If you are familiar with MFZ: Firebrands or The King is Dead, you know the direction.
Calling the PbtA "moves" moves: A bad move?
There are also some more “traditional” games by Vincent’s standards. He’s making some straight-up PbtA builds, like World of Adventure, Under the Hollow Hills, and stuff like that, as well as republishing a sci-fi version of Dogs in the Vineyard.
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@Deodatus
I played the original MFZ tactical game, but have no idea about its Fireband counterpart.
Never heard of The King is Dead.
How are they different from, say classic AW2 ?
@Paul_T
Uuuuh, really? Dogs in spaaaaaace?! 
Yes! Here’s a glimpse:
Very different! No GM, no playbooks, no randomizers (or almost none). They are formatted as booklets of prompts that the players take turns reading out. Instead of “moves”, you have “scenes” or “plays”, which define the rules for a certain type of event/scene/moment/story. Quite interesting, from a design perspective (and really revolutionary!), although in practice I’ve found them a bit unsatisfying to play.
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Interesting 
How so?
(but I don’t want to completely derail this conversation… maybe open a new thread?)
This is a super interesting take, and I think it can be leveraged to put newer players in the right mindset.
I’m wondering if renaming “Move” to “Scene” would help frame what a Move does. Making it less about “Swing a sword, thus roll to hit” and more “When a character’s contribution to a given scene is Violence, they Roll+Blood” or whatever, which then prompts them to move the scene forward in a certain way.
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A scene is already quite a definite concept, this only blurs meanings.
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I think of it more like a “move” in Chess. It’s something you can do, which progresses the state of the game, and (usually) creates or invites a response from other players.
I think the “creating a response” part is pretty key here - especially for MC moves, which are basically defined as “something the MC says which demands a response from the players”, in my opinion.
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Sure! I’ll reply privately.
(I’m afraid I might have gone off a tangent with my poorly explained comments on kicking down doors and whatnot, so I’ll try and get back on topic)
Ahem
Although I do like that interpretation very much and think it implies all kinds of crazy design possibilities, I do not feel as if that’s what the authors were going for. It’s been some time since I read AW, so I’m not entirely sure of the OG standpoint, but Adam Koebel definitely has another perspective in Dungeon World, which is what I’m most familiar with (I know, I know).
First, because there’s a huge amount of things that players do that move the plot forward and do not count as moves, such as murdering someone in their sleep (although I suppose that could count as a GM Move anyway?). There’s also the way that monster moves work, which as written are basically moves in the chess sense.
To me, it seems, it would make more sense to call the options that a move entails “moves”, and to call the actual moves “procedures” or something (which, I recognize, sounds at lot less exciting and fluid).
Which is why I like this so much, although “Scene” might not be be the exact word we should be going for as Froggy said. That, then, would look a bit like
ARM WRESTLING (scene)
When you get in an arm-wrestling contest with someone (trigger/scene), roll +STR. For a 10+, make two moves; for a 7-9, make one:
- Make the crowd go wild (move)
- Make it look like you’re going to win/lose - the bookies will notice (move)
- ((something else)) (move)
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That’s not bad!
And, oddly enough, that’s exactly what Vincent’s “prompt-based” PbtA designs do (like Firebrands).
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I too would discourage the use of “scene” here; I agree with Froggy that this word is already “Taken” – people have an idea of what a “scene” is in an RPG, and trying to redefine it is going to make a mess.
Maybe there’s something better, but I’m not really convinced that “Move” is holding us back in any meaningful way at this point. Clarifying the differentiation between “player moves” and “GM moves” by calling the latter “reactions” or “cuts” or whatever solves all the issues I have with this terminology.
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Late to the thread, but I completely agree. I think ‘move’ is stylish but basically just misleading for the player-facing variety. In my PbtA games I use the term “rules” for player-facing moves and “specials” for advancement moves on playbooks.
GM “moves” I still call moves, because I think those make sense - make a play of some kind, intervene, do something.
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Hm. Calling them “rules” to me kinda implies that the rest of the stuff in the book ISN’T rules, which seems strange and confusing.
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I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s an issue. Most RPGs are a mixture of textual guidance, discussion, hard rules presented in text, and step-by-step procedures called out in numbered lists, and they get by just fine without having a special name for those different flavors of rule.
My texts are the same; there’s a mixture of rules presented as text and rules presented as short procedures with clear fictional triggers, and I just don’t bother calling the latter anything specific. They’re just more rules.
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While I agree with Michael here, I also find the “rule” distinction awkward and confusing, as Airk says.
“Procedures” could be a term, I suppose…
Nothing feels quite right in this sphere.
I wonder if it would change anything to simply rewrite the MC moves in the same format? After all, there are lots of player-facing moves which don’t involve a roll.
When a player looks at you expectantly, because they missed a roll, handed you a golden opportunity, or simply because it’s clearly your turn to speak, choose one:
[List of MC moves follows.]
Effectively, the MC gets one “move”, in the same format, just with lots of options to choose from.
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That reminds me now Ironsworn has two moves that are similar to GM moves: Ask the Oracle and Pay the Price. Both are categorized as Fate Moves and include roll tables.
Pay the Price trigger when “you suffer the outcome of a move,” and is triggered by many of the misses of other moves. Meanwhile, Ask the Oracle formalizes the establishment of details, especially since the system is designed to be played both with or without a GM.
Oh, and for more specific cases, a “suffer move” may be triggered instead of Pay the Price, such as Face Death.
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That’s a great case study: do those moves actually replace a GM during solo or co-op? What if a GM is using those moves as if from a GM “playbook?” Does this confuse the GM position and what does that mean for arbitration? Thinking of the original post, should Ironsworn instead have rules/a ruleset? Does this game even make sense with “moves” or is it just using the established vocabulary being PbtA?
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Great post! On a sidenote, Baker stated somewhere that forgetting to use a move does not cause a failure state in AW, you just instinctively ‘fall back’ to a more simple layer by design and resolve the situation there: Something like this:
Peripheral & playbook moves
Basic moves
Conversation
So if you play by the agendas and principles but do not use a single move for hours, you still play AW RAW, just on a more simple level.
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