Right. I gave the imagined example, upthread, of the PC going to Isle's car shed only to find that she's not there, but her cap is lying on the ground and the car is missing.So to take one of your examples and run with it....let's say the PCs are actively trying to determine a culprit because an ally of theirs has been arrested for a crime. Even something as fundamental to this situation as "did the ally actually commit the crime" is likely unknown when play begins. The ultimate outcome is determined through play, and how the rolls go and what they lead to; it's not decided ahead of time.
So it can go either way......perhaps the ally was framed, perhaps they committed the crime. You'll see the phrase "Play to find out" and that applies to the GM, too.
Has Isle been kidnappd? Has she eloped? Maybe the GM knows, and has even set up a countdown till the kidnappers kill Isle clock. Maybe the GM doesn't know. It makes no difference to the application of player-side moves. And the only difference it makes to the GM is that instead of simply saying what honesty demands s/he also has to say what prep demands.
Right. I posted about this in detail not too far upthread.One additional thing - there often is a move, you just need to think of how to apply it. Because the move should force you to set up a dramatic situation.
Vincent Baker calls out most of the moves in his Moves Snowball example of play, but not all of them. Eg when he narrates to Marie's player that she finds Isle and friends sitting on the roof of the car shed, this is offering an opportunity. But the example doesn't call that out. I riffed off this in my own Isle example (post 223) by imaging that the GM move is, instead, to announce offscreen badness by narrating that Isle is not there, the car is gone, and her cap is lying on the ground.
@Faolyn, I feel that you are not really taking seriously the notion that everything the GM says is a move, made in accordance with the principles. And that those moves - because they involve concepts like badness and opportunity with a cost and their stuff's downside and consequences but also can be opportunities without a cost - require a value framework. Is it good or bad that Isle should be missing? In @Campbell's example, is Rorik finding the dead body an instance of badness ("there's a killer on the loose") or an opportunity ("cool, now I've got the corpse and recently-living brain I need for my workspace!")? We can't tell what is bad and what is a cost and what is a downside and what is a (meaningful) consequence until we have a framework for evaluation. That framework is provided primarily by the players. Which goes back to @chaochou's remark about the players setting their own agenda.
@Campbell is using the word "gift" in the same way that Vincent Baker refers to a player providing an opportunity on a golden plate - the GM is expected to respond by making an appropriate move, consistent with the agenda and principles, as I and @Blue have explained in our posts.Treat what like a gift how? What is the It that should be brought? What moves should or could be made? I literally am not understanding what you mean here, and using slang doesn't help.
I think these questions show that you are not taking seriously what the AW rulebook says.And how would I be mindful of my fronts in this situation? How would giving clues make things impersonal? What moves fit my principles, and are you talking about my principles as a player or as an MC? What if Rorik wants to look for clues to find out who actually killed Plover? Do I just give him a bunch of clues, or does he have to roll, and if so, what does he roll--since apparently it's not Read Sitch and there's no basic investigation skill.
Your questions suggests that you are envisaging play very similar to trad CoC play - the GM has all the backstory worked out (who did what to whom when) and then the players, via their PCs, are identifying clues that will reveal that backstory. But AW does not approach RPGing in that fashion. There is not a single AW principle or move that talks about clues, so we can't use that as an analytic category to explain AW play. But there are moves that talk about announcing badnes, be that future badness or offscreen badness. I showed, in a post above, how that move could be used to frame a situation in response to a player's action declaration that does not trigger a player-side move: ie the player declares that their PC goes to find Isle at the car-shed, and the GM responds by telling the player that Isle's not there but they (ie their PC) can see that the shed has been broken into, the car is missing, and Isle's favourite cap is lying on the ground.
I also explained how, if the player were now to have their PC look around, that would be reading a charged situation and I talked a bit about how the GM might make moves in response to the results of a read-a-sitch roll.
But making any of those moves requires knowing what would be bad, or an opportunity, for this (these) PC(s) in this context. Which is why the play of the game is inherently personal.
I quoted the rulebook discussion of this (p 200) upthread. And it is rehearsed above in this post, and also in Blue's post.If I'm running D&D, the player can ask "what's the general mood like" or "who's the baddest mofo in the room," and I can tell them to roll Insight. Or I can tell them to roll Insight as soon as they enter, or just use passive Insight. If the player asks if there are any exits, I can have them roll Perception, use passive Per, or for that matter, simply tell them there's another exit as soon as they need to escape out of one. Or if one of them says "Is there a back door? If there is, I'm going out it," then I can either say there is one, say no, or invent a back door right there and then. Ditto for GURPS, Fate, Cypher, and other systems I've played.
A player in AW can ask "What's the general mood like?" Assuming the situation is not charged, this does not trigger a player-side move. So the GM responds by making a move, as the agenda and principles dictate. Because I don't know anything about your player, and your fiction, I can't in this post speculate as to what an appropriate move would be. But I've given many examples in my posts upthread of what such moves might look like.
No. What you have described here is not a MC move.Since AW indicates that the MC sets up things like groups of opposition, rival gangs, and other stuff like that in a sandbox-y type of way, I would imagine that it would be perfectly in-game for me to say "this noble is having a masquerade tomorrow night, there's been a rash of muggings on this other street, there's been reports of demons on such-and-such a street, the glow-in-the-dark fungus farms are mysteriously failing, and you all have personal issues you said you want to deal with--so what do you want to do now?"
I don't think we can profitably discuss how fronts are authored and used at this point of the conversation. At this stage you're still not taking seriously that the MC makes moves in accordance with the principles.Unless you're saying that the GM doesn't actually set up anything, including the area's NPCs, until the players decide they exist? If otherwise, then AW should just say that it's a sandbox game.
I've got no view on whether or not you should play Apocalypse World. But if you want to understand the play of the game, I encourage you to stop thinking about "how it sounds" and read it literally having regard to the principles. None of the principles says hurt the PCs. But the principles do say to (inter alia) respond with f*****y and intermitten rewards. And the way this is done is by making moves. The only move that (literally) hurts the PCs is to inflict harm, which a GM would do if the dynamic of play warranted a hard move (as per my quote upthread about the dynamic of soft and hard/irrevocable moves) and if that followed from the fiction - eg it was established in the fiction that the PC is being targetted by a sniper, or is being beaten up by a thug, or whatever.It makes it sound very GM vs. PC to me. "I want to hurt the PCs, but I'm not allowed to do it unless I have a good in-game reason." I'm sure that's not what's intended, but the writing is so unclear that's what's coming across.
I honestly don't understand what you're describing here. There are too persuasion-type player-side moves: one based on the threat of violence (go aggro) and one based on the offer of a quid quo pro (seduce/manipulate). If the player declares some other action, like just a simple request of an NPC, then - as per what I posted and Blue posted - the GM makes an appropriate move in response, where appropriate means in accordance with the principles.The only options that require roles are both manipulative (and one of them I am not interested in doing at all), and the lack of a persuasion-type move makes everything both arbitrary and dependent on aggressive activity. If the MC decides one thing, then there's nothing the player can try to accomplish peacefully.
Some further responses, to other parts of your post:
This is not railroading. It's framing - the GM is telling Keeler's player where Keeler is and what she notices. It's exactly the same as the D&D GM saying, "OK, so when you all meet back at the inn . . . ".It looks to me like the MC is railroading this: Keeler will walk by the armory and she will not only hear people in there but will automatically go inside and find out what they're doing.
If there is some reason why Keeler's player thinks that Keeler would not be at the armoury, now would be the time for her to explain that - similar to the discussion that the example sets out of the GM and Marie's player discussing where Marie is. But for what I think are understandable reasons, Vincent Baker has skipped over such a possibility.
I think Baker's thought is that describing to Keeler what she hears from her gang members as she wanders past her armoury is no more controversial than - for instance - a CoC GM telling the players what letters their PCs received in the morning mail. That assumes that the PCs in fact went out and checked their mailbox, but normally that assumption would not be controversial.But if the MC is actually expected to just tell PCs where they're going, what they're doing, and also that they know info that they couldn't possibly know, because this allows the MC to ramp up the tension, then I think they're doing it wrong. Or at least in a way that discourages me from wanting to play.
Here are some examples of random determination of fiction, chosen from various RPGs:OK, so how is this different from a typical RPG?pemerton said:AW has no random determination of the fiction. At every point someone has the job of deciding what the fiction is: either a player is saying what their PC does, or the GM is announcing backstory, or framing, or consequences.
* In AD&D, a failed roll to pick locks means that the thief failed to pick the lock.
* In 3E D&D, a certain degree of failure on a climb check means that the character falls.
* In Rolemaster, there are many many crit results (far too many to spell out in a post) that dictate what injury is suffered by the victim of violence.
* In classic D&D, a wandering monster roll determines who/what the PCs encounter.
* In 5e D&D, a failed save against a Charm Person spell tells us that the target of the spell has been ensorcelled by the caster.
* In 3E D&D, a certain degree of failure on a climb check means that the character falls.
* In Rolemaster, there are many many crit results (far too many to spell out in a post) that dictate what injury is suffered by the victim of violence.
* In classic D&D, a wandering monster roll determines who/what the PCs encounter.
* In 5e D&D, a failed save against a Charm Person spell tells us that the target of the spell has been ensorcelled by the caster.
These examples could very easily be multiplied. There is nothing like this in AW. All the fiction is deliberately authored; but there are rules that establish who gets to author it when, under what constraints.