A nudge from a mod: the replies are getting a touch off topic…
Is Defy Danger a bad move?
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I totally agree with this. One of the benefits of PbtA games with clear, specific triggers for moves is that it leaves productive gaps where there are no rolls to make, so the MC moves kick in. The MC moves often maintain tension better than a roll would (especially: • Tell them the possible consequences and ask • Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost). If basic moves are wide enough to cover all moments of uncertainty, these MC moves see a lot less play.
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@Frasersimons… I know how WoD and BitD work… can you save me some digging and post the Veil 2020 and The Between’s versions of Defy Danger? (Or point me to where I can find them?) I’m very interested in the specifics, here.
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Here’s The Veil 2020’s version:
When you wish to accomplish something despite a risk, the Referee will tell you what you
stand to lose (Harm, your life, a limb, a piece of gear or cybernetics, escalating a
situation, etc.) Sum 2d6 and add the State modifier reflecting how your character feels in
that moment, then add an Emotion Spike to that State.
• A total of 6 or less means things go badly; what you staked is collected or lost,
either permanently or temporarily at the Referee’s discretion.
• A total between 7-9 is a partial success. You succeed—but there is a catch, a
compromise, a complication, or retribution to follow; what was at stake is not lost but
it may still be in jeopardy.
• A total of 10 or more is a complete success. You do what you set out to do and what was
at stake cannot be lost.
• A total of 12 or more is a critical success; you gain an additional benefit, effect, or
Advantage in the doing—now, or later.
When you receive help from someone else, the Referee may tell you to roll with Advantage,
implicating both characters in the stakes and possible consequences.
And The Between’s Night move (when you do something like this in the day, it is a similar move, but different):
When you do something risky or face something you fear, name what you’re afraid will
happen if you fail or lose your nerve. The DI will tell you how it is worse than you fear. You can
choose to back down or go through with it. If you go through with it, roll. *On a 10+, you do it;
describe what it looks like. *On a 7-9, you do it but there is a complication or cost; the DI
describes what it looks like.
On a 12+, you do what you intended or you hold steady, and the DI will tell you some extra
benefit or advantage you receive. Describe what it looks like.
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Nope. It does exactly what it sets out to do, or at least it always has when I’ve run Dungeon World.
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I’m generally fine with Defy Danger, though I absolutely hate the "stumble, hesitate, or flinch phrasing. Because the move is so broadly applicable, and DW puts characters such an enormous variety of situations, that specific detail either gets in the way or gets ignored. Fortunately, the move works equally well if you just delete “you stumble, hesitate, or flinch” entirely and otherwise leave the move alone.
I don’t really think that the “angling for your best stat” thing is a problem. If a player does it well, engaging with the fiction, then it leads to pretty cool play like the clever wizard pulling down a tapestry on the charging guards and Defying Danger with INT rather than trying to outrun them with her crappy DEX. And if done cheesily, it’s either easily corrected by talking to each other and getting on the same page, or it’s not and that’s indicative of a mismatch between players and/or system. The guy who cheezes every Defy Danger into their best stat, and then gets huffy when you call him on it… that guy probably won’t enjoy the game and you probably won’t enjoy playing it with him.
As far as it’s broad applicability… I can see the problems with it, but I think a wide-open adventure game like Dungeon World or Worlds in Peril needs some sort of a “fallback” move. I might be steeling my mind against a mind-flayer’s psionic blast, or trying catch the ledge as the orc shoves me over the railing, or jogging for 16 hours straight, or trying to schmooze with my betters in the King’s Court, and all of those are genre-appropriate situations that could go any which way. As a GM, I don’t generally want a different move for resolving each situation if one move will suffice.
But…
@Frasersimons’ comment and examples got me thinking. One thing I do struggle with on Defy Danger is when we go “oh, that’s Defying Danger” and then they roll and it’s a 7-9 and then I’m like “huh, what to do, what to do?”
So, along the lines of that Veil 2020 and The Between move, a possible re-write for Dungeon World’s Defy Danger:
Defy Danger
When you act despite an imminent threat or resist a calamity, say what you hope to accomplish and the GM will describe the danger (separate from you not accomplishing your goal). Once the stakes are set, roll…
…+STR if you power through
…+DEX if you act with speed or finesse
…+INT if you think quickly or apply your expertise
…+WIS if you steel your mind or trust your senses
…+CON if you endure or hold steady
…+CHA if you rely on charm or social graceOn a 10+, both; on a 7-9, pick 1:
- You do what you set out to do (otherwise, not so much)
- The danger is avoided (otherwise, it comes to pass
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That no one really likes to use Defy Danger is not a bug, it’s a feature.
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@Mathias can you say more? I’m not really sure I’m picking up just what you/re putting down here.
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As a move its purpose seems to be to handle all those edge cases where you want to disclaim decision making to the dice.
But it is the least elegant choice for sure. So, how do you motivate people to look to other moves first?
Make people prefer any other move. The most likely outcome is a 7-9 which is more taxing on the GM and it spells bad news for the player. So everyone will look if a different move fits, first.
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Ah, see… I disagree with that.
I agree that Defy Danger should be the “worst” move from a player-facing standpoint. That makes it a baseline for other moves to work against. If a basic, special, playbook, or custom move doesn’t provide some advantage (mechanically or fictionally or procedurally) over Defy Danger, then it’s not worth having. I think it’s really useful benchmark to design against.
And I agree that players should want to avoid Defy Danger if possible, and use a different/better move when they can, because the best you can hope for with Defy Danger is “you do it, cool.”
But I do not think that the move should be taxing the GM, or otherwise be unpleasant to the group as a whole, so that they try to avoid try to avoid it. That’s like when players would try to avoid combat in Storyteller games not because combat was a bad choice, but because it so awful to play. That’s not… good.
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I said it is simply more taxing than other moves.
For my money: yes.
For two reasons, both of them rather involved.
First reason: I think it fucks with the core gameplay loop of the game.
Now, I have a whole rant about this, but to boil it down: there’s a tendency in some AW-adjacent design (including in statements by Adam & Sage) to argue that “player says thing > basic move activates” is the core gameplay loop and “player says thing > MC makes a move” is an exception/outlier, and I firmly believe (and for what it’s worth, so does Vincent) that the precise opposite is true.
“Player says thing > MC move > what do you do?” is the basic loop of the game, and moves (especially basic moves) represent specific exceptions that are called out as operating differently.
In that context Defy Danger is terrible, because the trigger is so vapidly generic that it forcibly flips the structure. So instead of looking to the MC to see what happens, we fumble for dice and look to Defy Danger instead.
Second reason (and this is a critique I have of DW across the board): I think the move trigger “when you act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity” fails at one of the key functions of move triggers.
Jason D’Angelo has an excellent blog called The Daily Apocalypse where he is slowly, meticulously engaged in a deep text reading of AW 2E that draws equally on the game mechanics, the places in the text where the Bakers state clear intent, and their wider work / statements as designers.
At some point he breaks out and talks about what it means to be powered by the apocalypse. And in this post, he draws a bunch of Vincent’s past design thinking together and makes some points I found hugely compelling and transformative.
To quote Jason quoting Vincent:
"If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don’t need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That’s the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool.
If your rules model a character’s doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that’s not so great.*"
And herein lies the genius of AW. When you “read a charged situation”, when you “seduce, manipulate, bluff, fast-talk, or lie to someone”, when you “go aggro on someone” or “attack someone unsuspecting or helpless”, and especially when you “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom”: shit is always interesting. All these statements are provocative, pointed, laden with risk. Not to be twee, but they’re charged statements.
The move triggers in AW are chosen to engineer the conversation such that because you want the agency and benefits and perceivable consequence that go along with activating them, you are much more likely to say those interesting things.
Compare that to “take aim and shoot an enemy at range”, “attack an enemy in melee”, “consult your accumulated knowledge”, “have leverage on a GM character and manipulate them”. Where is the urgency? Where is the charge, the risk, the stakes, the interest?
(I can imagine a Conan style game where a not dissimilar set of actions are framed in a far more provocative and interesting way).
But bringing this tangent back to Defy Danger specifically: it is the guiltiest of the problem above out of all of Dungeon World’s moves.
“Act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity” is so vague it does nothing to engineer the conversation or tell the players anything about what to play, especially given the second half of the clause is triggered by the GM and completely out of the player’s hands.
At least “do something under fire or dig in to endure fire” requires that the fire is already here, in your face, and in the middle of fucking you up, rather than just vaguely “imminent”.
Anyhow, that is a whole lot of text. Apologies for going on a little.
Obviously a lot of this is my lens on good AW-adjacent design / other people I respect’s lenses on the same, but a thread like this always is.
I hope I’ve at least shown enough working here to satisfy Fraser’s desire for a critical framework 
(Addendum: Part of the reason I give Act Under Fire an easier time than Defy Danger is because I strongly dislike roll + stat. Every basic move is a chance for the designer to put their thumb on the scale of conversation, and specificity - whether suggestive or prescriptive - is important. Roll +Cool makes certain specific assertions about the ontology of the fiction; roll +stat tells us nothing.
Adding conditions to the move trigger - “When you gaze into the abyss, name what you’re looking for and roll”, “When you challenge someone’s actions, say if it’s their honour or their sense you doubt then roll” - seems to me a more interesting way to invite specific elaboration from the player than “do you roll +Dex or +Int?”).
(Addendum 2: The 10+ on Defy Danger is really awkward in how it flows back out into the fiction, too. “You do what you set out to, the threat doesn’t come to bear” makes some weird and specific assumptions about what kind of action you’re taking despite an imminent threat. Read literally, it seems to imply that if I am Defying Danger to push a comrade out of the path of a fireball aimed for both of us, on a 10+ I am somehow not burned despite what honesty would seem to demand?
The 10+ on Defy Danger feels like Act Under Fire and the Resistance roll from Blades weirdly mashed together and tangled up without any clear intentionality, and it doesn’t do it for me.)
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I have a broader, more direct take on this that encompasses the issue with Defy Danger-type moves. Mostly that they interact with a type of stake-setting and success that is antithetical to the rest of AW-adjacent design. Luke, above, and I have agreed around this before (but haven’t really nutted it out like we need to) The thing is…I disagree that Act Under Fire gets the better end of it. I think Defy Danger is kind of the best of these bad moves because of what it’s trying to do.
DW is trying to be accessible to D&D people. There’s a reason that a lot of Gauntlet play (that doesn’t want to emulate how we played D&D as teens and twenties) has to so thoroughly hack the system and build in play culture. This also works with DW trying to create a fantastical and heroic tone, both of which can resist players having the kind of freedom Defy Danger offers. The aforementioned “I determine the trajectory and roll +INT” isn’t actually wildly outside of the tone of what DW-as-written WANTS to be.
D&D has a trope of “I want to do this wildly fantastical thing” “ROLL!” “Nat 20!” Crowd goes wild. The idea that, hey, with a 20, everything is possible. So the 10+ stakes of Defy Danger being “you do it [without consequence]” is also consistent with what its largest audience wants. The truth is that there’s so little impact in the trigger being so fictionally wild because the fiction is so fictionally wild.
If you don’t want that, if you do want to ground your game differently, you’re going to need to build in a way to limit the way Defy Danger interacts with success. You’re going to need to decide what players can and can’t fictionally Defy Danger to do, because at the moment there’s really nothing built in to the system that does that for you. DW’s loop of play is based on that old style of D&D, the type where creativity and ingenuity are the player’s best weapons. The OSR mentality of “if you’re not rolling your best stat, you’ll fail, and if you fail, it’s time to die”. And that’s supported by the “player says -> MC makes move” loop, which is very indie. Horseshoes for days.
Honestly, this is another thing in DW that leans so heavily on the 16HP Dragon: That the MC should be controlling when moves can fire, because the triggers and stakes of the moves don’t control it enough itself. It’s an interesting part of it’s design, and I don’t hate offloading it to the MC like that, to give the game some flexibility, but it does feel like DW is a very different beast to AW2e, despite the surface similarities.
Also yes, despite everything else: “10+ you do it, 7-9 you stumble hesitate or flinch, 6- you don’t do it” are literally the worst stakes and we can do better.
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I totally agree: a move with a provocative, interesting trigger and a beneficial outcome gets players to say provocative, interesting things that they wouldn’t otherwise. Specific moves can push the conversation in a direction that freeform play wouldn’t go, which is much more important than a system for dice to arbitrate success and failure. Without interesting triggers and results, all moves do is make the narrative pacing more random.
I think in general Defy Danger tends to deflate tension (“You hit a 10, so I guess everything is fine, actually?”) rather than give push it forward.
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Yup, and that’s why I hate them. The beauty of apocalypse world moves is that they don’t solve any problems, they just create more interesting stuff. DW is very very different.
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I’m not sure I buy the idea that Defy Danger is any worse than Do Something Under Fire or Act Under Pressure or any of the other essentially identical moves I can think of from many PbtA games (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, The Sprawl, Monster of the Week, The Veil, Uncharted Worlds)-- in fact, the language is often identical, or nearly so: “you do it… [or] flinch, hesitate… [and get a] worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice.”
The major, obvious difference being the open stat vs. rolling off something like +Cool, which doesn’t seem like the deciding factor for me at least. Setting aside the stat issue, I’d look at the trigger and results. As people have said, the way the move pushes the fiction does deescalate tension, which is counter to how many PbtA moves operate, but again, I believe that’s true in AW as well as DW. It might be nitpicking, but I guess I want to push back on the idea that Dungeon World is somehow being a “bad” PbtA game here, when Defy Danger works basically identically to how Apocalypse World’s equivalent move worked.
Tangentially, I believe games that fall under the PbtA heading have plenty of license to play with how their moves and systems operate and the type of play they push-- as many people have said, DW is meant to feel like a different genre and type of game than AW. Generally speaking, I’m somewhat skeptical of criticisms about how one PbtA game isn’t designed like another, or like the original, but that’s neither here nor there.
Can people provide examples of games they think have done this better or in more interesting ways that address how the “10+, you’re fine for now” model isn’t pushing the fiction like other moves tend to do?
Edit: This maybe sounded like a way to shut down criticism, like if people can’t provide better examples, they shouldn’t criticize these moves, which wasn’t my intention. I agree that Act Under Fire/Defy Danger are unusual in how they don’t really suggest further action and was just wondering if people had seen other games that had strayed further from this type of move in interesting ways.
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It’s certainly compelling! I didn’t mean to imply people needed to meet my expectations, just that for most people talking about what they like and dislike about X game, they often seem to use those preferences to determine if it’s good design or not. By no means was I trying to draw a line in the sand or invalidate opinions.
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Hi this is a pretty bad take actually. Edit: yeah, I misread this and cut the quote too early. Which lead to me considering the complete opposite of what was said. I fucked up here, sorry. Leaving the rest for posterity.
I understand what you’re saying, but remember that criticism isn’t criticism. That is: analysing, discussing, and finding gaps in a move is not the same as pulling its hair and pushing it in the mud. Everyone can and should speak up about moves that rub them the wrong way regardless (or maybe especially?) if they don’t know what a better answer looks like.
There’s steps to critique, and all of them are valuable to one degree or another. Trying to shut down the early step of identifying a problem, by demanding a later step of finding a solution will only stifle discussion and lead to worse games.
I understand that you are seeking those solutions, it’s really uncomfortable to be stuck between “I don’t know what I want” and “but it isn’t this”. But that discomfort is a part of the process.
Re: moves that go beyond the 10+ = you do it paradigm and yeah sure. There’s a ton of options out there. Blades in the Dark is a version of this where you decided how high the stakes are before you roll, so 10+ may be limited effect, you only get a chance to roll to do the thing you really want. Also sets the 7-9s well. That’s a good idea, I don’t know if it’s what I want but it’s a solid idea. That way “So something nigh impossible” and “do something routine but with stakes” don’t use the same move and it’s nice.
I think you are misreading @DeusExBrockina, the full quote was:
Edit: This maybe sounded like a way to shut down criticism, like if people can’t provide better examples, they shouldn’t criticize these moves, which wasn’t my intention.
[Emphasis mine] So the take you are calling bad is not one @DeusExBrockina is making.
Back to the topic: Other PbtA examples are typically lists of options where you still don’t get all of them on a 10+, or a choice like on Hack’n Slash where you can opt in to trade something for even more effect.
Just having this choice prompts players to take a position on the fiction.
In general, having a basic move that leads to a “it’s fine now”, no immediate further snowballing necessary is not the worst when viewed in a comprehensive context.
It allows you to take a breather from the spiral… especially when you subscribe to the view that the core loop is player action -> gm move.
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Bwaaaap yeah that is on me. Absolutely misread that. Thanks for having my back, mate.
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