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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9016604" data-attributes="member: 42582">Pacing is a thing that I think DW and similar games handle well.But that's not the main point I've been making.I apologise for pedantry that you are likely to find annoying, but the difference between your "when the players declare a move, it happens unless the GM makes a GM move" and what I have said about DW is significant. What I have said is "when a player says what their PC does, either it triggers a player-side move (under the principle "if you do it, you do it") which is then resolved, or else the GM makes a move in response, typically a soft move but under limited conditions (that are spelled out) a hard move)".The varieties of permitted soft moves are spelled out (not in terms of fictional details, but in terms of abstract narrative types). Roughly speaking, they all involve increasing the tension ("rising action") without thwarting the aspiration that lies behind the action declared by the player for their PC.So if the players declare "We leave the dome looking for the enemy's installation" and - for the sake of the example - that does not trigger a player-side move, then the GM makes a soft move. Two examples I think of straight away are "As you cross the barren terrain, the horizon turns from a dull yellow to a deep red: it looks like a dust storm is rising" (this is an example of announcing future badness) and "You can see the installation in the distance. It's built into a rocky outcropping, and the entrance is covered by a pillbox sitting on another bit of rock opposite it" (this is an example of providing an opportunity, with a cost). (The second one is, roughly, what I ended up doing in Traveller when I worked out the published game rules weren't going to help me.)The game continues in this vein until either a hard move is made by the GM or a player-side move is triggered. A GM hard move permits the GM to narrate new stuff that makes the PCs' situation concretely worse here-and-now: suppose, for instance, that - following the second example I gave - the player declares "I walk up to the entrance and knock on it", that counts as handing the GM an opportunity on a plate, which is one condition permitting a hard move. So the GM might respond: "A rifle shot is fired from the pillbox. Your vacc-suit blunts much of its force, but you still take 1 harm, and there's a hole in your suit. What do you do?"In my Traveller game, what actually happened was that the PCs sneaked up on the pillbox, edging along the rocks. And this is something for which Classic Traveller does have a rule - there is a nice little subsystem for resolving manoeuvring in vacc suits, which is highly analogous to a DW player-side move. So I called for an appropriate check, and the player failed, and so (to use DW terminology, which is not out of place in Classic Traveller for the reason I just gave) and so I made the move that the rule told me to, namely a "harder" but not maximally hard move: "One of the hoses on your suit has become snared on a protrusion of rock: what do you do?" Exactly the same sort of dynamic would play out in DW (the player side move would be Defy Danger; or, in Apocalypse World it would be Acting Under Fire - the name of that move is metaphorical, with "fire" encompassing any risk or threat or situation which makes it hard for the character to keep their cool.There's never a point in AW (or DW) play in which the rules don't stipulate who is licensed to add to the fiction, within what constraints: players say what their PCs do, and the GM does everything else making either soft or hard moves as the rules dictate. As [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] has pointed out, many times the rules take as their input the state of the fiction (eg see my example just above of acting under fire), and the technique for settling that fiction, if it's unclear, is a series of consensus-building tools, the most fundamental of which is the GM asking questions of the players.There are two reasons why the players do not always want to hedge and downplay the fiction so as to avoid triggering player-side moves: (i) basic principles of sincerity and pleasure in the unfolding events, but also and importantly (ii) sometimes they want to achieve decisive results for their PCs, rather than simply have the escalation of soft moves by the GM, and hence need to trigger player-sie moves.</blockquote>

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