What I find interesting about PbtA games, even if I don't like the way it seems to be implemented, is how those games provide a broad list of potential outcomes to situations. Strip out the idea of moves and what you have is a way of telling GMs things they can consider aside from overone on this side dies. That's cool and worth appreciating, even if I feel like the kind of moves in the quote above aren't granular enough o preserve what I think of as player agency and GM choice.
The GM is Not There to Entertain You
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Sorry that I don't preface every post with the complete list of games I've ever played to allay your suspicions. Here's a thought. You could start a thread where you demand everyone on the forums posts every game they've ever played just so you can check to be sure when they disagree with you. I'm sure that would work. Of course that's self-reporting, just like your assertions that you've played these games. Your claims are just as valid as mine.
Any chance we can permanently skip the bit where you feel the need to question other people's geek cred whenever they disagree with you? It's boring, really.
Of course you are. Because I disagree with you. And because I disagree you cannot believe I have read or played or run these games. How's the sequence go: If you disagree with me you must not have read it, if you've read it you must not understand it, if you claim to understand it the fact that you disagree with me proves you don't understand. It's the same thing every time.
It is a salient point. Sorry you disagree, you must not have read the same PbtA games I have. Or you must not have played or run them as much as I have. Or...you know...we can both be real gamers and just have a disagreement.
Because it's true. As seen from the example in the thread. One PC pulls a gun and the whole group is referee-fiat captured as a result. Removing the agency of the PCs to resist that capture in any way. That clearly causes problems with several posters' sense of agency. It's because the difference in resolution that some agency is removed. If the characters were real people in a real world facing that situation, they'd be able to do something about it. At least try. But PbtA games have a lower resolution, zoom out, etc and you lose granularity. You lose some agency as a result. It's not necessarily bad, but it's a bit weird to pretend it's not true.
So? The players control their characters. The referee controls the world. Conflicts aren't resolved until both sides decide they are, something forces one side to relent, or one side ceases to exist.
That's the point. The PC don't want the conflict to resolve this way, they want to fight it...but they can't. Their ability to fight it...their agency...is removed and the referee simply declares something to be true that the characters reasonably would be able to act against.
Right. Up to a point. Players can make meaningful choices from a finite, curated list of moves. Anything not directly related to those is either out of bounds or up to the referee. PbtA certainly pushes things towards drama, I'm not claiming otherwise. But it does so by removing agency. You have to skip over agency to hard frame a scene. You have to skip over agency to make a sequence-of-events move in response to a failed player move.
A player rolls a failure on some check, now the referee gets a move. The referee picks hard or soft, say hard. The referee picks from a list or makes one up. The referee then spits that hard move out into the fiction...without the players being able to do anything about it. This is why I always start with soft move, to telegraph terrible things about to happen rather than just spring something on the players. It's such a cool idea that I basically stole it and use it to run all my games.
A separate example but shows the same thing. A player fails a move, the referee makes a hard move, separate the party. Cool. What form does that take? A wall falls between them. Okay. Sweet. Now, if you've played any RPG for more than five minutes, you know you'll have a table full of players shouting at you about all the things they're going to do to prevent this from happening before you can finish the sentence declaring the wall falls between them...or you have players gripe about how they wanted to do something but you won't let them. But nope. The wall falls, the party is separated. What agency do the characters have in that event? None.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Absolutely. There's a lot of great referee advice on PbtA games. But they do produce a very forced style of play and forced kind of story-thing as a result. Something that pulled back a hair on the "push, push, push" mentality would be great. Something that builds in "quieter" moments like Masks is great. Between that and Marvel Heroic I don't really need any other superhero game ever. The referee advice from something like M&M3 tossed into the mix with either/both of those...that's about as solid as you could hope for.
hawkeyefan
Legend
But that never happened. That example was misconstrued. See the posts not far upthread where @Campbell clarifies his example was about a solo PC, and it seems @Lanefan assumed it was about an entire group of PCs.
Which isn’t how PbtA games tend to work. The example of one PC drawing a gun somehow leading to an entire group of PCs getting captured is obviously flawed; play would almost never go that way.
I like your analysis.
The RPG where I've had the most amount of PCs being taken prisoner is Classic Traveller. At the front end, it makes it easy for the players to judge overwhelming firepower and hence have their PCs surrender. Probably more important, though, has been handling the back end - that is, how do they escape? Traveller isn't quite as robust here as Apocalypse World would be, but it offers more than just GM fiat too. One PC has been tried twice - once she was banished, the other time she blew up the tribunal with a concealed grenade. There is action resolution to help with these things, including rules and rolls for dealing with bureaucracy, for NPC reactions, etc.
Another time the PCs turned the tables on their captors, and managed to take control of the one suit of powered armour that was in the installation. On this occasion I made up some rules of my own: rules for grappling when a PC wrestled a guard wielding a submachine gun; and an ad hoc roll (10+ and it goes well, 7-9 and it goes OK) for when the same PC, having wrested the SMG from the guard, entered the installation to try and grab the powered armour.
The PCs have also from time to time made alliances with or secured recruits from NPCs who have captured them. I don't know if it's a Traveller trope, but in our game at least the PCs' band of hangers-on keeps growing and that seems more than mere coincidence: they pick up extra starship crew, specialists in various skills, etc; and the costs of paying salaries isn't very great compared to the cost of fuelling and servicing a starship!
I know it's fairly common to compare MHRP to Fate, but personally I don't really see it. It doesn't have compels (Limits can sometimes resemble compels, but they're much more targetted and "fine-tuned") and you don't earn Fate points for having your aspects invoked.
I think it's great for stylised and trope-heavy settings and situations. That's no surprise, given it's a super hero system. But has also made it easy to adapt for fantasy, including LotR/MERP.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
True enough - in a D&D setting, capturing people without using magic is best done via traps rather than brute force.
The loss of h.p. and spells, however, would be fine from the captors' point of view, in that weakened prisoners are usually easier to keep in place than are prisoners at full strength.
This depends greatly on the players and-or how they see their PCs, I think; and that varies player-to-player, never mind table-to-table.
A few years back I was DM in a situation where the PCs had sheltered in a dead-end cave and the bad guys (who the party knew to probably be more than they could handle) trapped them in there. What followed, while the bad guys waited outside, was a long in-character debate within the party as to whether to surrender or go out fighting; with said debate only ending when one PC just said "Screw it", walked out without warning, and - much to my surprise as DM - surrendered.
Result: chaos all round! Of a party of 8, three others ended up getting captured (one by force, two surrendered) while the other four each found ways of independently escaping and scattering once they realized rescuing the one who surrendered was pointless. For a short time I was running 5 parties at once - the group of 4 captives plus 4 parties of one PC each - until the four started finding each other; and they somewhat later managed to find their companions...who had escaped on their own in the meantime.
As written, yes. It can be done, sort of, but it takes probably a bit too much buy-in to be feasible.
A partial workaround is to make missile weapons much deadlier - as in, as deadly as guns are in real life - at ranges of less than maybe 5 or 10 feet, to enhance their threat. Mechanically this might be achieved by multiplying their damage by [double the target's level] in these conditions (not every gunshot kills), or by bespoke mechanics if one doesn't mind subsystems.
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Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Your original example read as if the single PC pulled the gun and the next scene was the whole party captured and being interrogated.
If it was intended as you say above, however, I'm fine with it.
Campbell wasn't clarifying, just reiterating. Here's the original post:
Campbell clearly used the singular "a player character", and was clearly using "they" and "them" as genderless singular pronouns.
This isn't right either. The players in AW can have their PCs do whatever makes sense, given their fictional position. If what they do triggers a move, the move is resolved. Otherwise the GM does their bit, which is to make a soft move unless the player has handed them a golden opportunity to make a hard move.
The players had their chance to do things when they declared actions and rolled the dice! And the soft move that sets things up will typically have already happened, when the GM had to say something earlier in the conversation.
I know you say you've played DW et al, but your description of the process of play is weird to me, because you don't seem to be recognising that not every player action declaration for their PC triggers a move, and hence the role of the GM in making soft moves that build up the stakes until those stakes (or some of them) are settled one way or another when a player actually rolls for a move.
This reinforces my puzzlement about how you're describing play. Where did the wall come from (in the shared fiction? in the trajectory of play?) What did the players do that made the separation of the PCs by a falling wall a prospect?
Suppose that, in D&D, the PCs are exploring a dungeon that they know to be replete with traps. And they describe their PCs walking down a particular corridor. And then the GM declares that a portcullis falls, and calls for Reflex saves - whoever makes their save gets to decide which side of the portcullis they're on, and otherwise the GM makes a random roll (and anyone who rolls a natural 1 gets spiked for their troubles!). The players aren't normally entitled to dispute their Reflex roll. Maybe they can substitute something else for Reflex -say Fortitude to hold the portcullis up? But in that case they're bound by the result of that roll. They don't get endless saving throws.
So in a DW game, the PCs are exploring a dungeon that they know to be replete with traps. And then the GM mentions a corridor. And one of the players declares that they search it for traps: Discern Realities. And the throw fails. Well, the player has had their turn, and they failed their check, and now it's the GM's turn: "You notice the pressure plate too late - you've already stepped on it, and a portcullis falls between you and . . ." The player is not entitled to endless saving throws. If another player declares "I roll under the portcullis as it falls, to make sure they're not alone" that sounds like Defy Danger on DEX - if it fails a proverbial spiking would seem a fair hard move!
If another player declares "I grab the portcullis as it falls" I think it's fair for the GM to reply "Sorry, it's already fallen." Again, the Gm isn't obliged to permit endless saving throws. The player was prepared to take the benefits of traps being found: now they have to suck up the consequences - separation! - that are resulting instead.
How are the other PCs implicated in the situation and its consequences? Did they try to help? Try to hinder? Want the advantages of the the move made by the other player?
A final comment: as a player who often advocates "trusting the GM", I'm puzzled that you would make moves as an AW or DW GM that your players would regard as unfair because the stakes weren't clear.
Thomas Shey
Legend
And of course Cortex Prime is out now with a whole lot of discussion about how to adapt it to various purposes.
(I found the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow adaptation I did of it vaguely unsatisfactory on a game level, but that could very well been an artifact of my cutting some corners when putting it together).
