Force is generally used to refer to a particular approach by the GM to authorship: fudging/manipulating the mechanics to achieve a particular outcome; manipulating the backstory to achieve a particular outcome (eg a NPC ally suddenly turns up to take the blow intended for the BBEG); manipulating the backstory to allow the framing of a pre-planned/desired scene without regard to the outcomes of prior scenes (eg inventing a lieutenant to replace a killed BBEG; relocating missed clues to make sure the PCs and thus the players find them); and - maybe a bit more controversially as Force in the literal sense but definitely Force-adjacent - using social cues/pressure to get the players to exercise their authority over action declarations in such a way as to ensure they declare the actions the GM wants them to (eg to ensure that they don't declare actions that would expose the "big reveal" too early, or to make sure that they declare actions that will take their PCs to the "right" locations).
Okay. So...people have made it clear that they see what I do as obvious Force (IIRC "sniffing it out" nearly instantly) but...I don't do any of these. I
never fudge rolls. I never contrive backstory this way, holding myself to
extremely high standards about backstory growth. I certainly wouldn't replace BBEG-Prime with BBEG-Lieutenant (they haven't killed/defeated/turned/etc. any yet so I can't formally say I
don't do it.) If a clue is missed, it's just missed; maybe if the fiction happens to lead back to the clue then they get a second shot, but I would never contrive to ensure the clue is found no matter what. The only one that's hard is that last one, because it's possible I do it not intending to, being all implication and soft-touch stuff. I certainly wouldn't do it
intentionally.
I think this is an area where some care is needed.
For me, nothing makes me feel more alienated from the setting - and hence conscious of its "artificiality" - than needing the GM to tell me the fundamentals of what my character knows and feels and experiences. If my PC is somewhere new, then it makes sense that the GM provides me with new knowledge. But if my PC is engaging with something that they know, that is familiar to them, then the player experience being in contradiction to that doesn't work at all.
This is where, in my view, fictional positioning - understood in a fairly expansive fashion - is crucial. And it is fictional positioning that tends to be ignored in "artificial" examples of Spout Lore or wises. At least, that is how conjectured examples like Wise-ing up or Spouting Lore about various power ups, treasures etc that are not connected to the established setting and the PC's place in it seem to me.
This is curious. If it's not possible to tell you "your character would already know this," that seems to cut off an
enormous amount of interesting stories that depend on, for example, having a cultural background in the setting. It's not really possible to establish absolutely every cultural value a character might pick up over time, nor is it (IMO) very interesting to have every single stricture and ritual of a particular religion narrated out to the party the instant they show up. But if (for example) you have a dominant religion in an area (as is the case in almost all D&D-type games), the player characters as a general rule
should know that (say) white is worn to funerals in this land, or that a censer emitting blue smoke is a traditional sign that someone in the house just got married (a superstition about warding off evil spirits or whatever).
Do those things count as alienating you from the setting if you must be told that your character would already know it? If so, I'm confused how you manage to have characters that adventure in locations where their cultural background is relevant without either (a) just letting the player write that culture all by themselves, which falls into many of the issues I had had with my mistaken understanding of the dwarf forge (that is, unmoored from any fictional tethers and invented by the player for the players' benefit); or (b) literally hashing it all out collaboratively with the DM super far in advance so that you
do already know basically everything relevant about your character's cultural history and awareness.
Just to clarify (and, I hope, not belabor the point) re the setting where this particular Spout Lore-ing was done (some of which has been mentioned, some of which I don't think has been):
Having been presented like this (rather than the original framing which did somewhat confuse me), this sounds perfectly cromulent to me. You had a foundation for there to be hidden things, you had resources you could employ (the books) to reveal information, it was the DM creating a neat opportunity at your prompting rather than you giving yourself an opportunity, etc. Sounds rather similar to stuff I've done, afraid I don't remember any specific examples off the top of my head (we had a low-Int party for quite a while so Spout Lore was relatively rare for about the past year and a half, though that is changing).
A missed Spout Lore roll is not just that there is no information, there are also consequences to it. All missed rolls in PbtA games worsen the position of the characters by triggering a GM move.
I am well aware of the function of the Spout Lore roll, having run a Dungeon World game (augmented with the excellent Grim World third party book, though...without the grimness) for something like three and a half years. Probably three years of weekly sessions if you cut out all the breaks we've had for various reasons.
Not quite. The Spout Lore mechanics the player used require the DM to describe a positive result, exactly in the Luck example. In this thread they have been calling that player authorship, since it's the player's success on their Move that required this, and the player's focus (What do I know about dwarven forges in these mountains / food, warmth, shelter in the tundra) that directs the subject.
I find it different from the Luck example for three reasons:
1) With the Luck roll, it instantly fixes (or both fails to fix and specifically worsens) a problem. Spout Lore provides information. That information may be merely interesting or actively useful, but information alone is usually not enough to fix problems--one must also act, which will either push the fiction forward directly, or invoke a mechanic that will determine how the fiction progresses. (Fail forward, obviously, ensures that things advance in SOME way either way, with results being beneficial, detrimental, or mixed.)
2) Luck is something of a supernatural thing, some sort of numious successful-ness, which doesn't correspond to Spout Lore being rooted in past experiences and knowledge of the character. While this difference does lie in the fiction, it has strong implications for how the luck roll vs Spout Lore will play out (especially since, as noted, the luck roll gets consumed by usage, which is not true of Spout Lore in general.)
3) It's unclear whether it is the player who comes up with the lucky break or the DM, whereas it is clear in Spout Lore that it is the DM who gives the answer, they just do so at player request via invoking a mechanic.
This always comes back to the other principles and agenda in DW. The GM is a fan of the players, we're playing to see what happens, you ask questions, make moves, etc. So, the GM isn't really all that free. The player DID, with SL, determine the general topic of the revealed material, and their need/intent are driving things. The point is, it isn't players or GM in the driver's seat, the game is playing, its engine is running, and both players and GM are adding grist to the mill!
So...that's pretty much exactly what I go for. Which is why I get so confused when I describe things that sound, to my ears, exactly like this, and am then told that obviously I'm just leading my players around by the nose and either using sleight-of-hand or guilt-tripping to make them behave exactly how I want them to behave.
It's also incredibly confusing to call it "player authorship" when the DM
is still the author, they're just authoring "on commission" as it were, prompted by player actions (which may or may not be rolls--"golden opportunities" often come from unwise player choices, for example, and "exploit your prep" requires that you have something you prepped in the first place.) I also don't see, at all, how this is incompatible with (for example) drawing a
loose overall map of a location, such as the map I just drew of the lost city of Al-Shafadir for the session we just had on Monday, with labels on it for a general, loose idea of the neighborhoods visible to the PCs. (It's inside a volcanic caldera and they entered near the rim, so they got a good high-level look at some of the nearby neighborhoods.)
The players entered in an area serving as a market square--no traps there because it would be too much of a hassle to remove them if the city's former rulers wanted to return. But then they got a miss on Spout Lore, so they got to ask one question, knowing they wouldn't care for the results. Turns out this front square wasn't for keeping agricultural goods...it was for keeping
slaves, hence there would be little treasure and painting the former residents of this city in a much darker light than anticipated. (It's known that genies kept slaves in the ancient past; this city apparently made it their stock and trade, which is somewhat worse.) Various opportunities to explore and learn presented themselves, and the party had to choose at one point between following some bizarre scorched footprints on the stone streets, or checking out some clear evidence of looters that had gotten to the city before them. They chose to follow the latter--but that means a golden opportunity to do something with the looters that I
will exploit later. I had, of course, prepared for the possibility that there
could be looters, which a partial-success roll proved was true, and had thought in advance about what kinds of denizens would be present in this city.
From a Doylist perspective, I prepared stuff for this adventure in order to meet OOC player requests. The Bard player was a bit worn out from being the center of attention for a long time, and privately asked for something lighter and fluffier where he could just relax. Another player had also requested more opportunities for combat, and we were going to need to re-introduce our Druid player who had been out of the game for about a year. I drafted up something that seemed a suitably engaging but light adventure (check out a recently-rediscovered lost city) that I knew would be of interest to at least two of the three current players both as players and as characters, and which would fit well with the Druid's unfolding story. It's something of a callback to the very first adventure they went on, way back in 2019.
