Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9250939" data-attributes="member: 42582">This varies across systems, and can vary within systems.The "official" Burning Wheel rule is that the consequence is stated in advance of the roll - not to give the player a chance to back out, but to give the player sufficient context to decide how many resources to throw into the test. But Luke Crane, in his commentary in the Adventure Burner (reproduced for Gold edition in The Codex), talks about how, in his own play, he has relaxed this rule because often - even typically - the consequences are implicit in the situation, and so don't need to be spelled out to be known.When I GM BW, and other RPGs using a similar approach (eg 4e D&D out of combat, Prince Valiant, and Torchbearer 2e) I use a similar method to what Crane describes in his commentary: I aspire for consequences to be implicit in the situation (because of its vibrancy, the players' sense of stakes, the overall trajectory of things); but sometimes its not. When its not, I will sometimes make consequences clear, but - especially in Torchbearer, which doesn't emphasise GM transparency quite as strongly - may spring a surprise on a failure. Even when it's a surprise, though, I want it to be retrospectively an evident result of the established fiction. (Like "Of course the GM hit me there - it's where my PC is vulnerable, given the fiction and my PC's goals/aspirations/orientation/trajectory.)Apocalypse World doesn't have a rule about stating consequences, and doesn't use framing in the way BW does (eg it has no notion of "obstacle", which is key to BW and TB2e). But the soft/hard move structure picks up this slack - the hard moves drive home what the soft moves have set up. If no soft move has taken place, then there is not even the context for a player declaring an action that triggers a player-side move (eg there will be no pressure such that a PC is acting under fire) nor for the player otherwise handing the GM an opportunity on a plate (and thus licensing a hard move even if no dice have been rolled).My view in any of these systems is that, if a consequence is experienced as having come out of the blue, even in retrospect, then that is a weakness of GMing. Not a fatal one - GMs make mistakes all the time; it's a tricky gig! - but something to try and avoid in future.This might sound a bit like "telegraphing" in map-and-key, exploration-ish play. One difference is the methodology for establishing consequences (see [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s post about paladins upthread, and my reply). Another is that, in map-and-key telegraph-y play, the players aim to identify possible consequences so they can avoid them. In Burning Wheel consequences can't be avoided, because every time something of thematic significance is at stake the dice must be rolled, and many of those rolls (in my experience half, even more perhaps) will fail. AW uses its 6-. 7-9, 10+ structure so failure rates can't be directly compared to BW, but it is still quite different from the idea, in exploration-ish play, of trying to minimise failure chances, avoid rolls with a high chance of failure, etc.In BW, TB2e and DW this also gets linked to PC advancement: in DW, a 6- result awards XP; in BW, advancing abilities requires (inter alia) testing against near-impossible or literally impossible obstacles; in TB2e, advancing abilities requires failed as well as successful tests.</blockquote>

Verification