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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9124814" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Providing adversaries, as far as I'm concerned, does not even occur during the sequence you have described above. The provision of adversaries occurs either purely within the fiction (with numbers only called up when they are needed*), or only when an indexed result has been applied. More on this in a bit.An analogy occurred to me a short while ago. It is imperfect and such, but it captured an idea I would like to discuss. Consider a student in a high-level experimental physics course. Part of the purpose of the course is to learn new facts from physics, but part of it is also to teach the student that experimental design is one of the most critical tasks of actual, practicing physicists. But the professor has taken it upon himself to interfere with the student's experiments. Not out of any desire to be malfeasant; his two goals are (a) to avoid the distraction of erroneous results when the student has made a minor but hard-to-find error, and (b) to force the student to confront errors every now and then, even if they simply lucked into doing things the right way but for the wrong reason.This professor, despite having only the best intentions and taking steps intended to aid student learning, is in fact preventing learning. Because now, every experiment is not what the student thinks it is. Every experiment has the confounding variable of Professor Jones secretly altering the results. Rather than being allowed to make mistakes and then discussing those mistakes, the student acquires "knowledge" based on false premises and "data" that may be completely fabricated.Note, however, that this problem ceases when the Professor is open about his actions--because then it becomes part of a dialogue, something that affects known or indexed results, or which acts as advice or assistance (aka, not a black box anymore). Alternatively, the Professor can act secretly, but in ways that don't actually affect the learning process, e.g. by including faulty equipment that the student is expected to find, diagnose, and address. (Thinking to check your experimental apparatus to make sure it works the way you want it to is a very, very important skill to develop.) As soon as either component of this is changed, the problem goes away. It is only the joint state of black box AND manipulation that causes an issue.The provision of adversaries is either the post-indexing "your results were wrong--go back, find out why, and tell me" or the pre-system "this is a curious thing, how should we examine it so that a useful experiment can be conducted?" To somehow insert adversaries within the black box--never allowing the player, or student, to know that this challenge has been presented and yet it is there anyway--would completely defeat the purpose of having an adversary to begin with.Stepping away from the analogy and looking at the mechanics of actual games:When I run Dungeon World, I usually do only light prep work. I can often build an encounter in 5-10 minutes because monsters are very simple mechanically (much more complex conceptually, at least for creatures more interesting than bags-o-HP, but that's how DW do.) As a general rule, though, if there is a risk of danger or attack, that risk is already present within the fiction without any need for a secretive intrusion on my part. However, sometimes, a player makes a move and misses (6- on a roll), and one possible Hard move would be for an encounter to break out--perhaps even an unexpected one, e.g. the guards you were working with turn on you. This also can't be black-boxed, because the problem can only arise out of the indexed result. In either case, to put the actual threat into the black box would be to act unilaterally in defiance of both the rules and the fiction.*Ironically, this is one of the areas where games like 4e and 13A are actually very similar to games like Dungeon World. You don't need a statblock for something that isn't going to make or participate in moves. Just do what makes sense for the fiction of that creature.</blockquote>

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