I’ve noticed that while often similar the posters supporting a game say different things about it. D&D players do the same with D&D but it’s kind of expected that D&D games will be played very differently. That’s consistently not what’s said about these games. IMO this is part of the source of repeated questions.
I've made two fairly recent posts in the thread addressing this (
239 and
288).
And of course more could be made - see eg
@Aldarc's fairly recent reply to
@Crimson Longinus, setting out some aspects of methodology (
289).
The rule is
if you do it, you do it. When, in the fiction, are you "doing it"? That's a matter that might differ from table to table. Eg further upthread, I gave the following example of doing something while under serious pressure, triggering
acting under fire:
*Domino's player says "Great, that went well. I get on my bike and ride out towards the salt flats, but not all the way yet. I want to get a view from the Harvest Ridge." And then Domino's player looks at the GM.
*That action declaration doesn't trigger any player-side move, and so the GM makes a move, but a soft one - "You head up towards the ridge. But you hear a funny noise from the engine - something's not working right, and it's pretty loud too. What do you do?" This is the GM "activating their stuff’s downside."
*The player says "Fine, I turn back. I don't want any of Dremmer's scouts to catch me". Now the player is making a move (as per p 190) - "When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. . . . You can read 'under fire' to mean any kind of serious pressure at all." The pressure here is that Domino is out half-way to the Salt Flats, with a dodgy engine.
Now maybe at @Manbeacat's table that would be some sort of weaksauce thing that doesn't count as pressure at all! Different tables, different players, different moods on different days all bring differences of aesthetics, differences of judgement, etc.
To me, that's a virtue among humans, not a flaw.
You can see the same thing in discussions of
when is Hack & Slash triggered in DW play? Aldarc quoted the dragon example. Ironsworn gives a similar example (p 208):
A leviathan is an ancient sea beast (page 154). It’s tough to kill because of its epic rank, and it inflicts epic harm, but it doesn’t have any other mechanical characteristics. If we look to the fiction of the leviathan’s, description, we see “flesh as tough as iron.” But, rolling a Strike against a leviathan is the same as against a common thug. In either case, it’s your action die, plus your stat and adds compared to the challenge dice. Your chances to score a strong hit, weak hit, or miss are the same.
So how do you give the leviathan its due as a terrifying, seemingly invulnerable foe? You do it through the fiction.
If you have sworn a vow to defeat a leviathan, are you armed with a suitable weapon? Punching it won’t work. Even a deadly weapon such as a spear would barely get its attention. Perhaps you undertook a quest to find the Abyssal Harpoon, an artifact from the Old World, carved from the bones of a long-dead sea god. This mythic weapon gives you the fictional framing you need to confront the monster, and finding it can count as a milestone on your vow to destroy this beast.
Even with your weapon at the ready, can you overcome your fears as you stand on the prow of your boat, the water surging beneath you, the gaping maw of the beast just below the surface? Face Danger with +heart to find out.
The outcome of your move will incorporate the leviathan’s devastating power. Did you score a miss? The beast smashes your boat to kindling. It tries to drag you into the depths. Want to Face Danger by swimming away? You can’t outswim a leviathan. You’ll have to try something else.
Remember the concepts behind fictional framing. Your readiness and the nature of your challenge may force you to overcome greater dangers and make additional moves. Once you’ve rolled the dice, your fictional framing provides context for the outcome of those moves.
What this means is that
what counts as proper fictional positioning to Strike a leviathan, or to Hack & Slash a dragon, or to escape from such a foe by Defying/Facing Danger, will depend on each table. There is no canonical answer. Again, this is a virtue.
You can see a similar thing, too, in discussions of other systems. See eg these posts from
@Manbearcat about Torchbearer:
The above is quite different than a question of, say, "how do we hack Torchbearer to support Town-based Adventures?" Now I'm thinking about how several, very important, integrated components of Torchbearer are impacted:
<snip details>
Torchbearer is profoundly more integrated and intricate than any PBtA game so you have major design and cascade implications when you try to perturb and/or reskin/remap the system. You can absolutely do it (I've run Town Adventures), but you better_know_what the hell_you're doing. You better know the system very well in all the discrete ways mentioned above and in how they integrate. PBtA design doesn't have this kind of concerns. But its a tradeoff, because you can't get the sort of amazing intricacy of decision-space management in any PBtA game as you do in Torchbearer. That isn't to say that the decision-space management in various PBtA games isn't intricate or extremely consequential (a well-run DW game by an agile, aggressive GM who understands the levers/widgets/attrition model can be a harrowing experience), but it just cannot rise to the level of Torchbearer...and that is due to the nature of design tradeoffs and their impact on play.
Now none of that is to say that Dungeon World doesn't have a substantial and compelling Gamist layer when run and played both correctly, deftly, and aggressively. However, that Gamist layer is not "dungeon explorer-centered" and its 100 % not "map-and-key-dungeon-explorer-centered" (like B/X or Torchbearer).
Now I've run "town adventures" in Torchbearer 2e (see eg
this actual play report). They didn't particularly involve map-and-key. The Grind still mattered, but the light clock was not a factor.
Does the mean I'm doing Torchbearer "wrong"? Well
@Manbearcat is yet to make the trans-continental + trans-Pacific journey to come and personally remonstrate with me! I think he already knows that my table is lighter on consequences than his, and not just in Torchbearer play.
Yet I've never had any issues discussing RPGing with Manbearcat, be that Torchbearer or 4e D&D or Dungeon World or whatever else. It is possible for two people to grasp the design architecture of a game, to put that architecture to work, and yet to not play games that are clones of one another.
