Quantum Orges vs. Read a Sitch?

[funkaoshi]

Maybe a simple question for those of you who run PbtA games. I’m a bit confused about how moves like “assess a bad situation” from Zombie World, or “read a sitch” from Apocalypse World are meant to work in play. The Apocalypse World move seems to imply a failure escalates the situation in a bad direction. That’s how I ran it when playing Zombie World this past weekend.

But, I’d never run a D&D game like that—generally I have the situation fixed in my head and the players may try and figure out what’s going on through play. That you are trying to figure out what’s going on wouldn’t change what’s going on. The OSR is obsessed with quantum ogres and player agency and all this stuff to avoid railroading. Something is true and I don’t change it because the players do X, Y, or Z. In some ways what I think is the PbtA approach is an alternative vision for solving that problem. I can’t railroad them because the rails don’t go anywhere yet.

Obviously, PbtA isn’t D&D, so I am curious what people do. What’s the correct approach, if there is some canonical one?

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

It kinda depends on the specific game and the GM’s relationship to their prep.

Like, one of Dungeon World’s principles is “Draw maps, leave blanks” which is explained as:

When you draw a map don’t try to make it complete. Leave room for the unknown. As you play you’ll get more ideas and the players will give you inspiration to work with. Let the maps expand and change.

So while you might have a roughly-outlined map of the location (I often do), and even some notes on the encounters or whatnot that might happen there, the game is telling you to not pre-define everything. Everything not on-screen, or that hasn’t been yet been established on-screen, exists in a quantum space. Hell, in start contrast the “no quantum ogres!” mantra, one of the most commonly cited bits of Dungeon World advice is “Suddenly Ogres”.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. DW actually runs pretty darn well if you use a fully stocked, keyed locale and a concrete, disciplined “reality” to things offscreen. And the prep text of Apocalypse World specifically says that when you write up your fronts, you’re making “real, binding decisions” about them, and their instincts, and their arc (assuming the PCs don’t intervene).

If you have a concrete situation, location, etc. in mind, you can use a miss on a Read a Sitch type moves kind of like a random encounter result in an OSR game. Like, every 10 minutes of messing around there’s a chance that something bad shows and causing trouble, right? Well, every time someone Reads a Sitch, there’s a chance that they get a miss and something bad shows up and causes trouble.

Or not. Sometimes a miss on a Read a Sitch is just the GM telling them the requirements. “Yeah, there’s no way to tell from here whether that floor is stable. You can go out there and test your luck, or you backtrack and look for another way. What do you do?”

[Alexi_Sarge]

Great question!

It takes some getting used to, but yes, I’d say the best approach in PbtA GMing is to leave lots of blanks and develop the situation based on what the players do—including, but not limited to, the moves they roll.

A lot of PbtA principles help reinforce this—draw maps, leave blanks; sometimes disclaim decision-making; play to find out. The common thread is that you can’t predict exactly what will be fun and interesting to players. But if you build a tense situation and let the players loose in it, they’ll gravitate to what excites or interests them. Information-gathering moves codify this a little. If a player rolls “Discern Reality” and asks “Who’s really in control here?” it’s a big flag they’re interested in (depending on the situation) uncovering a conspiracy or pinpointing a ringleader to target or something like that. As GM, the best move might be to reveal something along those lines, even if I hadn’t worked out that detail ahead of time. Play to find out!

Misses can be an extension of this. When the players rolls a miss, you might give them more of what they’ve shown an interest in—give it to them hard, as it were. “Oh, you wanted to know who’s in the most danger here? It’s your favorite student, and the monster’s already grabbed him. Mark stress, then…What do you do?”

[JasonT]

I think there’s more than one way to answer this based on different MCing/GMing styles I’ve read people describing. I know a lot of folks approach PbtA games like the rolls create characters and objects that didn’t exist before as part of the prep, including introducing new threats whole cloth on a 6-. I’m not entirely sure where that comes from (and neither is at least one of the designers of Dungeon World, as far as I can tell), but it seems to work great for some folks.

That’s not how I run PbtA games, though. If I have a clear idea of what’s in a room because of how I (or an adventure writer) prepped something, and there are no threats in that room, either (a) I don’t call for a move at all because it’s not “a charged situation,” as read a sitch calls it, or (b) I use some other move, as they’re not all necessarily about making the PCs’ lives immediately more difficult. Even Apocalypse World lets you “offer an opportunity, with or without cost” whenever that move makes sense to you in context.

P.S. I read @Jeremy_Strandberg’s response after I wrote this, and probably could’ve just said, “Yeah, what he said.” But maybe it’s helpful to hear it phrased a couple different ways.

[SidneyIcarus]

The Gunlugger and The Driver are surrounded by Balls’ gang. They have their grenade launcher and pistol, and a motorbike that fits them both. It’s dangerous, but they have options. The Gunlugger bites their bottom lip and looks across the army in front of them. The player reads a charged situation and gets a 4. What happens next?

I have a lot of thoughts on this. In fact, Read a Sitch and related moves are my current FAVES in PbtA. My thanks to Shane for summoning me here.

A Two-Step Process

The rules say that the player gets to ask a question, but should prepare for the worst. So it begins with the player asking a question.

Before we do a hard or soft move for the failure, we have to answer this question. In answering their question, I have to play by the rules. I have to play by my Agenda, Principles, and Moves. Always say what the principles demand, what the rules demand, right?

The thing is, whenever we’re talking as MCs, we HAVE to be making a move. Use your answer to Put someone in a spot or tell them the consequences and ask or announce off-screen badness.

But there’s two other Always Says: Always say what prep demands, and what honesty demands.

Honesty and Prep in this case refer to the internal consistency of the game. And they’re important. Baker, himself, includes in the text for Read a Person:

“Dude, sorry, no way” is a legit answer to “how could I get your character to…?”

This is in the same vein as the rejection of Quantum Ogres. You don’t have to invent stuff in response to Read a Sitch. And this is a good version of turn their move back on them.

“What’s my best way out?”
Fuck, dude, there isn’t one. You’re cornered.
“What here is useful or valuable to me?”
Nothing.
“Who’s really in control here?”
Exactly who it looks like. No surprises.

(Side note: you can do this on successes as well! The +1 Forward and truth is the reward, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get the answer you want!)

Then, the part two of the two-step, is the Hard Move that’s authorised by the failure…if you want.

How to go hard on failures
Pacing is a really important consideration when running PbtA games. The snowball can lead to games running a mile a minute the whole time. Having the ability to let the game breathe when it needs to is as important as having the game be oppressive when it needs to be. Night Witches taught me a LOT about this. The game is too intense if you’re always pushing the hardest of hard on the failures, and a part of that is without the context provided by quiet moments, there’s no joy in the chaos.

Read a Sitch often (but not always) comes in during a period prior to action. Surrounded by the gang, we know action is coming, but for now we’re breathing. If I roll a 6-, do I want to leave the game breathing or do I want to escalate? And that question is intensely personal to the game and the type of MC that you are.

Escalating can lead to Suddenly Ogres. What’s your best way out? No time for that, Balls shoots you in the chest, take two harm. The fight starts. What do you do?

If you don’t want to escalate though, it’s okay for your 6- to just be bad news. It’s okay to not be poking wounds every time you open your mouth. The principle of Respond with Fuckery and Intermittent Rewards is 1000% about getting players excited to engage with you, rather than terrified of your MC Bullshit. Reward them sometimes. It fucks with them even more.

This Isn’t Nothing Happens
The reason it’s okay to go gentle on failures in Read a Sitch, but not REAAAAALLY in Discern Realities is that in Apocalypse World, you can only read a charged situation, which means that there’s still drama. Shit, we’re surrounded, it’s charged, I read it. Oh bad news, no way out? Well…it’s not nothing happens because we still have the charged ambush. You’ve still put someone in a spot. This is strictly different to Dungeon World, where Discerning Realities can occur in an empty room with no pressure, where failure kind of needs to push the game forward. Momentum will always exist outside of Read a Sitch.

The One-Step Process
In contrast to the two-step (answer question, make hard move), there is a version of the MC response where you react to the question with the worst news. This is a lot like murderous ghosts, the best game ever (not really, but maybe?).

In this version, the player asks and you chuckle “Oh ho ho, it’s the worst case scenario!” This is what the DW community calls “worse than it seemed”.
“What’s our best way out?” You spot a opening! But as you move to it a sniper hits you in the leg, stopping you cold. Take two harm and what do you do?
“Who’s in control here?” That’s right! It’s not Balls, it was in fact your friend and confidant Marie! She arises from between the gang members gloating at you, she’s had this planned for months!

This type of MC decision is more likely to bring out quantum ogres than any other. Good when you have no prep, bad when you have something for honesty to demand. There’s an attraction to it, which is probably more of a rejection of “the dreaded railroad” than an good-hearted attempt to generate better play. A rejection of our lineage, rather than an attempt to make something our own. It’s a misreading of play to find out what happens as a decree to always be reactive to the players’ desires and to never think ahead. Play to Find Out What Happens doesn’t mean the fiction is mutable on every roll, it means:

You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.

It means that if there’s no way out and they ask what’s the best way out, playing to find out what happens means putting what you hoped for aside and saying “The best way out is to surrender, or fight, dangerous and bloody.” Playing to find out what happens means ending with “so, what do you do?”

There’s no canonical approach. It’s going to depend not only on your MC style, but on the tone of the game you’re playing, and the immediate needs of your story. The first roll of the game being Read a Sitch is going to demand a different narrative than it will as a roll in the middle of a all-out firefight.

Always say what prep demands, what honesty demands, what principles demand, what the rules demand.

[Pat_P]

I believe all the posts above covered it very well. The GM moves from the book are a good constraint if dealing with worries of improv when running a module or pre-written adventure especially in an area the module/adventure may not have any special encounter or setting flavor where the players are currently.

Some moves I like from DW:
Show a downside to their class, race or equipment: “Hmm, maybe thief could pick this lock?” or, “It seems the guards only allow Dwarves to pass freely.”
Offer an opportunity, with or without cost: - This one was mentioned earlier as well and it is a lead in to another roll or future action. “You find a book that looks like a ledger of payments written in some strange shorthand. Maybe you can convince the accountant in town to tell you what it means.”
Show signs of an approaching threat - Here is one that work especially well with a module since you know what lies further along in the adventure. Cut away from the party and let them see a vile ritual in progress somewhere in the dungeon. Or as they spend too much time searching for the clue, footsteps echo throughout halls as the guards have discovered the bodies in the entryway.

Let failures lead to more rolls. Let the moves snowball. Let them lead the players to more decisions and actions on their part, even if those actions are session or two away.

(As I was typing this, Sidney posted a wonderful response above and I wholeheartedly agree that nothing is really canonical when considering GM’ing style, fictional positioning, and tone)

[funkaoshi]

Your whole reply is great. Thanks! I always feel like too much improv makes what the players are choosing to do kind of meaningless. (Unless the game is really about that sort of improv.) Lots of great advice.

Side note: you can do this on successes as well! The +1 Forward and truth is the reward, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get the answer you want!

Ah! This is one thing that I missed / didn’t click for me. I was thinking a win was about improving your position. And that felt weird.

[SidneyIcarus]

Read a Sitch is the move you make when you don’t know what to do. If you already know what you’re gonna do, just do it. Fiction Interrogation moves are this really interesting position where both the character and the player are asking the same questions while they look at the world.

[MagpieMark]

@SidneyIcarus is saying a lot of great stuff here, especially about the nature of prep (which you probably haven’t done in session 1) and being honest to the fiction. All of that stuff is overlap between the PbtA and OSR communities, but the strategy for dealing with the problem is different. Great discussion here.

I’ve often said that the worst answer to “Who is pulling your strings?” in Urban Shadows is “No one.” because it implies that the character who is a big enough problem to demand this question be asked (“I want to know why this vampire is here and who she is working for in this situation”) is… there for entirely their own reasons. And those reasons probably aren’t good. All I’m doing when I say “No one” is telling the player that this character is here in the fiction for their own motives!

But the sudden reversal caused by a player using this move and you (the MC) discovering new depths to an existing character can be really valuable—“OH, I guess El Narco’s brother IS setting up a betrayal that I didn’t see coming until just right now when this question was asked and it occurred to me that this would be really interesting.” Those moments aren’t EVERY time the players use the questioning move, which is totally about them not knowing what to do, but it happens often enough that it should be a tool in your arsenal. (Of course, don’t betray your prep/honesty as you fill in blanks!)

But I think all of this really stems from a fundamental misunderstanding the community often has (and perpetuates) by using the phrases “hard” and “soft” moves. Here’s a series of essays from Brendan Conway on this point, and he says it better and more in-depth than I can:

Picking the Right GM Move in PbtA: Part One

In short, there isn’t any such thing as a “hard” move, a response from the GM that is definitively solid and easily distinguishable from a “soft” move," a response from the GM that is weaker/softer/less permanent. We can have harder or softer moves, but there’s no magic line across which something becomes HARD or SOFT. There’s always just a conversation that has different, shifting stakes that revolve around the characters, the events, and the genre. A sudden death in ZW might be a “soft” move while a suddent death in Masks is “hard” af.

So when someone asks “Which enemy is the most vulnerable to me?” in Apocalypse World, you still need to think of it as part of the broader conversation. They want to have someone be vulnerable to them, to have a chance at changing the situation/taking advantage of an opportunity, etc. Your job as the MC is to step back and say “What kind of move is needed right now? Do I need to ramp up the tension with a hardER move—‘Sorry, kid. The most vulnerable person here is the crazy cannibal right in front of you. Everyone else has got hard cover.’ or can I give the player something softer that’s going to help them ramp things up—'Oh, I’m glad you asked. Fucking Rolfball is sitting on a huge tank of gasoline that these cannibals have been dragging around. Shoot it and he’s toast.”

There isn’t a canonical answer because this is the same thing you’re doing all the time as an MC… taking the temperature of the story (and the group) and applying the right amount of pressure to keep things at a roiling boil.

[Jay]

Though that depends on the specificity of what you want to do, I think. To pull a situation from my last AW session, if you want to shank your rival but your Hard is low because you’re an opera-singing Skinner in a pastel blue business suit, you might want to read the situation first so you know how they’re vulnerable to you, and then use that to either get +1 to the Go Aggro or even Sucker Somebody.

[Mathias]

Some great responses that capture how to handle these moves and how to stay true to the fiction and not become arbitrary.

I would like to add and circle back around to the origin of the question and bring up “to do it, do it”. I don’t know if there is has been a more intuitive way of saying this but to trigger a move there needs to be something in the fiction; not just the table desire to play a move.

So, often it is worth interrogating a bit what the character is doing to “read the sitch”. Sometimes this is super short and may seem superfluous but I think it can give very important context which will help “to pick a move that flows from the fiction”.

If they climbed a tree to scout out the valley then maybe they get spotted, too. But you could still give them the information of the lay of the land.
If they are in a nasty situation where everyone has a hand on their weapon and they quickly scan the room you can give them the certainty if it comes to it they will definitely get shot.

The purpose of the moves is to establish some certainty but you are right, not by stepping on the players’ agency.
A situation like above, where everyone is close to start shooting is highly chaotic. The hit/miss dynamic gives us a chance to offload the arbitration if there is a chance to get out of the situation unscathed or not.

And players can help in this when they think to give you that bit of fiction (so you don’t need to ask ‘what does that look like’) to play off of.

Another way of looking at railroading and player agency is to say that in PbtA by default the players have the narrative initiative (this leads into not needing combat rounds and an initiative ranking for it, as well).
They only give it up on a 6- or when they look to the MC expectantly*. But then it’s fair that the MC gets to have a say where the narrative goes while still being beholden to the agenda and their principles.

I guess this is a major difference between these games and the OSR? The MC is not an impartial arbiter of the fiction; you may have a strong opinion and an idea of how you would like to shape the fiction. But it is not pre-determined.

And the game limits when you have that say and you really always cede that initiative back to them once you’ve made your move.

*Or on a golden opportunity: but that is mostly for staying true to the fictional world as well, when the world just demands that y happens when you do x. Though, this may be due to your prep and not just a “laws of nature” consequence.

[shane]

I always feel like too much improv makes what the players are choosing to do kind of meaningless.

I think I see what you mean here, but I just want to make sure… In my mind you can be improvisational and the players choices can still be meaningful. The issue is that your improv can’t take away meaning. In the longer term you need to make sure anything you improvised in the past isn’t conflicted by something you improvise now. (Especially if it was meaningful to the player.)

[Kevin_Petker]

I think one thing to keep in mind is that “A miss” on the dice is not, necessarily, a “failure” in the fiction; it’s simply means, in Apocalypse World at least, that the MC says what happens; the MC isn’t forced to have “Ogres appear!”, they could give the characters an awesome opportunity, WITH or without cost.

PC: I scan the Ogres’ position [read a sitch]… a miss, guess they get the jump on us.

MC: Heck no, they are totally unprepared for you and, if you attack right now, you will slaughter them, but Tweezer won’t be able to challenge their leader to get her honor back… what do you do?"

[Michael]

I don’t call for a move at all because it’s not “a charged situation,” as read a sitch calls it,

I think this is the most important detail. If there’s not an immediate threat (making it obvious what’s at stake for a miss) then you’re not “reading a sitch”. The players can just ask questions and the MC answers them honestly. If there’s a charged situation, and the player misses, then all the MC does is raise the clearly established stakes.

[rabalias]

Lots of good thoughts above, so I’m just going to relay how I do it, recognising it’s not the only way.

For me, I always have a pretty good idea what’s happening in the scene, right now. There’s no hidden ogre that can just pop out from behind a curtain or whatever. Rolling a miss might mean an existing element within the scene does something surprising - like pull a gun, or shoot someone, or whatever. Or even better, it might mean they do something unsurprising. Either way, I don’t generally give the players a chance to react before it happens, because a 6 gives me permission to make a hard move out of nowhere, if I want it to (within reason - I probably don’t have them draw and shoot as one move, but if their gun is out then you’re getting shot with no opportunity to make a move).

I also have a pretty good idea what threats exist outside the scene, though not necessarily what their current position is. Maybe there’s this ogre who roams the general vicinity where the current scene is happening. Or maybe there’s this gang of ogres that hates one of the characters in the scene. A miss could mean that, unexpectedly - to the table, but also to me as MC - they show up now. I don’t really view that as railroading; I didn’t have something in mind to happen all along which I’m now ret-conning into place, I’m using the broader fictional positioning to have something new come into the scene.

Finally, there might be something really surprising, like maybe I didn’t even know there were ogres around here, but now suddenly I think it would be cool if there were some. This requires a few things to be true:

• It has to be possible for there to be ogres around here. We’re not in a barren desert with line of sight for miles around, it hasn’t been established that ogres were all wiped out in the great ogre plague.
• It has to make sense for them to show up right now, like if ogres are nocturnal then it has to be night-time.
• There isn’t some other obvious threat that would be more appropriate, like I’ve already established there are wandering goblins around here.
  In that case, I’m very happy to introduce an ogre from out of nowhere, that I never planned for.

So absolutely a miss can change the direction of a scene, using the existing elements; it can change what’s in the scene; it could even change what’s in the world. That’s in rough order of frequency - I’m much more likely to use the elements that are already in the scene than introduce something brand new, in general.

As others have said, it isn’t necessary for a hard move to be something bad, but I do tend to lean in that direction when someone rolls a miss, because screw them, they shouldn’t have picked up the dice if they didn’t want trouble. (Although the caveat there is that I have not played much Dungeon World, so the whole “you can discern realities in an empty room” is a bit outside my experience.)

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

I think this is the most important detail. If there’s not an immediate threat (making it obvious what’s at stake for a miss) then you’re not “reading a sitch”.

As a counter-point: in Dungeon World, Discern Realities doesn’t have the “charged” caveat. It’s just “when you closely study a situation or person, roll…”. So you do get into situations where the players are Discerning Realities even though the situation is currently low-stakes, low-tension.

When DR triggers in a non-charged situation, though, it often means that GM hasn’t been doing their job. Like, if you all arrive in town and head to the tavern and I make a big deal of setting it as a scene and describing the place and some people in there, but don’t really make a GM move with any teeth, and then the PCs Discern Realities… they’re basically asking me “YO WHERE THE GAME AT?” and prompting me to make a move they can respond to. The situation wasn’t clear enough for them to take action on, or they aren’t sure what the situation is and they’re trying to suss it out, or they think “we’re in this scene, there must be a reason, I’m suspicious!”

If I realize that I’ve stumbled into that problem, and put them in a scene without clear stakes or tension and they try to Discern Realities, I can either back out and try to address it at a meta level (“yeah, I’m sorry gang, I’m not trying to make this place into something more than it is… let’s just skip ahead to __”) or I can run with it and see what the dice say and what questions they ask and let that prompt me to fill in some blanks. Works either way.

[dunadhaigh]

Quantum orgies? That’s some wild PbtA.

[lumpley]

My favorite thing to do with Read a Sitch and Read a Person on a miss falls under the MC move “turn their move back on them”: I like to ask them a question in turn.

“Miss! I still get to ask 1 question. What’s my best way in?”
“Well, actually nobody’s watching that window, I guess they think nobody could get up to it. I bet you could, though. But I want to know, where are you most vulnerable to them right now?”

Or, as a reversal of “what should I be on the lookout for”: “what aren’t you paying attention to right now?”

[funkaoshi]

The issue is that your improv can’t take away meaning

This question was prompted by my running Zombie World at Breakout Con. I think the way I was handling the “assess a bad situation” move was a bit all over the place, because my thinking of how it was supposed to work was a bit muddled. As Mark notes, with this first session I literally did no prep. So things were very open ended when it came to what I could or couldn’t introduce into the game. With this move, or other failures, I would often go, “Suddenly Zombies!” But thinking about it later, I was wondering if that was the wrong approach. (Those Zombies weren’t there before! But of course, maybe they were.) You are building this canon in your head, but really, until things hit the table, it’s not really canon. That seems to be one take away here, perhaps.

[disquisition]

The OSR is obsessed with quantum ogres and player agency and all this stuff to avoid railroading

It’s been a while since I’ve read deeply about this point of contention, so correct me if I’m wrong, but part of issue is a feeling that some PbtA moves “break causality” right? In the sense that, in D&D, there’s either a goblin assassin hiding in the room or not, and when I make my Perception check, no matter what I roll, that fact doesn’t change. Whereas, in Dungeon World, my GM may know the goblin assassin is lurking, you know, somewhere, and if I flub my roll, suddenly he’s here, on top of me, with a dagger to my throat, but if I had succeeded on that roll, would the goblin still have been present? Or is there a sense in which my roll “caused” the goblin to appear?

In my experience, this has never actually been a problem, since the goal of the players in the PbtA games I’ve played is never to completely circumvent threats and obstacles, the way it often is in OSR games (or even D&D). When I throw my goblin assassin at a player after they blow a roll, no one bats an eye because by that point I’ve probably “shown signs of an approached threat” and it just makes sense in the fiction, and when you’re in the middle of it most players (again, in my experience) don’t stop to think about whether or not the goblin was there before the dice dropped.

It’s possible for an antagonistic GM to “cheat” the players out of a successful Discern Realities (or whatever) roll, and give them nothing interesting on a success while springing really hard moves on failure, but that’s basically true of D&D/OSR too—unless the players steal your notebook and rifle through your prep, they’ll never know what room the goblin assassin was “supposed” to be hiding in.

I think this is the most important detail. If there’s not an immediate threat (making it obvious what’s at stake for a miss) then you’re not “reading a sitch”.

Bit of an side, but one of my favorite tricks as MC is to let the players convince me a situation is charged—“Okay so you’re in the cantina, you said you’re scanning the room, almost sounds like you’re reading a sitch… But is this a charged situation?” “Yeah totally! This is where Keeler’s gang hangs out, and didn’t that car I stole belong to one of them?” “Oh, Marie? Sure!”