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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8416728" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.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.[USER=6915329]@Faolyn[/USER], 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 [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'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 [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER]'s remark about the players setting their own agenda. [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] 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 [USER=20564]@Blue[/USER] have explained in our posts.I think these questions show that you are not taking seriously what the AW rulebook says.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.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.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.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.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.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 . . . ". 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.Here are some examples of random determination of fiction, chosen from various RPGs:* 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.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.</blockquote>

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