Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
What if game C can provides experience X and experience Y, but perhaps neither in the same way or even to the same degree as games A or B. Am I allowed to talk about how I feel then?
Recurring silly comment about Apocalypse World and similar RPGs
- Thread starter pemerton
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AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, college professors are real d***s, they have all this data! Especially, ew, philosophers!
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
You're assuming the place is still being used for its original intended purpose...or used at all, for that matter.
Consider this for a dungeon complex's history:
The mad wizard built the underground complex (and the now-ruined castle above it) to suit his needs, sure; but that was 800 years ago. Since then it's been remodelled and expanded by the large village worth of Orcs who lived here from about 700 to 600 years ago, it's suffered a partial cave-in as a result of major flooding 400 years ago, and it was taken over and remodelled/expanded again by an adventuring company as their home base some 300 years ago; this company also bricked off some of the original wizard's construction out of (erroneous) concern those areas were unsafe. The adventurers gave up on the place 240 years ago, after which a second band of Orcs moved in and in their feeble attempts at renovations almost brought the whole complex down on their own heads. They left well over 100 years ago; since then the only real changes are that a couple of Umber Hulks tunnelled in to the lower level, and recently some bandits moved in who are slowly a) shoring up the walls and b) trying to access the various bricked-off bits as they've come to realize this place is bigger than they first realized.
The complex today is hugely bigger than the bandits will ever need. Hence, lots of very explainable empty areas if-when a party's mission is to go wipe out the bandits.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
The Dungeon Safety Council Interdungeon Working Group Construction Code SPECIFICALLY outlaws one-way opening doors! Section C.2 subparts ii, iii, and vi, taken as a whole, clearly indicate that every door shall open in either direction and spring automatically back into a closed position. Nor shall they contain windows or other lights. Sheesh, I thought every DM knew this stuff. What's your DM license # anyway? Do you have the official E. Gary Gygax signature card? So many posers nowadays!
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Not a fan of being yelled at, and not sure what you're trying to accomplish by it. I suppose to me, the very specific move rules, strong emphasis on a particular style of play, GM restrictions, and even the terms bandied about discussing it ("scene framing" and "no-myth" seem vaguely elitist to me; I'm sure I'm reading too much into it) all turn me off. I am not intending to insult the preferences of others by explaining my dislike, and I'm getting tired of having my character impungned because some people don't how I explain my dislike for these kinds of games. You want to come to a thread about a game you like and talk about your issues with it? No problem. I'm a big fan of devil's advocate as a concept.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
There's lot of reasons for dungeons though. Are all the ones in DW made by mad wizards on a budget?
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Sorry, that's a whole lot of memos that just didn't make it this far west.
License? I don't need no stinkin' license.
Will a Dave Arneson signature DM screen suffice?
Posers, hosers, and open-door closers.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Will this be on the midterm?Yeah, college professors are real d***s, they have all this data! Especially, ew, philosophers!
As you know, I think you're one of the most thoughtful posters on these boards, and your posts about "if you do it, you do it" in particular have been a big help to my GMing, especially Classic Traveller.
So this post is not any sort of petty quibble or disagreement with your posts. It's more some thoughts prompted by them, and by some other back-and-forths that have taken place in this thread.
On "diversity": it seems to me that, even within the universe of Apocalypse World and similar/related RPGs, there is scope for diversity. This has come up in previous threads about the game (eg the gyrocopter) and in this thread about @loverdrive's door.
In AW (from pp 108-16),
The GM's agenda is to Make Apocalypse World seem real, to Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring, and to Play to find out what happens.
In service of this agenda, the GM should always say What the rules demand (which in particular includes the rules about the conversation, and the place of moves in that), What your prep demands (which involves the GM making binding decisions, in advance, about how certain fictional elements are related to one another, and what their aspirations/goals/inclinations are), What honesty demands (no gotchas, no holding back information to try and trick the players, etc), and What the principles demand.
And here are the principles:
In service of this agenda, the GM should always say What the rules demand (which in particular includes the rules about the conversation, and the place of moves in that), What your prep demands (which involves the GM making binding decisions, in advance, about how certain fictional elements are related to one another, and what their aspirations/goals/inclinations are), What honesty demands (no gotchas, no holding back information to try and trick the players, etc), and What the principles demand.
And here are the principles:
• Address yourself to the characters, not the players.
• Name everyone, make everyone human.
• Think offscreen too.
• Make your move, but misdirect.
• Make your move, but never speak its name.
Adhering to these principles establishes the players' sense of the fiction, its internal logic, its emotional imperatives, etc. The GM is "announcing future badness", but the player is focused on Dremmer's scouts - Boar Knuckles and Peeler - approaching Isle, guns at the ready, while she's outside the hardhold scavenging for <whatever>. "Thinking offscreen" means having regard to that prep as soft moves are made and hard moves thereby set up.
• Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.
• Sometimes, disclaim decision-making.
These principles establish the balance between player and GM, and between what's strikingly deliberate, and what's not, in the authorship of fiction. Like, when in my Torchbearer game I had Megloss conjure forth the Flames of the Shroud and incinerate the NPC Gerda, that was me as GM making a strikingly deliberate decision to pour on pressure and up the stakes. On the other hand, earlier in the session, when it came time to negotiate a kill conflict compromise with Fea-bella's player, I said "What do you think of this: Gerda runs Fea-bella through the heart with her spear; but if Fea-bella has the will to live then, instead of dying, she is purged of her lust for the cured Elf-stone?" And the player said "Yes" - and so we worked through that.
But other times there's an element of punting. In Torchbearer, this is mostly via the various event rolls built into the system. AW has its own techniques, that Baker explains on p 115. Disclaiming not only eases the "moral" burden on the GM; it also helps reinforce the "reality" of the fiction.
• Barf forth apocalyptica.
• Look through crosshairs.
These really speak to the colour and themes of AW: life is hard, and cheap.
• Respond with <mischief> and intermittent rewards.
• Be a fan of the players’ characters.
As Baker elaborates (pp 113-14), "Put your bloody fingerprints all over everything you touch." But also
These principles go to colour and tone, but also to stakes, and why players play the game: perhaps to just get what they want for their PCs.
• Name everyone, make everyone human.
• Think offscreen too.
• Make your move, but misdirect.
• Make your move, but never speak its name.
Adhering to these principles establishes the players' sense of the fiction, its internal logic, its emotional imperatives, etc. The GM is "announcing future badness", but the player is focused on Dremmer's scouts - Boar Knuckles and Peeler - approaching Isle, guns at the ready, while she's outside the hardhold scavenging for <whatever>. "Thinking offscreen" means having regard to that prep as soft moves are made and hard moves thereby set up.
• Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.
• Sometimes, disclaim decision-making.
These principles establish the balance between player and GM, and between what's strikingly deliberate, and what's not, in the authorship of fiction. Like, when in my Torchbearer game I had Megloss conjure forth the Flames of the Shroud and incinerate the NPC Gerda, that was me as GM making a strikingly deliberate decision to pour on pressure and up the stakes. On the other hand, earlier in the session, when it came time to negotiate a kill conflict compromise with Fea-bella's player, I said "What do you think of this: Gerda runs Fea-bella through the heart with her spear; but if Fea-bella has the will to live then, instead of dying, she is purged of her lust for the cured Elf-stone?" And the player said "Yes" - and so we worked through that.
But other times there's an element of punting. In Torchbearer, this is mostly via the various event rolls built into the system. AW has its own techniques, that Baker explains on p 115. Disclaiming not only eases the "moral" burden on the GM; it also helps reinforce the "reality" of the fiction.
• Barf forth apocalyptica.
• Look through crosshairs.
These really speak to the colour and themes of AW: life is hard, and cheap.
• Respond with <mischief> and intermittent rewards.
• Be a fan of the players’ characters.
As Baker elaborates (pp 113-14), "Put your bloody fingerprints all over everything you touch." But also
Intermittently, though, right, give one of the players’ characters exactly what she hoped for, and maybe go a little beyond. Do it just enough, and not when they expect it, so that they always hope that this time is one of the times that it’ll work out. A third of the time? Half? Not rare, just not predictable.
These principles go to colour and tone, but also to stakes, and why players play the game: perhaps to just get what they want for their PCs.
The agenda and the principles do not require that, at every moment, the GM must push as hard as possible towards conflict. (And Baker's earlier game In A Wicked Age. in its discussion of GM scene-framing techniques and responsibilities, has (on p 11) a nice discussion of how to rush up to a conflict, how to circle around a conflict, and how to draw a conflict out where one doesn't presently exist.) And I think there is quite reasonable scope here for variation, across GMs and across tables and across games.
At some DW tables, the door is, in itself, a threat, and so any response to it is Defying Danger (as per p 62 of the DW rulebooks, the trigger for Defy Danger is When you act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity). At others, the door is just a bit of colour that is narrated, and the cleric's attempt to open it is just something resolved by way of a soft move, which may be any of the examples @loverdrive provided, or @AbdulAlhazred and my suggestions upthread that it just opens to reveal something else. I mean, what the principles demand and what prep demands and what will make the fiction seem real and what will make the PCs' lives not boring is infinitely varied, depending on details of established fiction, prior prep, mood and taste, etc, etc.
And of course if the GM narrates a colour door, and then the player of the fighter goes all bend bars/life gates on it, well then it's no longer colour! The player has made it an "active" part of the fiction, and the GM's job is to follow that lead. (Edwards had a nice video on this idea, of play turning background/colour "furniture" into something more active - he calls it "people" - which I discussed in this thread a few years ago.)
I don't think it helps our discussion of RPGing in general, or of AW and its cousins in particular, to be overly prescriptive about how intense the play should be in rushing up to conflict. It's not like these are resource-heavy games whose engines will break down if the GM lets up (cf Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, which do need a certain intensity of conflict to soak up the fate and persona points that players naturally accrue playing the game; Torchbearer 2e has an explicit discussion of this in the Scholar's Guide). If the principles are followed, and the GM makes their moves, then things will naturally head towards the crunch-points that enliven player side moves, and hence trigger hard moves from the GM, and thus get things snowballing.
***********************
On "easiness" of GMing: when I was young, and still early in my GMing "career" ( around 1984/5), I read Lewis Pulsipher's articles on how to GM (in a couple of White Dwarf compilations - the articles themselves are from the late 70s and early 80s). At that time, I didn't realise that there were multiple viable ways to do RPGing, so I read his articles as setting out the right way to GM AD&D. In retrospect, I can describe the style he was advocating as Gygaxian, super-gamist dungeon crawling.
I tried to write up a dungeon, and GM it, in his style. I was bad at it. And the players I was GMing for didn't enjoy it. And gradually I discovered that my preferred approach to GMing was a sort of "reactive" approach, drawing on my prep of NPCs and situation, which about 20 years later I learned could be labelled ("vanilla narrativism") and could be refined (by reading good RPG rulebooks and commentary that gave advice on how to do it).
What I think the AW rule book does really well is to talk about RPGing as a conversation. And one thing that distinguishes a conversation from a scripted performance is that the participants respond to one another in real time, as they go along.
Now this is related to what was the biggest single thing for me, in learning how to GM well (I hope) in the way that I want to;, and this is a thing that I think the AW rulebook could perhaps state more clearly than it does: namely, that GM prep is not a basis for adjudicating that a player's action declaration for their PC fails.
The AW rulebook engages with this indirectly - by instructing the GM not to prepare plots, and by saying that the purpose of prep is to have interesting things to say; and by telling the GM to either make a GM-side move or adjudicate a player-side move. But the idea that GM prep is a basis for adjudication is so heavily engrained in RPGing culture, and in so many RPG texts (such as modules for many systems, especially D&D and its cousins), that calling out the departure from that approach could be done even more directly than it is.
This actually leads me to a post from another very thoughtful poster who has influenced me a lot:
I don't think we need to proclaim easiness, nor exaggerate difficulty.
GMing a "no myth", "story now" RPG requires being able to make stuff up fairly quickly, drawing on what has already been said by everyone. In AW, it also means keeping in mind your prep, which should be a help and not a hindrance in being able to think of things! (Like in my Torchbearer 2e game, when a roll of a camp event turned up a Dire Wolf, I had my prep of the Moathouse to lean on, and so instead of having to make up, from scratch, where this Dire Wolf came from, I was able to present it as a scout from the Moathouse.)
But it's not rocket science. To paraphrase something Gygax said, I don't think RPGers in general have a shortage of imagination!
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Hang on.
You said that certain fiction is implausible. I assumed you were talking about yours, and invited you to comment on mine.
Are you talking about mine? In that case, please provide the details of your analysis.
