Pretty much the title. I think it’s quite nice but I’m interested in what people think of it.
Get in the way
When you get in the way of a party member, you can give them a choice. Ask them whether they fail because of you.
If they say yes, they choose one. If they say no, you choose one.
- You deepen your Debt or clear a Bond with them;
- You lose 1 Hold.
If you give them no choice, then you take both.
Looks interesting for me.
Is there a general Hold here? How does it function?
Yes! I’ll edit it in the main post later, but basically Hold is the main game currency. I renamed the traditional hold you get from moves for picking options as tokens.
That’s a bit like a Fate Compell, but a very handy one, and without absurd escalation. More like DramaSystem petition/grant. I don’t play PbtA but it seems really cool !
I tried to figure how to insert a+1 forward for another course of action, but the “revolving coin” aspect of the choice prevented me from doing it.
Also, its a bit unclear now whose resources the move modifies & when? (they choose, you choose).
How would you word it?
I don’t know those references! Could you tell more?
One place could be at the end. If you deny a choice to the other player, they get a +1 forward against you. Does that work?
Fate (an evolution of Fudge) is a game that tries to encourage vivid, often pulp-y fiction. It’s full of excellent ideas about skill lists, and predicative space (zones) etc.
But when you fear “losing the game” you’re not in the mood for that. So what they did was try to reassure the players so that they could agree to fail. Basically, you could give a player a cool idea for their character to fail (in relation with something they had written on their sheet), and they’d get a bribe for that.
In some forgotten corners of internet discussions about TTRPG it was called “flashlight dropping” : when the party hates you for dropping the torch in a dungeon full of creatures that fear only light. You see the problem : flashlight dropping is an excellent move, and the worst, according to the social contract, whether you want to win the game or play, say, Scoobidoo. So they came up with the bribe idea. That was a very good idea at the time, nothing said about that. It made you read what players had written (“flagged”)on their character sheets and use it for real. It’s not terribly bad, but to me it’s clearly insufficient. Also, there was a sort of a waging war in case of refusal, something I find very unsafe, like, it’s in the name : Compell. Exchanging tokens is good for signaling when you want to “drop the flashlight” : cool. Bribing and compelling, otoh, are not my idea of a functional exchange.
This leads us to Drama System.
This is easy to bolt on pretty much anything. Best DM in the world Sandra Snan 
grafts it on D&D advantage mechanic. It goes like this : when you begin a scene, designate one petitioner and one granter. At the end of the scene, if the granter feels they “yielded” the petitioner gives them a drama token. You then follow that token economy. That’s basically your move, grafted on Bonds and stuff from the PbtA economy.
I think your solution for the +1 works, I couldn’t really tell because I’m not a PbtA expert. One thing though : I didn’t see the bonus as “against you” (which Bond does in a way) but as “for a certain course of action”. Like : I hinder your attempt to destroy the door, but I give you a bonus to go in through the window. This is the aikido version : you don’t just block, but you suggest another course of action. It can be useful in a “no but” sort of way. Interpret that as an advice or as an “opening”. Which Bonds clearly can’t do.
What. a. wall. of. text.
Sorry for that.
My suggestion for the wording:
You choose one for [whose?] character / They choose one for [whose?) character
Screw that. Your post was highly educational, even if I don’t understand 100% of the examples without the system context.
Oh, I get it. It’s kind of hanging the carrot to get the players to accept the deal. I like it.
I have a game in a few, but I’ll try to work that in after that.
Yes except without the carrot part. I see it not as a carrot, but as an hint of an alternative. I don’t like this feeling in games when I have to come up with a whole new thing in an instant : blank page alarm. Talking about, maybe just hinting at an alternative before the roll is preferible to me. That’s what I like with Otherkind dice and PbtA moves, when they are not too abstract.