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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8596926" data-attributes="member: 75787">And I guess this is why it doesn't work for me. It says that the focus is "see what your characters do" but in practice, because much of the time any action results in success with a complication, it seems more like the focus is "see what the world does to your character". When I play Fate, if I fail to interrogate a suspect, I can choose simply to fail and then try something else, or I might decide to use one of my character aspects, or I might succeed with a complication -- but the focus is on my character and what they do. When I play a PbtA game, that has not been the case. Very often my dice roll results not in a choice over what I do (accept failure, put in more effort, accept a consequence) but in the world taking over focus and doing something.As an example, from AW p137 "Act Under Fire" the suggestion is that if you roll 7-9 on dragging a friend to cover, you offer the player a choice between one of the two of you getting shot. That sort of thing I found frustrating. There's no option to say "this is important to my character, I'm willing to burn something just to make it work", there's no option to say "I'd prefer to simply fail and try a different approach". There isn't even the suggestion that a player could choose a complication (although I'm guessing most GMs would allow that). This is made more noticeable because when your character does something well, it's over fast -- you did it, you narrate it, next player. When you are in that intermediate state, there's a pause while the GM explains what's going on and your alternatives, and then you might have a question (like, how badly is my character going to be shot? Will my friend potentially die?) The focus has switched from your action to the complication. And because it takes so much more time, I found that when I played PbtA games, most of the time was not spent on seeing what my character did, but instead on understanding and reacting to what the world did when I didn't succeed completely.I really, really want to like PbtA, and I've played maybe a dozen variants in home games and at cons. But it  often feels like I'm along for the ride; there's no need to think or plan or worry about what my character would actually do, because a complication will come up and I'll just be reacting to GM intrusions.</blockquote>

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