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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 8416118" data-attributes="member: 99817">These are interesting questions. They're interesting, in my mind, because they drive at something fundamental, which I've mentioned in other posts in this thread.And it comes down to whether it is the player, or the MC, who has determined the purpose of the player character.If the player has done so ("I need to find my missing sister") then there's really no such thing as a 'passive' roll. Let's say they're searching her last known location looking for clues to her whereabouts - on a failed roll, the MC can make as hard move a move as they like. And it doesn't have to be they don't find a clue - they can find a whopping great obvious sign which doesn't reveal something welcome:"Uh oh, looks like she's been taken straight to hell!" or"Oh no, she's to be sacrificed at midnight by the Lord Lieutenant" oranything else which appropriately challenges the player-authored concept.If it's a player-authored goal, the options are - literally - limitless, but at the same time bounded by, and dependent on, the player's intent.It's when the GM has determined the purpose of the player character ("You've been hired to find the missing villagers") then these rolls become passive - because the whole exercise serves no purpose. Looking for 'clues' is a euphamism for 'the GM has already decided where you have to go and what you have to do next'. The player is trying to learn what the GM is going to tell them to do next. It's a waste of everyone's time not telling them but for some reason it gets gated behind a roll and now the roll isn't great and the GM is wondering how they invent something new for the character to do out of thin air, and the player is wondering why we can't just fudge round this thing that just happened so we can get on with rescuing the damn villagers. Awkward. But revealing of the core conceits of play.So my advice would be to re-evaluate the set-up and premise of character creation, the processes which are being used to create the situations each PC finds themself in, and ask yourself if it's the players who generated the purpose and goals of the PCs. If you have strong characters with clear player-generated goals and obligations and drama around them, you shouldn't get passive moves (although there are too many PbTA games for me to speak for more than a handful).</blockquote>

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