Quantum Orges vs. Read a Sitch?

[Chris_Mitchell]

My biggest advice to new MCs is that “to do it, you have to do it” applies to read a sitch and read a person as well. You have to describe what your character is doing. I hear so many APs where the players are like “I read a sitch” or " I discern realities". But the player should describe what the PC is doing here.

And then the MC should never say their move out loud. So even when the MC answers the question, it should be a description of something physical that happens in the reality of the game, not handing them meta knowledge. Show, don’t tell.

“I look her in the eyes, watching for a hint of a lie” (Are they telling the truth)
“Her eyes are hard, and cold, and flat, no disassembling” (Yes)

“My eyes are darting back and forth as he talks, looking for any escape” (What’s my best escape route)
“Your eyes glide over it, so as to not bring attention to it, but the door behind Dremmer is slightly ajar”

Read a sitch is a little quantum-y. In game design terms, it allows the player to establish a piece of the fiction through their characters stats and random chance. When they roll well and look for an escape route, they’re creating an escape route in the fiction with dice.

This is story now play. The OSR generally has other agendas at play, which are also fun, but don’t really apply to PBtA.

[Paul_T]

In theory, you could run some PbtA games with a more strict sense of “simulating the diegetic space”: consider (perhaps even before the roll) what a likely miss might look like, and what dangers are facing the character at the moment.

I don’t always like the “Quantum Ogre” approach, like when a failed move under safe circumstances means Something Terrible happens. Part of the beauty of the open-ended miss is that it scales with situations: the worst possible thing is very different when you’re trapped between the jaws of the Megalodon, compared to when you’re quietly looking over an empty room, and I think that’s part of the way the game is supposed to run - instead of adjusting the “difficulty” of the roll, you adjust how bad it’s going to be if you fail.

A character making a move under very safe and secure circumstances should be “rewarded” with a relatively “mild” miss (maybe even an opportunity rather than a threat of some sort), and that’s good: it rewards players/characters for having their circumstances under control.

How do you decide what to say? Making that interesting is usually all about getting more detail, for me.

If you’re not sure what should happen on a miss, ask the player more questions about what they’re doing.

Getting more detail will eventually tell you what can go wrong or what kind of move you can make in return. If it’s a rather “weak trigger”, like the Discern Realities move, you’ll need this to regulate it at all, I find: is the character spending a lot of time looking around, poking their fingers into holes, opening themselves up to the spirit world, or what? Each will call for a very different MC move in turn. (Wasting time vs. losing a few fingers vs. getting possessed, to take the most obvious case for each.)

Having said that, most PbtA games run better on a dramatic sense of pacing and action (as most people here are suggesting). You absolutely could run it as more of a “simulation”, though, as long as you accept that it’s ultimately the GM’s imagination that’s serving as the simulation.

[darren]

I think an important piece of advice to consider from the DW text is that sometimes there’s just nothing (say what honesty demands, etc.). It’s maybe a little cruel, but I think if someone goes through the fictional work to trigger DR, let them, even if they’re like “I gotta get a perception roll in here!” Then, you let them know that everything is perfectly fine. Or, on a miss, give them a false impression — let their character think there’s something amiss (“you can’t place it…but something about this place is definitely rubbing you the wrong way…”). This happened in a SCUP game of mine and it led to a wonderful escalation of events because of a character’s paranoia!
Can we blame the player for assuming ogres?