Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking about. This idea that maybe we are changing the nature of the world based on good or bad dice rolls, and what that impact is on player agency, if any. This is the proper high-brow RPG nonsense that I am here for.
Quantum Orges vs. Read a Sitch?
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To stay with the Quantum Ogres… we are not finding out if there is a cat or not but if the cat is dead or alive.
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Right on! Yeah, I think way I think about it is, you (probably) aren’t changing the nature of the world, it’s just a matter how established threats move through the fictional world.
In D&D, as GM I might need to know where the goblin, zombies, etc., are (or at least have a pretty solid idea), and when the PCs’ path intersects with those threats, they come in to play.
In DW and friends, you’ll still usually have a set of threats in front of you, but instead of mapping them all out ahead of time, you might let the dice decide when their paths intersect with the PCs.
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You know my heart, @funkaoshi. Let me tell you a story about @JimLikesGames’s Polizeta.
Jim played in my “make it or break it” multi-session game of Cartel in like… 2014? Basically, I had hit a point with the system where I thought it mostly worked, but I wanted to see a few sessions in a row with people who weren’t my home group to see if the game held up. There are three moments that convinced me that everything was pretty good, one of them involving Jim’s dirty cop. (Jim will inevitably correct my memory on something in the below story, I’m sure!)
We established during character creation that another member of the anti-cartel unit, Reyes?, was suspicious of him and his dealings. She was always nosing around, trying to figure out who he was really working for, and a few narcos had overplayed their hands and almost gotten Jim’s character into trouble. Reyes was relentless.
During one of the final scenes of the game, Jim decided to push on Reyes, making a move to get her off his case by pressuring her. He missed, and I sat back to think about the right move. Sure, she could try to arrest him or blackmail him or something, but it all felt too direct, too hard. I wanted something at that moment that would complicate the situation more than anything else, i.e. a softer move that would dig Jim’s character’s grave a little deeper.
“So Reyes says something like 'You think you’re the only one who works for El Narco? Shut the fuck up and do your job, and maybe I won’t have to tell him that keeping an eye on you is my full-time job.”
And it just fit. Reyes was dirty too. Everything before was a cover, a lie. It was all designed to throw other people off the scent. How could she be dirty, if the was constantly complaining that Jim’s character was dirty?
The fiction is always flexible, but PbtA games challenge us to think in terms of uncertainty. What’s still uncertain here? What can be made uncertain here through the use of additional fiction that complicates the situation in engaging ways? What is certain and can’t be changed without violating the authenticity of the thing itself?
In many ways, this conversation also revolves around declaiming authority. In OSR games, you use the random encounter table to do this precise thing. Was there there a terrible monster her a second ago? Or did my roll on the table just put this terrible monster here because the PCs are here? The answer to these questions is irrelevant because they are the wrong questions. The monster is here… and it either feels authentic to the moment and the fiction, or it’s clearly just a bullshit ogre placed here to suit the GM’s need for an ogre in this moment.
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Sadly, there’s no such specific requirement in the wording for Discern Realities—it is potentially triggered literally anytime you examine something closely. But I still tend to run it like Read a Sitch or else I get D&D players grabbing dice and rolling unbidden like it’s a perception check. I wonder how other DW GMs handle it.
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For me, the players don’t decide when they roll in a PbtA game, they just say “What they do.” and the MC says, “Ah, roll [x-move].” or such.
If the players are wanting to make lots of Discern Realities checks, that is AWESOME, it’s more rolls, more stuff in the fiction, and more potential for trouble!
But, also, it’s totally cool to have them roll it only when it’s “important”; the MC still gets to decide that, but always be a fan!
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Absolutely true. I have taken a similar tack with DW: lots of hard framing, and rolls that resolve well-defined uncertainty rather than open-ended curiosity. I think it takes more heavy lifting from the GM to keep DW on track (in terms of pacing and tension) and I’ve steered away from it for that reason.
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This varies system-to-system for me. I think playbook moves in Apocalypse World, Masks, and Monsterhearts tend to have sufficiently clear triggers and stakes that they player can drive toward them and call for them. The brainer in Apocalypse World is likely to speak the move by name when they’re putting on the violation glove and doing a deep brain scan, and that works.
Something more broad (like Discern Realities or even more so, Defy Danger) can really drift the feel of the game if there’s not a consensus on when those moves trigger and what is at stake.
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In the long explanation, the rules say:
To discern realities you must closely observe your target. That usually means interacting with it or watching someone else do the same. You can’t just stick your head in the doorway and discern realities about a room. You’re not merely scanning for clues—you have to look under and around things, tap the walls, and check for weird dust patterns on the bookshelves. That sort of thing.
So, this makes it clear that Discern Realities is an involved thing to do.
When they just ask questions about the situation at hand, just answer truthfully. And it’s good when they want to make moves!
But yeah, part of your job is spotlight management. To be able to do so effectively you need to be the one to call for rolls or not; and not for a player to just roll.
Getting a little roll discipline can sometimes be a thing online.
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Ah, yes, I was only speaking towards Basic Moves here.
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That particular block of text is one of my least favorite bits of DW. Because there are all sorts of times when everyone at the table is expecting DR to trigger but the only “action” the character is taking is standing there, eyes darting, sizing up the scene and thinking. The move works just fine that way.
The key distinction to me is that, when you ask the player “what do you do?” they describe doing something with the intent of gaining insight. Maybe it’s actually picking stuff up or fiddling with things, maybe it’s just standing there and thinking about it.
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But thinking something over is an involved activity? It’s quite different from quickly scanning. The character is putting time and effort in.
The quick thing might be better served with a Defy Danger Wis or Int. And then it only triggers when there is potential calamity at hand.
That said, I don’t think this is really that big of an issue with Dungeon World, the game that is so good at DnD genre emulation that every GM who runs it for any period of time has drifted and hacked the hell out of it.
Like, I don’t play with race moves, alignment and have tacked on Heritage moves and a new social basic move to my kit when I run it.
So, if you must, I’d say, just add “in a charged situation” to your Discern Realities. But I think you don’t actually have to.
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I feel a lot of the uncertainty as to how to activate a given PbtA move exists in that space between embodied role play and narration.
It’s clear to me in play that Discern Realities both follows from the fiction and also that the fiction can be a narrative statement (“I want to look this wall up and down with the intent to Discern Realities”) as easily as it can be a carefully roleplayed action in-game (“I scan the wall with my keen eyes, looking carefully between each brick for something for something unusual”).
Whether this is the literal intent, I don’t know, but practically I think we have to accept both methods of action or else writing moves gets REALLY tricky.
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Oh yeah, and it’s everyone’s job to be on the look out if something might trigger a move… so I often clear up in the beginning of play that it is perfectly alright to be explicit if you are angling for hitting a certain move. I might be missing a Special Move you got, after all, because I’m busy playing out something in character, etc.
Sure. Definitely. As long as “time and effort” scales with the situation at hand. A couple seconds scanning the melee to find a weak point in the enemy’s line is Discerning Realities. So is a few minutes poking and prodding a room looking for secret doors.
My beef with the text in the DW book is that it gets held up as reasons why what someone’s doing doesn’t “count” as Discerning Realities. See: dozens of past threads on G+ and Reddit.
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DW tends to have this problem more than any other because of the startling amount of baggage it carries as high fantasy RPG.
In AW, we’re thinking of these action-driven media like Fury Road. Everything is solved with a gun or a fist or some sexy sexy sex (which, I guess can also come under the fist category depending on your Battlebabe). In DW we’re obsessed with this strict chronology of, like, simulating the dungeon crawl. The way we, culturally, dungeon crawl is so much more slowly paced than PbtA tends to want to be.
The example of the tavern where PCs are trying to find the scene, that’s… Yeah! The tools they have are for coercion and Dungeon Questing so they’re looking for that. An empty room in dungeon world invites Discern Realities without the charged situation, threat, or stakes. An empty room in Apocalypse World doesn’t exist.
As was alluded to earlier with letting players charge the situation themselves (and, which is an example in the gametext) (also sorry for not putting names to these quotes, I’m on my mobile), the secret sauce is that Apocalypse World is so full of obligation and dependance, that every situation is (or can be) charged.
DW has moments of quiet, gentle pacing. AW has fights we don’t know we’re in yet.
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The fucking look on your face when it dawned on you that was what was going on. Christ.
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Like, in Masks, there’s Assess the Situation. I try to make sure that there’s actually a Situation to be Assessed, like there clearly needs to be something going down before I’ll call for that Move. The beauty of the superhero genre is that you don’t need Quantum Ogres when as MC you have your mom as something you can drop into a scene on a 6-.
“Yeah, Snatch and Grab are clearly robbing the bank as you walk in.”
“Shoot, I wanna Assess the Sitch. CRAP IT’S A 4.”
“Yeah, it’s tough to make out exactly what they’re up to because your little sister who was here to deposit her babysitting cash sees you and starts waving in what she seems to think is a subtle manner.”
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I live for stuff like Mark and Jim’s dirty cop reveal. To me, nothing is canon unless it’s been said at the table. The GM’s prep and theories about what’s going on behind the scenes are just suggestions – and when I GM, my favorite moments are when the character’s actions and dice rolls prompt me to totally retcon everything I thought I was going to do. To me, it helps put the GM and players on a more equal footing vis-a-vis the fiction – the GM may be controlling different parts of the world, but they don’t necessarily have any more insight into what could happen.
And speaking of equal footing, what are folks’ thoughts on investigative moves like this in GMless games? I’m working on a game called Get Ready 2 Rock that has an investigative move that’s sort of left over from an earlier edition that was GMed, and I’m wrestling with whether to cut it. On the one hand, there’s no GM who has knowledge about the world that the players don’t, or who has special responsibility for making stuff up about the world, to direct your inquiry to. On the other hand, it could function as a way for players to turn their share of the GMing duties in a scene over to the dice and/or formally ask other players for input (kind of like how GMs ask players for input sometimes).
Current text of the move is here, FWIW:
Scope out the Place:
When you check out a situation, name another player as your source, ask one of the questions below, then roll + Key
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Where do they keep the thing I want?
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Who here would be able to offer me something good?
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What might most people not notice about this place?
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On a 10 or more, your source will tell you why the situation is too good to pass up, and why you’re already in too deep to back out
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On a 7-9, your source will tell you the answer and what it will cost you to take advantage of it. If you go for it anyway, add one Rock to the band pool
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On a 6 or less, your source will tell you who here has it out for you and how you’ve left yourself vulnerable to them
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I like that move, and I’d definitely keep it in for playtesting. Maybe allow the source to ask some questions back?