thoughts on Apocalypse World?

[niklinna]

Maybe I read the wrong thing, then. But on the Dungeon World SRD, if I click on the Bard entry, I get a choice of racial Moves--and my choices are Elf and Human. If I click on Fighter, my racial Moves are Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human. If I click on Paladin, I get one option: Human. If I do a search on DriveThruRPG on Dungeon World Playbooks, most of them are new classes (some of which sound rather interesting), but there's also "The Orc" and "The Fae" and other such racial classes. What this means is, I don't get to define what dwarf means in my game, because the game has already done so, using a race/class restriction that I hate. I know that this OSR-style restriction is popular among some, and that's absolutely fine, but I hate it.

Do the DW books say or imply I can just make up new Moves if I want dwarf bards or elf paladins? If so, are there rules for that, or does "balance" not matter in this game? If the books don't suggest I can make new Moves, then what does it mean for my game?

I don't get Dungeon World's presentation of limited race choices for certain classes either, but, it's good to keep in mind that in all PbtA games (that I've seen), playbooks are starting points, not full & restrictive definitions. So the authors say only humans get to be paladins, or only human and elf rangers get special moves. Chuck it! Be a dwarf paladin, make up a special move dwarf paladins get. I think they could have been much clearer about that, but it's just something in the air if you plug in to the community.

Yeah, but that's not the problem. The problem is that the book itself doesn't really inspire me. And I can--and have--defined the game world with my players using other systems, including D&D, Fate, and GURPS. So with Apocalypse World, I'm left with a meh setting and a ruleset that I find, quite frankly, confusing, counterintuitive, and strangely limited.

Well, I can't argue that. Apocalypse World makes a very loose sketch of the world and leaves your group to fill in the other 98%. Blades in the Dark has a much more detailed setting—for the one city. If Apocalypse World doesn't get your juices flowing, drop it and move on.

I'll give you an example. I'm looking at the Moves Snowball, which gives an example of play and maybe you can explain what I'm not getting. We have a situation where the PC Marie is going to "give grief" to an NPC, Isle, and her brother Mill and lover Plover are there as well.

Between this and the description for Read Sitch, I learn that it's supposed to be used in scenarios where there's potential danger, either on your part or the part of the NPCs. Does this mean I can't use it in any situation that isn't charged?

No, it means there's no point using it in a situation that isn't charged. If nothing bad could happen, there's no need to roll the dice and the GM will just flat-out tell you what the situation is. Player moves are always about doing something when failure will have consequences. If failure won't have consequences, it's not worth fussing over.

I can't go into a room where people are just hanging out innocuously and where I have no intention of starting trouble and try to read the room? In comparison to any other game that has an Insight/Psychology/Sense Motive-type skill, this seems seriously limited. Does the game assume that nobody would use this ability unless there currently is or will soon be danger? Or does the game assume that there's always a potential for danger, no matter how peaceful the situation seems? The MC's response here--"You do? It's charged"--certainly indicates that you're not supposed to use this ability outside of potentially threatening situations. Anyway, Marie's roll succeeds and she wants to know who the most dangerous person in the area is:

This is something I do feel the author's prose fails in. A move is something your character does that is risky. Anything else is just your character doing stuff, even if it looks like using an ability or named move. But absent that risk of failure, it isn't a mechanical, technical, move. So yes, you can read the room without trying to start trouble, and if the situation isn't charged, the GM will just tell you what the deal is. But if there's a chance the tough guy who has everybody under his thumb can tell you're figuring that out, and will come at you, that's when you roll the bones.

So I look up Misdirect.

But... this is basically what nearly every practiced GM does. It looks like the point of this Move is to say "go after Plover," but it fails, because the PC attacks Isle instead. Does the MC's failure mean anything? Assuming I'm even correct as to the point of the Move, because the MC doesn't actually say.

Another point of confusion. GM moves are different from player moves, and in some ways I feel they are training wheels for newer GMs. They are formalizing something experienced GMs just know how to do.

Later on, we get this:

What? How does Keeler know this? Did the MC here take over Keeler and force him to enter the armory in order to witness this? Does Keeler have X-ray vision and super-hearing? Are his gang members talking really loudly and narrating their actions? Are we to assume a third-person omniscient eye? I kind of hate this. If this were a TV show, I'd be rolling my eyes so hard right about now. Keeler's player should have to go into the armory to know what's going on, and if that means that that Keeler misses out on info if she doesn't, then oh well.

(Sure wish I could figure out how to do nested quotes here.) It's just the GM tossing in a "you happened to hear this while walking around". It's taking control of the PCs in a sense, but I'd say it's safe to assume PCs walk around their home bases. If a player's not cool with that, the GM can find another way to bring that information around—say somebody comes to report that they heard the info while walking around.

I'm starting to get the impression that you haven't accepted some of the central premises of the game, but keep on poking at it because without doing that, things don't make sense and/or bug you. One of the central premises of the game is that the GM & players together are building a story through actions, and not waiting for anybody to stumble on clues or do the particular thing necessary to get the ball rolling. You just kick the ball! Whether you're the GM or a player, you just kick the ball. You don't have to like it, but that's a foundational principle of PbtA gaming.

Later on, Keeler's gang decides to attack Marie because she attacked Isle (I guess Plover knows that Marie is a psychic and was able to put two and two together when Isle started bleeding out her ear). The gang cuts open the top of her door at home and drop a grenade in.

What? How is this misdirection? Is this game GM v. Players, but wants you to restrict your GM attacks to what makes sense in-game? It really looks like what this game calls misdirection is what every other game calls "describing what happens." Which would naturally be an explosion if someone drops a grenade at your feet.

About this particular bit, I can't comment. Based on what you've quoted, I'd say the GM is being a jerk. Maybe more context would give me something to go on.

So what am I missing? Again, this is a serious question, not a gotcha or anything. I am literally not getting this.

At this point, all I can say is, if you want to answer that question, get in on a game as a player/auditor with a GM who will be happy to lift the curtain and explain what they're doing. You are clearly not getting it by reading.

Yeah, and that's why I don't want to play Blades. To me, the setting is so important because it defines most of what makes my character tick. It's a major disconnect between the setting and the rules, and it makes me wonder why Evil Hat even included the setting in the first place. Why not make it setting agnostic, or make an implied setting, or set it in a more standard location? It feels to me like they had the setting and and the game and decided to combine the two.

I've told you about several options for using the setting in different ways, so you do have options.

It's not that I would expect PCs to go investigate. It's that I'd use this setting for a completely different type of game. The world outside the city is a crumbling nightmare. It's your job to explore it. Demons and ghosts haunt the dark streets. It's your job to protect the commoners. Things like that.

You have the freedom to do that very thing, so have at! It's a cool setting, by all means grab it and run a game in it with whatever system you like.

 

[chaochou]

It's not that I would expect PCs to go investigate. It's that I'd use this setting for a completely different type of game. The world outside the city is a crumbling nightmare. It's your job to explore it. Demons and ghosts haunt the dark streets. It's your job to protect the commoners. Things like that.

This is not what PbtA is for - it's not for the MC to tell the players the 'job' of their characters and for the characters to be meekly led into accepting the MCs version of things. It's not for the MC to provide 'hooks' which create the basis for the characters becoming protagonists. The players get to decide what to do and what interests them and what they want to change - not the MC. The MC is just there to put pressure on what the players decide to do, not to give them things to do.

This is the fundamental structure of Story Now play, whereas what you're describing is GM-controlled play. That's fundamentally why you're having such a hard time with PbtA. The design fights against full on railroad play and also against GMs who want to protagonise the characters (by telling them their 'job') while pretending its the players doing so (illusionism) or with passively complicit players (participationism).

 

[pemerton]

This post is prompted mostly by @Faolyn's posts.

My views on AW are probably a bit idiosyncratic. They are not shaped primarily by comparison to 3E or 5e D&D. They are shaped by comparison to scene-framing games like Burning Wheel, 4e D&D and Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic; to high-sim "task resolution" games like Rolemaster; and to Classic Traveller, which has one foot in the RM high-sim camp but also has a lot of discrete subsystems which (roughly, and as per my post upthread) take the form if you try this thing, then make this throw to succeed or else the referee will tell you what bad thing happens.

I've also read a lot of Vincent Baker's design thoughts on his blog, and I think a fair bit of those thoughts is reflected in AW's design.

To quote Baker,

Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it.​

The essence of the player role in a RPG, since the hobby's invention, is that the player takes on the role of an imagined person in a fictional situation, and says what it is that their character does. More formally, that is action declaration. The essence of the GM role is to describe that fictional situation - to provide both background and also more immediate framing. And once a player declares an action for their character, we then need a way to work out what happens next.

What makes AW distinct, as a RPG, is how it tells the participants how to do these things. For many action declarations, the GM just says what happens next. In doing so, the GM should be guided by the game's agenda and principles. So suppose a player says I leave home and walk across the compound to see if Isle is hanging around (a bit like Marie the Brainer in the "Moves Snowball" example of play). In that example (p 152), the GM tells Marie's player that she finds Isle with Plover and Mill (all NPCs): Baker doesn't tell us what GM move this is, but we can identify it as offering an opportunity. But the GM isn't obliged to make that move. Instead, for instance, the GM could announce offscreen badness:

You stroll over to the car shed where you know Isle hangs out, but the shed's been broken into and the car's not there. Isle's not there either: you can see her cap lying in the dust on the ground; and the tyre marks look like someone drove out of there in a hurry!​

In some ways, this is like GMing the introductory or framing parts of a D&D module. But not identical: the principles, and the GM moves used in accordance with them, will tend to drive towards conflict more quickly, and harder, than D&D by default. Less exploration, more drama.

And some action declarations are player-side moves. The basic rule here is that, if you do it, you do it (pp 12, 152; the flip side is to do it, (you have to) do it). Now the next sentence cannot be emphasised enough, and @Faolyn provides the full answer to your question about how read a (charged) situation compares to making an Insight check in D&D: because the game is super-tight and super-coherent in its design, the "free narration" parts of play - like the examples above - will naturally lead to players making these action declarations. And when they do, then the dice have to be rolled. And the outcome of the roll tells us who gets to add the next bit to the fiction, and how.

For instance, in my example the situation is charged because that's what the GM has narrated: the shed's broken into, the car's missing, it looks like Isle's been taken to. If the player has their PC look around the shed, trying to work out what's gone on and what's happened to Isle, they are reading a charged situation and have to make a throw. And if they succeed, they get to ask questions which oblige the GM to introduce more elements of background and framing. As the rulebooks says (p 199),

As MC, sometimes you’ll already know the answers to these and sometimes you won’t. Either way, you do have to commit to the answers when you give them.​

It doesn't matter to the dynamic of the game whether the GM has already made something up (Dremmer's gang broke in and stole the car and kidnapped Isle!) or is making it up now. The GM will always say what their prep demands and what the principles demand (p 109) and the principles will point towards things to say even if there is no prep (it took me only a minute or so to think up my variant on the Isle scenario). And because the GM will always say what honesty demands (p 109), further narration will snowball off those initial answers. And because after every move the GM asks, "What do you do now?" (p 116), the player will declare more actions for their PC and the cycle of creating the fiction will continue.

And suppose the attempt to read a charged situation fails: then the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like. And the principles govern here, too. Let's respond with f*****y - "As you step into the shed, you're struck from behind and fall unconscious. When you wake up, you're lying tied up in the boot of a car. You can hear Dremmer talking outside and above you." Ie, the GM has captured someone.

If the prep has been light, then the difference between passing and failing on that read a sitch check could be more than just a sore head! The framing is different. The likely action declarations are different. But the backstory might be pretty different too: to me, that failure result looks more likely than the success result to be leading to a revelation that Isle conspired with Dremmer to capture the PC.

I think looking at this system starting from the premise but why can I only use Insight if the situation is charged is getting things backwards: that's already assuming that every action declaration is the same as a prompt to the GM to introduce new framing or reveal new backstory. The distinctive character, and brilliance, of AW is that it's not. I hope this post has helped explain that in a bit more detail.

 

[pemerton]

This is not what PbtA is for - it't not for the MC to tell the players the 'job' of their characters and for the characters to be meekly led into accepting the MCs version of things.

<snip>

The players get to decide what to do and what interests them and what they want to change - not the MC. The MC is just there to put pressure on what the players decide to do, not to give them things to do.

In my post just upthread, and just below this one, I've tried to spell out - with reference to the moves and principles - how the allocation of authority to establish fiction works in AW.

The same thing can be done to spell out what @chaochou says here,

So part of PC gen - including but not limited to the Hx phase - establishes background. So when the GM engages in framing early on, honesty demands that the framing follow from that established background. There's no "Four strangers - a cleric, a fighter, a thief and a wizard - meet in an inn."

And the principles include asking provocative questions and building on the answers and also being a fan of the players' characters. So it is the players, via their PCs and their answers to provocative questions, who are expected to provide the trajectory for play. But the GM will be putting their bloody fingerprints all over everything they touch (p 113). That's the pressure that chaochou refers to.

The same notions can be seen by drilling down even more finely. Consider seduce/manipulate, that I also posted about upthread. A player who succeeds on their throw for this move, and commits as required by the degree of success, can require the GM to have a NPC give the player's PC what they want. There's no GM move that allows the GM to tell a player what their PC chooses to do.

Or consider seize by force: a player who succeeds on this move can have their PC take definite hold of something. And this "binds" the GM in the sense that the GM is a fan of the players' characters and is expected to respond with intermittent rewards. But the players are under no requirement to be fans of the NPCs, to pause and ask what they do, nor to provide them with intermittent rewards! So the combination of principles and player-side moves establishes an asymmetry in this respect, which Baker notes towards the end of the "Moves snowball" play example (p 156):

A subtle thing just happened. I’ve been saying what they do and then asking Marie’s player what Marie does, but here she’s seized initiative from me. It isn’t mechanically significant, we’ll still both just keep making our moves in turn. It’s just worth noticing.​

What I'm trying to show in this post, and the previous one, is that the difference from GM-driven play, and from some typical D&D play, isn't just a matter of ethos. Of course ethos is part of it (that's what an agenda and principles are, at their core) but the ethos is spelled out in detail, and it interacts with the technical rules for action resolution in particular ways that combine to yield the overall play experience.

To even think about replicating this in D&D play, you'd first have to ask how would I implement seduce/manipulate, or seize by force (beyond just inflicting hp of damage)? I don't think that's a trivial question. As far as I know the only version of D&D to come close to doing this is 4e, via skill challenges; and skill challenges are scene-based resolution and so quite different from AW's if you do it, you do it.

 

[Manbearcat]

This post is prompted mostly by @Faolyn's posts.

My views on AW are probably a bit idiosyncratic. They are not shaped primarily by comparison to 3E or 5e D&D. They are shaped by comparison to scene-framing games like Burning Wheel, 4e D&D and Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic; to high-sim "task resolution" games like Rolemaster; and to Classic Traveller, which has one foot in the RM high-sim camp but also has a lot of discrete subsystems which (roughly, and as per my post upthread) take the form if you try this thing, then make this throw to succeed or else the referee will tell you what bad thing happens.

I've also read a lot of Vincent Baker's design thoughts on his blog, and I think a fair bit of those thoughts is reflected in AW's design.

To quote Baker,

Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it.​

The essence of the player role in a RPG, since the hobby's invention, is that the player takes on the role of an imagined person in a fictional situation, and says what it is that their character does. More formally, that is action declaration. The essence of the GM role is to describe that fictional situation - to provide both background and also more immediate framing. And once a player declares an action for their character, we then need a way to work out what happens next.

What makes AW distinct, as a RPG, is how it tells the participants how to do these things. For many action declarations, the GM just says what happens next. In doing so, the GM should be guided by the game's agenda and principles. So suppose a player says I leave home and walk across the compound to see if Isle is hanging around (a bit like Marie the Brainer in the "Moves Snowball" example of play). In that example (p 152), the GM tells Marie's player that she finds Isle with Plover and Mill (all NPCs): Baker doesn't tell us what GM move this is, but we can identify it as offering an opportunity. But the GM isn't obliged to make that move. Instead, for instance, the GM could announce offscreen badness:

You stroll over to the car shed where you know Isle hangs out, but the shed's been broken into and the car's not there. Isle's not there either: you can see her cap lying in the dust on the ground; and the tyre marks look like someone drove out of there in a hurry!​

In some ways, this is like GMing the introductory or framing parts of a D&D module. But not identical: the principles, and the GM moves used in accordance with them, will tend to drive towards conflict more quickly, and harder, than D&D by default. Less exploration, more drama.

And some action declarations are player-side moves. The basic rule here is that, if you do it, you do it (pp 12, 152; the flip side is to do it, (you have to) do it). Now the next sentence cannot be emphasised enough, and @Faolyn provides the full answer to your question about how read a (charged) situation compares to making an Insight check in D&D: because the game is super-tight and super-coherent in its design, the "free narration" parts of play - like the examples above - will naturally lead to players making these action declarations. And when they do, then the dice have to be rolled. And the outcome of the roll tells us who gets to add the next bit to the fiction, and how.

For instance, in my example the situation is charged because that's what the GM has narrated: the shed's broken into, the car's missing, it looks like Isle's been taken to. If the player has their PC look around the shed, trying to work out what's gone on and what's happened to Isle, they are reading a charged situation and have to make a throw. And if they succeed, they get to ask questions which oblige the GM to introduce more elements of background and framing. As the rulebooks says (p 199),

As MC, sometimes you’ll already know the answers to these and sometimes you won’t. Either way, you do have to commit to the answers when you give them.​

It doesn't matter to the dynamic of the game whether the GM has already made something up (Dremmer's gang broke in and stole the car and kidnapped Isle!) or is making it up now. The GM will always say what their prep demands and what the principles demand (p 109) and the principles will point towards things to say even if there is no prep (it took me only a minute or so to think up my variant on the Isle scenario). And because the GM will always say what honesty demands (p 109), further narration will snowball off those initial answers. And because after every move the GM asks, "What do you do now?" (p 116), the player will declare more actions for their PC and the cycle of creating the fiction will continue.

And suppose the attempt to read a charged situation fails: then the GM can make as hard and direct a move as they like. And the principles govern here, too. Let's respond with f*****y - "As you step into the shed, you're struck from behind and fall unconscious. When you wake up, you're lying tied up in the boot of a car. You can hear Dremmer talking outside and above you." Ie, the GM has captured someone.

If the prep has been light, then the difference between passing and failing on that read a sitch check could be more than just a sore head! The framing is different. The likely action declarations are different. But the backstory might be pretty different too: to me, that failure result looks more likely than the success result to be leading to a revelation that Isle conspired with Dremmer to capture the PC.

I think looking at this system starting from the premise but why can I only use Insight if the situation is charged is getting things backwards: that's already assuming that every action declaration is the same as a prompt to the GM to introduce new framing or reveal new backstory. The distinctive character, and brilliance, of AW is that it's not. I hope this post has helped explain that in a bit more detail.

Great post.

Put another way, an Apocalypse World GM (MC) is nearly always putting forth a charged situation that can be read. The conversation of play is probably 90 % dedicated to conflict-charged situations with an intervening 10 % of exchanges related to transitions/gear & crap (or clarifying exchanges in the meta channel)! The impetus for them doing so will always be the same (its right there in the Agenda and Principles; play to find out, make their lives not boring, follow the rules, ask provocative questions and use the answers, be a fan of the characters, look through crosshairs, et al). However, what will change is (a) the gamestate/state of the fiction leading up to the soft move that the GM is making to establish the situation (the fiction established through play and fronts that they're following) and (b) the nature of the soft move made (and therefore the orientation of the fiction to the PCs and the orientation of the players' PCs to the fiction).

What the player is saying when they want to read a charged situation/interaction is:

* I'm interested.

* I (and my PC) want to know more...I (and my PC) want to be prepared for what is to come...and I'm willing (or wanting) to risk things getting worse by my 2d6+sharp result gone bad.

* And I know you (the MC) want to know more (because that is your job and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place if you didn't want to know more!).

 

[Aldarc]

That might be a good way for me to do horror (I definitely follow the situations, not plots idea--if only because plots have so many moving pieces I tend to forget them!). Which PbtA game would be best for that, though? IIRC Dungeon World--and correct me if I'm wrong--leans heavily into restricting race and class, or uses race-as-class, both of which are things I hate with the power of a thousand suns. Even though I run a mostly-human-only Ravenloft, the idea that those restrictions are built into the game anyway bothers me enough to not want to spend money on the system.

Maybe I read the wrong thing, then. But on the Dungeon World SRD, if I click on the Bard entry, I get a choice of racial Moves--and my choices are Elf and Human. If I click on Fighter, my racial Moves are Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human. If I click on Paladin, I get one option: Human. If I do a search on DriveThruRPG on Dungeon World Playbooks, most of them are new classes (some of which sound rather interesting), but there's also "The Orc" and "The Fae" and other such racial classes. What this means is, I don't get to define what dwarf means in my game, because the game has already done so, using a race/class restriction that I hate. I know that this OSR-style restriction is popular among some, and that's absolutely fine, but I hate it.

Do the DW books say or imply I can just make up new Moves if I want dwarf bards or elf paladins? If so, are there rules for that, or does "balance" not matter in this game? If the books don't suggest I can make new Moves, then what does it mean for my game?

I think you are being a little too "legalistic" here. The writers of Dungeon World sought to evoke older editions of D&D with its race/class "restrictions," but that doesn't somehow mean that you are solemnly bound to them so that you can't make Dwarf Bards. Write 'Dwarf' at the top of your Bard sheet, pick whichever racial move you prefer (or make up your own), and you're done. No need to overcomplicate or fret over the little things.

Some people choose to make playbooks that are based on the principle of race as class. It doesn't mean that you can't define the Orc or Dwarf. What that means is that people have modded the game to create fan and 3pp content, and you can do likewise. There is not one "the Warlock" playbook created for Dungeon World. There are at least five on this mega-listing of Dungeon World playbooks people have created.

If you are still worried about spending money on Dungeon World, there are a TON of free mods and variations of Dungeon World that are typically more open about these sort of things. For example, here is Jeremy Strandberg's Homebrew World, which provides the option of simply listing whichever race beyond the standard set (i.e., human, dwarf, elf, halfling) you are and supplying more generic backgrounds for each playbook. It also modifies the playbooks so that they are a little more balanced, interesting, and quicker for convention play. It also replaces Alignment with Drives.

Yeah. I'm not adverse to trying it at all. I just think I need more (preferably written) examples, and specifically with notes as to why things were done that way. The AW book's examples are... lacking. They seem to be written for those who immediately get the idea, not for those who are struggling with the differences.

I have a few other issues with AW. It creates just enough of an implied universe, what with the psychic maelstrom, to make me kind of have to play in it, but not enough to truly paint a picture of what it's like (compare to a game like Troika!--which I also haven't played yet, sadly--where I can just see the golden barges sailing through the hump-backed sky in my mind). The examples in the "Barf the Apocalypse" section don't cause me to imagine what the world as a whole is like.

But the PbtA system itself makes me want to figure it out.

I don't think that you are being adverse or difficult in our interactions about PbtA. (It reminds me a bit of me trying to get my head wrapped around Fate for the first time after mostly playing games structured like D&D.)

I honestly doubt that if Apocalypse World was my introduction to PbtA that I would have quite understood it. I only "got" Apocalypse World after going back to it later in my PbtA journeys when I already understood what it was trying to say and accomplish. This is why I would potentially recommend you can check out other games, possibly in genres that inspire you more readily than the Mad Maxian post-apocalyptic world of well... Apocalypse World. (I know, for example, that games like Troika and Mork Borg don't inspire me in the slightest.)

Iron Sworn (which is free) has already been recommended as a good distillation of PbtA style gaming. Magpie Games also is good at explaining PbtA at this point with their games: e.g., Masks, Monster Hearts, Urban Shadows, Avatar Legends, etc. If you like supernatural horror, I suspect that you may like Urban Shadows from Magpie Games, though it's more urban fantasy (with horror). Maybe that would inspire you. There should be a Quick Start primer for Urban Shadows (2nd Edition) and Avatar Legends as well.

Blades in the Dark is another thing I have issues with. Such a beautiful, amazing setting, perhaps one of the most unusual and interesting post-apocalyses I've ever seen... and they're wasting it on heists. Heists are great, but I can do that anywhere. In a setting where the sun is broken, I want to explore the world and deal with the consequences of that, not just steal things and create gangs.

Yeah, and that's why I don't want to play Blades. To me, the setting is so important because it defines most of what makes my character tick. It's a major disconnect between the setting and the rules, and it makes me wonder why Evil Hat even included the setting in the first place. Why not make it setting agnostic, or make an implied setting, or set it in a more standard location? It feels to me like they had the setting and and the game and decided to combine the two.

Just because how you would approach the setting differs from the default doesn't mean that there is a disconnect between the setting and rules. That said, the setting outside of Duskvol is mainly a backdrop for why the characters can't just leave the city or "take the money and run" when things get too hot for them. The city is meant to serve as a crucible and the self-contained sandbox for the characters. It's designed to keep players in the city while things increasingly heat up inside of the crucible. What will come through the other side? Play and find out.

The setting is important for understanding how the characters tick, but the game does approach tackling it from a particular angle: street gangs. This is not much different from how D&D generally presumes that you are approaching their settings of Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or Planescape from the perspective of "hardy, combat-capable adventurers" (often heroic) and not the myriad of other ways one could engage these settings. (It reminds me of how liberating it felt the first time that I played 7th Sea, and I realized that I could create my character as a mundane traveling merchant who sucked at combat rather than forcing any given D&D class through that same square hole.) Why do you adventure in the worlds of D&D? (Because you will engage in adventure in some capacity.)

Gangs may not be what you want to explore in such a setting, but complaining about this would be a bit like complaining how despite having such interesting settings games like Thief or Dishonored and books like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouse or The Lies of Locke Lamora force us to approach them from the perspective of criminals, thieves, and outsiders. Out of all the things that could be explored about New York between 1945 and 1955, why does The Godfather focus on the mafia? It just does. You're presumably picking up these titles for either gameplay or viewing/reading experience based on that premise. The game does not exist for supporting the setting; the setting exists for supporting the game.

In the case of Blades in the Dark, that's playing a gang of criminals in Duskvol. It's not your job as a GM to tell either players or PCs what their jobs in this world are. It's your job to listen as they tell you what their jobs are, what they plan on doing, and for you to then respond accordingly in a way in the fiction that respects their choices. If you are playing Blades in the Dark (and not some other supplement), then the game is asking you how your criminal got involved in crime in such a setting. Why are you a criminal in the world of Blades in the Dark?

In a number of play-thrus I have watched, it's not uncommon that the characters are down-on-their-luck people (e.g., merchants, "whalers," ex-watchmen, nobles, etc.) who have been forced into crime either as a last resort or because they have nowhere else to turn because society failed them. The entire premise of Breaking Bad is essentially predicated on the broken health care system in the United States, which pushes a high school chemistry teacher into a world of crime.

And Duskvol is in a much worse state of affairs. The nobility and cops are corrupt, and the vigilantes are privileged rich billionaires with dead parent issues who are investing their tremendous wealth in ridiculous bat costumes, martial arts and magic camp, high tech gadgets, endangering his teenage wards, and a private space satellite for his vigilante friends rather than either seeking professional therapy or solving the systemic issues that keeps Duskvol a hell-hole... oh wait a tick. Anyway, is it any wonder that your character is a criminal?

It's not that I would expect PCs to go investigate. It's that I'd use this setting for a completely different type of game. The world outside the city is a crumbling nightmare. It's your job to explore it. Demons and ghosts haunt the dark streets. It's your job to protect the commoners. Things like that.

There are supplements that focus on playing revoltuionaries, vigilantes, or even cops, if that's your thing. These supplements are even from Sean Nitter of Evil Hat Games who helped work on Blades in the Dark.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't get Dungeon World's presentation of limited race choices for certain classes either, but, it's good to keep in mind that in all PbtA games (that I've seen), playbooks are starting points, not full & restrictive definitions. So the authors say only humans get to be paladins, or only human and elf rangers get special moves. Chuck it! Be a dwarf paladin, make up a special move dwarf paladins get. I think they could have been much clearer about that, but it's just something in the air if you plug in to the community.

Honestly, it I have to do extensive homebrewing just to get it to a point that feels playable to me, I might as well stick with a system I already know well. And I already have at least three or four other systems with D&D-like abilities other than D&D.

Well, I can't argue that. Apocalypse World makes a very loose sketch of the world and leaves your group to fill in the other 98%. Blades in the Dark has a much more detailed setting—for the one city. If Apocalypse World doesn't get your juices flowing, drop it and move on.

It's just that I've heard so much that's good with the system. I mean, I'm sure there's another PbtA game I could more easily get into--I bought Thirsty Sword Lesbians which is amusing, even if I think I'd have a hard time RPing thirsty.

But sadly, I don't think anyone else at my table is interested in running the system and I don't feel comfortable gaming with people I don't know, so if I want to experience the game for myself, I'd have to run it. I could maybe listen to a podcast or watch a liveplay, if there were good ones, but I sometimes find it hard to get into those.

No, it means there's no point using it in a situation that isn't charged. If nothing bad could happen, there's no need to roll the dice and the GM will just flat-out tell you what the situation is. Player moves are always about doing something when failure will have consequences. If failure won't have consequences, it's not worth fussing over.

OK, I'll accept that. I still think that there's times when there would be consequences for failure even if there weren't actual danger in the air, but OK. I have no problem with just giving the PCs this info.

Another point of confusion. GM moves are different from player moves, and in some ways I feel they are training wheels for newer GMs. They are formalizing something experienced GMs just know how to do.

OK, that's good. I don't have to worry about following the exactly as written, then.

(Sure wish I could figure out how to do nested quotes here.) It's just the GM tossing in a "you happened to hear this while walking around". It's taking control of the PCs in a sense, but I'd say it's safe to assume PCs walk around their home bases. If a player's not cool with that, the GM can find another way to bring that information around—say somebody comes to report that they heard the info while walking around.

Select the text, and in the List option, select Indent. It's about as close as you can get.

I'm starting to get the impression that you haven't accepted some of the central premises of the game, but keep on poking at it because without doing that, things don't make sense and/or bug you. One of the central premises of the game is that the GM & players together are building a story through actions, and not waiting for anybody to stumble on clues or do the particular thing necessary to get the ball rolling. You just kick the ball! Whether you're the GM or a player, you just kick the ball. You don't have to like it, but that's a foundational principle of PbtA gaming.

It's just this is one of the central premises of Fate as well, and that game doesn't have these weirdly semi-railroady moments. I mean, if this is just the case of this MC not being very good at revealing info in ways I'd consider plausible, then fine, I can fully accept that. I could run the game and say "You're passing by your armory and hear noises coming from within, what do you do?" I do that all the time right now in D&D.

But if the game actually wants you to say "Meanwhile, across town in their secret hideout, the Hell Bunnies Gang are arming themselves and will be heading out to cause mayhem at your favorite dive bar, what do you do?" because that'll get the ball rolling, then I just find that silly.

About this particular bit, I can't comment. Based on what you've quoted, I'd say the GM is being a jerk. Maybe more context would give me something to go on.

There's not that much, I think. The MC declares how much damage the grenade (3-harm) does and the PC rolls the harm move and decides that she falls over. The PC pretty much deserved the actual attack.

But it's the use of the term misdirection that bugs me. OK, this is a word probably meant for new GMs, but it's such an odd choice of words that I feel like I'm missing something.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, the folks who wrote and play Blades in the Dark are quite happy to waste their time on heists. There are many Forged in the Dark (and Apocalypse World) offshoots with different settings & premises, some of them incredibly specific, a trend I don't particularly get into myself—so I can appreciate why you would feel heists are a waste—but there it is.

Anyhow! The activity rules cover just about anything you might want to do pretty well, so nothing prevents you from taking Blades in the Dark and structuring the activity of your group sessions differently. The book describes free play, engagement, score, and downtime as formal phases, and crew playbooks as gangs of criminals. You can rename those phases and crew playbooks, repurpose them, replace them, or ditch them entirely. A score/heist is really just a quest with the assumption that the PCs are criminals after all, and most of the base playbooks would be fine for heroic questing in the cities or wilderness of the Shattered Isles. There's a set of playbooks to play vigilantes, and another for officers of the law. There was a jam on itch.io that produced 100 playbooks of all kinds—check it out!

a Blades hack that focused on investigating supernatural phenomenon and figuring out the nature of the world, perhaps with conspiracies to uncover as well, could be really fun, and since the powers of the city don't want these questions answered, a lot of the assumptions of the game would stay the same, I'd think.

 

[Faolyn]

This is not what PbtA is for - it's not for the MC to tell the players the 'job' of their characters and for the characters to be meekly led into accepting the MCs version of things. It's not for the MC to provide 'hooks' which create the basis for the characters becoming protagonists. The players get to decide what to do and what interests them and what they want to change - not the MC. The MC is just there to put pressure on what the players decide to do, not to give them things to do.

First off, I object to the idea that the PCs are being "meekly led" into accepting anything. I don't know what type of non-PbtA games you've played, but every game I've played has had the players and GMs deciding what to do. Often it starts with the GM saying "I have an idea for a game," but the players have as much input as the GM on the direction it will take.

Secondly, I'd also say you're wrong because Blades does tell the players what their job is--they have to pick one of these playbooks, and all of the playbooks are for criminals. And it doesn't even let two people pick the same playbook! One of my current D&D games has two warlocks, and the two of them have such different personalities that it makes for a lot of fun for the party. They couldn't do that in Blades.

This is the fundamental structure of Story Now play, whereas what you're describing is GM-controlled play. That's fundamentally why you're having such a hard time with PbtA. The design fights against full on railroad play and also against GMs who want to protagonise the characters (by telling them their 'job') while pretending its the players doing so (illusionism) or with passively complicit players (participationism).

Wow, hostile much?

I fail to see how saying

"You're playing criminals who go on heists and run gangs (only you don't actually plan the heists; instead, you have to go on them and retroactively decide what your plans were), also, you all have to pick different types of criminals, what do you want to do?"

is less railroady than

"You're playing scholars and explorers who are trying to determine why the sun broke, how do you want to go about doing this?"

or

"You're in a Victorian-style city, and since the sun broke there's been a sharp rise in crime and gang activity, demon activity, ghosts, cults, and other weird $#!^. Meanwhile, there are constant shortages of food and other necessities, so scholars try to figure out what caused the problem and how to continue to survive while nobles continue to parties and have their noble intrigues. What type of characters do you want to play?"

Please enlighten me.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Question for @pemerton , based on the example you were using of reading a charged situation, though I'd truly love to hear from anybody/everybody about this.

So I fully get the notion of a failed roll in that situation (looking into what's clearly a kidnapping) resulting in the PC getting attacked/captured/etc.

What I'm still less clear on--and this applies to PbtA as well as FitD--is what a success with consequence might look like in that situation. I'm asking because those partial successes are obviously and by design the most common results, but also because I'm properly trained to GM what a failure or a success looks like...but not those mixtures of the two.

Would an example of a success w/ consequence for that action be spotting blood spatter, meaning that, in the fiction, we've now established that the kidnapping victim was also hurt? Or in this situation should the consequence really be directed at the PC doing the action?