassin-cult, it's not exactly hard to call them evil).
The black dragon is trying to become absolute ruler of their home city, using economics and soft power from the shadows, creating oppression through monetary control and (apparently) via addictive alchemical concoctions. The Cult of the Burning Eye is a bit too crazy to directly be oppressive, but is much more of an overt security threat, and has links to nasty aberrations and such like mind flayers and oblexes and such which do do the whole magical (or rather psionic) enslavement thing.
I mean, these can all tie in by making threats to things the PCs care about, and asking questions like "how far will you go to protect your..." etc. They seem like reasonably classic 'fronts'.
And every time they overcome these forces there's always the chance for learning something new, or to meet prospective teachers and/or students. Even when they aren't directly facing these fronts, there's the intentionally-mysterious and complicated world of Jinnistan and its power plays and diplomatic struggles, places throughout the deep desert where lost cities or archaeological sites have hidden for centuries or millennia, opportunities to establish their reputations or stake claims that will advance their long-term goals, etc.
It seems like there's a heavy exploration theme, and a sense of their being a lot of established backstory, though it could be more the way you present it (IE maybe all this was established in play). Nothing wrong with that theme of course. I would just observe that classically a thematic focus like this in DW would be player-driven and the 'exploration' would be more "the players making up a lot of stuff."
Well, as stated, I prepped stuff specifically for OOC player-request reasons, so "ultimately" the reason is "because my players asked for a kinda-fluffy low-engagement adventure, and Explore A Lost Ruin fits in well with that." However, in terms of story, the party had just returned to town from doing some things at the Bard's behest (helping with religious initiation rituals so the Bard could find a way to rehabilitate the Raven-Shadow cultists, because he wants to save them from their darkness, if he can), but they were feeling a bit light in the pockets as they'd had to invest various amounts on prior adventures.
Visiting an ally of theirs, the artificer wizard Hafsa, they were offered a job much like the very first adventure they'd gone on; she'd heard through her wizard-college connections that a legendary lost genie-made city had recently been rediscovered. Since Hafsa has a thing for ancient relics (particularly if they relate to magical items and/or practices), she's willing to pay them for whatever they can uncover, but they have to get going soon, as if she has learned about this, you can guarantee others have too. So they did some research on the city: legends claim it was in an active caldera and ruled by both efreet and marids (fire and water genies). They visited an alchemist they know, who (after a successful Supply roll) hooked them up with some alchemical protection against the expected dangers of such a place, and then they set out.
Their Perilous Journey went well, but they had to think fast to avoid a fight with some semi-elemental wild beasts of the deep desert (hellcats), which a collaboration between the Battlemaster and Bard resolved most handily. Arriving at the entrance of the city, just after sunset...they found their missing Druid friend!* He had been returned to the world there by celestial beings in order that he rejoin the party, but possibly also for other reasons (the Druid is convinced he was sent to this specific spot for a reason--we have yet to find out what that reason is.) After spending the evening joyfully reconnecting with (or, in the Spellslinger's case, meeting) their friend, they settled down in the entryway for the night. (This is where we broke for that evening; everything after was the next, and as of today most current, session.)
From there, they entered into the city hoping to learn its history and find valuables (both in terms of knowledge and in terms of treasure) to bring back with them. Discovering the market square up front was the result of a successful roll, followed by another successful roll that demonstrated the absence of traps or hazards to be concerned about. Discovering that it was a slave market was the result of an unsuccessful one, as there would be little treasure there (the place had had rather more living valuables, unfortunately...) and painting this society as much more openly wicked than was hoped (meaning the history of this place will likely be more distressing and unpleasant for the Bard, who was the one that rolled the 6- on this Discern Realities roll.)
However, given it was a slave market and slaves are usually expensive, they advanced further into the city and discovered basically the "financial district," since so much coin flowing around the slave market made it natural to put money-management places nearby. Other successful rolls established that there at least had been another, larger group of looters in the area, and they found good evidence that these looters were nearby. However, instead of following up on that, they followed up on a different Discern Realities answer, strange scorched footprints on the stone that even the Bard (with his Bestiary of Creatures Unusual) couldn't identify--a distinctly unusual thing (implying whatever created those footprints isn't even remotely a beast of any kind).
They ran into some fire elementals that had been bound by magic to take approximately humanoid form, and the elementals began approaching menacingly; the Battlemaster and Druid collaborated to command the elementals not to attack them (Battlemaster using Parley, Druid using Elemental Mastery). Battlemaster did just fine, but the Druid only got a partial success, and chose his one result as "the effect you desire comes to pass." Nature's price (which I must admit took me a second to think up) was that he became elementally aspected toward fire: he cannot take the form of spirits related to air, earth, or water (meaning anything that can fly, anything aquatic, or anything that burrows) until he discharges this elemental imbalance or spends a long time meditating to restore his own elemental balance, but being aspected to fire infuses his attacks with literal firepower (a bit of extra damage, and his attacks can ignite flammables.) He also didn't retain control, which I said meant that the fire-elemental-guard-things, rather than attacking, lined back up again and started marching off in a completely different direction, so the party chose to follow them. They managed to stop the fire-elemental-guard-things from going into a building the Battlemaster recognized as a barracks attached to the royal palace, and that's where we broke for the evening.
This got really long, sorry about that. Was trying to cover as much as I could remember.
*This, I will grant, looks like a pretty blatant use of Force, ensuring that the Druid player actually gets to play instead of waiting in the wings for a more organic introduction point. I felt this was appropriate, even within the principles and agendas of Dungeon World, as the Druid had waited almost a full session already.
Yeah, I don't run Dungeon World as a pressure cooker, because it would stress out my players and make them dread attending sessions. That doesn't mean there is no pressure at all, there totally is, and there have been times where they had to act fast in order to prevent something Really Truly Awful from happening. But I pump the breaks now and then so that the players can relax a bit and just explore a fantastical world together, without needing to feel like reality is breathing down their necks. If I had to give an analogy, it would be the difference between a roller coaster and a horseback ride. Riding either one can be full of exhilaration and excitement and even fear, but a roller coaster is almost constant tension all the time, whereas riding on horseback you can slow down to soak things up before you move on to other things.
I think this is fundamentally where you are distinct from @Manbearcat at least. I'm not sure about @pemerton, but I suspect he would also focus a lot more on the 'putting pressure on the PCs' aspect. Personally I wouldn't put any words in the mouths of the designers of DW in terms of how they envisage pressure, but my understanding of the text of the game seems to tell me that they'd consider your approach to be rather 'softball'. I don't see a reason to be critical of that. I can also understand why other DW GMs might feel like the game you're running is not 'purist' DW. My own games can get fairly intense, but I understand that there are times when players might get lazy, and every group is different.
Much of that fantastical world, I never planned. It just happened, spontaneously, as we played. Some parts I did plan, but only loosely, usually based on Session 0 things and expressed interests of the players or the characters. I did not, for example, plan out any specific interactions between the party Bard and his devilish ancestor, whomever that may be; but I did plan that he has a devilish ancestor, a powerful one (Bard has successfully narrowed it down, albeit by tapping every resource readily available, to either Baalzephon or Glasya herself, and he's not super happy about either option). Leaping straight to a direct answer would be both unsatisfying and not entirely in keeping with the established fiction, as that side of the character's tiefling blood was established to be old--the player himself established that no one in the family knew anything specific about his father's heritage other than that it went back a long way (he's related to a saint from many centuries ago on that side of his family--also a tiefling).
This message is already long enough, so I'll save my reply to you for later @pemerton . But I assure you a reply will come.
Sounds pretty classic DW to a large degree. Certainly the GM should feel welcome to establish some significant elements in the fiction themselves too. I do think your DW is a bit more 'classic' in some respects. Maybe that is more presentation than substance, but it is definitely true that the game veers more in the direction of pressure cooker than what you describe.
Then honestly I give up any attempt to understand what "Force" means. My every effort has failed.
That one was because I expected the in-town preparations to be a quick affair and instead my players spent a lot of time chatting up Hafsa (they hadn't seen her or her fiancee in a while), and then I took longer than expected to whip up stat blocks for the hellcats that ended up (mostly) not being needed, as the players avoided getting into a fight with them. (Their ability to track by scent was relevant, but otherwise none of the monster moves were very relevant due to the specific way they avoided the fight--getting them to go after some male antelope that had gotten into a competition for a mate.) I'd intended for it to be a relatively short thing and then he'd be in the action, but my intent rarely works out when it comes to how long things will take.
As noted above, I am--or at least was--earnestly trying to understand what "Force" means. I had assumed "make it so the character definitely appears here, where the players just happen to be" automatically made it Force because I was doing what was convenient to keeping the game going, as referenced earlier with Force being what is used to make desirable results happen.
So...yeah. I honestly have no idea what's supposed to differentiate "scene framing," "Force," and the player-triggered-DM-authorship stuff that had confused me so much.
Incidentally, I still plan to respond to your above post. I just felt these were short so I could get them out quick.
I have definitely heard 'classic RPG' GMs state that certain instances of scene framing scanned as 'force' to them. Specifically I think @Lanefan might remember a thread where an example came up where we discussed framing a scene in a dwarf settlement, and then framing a scene involving some exploration stemming from that where the PCs confront some sort of threat to the dwarves, and someone immediately objected to the scene framing itself. The objection was that it is 'FORCING THE PCS' to move them from the settlement to the encounter without describing every single corridor and bit of environment in between. The logic was that the player's lacked autonomy to wander aimlessly and they seemed convinced that there must be SOME sort of possibility of this wandering around opening up some alternative course that was thus being 'denied' to the players, forcing them into a specific situation.
The problem with that interpretation, IMHO, is that it casts basically all play as being forceful. In other words, if I say "well, there's nothing interesting in those tunnels, the PCs eventually come to a spot where they have encounter X." how is that different from a GM literally authoring all those empty tunnels and playing it out? I see no reason to see the two as different, except in terms of in the scene-framing case we didn't waste a lot of time describing lots of empty tunnels. In a DW game I look at the "terrain being explored" as the STORY, not some sort of made-up environment. I mean, honestly, DW specifically to me is less a game about exploring terrain than about exploring CHARACTER. So, if the situation that is being generated (scene framed) is addressing a player's evinced areas of dramatic interest, then its not really meaningful to call it force. Now, maybe in a classic AD&D game if the GM just uprooted the PCs and dumped them into a situation of his choice in some distant location, that WOULD be force, but I think force needs more context, it could look different in different games.
I'm going to give 3 examples within the same scene of what Force would look like in Dungeon World.
Situation: The players are looking for a witness who can finger a powerful figure in the city over something important. They've located someone that is a prospect but the GM has made a soft move signaling they're either too terrified to intercede or just not sufficiently incentivized. They're in the apartment of the NPC.
STRATEGIC VIOLATION
Something like a piece of parchment on the drawing table with a not-so-veiled threat to pay the gambling debt immediately or a waste bin with a crumpled handkerchief covered in bloody black expectorant. Some kind of something that can be used for leverage downstream in subsequent moves (Parley or perhaps even Lay on Hands) to earn the NPCs trust/favor/good will. The NPC should have a dramatic need which is responsive to the player.
If the GM (instead of the above) goes on to describe nothing of consequence or something entirely unrelated it is either because (a) Force via incompetence (the GM just doesn't suss out what is happening here, doesn't clarify, or they just don't know what they should be doing with DR outcomes), (b) Force via prescriptive backstory which shuts down the prospects of wooing this witness (that shouldn't be a thing in DW), or (c) Force because the GM just wants the "find a witness" situation to drag on and fill more play time.
Regardless of whether its (a), (b), or (c), it is the GM subordinating the player's strategic move made and the system's say and supplanted them with an unresponsive alternative authored by the GM.
TACTICAL VIOLATION
The Paladin PC's player says "As we attempt to parley with the witness, I'm standing next to the witness...close enough that I can always intercede if a sniper fires a volley through the window or a Wizard casts a spell or whatever. With Staunch Defender, I get 1 Hold even on a 6- so I can turn any attack against the witness onto me."
If the GM then erects some kind of poisoned drink "OH THIS BOTTLE OF BRIGHTMOOR VINTAGE JUST ARRIVED THIS MORNING > GRAB > SIP" because they think they can finagle the language of Defend to get around the Paladin's move (by the way...before we even get into Force, I would say that adjudication - that poisoned wine glass doesn't constitute an attack that someone can Defend against "An attack is any action you can interfere with that has harmful effects" - is not an appropriate reading of the text and certainly not with the present fictional positioning where a Paladin is "bodyguarding" a witness for harm...the trope of interceding a charge from drinking a poisoned chalice is a normative one)...that is Force. The GM is subordinating the player's tactical move (they're affecting the orientation of things in the imagined space to deploy their auto-1 Hold to intercede) and in its stead supplanting it with an alternative fiction ("the guy is dead because Defend won't let you intervene here - MEGA-ULTRA DEGENERATE FORCE - or "you're going to have to act fast <hence the GM is making up a fiction to now gate the protection of this guy behind a Defy Danger Dex move - not a Paladin's strongsuit! - despite the preemptive move the Paladin made to protect him> or the guy is drinking the poison."
Like I argued above, I think this is also a violation of "system's say" (Defend with the appropriate fictional positioning - you're right there - should absolutely fold this kind of intercession into it) so the GM can subordinate a player's tactical input and supplant it with the GM's alternative.
THEMATIC VIOLATION
Take the exact situation above. Let us say the Paladin has the Alignment "Endanger yourself to protect those weaker than you." A skillful DW GM should be aiming for situation framing and/or be responsive to player cues that puts Alignments and Bonds into the crosshairs each session.
In the above scenario, we would have BOTH a violation of a player's Tactical and Thematic input.
Aggressively working to shut down the player actuating their expressed dramatic need? Force over thematics.
There is no prior fictional positioning that should make this witness not "weaker than the Paladin" and you suddenly whip up a fiction to shut that down (his station or capability in the scene is amplified to make this Paladin : witness relationship tilt away from "weaker than the Paladin"...? Force. Or the GM somehow makes it impossible via situation framing for the Paladin to endanger themselves. Force.
Honestly, this is such a perfect case of a GM framing a scene that is responsive to the Paladin player's evinced dramatic need (which, again, you should be aiming at trying to skillfully test the fiction with these things at least every other session...at the least - each session if possible...if you get a golden opportunity like this? Exploit it!)...to not do so would constitute "Force by way of GM Error" in my opinion.
Long story short.
At End of Session, the Paladin's player SHOULD be able to tick their "Alignment xp box" (because they fulfilled it. If they haven't, the GM has intentionally deployed Force or incompetently shut down the player's thematic interests by (OOPS) supplanting it with alternative framing that renders "Endanger yourself to protect those weaker than you" not in-play.
Hopefully, those examples using the same scene help people understand what Force is, how it looks in play, and (for those who have participated in DW), how trivial it should be to spot.
No disagreement with your analysis. I would just point out that it is very hard for people steeped in purely GM-Directed reveal-the-backstory (Story First) process of play to even SEE it. I expect the objections would all be along the lines of things like "but then how does the GM lay out the plot with the witness unless he can define how the interaction with the PCs works?" or some variation of that, or else even harder core some statement about how the GM 'MUST' be in charge of the backstory in an RPG! etc.
Likewise they might see the second situation as simply an application of 'the rules', where again the fundamental agenda of DW is not grasped. You are applying ABSTRACT PRINCIPLES in service of the game's agenda, any action the Paladin takes which involves his defending move MUST be honored because it is an evocation of the character's concept. That simply doesn't scan in something like classic AD&D play, which is predicated on puzzle-solving activity and by selecting the wrong move the Paladin has 'lost'. Of course classic play would insist that the situation be determined BEFOREHAND, and the application of force could still be levied by observing that the GM invented the poison wine in response to the player's action declaration (IE guarding against attacks). Anyway, I actually think this sort of misstep is likely to happen now and then in DW. Not every GM is some godlike figure who's able to suss out the most direct and immediate interpretation of a situation in the abstract and translate that to an extrapolation of whatever move was made. One might also ask whether or not there were other measures the paladin player could have evoked and how those relate to the concept of skilled play in DW (IE DR could have identified something like this threat and given an equivalent degree of forward when it presented itself).
Your third observation likewise could be something which escapes some GMs at times, that situations MUST be cast in terms of addressing the PC's alignment or bonds in all possible cases. I think its a fair conclusion in the example, but I also think that real world play is rarely quite so clean (at the very least there are other players present, so it is usually a choice of which one's get picked out for attention at a given moment). Its a decent illustration though and a truth of DW play that scenes need to be framed in reference to addressing bonds/alignment consistently. There is literally NO POINT to a scene in DW which doesn't do so (I guess it could be a transition, but that would be more likely to evoke questions from the GM to the players about the environment instead, so just serving the cause in a different way).
Well, this is an interesting question, and it is one of those things that is hard to know what is best. I mean, I'm happy playing something that is D&D-adjacent, and thus leveling up and such feels comfortable to me. OTOH certainly if you are aiming to emulate legends and myths that is a bit problematic. There are some subgenre of legends where characters seem to 'progress' in a sense, or where progression would work thematically (King Arthur starts out as a mere squire and supposedly son of a knight, but ends up the son of a king and a powerful king with a magic weapon, etc.). So, which exactly genre do we aim at, and how do we execute that? Actually 4e isn't far off of the 'King Arthur' sort of thing, PCs are definitely heroes from day one. Maybe the main question with 4e's character progression is more just the strong 'kitchen sink fantasy' genre that it carries with it. If the goal was STRICTLY limited to simply getting closer to classic folklore, then I would just reskin a lot of 4e material. So, my ANSWER is that leveling up is a thing in HoML, but that does push against doing stories like classic Greek heroic Myths, as the main characters in those are pretty consistently superhuman (and almost all demigods).
I like everything about this, especially as it relates to heroic campaigns.
Fate sounds really cool. It reminds me a little bit of Joss in the Gygax game Dangerous Journeys, at least the way we used it, which was specifically for narrative and mechanical purposes.
I never got exposed to that game... I'm definitely also open to some alternative formulations or just tweaks. I'm not 100% sure how well it works. I've found that people who are used to playing things like D&D still tend to neglect using it. OTOH, as I said, if the narrative focus is correct then they probably don't NEED to very often.
This sounds like a really cool mechanic/playstyle to promote the creativity of the player's options. I imagine you will get a lot of creative ideas since they won't be always bound with daily and encounter powers.
This sounds like it already has talent in it.
Good luck. Sounds like you all will have a blast.
Well, there are of course pitfalls with a 'power point' mechanic, as was discovered by 4e in PHB3 (it was an issue with spamming) that AEDU avoided. So that element requires some fairly careful design of powers. There are a few tricky areas in terms of the degree to which the GM should enforce the allocation of Boons (basically the stuff you get as you level up) as narrative consequences vs the players being in charge of them. I think maybe at least part of the answer is to emphasize Quests as a really formal mechanic. So the player can say "I'm questing for the Vorpal Sword." and that could pretty much define a boon they're going to get, though it might be within the GM's purview to determine exactly what a Vorpal Sword is, and maybe the scope of the quest (IE is it something that they're going to find at the end of the next encounter, or is it something they're going to have to spend a story arc achieving).
Its definitely a work in progress, I've written a few board game/war game rules sets that got some play, but not really anything like this before.
In my BW game where I play Thurgon I'm the sole player. I have two characters - Thurgon and Aramina. Under the build rules Thurgon is the main character (5 lifepaths: Born Noble, Page, Squire, Religious Acoloyte, Knight of a Holy Military Order) and Aramina the sidekick/companion (3 lifepaths: City Born, Neophyte, Sorcerer). In play, I move between them although if they come into conflict I am Thurgon and my GM plays Aramina.
That sounds pretty much exactly how we handle henches here: the hiring character's player plays them unless there's a conflict, at which point the DM takes over playing the hench until it's sorted.
In my Prince Valiant game there are three or four players depending on who turns up, and currently the party consists of 3 knights, the wife of one of those knights, a warband of around 30 soldiers, and a couple of hunters who are also members of the entourage.
In our Classic Traveller game there are five player positions, although I don't recall if we've ever had all five players at the table at the same time. (We have a default protocol for who controls which positions depending on who turns up.) The smallest position is two characters, the largest about a dozen. In each position there's an informal but fairly clear understanding of which character(s) are main PCs, which are important hangers-on that the player has a say one, and which are mere entourage: and also which are fair game for the GM to use for my own nefarious purposes "behind the scenes" (normally that would be certain "ambiguous" hangers-on).
It's no surprise that our Traveller game doesn't involve as much emotional intensity in the situations and resolutions as the two-person BW game. And the causation there runs in both directions: BW encourages emotional intensity and intimacy, and thus works well for small numbers of participants. Traveller doesn't really encourage emotional intensity or intimacy, but does involve travelling from world to world collecting starship crew, hangers on, specialist assistants, etc. So the size of the (fictional) group grows, and the game can largely handle this.
I don't think I would want to GM a table with nine players. I've done it - back when my Rolemaster campaign was part of a club scene and so had somewhat random recruits - but I think it's not very ideal. These days I would say two or three players is my preferred number: it allows for a bit of conflict and rivalry but there's not too much pressure on who has the focus now.
Nine players is a lot, no argument there. My practical limit these days is four as that's all that'll fit around the table, but I'm happy running five if space allows. Beyond that it gets unwieldy for anything more than a one-off.
Nine characters, however, is a typical party around here; with each of four or five players having one or two PCs and the remainder being henches or adventuring NPCs. Emotional intensity, the way you mean it, isn't a big thing with our crew; though it does rear its head now and again.
I have definitely heard 'classic RPG' GMs state that certain instances of scene framing scanned as 'force' to them. Specifically I think @Lanefan might remember a thread where an example came up where we discussed framing a scene in a dwarf settlement, and then framing a scene involving some exploration stemming from that where the PCs confront some sort of threat to the dwarves, and someone immediately objected to the scene framing itself. The objection was that it is 'FORCING THE PCS' to move them from the settlement to the encounter without describing every single corridor and bit of environment in between. The logic was that the player's lacked autonomy to wander aimlessly and they seemed convinced that there must be SOME sort of possibility of this wandering around opening up some alternative course that was thus being 'denied' to the players, forcing them into a specific situation.
The problem with that interpretation, IMHO, is that it casts basically all play as being forceful. In other words, if I say "well, there's nothing interesting in those tunnels, the PCs eventually come to a spot where they have encounter X." how is that different from a GM literally authoring all those empty tunnels and playing it out? I see no reason to see the two as different, except in terms of in the scene-framing case we didn't waste a lot of time describing lots of empty tunnels. In a DW game I look at the "terrain being explored" as the STORY, not some sort of made-up environment. I mean, honestly, DW specifically to me is less a game about exploring terrain than about exploring CHARACTER.
Which is probably a big difference between our approaches, as to me exploration of terrain is as - if not more - important than exploration of character.
That, and if the tunnels had been played out in detail who's to say the PCs wouldn't have given up and turned back partway through, as a proactive player choice rather than something reactive (or just narrated) after a poor [Find-Your-Way]* die roll.
* - insert suitable-to-system term here that covers an attempt to find a path through a quasi-maze.
So, if the situation that is being generated (scene framed) is addressing a player's evinced areas of dramatic interest, then its not really meaningful to call it force. Now, maybe in a classic AD&D game if the GM just uprooted the PCs and dumped them into a situation of his choice in some distant location, that WOULD be force, but I think force needs more context, it could look different in different games.
