Barf Forth Apocalyptica
powered by the apocalypse => Monster of the Week => Topic started by: StormKnight on March 07, 2017, 08:18:58 PM
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I recently got a copy of Monster of the Week. I'm got a lot of experience with traditional RPGs and freeform roleplaying, but the more 'narrative' RPGs are still a mystery to me. Unfortunately, MotW isn't really helping with that. I've run three games, but I feel more like I'm forcing the system to act like a traditional RPG that I'm used to than actually taking advantage of it. I love the simplicity of the system. The character archetypes are all very cool, and making characters is fun. But I'm being pretty stumped with running it. I've got a lot of questions here. I tried asking these over on RPGG, but got pretty mixed responses - a lot of people giving opposite opinions!
* At a high level, can anyone provide any advice on what I need to unlearn from traditional RPGs for playing MotW? Like, what I should do differently in MotW than a regular RPG?
* I find it very confusing when the Keepers should be performing 'moves'. "When its your turn in the conversation" doesn't make a lot of sense.
* Do Keepers generally actually bother making a "move" every time they say something significant? It seems like the system is designed around that, but having to ponder that out every step of the way seems like it would really slow things down. It also gets confusing in that the huge number of Keeper moves can cover almost anything that could happen...but not quite. I have no idea if the omissions are intentional part of the system or oversights, as they really seem to be more "things that fell through the cracks".
For example, in our first play a minion nicked a player with a magical dagger putting him into an enchanted sleep. This could be the keeper move "Use a supernatural power". But if instead of a magic dagger the minion had a gotten their hands on a powerful sedative in a syringe, as far as I understand the minion couldn't use that on a character, since no minion move covers that. So should a minion not do that?
* Several moves just don't seem to match up well with how we are trying to play the game:
+ Manipulate Someone: The descriptions make this sound more like "make a deal with someone"; you offer something in return for something else. But this doesn't match up well with what we perceive as how characters normally "manipulate someone"; usually characters want to trick people, or make more emotional/forceful appeals. That it doesn't work on monsters baffles us - tricking or making deals with monsters seems like an absolute staple of the genre!
+ Act Under Pressure: This one makes sense.
+ Help Out: Also makes sense.
+ Investigate a Mystery: Conceptually this makes sense, and I love the "get to ask questions" concept. But the questions you are supposed to ask just never seem to match up well with what is going on when character's do things that logically trigger "investigate a mystery". Its like we're always fumbling to come up with how any of the questions could be answered in the current situation.
Last session I tried stretching things around and had investigating a mystery lead to an answer a bit later. But then, since the "answer" was in the form of meeting someone with info, it logically led to just more than one question worth being answered! And it felt a "railroady"; the PC doing the checking could easily have not gone down the specific route of actions that led to the person, and then I wouldn't have had a clue how to provide the info.
+ Read a Bad Situation: I have no idea in what sort of context people would do this. It just doesn't seem to represent anything that I've seen come up in RPGs before.
+ Kick Some Ass: works fine, though it seems like you easily wind up in situations where its just sort of "And...I hit it again..." a few times in a row.
+ Protect someone: hasn't come up, but makes sense.
+ Use Magic: No clue how this is intended. Can anyone just "use" magic? Do you need to find spellbooks? Obviously some characters should be able to just use magic by default, like the Spell-Slinger, but what about the Chosen who takes the stats focused on Weird? What about a Professional? We've got an entire stat that I've never yet used!
I read through the forums before posting, and saw a thread where someone compared it to "use wifi" - you have to have magic around to use it. But I have no idea what that means. When is magic around? How do characters know if magic is around? If you are on a ley-line should even the Mundane be able to use magic?
* Weapon tags...we've got too page of these and no explanation of how they get used in play. Something like "loud" or "messy" I can readily see results/applications for, but something like "balanced"? I have no clue on that, or how the difference between things like "close" or "intimate" might translate meaningfully into play.
* Motivations for bystanders and locations. Really confused about these. Is the intent that a bystander/location never "acts" out of character for its motivation? Like, if a place is a 'maze', you will never meet a helpful friend there, you can only do that at a crossroads? I have no idea what is accomplished by assigning a motivation to locations, or how that is used in game.
Sorry, that's a big handful of questions. Any responses and help would be appreciated.
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I haven't played MotW, so I won't comment on your specifics (I'm sure someone else will soon!).
However, a few brief comments in the meantime:
1. Don't look at "PbtA games" as being something fundamentally different from other games you've played. Chances are pretty good that they're not! For many, many people, the MC style of playing a PbtA game is just the way they've played RPGs all along.
Instead, just focus on what the game (Monster of the Week) is, and playing it to its best potential.
What do you have to unlearn? The main thing might be just trusting the rules. In many "trad RPGs", the GM applies rules flexibly, to achieve their agenda, particularly when they have a specific plot in mind. (For example, consider "fudging".)
The design of a good PbtA should make that totally unnecessary, and, in fact, could ruin the game. Many of the rules put quite a lot of power in the players' hands, so be ready for them to make their own through your imagined scenario. Let them make their moves and then follow them to their logical conclusions.
If you come with a "prepared plot" in mind, the rules will fight you.
2. The idea of the MC move is simple:
It's "your turn to talk" when the players expect you to make your contribution to the game/fiction. They look at you because they're curious about something, or because they need your input to continue playing.
For example:
"I lift up the rock. What happens?"
"I open the door. What do I see?"
"Crazy fool! I'm going to try to grab the knife from the table before he gets it!"
"Uh... so, where were we again? Were we in the tavern?"
All of these demand a response from you before play can continue. That's what it means for it to be "your turn to speak".
Yes, when it's your turn, you should pretty much always make a move.
A move is simply your contribution to play. Just like those player prompts above, your contributions should demand a response from the players (in order to continue the conversation of play). The list of moves are just a list of categories or suggestions which tend to accomplish that well. Read them flexibly; yes, perhaps a minion with a syringe is "making an attack" or "using a supernatural power". Or maybe this minion has a "custom move" (stab with a syringe). The important part is that you're prompting a response from the player.
Sometimes you'll be "padding" your conversation with pure description, dialogue, colourful narration, and so on. That's fine; just remember to also "make a move" at the end of it. Don't forget basic moves like asking leading questions, offering opportunities, and so forth.
In practice, I think you *could* skip some opportunities to make moves, but, generally speaking, it's a good idea not to. Those would exceptions to the rule rather than good practice, if that makes sense. "Offer an opportunity" is a good "default" move if nothing else seems right.
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I was in the middle of writing a long manifesto that dealt with each of your points in some detail. Then we suffered a power outage. :( I'll start over again this evening.
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OK, take two:
Just as a general suggestion, you might get more traction on the generic PbtA aspects of this question if you ask it in the AW subforum. Also, I'd like to preface my responses by saying that though I've read through it, I've never run or played MotW. I have run/played scads of Apocalypse World and a smattering of Dungeon World, however, so maybe take my responses as high-level stuff rather than nitty-gritty.
Right, so I'll try to handle your questions more or less in order. Warning, wall of text follows:
* What to unlearn: I'm going to disagree with Paul T. a little bit and say that at a high-level, PbtA games are paradigmatically different from what most people think of as "traditional" RPGs (and I'm thinking D&D, GURPS, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc here). There are three big issues that you'll need to "unlearn" to really start to get the system firing on all cylinders for you.
1) First and foremost, you need to wrap your head around the idea that the rules do NOT in any way simulate or model reality. There's no "encumbrance" mechanic. There are no rules that tell you just how wide a chasm your character can jump across. Instead, the rules are mechanics to help drive the story. So instead of saying, "There's a 15-foot chasm," and looking to see if the PC has sufficient Strength (or Agility or whatever) the MC (Keeper) says, "There's a chasm, but you think maybe you can jump it if you get a running start." If you try to jump it, the MC will probably say that this is Acting Under Pressure and call for a roll. The width of the chasm is immaterial; if you aced the roll, it was clearly narrow enough that you could clear it. If you completely flub the roll, well, I guess it was a little wider than it looked, and now you're in some deep shit.
2) You need to let go of the idea of fixed time increments. There are no "rounds" or "turns" or "phases" or "initiative." Instead, you're just describing what's happening around the PCs and they're telling you what they're trying to do. The order in which that stuff happens isn't determined by stats or die rolls or whatever, but rather by what is happening in the fiction.
3) Finally, combats are way more abstract than you'll be used to. There is no "to hit" roll. Get out of the mindset of "I hit it in its hit-points until it has no more hit-points." More on this on the "Kick Some Ass" section below.
* Conversation: remember the part about not having discrete time mechanics? Here's where the "conversation" part becomes important, as that's exactly how it works. You say something. I respond. You respond to my response. Mike chimes in with his two cents. You take Mike's idea and run with it. And so on.
* Making moves: Here's one where Paul T. and I agree - pretty much any time you talk, chances are you're making some kind of move. Even something as simple as describing what the players see is making a move: When the players ask, "What do we see when we enter the crypt?" and you say, "The place is dank and mildewy. There's a stone sarcophagus in the middle of the room, and as soon as you cross the threshold you hear a low, grinding noise and the lid begins to move." In AW parlance, this is you announcing future badness (or in DW parlance, revealing an unwelcome truth). Either way, you're letting them know that bad shit is about to happen.
In this regard, it's just like any other RPG - your job is to describe the world the PCs inhabit; what's happening, how do they perceive it, etc. The list of Keeper "moves" just serves to give you some handy reminders and structure for the things you can/should be saying.
In terms of what moves are appropriate for minions or monsters, your basic Keeper moves are always appropriate. It's totally cool to have the minion stab a PC with a syringe full of sedatives - that's you inflicting harm as established, one of your basic MC moves.
But it's here that I want to make a little digression to talk about just how "hard" or "mean" the moves you make should be. For the most part, you'll want to describe actions but stop short of their consequences. So maybe, "The minion is coming at you, a syringe full of a milky substance in his clawed hand. What do you do?" Again, this is you announcing future badness, making it clear that if the PC does nothing, he's going to get stuck with a syringe (and this is what's meant by "setting up" a future move). You stop short of inflicting harm on them, giving them a chance to react -you're turning the conversation over to them. Hence, "what do you do?"
In certain circumstances, however (typically either when you've already set up a move or when the player misses a roll), you'll narrate both the action and its consequences at the same time. So for instance, "The minion comes at you, and he's faster than you guessed. Before you can stop him, he jams a syringe into your shoulder an pushes the plunger to the stop. In an instant, you start to feel woozy. Take two S-harm and make the harm move for me." In AW parlance, narrating both an action and its consequences at the same time is usually referred to as a "hard move." And as mentioned, this is usually the result of the player flubbing a roll.
But don't be afraid to make a hard move if the fiction warrants it or if you've done the appropriate set-up. For example, I have a player whose first response is almost always to try to talk her way out of a situation, even in cases where that's wildly inappropriate. So an exchange might look like this:
MC: "As soon as he figures out that you've given away the Loc-Nar, Dremmer roars 'You bitch! I'll fucking kill you!' He's in the process of drawing his big, shiny, long-barreled magnum from it's holster. He's fucking foaming at the mouth. What do you do?" This is me, announcing future badness. I'm making it abundantly clear that Dremmer's past the point of negotiation, and that dedicated violence is about to occur.
Player: "I say, 'Wait, wait, I'm sure we can come to some kind of...'"
MC: "You're standing there jawing away, but as soon as his front sight crosses your center-of-mass, he unloads several rounds into your chest and abdomen, still shouting bloody murder. Take 3 harm minus your armor and make the harm move for me." I've done my due diligence in explaining the fictional situation to the player. Because the player has done nothing to alter the fictional situation when it was her turn to speak, I make the move I've set up - I inflict harm as established. I'm narrating the action (he shoots at you) and the consequences (you get shot) at the same time, a classic "hard move."
* Manipulation: This move is all about using leverage to get someone to do what you want. The important part here is the leverage, which can come in a number of varieties; a quid pro quo (the kind of "deal-making" you've identified), empty threats, promises of future rewards, etc. And when I say "empty threats," I mean it, as any time you are 100% willing to inflict immediate violence if the person doesn't comply with your wishes, that's not manipulation, that's going aggro. But you can threaten someone without being willing (or able) to inflict immediate violence. So saying, "Tell me where Moxie is or I swear to god I'll tell Dremmer that you were the one who stole the Loc-Nar" is manipulation (a threat, but not one of immediate violence). Or "Tell me where Moxie is and I'll give you my fragment of the map" (a deal). Or "Tell me where Moxie is and I'll owe you a favor" (a promise of future rewards). And if you hit the roll with a 10+, then sure, maybe the guy's willing to take you at your word that when he comes to you asking for a favor, you'll help him out. But on a 7-9, he presses you; "You first. Give me your piece of the map and I'll tell you where Moxie is." At this point it's up to the player to decide whether information about Moxie's whereabouts is worth parting with a piece of the map. And on a miss? As hard and direct a move as you like; "He hems and haws and finally grumbles, 'Yeah, OK, I'll take you to her. Follow me. But don't do anything stupid.' He leads you through the back door into the kitchens, but as you pass the walk-in cooler, someone steps up behind you, touches a stun-gun to your neck, and you black out." This is you, capturing someone. And as an aside, this is a great time to shift the spot-light onto the other players - "Man, Wentworth left to talk to the guy about finding Moxie like an hour ago and he hasn't come back yet. What do you do?"
The trick for the Keeper is in determining whether or not what the player is offering/promising/threatening constitutes adequate leverage/motivation for the NPC. And this is why you typically can't manipulate monsters - their motivations are inscrutable, unknowable, and/or totally alien. But if the PCs do happen to figure out just what it is that motivates a particular monster and can secure sufficient leverage, well, then maybe using manipulation on them is appropriate.
* Investigate a Mystery: I'm gonna let someone with more direct experience with MotW tackle this one.
* Read a Bad Situation: This is a move you use when shit's about to get real and you need to form an exit strategy. It's for when things are tense you're looking for any small advantage to help you get out the other side of it. That's why acting on this information gives you +1 forward - forewarned is forearmed, so to speak. So for instance, your conversation with the cultists is getting tense, but by reading a bad situation you suss out that they all look to Professor Calder for leadership ("who's really in charge here?"). So maybe when the bullets start flying, killing him first will throw the rest of them into momentary panic or disarray, giving you a better chance of escaping without too many holes in you.
*Kick Some Ass: Remember how I said there's no "to hit" roll in PbtA games? Combat moves in PbtA games are way more abstract. Depending on the scope of the encounter, one roll to kick some ass might be an entire battle. Or it could be one exchange of gunfire. Or anything in between.
And since it's not, "one roll, one swing/shot/hit," it's important to let the fiction dictate what happens next. It is your job as the Keeper to take the choices the player has made and turn that into a fictional consequence. Say the PC has chosen to inflict lots of damage or frighten the enemy - what does that look like, and how does it affect the fictional situation? "You unload on the creature with your shotgun, pumping round after round into it as it staggers back. Bleeding profusely, it hisses, then darts down a nearby sewer grate. You didn't think something that big could fit down an opening that small." And of course, "What do you do?" This makes it clear that "I hit it again" isn't really an option. Now you're not shooting the creature again, you're casting about for the nearest man-hole so you can get to tracking a wounded monster through the sewer tunnels. Hilarity ensues.
This is what people mean by "following the fiction." You're using both the unfolding fictional situation and the game's mechanics to help you say what happens next, which in turn leads to the next fictional situation and the next set of moves, and so on.
Also, it's important for the Keeper to take a turn as the monster(s) as well. Don't just have the monster stand there like a dope - have it do something that puts the PCs at risk. For best effects, have it do something they can't ignore, usually by setting up a future move. Even if the PCs attack does damage, you can use the effects of that damage to drive the story; "You swing laterally, your sword tearing deeply into the dusty, tattered wrappings of the mummy's torso. It staggers back from the blow, but recovers quickly. Worse, it emits a dry, raspy chortle, and you see shiny black scarabs pouring from the wound you've just opened. The scuttling swarm of insects is lightning quick and heading straight for you. What do you do?" I can virtually guarantee that "I hit it again" is going to be low on the priority list for the player's next thing to say. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd put my money on something that sounds more like, "Oh, shit!"
* Use Magic: Again, this one's too MotW-specific for me to want to tackle in too much detail. But as a general rule, if it's a basic move, anyone can do it. How good or bad you are at it will have to do with how Weird you are.
* Weapon Tags: Most of these are relatively self-explanatory, but where they really come into play is in helping to work with the fiction to either describe what can happen or what has happened (prescriptive versus descriptive). So if you have a weapon that has a tag of "hand," but your enemy isn't within arm's reach, you can't use that weapon to hurt them (prescriptive). That's how the range tags (intimate, hand, close, far) work, indicating which weapons you can use at a given range - and the range between people right now, at this instant is part of the fictional position. When a player asks, "How close is that guy?" give him or her an answer that indicates which weapons might be useful: "He's maybe 20 feet away, definitely close range."
Similarly, if you're using a weapon that has the "area" tag, it applies its full harm to multiple people at once (descriptive). If a weapon has the "flaming" tag, hitting someone with it lights their shit on fire. This gives you some clue as to what happens next, how the use of this weapon or piece of gear changes the fictional situation.
* Motivations for Bystanders and Landscapes: Think of these as an extra set of moves that give character to a scene's location or extras. They're helpful hints for ways to mess with the PCs when it comes time to say something about the world.
Where these come in most handy is when you're setting your next scene - where is it taking place and what is happening there? Who else is there and what are they doing? Say for instance that you've decided that the sewer tunnels are a Landscape Threat, and further that they constitute a "Maze." One of the things a maze does is to hide something. So maybe when moving on to the next "chapter" of the story, you use that landscape to set the scene: "Casey comes to you in tears. When you can finally get her calmed down enough to make intelligible words, she blubbers, 'Keaton. He followed the...he went right down the man-hole. I begged. I said not to go. Not alone. Please help me. Oh god, you have to help me find him!'" And you're off to the races.
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Good stuff, Munin!
Without knowing why and how PbtA games are different from StormKnight's previous experiences, we can't be too sure what needs to be "unlearned". I think your points are also a likely guess! There are many games which do those things you're describing.
StormKnight, you were asking about the use of MC moves - Munin's examples show it well, particularly the combat examples. Each time, the MC is doing some description (for instance, what it looks like when the sword hits the mummy), but then he is *also* making a move (like the scarabs pouring out of the wounds). That's what keeps the action moving. Read them again if you don't see what I mean!
By the way, my uninformed guess on the "Do Magic" thing is that it applies when you, as a group, agree that it does. Are you playing in a world or genre where any old person can try to "do magic"? (Probably not.) So, then, what does it take?
I'd imagine it will usually be when they have an opportunity to do so. If they stumble across a cultist's directions for a summoning ritual, and they want to act out those directions to see what will happen... well, now they're (trying to) Do Magic. Roll it!
If those directions were fake, though - useless, inert - then, no, they're just making fools of themselves (or wasting time).
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Good advice all around from Paul T. and Munin. You two have explained the core PbtA philosophies well.
StormKnight, let me try and address your issues with MotW specifically. I've been running MotW for a stretch now, and it's a hack/setting that I really enjoy.
Moves
Manipulate Someone: Echoing the above, the key with this move is to start with the established fiction and go from there. If it seems like a monster/minion *should* be susceptible to the kinds of leverage hunters would apply (threats of violence... promised favors... flirtation, and so on), then let the hunters try and manipulate them! "Dream Away the Time" has notes on Oberon which make it clear that he's a minion who can be manipulated. If a hunter tries to manipulate a monster with no reasonable chance of coercion, don't call for the roll, and make sure the hunter knows this baddie isn't down for negotiations (always say what honesty demands).
Examples:
Ted, the Mundane: "Okay, so, what if I offer this vampire lord like, some blood? My blood? Will he go away then?"
GM: "'I need more than just one little snack,' he says." (offering an opportunity with a cost)
Ted: "How about... every month? My place?"
GM: "Roll manipulate someone."
Ted rolls and nails it at 10+. The vampire lord will skedaddle... for now.
Lane, the Chosen: "I tell the werewolf we'll buy it steaks if it stops killing people at the clown college."
GM: "It 100% doesn't understand you, and now it's advancing, baring some scary-sharp fangs. What do you do?"
It's also worth noting that the Monstrous playbook has as an advancement (Dark Negotiator) which allows a hunter to just generally manipulate monsters. I'd play that pretty loose--in the example above, maybe a Monstrous with Dark Negotiator *could* convince that werewolf with a nice ribeye.
Investigate a Mystery:
The questions given for this move (or for most PbtA-style "query" moves) seem more limiting than they actually are. I find that most of the time a hunter's investigate question falls into one of these categories, even if they're not asking that question word for word. Again, always look to the fiction and keep your answers grounded in the fiction as well. Don't answer a "What sort of creature is it?" by saying "It's a chimera made of household pets." Instead, give tangible details about the clues the hunters find.
Also, keep in mind that "What sort of" =/= "What is." Ghouls and carrion worms are both necrophages, and the hunters may need to do more investigating to suss out just what kind of corpse-eater they're dealing with.
Example:
Louisa, the Expert: "I'm scoping out the crime scene with my full toolkit out."
GM: "Give me investigate a mystery.
She rolls a 10+, meaning three questions.
Louisa: "What sort of creature is it?"
GM: "You have a ruler and magnifying glass, right? You measure some of the tracks--they're pretty deep, and spaced apart too wide for a regular wolf. You also find some long, gross hairs. This thing is some sort of bipedal animal."
Louisa: "Like a werewolf?"
GM: *coy glance* "You've got two more."
Louisa: "Okay. Does it have a den nearby, maybe?"
GM: "You're not sure about a warren but you see the tracks head north, through some thick brush, towards the park." (The GM didn't say it, but they're treating this as "Where did it go?" It's not a direct answer to Louisa, but it's not a lie, and it's in the spirit of her question.)
Louisa: "Yikes. I go over to the corpse and check him out. Like, what exactly happened?"
GM: "You said you had a year of pre-med, right? This dude's throat's been torn out--bite radius is *huge*--and, wow, it sure looks like something just tore his arms clean off." (You could count this as either "What happened here?" or "What can it do?," as we've established the creature is a biter and crazy strong. Answer's the same either way, and--again--it's playing fair with Louisa's fictional positioning.)
Read a Bad Situation:
The two most common uses I see are when the hunters are looking to setup an advantage in a fight, or when the hunters have walked into danger, but they don't know it yet. In the former, a hunter might say they're frantically looking around for something that might drive the giant spider away. In the latter, the hunters might have walked into the giant spider's lair, and the spider's hiding somewhere, waiting to pounce.
Examples:
Zuzu, the Divine: "This thing's killing us! Is there anything in the room that might help?"
GM: "Roll me read a bad sitch."
She gets a soft hit, so one hold which she spends asking for a way to "protect the victims."
GM: "There's one of those big red factory push buttons here which looks like it's connected to the loading gate. If you close that the spider won't be able to reach the bystanders on the other side."
The hunters have broken into a factory after dark, looking for the giant spider queen.
GM: "There's webbing all over the place. Blood, too. Man, this place looks dangerous! Anyone want to try and read a bad situation?
Zuzu: "The situation's bad?"
GM: "Zuzu, as you're walking along you accidentally kick a dismembered arm."
Zuzu: "I'M READING A BAD SITUATION."
She nails the roll and starts spending hold.
Zuzu: "Are there any dangers we haven't noticed?"
GM: "Zuzu, after kicking the arm you slowly look up, and see the spider queen hanging off the roof, high above you. It looks like it's ready to pounce!"
Kick Some Ass:
If your hunters are engaging in tit-for-tat scrums with monsters too often, consider a few things.
1) How tough are your big-bad monsters? Specific playbooks can get pretty tanky, but a straight-up fight with a vampire leader should never be a sure thing.
2) Are you using the harm moves? Even 0-harm exchanges can knock away weapons or put hunters in dangerous situations. (For example: one mystery I ran, set in a cannery, saw the hunters getting repeatedly knocked into the canning machinery by devious government reptilians.)
3) Are your monsters/minions too willing to "just attack"? You don't need to answer every kick assb roll with a strike of your own. Monsters can try to escape, try to hide in the shadows, try to do a maniacal monologue, and so on. A "trickster" monster might not even fight at all, instead opting to dance and dodge around, taunting the hunters.
Use Magic:
Should every hunter be able to use magic? In short: yes. In not-so-short: depends. As always, the fiction's the thing to focus on. Use Magic isn't an ability that everyone "gets"--it's a set of options, for everyone, guiding what *could* happen when someone in the fiction uses magic.
The better question to ask when this comes up (remember your principles: "ask questions and build on the answers") is "How do you do that?"
Examples
Ezekiel the Lesser, Spell-Slinger: "I'm going to use magic to place a binding spell on this clockwork tiger."
GM: "Okay, how do you do that? Like, where does this spell come from?"
Ezekiel: "Well, I'm a Spell-Slinger, so I learned it from my order during my training. It's an incantation, and I have to wave my hands like this." Ezekiel demonstrates.
GM: "Fair enough! Roll it! But, I'm going to say you need your spellbook to cast as well."
Morton, the Mundane: "I'm going to use magic to locate the missing children."
GM: "Woah, really? Aren't you a plumber Mort? Where'd you learn to do arcane geo-positioning?"
Morton: "Ah... I got nothing. I guess I'm calling my plumber buddies instead to see if they've seen anything on the job."
Now, there's nothing to say that Morton couldn't, eventually, learn some sort of basic magic. He's rolling with a crew of monster hunters, after all--maybe Ezekiel teaches him something! Point is, a Mundane or Professional (depending on the Professional's agency) aren't going to have as many good explanations for a use magic roll as, say, a Spooky, Monstrous, Expert or Spell-Slinger.
Motivations
These are chiefly for you, the Keeper. Isn't that nice? They're like the elevator pitch for that location/character. If you use them "incorrectly," your hunters will never know. That said, they *are* a good tool to have in your kit. When the hunters finally drag themselves over to the Sacrifice Pit, I'm not going to be scrambling through my notes, wondering what the hell I put that Pit in for. I just scan my locations for "Sacrifice Pit: Location: Hellgate," and I quickly remember that, oh yeah, that's where the stone golems are coming from.
It's the same for bystanders. While I might prepare a quick bio for each my key NPCs, something like "Dave Henton: Bystander: Detective" does *alot* of work when I need to pull Dave and his confounding inquisitiveness out in the middle of a mystery.
Let me know if this helps StormKnight. MotW is one of my favorites for quick n' easy RPG sessions, and it'd be awesome to hear that you're getting a better handle on the system.
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Morton, the Mundane: "I'm going to use magic to locate the missing children."
GM: "Woah, really? Aren't you a plumber Mort? Where'd you learn to do arcane geo-positioning?"
Morton: "Ah... I got nothing. I guess I'm calling my plumber buddies instead to see if they've seen anything on the job."
Absolutely, but keep in mind that if Mort's player is creative, the exchange might go like this:
Morton, the Mundane: "I'm going to use magic to locate the missing children."
GM: "Woah, really? Aren't you a plumber Mort? Where'd you learn to do arcane geo-positioning?"
Morton: "I apprenticed under this crusty old master plumber who also dug wells. He used dowsing rods to find the best spot. Swore by them. I mostly thought it was bullshit at the time, but after some of the crap I've seen in the past eight months, I'm not so sure. And at this point, we're out of leads, so I'm gonna bend a couple of metal hangars into dowsing rods, hold them loosely in my hands the way he showed me, and focus my mind on the kids."
GM: "Fantastic! Roll+Weird!"
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Absolutely, but keep in mind that if Mort's player is creative, the exchange might go like this:
Morton, the Mundane: "I'm going to use magic to locate the missing children."
GM: "Woah, really? Aren't you a plumber Mort? Where'd you learn to do arcane geo-positioning?"
Morton: "I apprenticed under this crusty old master plumber who also dug wells. He used dowsing rods to find the best spot. Swore by them. I mostly thought it was bullshit at the time, but after some of the crap I've seen in the past eight months, I'm not so sure. And at this point, we're out of leads, so I'm gonna bend a couple of metal hangars into dowsing rods, hold them loosely in my hands the way he showed me, and focus my mind on the kids."
GM: "Fantastic! Roll+Weird!"
Yeah you're spot-on Munin. My usual mode for RPing a Mundane is "sad-sack monster hunting newbie," but there are always other options, as you've shown.
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A note on the "ask questions" moves, like "read a bad situation":
When I play, I always like to ask, "What are you doing?" or "How are you doing that?" or even "What do we see your character doing, right now?"
I find this really helps ground the action a bit. It helps to answer the questions (because I can phrase the information in a way which relates to what they're doing), and it helps me choose a move on a miss.
For the former, if the character is trying to find out "What happened here" by inspecting the body, I'd give them an answer by describing how it looks like the victim's arms were torn out of their sockets. But if they said they were inspecting the house where it happened, I might answer by saying that they see lots of broken glass - clearly, there was a scuffle inside the building, and then someone very large jumped out of the window.
For the latter, their actions tell me what they're exposing themselves to. In a firefight, a character ducking behind a wall might say they "read a bad situation" by peeking over the wall quickly. This leads naturally to a miss result: they take a bullet, without it feeling forced or like I just made it up on the spot.
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Thank you for all the responses, especially Munin for the very long response - so sorry it got deleted. I hate it when that happens!
I feel like I'm just having a mental jam here. Some things just don't compute, down to the whole concept of the game. Maybe I'm just thinking about it too hard.
For example:
What do you have to unlearn? The main thing might be just trusting the rules. In many "trad RPGs", the GM applies rules flexibly, to achieve their agenda, particularly when they have a specific plot in mind. (For example, consider "fudging".)
Isn't PbtA all about "applying rules flexibly"? I mean, very little is defined to any mechanical extent; most of the game is based on GM fiat. Like, in a traditional RPG, the GM might "fudge" to let a villain escape (likely an example of "bad" fudging). In MotW, they rules tell the keeper 'sure, have a monster escape no matter how well contained it is'. Its a move. I can't think of much that you'd "fudge" to do in traditional RPG that you can't just do by the rules in MotW.
If you come with a "prepared plot" in mind, the rules will fight you.
I've seen a lot of comments like this and am still confused by it. The MotW rules actually recommend a lot more preparation that I often do for games! You are figuring out what will happen in each place, what the role of each NPC is, how the monster will be defeated...lots of stuff that I wouldn't normally plan in advance!
In practice, I think you *could* skip some opportunities to make moves, but, generally speaking, it's a good idea not to.
So, if a "move" is basically "say something"...what would "skipping" a move look like?
Like, in last game the PCs decided they wanted to get into a locked room that was actually totally irrelevant; they'd seen a "bad guy" try the door, but that was because he was confused about which door he was supposed to use. So, was having there be nothing interesting in that room be "skipping" a move?
In terms of what moves are appropriate for minions or monsters, your basic Keeper moves are always appropriate. It's totally cool to have the minion stab a PC with a syringe full of sedatives - that's you inflicting harm as established, one of your basic MC moves.
Wouldn't 'harm' be the game keyword? I figured that was for doing damage with weapons, per the comments about how to handle things if one party in a fight isn't fighting back.
And its not a minion move, which I assume are meant to limit what minions can do.
Why is that a monster can 'attack with stealth and calculation' while a minion cannot?
This move is all about using leverage to get someone to do what you want. The important part here is the leverage...
From what I've heard, 'leverage' is used in other PbtA games, but it isn't mentioned in MotW. The 'manipulate someone' move seems to be all about 'I'll give you X if you do Y'. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Its just that, when I was talking with my wife whose been playing RPGs with me for about 20 years about this, neither of us could remember a single occasional in an RPG where "I'll give you X for Y" happened in a game. This doesn't mean its never happened for us, just that it was never memorable or interesting. Whereas occasions where a character has tricked someone, bluffed someone, seduced someone, made an emotional appeal to someone...that's like pretty much every session!
So I guess I understand this move fine...it just doesn't really work for us.
* Read a Bad Situation: This is a move you use when shit's about to get real and you need to form an exit strategy. It's for when things are tense you're looking for any small advantage to help you get out the other side of it. That's why acting on this information gives you +1 forward - forewarned is forearmed, so to speak. So for instance, your conversation with the cultists is getting tense, but by reading a bad situation you suss out that they all look to Professor Calder for leadership ("who's really in charge here?").
"Who's really in charge here" isn't a question in MotW. :)
* Weapon Tags: Most of these are relatively self-explanatory, but where they really come into play is in helping to work with the fiction to either describe what can happen or what has happened (prescriptive versus descriptive). So if you have a weapon that has a tag of "hand," but your enemy isn't within arm's reach, you can't use that weapon to hurt them (prescriptive).
Yeah, but as you mentioned, there's no definitive timing or location. So "I dash across the room to stab them" isn't "harder' in any sense than "I reach out my arm and stab him".
There are a few situations where I can see the 'range' tags applying (one person is restrained, there's an obstacle in the way, the monster is going to splash acid when cut so you really don't want to be next to it). But 'balanced'? I haven't a clue!
Motivations
These are chiefly for you, the Keeper. Isn't that nice?
Hmm. I feel like I'm struggling to fit places into these odd terms that don't really mean anything or tell me anything useful. It just isn't a concept that makes sense to me.
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So I'm kind of thinking that I've been taking the keeper moves as restrictions, whereas most people see them as suggestions. I very much got the idea from the book that the intent was that the keeper ONLY performs the listed moves, and shouldn't do something if its not a move. I mean, if there's a different list for 'monster moves' and 'minion moves', doesn't that mean that a minion should NOT do something on the monster move list?
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So, with 'Investigate a mystery' is the intent is that you design the mystery around the move, planning situations where the questions will logically make sense and can be answered by the available info?
The sample mystery really didn't do that though...the witnesses don't know anything, and there's no 'crime scene' to investigate.
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StormKnight, you're right to point out that MotW asks for substantially more preparation than vanilla AW. AW lends itself to big, sweeping, cinematic stories, while MotW is explicitly aiming for the feel of an episodic television series. It really helps the game's pacing when you can start a new session and be ready to roll with a fresh bag of tricks.
However, MotW does *not* ask you to prepare a plot. It asks you to stat up at least one big-bad monster; probably some minions, bystanders, and locations; hooks for the hunters; and the countdown. Those things inform the plot, but they aren't the plot itself. You're playing along with the hunters to discover the plot, and the hunters will take or leave what you have on your mystery sheet. Even if you put "Hawkins' Middle School" down on paper, you absolutely can't think that it's your job as the keeper to get the hunters there--they might not go to the school at all, but still manage to solve the mystery. Likewise, the mystery countdown is what *would* happen if the hunters don't interfere. It should inform your choices as keeper and guide how you put pressure on the hunters over time, but it's not a list of set-pieces that you're driving the hunters towards.
This is where "investigate a mystery" comes in. You can--and should--sketch out specific mystery elements and their solutions. Just remember that those notes aren't the plot, and aren't the only things the hunters will try to investigate.
For example, let's look at the sample mystery again, "Dream Away the Time." When I ran this for my hunters, they went to question one of the redcap's victims, Alice Rigsdale. In the course of their interrogation, my Expert got her hands on Alice's phone, and used some killer hacking skills to access the camera.
I ruled that as "investigate a mystery," and called for the roll. Expert gets a soft hit, meaning one question: "What can it do?" Now, in other systems it's possible to separate the success of an action from the outcome the player wanted--sure, you passed the skill check to hack the phone, but you don't find anything useful. PbtA/MotW doesn't work like that, though, and just saying "you don't do it/find it" is rarely a good keeper move.
Instead, I described how Alice's camera flipped on when the redcap attacked her. The video was blurry, but my Expert managed to briefly see the outline of some sort of hulking figure before it disappeared in a shadowy (clearly supernatural) fog.
Now, almost none of that stuff is in the mystery sheet. There's no line saying "hunters can find a blurry video of the redcap on Alice's phone," and Alice herself isn't even given a full bystander paragraph. But, that investigation made sense with the established fiction, so I answered the Expert's question honestly, revealing that the monster can cloak itself in shadow.
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Isn't PbtA all about "applying rules flexibly"? I mean, very little is defined to any mechanical extent; most of the game is based on GM fiat.
Sort of. But it's not so much about applying the rules flexibly, it's about applying the flexible rules consistently. Essentially what PbtA systems do is say, "here are some tools that are handy for telling compelling stories about cool characters." And they do that by abstracting all of the simulation-of-reality stuff that has a tendency to bog down a lot of traditional RPGs.
One of the key concepts to consider is that of the "inconsequential roll." This is a roll whose outcome (either success or failure or both) leads to no change in circumstances. A good example of an inconsequential roll is a missed "to hit" roll in D&D - all that means is that you have to try to hit again. Or a failed "spot" check, or anything that uses a multiple roll system to resolve tasks the characters might undertake where time is a factor (i.e. roll once each turn until you amass X successes).
By design, PbtA games largely do away with inconsequential rolls. It's not a matter of making a separate Climbing check for every 10 feet of cliff you want to ascend; in a PbtA game, you make one roll and the result of that roll dictates what happens. Treating this as acting under pressure, if you hit a 10+, awesome, you've scaled the cliff. If you hit a 7-9, you've scaled the cliff but it has cost you something (the Keeper is going to offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice). And if you miss, the Keeper is going to make as hard and direct a move as he or she likes (inflicting harm, capturing someone, separating the PCs, taking away their stuff, etc).
But here's the important part - whether you succeed or fail, the underlying fictional situation has changed. "I try it again," is almost always the wrong answer. If you are doing your job as the Keeper correctly, those successes and failures (both) have consequences, and those consequences have tangible effects in the fiction. This is what Vincent means in AW when he says the best moves are those which are irrevocable. The "ugly choice" is pure magic for this; you can kill the monster, or you can save the kid, but you can't do both - which is it going to be? Whatever you decide, there will be repercussions.
If you come with a "prepared plot" in mind, the rules will fight you.
I've seen a lot of comments like this and am still confused by it. The MotW rules actually recommend a lot more preparation that I often do for games! You are figuring out what will happen in each place, what the role of each NPC is, how the monster will be defeated...lots of stuff that I wouldn't normally plan in advance!
I think KidDublin handled this one well, but I'd just like to add that it's best to give your NPCs/monsters solid motivations and then just turn them loose. As the players do stuff, the NPCs/monsters will react, and their plans will change by necessity. Because players are players, you might have no idea what they are going to do, which means you don't know what the monsters are going to do in reaction. Hence the term, "play to find out." If you have a rigid "Clue X leads to Encounter Y leads to Clue Z leads to Boss Fight Omega," what are you going to do when the players kill the guy in Encounter Y who was supposed to give them Clue Z?
Instead, just set up the situation, the motivations, the rough initial plans (this is essentially what your countdown represents), and blast off. Re-evaluate at every step based on the PCs' actions (or inactions).
In practice, I think you *could* skip some opportunities to make moves, but, generally speaking, it's a good idea not to.
Like, in last game the PCs decided they wanted to get into a locked room that was actually totally irrelevant; they'd seen a "bad guy" try the door, but that was because he was confused about which door he was supposed to use. So, was having there be nothing interesting in that room be "skipping" a move?
Getting into that locked room is a perfect example of an inconsequential roll; don't do that. Unless succeeding or failing to enter that room will have some consequence, just let them do it. And in doing so, give them some information that gives some insight into the NPC: "Yeah, you force the lock in short order. But the room is just a supply closet. Mops, buckets, bleach, big rolls of toilet paper. You wonder what he could possibly have been looking for, and if not finding it is important."
But a better way to handle this is to highlight the NPC's confusion up-front: "The guy stops in the hall, visibly indecisive. He takes a few steps one way, then stops and turns around, trying the door on the left. When he finds it locked, he looks a little panicked for a second. Then he tries the door on the right, finds it unlocked, heaves a sigh of relief, walks through, and closes it behind him."
You do this because the important part is not that one of the rooms is irrelevant, but that the NPC is confused.
In terms of what moves are appropriate for minions or monsters, your basic Keeper moves are always appropriate. It's totally cool to have the minion stab a PC with a syringe full of sedatives - that's you inflicting harm as established, one of your basic MC moves.
Wouldn't 'harm' be the game keyword? I figured that was for doing damage with weapons, per the comments about how to handle things if one party in a fight isn't fighting back.
And its not a minion move, which I assume are meant to limit what minions can do.
Why is that a monster can 'attack with stealth and calculation' while a minion cannot?
Ah, OK, I think I see part of the problem here.
You have a list of basic Keeper moves, right? These are ALWAYS appropriate. You can do these at any time. So long as you can follow the fiction along its appropriate course, you can do this with any agent. So if one of your Keeper moves is capture someone, then it's totally cool to have a minion be the thing that captures the PC, so long as it is fictionally appropriate.
Where the monster moves versus minion moves are important is in shaping the scenes. So attack with stealth and calculation describes how the monster makes its approach - but minions don't attack that way because they aren't smart enough. They can both attack the players, it's just that monsters are more clever about it than minions (who are more of a blunt-force tool).
Example: The PCs are investigating the scene of a supernatural crime. Looking for clues, one of them makes a roll to investigate a mystery and completely flubs to roll to the tune of a 3. Using this opportunity, the Keeper chooses to have the monster attack with stealth and calculation, and narrates this as, "You're looking around the darkened basement for anything that can give you some insight into what happened here. At one point, while Mort and Kevin are busy examining the victim, you notice a few fresh drops of blood some distance removed from the body. Nearby is another blood smear. A few feet away is another - they seem to lead to the basement window. As you're intently examining the latch mechanism for any signs of forced entry, there's a sudden, hostile presence to your left - more felt than seen or heard - and you are struck."
What the Keeper is doing here is using the monster's move to set up the fictional situation. Because the monster is using stealth and calculation, it is making its attack from a hidden position against an opponent who is separated from the rest of the party (rather than merely charging the entire party). What this means is that for at least a little bit of time, the PC who flubbed his roll is fighting the monster on his own, without help. And because you can make as hard and as direct a move as you like on a player miss, it's totally kosher to have this attack actually land and do damage (or have some monster-related custom move effect). And at this point, the Keeper (acting as the monster) has done something, and conversation shifts to the player, which you indicate by saying something like "A tentacle wraps around your chest and something sharp is jammed into your stomach once, twice, three times. What do you do?" At this point, the player does whatever it is he or she is going to do, maybe makes some move, maybe just screams for help and tries to get away, whatever. Dice might be rolled, then maybe conversation reverts to the Keeper. He does something as the monster, then maybe he asks the other players what they're doing while the monster is mauling their friend. Or maybe since this is a stealthy, calculated attack, the monster just gets in a single hit and then vanishes before the PCs can react.
Does that make sense?
This move is all about using leverage to get someone to do what you want. The important part here is the leverage...
From what I've heard, 'leverage' is used in other PbtA games, but it isn't mentioned in MotW. The 'manipulate someone' move seems to be all about 'I'll give you X if you do Y'. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Its just that, when I was talking with my wife whose been playing RPGs with me for about 20 years about this, neither of us could remember a single occasional in an RPG where "I'll give you X for Y" happened in a game. This doesn't mean its never happened for us, just that it was never memorable or interesting. Whereas occasions where a character has tricked someone, bluffed someone, seduced someone, made an emotional appeal to someone...that's like pretty much every session!
But don't you see? Seduction is "I'll give you seX if you give me Y." ;) An emotional appeal is "You'll make me happy if you do Y." A bluff is faking that you have a gun and saying "Do Y and I won't shoot you." A bribe is straight-up "I'll give you X if you do Y." Blackmail is "Do Y or I'll e-mail these photos to your wife." These are all cases of an "exchange," and manipulate someone is the appropriate move for all of them. You just need to be more open-minded about what you're treating as the "currency" used to make that exchange.
* Weapon Tags: Most of these are relatively self-explanatory, but where they really come into play is in helping to work with the fiction to either describe what can happen or what has happened (prescriptive versus descriptive). So if you have a weapon that has a tag of "hand," but your enemy isn't within arm's reach, you can't use that weapon to hurt them (prescriptive).
Yeah, but as you mentioned, there's no definitive timing or location. So "I dash across the room to stab them" isn't "harder' in any sense than "I reach out my arm and stab him".
Ah, but that's the important part - depending on the fictional situation, it's entirely possible that it is harder to dash across the room than to reach out your arm. For instance, unless teleportation is a thing in your setting, dashing across the room is assumed to take some (non-specific) amount of time - what is the monster doing while you're dashing across the room? Or maybe the monster is a squid-like mass of flailing, ropy, barbed tentacles whipping every which way. So yeah, you can attack the creature's body with your knife, but first you've got to get close enough to do so. That sounds pretty freakin' dangerous, doesn't it? So maybe crossing that distance is more complicated than just the player saying, "I walk over and stab it," because that doesn't fit the fiction. Instead maybe it's some ducking, rolling, bobbing, and weaving to close the distance without getting mauled, which sounds an awful lot like doing something under pressure to me. This involves making a roll (and suffering the consequences) before you even get the opportunity to make an attack. But if you had a pistol instead of a knife (with a tag of close instead of hand), you could maybe just shoot the thing and kick some ass might be the more appropriate move.
"Balanced" is a little more esoteric (and not present in AW, so I'm venturing a guess here), but weapons that are well-balanced tend to be very quick to bring to bear. I'd almost treat this as the opposite of slow. Between the guy with the regular sword and the guy with the balanced sword, maybe the guy with the balanced sword gets to take the conversational lead when the situation comes to blows (i.e. he's the one who gets to make the roll to kick some ass rather than the other guy). Or if you're fighting an NPC or monster, maybe the balanced weapon lets you get in a hit first before the real mano-a-mano violence starts.
Does this help?
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Remember, also, what I wrote earlier about a move being a piece of new information or a statement which prompts a response from the player(s).
Getting into a locked room (which is empty) has nothing to do with moves at all. (Unless Monster of the Week has a "get into a locked room" move, I suppose. In that case you should roll it!)
When it's your turn to talk, you make a move. If there is danger or interest or suspense in this room, you use that to inspire your move. A hidden enemy attacks, that kind of thing.
If there is not, you use your move to push the game towards the interesting stuff. You say something which prompts a response from the players.
Is there hidden information in the room? Offer it as an opportunity with a cost. "You can see there is a locked safe in the corner. You could probably get it open without too much trouble, but you'll have to fetch the tools from the other room to do so. That means anyone else still in the building would likely have enough time to escape. Do you want to?"
Or reveal an unwelcome truth. "There is a safe in the corner, open wide. There are some photos strewn around the room. Looks like the Company had a dossier on your employer..."
If there's nothing of interest in the room, use your move to prompt the next interesting bit of play. Reveal off-screen badness, for example:
"While you're rifling through the contents of the room, there is a gunshot, somewhere upstairs, then total silence. What do you do?"
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As for "applying the rules", here's my take on it:
The procedure of playing a PbtA game is very loose in many regards. However, the rules that are set in stone should be used reliably and consistently.
So, you might have to exercise your judgement concerning what triggers a particular move, but you should be consistent (as a group) in how you do so, and then you should follow the results of the move 100% of the time.
Cohering around the rules is what keeps the group on the same page in an otherwise relatively freeform endeavour.
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There's one thing that I wanted to add about monster moves like attack with stealth and calculation, and that's to keep in mind that these moves don't always have to be made at the PCs; they can also be used to set up a scene. Consider the following:
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Keeper: "You've gotten a call from Inspector Crabbe, your contact at Scotland Yard. He wouldn't elaborate over the phone, simply saying, 'You're going to want to take a look at this.' When you get to the address he gives you, it's an obvious crime scene. The bobbies have the place heavily cordoned off, but Crabbe is expecting you and waves you through. He takes you to a flat on the sixth floor, giving you the basic details as he goes; 'Single victim, no signs of forced entry. Lividity and rigor put the time of death some time last night around midnight, but this doesn't square with the body temperature. The corpse is ice-cold. As in, substantially colder than room temperature.'
Mort (Mundane): "What do we know about the victim?"
Keeper: "Crabbe looks in his notebook; 'Doctor Raymond Helms, male, age 82. Emeritus professor of astronomy at Cambridge. Widower, adult son lives in the south of France, no other known relatives.' As you enter the flat, you see the victim. He's on the floor of the main room, his throat torn out - the blood-spatter is impressive to say the least. The body lies next to an antique brass Newtonian reflecting telescope that's pointed out the balcony window. There are no signs of a struggle. Crabbe says, 'None of the neighbors heard anything. Not even so much as a thump when the body hit the floor.'"
Louisa (Expert): "OK, so aside from the body being inexplicably cold, why did you call us?"
Keeper: "'Right, that would be the study. If you'll follow me.' Inspector Crabbe leads you into a dim, dusty, cramped room at the back of the flat. The smell of book leather and old paper is strong. At first the room looks ordinary, if somewhat cluttered. Crabbe gestures towards the ceiling with his pen. 'What do you make of that?' Carved roughly into the plaster of the ceiling is a vast array of intersecting arcs and lines. Louisa, you recognize all sorts of astrological symbols. Lying open on the desk is a small, leather-bound journal. It looks old. And there's a huge chunk of missing pages torn out of the middle."
Mort: "I've got a bad feeling about this..."
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Right, so what's going on here is that the Keeper is using the monster's move to set up a scene, describing a fictional situation. Essentially, he's giving the players an opportunity to investigate a mystery, and he's doing it in such a way as to give character to the monster. And before the players even roll any dice, we know a couple of important pieces of information: 1) the lack of any signs of forced entry or a struggle means the monster could surreptitiously gain access to the victim's flat (the attack was stealthy). 2) the victim's background, the strange carvings, and the pages torn out of the journal mean that the monster was after something specific and that this wasn't just a random killing (the attack was calculated).
The monster might be long gone and pose no immediate threat to the PCs, but the entire scene and everything that follows from it stems from the Keeper having the monster attack with stealth and calculation. In this sense, the move doesn't reflect something the monster is doing to the PCs, it's something that you (the Keeper) is doing to drive the story.
Does this help put the monster and minion moves in context?
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StormKnight, you're right to point out that MotW asks for substantially more preparation than vanilla AW.
I wasn't comparing to AW, which I never played. Just to "traditional" RPGs. Though stating out enemies is way, way easier in MotW! :D
However, MotW does *not* ask you to prepare a plot.
Yeah, it tells you not to, then it tells you to decide in advance what is going to happen at each location. Sorta. Like "this place is a crossroads, so you are going to meet someone there". Which seems like a lot of "plot" to me. Kinda. I'm really confused about the whole thing.
I feel like trying to set up games as it describes, I'm doing a lot of useless work and not a lot of useful work. For example, deciding what will happen if the PCs aren't there...that all usually gets completely scrapped in the first 30 seconds as soon as the PCs interact with things in any way. So what does that accomplish?
It asks you to define what a place is. So I define a place as a "maze". But I don't spend any time thinking of what sort of things that will happen there that will make it feel like a maze, so when it actually comes up in game, it doesn't wind up feeling like one.
I get that its trying to give a set of tools here, but I really haven't the faintest idea how to use them. I don't know if its that they are badly explained or just that it doesn't work well with me. Or that I'm just dense.
It is obvious this DOES work well for a lot of people I guess.
Getting into that locked room is a perfect example of an inconsequential roll; don't do that.
Right. Totally. But what I was trying to figure out was whether people would insist on making a Keeper move in response to that. To me, I'd just be inclined to say much what you said - you get it open, doesn't look important, you guess he was just confused. Though, I guess one could say that the move is 'make them investigate' since they need to keep looking.
Where the monster moves versus minion moves are important is in shaping the scenes. So attack with stealth and calculation describes how the monster makes its approach - but minions don't attack that way because they aren't smart enough.
I really don't think that's intended; monster and minion just define the role of the character within the story, as made very clear in the sample story where there's a minion that is INCREDIBLE clever, powerful and smart. You could easily have a bunch of ninja assassins as minions who pretty much "attack with stealth and calculation" by default.
All of which is moot if one just takes the moves as suggestions, which I'm increasingly thinking is how most people run the game.
But don't you see? Seduction is "I'll give you seX if you give me Y." ;) An emotional appeal is "You'll make me happy if you do Y." A bluff is faking that you have a gun and saying "Do Y and I won't shoot you." A bribe is straight-up "I'll give you X if you do Y." Blackmail is "Do Y or I'll e-mail these photos to your wife." These are all cases of an "exchange," and manipulate someone is the appropriate move for all of them. You just need to be more open-minded about what you're treating as the "currency" used to make that exchange.
I really disagree with your assessment, though had a good laugh at your pun. :p
In your example of faking the gun, a 7-9 result would mean that "they'll do it, but only if you do something for them right now to show them you mean it". Well, I suppose you could show them the gun you don't have...which kind of leads to failure. :p
Basically, the result is just really narrow that stops making a lot of sense outside the basic negotiation range. And its really limiting - there are so many interesting things that could happen in a "manipulate someone" situation that don't fit that narrow result!
I guess I'm winding up at the point where I should maybe just use the player rules (which I mostly like), but rewrite some of the results to allow more flexibility and basically ignore the Keeper rules...but I guess I'm not getting whatever makes MotW special that way. :(
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Yeah, it tells you not to, then it tells you to decide in advance what is going to happen at each location. Sorta. Like "this place is a crossroads, so you are going to meet someone there". Which seems like a lot of "plot" to me. Kinda. I'm really confused about the whole thing.
Don't think of your location motivations as things that will happen, but things that could happen, given the appropriate push in the fiction. That isn't really "plot" , is it? No more than the "plot" of Raiders of the Lost Ark is Temple (Deathtrap), University (Crossroads), Tavern (Wilds), Nazi Dig Site (Fortress).
I feel like trying to set up games as it describes, I'm doing a lot of useless work and not a lot of useful work. For example, deciding what will happen if the PCs aren't there...that all usually gets completely scrapped in the first 30 seconds as soon as the PCs interact with things in any way. So what does that accomplish?
It asks you to define what a place is. So I define a place as a "maze". But I don't spend any time thinking of what sort of things that will happen there that will make it feel like a maze, so when it actually comes up in game, it doesn't wind up feeling like one.
The countdown is your tool for applying pressure. Yes, it changes as soon as the hunters start mucking about, but that's by design (and even an interrupted countdown gives you a good sense for what sorts of things the monster might try.) Locations don't function like that, though. You don't need to advance a "hellgate" if the hunters neglect it--unless, of course, your countdown has something like "Dusk--Hellgate goes into overdrive."
When it comes to making locations fit their motivation, the keeper section of the rules recommends the creation of custom moves. For example, here's one I used for a "lab" location:
Any hunter that looks for something cool in R&D rolls +Sharp. On a 10+, they find something useful. On a 7-9 they find something potentially useful, and get to decide if they activate it. On a miss, they find something useless and dangerous, and turn it on by mistake.
See how that fits the R&D/Lab location without planning for anything specifically? The move only triggers if the hunters choose to poke around (of course, I fully expect them to do that, because they're #SillyPCs), and it leaves plenty open for improvisation and collaborative decision making. If the hunters don't visit R&D I don't do anything with that location, because it's not important to the story we're telling and nobody is there to trigger my custom move.
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Yeah, it tells you not to, then it tells you to decide in advance what is going to happen at each location. Sorta. Like "this place is a crossroads, so you are going to meet someone there". Which seems like a lot of "plot" to me. Kinda. I'm really confused about the whole thing.
Oh, oh, hang on - I think I see the issue here; you don't have to make this decision about a particular move in the place in advance. If the PCs are in a location that you have decided is a Crossroads (let's say the local cop bar), then if you're struggling to decide what happens next, you take a quick look at the moves that go along with that location, pick one, and start building a scene around it.
Let me give you an example - I'll use the AW "Landscape Threat" as a template (it's different words, but same concept, and I'll put a MotW spin on it):
Let's say you have decided that the night club operated by the local vampire coven (called "Umbra," of course) is a "Mirage." It's impulse is "to entice and betray people." So the vampires lure people to their death here - think like the opening scene of the film Blade, only more subtle and refined. So now that you've decided what this place is and what it's impulse looks like, you can use this in a couple of ways.
First, if the players go there, you can take a look at the list of moves for inspiration - let's say our PC investigators are looking into a disappearance and that the last place the victim was seen was at Umbra. What will the players find when they go there? Maybe I have no idea, because I haven't really planned it in advance. So I look at the list of moves for this place and see shift, move, rearrange on there. Great! This gives me an idea, and I describe how the PCs are looking around the joint for clues and notice that in a couple of the selfies that the victim posted to Facebook before her disappearance, she's sitting in a particular booth in the VIP room, and that in the photos, there's a door. Only the PCs notice that now, when they are actually here and looking around, the door isn't there. Intriguing! What will they do? Let's play to find out!
Alternately, you can use the location's move as a way to lead into the next chapter of the story. Let's say the PCs don't really have a solid lead and are milling around their office trying to decide what to do next. I look at my possible location moves and see disgorge something as an option. This gives me an idea, and I decide that the thing that gets disgorged is a survivor with a crazy story. No one believes her and she's not even sure she believes herself (maybe she did a lot of drugs last night). The girl tells them that she was clubbing with a friend last night. They ended up at Umbra, where a totally hot guy got them access to the VIP room. They got high as kites and were dancing up a storm, but at some point she passed out - and that's when something weird happened. She remembers vaguely regaining consciousness, unable to move, and seeing a bunch of men - only maybe they weren't really men? - attacking her friend. Terrified, she managed to stumble out and spent the rest of the night passed out behind a dumpster in some alley downtown. Calls to the missing woman go straight to voice-mail. She's afraid to go to the police, and wants the PCs to help her find her friend.
In both cases, I am using the location's move to present them another piece of the mystery. It's just that the first is made in response to something the PC are already doing, whereas the second is made as a prompt to see what the PCs do when presented with a new situation. Does this make sense?
What you should NOT do is build all the moves/scenes/plots in advance and hope the players go through them in some particular order.
It asks you to define what a place is. So I define a place as a "maze". But I don't spend any time thinking of what sort of things that will happen there that will make it feel like a maze, so when it actually comes up in game, it doesn't wind up feeling like one.
I get that its trying to give a set of tools here, but I really haven't the faintest idea how to use them. I don't know if its that they are badly explained or just that it doesn't work well with me. Or that I'm just dense.
It is obvious this DOES work well for a lot of people I guess.
It's designed such that you don't necessarily have to think about it in advance. When the players get to the "maze" location, you can look at your list of moves and pick one without having to plan it ahead of time. So if they descend into the sewer tunnels (which you have decided is a maze) to hunt for a monster, you can look at your list of moves and find one (in AW, an example might be bar the way) and use it according to its impulse (to frustrate, to deny passage). "You wander around the tunnels for over an hour, but after just a short time, things all start to look sort of the same. At some point, you realize you're right back where you started, probably arguing about who screwed up and how you got turned around. What do you do?" Essentially, because the location is barring the way, it is allowing you as the Keeper to say that the PCs can't just walk through, that they must undertake some action or use some cleverness to navigate the terrain.
Or you could make this move in response to a PC's roll. For instance, hunting for monsters in the sewers sounds kind of hazardous, right? So maybe you decide that whichever PC is guiding the party is acting under pressure (maybe with another player giving aid) to keep from getting lost. If the player misses the roll, you can make the moves as a response to the player's (awful) roll. Or maybe if the player hits a 7-9 you can use the move as part of an "ugly choice" to present an opportunity with a cost and say, "You guys keep getting turned around and crossing your own path. If you stick together, you get the feeling this might take half of forever. But you could split up and cover more ground, radically increasing the chances that at least one of you finds a way through quickly. What are you gonna do?"
In your example of faking the gun, a 7-9 result would mean that "they'll do it, but only if you do something for them right now to show them you mean it". Well, I suppose you could show them the gun you don't have...which kind of leads to failure. :p
Yeah, it absolutely leads to a failure, and that's OK. It should be harder to bluff someone with a fake gun.
But here's one of the most important things to understand about PbtA games: failure is OK. Failure more often than not drives the story forward. Failure (or partial success) provides the complications that make the characters' lives interesting. It provides the dramatic tension. If the PCs always succeed, the game really loses something.
Basically, the result is just really narrow that stops making a lot of sense outside the basic negotiation range. And its really limiting - there are so many interesting things that could happen in a "manipulate someone" situation that don't fit that narrow result!
I guess I just don't see it that way. My players use this move all the time for a wide variety of circumstances, and the flexibility that it provides is magical. And one of the best things is that it preserves player agency on both sides of the roll, both the person doing the manipulating and (for PCs) the person being manipulated. This move is pure gold for PvP. So in the case of the fake gun, the person you're trying to bully has called your bluff - now what do you do? Do you back down, slink off, and come up with another plan? Do you escalate to physical violence? Do you change tactics and offer something else? The choice is yours.
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Hey again all. I appreciate all the attempts at help. After more attempts at playing, I think that unfortunately I'm just on a track that doesn't go anywhere. I thought that I just didn't "get" the game, and just needed to learn to play it properly. Increasingly, I don't think its that simple. It seems that there's really no "game" here - the game is really just all "inspiration", and if it doesn't inspire you, or the sorts of "stories" you tend to tell don't sync up with the stories it wants you to tell, I'm just not sure if there's any way around that.
So I'm not sure all this quibbling over details really accomplishes all that much, if it ever was going to in the first place. :(
Yeah, it tells you not to, then it tells you to decide in advance what is going to happen at each location. Sorta. Like "this place is a crossroads, so you are going to meet someone there". Which seems like a lot of "plot" to me. Kinda. I'm really confused about the whole thing.
Oh, oh, hang on - I think I see the issue here; you don't have to make this decision about a particular move in the place in advance. If the PCs are in a location that you have decided is a Crossroads (let's say the local cop bar), then if you're struggling to decide what happens next, you take a quick look at the moves that go along with that location, pick one, and start building a scene around it.
OK, I think I see one difference in our discussion here - MotW locations don't have moves associated with them. There's nothing but a "motivation" and a brief description of what that "motivation" means.
But also, most of the stuff you are giving as examples, like:
"You wander around the tunnels for over an hour, but after just a short time, things all start to look sort of the same. At some point, you realize you're right back where you started, probably arguing about who screwed up and how you got turned around. What do you do?"
Is exactly what I said seems more useful; coming up with concrete things to happen that give the feeling of the place. :)
Yeah, it absolutely leads to a failure, and that's OK. It should be harder to bluff someone with a fake gun.
Should it? What if you were trying to threaten someone, got a 7-9 and decide to "escalate" the situation and show them you are serious by pushing the lighter in your pocket against their back and saying you are going to shoot them? Its all relative. A 7-9 is supposed to be "partial success" or "success with complications".
But here's one of the most important things to understand about PbtA games: failure is OK. Failure more often than not drives the story forward. Failure (or partial success) provides the complications that make the characters' lives interesting. It provides the dramatic tension. If the PCs always succeed, the game really loses something.
But the loss situation you are describing doesn't really move the game forward; it just amounts to "try again" or "try a bit harder". And there are so many potentially interesting results for "manipulate someone". Maybe the person you are threatening does what you want, but then has a heart attack from fear and now you need to help them. Maybe the person you casually seduce goes along with it, but then becomes obsessed with you. The reporter you are trying to get the film from hands it over, but decides to also post it on the internet, letting some enemies know about you - none of which are permitted results as written!
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Hey again all. I appreciate all the attempts at help. After more attempts at playing, I think that unfortunately I'm just on a track that doesn't go anywhere.
You know what might help most? Go to the original source material from which Monster of the Week is derived - grab the 1st Edition version of Apocalypse World. When 2nd Edition dropped, Vincent put up the 1st Ed PDFs up for free. I can't find a link, but if you PM him (he's lumpley on these boards) he'll almost certainly just shoot you a copy. You may not be at all interested running a game in a post-apocalyptic setting, but reading the Apocalypse World rules will give you a much better handle on how the "Powered by the Apocalypse" games are supposed to work.
OK, I think I see one difference in our discussion here - MotW locations don't have moves associated with them. There's nothing but a "motivation" and a brief description of what that "motivation" means.
But also, most of the stuff you are giving as examples, like: [SNIP] is exactly what I said seems more useful; coming up with concrete things to happen that give the feeling of the place. :)
Yeah, but the important point is that I don't come up with that stuff ahead of time - I only do it when the PCs actually go there.
Here's something that's important about PbtA games - they thrive on improvisation. You're absolutely right in that trying to plot specific encounters in specific locations (especially in a specific order) is an exercise in folly. PbtA games will not only not help you in this regard, they almost actively fight you. Where they shine is in giving you the tools to improvise and roll with the story that you and your players are creating. They create the mechanics that help you say what happens next, without having to plan it all out up front. Did you get an 8 on your attempt to act under pressure? Well, the Keeper is going to offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. Or did you get a 4? Expect something bad to happen.
But here's the catch - that worse outcome, hard bargain, ugly choice, or bad thing that happens flows from the fictional situation. It's a natural extension of what's happening in the game world right now, both on-screen and off-screen.
By way of example, I sometimes run Apocalypse World games at conventions. When I do so, I almost never have any plot points in mind. And often, I don't even have a setting in mind. I'll ask each player (most of whom I've never met before) to give me an adjective that describes their idea of the apocalypse, and we'll build the world completely from whole cloth as we play. And based on the playbooks that they choose and the relationships they form during the Hx part of character creation, and the answers to all of the provocative questions I ask, we build the "plot" as we go too. And it's usually hilarious and awesome. I have never seen any other system that lets me do this.
But the loss situation you are describing doesn't really move the game forward; it just amounts to "try again" or "try a bit harder". And there are so many potentially interesting results for "manipulate someone". Maybe the person you are threatening does what you want, but then has a heart attack from fear and now you need to help them. Maybe the person you casually seduce goes along with it, but then becomes obsessed with you. The reporter you are trying to get the film from hands it over, but decides to also post it on the internet, letting some enemies know about you - none of which are permitted results as written!
No, it's not "try again" or "try harder" - it's "try something different." The 7-9 clause on manipulate stipulates that the person you're trying to manipulate wants something from you first. It makes success conditional or costly, and in that regard is almost exactly like the 7-9 result on act under pressure.
Also, hilariously, many of your "success complications" are the kinds of things I'd actually apply to straight-up misses. Like, "yeah, OK, you missed the roll - but the reporter gives you the film anyway. But she does so by giving you a link to where she's published it on her Facebook page; it looks like that shit's already gone viral." So sure, you get what you asked for - which is sort of like a success - but upon further reflection it wasn't really what you wanted. In AW parlance, that's called "putting your bloody fingerprints all over something" and is one of the best parts of the game.
Like I said, give Apocalypse World a read. I think it will help crystallize things for you in terms of how these games are supposed to work.
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It seems that there's really no "game" here - the game is really just all "inspiration", and if it doesn't inspire you, or the sorts of "stories" you tend to tell don't sync up with the stories it wants you to tell, I'm just not sure if there's any way around that.
You know, I'm not sure what you mean by "game" in this context. AW isn't that different, in this respect, from a lot of mainstream roleplaying games.
If you're looking for something more structured than, say, Call of Cthulhu or FATE or something like that, then you're quite right! PbtA games (generally) don't do that. If that's the perspective you're bringing to this, then your observation (the bit I quoted) is completely correct.
Would you like to clarify?
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You're also quite right that the design of moves omits some of the more unusual outcomes we might enjoy seeing - like someone having a heart attack when you're trying to talk them into something.
It might help to know that the rules which these "moves" are ultimately derived from did exactly that. However, the simplicity and ease-of-use of the "modern" move design won out as a more "efficient" way to get to the good stuff at the table reliably. Some of us (like myself) still design and play games based on the earlier concept, though. It's just a different approach to design.
In a PbtA game, those unusual events still happen. They're just not mandated by the moves. Under what circumstances would you bring them into play in some other game? Chances are that you could (and should) do exactly the same thing in a PbtA game. On a miss is a natural circumstance for that, as Munin points out. More normally, they would just be typical "MC moves".
For example, you want to talk the reporter into letting you look at the files. We roll, and that happens. Great. But now it's your turn to make a move again, so you say, "The reporter is watching you rifle through the file, with this focused, hungry look, then turns away when he realizes you noticed." That's hinting at some future developments.
The outcomes described by the moves don't dictate the totality of play, in other words. They establish certain constraints on the fiction, but the rest is up to you and your players, just like it would be in any other game. You're still expected to play and invent and then act it all out. The moves just kick in now and then to steer things in this direction or that.
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You know, I'm not sure what you mean by "game" in this context. AW isn't that different, in this respect, from a lot of mainstream roleplaying games.
Yeah, I guess I just had unreasonable expectations. So many people talked about PbtA games being radically different from other RPGs, and the rules producing such 'magical' (their literal word, on more than one occasion) experiences, and the rules are written in such a strangely rigid way, it seemed like they ought to DO things for you. To provide mechanics that actually drive the game, and help with uncertain situations or pacing, or, well, anything that might hang up a GM during a normal game.
Instead, all you've really got from the GM's point of view are a large amount of very high level suggestions of things that could possibly happen. An I don't think I've ever, while GMing any game, thought, "gosh, I could really use a big list of very vague things that could possibly happen here". That's just not useful. And the ways it limits things don't really make any sense; why, for example, can't a monster capture someone? Monsters do that all the time!
I feel like it tells me not to be creative when I have creative ideas ("ooh, this could lead to X happening...oh, but X isn't the defined result, or isn't an allowed GM move"), then demands very specific creativity when I don't have ideas ("the PC gets in trouble...how...they are far away from any possible trouble, the monster isn't anywhere nearby (or even aware of this), and there's really nobody but the other PCs around").
You're absolutely right in that trying to plot specific encounters in specific locations (especially in a specific order) is an exercise in folly. PbtA games will not only not help you in this regard, they almost actively fight you.
Um...I never said that, so I'm certainly not right about it. :)
I don't know what you mean by actively fighting you though; PbtA games - or at least MotW - don't really DO anything (from the GMs point of view). I don't see how they'd "fight" having something planned.
Indeed, numerous things that are classical examples of poor planning/railroading in RPGs - such as pre-determining that PCs are going to get captured, or that an NPC is absolutely going to escape - are much easier to pull off in MotW, since the GM moves explicitly allow them with no possibility of PC interference. You don't have to worry about your PCs coming up with a good plan that will mess up the monster escaping when the rules tell you that you can have the monster escape "no matter how well contained it is".
No, it's not "try again" or "try harder" - it's "try something different." The 7-9 clause on manipulate stipulates that the person you're trying to manipulate wants something from you first. It makes success conditional or costly, and in that regard is almost exactly like the 7-9 result on act under pressure.
It very much reads to me as a "try harder"; "do something know to show them you mean it" to me definitely means you are still using the same approach. When I can even make sense of it; honestly, it doesn't make much sense to me in most situations.
The 7-9 under act under pressure, on the other hand, seems like a great generic mechanic; it could easily be the 7-9 result for the whole game! I'm really baffled about why the game isn't set up that way. Something like "when you attempt something in which the outcome is uncertain, the Keeper selects an appropriate stat. Roll 2d6 and add the stat:
6 or less: Something goes badly wrong.
7-9: You accomplish what you wanted, but there's a complication, you get into trouble, or have a hard choice to make.
10+: You accomplish what you wanted to."
With the given moves then as examples of possible moves. Since it sounds like people "make" custom moves as is, it sounds like they are basically playing this way anyway.
Also, hilariously, many of your "success complications" are the kinds of things I'd actually apply to straight-up misses. Like, "yeah, OK, you missed the roll - but the reporter gives you the film anyway. But she does so by giving you a link to where she's published it on her Facebook page; it looks like that shit's already gone viral." So sure, you get what you asked for - which is sort of like a success - but upon further reflection it wasn't really what you wanted. In AW parlance, that's called "putting your bloody fingerprints all over something" and is one of the best parts of the game.
Technically, they wouldn't be allowed as failures either, since a fail is just specifically that they get mad or upset at you. :)
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Well, interesting! I'm seeing a bunch of different things in your responses now, and it might clear up the mess if we dig to the bottom of it.
First of all, I stand by the assertion that PbtA games just aren't *that* different from other games you've played... for the most part. If you and/or your group have some specific problems which have been holding you back, and the game you're playing addresses those problems, then playing a well-designed PbtA game can really feel nothing short of magical. But it depends on what comes naturally and easily to your group and what doesn't. Some people play and they go "Oh, wow!", whereas others go, "Hey, how is this different from what I've doing all along?"
Not too surprisingly, it depends a great deal on how you've been playing "all along". The rules certainly do "do some things for you"; if you're not seeing that, you're either playing it "wrong", or they are things you and your group already have been doing without trouble.
Second, I'm not familiar with Monster of the Week in particular, so it's possible there are some poorly designed moves or some badly written text or some assumptions of play which are tripping you up. It sounds like the game is fairly well-liked, so I'll assume that's not the case, but it's entirely possible.
Finally, it DOES seem to me that you're having some kind of disconnect with the philosophical approach to playing with these rules, and addressing that might be the root of the problem. Your description of things feeling overly limiting in some places and far too wide-open may be a personal preference... or it may mean that you're interpreting something entirely wrong (or at least differently).
Some examples:
Instead, all you've really got from the GM's point of view are a large amount of very high level suggestions of things that could possibly happen. An I don't think I've ever, while GMing any game, thought, "gosh, I could really use a big list of very vague things that could possibly happen here". That's just not useful. And the ways it limits things don't really make any sense; why, for example, can't a monster capture someone? Monsters do that all the time!
The GM rules in most PbtA games (I'm going to assume that MotW is no different) largely DO consist of "high level suggestions of things that could possibly happen". I'm like you in that I don't particularly need a "big list of very vague things that could possibly happen here", and don't constantly - for example - refer to the specific move lists when I play PbtA games. However, some people do find them really useful and really inspiring. For me, those lists are occasionally very useful, but it's more likely to be away from the table, during prep.
Most of the interesting mechanics all happen from the player's side - and that's where the juice of the system kicks in.
Now, your comments about things being limited - particularly, in your example, "why can't a monster capture someone"? This makes no sense to me. I've never seen a PbtA game really limit your options in this kind of sense. I can't imagine that MotW does, either. Where did you get the idea that a monster can't capture someone?
Are there lists of things that a monster *might* do, which you've interpreted as the *only* things a monster *can* do at all?
I feel like it tells me not to be creative when I have creative ideas ("ooh, this could lead to X happening...oh, but X isn't the defined result, or isn't an allowed GM move"), then demands very specific creativity when I don't have ideas ("the PC gets in trouble...how...they are far away from any possible trouble, the monster isn't anywhere nearby (or even aware of this), and there's really nobody but the other PCs around").
I've seen a few situations where a move demanding a specific outcome which didn't fit the fiction. Generally, this means that you shouldn't have used that move in the first place, or, occasionally, that it's a badly designed move. Look over the game's "advice text" on how and when to apply the moves: sometimes there are some counterintuitive bits in there, and learning when best to use the moves is a big part of getting that to work for you. (It's the main "system mastery" involved in learning the game.)
However, I don't think you should ever feel like you have creative ideas you can't use. Can you give some examples? I find it hard to imagine. (Again, it's possible that, for example, MotW's list of MC moves is terrible.)
Give us an example from your actual game, and we might be able to help you better!
You're absolutely right in that trying to plot specific encounters in specific locations (especially in a specific order) is an exercise in folly. PbtA games will not only not help you in this regard, they almost actively fight you.
I don't know what you mean by actively fighting you though; PbtA games - or at least MotW - don't really DO anything (from the GMs point of view). I don't see how they'd "fight" having something planned.
Indeed, numerous things that are classical examples of poor planning/railroading in RPGs - such as pre-determining that PCs are going to get captured, or that an NPC is absolutely going to escape - are much easier to pull off in MotW, since the GM moves explicitly allow them with no possibility of PC interference. You don't have to worry about your PCs coming up with a good plan that will mess up the monster escaping when the rules tell you that you can have the monster escape "no matter how well contained it is".
I'm not sure what you mean by the last bit about monster escape - is there actually a rule or move like that in the text? Most PbtA games don't have such things, but perhaps MotW does for a specific reason, and understanding it in context might be helpful.
In most PbtA designs, there are lots of things - both subtle and obvious - which work against railroading or preplotting. Here's the most obvious example:
Many player moves allow the characters a specific chance of succeeding at certain tasks. Furthermore, since there are no "modifiers" or "difficulty numbers", the MC can't adjust the rolls so those outcomes are impossible. This means that, as long as you play by the rules, you - the MC - can't prevent certain outcomes to "preserve" a plot.
For example, let's say I set up a trap for a monster (maybe a vampire who we have established will die if exposed to sunlight, and I've made a hole in the ceiling, so a beam of light comes through onto the floor), and then I go into a fight with it. We will probably roll "Kick Some Ass", right? Well, on a 10+, I can choose "You force them where you want them", and push the vampire into the beam of light.
Short of really obvious cheating, you, the MC, cannot hedge the game so that the vampire isn't pushed into that beam of light and destroyed.
The game guarantees me a chance of success.
Similarly so for many other moves - especially consider how the investigation and "read a situation" moves allow players guaranteed access to certain pieces of information.
That's one example.
"do something know to show them you mean it" to me definitely means you are still using the same approach. When I can even make sense of it; honestly, it doesn't make much sense to me in most situations.
Yeah, there's definitely some disconnect here between the way the move is written and the way you're applying it. Can you give an example from your game?
The idea is that you make clear that your leverage or threat is real - and, yes, in the case of a bluff, you'll likely fail if you can't back it up.
The 7-9 under act under pressure, on the other hand, seems like a great generic mechanic; it could easily be the 7-9 result for the whole game! I'm really baffled about why the game isn't set up that way. Something like "when you attempt something in which the outcome is uncertain, the Keeper selects an appropriate stat. Roll 2d6 and add the stat:
6 or less: Something goes badly wrong.
7-9: You accomplish what you wanted, but there's a complication, you get into trouble, or have a hard choice to make.
10+: You accomplish what you wanted to."
With the given moves then as examples of possible moves. Since it sounds like people "make" custom moves as is, it sounds like they are basically playing this way anyway.
I think most people use the written moves 99% of the time (at least in my experience). However, the way you've suggested - play with just the "Act Under Pressure" move - is a valid way to play. I've written a PbtA game which does just that. World of Dungeons is another one.
Perhaps you might want to try playing this way for a while, until you find the need or desire to bring in some of the other moves. Your game will lack some variety, but it's a fun way to play!
Also, hilariously, many of your "success complications" are the kinds of things I'd actually apply to straight-up misses. Like, "yeah, OK, you missed the roll - but the reporter gives you the film anyway. But she does so by giving you a link to where she's published it on her Facebook page; it looks like that shit's already gone viral." So sure, you get what you asked for - which is sort of like a success - but upon further reflection it wasn't really what you wanted. In AW parlance, that's called "putting your bloody fingerprints all over something" and is one of the best parts of the game.
Technically, they wouldn't be allowed as failures either, since a fail is just specifically that they get mad or upset at you. :)
Now, here, again, you've lost me. Aren't we talking about the Manipulate move? (I could have lost track, of course...)
If so, how does it specify that a failure is someone getting mad or upset at you? That sounds very odd. (I certainly wouldn't want it to! That sounds rather boring.)
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Well, interesting! I'm seeing a bunch of different things in your responses now, and it might clear up the mess if we dig to the bottom of it.
First of all, I stand by the assertion that PbtA games just aren't *that* different from other games you've played... for the most part. If you and/or your group have some specific problems which have been holding you back, and the game you're playing addresses those problems, then playing a well-designed PbtA game can really feel nothing short of magical. But it depends on what comes naturally and easily to your group and what doesn't. Some people play and they go "Oh, wow!", whereas others go, "Hey, how is this different from what I've doing all along?"
Not too surprisingly, it depends a great deal on how you've been playing "all along". The rules certainly do "do some things for you"; if you're not seeing that, you're either playing it "wrong", or they are things you and your group already have been doing without trouble.
Second, I'm not familiar with Monster of the Week in particular, so it's possible there are some poorly designed moves or some badly written text or some assumptions of play which are tripping you up. It sounds like the game is fairly well-liked, so I'll assume that's not the case, but it's entirely possible.
Finally, it DOES seem to me that you're having some kind of disconnect with the philosophical approach to playing with these rules, and addressing that might be the root of the problem. Your description of things feeling overly limiting in some places and far too wide-open may be a personal preference... or it may mean that you're interpreting something entirely wrong (or at least differently).
Yeah, there's definitely a big disconnect going on here! :)
Now, your comments about things being limited - particularly, in your example, "why can't a monster capture someone"? This makes no sense to me. I've never seen a PbtA game really limit your options in this kind of sense. I can't imagine that MotW does, either. Where did you get the idea that a monster can't capture someone?
Are there lists of things that a monster *might* do, which you've interpreted as the *only* things a monster *can* do at all?
The rules are very much written as restrictions; though I'm gathering people don't seem to play them that way!
For example, the Threat Moves section explains:
"Each type of threat has its own set of special moves it can make. Use these as well as the basic Keeper moves when you're describing what a threat is doing".
"Capture someone" is specifically a Minion move and not a monster move; so as written a monster cannot capture someone.
I've seen a few situations where a move demanding a specific outcome which didn't fit the fiction. Generally, this means that you shouldn't have used that move in the first place, or, occasionally, that it's a badly designed move. Look over the game's "advice text" on how and when to apply the moves: sometimes there are some counterintuitive bits in there, and learning when best to use the moves is a big part of getting that to work for you. (It's the main "system mastery" involved in learning the game.)
Its possible we're using the PC moves when its inappropriate, but we're barely using them as is! And I think the situation generally fits.
For example, the Investigate a Mystery move reads:
"Investigating can be done any number of ways; following tracks, interviewing witnesses, forensic analysis, looking up old folklore in the library, typing the monsters name into google, capturing the monster and conducting tests on it Anything that might give you more information about what's going on is fair game for an investigate move".
OK, so we've used it more than once when interviewing witnesses and locals, looking through the police files for a case and examining the scene of a murder; all of those seem well within the scope, but we usually can't get from there to most of the questions the move allows you to ask, and miss of "you reveal some information to the monster or whoever you are talking to" rarely seems to apply.
However, I don't think you should ever feel like you have creative ideas you can't use. Can you give some examples? I find it hard to imagine. (Again, it's possible that, for example, MotW's list of MC moves is terrible.)
As mentioned, some of the moves have very specific results, which would then block up anything that isn't that specific result. So, for example, as we've been discussing, a failed Manipulate Someone roll leads to a very specific result - "you offend or anger the target" - but there are a ton of other things that could happen instead of that!
I'm not sure what you mean by the last bit about monster escape - is there actually a rule or move like that in the text? Most PbtA games don't have such things, but perhaps MotW does for a specific reason, and understanding it in context might be helpful.
Yep. There is a monster move that is literally "Escape, no matter how well contained it is".
Many player moves allow the characters a specific chance of succeeding at certain tasks. Furthermore, since there are no "modifiers" or "difficulty numbers", the MC can't adjust the rolls so those outcomes are impossible. This means that, as long as you play by the rules, you - the MC - can't prevent certain outcomes to "preserve" a plot.
For example, let's say I set up a trap for a monster (maybe a vampire who we have established will die if exposed to sunlight, and I've made a hole in the ceiling, so a beam of light comes through onto the floor), and then I go into a fight with it. We will probably roll "Kick Some Ass", right? Well, on a 10+, I can choose "You force them where you want them", and push the vampire into the beam of light.
Short of really obvious cheating, you, the MC, cannot hedge the game so that the vampire isn't pushed into that beam of light and destroyed.
Well, in most RPGs, if an attack did enough damage to take down a target, short of obvious cheating the GM couldn't just keep the target up anyway. :)
"You shove the vampire into the sunlight, and it screams in terror, turns into mist and flees" (Escaping no matter how well contained it is). It is quite unlikely you've defined that one touch of sunlight just kills a vampire anyway. :p
However, I'd put something like that squarely in the realm of "bad" GMing; you shouldn't be doing stuff like that, in any game.
The game guarantees me a chance of success.
Similarly so for many other moves - especially consider how the investigation and "read a situation" moves allow players guaranteed access to certain pieces of information.
But if you, for example, plan that, say, there are journals detailing past encounters with the monster, then when the PCs investigate and everyone is going "umm, hmm, I don't know how we get that info from here" instead of joining in the "I have no clue", you say "well, one of the books you discovered..."
Good planning is just coming up with plans to handle situations that might be difficult or bog down during play, not coming up with plans to limit what's going to happen.
Now, here, again, you've lost me. Aren't we talking about the Manipulate move? (I could have lost track, of course...)
If so, how does it specify that a failure is someone getting mad or upset at you? That sounds very odd. (I certainly wouldn't want it to! That sounds rather boring.)
Yep, the manipulate move Miss is "your approach is completely wrong and you anger or offend the target".
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Now we're getting into some specifics of Monster of the Week, and I've never read or played it, so someone else will have to respond to you. (From the way you're describing some of the game, it sounds to me like bad design. But, without having the text in front of me, I can't say whether that's the game or if you're misreading it in some way. For example, I have the 'basic moves' in front of me here - they're available online for free - and the "manipulate" move doesn't say anything about a miss condition.)
However, I can touch on the general questions:
* First of all, a specific example from actual play would be REALLY helpful here. PbtA games rely a LOT more than other games on the specifics of the way you're playing, and the fiction that's happening when moves are rolled. This can seem frustrating when you're trying to get answers online, but it's really, really helpful to get into the specifics. Often, establishing some fictional details makes the difference between making the rules work and having them feel weird or out of place.
In fact, the number one tip for playing these games well might be: "When things seem strange or uncertain, or aren't fitting well, keep asking questions, nail down more details about what's happening. Ask 'What does that look like?', or 'How are you doing that, exactly?" or perhaps even 'So, are you standing to his left? And what tone of voice do you say that in?' All these things really help apply the rules, as strange as it may sound.
Give me a specific example from your actual game (as best as you can remember, anyway), and some details about the situation, and I'll show you what I mean!
For instance, if the 'manipulate' move does say "you offend or anger the target", what situation came up where it didn't seem like it applied? I could imagine one if I try really hard, but it seems like it would be quite relevant in most situations I can picture.
* You are definitely reading the MC moves too specifically. Remember that when you make a move, you're supposed to 'Use the Keeper moves, without names'. (Ugh. I don't love that phrasing. I prefer AW's "Make a move, but misdirect".) This means that you get the effect the move describes, but make it in a way which flows logically from the fiction. In other words, interpret it loosely. They're creative prompts, to be interpreted by you, and then narrated into being in a way which creates whatever your group considers to be exciting.
For example, can a monster "capture someone"? After all, that's a minion move, as you say.
Yes, it most definitely can. How?
1. The MC move separate them: "The monster grabs Lily and pulls her into the parallel dimension. Suddenly you can't see or hear her anymore."
2. The MC move put someone in trouble: "The monster lashes out with a tentacle and grabs Lily, throwing her into the pit."
3. The monster move seize someone or something: "The monster grabs Lily, wrapping its coils around her neck, and drags her away."
4. Make a custom move for the monster (which could include on the spot, so long as it makes sense, given the fiction): "This monster can strike out of the darkness, blinding a victim/This monster has claws which, once closed, are almost impossible to pry open/etc."
5. Make a custom move for the monster: "This monster also has the move 'capture someone'; it's something it does a lot."
Really, the moves shouldn't feel like restrictions. They should cover pretty much anything which seems logical. They're creative prompts, not constraints. Some people find the specific list unnecessary; others like the inspiration they provide. ("Oh, man. I can't think of anything for the minions to do now. Oh, but wait: it says they could capture someone. Hmmm. Who are they interested in? Oh, they'd probably love to get their hands on Lily. Ok, I'll narrate that!")
The monster moves are a *description* of how the monster typically acts; not limitations on its behaviour. If the write-up for this monster says that it has the moves "capture someone" and "lash out with a prehensile tongue", that doesn't mean that's ALL it can do, it means those are two behaviours it often engages in - things it might do by instinct when it can't think of anything (or if you can't think of anything else!).
I hope that helps.
* When it comes to the move "escape, no matter how well contained it is", you should remember that it's not a magic button for you, the MC, to press. It operates within the scope of the Agenda and Principles. (Which are supposed to help codify 'good GMing practices' for this particular game.)
In other words, the idea that you should "play to find out what happens", "be a fan of the hunters", and "build a coherent mythology in play" come *first*.
"Play to find out what happens" means that you do not try to force a plot or specific outcome on the players. You come to the table with an open mind about outcomes, and "don't always decide what happens". (I am going to guess that the book tells you how to accomplish this, specifically - if not, look up Apocalypse World; it describes this very well, and gives you multiple options for doing it.) This means you shouldn't use this move simply to "make things happen the way you want it to".
"Be a fan of the hunters" means you're looking forward to their success. If having the monster "escape, no matter how well contained it is" cheapens their achievement or success, or makes them seem incompetent, or if it feels unfair... again, don't do it.
"Build a coherent mythology in play" (especially in conjunction with other directions to you, like "Always say what honesty demands") means to establish how things are, and then stick to it. Don't trick the players or play "gotcha". If they've found a reasonable way to contain a monster, and you've given them the impression that it will work, then you shouldn't choose the 'escape' move for the monster - that would break what you've established thus far.
This is where my vampire example comes in - I postulated a scenario where the group had already established that a vampire would be destroyed if exposed to direct sunlight, which the player then used to formulate a plan. Finally, the move rolled and the options chosen allowed the player to carry out the plan.
If you, as MC, decide that it *simply didn't work*... you'd be violating the Principles you're supposed to be operating under. You're not being a fan of the hunters, you're not following the "coherent mythology" you've been building up, and you weren't saying what honesty demands before the plan was put together (if you felt the vampire could easily survive that, you should probably have told the player when the told you what their plan was - or at least indicate that it might fail, if they didn't have that information on hand).
AW's text says this upfront: "You, as MC, could just say rocks fall and kill everyone. Just to get this out of the way: if you were gonna do that, might as well not play, right? Just pack up and go home. So, you're not here to 'get' them. If you DO want to play, it's because you're here to be a fan of the characters." (Not a verbatim quote, but something like that is right at the front of the book. Hopefully, Monster of the Week has something similar... it's pretty vital.)
So, as you can see, the "rules" for the MC are fairly vague, compared to, say, the player rules or a more structured boardgame-like RPG. But, if you understand and follow them, they should really help you not to be a "bad GM". They're guidelines and principles and examples which help you get there. It doesn't sound like *you* need them to do so - you're clearly aware that this kind of behaviour would be bad GMing - but some people do, because they haven't learned that yet.
Is there some reason why you feel that AW's rules enable or encourage you to do things which you normally wouldn't do (like having a monster arbitrarily escape)? If so, that's a pretty bizarre position to take: essentially, "These rules allow me to do things that are not fun! Haha! So I'm going to do them!"
On the other hand, some players and some groups really need strict rules to keep them from sliding into this kind of "un-fun" behaviour. If so, PbtA games (like many/most other RPGs) are not for them. There are lots of other games that might suit them, instead!
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(Oh! Monster of the Week calls the GM the "Keeper". AW calls the GM the "MC". I mixed them up in my post. Hopefully you can sort that out! MC = GM = Keeper.)
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Like Paul, I think I'm starting to lean towards bad wording/design. Good PbtA games don't limit, they enable.
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* First of all, a specific example from actual play would be REALLY helpful here. PbtA games rely a LOT more than other games on the specifics of the way you're playing, and the fiction that's happening when moves are rolled. This can seem frustrating when you're trying to get answers online, but it's really, really helpful to get into the specifics. Often, establishing some fictional details makes the difference between making the rules work and having them feel weird or out of place.
I agree that we need some specific examples. StormKnight, it seems like one of your major issues with PbtA/MotW is that the move outcomes *feel* limiting. As a proponent of the system, my argument basically boils down to "but they're not, in practice." The best way to get that across is if you can come up with clear examples. Give us some fictional situations that you consider troublesome, and we can show you how we might call them as MCs/Keepers. (If you want, start with some MotW-specific ones.)
Additionally, I think it's important to keep a clear separation between PbtA "problems" and MotW ones. StormKnight, if I understand correctly you're still trying to get on board with Apocalypse World/Powered by the Apocalypse *in general*. Jumping to Monster of the Week complicates that, as Monster of the Week (like many good PbtA hacks) diverges significantly from AW in a few places. The "panic button" Keeper moves you mention--such as escape, no matter how well contained--and the notion of monster weaknesses are the most prominent examples of that.
I consider those elements to be what makes MotW fun, but they're also part of the game's buy-in. If you and your players aren't on the same page about how monsters (or investigations, or minions) work in MotW, you're not going to have a good time. Maybe you don't want to play a game where the monster can always slip away (given the right fictional positioning)--that's fine! A move like that wouldn't work *at all* in vanilla AW, because AW is about badasses carving their way through a topsy-turvy post-apocalypse, and it's not about badasses hunting down monsters every week. The games are about different things, and MotW has rules specific to what it's about.
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Also, I'll add that the manipulate someone move does have a miss condition suggestion in the 2nd edition book that isn't in the hunter reference sheet. Specifically, it says:
On a miss, your approach is completely wrong: you offend or anger the target.
I agree that this can read as limiting. However, it's important to note that this guidance doesn't supplant the general rule for making hard moves.
As well as a failed attempt to deal with a soft move, events in play can turn out so that a hard move is appropriate. Specifically:
• When the hunters hand you a golden opportunity
• When a hunter misses a roll (that is, rolls a 6 or less)
• When a hunter has used up all their Luck.
Missing a roll (with a total of six or less) is always a time when you can make a hard move. The hunter’s screwed something up badly, so do whatever you need to. For example, if a hunter tries to protect someone and blows it, then you can inflict harm on the victim, maybe even kill them: make whatever was threatened come to pass.
In the case of a failed manipulate someone, it stands to reason that whoever you're chatting up is unconvinced. But their being unconvinced doesn't have to be your hard move--in fact, I'd say it shouldn't be. The rules as written allow you to snowball that failure any way you want as long as it follows from the fiction, because the rules as written say you're always allowed to make a hard move on a miss.
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Ah, that does sound a bit limiting. I prefer to be able to do something like "you succeed... but it turns out to be bad news for you" on a miss, like in the examples StormKnight brought up. It's a useful tool, in my experience - among other things, it allows you to roll comfortably in situations where it just wouldn't be *fun* to have the character fail, and still have that roll matter.
StormKnight, is this thread helpful to you? I'd like to hear whether this is helping you understand better or just frustrating.
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Ah, that does sound a bit limiting. I prefer to be able to do something like "you succeed... but it turns out to be bad news for you" on a miss, like in the examples StormKnight brought up. It's a useful tool, in my experience - among other things, it allows you to roll comfortably in situations where it just wouldn't be *fun* to have the character fail, and still have that roll matter.
I'd still play it that way, honestly. This additional miss text in the main book seems misleading, as the reference sheets make it clear that the shared hunters moves don't have explicit miss conditions (which, if memory serves, is the same in vanilla AW).
I think the "offend or anger the target" is a "suggestion" in the true sense of the word, as opposed to "a move which dovetails with good roleplaying principles."
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Now we're getting into some specifics of Monster of the Week, and I've never read or played it, so someone else will have to respond to you. (From the way you're describing some of the game, it sounds to me like bad design. But, without having the text in front of me, I can't say whether that's the game or if you're misreading it in some way. For example, I have the 'basic moves' in front of me here - they're available online for free - and the "manipulate" move doesn't say anything about a miss condition.)
I think there are a few separate threads of conversation here, so I'm going to try to break them out into different posts.
The more important (well, from my point of view) thread at the moment is "how to use the player moves", so I'll give some examples a shot here.
Investigate a Mystery is the move that is giving us the most trouble. It seems to logically come up a lot, but we're whenever it does its always a struggle. It allows the PC to ask either one or two questions from:
* What happened here?
* What sort of creature is it?
* What can it do?
* Can can hurt it?
* Where did it go?
* What was it going to do?
* What is being concealed here?
You are supposed to justify with the narrative how each question gets answered. Invariably, we make the roll then kind of sit there staring at each other, and then try to figure out "well, could we come up with an answer to any of these?" Its awkward and confusing.
The miss result is equally confusing; "on a miss, you reveal some information to the monster of whoever you are talking to". We almost never have a good idea for to make that make any sense or be meaningful in play.
Examples:
(From the included intro scenario) The investigators arrive and talk to the sheriff (the Professional works with the FBI, so he's said its related to a case they are investigating). They get access to the police reports from people that have been assaulted and are looking at these and discussing them with the sheriff. We really struggled to find questions that fit or made sense. The adventure specified that the victim's couldn't remember what happened. There was no real physical evidence. So...what can they find out from that?
Oh, except for "what happened here", which is very confusing as a question to me - usually "what happened here" is pretty obvious and would be the sort of thing I'd include in the description without calling for any sort of roll. Often, that's pretty well established before people even start looking around. I mean, if they didn't know that "people are being attacked by a mysterious assailant that no one can seem to remember" (which is WHAT HAPPENED HERE) they wouldn't have come to investigate in the first place!
A miss didn't happen, but I would have been pretty lost here. How would the monster find anything out from this? What would it find out? The sheriff could find things out, but...what that would make any difference in play?
Essentially any time we've used the move, we hit the same problems.
However, these are kind of hard to give 'examples' for, since an investigate move generally involves potentially a lot of detail.
Example 2:
Investigating people that have vanished from a mental health institution. The monster behind it is a Corpseweed; a faerie plant that, if it grows into a corpse can create a simulacrum of that person. It is offering patients and doctors "wishes", getting them to go through doors that it enchants to then lead to what they want - which can either be strange but fine for the person, or utterly horrifying, or even lethal, depending on what they wanted and how much it likes them. Its greater goal is that creating these doors from human desire is weakening the veil between the human and fey world (part of the 'season arc').
I didn't make just talking to patients an Investigate move, though it really could have been by the description; I just couldn't see how that would lead to answering those questions.
Searching through the empty. not-in-use part of a mental institution where they suspect something is lurking, looking for traces and clues.
In this case, I decided to, rather than having what the character had done so far answer the question, to set up a situation that would answer the question; the monster lured the character through one of the portals it had been creating, which was intended to get her out of the way - but brought her to a faerie with more info. However, this was really a cop-out, since that situation was likely to happen anyway. And if she hadn't gone through the portal, it wouldn't have led to the info. And this answered more than just that one question!
Example 3:
Investigation a mysterious murder. First investigation was looking through the police files. Really hard to answer any of the questions from a single incident. Even harder on a failed roll; how does looking through files in a record room reveal information to the monster, or to anyone else?
Being on-site for the second body led to a lot of the same problems. I could give plenty of info for what they were finding, but most of the questions just don't seem answerable.
Manipulate Someone
Pretty sure we're totally misusing it in situations we're not supposed to. Still works fine, except for the 7-9 result, which we just have no idea how to interpret.
Example 1:
PC leaps down and confronts the ogre heading for town, and informs him that she (the PC) has come with a message from Oberon and that the ogre is to return at once; his job is done. What would a 7-9 mean here? (I opted to have Bonecrusher fall for it long enough to reveal a bit of info, and then realize it was a trick and attack her).
Example 2:
Someone fired shots at the investigators; when captured, he explained that he wasn't trying to hurt them, but had been paid to scare them off. PC confronts the guy (a doctor) she thinks is behind the attack and claims her partner has just been killed, wanting to judge his response. No idea what to do on a 7-9. (She failed; he didn't think the was nearly distressed enough and figured she was up to something. While talking to her, suddenly injects her with a tranquilizer and takes her prisoner).
Example 3:
Later, when she's awake, she's learned that the doctor is killing people that he believes are "aliens" disguised as humans; he's just run tests on her to verify that she's human, but now he doesn't know what to do with her. She explains that she's after the aliens as well; that she and her partner are from a secret branch of the FBI that defends against alien threats. Again, no idea what would happen if it had been a 7-9.
Aid Another
Generally fine, but confusing about what a failure result leads to when the person is helping with Investigation or something else where there is no immediate threat.
Read a Bad Situation
We tried to use this when a PC was looking for a) where the monster was likely to come from and b) where would be good to ambush it from; neither question seemed to be covered, so I guess that's a bad use.
Second use was when they were shot at (mentioned above); wanted to find out where the attack was coming from, and a good way to get to him without being exposed to more shots. Worked OK here.
Really just not intuitive. I wonder if that's because I'm used to one of two options for how this sort of stuff is normally handled in RPGs:
A) tactical/miniature based RPG; you've got a map and stuff, and figuring out things like this is all part of the game; the answers are all there on the board, and trying to figure them out is half the fun.
B) Heavily narrative RPG; the complete other side, where a PC would just add to the environment as needed (unless there was a big reason for what they decided to add to not be there). So a PC might just say "I'm going to hit a button to close the sliding door, protecting the bystanders!" without needing to ask the GM if there is a sliding door or a button.
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Let me give your first scenario a shot StormKnight, since I'm familiar with that example mystery. But, before I do, a suggestion: download the reference sheets here, if you don't have them already: http://genericgames.co.nz/files/ (http://genericgames.co.nz/files/) . The archive you want is "Monster of the Week revised files". Take a look at the shared moves in the hunter reference sheet--they don't have any miss (6-) stipulations listed. Does it alleviate any of your problems if, instead of doing a specific thing on a miss, you instead just choose to make a hard keeper move, as described on page 174?
The problem, I think, is that the full book includes some unnecessary descriptions of what to do on a miss. In vanilla AW 2nd edition, the miss for almost all the shared moves is "on a miss, be prepared for the worst." Try thinking about misses that way, instead, and see if that makes the system more palatable.
Anyway... your first example. Let's say it's Roy the Professional who's taking the lead on this investigation.
(From the included intro scenario) The investigators arrive and talk to the sheriff (the Professional works with the FBI, so he's said its related to a case they are investigating). They get access to the police reports from people that have been assaulted and are looking at these and discussing them with the sheriff. We really struggled to find questions that fit or made sense. The adventure specified that the victim's couldn't remember what happened. There was no real physical evidence. So...what can they find out from that?
Oh, except for "what happened here", which is very confusing as a question to me - usually "what happened here" is pretty obvious and would be the sort of thing I'd include in the description without calling for any sort of roll. Often, that's pretty well established before people even start looking around. I mean, if they didn't know that "people are being attacked by a mysterious assailant that no one can seem to remember" (which is WHAT HAPPENED HERE) they wouldn't have come to investigate in the first place!
What happened here?
Keeper: Roy, you have a pretty good rapport with this sheriff, yeah? He thinks you're a fed?
Roy: Absolutely.
Keeper: Cool. He makes good with the details--who, what, where, when, and so on. *I give Roy a big ol' info dump* Also, the sheriff stresses that each victim was cut in the same way, with significant--but not life-threatening--blood loss.
What sort of creature is it?
Roy: "You have any pictures from the scene?"
Sheriff: "Sure. Take a look."
Keeper: He hands you some crime photos. There are some close-ups of footprints in the mud. Big ones. Deep, too. Wow, whatever made those must be huge. There are some notes attached from the CSI team. We're talking, like, seven, eight feet? 300-something pounds?
What can it do?
Roy: "Not one of the victims remembers anything?"
Sheriff: "It's the damnedest thing. I can figure one, maybe even two people might forget an assault. Post-traumatic stress, ya know? But all of the victims? Doesn't make sense. Maybe our doer did something to 'em."
What can hurt it?
(You're right that this question doesn't fit this particular investigation--that's okay! The below is how you can work that out with a hunter without just saying "no.")
Keeper: Roy, how would you find that out?
Roy: I, uh, I guess I couldn't, huh? Let me try something else...
Where did it go?
Roy: "Any pattern to these attacks?"
Sheriff: "Well, most happened around this area..."
Keeper: The sheriff circles a few areas right around the nature reserve.
What was it going to do?
Roy: "Anything odd about the wounds on these victims?"
Sheriff: "Well, we did find a few of these. Lab guys can't tell what kind of thread it is, but it's covered in blood. Soaked, actually."
Keeper: He holds up an evidence bag with some crusty, dark red strings in it.
Sheriff: "These were deep in the cuts. Like some kind of cloth was jammed in there."
What is being concealed here?
Keeper: Roy, you look over and see that the Sheriff's microwave has been thrown in the trash, as well as an electric shaver and a laptop.
Roy: "Tech problems, Sheriff?"
Sheriff: "Yeah. Just up and quit on me these past few days. Had a guy try and take a look at it--he said it looked perfectly fine, 'cept it didn't turn on. Same thing happened to my cousin. And Bette down at the grocer, too. Strangest thing--stuff's breaking all over town it seems."
Does the above make sense, StormKnight? If you were a player, would you be satisfied with these answers? I could keep going with your examples, but I want to see if you have any issues with what I've written above.
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KidDublin's got a good take on "Investigate", I think.
I'll add a few things:
1. I'm not totally sold on the design of the move. It's OK, I think, but not great. (And you've basically nailed down why; it's a bit ambiguous about when to roll it and *why* you're rolling it in the first place, which makes things like handling a miss really awkward.) I really don't want to come off as a critic of Monster of the Week when I haven't even played the thing, but everything I'm finding here isn't convincing me that it's a terribly good AW hack.
2. When I use "reading" moves in PbtA games (like this one), I always ask the players exactly what they're doing. The idea is that the *methods* they're using will bring different results, meaning that character decisions and actions matter.
For instance, if you ask me "What can hurt it?", I owe you an answer. However, I will give you *as good an answer as I can*, given your method of inquiry. If you're just getting second-hand commentary on a crime scene you haven't even visited... I can only believably give you so much detail. I'll try my best to finagle something in there - maybe there's some weird alien fluid by the broken window, for instance, and you'll have to make your own guesses as to what that means - but that's best you're gonna get. If you were interviewing a survivor who had real information on the creature, they would give you much more, and much more specific information. So your approach matters.
In other words, I treat the questions as, basically, warranting that I give up *all the information I can think of on the subject, given what the characters are doing*. What could they conceivably and believably find out to answer this question in this particular situation? It's got to feel believable to me. Like KidDublin's examples, sometimes it means it's gonna be a bit vague. If they go to the crime scene themselves, they could go more thorough answers, for example.
The other way to play is to assume that the question's answer has been found, in full. (I don't know if the book explains this, or offers guidance.) If you prefer to play in that mode, then you, as the MC/GM have to go an invent an answer. That's fine and fun to play (especially if you're improvising!), but it gives you a very different relationship to the fiction.
3. On the subject of the miss, if the game doesn't help you set up a monster which has some means of learning stuff about the PCs, and then lists that as the default "miss" on an investigation move... that sounds like a disaster, to me. Are you sure there isn't something in there?
I'd want to say, for example, that there is a mole in the police department, and on a miss that person goes and tells the monster something about the PCs. Absent that kind of fictional justification, yeah, that miss clause is pretty awkward.
In general, though, keep in mind that when a "miss" happens, you shouldn't be wracking your brains for some terrible misfortune. If nothing bad is likely to happen, don't force it. You're only called to make a move that's "as hard as you feel appropriate". Sometimes your MC moves can seem like good things - or even be good things ("Offer them an opportunity"), hint at other bad news, elsewhere ("Announce off-screen badness"), or deal with the framing of the narrative ("separate them" - "You're going to have to spend all day there, reading those documents. What do the rest of you do in the meantime?", or perhaps "You waste a lot of time talking to the cops, and it's now the next morning. What do you do?" or even "Afterwards, you go to the ATM, and your bank card is declined. What gives? How are you going to buy yourself dinner?").
A sidenote:
Misses on an "aid" or "interfere" move can be very awkward. Again, if there's no apparent problem... let it go. Use "your move" as an excuse to talk about something and complicate the situation, or to raise the tension level subtly. It doesn't have to be ninjas jumping through the roof... it could just be that you forget a detail or leave your fingerprints or something, or someone at the office develops a crush on your character.
An "MC move" really just means you get to throw in something you, as MC/GM, find interesting.
However, it also helps to give this kind of thing some thought ahead of time and to have a "fallback option" (for when you can't think of anything). In this case, it could be to give the rolling character a -1forward (-1 to their roll) - you're trying to help, but you're getting in the way, instead.
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Wow, this has been a fascinating exchange for me. In large part because I have had friends who have brought up similar concerns. I have literally heard the "too limiting" in some ways, and yet "to broad" in others. I too had some trouble at first and honestly didn't really "get" a lot of nuance until I starting making my own hack (Though I learn something new every time I read stuff like this, brovo with these explanations by the way).
But there is totally something to "get." I more recently explained away the "too limiting, yet to broad" by saying to myself, explicit text in rules as written is the stereotype, if you don't feel like being adventurous just do exactly that, otherwise treat that stuff as a guideline or inspiration and go nutz.
But for the record I will say this. There is a lot of... "culture" for a lack of a better word that makes AW or pbta work, implied/learned stuff. The advantage for trad games is that you know very explicitly the authors intent as defined by a 500+ word rule under the appropriate chapter heading, so when you do disregard it, you at least feel pretty clear on which part of the game your breaking and why. In these games I think people never even get the context of why a thing has a limiting way of describing it. A lot of newcomers aren't going to be comfortable breaking a rule they don't understand, and yet don't really like the rule as written, hence feeling like they don't get it.
Great stuff, it sucks that there hasn't really been any "ah-hah" moments but still, we do well to remember not to take well worn concepts "from our perspective" for granted (not that I am saying anyone here did that :)).
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(Oh! Monster of the Week calls the GM the "Keeper". AW calls the GM the "MC". I mixed them up in my post. Hopefully you can sort that out! MC = GM = Keeper.)
Heh heh. I keep trying to remember to type "Keeper" and not "GM". But yeah, MC, Keeper, GM, DM, Storyteller, referee...whatever. :D
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Let me give your first scenario a shot StormKnight, since I'm familiar with that example mystery. But, before I do, a suggestion: download the reference sheets here, if you don't have them already: http://genericgames.co.nz/files/ (http://genericgames.co.nz/files/) . The archive you want is "Monster of the Week revised files". Take a look at the shared moves in the hunter reference sheet--they don't have any miss (6-) stipulations listed. Does it alleviate any of your problems if, instead of doing a specific thing on a miss, you instead just choose to make a hard keeper move, as described on page 174?
Lol. I not only downloaded the references before playing, I then made my own version of the reference since they didn't include the miss text. :p
When treated as examples, the miss text is fine...but there are still a lot of things where we just don't seem to know how to handle successes or failures.
Anyway... your first example. Let's say it's Roy the Professional who's taking the lead on this investigation.
So this brings up another question - would you tend to have everyone PC who is there make an investigate roll? Have some of them 'Help Out'? or just have one person make it?
Also, how does this actually tend to work out for you in play? We started with a lot of roleplayed conversation which covered a lot of the "basics" - stuff that you categorized in "what happened here". After all that, we used to move to dig deeper and get more answers - or we tried to at least.
(From the included intro scenario) The investigators arrive and talk to the sheriff (the Professional works with the FBI, so he's said its related to a case they are investigating). They get access to the police reports from people that have been assaulted and are looking at these and discussing them with the sheriff. We really struggled to find questions that fit or made sense. The adventure specified that the victim's couldn't remember what happened. There was no real physical evidence. So...what can they find out from that?
Oh, except for "what happened here", which is very confusing as a question to me - usually "what happened here" is pretty obvious and would be the sort of thing I'd include in the description without calling for any sort of roll. Often, that's pretty well established before people even start looking around. I mean, if they didn't know that "people are being attacked by a mysterious assailant that no one can seem to remember" (which is WHAT HAPPENED HERE) they wouldn't have come to investigate in the first place!
What happened here?
Keeper: Roy, you have a pretty good rapport with this sheriff, yeah? He thinks you're a fed?
Roy: Absolutely.
Keeper: Cool. He makes good with the details--who, what, where, when, and so on. *I give Roy a big ol' info dump* Also, the sheriff stresses that each victim was cut in the same way, with significant--but not life-threatening--blood loss.
What sort of creature is it?
Roy: "You have any pictures from the scene?"
Sheriff: "Sure. Take a look."
Keeper: He hands you some crime photos. There are some close-ups of footprints in the mud. Big ones. Deep, too. Wow, whatever made those must be huge. There are some notes attached from the CSI team. We're talking, like, seven, eight feet? 300-something pounds?
What can it do?
Roy: "Not one of the victims remembers anything?"
Sheriff: "It's the damnedest thing. I can figure one, maybe even two people might forget an assault. Post-traumatic stress, ya know? But all of the victims? Doesn't make sense. Maybe our doer did something to 'em."
What can hurt it?
(You're right that this question doesn't fit this particular investigation--that's okay! The below is how you can work that out with a hunter without just saying "no.")
Keeper: Roy, how would you find that out?
Roy: I, uh, I guess I couldn't, huh? Let me try something else...
Where did it go?
Roy: "Any pattern to these attacks?"
Sheriff: "Well, most happened around this area..."
Keeper: The sheriff circles a few areas right around the nature reserve.
What was it going to do?
Roy: "Anything odd about the wounds on these victims?"
Sheriff: "Well, we did find a few of these. Lab guys can't tell what kind of thread it is, but it's covered in blood. Soaked, actually."
Keeper: He holds up an evidence bag with some crusty, dark red strings in it.
Sheriff: "These were deep in the cuts. Like some kind of cloth was jammed in there."
What is being concealed here?
Keeper: Roy, you look over and see that the Sheriff's microwave has been thrown in the trash, as well as an electric shaver and a laptop.
Roy: "Tech problems, Sheriff?"
Sheriff: "Yeah. Just up and quit on me these past few days. Had a guy try and take a look at it--he said it looked perfectly fine, 'cept it didn't turn on. Same thing happened to my cousin. And Bette down at the grocer, too. Strangest thing--stuff's breaking all over town it seems."
Does the above make sense, StormKnight? If you were a player, would you be satisfied with these answers? I could keep going with your examples, but I want to see if you have any issues with what I've written above.
Well...first of, you are clearly better at answering these questions than I am. :)
But several answers we just covered in conversation; like I said "what's going on here" doesn't seem like the sort of thing you need to roll for. Same with the victims not knowing what happened. And the 'random stuff breaking and strange stuff going on' was part of what drew their attention to the area in the first place, so that really wouldn't be news to them.
Nothing about huge footprints is mentioned in the write-up (which really does make it sound like there's basically no evidence at all!), and again that seems like that would be pretty obvious - not something that should require a roll to discover.
The thread in the wounds is a good idea - my mental image is that he was cutting them, and then 'draining' the blood into his cap. Your idea leads to better clues. This is why I tend to think that advance planning (which MotW says not to do!) is a good idea - some things lead more easily to clues than others!
We sort of did a 'where did it go' similar to what you mention, except there was no real easy way to get to that specific question from the info. What the player wanted to ask was "is there any pattern to the location of the attacks?", and I decided to specify that they had been spreading out from the nature preserve. (Though both your response and mine bother me - in a small town, I doubt he'd have much choices for victims, so its far more likely to be 'wherever he happened to find someone out late alone').
We actually pondered over "what can hurt it", and I said that since it was cutting all of the victims it must need blood. I was told that this was an extreme jump of logic, which I agree with. :p
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Interesting. The book doesn't give you any guidance on when and how to roll the move, and who rolls it?
That seems like an important oversight.
As you point out, it's awkward to use that move if you get all the information *first* and *then* roll the move. It would probably work better if you rolled it earlier in the interaction.
(I spoke about "system mastery" for PbtA games earlier... this is very much where it happens. Figuring out where and how to smoothly use the moves is really key, and it sounds like MotW has a lot of moves which either aren't entirely obvious in this respect - or maybe the text isn't very good at orienting you to that. I'd recommend rereading the section about the move, in case it has good advice you skipped over before starting the game. Sometimes it makes more sense on a second reading, once you've played!)
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So this brings up another question - would you tend to have everyone PC who is there make an investigate roll? Have some of them 'Help Out'? or just have one person make it?
If everyone's doing different sorts of things, sure. If the Expert's taking the lead and, like, the Meddling Kid is taking notes as they talk, I might count that as a Help Out from the Kid.
Also, how does this actually tend to work out for you in play? We started with a lot of roleplayed conversation which covered a lot of the "basics" - stuff that you categorized in "what happened here". After all that, we used to move to dig deeper and get more answers - or we tried to at least.
In play, what usually happens is one person triggers the move by engaging in some clear snooping. If my Meddling Kid is pacing around the crime scene, and pulls out her magnifying glass--boom, gimme investigate a mystery. If they hit, that doesn't mean all my answers need to be related to magnifying something--we might roleplay something where the Kid brings that glass right up to someone's face... and then asks them a question which could reasonably stand-in for one of the move's questions. There's still room to negotiate exactly what a hunter is doing as they ask those questions, but they need to start poking around before the dice roll.
But several answers we just covered in conversation; like I said "what's going on here" doesn't seem like the sort of thing you need to roll for. Same with the victims not knowing what happened. And the 'random stuff breaking and strange stuff going on' was part of what drew their attention to the area in the first place, so that really wouldn't be news to them.
If you don't need to roll to find something out, then you don't roll for it. It's not investigating a mystery if you already know exactly what you're looking for. By the same token, I wouldn't spend a hunter's hold for a "What happened here?" question if I didn't give them any new information! However, I can imagine a scenario where "What's happened here?" is a totally valid question.
Keeper: "You all walk into the town square. Everyone is wearing demon masks and riding around on tricycles, on fire. There's one normal-looking fella cowering by the garbage cans."
Roy: "I pull out my P.K.E. meter." *Rolls investigate a mystery, hits* "What the hell happened here?"
The thread in the wounds is a good idea - my mental image is that he was cutting them, and then 'draining' the blood into his cap. Your idea leads to better clues. This is why I tend to think that advance planning (which MotW says not to do!) is a good idea - some things lead more easily to clues than others!
This is me leveraging the limited preparation MotW asks for, in order to improvise. The mystery never says how the Redcap colors his hat (pouring is just as effective as dipping, one imagines). However, in that moment I decided the Redcap was leaving those threads behind, because it was an honest, fictionally appropriate way to answer Roy's question.
Nothing about huge footprints is mentioned in the write-up (which really does make it sound like there's basically no evidence at all!), and again that seems like that would be pretty obvious - not something that should require a roll to discover.
Just because it's not explicitly mentioned in the mystery text doesn't mean it can't happen--that's a feature of the game, not a bug. You're right that there's no mention of the footprints--I made those up because, again, it was an honest, fictionally appropriate way to answer Roy.
We actually pondered over "what can hurt it", and I said that since it was cutting all of the victims it must need blood. I was told that this was an extreme jump of logic, which I agree with. :p
For a normal person? Totally. For a crew of seasoned monster killers who literally do this kind of thing every week? Not at all, my dude.
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[This is why I tend to think that advance planning (which MotW says not to do!)
That's a major misunderstanding. Clearly planning is required, which is why such a lot of the book is devoted to mystery planning.
What you shouldn't do is plan how the mystery will play out. You prepare the situation as it stands when the hunters arrive, what happens next is up to the group as the hunters do stuff, and you see what happens as a result.
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One thing to keep in mind with investigate a mystery is to treat the PCs like Sherlock Holmes: they notice things that other people don't. They see things in crime photos others have missed. They infer things from police and coroners' reports that others overlook. When on scene, they find clues that lead them to make deductive leaps. This is doubly true the more experience they get (i.e. "this is sort of like that time when..."
So if you're going over the reports of a mysterious murder, think about little details in those crime reports that might hint at the answers to those questions:
What happened here?" This question is deeper than a simple answer of "someone was murdered." It dips into the how, or even the why. It highlights the unusual aspects of the event. So maybe in cross-referencing the coroner's report (which says much of the brain tissue was reduced to viscera) with the crime scene photos (which show no obvious cranial trauma), you know that what happened here was not that someone was killed, but that a dude got his brain pulped. This also speaks to "What can the monster do?", but that's OK. This question is also a good way to illustrate motive - see my previous example about the pages torn out of the victim's journal.
"What sort of creature is it?" Footprints, hand-prints, marks on the victim, blood smears, etc are all fair game here. Perhaps in one of the crime-scene photos, one of the investigators sees a bluish smear on the edge of a dresser. It's not "blood," so the police didn't care, but the PC has seen it before - it looks exactly like the blood from an old "alien autopsy" video.
"What can it do?" The lack of forced entry is interesting. Police reports note that the doors and windows were locked - note is made of how the police had to force their way in - so the creature is clearly able to teleport or phase somehow. Alternately, maybe it has some sort of telekinetic powers.
"What can hurt it?" Here the presence or creature blood is again useful, as it indicates the creature can be wounded. Alternately, you can use things about the scene to give a view into the creature's psyche; the victim was mauled except for their right arm, which was adorned with a silver bracelet. The house was trashed, with every window and mirror broken except for the big salt-water fish-tank.
"Where did it go?" Again, footprints and blood-trails are good here. You can also use associated ancillary data - There's nothing from the police report itself, but there were a bunch of "noise disturbance" calls to the police that same night, all of which happened in this general area. By looking at the time tags of the complaint calls, you can plot out the creature's path, at least for long enough to give you a general direction.
"What was it going to do?" What is it that the monster is really up to? And what would evidence of that look like? So for instance, in your Corpseweed example, maybe all of the doorways in the abandoned part of the sanatarium have an odd, psychic "stain" to the that is discernible by the Medium. Maybe sound is weird there, like people who are close sounding far away or vice versa. Something that demonstrates the breakdown of reality.
"What is being concealed here?" This is a good one if there are people aiding the monster (either intentionally or not). Why was this police report filed in the wrong place? Why is evidence listed in the log books missing? But again, this question speaks to the monster's motives - what is it trying to conceal, and how might it go about it? This is a great way to introdce a Minion, FWIW.
In terms of giving aid, I find that failures usually lead to interference or putting someone in a spot. Interference is easy - instead of applying a bonus to the roll, the commensurate penalty is applied instead. "Dammit, Mort, all your tromping around in your work boots has completely obscured all the footprint evidence!" Or "Mort, where'd you put those 911 transcripts?" "Ummm, shit. I think they may have gone out in the trash with all the Chinese take-out boxes."
And finally, for the manipulation roll with the crazy, alien-hunting doctor, a good 7-9 result would be to have the doctor demand proof; "A Fed, eh? Where's your badge and gun?" Or better yet, "A secret division, eh? Let's call your supervisor right now. I can help you people, you know." This might snowball into another PC having to fake being an FBI director over the phone (certainly actingunder pressure) lest their teammate get hurt.
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That's excellent advice.
Question:
Does the game instruct you to hide the information from the players, or gleefully give it away?
That will affect how you interface with this move. If you're supposed to show them your cards as soon as possible (once they earn them, like by rolling a move), then you should do your best to answer the questions enthusiastically, contriving reasons to give them the information. (Munin gives some great examples of how you can justify this! I think it's OK to treat the questions fairly creatively and flexibly - after all, the players will be glad to just learn more information, since they are curious about the monster.)
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OK, I mentioned a bit back that I thought there were a few conversation topics going on here. Finally getting around to addressing another. I think this all more "behind the scenes theory", and I'm not sure its very practical.
* You are definitely reading the MC moves too specifically. Remember that when you make a move, you're supposed to 'Use the Keeper moves, without names'. (Ugh. I don't love that phrasing. I prefer AW's "Make a move, but misdirect".) This means that you get the effect the move describes, but make it in a way which flows logically from the fiction. In other words, interpret it loosely. They're creative prompts, to be interpreted by you, and then narrated into being in a way which creates whatever your group considers to be exciting.
For example, can a monster "capture someone"? After all, that's a minion move, as you say.
Yes, it most definitely can. How?
1. The MC move separate them: "The monster grabs Lily and pulls her into the parallel dimension. Suddenly you can't see or hear her anymore."
2. The MC move put someone in trouble: "The monster lashes out with a tentacle and grabs Lily, throwing her into the pit."
3. The monster move seize someone or something: "The monster grabs Lily, wrapping its coils around her neck, and drags her away."
4. Make a custom move for the monster (which could include on the spot, so long as it makes sense, given the fiction): "This monster can strike out of the darkness, blinding a victim/This monster has claws which, once closed, are almost impossible to pry open/etc."
5. Make a custom move for the monster: "This monster also has the move 'capture someone'; it's something it does a lot."
Really, the moves shouldn't feel like restrictions. They should cover pretty much anything which seems logical. They're creative prompts, not constraints. Some people find the specific list unnecessary; others like the inspiration they provide. ("Oh, man. I can't think of anything for the minions to do now. Oh, but wait: it says they could capture someone. Hmmm. Who are they interested in? Oh, they'd probably love to get their hands on Lily. Ok, I'll narrate that!")
The monster moves are a *description* of how the monster typically acts; not limitations on its behaviour. If the write-up for this monster says that it has the moves "capture someone" and "lash out with a prehensile tongue", that doesn't mean that's ALL it can do, it means those are two behaviours it often engages in - things it might do by instinct when it can't think of anything (or if you can't think of anything else!).
Actually, the book LITERALLY describes the keeper moves as being restrictions on the Keeper's actions, and the phrasing in the book is very consistent for them being restrictions. It never says things like "ask a question such as". Everything is written as a limitation, a restriction.
If the rules are intended as restrictions, it is very clearly violating the spirit of the game to interpret the actions as you have described above; if they are meant as restrictions and a certain action is clearly and specifically on the list for minions but not for monsters, then obviously the monster shouldn't do it!
But, on the other hand, if the list is just meant as inspiration and not as restrictions, there's no point to "justifying" the action as you've done; it doesn't matter if it can be mapped to a move or not; the moves are just there to inspire you anyway.
I get the idea that most people don't actually treat the moves as restrictions at all, and just as inspiration, which I guess is the best way to play.
"Play to find out what happens" means that you do not try to force a plot or specific outcome on the players. You come to the table with an open mind about outcomes, and "don't always decide what happens". (I am going to guess that the book tells you how to accomplish this, specifically - if not, look up Apocalypse World; it describes this very well, and gives you multiple options for doing it.) This means you shouldn't use this move simply to "make things happen the way you want it to".
"Be a fan of the hunters" means you're looking forward to their success. If having the monster "escape, no matter how well contained it is" cheapens their achievement or success, or makes them seem incompetent, or if it feels unfair... again, don't do it.
I still am really not sure what is meant by "do not try to force a plot". What puzzles me most is that MotW seems far LESS like a game you can "play to find out what happens" than the vast majority of other RPGs. The prep all seems to be about forcing the plot - just not in any useful ways.
I cannot imagine any situation in which a monster escaping no matter how well contained it is would NOT cheapen their achievement or success or seem unfair. The only reason I can see for writing it that way is to "allow" the Keeper to let a monster escape even if it makes no sense for it to happen; otherwise the 'move' would be "The monster escapes if there is any reasonable way for it to do so" or something like that.
Sigh...tried to get back to the game this evening and it was just a complete disaster. We quit literally in the middle of an action/attack...just were totally stuck for what to happen. So much time spent looking at the moves list and hemming and hawing about what stuff should mean. Generally trying to cut combat to be way shorter because its really lacking in excitement. I guess maybe its just time to give up on this. :(
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And finally, for the manipulation roll with the crazy, alien-hunting doctor, a good 7-9 result would be to have the doctor demand proof; "A Fed, eh? Where's your badge and gun?" Or better yet, "A secret division, eh? Let's call your supervisor right now. I can help you people, you know." This might snowball into another PC having to fake being an FBI director over the phone (certainly actingunder pressure) lest their teammate get hurt.
Incidentally, the characters actually ARE with a secret division of the FBI (one officially, one as a 'consultant'). :p
For the most part, again, that just seems to take it back in a circle.
"I try to convince him to trust me"
7-9..."OK, convince him to trust you"
Its just going back to where things started. A clever PC would quickly learn to always phrase things to allow an easy escalation; that would be silly and gamey, but I think it would be hard not to do it.
But it doesn't sound like most people actually use the rules anyway.
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So what do people actually feel that they GET out of MotW? What does it do for you over just freeform roleplaying? What is awesome about it? What am I missing here?
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StormKnight, regardless of how many diehards like me tell you otherwise, if a game isn't fun for you, then it's not fun for you, and it's fine to admit that and move on. If you're still interested, though, we can keep trying to address some of your issues.
Actually, the book LITERALLY describes the keeper moves as being restrictions on the Keeper's actions, and the phrasing in the book is very consistent for them being restrictions. It never says things like "ask a question such as". Everything is written as a limitation, a restriction.
Can you provide the exact quote from the book where it says this? I can't see a passage where the Keeper moves are presented in this fashion. Here's what I found which best describes the general principles behind Keeper moves.
“For the hunters, their moves cover specific cases. Hunter moves say that when a hunter does this, it is resolved like so. Your Keeper moves are more general, giving you broad but definite options.”
So broad, but definite, which doesn't quite equal "restrictions." Also, you say that the book never tells the Keeper to "ask a question, such as." That's not accurate. The below is from the Keeper moves section, describing what a Keeper can do when they're not sure what move to make.
“Mostly it will be obvious what should happen next, and picking your move is easy. Other times it’s not so obvious, and you might need to think a little about what you will do. That’s fine, take a moment if you need to. Or you can just ask the hunters what they do—that’s a good default move when you can’t think of anything right now.
If you can’t decide, you can always fall back on your Keeper principles or your agenda, and describe something consistent with them.”
Those two passages are key ones to keep in mind while running MotW. You should also keep in mind that the minion and monster moves are meant to be used in addition to the Keeper's basic moves, and those are written broadly enough that it's difficult (for me, at least) to think of a story beat that doesn't fit one of the basic moves.
Paul T's advice is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the game. The question you seem to be hung up on is "Are the Keeper moves rules that I have to follow, or advice for good roleplaying?" The answer is: both. In PbtA, the rules are often indistinguishable from advice. What a move like "separate them" is really saying is that it's often a neat story beat to have the PCs separated.
When it comes to the "forcing a plot" issue, I'm not sure what else to say to convince you that MotW isn't asking for a plot. You say MotW seems like a game that wants you to pre-plan a rigid series of events, but at no point does the book ask you to do that. Can you go over the section on mystery planning again, and provide the specific examples from the text that are leading you to the conclusion that MotW isn't about "playing to find out what happens"?
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Interesting!
Yeah, I have to say again that I haven't read or played MotW, but your interpretation of it (whether it's your understanding or a bad text, I can't say) sounds... rather odd. I don't really see how this game could work by an overly strict reading of the "moves" - for instance, "separate them" or "offer an opportunity" are such abstract moves in the first place that I don't see how they could feel restrictive.
Have you ever had the chance to read or listen to or watch a "replay" or "actual play" of the game? The PbtA texts I'm most familiar with - Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts - both do this really well, showing you how to use the moves in play. If you have the patience for it, watching a good group play can be really eye-opening, too.
I cannot imagine any situation in which a monster escaping no matter how well contained it is would NOT cheapen their achievement or success or seem unfair. The only reason I can see for writing it that way is to "allow" the Keeper to let a monster escape even if it makes no sense for it to happen; otherwise the 'move' would be "The monster escapes if there is any reasonable way for it to do so" or something like that.
Oh, sure! I think the wording of the move is a bit sloppy (as you point out, if there's simply no way to confine the monster at all, that's no fun, nor believable - I agree with your rephrasing of the move), but I think it points to a cool and fun kind of event or scene which we might see in this kind of story.
Here are some examples of where I would use it:
* The monster is captured or contained by people who are not the Hunters. The police, the military, the local asylum, etc.
However, it escapes, despite everything they tried! This escalates the tension and lets the players know they can't rely on the authorities. It shows them as incompetent (or, at least, not up to the challenge of this monster), and makes it clear that the Hunters will have to do it themselves.
* The monster is captured or contained by the Hunters, but they face a difficult choice and they make a decision which gives it an opportunity to escape.
For example, a Hunter captures the monster, but he is distracted by his love interest, and decides to break his promise to the rest of the team to stay on guard, and, instead, goes out on a date/gets busy with his lover. While he's away, the monster escapes!
* The monster is captured, but the Hunters' knowledge of its abilities is incomplete, so they've made an error in containing it.
It escapes, taking advantage of this error. This is interesting, because it reveals more information to the Hunters - "Oh, we didn't know it could fit through a hole that small/turn into fog/teleport/trade bodies with a guard! We'll deal with it differently from now on."
The escape, in some way, reveals something important, or gives weight to a decision made by the players.
I certainly would NEVER use this move in a situation where the players, to the best of their knowledge, and yours, have done everything to contain it, and it doesn't seem reasonable for it to escape. Why would you? That's no fun for anybody.
The short version is:
This move is telling you that it would be "cool" to have this scene happen in the game - the terrifying monster bursts forth from confinement!
You can work that in, if it seems like a good idea.
How do you know if it's a good idea? It should, first of all, follow your own aesthetic judgement (you think it would be cool, in other words), and, second, follow your Agenda and Principles. If it seems like it would be cool/fun to see, and it keeps things interesting, still maintains the frame that you're a fan of the characters, saying what honesty demands, and so on, then you use it! If not, you don't.
Basically, where you rewrote the move to say "...if it's reasonable to do so".... that should apply to EVERY RULE in the game, every single move you make (both you and the players). Add it, mentally, to every single move in the game! That's how it's supposed to be used.
If you can imagine seeing that in a movie and it would make you think, "Oh, that's cheap," then don't do it.
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StormKnight, regardless of how many diehards like me tell you otherwise, if a game isn't fun for you, then it's not fun for you, and it's fine to admit that and move on. If you're still interested, though, we can keep trying to address some of your issues.
So, a confession here is that while, in theory, I really like RPGs, I don't think most RPGs are very good. Part of my annoyance is that most provide helpful mechanics for combat but very little past that, failing to provide any real mechanical support for many of the things that could happen in the game. (MotW seems to have this failing as well).
Another, quite large part of my annoyance is that most RPGs are unreasonably complex, with too many pages of rules, tables of modifiers, more stats than are needed, etc. This is a problem for me, and it is frequently even MORE of a problem for people I game with. (I find the list of modifiers for, say, Savage Worlds, annoying, my players find it utterly ridiculous).
So when I started to try Monster of the Week and I have someone who normally HATES making characters being enthused about how easy it is to make a character, and being excited about how simple the rules are and how there's not a ton of stuff to remember or look up, I really, really want the game to work out. Which is why I'm finding it totally infuriating that I just can't seem to run this.
Actually, the book LITERALLY describes the keeper moves as being restrictions on the Keeper's actions, and the phrasing in the book is very consistent for them being restrictions. It never says things like "ask a question such as". Everything is written as a limitation, a restriction.
Can you provide the exact quote from the book where it says this? I can't see a passage where the Keeper moves are presented in this fashion. Here's what I found which best describes the general principles behind Keeper moves. [/quote]
Page 166:
"To help you make your decisions about what happens next whenever the outcome is uncertain, the rules restrict you to certain options. These parts of the conversation are called "moves".
So broad, but definite, which doesn't quite equal "restrictions." Also, you say that the book never tells the Keeper to "ask a question, such as." That's not accurate. The below is from the Keeper moves section, describing what a Keeper can do when they're not sure what move to make.
I'm referring to several moves that result in asking specific questions, such as Investigate a Mystery and Read a Bad Situation. They specify exact questions.
In similar fashion, most of the player moves gives very definite results on what happens. A 7-9 result on Kick Some Ass means you take damage, and that's it. The opponent can't disarm you or do something else. Just do damage back.
Paul T's advice is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the game. The question you seem to be hung up on is "Are the Keeper moves rules that I have to follow, or advice for good roleplaying?" The answer is: both. In PbtA, the rules are often indistinguishable from advice. What a move like "separate them" is really saying is that it's often a neat story beat to have the PCs separated.
Note that this isn't really an issue except in the theoretical sense; it is now mostly obvious that most people just treat it all as guidelines. However, it then gets confusing when people talk about, for example, "creating a custom keeper move" - why would you ever need to "create" a move if the moves are all just guidelines?
For the most part it seems like the thing to do is just ignore all the keeper "motivations" and "moves". They don't actually DO anything or add anything to the game. They are just there for inspiration, and if I don't find them at all inspiring (indeed, I often find them annoying instead), that's no use.
When it comes to the "forcing a plot" issue, I'm not sure what else to say to convince you that MotW isn't asking for a plot. You say MotW seems like a game that wants you to pre-plan a rigid series of events, but at no point does the book ask you to do that. Can you go over the section on mystery planning again, and provide the specific examples from the text that are leading you to the conclusion that MotW isn't about "playing to find out what happens"?
I don't think I've ever said it wants you to pre-plan a "rigid series of events". It does ask you to plan a great deal. All of the 'motivations' are about defining what a location or person is going to do with the plot. A 'crossroads' is a place to meet someone, so you are pre-defining that the PCs will meet someone there. What it doesn't seem to want you to do is decide who they will meet or how they will meet them, so its like it wants you to define the plot without actually defining anything useful to know about the plot.
Other elements include things like pre-defining how the players will defeat the monster (its weakness), pre-defining the "destiny" of the chosen. the whole "something bad is going to happen" result on the chosen's premonitions (what in the world does that even mean? What bad will happen? What if something bad doesn't really present itself? What if the character consistently makes good rolls that would avert something bad happening?)
Mostly I just have no idea how the system would "fight" you if you pre-determined a "plot", which is something people keep saying. Maybe we're just talking about totally different things. For example, this is basically what I "planned" for the first few sessions of one of the last non-MotW games I ran; a time-traveling action/adventure game using Savage Worlds:
1) PC is in a remote cave when massive apocalypse occurs. Part of backstory and set-up.
2) Nearest city has one building that is surrounded with wrecked military vehicles and has a flag with 'SOS Survivor" or something like that hanging out of the window. Inside is a wounded but stable soldier (with name, personality, stats).
3) Soldier has been picking up radio transmissions urging that if anyone is alive they should go to the Amelion Institute, with locations.
4) Amelion institute is run by an AI with limited abilities, and has a time travel device. Automated defense are in place that it cannot turn off.
So the assumed plot is that:
1) PC will go to nearest city.
2) PC will meet up with survivor.
3) They will go to investigate transmissions.
4) They will get into the institute.
5) They will use the time travel device.
Now, if that was my "plot" (again, just for the first bit) and I was running this in MotW, how would the system fight me on any of that?
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Interesting!
Have you ever had the chance to read or listen to or watch a "replay" or "actual play" of the game? The PbtA texts I'm most familiar with - Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts - both do this really well, showing you how to use the moves in play. If you have the patience for it, watching a good group play can be really eye-opening, too.
I think watching a replay of people playing an RPG has to be one of the most boring activities possible. :)
However, I was so determined to figure this out that I did try a few youTube videos of people playing MotW to figure this out; they seemed to be stumbling and having problems with the same things we are. I also tried reading PbFs on RPGG, but I find those really, really hard to follow.
Anyone got any recommendations for something good to watch/read that really gives solid examples of people playing the game well?
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Watch the Roll20 series with Adam Koebel (co-author of Dungeon World) and his group playing 2nd Edition Apocalypse World. I can't seem to find the direct link to the first session (originally intended as a one-shot), but here's where they pick up and start the actual campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6982qd_IUeA
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Watch the Roll20 series with Adam Koebel (co-author of Dungeon World) and his group playing 2nd Edition Apocalypse World. I can't seem to find the direct link to the first session (originally intended as a one-shot), but here's where they pick up and start the actual campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6982qd_IUeA
Sorry, I have absolutely no interest in Apocalypse World.
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Page 166:
"To help you make your decisions about what happens next whenever the outcome is uncertain, the rules restrict you to certain options. These parts of the conversation are called "moves".
Fair enough--the book does literally say that. I don't see the keeper moves as "restrictive," so much as a guide for focusing on the sorts of things that *should* happen in monster hunting game.
I'm referring to several moves that result in asking specific questions, such as Investigate a Mystery and Read a Bad Situation. They specify exact questions.
They do, but, again, I think the other players in this thread have all done an excellent job demonstrating how those exact questions can be interpreted and applied in wildly different ways, depending on the in-game situation. Then again, if you want to go ahead and just let your players ask whatever they want, do that and see how it works! I'd be willing to bet that they still ask variations on those same questions. Just make sure you have them back up those questions with the appropriate fictional posturing--testing blood samples, collecting bone fragments, and so on.
In similar fashion, most of the player moves gives very definite results on what happens. A 7-9 result on Kick Some Ass means you take damage, and that's it. The opponent can't disarm you or do something else. Just do damage back.
The harm move lets you have a hunter "drop something" when they get hurt--even if it's a 0-harm "hurt". (In fact, the harm move lets you drop all kinds of nasty consequences!) That drop could be because they stumble and let go of their dagger, or because the werewolf wrenched the weapon out of their hand while attacking. Also, you're allowed to have a monster just try and disarm a hunter on its own! Describe how that zombie looks like it's trying to grab Zoe's baseball bat, and give them a chance to act under pressure. If they botch it, you're well within your rights to take away some of the hunters' stuff by having that zed grab the slugger.
A 'crossroads' is a place to meet someone, so you are pre-defining that the PCs will meet someone there.
Not exactly. You're making a place where the PCs could meet someone, and maybe you're populating that place with some bystanders they're likely to meet if they go there. But, you're not saying that they must go there to find or kill the monster. Playing to find out what happens means--in part, for MotW--having stuff ready, using it when it makes fictional sense, and ignoring it otherwise.
Mostly I just have no idea how the system would "fight" you if you pre-determined a "plot", which is something people keep saying. Maybe we're just talking about totally different things. For example, this is basically what I "planned" for the first few sessions of one of the last non-MotW games I ran; a time-traveling action/adventure game using Savage Worlds:
1) PC is in a remote cave when massive apocalypse occurs. Part of backstory and set-up.
2) Nearest city has one building that is surrounded with wrecked military vehicles and has a flag with 'SOS Survivor" or something like that hanging out of the window. Inside is a wounded but stable soldier (with name, personality, stats).
3) Soldier has been picking up radio transmissions urging that if anyone is alive they should go to the Amelion Institute, with locations.
4) Amelion institute is run by an AI with limited abilities, and has a time travel device. Automated defense are in place that it cannot turn off.
So the assumed plot is that:
1) PC will go to nearest city.
2) PC will meet up with survivor.
3) They will go to investigate transmissions.
4) They will get into the institute.
5) They will use the time travel device.
Now, if that was my "plot" (again, just for the first bit) and I was running this in MotW, how would the system fight me on any of that?
In Monster of the Week, a good investigate a mystery might let a hunter discover the transmissions/Amelion Institute without ever going to the city or talking to the soldier. And that would be completely fine! MotW has a move that--if the hunter gives appropriate fictional justification--forces the Keeper to make with some juicy info. If you only dole out info when you planned to, you're fighting the game and your hunters will be salty.
In vanilla Apocalypse World (which this example gels with better, I think) you've got an even harder time of it. Your PCs might just walk off into the desert, in the opposite direction of the town, completely ignoring your plot. You're playing to find out what happens, so you're obliged to follow them. You're not obliged to punish them for ignoring those plot hooks, and you absolutely shouldn't try to guide them back to that lone city.
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Now, if that was my "plot" (again, just for the first bit) and I was running this in MotW, how would the system fight me on any of that?
Your first list isn't a "plot", it's just some details on a prepared situation. The second list is (your "assumed plot").
If the players are happy to go along with your assumed plot (or do by coincidence), nothing is going to happen. As with any kind of talk of pre-plotting or railroading, the meaningful interactions happen when the players do NOT go along with the assumed plot.
The design of MotW doesn't seem to be tremendously strong-handed in terms of fighting GM Force (a term for when the GM takes too much authority over the game's direction into her hands), but it will fight you in subtle ways. If you're trying to hide information, the "reading" moves can give it to the players. If you're trying to kill off someone, they can Protect them; if you're trying to protect someone, they can Kick Ass (and likely kill them). Most of the moves give guarantees of certain outcomes; in a group which understands the rules and uses them functionally, it's very hard for a GM to contrive a way to take away those guarantees without having the players call shenanigans. The specific Hunter moves put that even more into perspective. The Use Magic guarantees a variety of results, as well.
More importantly, though, the Agenda and Principles, the basic philosophy of play (e.g. "tell them what honesty demands") are written so as to create a certain style of game. All of this only applies if the group (you and your players) buy into that philosophy in the first place.
If you are thinking that it's possible to subvert that Agenda and Principles without breaking any of the dice rules... it's true. The game isn't designed to be "foolproof" for someone who doesn't want to play that way in the first place. There may be other, better games for you which are more procedural, and enforce their procedures more strictly.
The reason that Apocalypse World game (videos) is a good one to check out is because the people playing do a really good job of using the system and the moves, as well as follow the Principles, and it would be a good example to emulate. (It is, however, indeed, one of the most boring things in the world! It's not for everyone. But if you have the patience for it, you will likely find it rewarding.)
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=== THIS POST IS DISCUSSING USEFUL STUFF THAT I DON'T GET ===
In similar fashion, most of the player moves gives very definite results on what happens. A 7-9 result on Kick Some Ass means you take damage, and that's it. The opponent can't disarm you or do something else. Just do damage back.
The harm move lets you have a hunter "drop something" when they get hurt--even if it's a 0-harm "hurt". (In fact, the harm move lets you drop all kinds of nasty consequences!) That drop could be because they stumble and let go of their dagger, or because the werewolf wrenched the weapon out of their hand while attacking. Also, you're allowed to have a monster just try and disarm a hunter on its own! Describe how that zombie looks like it's trying to grab Zoe's baseball bat, and give them a chance to act under pressure. If they botch it, you're well within your rights to take away some of the hunters' stuff by having that zed grab the slugger.
Good point that you can have the harm effect drop something. And you can have a monster initiate it. But I think both have a very different feel from using it as a result of an attack.
Mostly this comes from having read the description for Dungeon World combat, in which, AFAIK, a failed or partial success attack could result in a great number of things happening; the MC is basically supposed to pick an appropriate move for the foe to do as a result. But in MotW it is fixed to just doing damage.
The big difference is when you might prefer to NOT deal damage; by the rules you would still deal damage even if you then had the monster try to disarm them, or push past them to get inside somewhere, or whatnot. You wouldn't JUST have the monster do that.
Which way to you actually play? Do you treat failed/partial Kick Some Ass results as open opportunities to do something unpleasant, or do you always deal damage?
On a related topic, from what I can understand, if a PC, say, shoots at a monster that does not itself have a ranged attack from a short ways away, I guess I should just have it deal damage and not make a roll at all? I think that's what the rules describe, but its a bit odd either way. If I just have it do damage, it eliminates the possibility of the shot going wrong or the monster notably retaliating at all.
But if I have the PC roll, the monster will usually deal damage, and that often doesn't fit if the monster is out of its reach.
Actually, in many situations it seems odd to the monster deal damage back all the time anyway. If, for example, several people attack a foe at once, it starts to get narratively really odd when its hitting back at all of them at the same time (assuming its not something with super speed or lots of arms). Or, if the PC is shooting at it and it has a limited ranged attack (like, maybe it throws spines) but at the moment its is kind of distracted by the hero shoving a sword through its face, it seems strange to have it ALWAYS do damage back.
Thoughts, how is this handled?
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=== THIS POST IS DISCUSSING USEFUL STUFF THAT I DON'T GET ===
(Lots of stuff about inflicting harm)
Thoughts, how is this handled?
I think you are skipping over the inflict harm move for the Keeper being "Inflict harm, as established."
If you go through your problematic results, thinking about what danger has been established in the game fiction makes the answers come out easily.
For the case where the monster try to disarm them, or push past them to get inside somewhere
then kick some ass is not triggered, as that's specifically when the monster is trying to fight back. To resolve this you could allow the hunter to inflict harm as established (i.e. via their weapon), and then use Keeper moves to disarm or have the monster get by.
For the suckering case, a PC, say, shoots at a monster that does not itself have a ranged attack from a short ways away, I guess I should just have it deal damage and not make a roll at all
. That's right - if you just shoot a target that can't shoot back, it's not kick some ass either. It might also be act under pressure if the target is trying to dodge, or any other move that applies.
For ganging up: several people attack a foe at once, it starts to get narratively really odd when its hitting back at all of them at the same time (assuming its not something with super speed or lots of arms)
. If the monster has established it has limited attacks, then some hunters cannot be harmed - good for them, bad for the monster. (Note that I'd usually have a dog-pile like this be a single kick some ass roll, with the other hunters helping out or even protecting someone, which simplifies things a bit).
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=== THIS IS JUST TALKING THEORY AND STUFF AND ISN'T VERY PRACTICAL ===
They do, but, again, I think the other players in this thread have all done an excellent job demonstrating how those exact questions can be interpreted and applied in wildly different ways, depending on the in-game situation. Then again, if you want to go ahead and just let your players ask whatever they want, do that and see how it works! I'd be willing to bet that they still ask variations on those same questions. Just make sure you have them back up those questions with the appropriate fictional posturing--testing blood samples, collecting bone fragments, and so on.
I think we've pretty well established that nobody here actually strictly follows the rules. :)
(The very first person I got advice from stressed very strongly that I really should follow the rules very close and strictly and not be tempted to apply things loosely - that's clearly not the popular advice!)
But once again your comment kind of confuses me - you say that I "just let your players ask whatever they want and see how it works" - but aren't you advocating that that's exactly how its supposed to work?
A 'crossroads' is a place to meet someone, so you are pre-defining that the PCs will meet someone there.
Not exactly. You're making a place where the PCs could meet someone, and maybe you're populating that place with some bystanders they're likely to meet if they go there. But, you're not saying that they must go there to find or kill the monster. Playing to find out what happens means--in part, for MotW--having stuff ready, using it when it makes fictional sense, and ignoring it otherwise.
But, its not like the PCs couldn't meet someone somewhere else, right? A motivation defines what is most likely to happen there, which to me is exactly what the prep for a normal RPG is doing - except that in a normal RPG, you'd spend time on figuring out the useful details, which increases the odds that things will be consistent, won't be skipped over or bogged down, etc.
Whether or not the PCs "MUST" go there is highly situation. There won't be many places that PCs MUST go..but if, for example, there's a swarm of alien bugs and they need to destroy the hive, it is very, very, very likely that they will go to the location of the hive to resolve the situation. That's pretty much a "must", and its going to be in MotW as well as in anything else, right?
In Monster of the Week, a good investigate a mystery might let a hunter discover the transmissions/Amelion Institute without ever going to the city or talking to the soldier. And that would be completely fine! MotW has a move that--if the hunter gives appropriate fictional justification--forces the Keeper to make with some juicy info. If you only dole out info when you planned to, you're fighting the game and your hunters will be salty.
Wait, that's not fighting me - I WANT the PC to go there! That's the point! The NPC has noticed this transmission because this is info that I really want the PC to have, so I'm thinking in advance about how the PC will get that information. If the PC gets to it another way, that's great.
I mean, I've had it happen a few times where after a session PCs will ask "Wow, how did you know we were going to come up with that to deal with that situation?" and invariably I had no idea they were going to that; I'd planned like three different ways to handle the situation, and the PCs came up with a completely different one. That's cool. Good planning isn't meant to limit, its meant to keep you from being stumped in the middle of a game!
In vanilla Apocalypse World (which this example gels with better, I think) you've got an even harder time of it. Your PCs might just walk off into the desert, in the opposite direction of the town, completely ignoring your plot. You're playing to find out what happens, so you're obliged to follow them. You're not obliged to punish them for ignoring those plot hooks, and you absolutely shouldn't try to guide them back to that lone city.
Well, players can do ridiculous, suicidal or absurd things in any game system, but I think its reasonable to assume that you'll be playing with people interested in doing reasonable things with their characters, and invested in pursuing the genre. But yeah, in D&D you could set up a city and dungeons and whatnot and have the player decide to go be merchants in a far off land. In Call of Cthulhu your characters could decide to immediately flee the country at the first hint of something supernatural. You Star Wars pilot could decide to vent all the air on the spaceship just because. In any of those cases, its a good time to stop and check your expectations. :)
The design of MotW doesn't seem to be tremendously strong-handed in terms of fighting GM Force (a term for when the GM takes too much authority over the game's direction into her hands), but it will fight you in subtle ways. If you're trying to hide information, the "reading" moves can give it to the players. If you're trying to kill off someone, they can Protect them; if you're trying to protect someone, they can Kick Ass (and likely kill them). Most of the moves give guarantees of certain outcomes; in a group which understands the rules and uses them functionally, it's very hard for a GM to contrive a way to take away those guarantees without having the players call shenanigans. The specific Hunter moves put that even more into perspective. The Use Magic guarantees a variety of results, as well.
There's nothing unique about players being able to interfere with things though. Getting information is based around being able to logically do so; most RPGs would have you able to use skills to get info logically available. Setting up to kill a protected person is probably easier in MotW than in, say, D&D 4e where a determined party can set up some really effective - and very mechanically defined defenses. An NPC you want to keep alive in MotW can probably take way more damage than PCs can dish out before they can escape and there's not going to be any huge damage swings, while in Savage Worlds damage rolls can explode out to any value, so a stray thrown knife could get insanely lucky and kill an elder god!
Now, I'd classify most of those as bad planning.
Good planning is not "the PCs can ONLY get info this way". Good planning is "Hmm, the PCs are going to need info to move forward. How are they likely to get it? Are there people they are likely to need so I should give thought to where they will find them? Of these possibilities, which one will lead to the best game?"
For example, a while ago I was running a improved investigation bit and made a lot of bad calls, to where we redid it. For example:
* I decided that a certain NPC had used an alias. This was a huge red herring; it didn't lead anywhere fun, it just made things much harder and duller for the PCs. It might have been a smart thing to do, but it was much better for the NPC to not do that. And it could be easily be justified; the NPC was arrogant as hell.
* I decided that a 'control' panel was controlled by mystic energy. While this was technically fine, its not something the PLAYERS can intuitive mess around with. Within the fiction, it was a mix of tech and magic. Giving it actual controls gave the PCs something easily recognizable to spot and mess with.
Another game hit a big stall because neither I nor the player could come up with what evidence that would be useful to the players a criminal might have left behind - because we were improving and hadn't planned that part in advance.
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Which way to you actually play? Do you treat failed/partial Kick Some Ass results as open opportunities to do something unpleasant, or do you always deal damage?
On a partial, the rules are clear that the hunter and whatever they're attacking trade harm. As part of that harm, I can make a harm move choice that disarms the hunter, and fictionally, I can narrate that disarmament as "the hunter drops their weapon because of the pain" or "the monster grabs the hunter's weapon." I don't see that latter choice as being any different that disarming a hunter as the result of an attack.
On a miss, I absolutely use that as an opportunity to do something unpleasant. Sometimes that "unpleasant" is direct harm, sometimes it's indirect--say, I have the monster throw the hunter into a big rusty pile of bear traps. I'm separating the hunter from his buddies (and from fighting me), and I'm absolutely applying harm as established.
I think we've pretty well established that nobody here actually strictly follows the rules. :)
I disagree! We've established that the rules are written and applied broadly, by design. When we tell you that the investigate a mystery questions can apply to many different kinds of clue, that's not a deviation from the rules--those questions are meant to work that way.
But once again your comment kind of confuses me - you say that I "just let your players ask whatever they want and see how it works" - but aren't you advocating that that's exactly how its supposed to work?
I made that suggestion for two reasons. 1) Because it's your game, and if one component isn't working for you you can ignore it. In this case, I think if you ignored the question list it wouldn't "break" the game, as long as you demand fictional details for whatever question the hunters try to answer. HOWEVER... 2) I also think that if you ignore the move's list your hunters will still ask variations on the kinds of questions supplied there. They may not literally say "What kind of monster is it?", but that will be the point behind some of their questions anyway.
Often, when I run MotW, my hunters will roll investigate and ask something as their character--"Say, where do these big heating vents lead to?" They've not asked a question straight from the list, but we both know that the choice from investigate a mystery would be something like "Where did it go?" or "What is being concealed here." As keeper, I answer as though they'd made an explicit choice from the list.
But, its not like the PCs couldn't meet someone somewhere else, right? A motivation defines what is most likely to happen there, which to me is exactly what the prep for a normal RPG is doing - except that in a normal RPG, you'd spend time on figuring out the useful details, which increases the odds that things will be consistent, won't be skipped over or bogged down, etc.
I agree! Of course the PCs could meet someone somewhere else! But, the motivation serves as a reminder for you that--in this case--this specific location has fictional underpinnings that make it particularly good at providing opportunities for meet-ups.
I'm not sure what useful details you'd supply in a "normal RPG" that you wouldn't in MotW--can you elaborate?
Whether or not the PCs "MUST" go there is highly situation. There won't be many places that PCs MUST go..but if, for example, there's a swarm of alien bugs and they need to destroy the hive, it is very, very, very likely that they will go to the location of the hive to resolve the situation. That's pretty much a "must", and its going to be in MotW as well as in anything else, right?
They might go to the hive. They might not. I'm playing to find out what happens, and I'm not making any assumptions about what the hunters need to do. I've written the hive up in case they go there (and, yeah, my writing it up certainly means I think they're likely to visit), but I'm not doing any extra legwork outside my agenda/moves/principles to get them there.
Maybe the Professional calls in an orbital strike, nuking the hive from the comfort of his home. Maybe they ignore the hive and the entire world is overrun by giant larvae (at which point we port all the hunters over to Apocalypse World and keep going). Who knows? Certainly not the keeper.
Wait, that's not fighting me - I WANT the PC to go there! That's the point! The NPC has noticed this transmission because this is info that I really want the PC to have, so I'm thinking in advance about how the PC will get that information. If the PC gets to it another way, that's great.
I agree! My point was that if you followed your "plot" strictly and forced the hunters to go to the city before discovering the signal, the rules would fight you, because the rules demand answers even when you hadn't planned on giving them. Since you wouldn't ever run a session like that, you're in agreement with PbtA/MotW principles here.
Good planning isn't meant to limit, its meant to keep you from being stumped in the middle of a game!
Yep. That's the sort of planning MotW asks for.
Well, players can do ridiculous, suicidal or absurd things in any game system, but I think its reasonable to assume that you'll be playing with people interested in doing reasonable things with their characters, and invested in pursuing the genre. But yeah, in D&D you could set up a city and dungeons and whatnot and have the player decide to go be merchants in a far off land. In Call of Cthulhu your characters could decide to immediately flee the country at the first hint of something supernatural. You Star Wars pilot could decide to vent all the air on the spaceship just because. In any of those cases, its a good time to stop and check your expectations. :)
I agree, to a point. MotW has a specific "buy-in" the players need to agree on--you will be monster hunters, the main action of most sessions will be investigating and killing monsters, and monsters are particularly tough creatures with special weaknesses you need to exploit. Just FYI, other PbtA games aren't as stringent with their buy-in. In Apocalypse World, if your players want to up and leave the big, multi-faction war that's been brewing for ten sessions, and drive off to the next state over, they're entitled to do so.
There's nothing unique about players being able to interfere with things though. Getting information is based around being able to logically do so; most RPGs would have you able to use skills to get info logically available. Setting up to kill a protected person is probably easier in MotW than in, say, D&D 4e where a determined party can set up some really effective - and very mechanically defined defenses. An NPC you want to keep alive in MotW can probably take way more damage than PCs can dish out before they can escape and there's not going to be any huge damage swings, while in Savage Worlds damage rolls can explode out to any value, so a stray thrown knife could get insanely lucky and kill an elder god!
Yes, many other games let players find information if it's logical to do so, and available. MotW lets players find information when the keeper has only a dim sense of its availability. If a hunter hits on investigate and supplies the right fictional explanation, I'm obliged to give them an answer, even if I didn't consider that the vampire left some bloody rags at the scene of its last attack.
I might have no sense of the availability of that clue before the hunter starts investigating, but their fictional positioning and the rules compel me to make those rags (or something like them) appear. My prep informs the sorts of things the hunters can investigate and roll for but, likewise, the results of their moves inform what information is and isn't available. The rules forbid me from saying "you find nothing" when a hunter hits on investigate.
Your second point about "protecting" NPCs and "keeping them alive" is a little unclear--could you explain a bit more about the comparison you're drawing between MotW and "most RPGs"? To me it seems you're saying it's easier, in MotW, to apply the rules for bystander, minion, and monster creation to create an NPC that the hunters cannot eventually kill (or otherwise remove from the action).
That may well be true! However it's not an issue, because your principles say that "nothing is safe." Even if you can protect an NPC using the rules, you shouldn't, because your agenda is to "play to find out what happens" and to make sure that nothing is safe.
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If a hunter hits on investigate and supplies the right fictional explanation, I'm obliged to give them an answer, even if I didn't consider that the vampire left some bloody rags at the scene of its last attack.
This is super-important, and something that is easy to miss. As the Keeper, your job is not to consider the scene of the investigation before the PCs get there and predetermine the available clues; rather, your job is to honestly respond to the questions that their successes allow them to ask. So if the PC asks, "What sort of monster is it?", your job is to come up with some kind of "evidence" that reveals this information. You might have originally envisioned an attack that left no witnesses, but if the players ask something that only a witness would likely have known, congratulations, you've just invented a witness! Now tell the players who they are, how they saw what they saw, and how it is that the monster left them still alive:
"While you're investigating the murder scene, a neighbor gets stopped by the uniformed officers out front. At first you write him off as a rubber-necker trying to get a look at the carnage, but he keeps asking if 'the pretty lady in 3B' is OK. At first he doesn't want to answer any questions about who he is or what his connection to the victim is, but when you ask for his ID, you realize that he lives across the street and that his balcony overlooks hers. After you threaten to haul him off to jail for voyeurism, he agrees to cooperate. But whatever he saw has him pretty shaken up. His story is a little disjointed, but he eventually reveals that..."
It's the same with read a bad situation - you come up with the answers to their questions in the moment, adding to the fictional landscape as necessary to answer their questions and propel the story. Once you get the hang of it, this is an incredibly useful and powerful GMing tool because it lets you alter the direction of the story based on what the players are doing (as opposed to plotting/planning everything out beforehand). So if they ask, "what's my best way in?", invent a way in. If you already did a little prep and you have something in mind, great. But if not, make something up right now. "Well, there's an old storm-drain that runs under the property. Gods only know what's down there or where it comes out, but that certainly would get you inside the perimeter." This is you presenting an opportunity, with or without a cost, which is one of your basic Keeper moves.
Does this make sense?
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Also, this is quite a bit of what people are talking about when they say that "the rules will fight you if you try to force things." You might have an encounter already planned for the aforementioned storm drain, but what do you do if the players don't ask "what's my best way in?" at all? Maybe they ask some other question. And sure, you could give them the information anyway and try to nudge them into the storm drain - but they'll feel smarter and more in control of the story if instead they ask "which enemy is most vulnerable to me?" (I don't know if MotW has this, but it's an option in AW) and try to have the most charismatic and persuasive PC seduce the night watchman instead.
Because you can't know what's going through the players' heads, PbtA games give you mechanics to drive the story based on what the players show an interest in (as reflected through their moves, questions, etc) rather than what the GM thinks might be cool. The GM still populates the world with believable monsters and NPCs, but the players have much more control over how they engage with the fiction in a PbtA game than they might in a more traditional RPG. If you've run a lot of very "sandboxy" games/settings in the past, this may not feel like as much of a change. But if you've never played a game that gives the players as much low-level agency over the direction of the story, it's a huge shift.
And this is what people mean when they say, "play to find out" - I have no idea how the players are going to try to get into the bad-guys' compound. I may not even have given much (or any) prior thought to how it's laid out or what it contains. I will simply respond to their questions by presenting them with fun details, interesting opportunities, and harrowing risks. Whichever way they choose to go, sweet. I'll roll with it and we'll figure out what happens as we go.
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Nicely put, Munin.
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Because you can't know what's going through the players' heads, PbtA games give you mechanics to drive the story based on what the players show an interest in (as reflected through their moves, questions, etc) rather than what the GM thinks might be cool. The GM still populates the world with believable monsters and NPCs, but the players have much more control over how they engage with the fiction in a PbtA game than they might in a more traditional RPG. If you've run a lot of very "sandboxy" games/settings in the past, this may not feel like as much of a change. But if you've never played a game that gives the players as much low-level agency over the direction of the story, it's a huge shift.
This perfectly encapsulates why I've been loving PbtA games so much. By not prepping very much, you keep the story tightly bound to the interests of the players, and also can have very little idea what is going on as GM. In D&D (as the DMs I've played under do it, at least), when somebody does something, they consult their prep and, half the time answer with "Well, you don't accomplish anything". They knew everything that was going on, and whatever the player did failed to be related. In anything PbtA, a player investigating X should cause X to be important in some way. Which creates a vastly more pacy experience in which every player is guaranteed to feel as involved regardless of the quality of their ideas or rolls. It also allows you to truly "play to find out what happens" and have a story spill forth from the dregs you actually planned, which is incredibly exciting.
The main purpose of the rules is allowing you to keep things moving in a fun direction, where you'd have no clue how to do so otherwise. I think this might tie into some of the problems I'm seeing here? Because that is the main purpose of the GM rules in every PbtA game -- to provide direction without prep -- not to restrain or limit.
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Hey all. Been pondering how to respond to this for a while. I keep just running into walls with figuring out what to say. Still haven't a clue how to play the game - in some ways I feel even more confused than when I started. I think this particular thread has gotten way too off track; I keep thinking I should try some more specific questions, but I don't know if it will help. Its clear I don't even have a good grasp for the overall format for what a fight would like and play like, or how an "investigative" scene would go.
For ganging up: several people attack a foe at once, it starts to get narratively really odd when its hitting back at all of them at the same time (assuming its not something with super speed or lots of arms)
. If the monster has established it has limited attacks, then some hunters cannot be harmed - good for them, bad for the monster. (Note that I'd usually have a dog-pile like this be a single kick some ass roll, with the other hunters helping out or even protecting someone, which simplifies things a bit).
This wouldn't have remotely fit with how I'm gotten the idea MotW worked. I was assuming that generally, when someone says they are doing something that triggers a move, you would fairly immediately roll and resolve the move. The situation Mike is describing would require everyone to declare what they are doing, and then resolve it all; while some RPGs use that type of "initiative" mechanic, I really don't see it here.
Further, with a party of 4, that would take 4 rolls to only inflict 1 attack worth of damage; it would take a lot longer to accomplish things. And a "help out" move would still expose the person to trouble, so you'd still have to figure out what goes wrong on a bad roll.
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Your second point about "protecting" NPCs and "keeping them alive" is a little unclear--could you explain a bit more about the comparison you're drawing between MotW and "most RPGs"? To me it seems you're saying it's easier, in MotW, to apply the rules for bystander, minion, and monster creation to create an NPC that the hunters cannot eventually kill (or otherwise remove from the action).
OK, example here by way of explanation. A while ago in a very MotW themed Savage Worlds game, a PC was on the phone when demons attacked the mall she was at. A demon down the hall from her lunged for an innocent victim. She was too far away too reach it and had no ranged weapon, so in desperation, she threw her phone at it.
Now, in MotW, you might decide that would distract the demon. It might do damage, but its an improvised attack, so probably just 1 point - if it gets past armor.
But we were playing Savage Worlds, where you roll for damage and damage can "explode", where you keep rolling the die again and again. So we all stared in amazement as the mere d6 damage exploded several times, and the demon fell dead with a phone sticking out of its forehead.
That couldn't happen in Monster of the Week. One shot like that could never kill a monster.
(Now, granted, there are many RPGs that are less unexpectedly lethal than Savage Worlds; that couldn't happen in most versions of DD& either!)
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If a hunter hits on investigate and supplies the right fictional explanation, I'm obliged to give them an answer, even if I didn't consider that the vampire left some bloody rags at the scene of its last attack.
This is super-important, and something that is easy to miss. As the Keeper, your job is not to consider the scene of the investigation before the PCs get there and predetermine the available clues; rather, your job is to honestly respond to the questions that their successes allow them to ask. So if the PC asks, "What sort of monster is it?", your job is to come up with some kind of "evidence" that reveals this information. You might have originally envisioned an attack that left no witnesses, but if the players ask something that only a witness would likely have known, congratulations, you've just invented a witness! Now tell the players who they are, how they saw what they saw, and how it is that the monster left them still alive:[/quote]
OK...yeah, this is a very different approach. It really isn't explained in the rulebook at all; there's not much for advice for how to approach this. In fact, the way the intro scenario is presented, bothering to come up with dozens of witnesses, would seem to preclude "inventing" a witness; why bother with coming up with all of those people in advance if you are just going to wing-it and new ones anyway?
So, do you find that most games only have a single investigative "scene"? Since with a decent number of players, they can easily get enough questions to ask everything they would want to know, they'll know everything useful after one "scene" anyway, no matter how unimportant it seems like the scene should be.
Also...if every question can be answered regardless of how logical it seems or what the approach is...doesn't that kind of take all the fun out of actually "solving" a mystery?
It's the same with read a bad situation - you come up with the answers to their questions in the moment, adding to the fictional landscape as necessary to answer their questions and propel the story. Once you get the hang of it, this is an incredibly useful and powerful GMing tool because it lets you alter the direction of the story based on what the players are doing (as opposed to plotting/planning everything out beforehand). So if they ask, "what's my best way in?", invent a way in. If you already did a little prep and you have something in mind, great. But if not, make something up right now. "Well, there's an old storm-drain that runs under the property. Gods only know what's down there or where it comes out, but that certainly would get you inside the perimeter." This is you presenting an opportunity, with or without a cost, which is one of your basic Keeper moves.
I don't see how that's a tool at all. You can always do this; the only question is whether you have an idea or not.
If nothing is pre-planned, why even have the player ask the question? Instead of asking a question that the GM doesn't know the answer to either, why not have the PC just declare what the "best way" is?
Granted, I still haven't a clue when "Read a bad situation" would ever get used in the first place!
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Because you can't know what's going through the players' heads, PbtA games give you mechanics to drive the story based on what the players show an interest in (as reflected through their moves, questions, etc) rather than what the GM thinks might be cool.
Well, sure you can know what's going through the player's heads. You can talk about it, decide what interests people and what doesn't. Though generally that breaks up the pace when it happens during the game.
I don't see how the moves/questions reflect that; those reflect what the player has the PC try to do, not what their interest level is. If they are bored with a situation, they are still going to be trying to find a way to resolve it.
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You might have an encounter already planned for the aforementioned storm drain, but what do you do if the players don't ask "what's my best way in?" at all?
If you have something interesting planned for the storm drain, and they don't go in the storm drain, you'll have to improvise what happens.
If you don't have anything planned for the storm drain, you'll have to improvise what happens whether they go in the storm drain or not.
The best case with not planning is the same as the worst case with planning!
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In D&D (as the DMs I've played under do it, at least), when somebody does something, they consult their prep and, half the time answer with "Well, you don't accomplish anything".
I've had bad GMs do that, but in a normal game there's no good reason for that to happen, prep or not. I feel like what we've played in the past as an "RPG" seems to be totally different.
Though...I guess in the first game of MotW we played, a player ran off to gather up stuff to fight vampires, when there wasn't actually a vampire. Would you count that as "you don't accomplish anything?"
Which creates a vastly more pacy experience in which every player is guaranteed to feel as involved regardless of the quality of their ideas or rolls.
Shouldn't clever ideas yield better results that bad ideas? And don't bad rolls in MotW get you in trouble, while good rolls help you out?
It also allows you to truly "play to find out what happens" and have a story spill forth from the dregs you actually planned, which is incredibly exciting.
But nothing ever happens unless you decide it does, and there's very few mechanics covering most of that. That's why I get the feel that MotW is much LESS about "finding out what happens" than most RPGs. None of the mechanics actually cause unexpected things to happen - its just all based on player input and GM fiat.
Again, an example; a while ago in a miniatures based RPG a random "push" effect knocked a character through a portal to the elemental plane. That wasn't planned; it wasn't something I (as the GM) particularly wanted to happen. But hey, miniature got moved there, makes sense. It took the game in a very unexpected direction.
Now, a character could get knocked through a portal in MotW, but only if I specifically make the decision that it happens. I'll never be surprised by something like that.
The main purpose of the rules is allowing you to keep things moving in a fun direction, where you'd have no clue how to do so otherwise.
That would be great, but they don't do anything of the sort. If I have no clue how to keep moving, there's absolutely no support at all for it!
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This is super-important, and something that is easy to miss. As the Keeper, your job is not to consider the scene of the investigation before the PCs get there and predetermine the available clues; rather, your job is to honestly respond to the questions that their successes allow them to ask.
OK...yeah, this is a very different approach. It really isn't explained in the rulebook at all; there's not much for advice for how to approach this. In fact, the way the intro scenario is presented, bothering to come up with dozens of witnesses, would seem to preclude "inventing" a witness; why bother with coming up with all of those people in advance if you are just going to wing-it and new ones anyway?
I can't speak to the intro scenario, but this is how these kinds of moves in PbtA games generally work; they are essentially a cueing mechanism.
So, do you find that most games only have a single investigative "scene"? Since with a decent number of players, they can easily get enough questions to ask everything they would want to know, they'll know everything useful after one "scene" anyway, no matter how unimportant it seems like the scene should be.
Also...if every question can be answered regardless of how logical it seems or what the approach is...doesn't that kind of take all the fun out of actually "solving" a mystery?
OK, two things here: first, you can absolutely have more than one investigative "scene," especially once minions etc. are factored in. Figuring out just WTF is going on is likely to be a multi-step process.
Second, don't just have all of the players roll to investigate willy-nilly. Instead, have one or two take the lead and have the others roll to help them. Remember, the PbtA mantra of "to do it, do it" reigns supreme here.
And actually, this may be part of the disconnect you're having with these rules: the moves are triggered by the fiction, not vice-versa. If what you are doing fits the trigger condition for a move, you roll. If it doesn't, you don't. So if all of your PCs are in a scene that might involve investigation, don't settle for having a PC just say, "I roll to investigate a mystery," because that's not good enough. Ask them how. What are they doing to investigate this mystery? How, specifically, are they going about it? And if they can't tell you, or if their answer is lame and unconvincing, don't ask for a roll. But if they have a good approach, use their answers to help you decide in turn how to answer the questions they ask. Incorporate their back-stories and particular strengths. How the Psychic investigates a mystery is going to look totally different from how an Expert does it, and it's going to yield different results.
Which gets me to my next point, which is that just because a player gets to ask a question doesn't mean you have to tell them absolutely everything pertaining to that question. This circles back to your point about multiple investigative scenes and PCs piecing together the answer. So when they ask, "what kind of monster is it?" you don't have to say "yeah, it's totally a vampire." But you can say, "The bodies are eviscerated - seriously, organs everywhere - but there is a surprising lack of blood. Whatever this thing is, it likes blood." This could be a vampire, sure. Or it could be something else, like a Red Cap. You have to be honest, but you don't have to (and shouldn't) take all of the mystery out of it in a single go.
I don't see how that's a tool at all. You can always do this; the only question is whether you have an idea or not.
If nothing is pre-planned, why even have the player ask the question? Instead of asking a question that the GM doesn't know the answer to either, why not have the PC just declare what the "best way" is?
It's not that nothing is pre-planned; the Keeper knows the truth about what the monster is and what it's up to, for instance - and the players don't, at least not initially. That knowledge informs the "best way" in directions of which players may be unaware.
But you know what? It's totally cool to flip it back on your player and say, "given what you know about the situation, what do you think the best way in is?" Chances are they'll come up with something cool that you hadn't considered. Rolling with it usually produces awesome and hilarious results.
Further, answering the player's question also changes the fiction. In some ways, it's like a reminder to the Keeper to fill in details about the world or the situation or a particular NPC or whatever; those details become important as soon as dice hit the table and someone asks about them. They might have been important before, but they're definitely important now.
As for cases in which read a bad situation might be useful, I'll give you one from our last AW session. Backstory: The Savvyhead (a techno-geek) and the Gunlugger (pretty self-explanatory) had both gotten pretty shot-up, and needed medical attention. They were in a place which we'd established was the "home town" of the Savvyhead, and were dealing with some sinister NPCs (specifically one called "The Bone Mechanic"). In the course of play, it came out that the Brainer (a freaky sci-psychic) had divined the Savvyhead's true purposes for returning to this place, and (because they asked) relayed this information to the NPCs. What none of the players knew was that those purposes were at odds with what the NPCs (including the "Bone Mechanic") were trying to accomplish. As The Bone Mechanic put the Savvyhead under sedation to begin the surgery necessary to heal him, the Brainer saw Simon (the NPC leader of the place) give the Bone Mechanic a pointed look and the slightest of head-shakes.
This immediately led the Brainer's player to read a sitch (the AW version of the same move). He got a partial, which let him ask one question. As the MC, I had already decided what was going on - left to his own devices, the Bone Mechanic was going to kill the Savvyhead on the operating table. And had the player asked, "what should I be on the lookout for," I'd have made this explicitly clear. But the player didn't ask that. Instead he asked, "which enemy is most vulnerable to me?" This told me two things: first, the player had a pretty good idea of what was going on, strong enough that he was willing to take the risk of direct action without solid confirmation. Secondly, it told me that he already viewed the Bone Mechanic and his orderlies as "enemies."
So instead of laying out the motive of the NPCs (they're going to try to kill your friend and make it look like he "couldn't be saved") and letting the player decide how to tackle the situation (which may not have involved violence), things were already headed in a "tactical" direction. This led me to say, "The orderly filling up the syringe from an ampule labeled 'potassium cyanide' is fully absorbed in his task right now, and his back is to you." What followed was a vicious surprise attack by the Brainer, which degenerated into a mad scramble versus the Bone Mechanic over the cyanide-filled syringe, and a whole lot of mayhem as a (now poisoned) Brainer managed to get free long enough to jam an adrenaline injector into the unconscious Gunlugger, who then jerked awake and started laying waste to people with her bare hands.
I had no idea going in that any of this was going to happen. The situation was a natural outgrowth of the Savvyhead's true purposes for returning to this place (purely a player-driven thing), the Brainer's ability to accurately divine that information (a side-effect of his particular playbook), the Brainer's willingness to share that information with the NPCs (another player decision), the NPCs' reactions to that information (which came from my prep about the NPCs ultimate goal), and the question that the player asked when reading the situation (another player decision).
That's why when you say things like...None of the mechanics actually cause unexpected things to happen - its just all based on player input and GM fiat
...I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. Because it's not just "GM fiat" if you're doing your job well - it's a consequence of the fiction. And because the players have input into that fictional landscape, the results of following that fiction can come as a surprise to everyone involved - including the GM.
Because you can't know what's going through the players' heads, PbtA games give you mechanics to drive the story based on what the players show an interest in (as reflected through their moves, questions, etc) rather than what the GM thinks might be cool.
Well, sure you can know what's going through the player's heads. You can talk about it, decide what interests people and what doesn't.
What you're talking about is what you do before the campaign ever starts, i.e. "session 0," when you're deciding the tone of the campaign and creating characters. I'm talking about the stuff that happens during the course of any given session. It's what saves you from being this guy:
(http://i.imgur.com/Mg8yxec.jpg)
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The main purpose of the rules is allowing you to keep things moving in a fun direction, where you'd have no clue how to do so otherwise.
That would be great, but they don't do anything of the sort. If I have no clue how to keep moving, there's absolutely no support at all for it!
OK, I had to cut short my writing and didn't get to elaborate on this, because this has been a big problem with MotW for me.
Let's again take an example; in our last session, a character attempted to lash out with her chain-blade and disarm the poacher who was pointing a rifle at her. She rolled in the 7-9 range, and the game came to a crashing stop because we just couldn't figure out what should happen next - ie, what would keep things moving in a fun direction. Its been several weeks now. We just haven't gone back because this got so frustrating.
So, what rules would tell us what to do here? I am not asking "what would YOU do", or "what are some possible things I could have done", but how do I FOLLOW THE RULES and figure out what happens next here? Because that's what you are saying the rules do, but I don't see any rules that even relate to that.
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So, do you find that most games only have a single investigative "scene"? Since with a decent number of players, they can easily get enough questions to ask everything they would want to know, they'll know everything useful after one "scene" anyway, no matter how unimportant it seems like the scene should be.
Also...if every question can be answered regardless of how logical it seems or what the approach is...doesn't that kind of take all the fun out of actually "solving" a mystery?
OK, two things here: first, you can absolutely have more than one investigative "scene," especially once minions etc. are factored in. Figuring out just WTF is going on is likely to be a multi-step process.
Second, don't just have all of the players roll to investigate willy-nilly. Instead, have one or two take the lead and have the others roll to help them. Remember, the PbtA mantra of "to do it, do it" reigns supreme here.
And actually, this may be part of the disconnect you're having with these rules: the moves are triggered by the fiction, not vice-versa. If what you are doing fits the trigger condition for a move, you roll. If it doesn't, you don't. So if all of your PCs are in a scene that might involve investigation, don't settle for having a PC just say, "I roll to investigate a mystery," because that's not good enough. Ask them how. What are they doing to investigate this mystery? How, specifically, are they going about it? And if they can't tell you, or if their answer is lame and unconvincing, don't ask for a roll. But if they have a good approach, use their answers to help you decide in turn how to answer the questions they ask. Incorporate their back-stories and particular strengths. How the Psychic investigates a mystery is going to look totally different from how an Expert does it, and it's going to yield different results.
Which gets me to my next point, which is that just because a player gets to ask a question doesn't mean you have to tell them absolutely everything pertaining to that question. This circles back to your point about multiple investigative scenes and PCs piecing together the answer. So when they ask, "what kind of monster is it?" you don't have to say "yeah, it's totally a vampire." But you can say, "The bodies are eviscerated - seriously, organs everywhere - but there is a surprising lack of blood. Whatever this thing is, it likes blood." This could be a vampire, sure. Or it could be something else, like a Red Cap. You have to be honest, but you don't have to (and shouldn't) take all of the mystery out of it in a single go.
I am so confused. I feel like this is a complete contradiction. Earlier you said that the PCs should be able to answer any question they want, and the Keeper should produce the evidence to do so. Now you are saying it should be limited. If we're just poofing up whatever evidence we want, then surely then can run some test to figure out exactly what monster it was, or the victim just happened to drop their diary describing exactly the monster they were hunting, or something like that.
And, again, you seem to be saying that all the PCs should declare all their actions up-front before starting resolving things. That really isn't how I'd pictured it working it all. I'd figure "Help Out" would go something like:
Beth's player: "I'm going to dig through the files and look for anything unusual about the murders".
Jasper's player: "OK, I know the organization of this place well, so I'll help with cross-referencing details and stuff".
GM: "OK, sounds like Jasper is "helping out", so roll to see if you help Beth.
Whereas two characters investigating would look like:
Beth's player: "I'm going to dig through the files and look for anything unusual about the murders".
Jasper's player doesn't interrupt.
GM: "OK, Beth, roll to Investigate a mystery" (rolls, asks some questions)
Jasper: "While she's doing that, I'm going to go down to the lab and run analysis on those scrapings I got earlier".
GM: "OK, Jasper roll to Investigate a Mystery" (rolls, asks some questions)
So do you go with declaring all actions first?
If so, most likely unless a PC intends to help another specifically they are probably all doing kind of different stuff; one PC is examining the body, one is calling some of their contacts, etc, etc. Would you just arbitrarily pick some to be "investigating" and some to be helping?
And what would keep them from just investigating some more (assuming there isn't an immediate pressing time limit; ie, the creature only comes out and night and they are investigating first thing in the morning)?
That's why when you say things like...None of the mechanics actually cause unexpected things to happen - its just all based on player input and GM fiat
...I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. Because it's not just "GM fiat" if you're doing your job well - it's a consequence of the fiction. And because the players have input into that fictional landscape, the results of following that fiction can come as a surprise to everyone involved - including the GM.
GM fiat is the GM making a decision, as opposed to a rule or mechanic doing so.
A pistol doing 2 damage is a rule.
A collapsing bridge doing 10 damage is GM fiat.
In some RPGs, whether or not a monster can get out of a trap (especially if there don't happen to be PCs around) might be decided by a check for the monster - a rule.
In MotW, that question would just be decided by "whether or not the GM thinks it should get out" - GM fiat.
Deciding what is behind a door with a wandering monster table would be using a rule.
Deciding what is behind a door by making up something to be behind the door - GM fiat.
Is there a better word?
You can totally be surprised by what the PCs do (in any game). But I don't see how you can be surprised by something that you have to make up. (And again, I think this line of discussion is pure theory - it doesn't have any actual practical value for figuring out how in the world to play this game).
What you're talking about is what you do before the campaign ever starts, i.e. "session 0," when you're deciding the tone of the campaign and creating characters. I'm talking about the stuff that happens during the course of any given session. It's what saves you from being this guy:
(http://i.imgur.com/Mg8yxec.jpg)
You know, I've seen a few friends post that on FB recently and I just can't make any sense out of it. I really have no idea what this is supposed to mean...I gather a lot of people have kind of dysfunctional groups I guess, so you sit down to play a game about fighting monsters and they decide to be merchants or something? I don't know. I don't think I've ever had that happen. OK, I do remember a time in one game, when two players completely ignored an arrow that whizzed out from a window and nearly hit them...like, just kept on going with their conversation. That was pretty baffling. All the other player's at the table besides those two were equally confused about why they were ignoring a possible imminent threat to their life, but...that was pretty anomalous and strange. :)
Is that the sort of thing this refers to?
But yeah, during play, PCs will say things like "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." or stuff. Again, there do tend to be problems with it being too immersion breaking.
SO...I think that perhaps that you assume players will take actions that really interest them, whereas what I've seen is that players take actions that are what they think their character would do in that situation. So, to you, if a player says "I'm going to look through the files", that means they want looking through the files to be important. While I can very well see a player saying that because it would be careless NOT to look through the files, and their character is a smart and organized person so of course they would do it, but not really having much interest in the details of that.
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I think this particular thread has gotten way too off track; I keep thinking I should try some more specific questions, but I don't know if it will help. Its clear I don't even have a good grasp for the overall format for what a fight would like and play like, or how an "investigative" scene would go.
I'm with you on this. Do you think it would help if we identify the main avenues you're having issues with, and then explode those out into separate threads? That way we could really dig into the specifics. Right now it seems we keep bouncing back and forth between different areas of the game you're struggling with, without ever fully addressing your questions. I could see a few possible threads:
1. Combat in MotW
2. Investigations in MotW
3. Mysteries and the Role of Prep in MotW
Any others you'd want to add, or modifications you'd want to make? For the mysteries thread, it might even be fun to write a collaborative mystery, so you can see the decision process for MotW prep yourself.
GM fiat is the GM making a decision, as opposed to a rule or mechanic doing so.
A pistol doing 2 damage is a rule.
A collapsing bridge doing 10 damage is GM fiat.
In some RPGs, whether or not a monster can get out of a trap (especially if there don't happen to be PCs around) might be decided by a check for the monster - a rule.
In MotW, that question would just be decided by "whether or not the GM thinks it should get out" - GM fiat.
Deciding what is behind a door with a wandering monster table would be using a rule.
Deciding what is behind a door by making up something to be behind the door - GM fiat.
Is there a better word?
This is a misunderstanding of how the rules in MotW/PbtA work. By your definition, "things the rules tell you" =/= "GM fiat," while "things the GM decides outside the rules" = "GM fiat." BUT, in MotW the rules (and agenda, and principles) should always inform what the GM adds to the fiction. The GM doesn't just up and decide that a monster escapes no matter how well contained. However, if the outcome of a move would allow that to happen, the GM is following the rules if they narrate the monster escaping. Using the phrase "GM fiat" suggests that GM improvisation should be arbitrary--it shouldn't. When the GM invents or improvises, it's always in the context of the rules.
Example:
GM: Illyana, the beholder you have trapped in that ritual circle is getting agitated, and flexing its magical prowess. Looks like it's trying to bust out. What do you do?
Illyana: I'm going to reinforce the circle with my holy magic, so it can't escape.
GM: Cool, that sounds like use magic, gimme the roll. (She misses. Like, it's not even close.) Illy, you push your powers farther than you've ever done before, and... it doesn't work. The beholder busts out of the ritual circle in a flash of crimson energy. Oh, and now it's looking directly at you.
Can you see how that's not GM fiat? How that hard move only happened because the outcome of the missed use magic--combined with the fictional situation--allowed it to? If Illy had hit on that roll I wouldn't have the creature escape, because the rules tell me that's not the time for a hard move. (However, on a 7-9 hit I might have asked her to sacrifice a touch of lifeforce--1-harm's worth--to keep it imprisoned.)
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SO...I think that perhaps that you assume players will take actions that really interest them, whereas what I've seen is that players take actions that are what they think their character would do in that situation. So, to you, if a player says "I'm going to look through the files", that means they want looking through the files to be important. While I can very well see a player saying that because it would be careless NOT to look through the files, and their character is a smart and organized person so of course they would do it, but not really having much interest in the details of that.
Related: in MotW, if a character starts looking through some files that could reasonably be related to the mystery at hand, that's definitely investigate a mystery. Like, it's not a choice whether or not we roll the move at that point--them's the rules. The character asks a question--"What kind of monster is it?"--and I provide a response. Maybe the documents detail some strange experiments with gene-splicing, creating human-cockroach hybrids. I might not have known that those documents had that information when the character started rifling around, but the rules say I have to make an honest stab at answering the character's question. That's not GM fiat--that's improvisation guided by rules.
Also, you contend that the rules don't make unexpected things happen.
But nothing ever happens unless you decide it does, and there's very few mechanics covering most of that. That's why I get the feel that MotW is much LESS about "finding out what happens" than most RPGs. None of the mechanics actually cause unexpected things to happen - its just all based on player input and GM fiat.
This is an example of the rules allowing unexpected things to happen! I didn't expect these files to be important, but the rules are now telling me that, in some fashion, they're important. Yes, I decide how they're important, but that decision is driven by player input (unless you're a mind-reader your players will do unexpected things which trigger the game's mechanics) and the fiction.
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Good comments by KidDublin. There are a lot of different questions at work here, and it would make sense not to muddle them all together. It's also really hard to get to the bottom of a problem. Can you, maybe, describe a specific situation where you had trouble (like you started to do above), and we can show you how we might have handled it?
I think that you're right to a certain extent, StormKnight: PbtA games are largely improvisational in nature, and depend on the creativity of the participants. They depend heavily on the players approaching them with the right attitude and using the game moves in the right spirit (e.g. following the Principles). They also depend heavily on a sense of dramatic pacing and a focus on making an exciting story or fiction - like a thrilling TV show, for example. If you consider the creative aspects of roleplaying to be "fiat", then, yes, there is a lot of that present.
Like I said earlier, "system mastery" in a PbtA has a lot to do with understanding when and how to bring in the various moves and how to interpret their outcomes. (It's not too different from learning when to call for an Ability Check versus a Saving Throw in D&D, and when the right time is to roll Morale or Reaction, except the moves sometimes have a heavier impact on play, so you can't gloss over their outcomes.)
In something like Savage Worlds, an unexpected roll and the application of a specific rule can create a really unusual outcome. It's unexpected and fun because you've all agreed to a) what's happening in the fiction, and b) which rules are going to be applied to that situation, as well agreeing to abide by the outcome of the dice (or whatever).
In a PbtA game, the same thing happens, except that, instead of counting hexes or adding together move actions (or whatever thing) the participants have to reach agreement on what the rules they're using do. You're right that, by itself, a vague move like "Act Under Pressure" doesn't actually tell us a whole lot.
When it works really well as when you, as a group, commit to fleshing out the fictional situation you're describing enough that all the outcomes take on specific weight. What is the character doing? What are they hoping to accomplish? What pressure are they under, and what danger might they be exposing themselves to?
The basic guideline I find really useful is, "Keep asking questions, until the situation and the consequences of the roll are crystal-clear." By doing so, you will fix 90% of your problems. For example:
Let's again take an example; in our last session, a character attempted to lash out with her chain-blade and disarm the poacher who was pointing a rifle at her. She rolled in the 7-9 range, and the game came to a crashing stop because we just couldn't figure out what should happen next - ie, what would keep things moving in a fun direction. Its been several weeks now. We just haven't gone back because this got so frustrating.
What was actually happening here? Was the poacher threatening to shoot the character? Were they trying to get away? Were they trying to kill someone else?
What was the PC trying to accomplish? How were they doing it?
I'd have a discussion like that with the players, until it was clear we were all on the same page about which move to use. For example, if the poacher was about to shoot the PC, and they were trying to get past them, we might roll to Act Under Pressure. If, on the other hand, the PC was trying to keep the poacher from shooting someone, it might have been Protect Someone. There's a bit of negotiation here, as we determine what's happening and what move (if any) might best describe this situation. The point is that we define the fictional situation sufficiently to all know exactly what might or might not happen, together.
Once that's done, we all abide by the move. "Protect Someone" has really clear outcomes, so let's say we're going with Act Under Pressure instead - that's a trickier one. The poacher is about to shoot the PC, we can see their finger squeezing the trigger... the PC has a just a moment to jump forward and to knock the rifle out of their arms! We roll the move.
On a 10+, they do it: we know the poacher's been disarmed, the PC pulled it off. It's often fun to ask the player exactly what they do, and then play along with it, giving them their success and their desired outcome. On a miss, the opposite: it's up to the MC, but the obvious thing is that the PC gets shot before they can act, and usually the obvious thing is the best thing. On a 7-9, the easiest thing to go with for Act Under Pressure is that both happen (the PC succeeds but pays a price): they jump forward and smash the rifle out of the poacher's hands... but the poacher gets off a shot and the PC is hit, too.
You'll note that if we hadn't established what's happening - the poacher trying to shoot the PC, in this case - we would have been floundering a bit. Or, maybe, not floundering, but it would have felt like the MC was just arbitrarily picking something.
That's why nailing down a lot of descriptive detail in play makes the whole thing work - once we've done that, there's *no question* that, yeah, the poacher would totally shoot the PC here (or whatever other thing), and nothing feels arbitrary.
Your examples of how to use Investigate and Help rolls sound perfect to me. You can choose either option (or let the players choose), as seems most appropriate. (Again, this is much like deciding whether avoiding a slow-moving trap is an Ability Check or a Saving Throw, or whether those scared brigands should be rolling a Reaction Roll or a Morale Check in D&D.)
In short, this game doesn't work like a board game - it doesn't tell you exactly which rule to use when (in the way that, say, Monopoly does) nor dictate specific outcomes. Instead, it gives us constraints on our roleplaying, and we have to all be on the same page about these to play successfully. Think of the moves as formalized rulings in an old-school D&D game that's been going on for years, perhaps, if that helps.
Finally, are there any good recordings of MotW play online? YouTube videos, podcasts? The can be boring to listen to, it's true... but, at the same time, an hour or two checking out how people play will teach you a lot more than any amount of discussion, because it's an illustration of it in progress. (And at this point you've probably spent at least that much time just composing posts for this thread.) Any recommendations, other readers?
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Dealing with moves which allow the player to "ask questions" (like Investigate):
This is not "canonical" (and I've never read the MotW text), but my interpretation.
* The player gets to ask the questions they are given by the move.
* I, as the MC, strive to answer them as fully as I can. (And I'm excited for the players to learn more about the mystery!)
* However, I limit myself, limiting the information I give them by what they could believably learn in this fictional situation.
Sometimes that means the answers are vaguer than they would like. Sometimes, they get what they wanted and more.
But that makes the approach they take matter.
Let's say they're interrogating Farmer Jim about the murder that took place three years ago. They want to know, "What kind of monster is it?"
Let's say I know it was an green-skinned alien warrior from Zimmerthrax, the advance part of an invasion force about to hit the Earth. I'm ready to tell them all that, except...
Does Farmer Joe know about Zimmerthrax? No, that's definitely not public knowledge. Does he know about the impending invasion? Probably not.
And the event was really long ago, so his memories won't be too clear, so I won't give good detail.
He might just say he saw someone - looked kinda like a person - with green skin, and that they were moving real fast (or whatever it is that I know about these aliens).
If they asked a knowledgeable witness who was watching the event through a night-vision scope, on the other hand, they might learn everything and more!
Either way, though, they're learning something useful and can move ahead with better information.
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I am so confused. I feel like this is a complete contradiction. Earlier you said that the PCs should be able to answer any question they want, and the Keeper should produce the evidence to do so.
No. They should be able to ask any question they want (specifically from among the choices allowed by the move, a limitation that is very important), and the Keeper should answer it honestly. But "honestly" doesn't have to mean "completely." Use the fiction to give them clues. Where the inventing-things-in-the-fiction part comes in is in how you answer those questions.
Let me give you a more concrete example that might better illustrate what I'm talking about. Let's say the monster in question is a murderous ghost. It is generally incorporeal and/or invisible, but it can manifest in order to make its homicidal fury known. The PCs are investigating an old house where said murderous ghost has despatched a member of a work crew doing remodeling - seems the ghost didn't like having that wall knocked out to make the floorplan more "modern, open, and airy." The PCs check out the scene of the crime, looking around for any clues as to what happened here. They talk about how they're carefully casing the joint, looking for any physical evidence. The body is already gone, but they have crime-scene photos and the police report, which they are cross-referencing now that they are actually on-site.
The Keeper decides that this description of the PCs' actions is sufficient to trigger investigate a mystery and calls for a roll. Since everything they've described so far sounds like standard police work, the Keeper calls for the Expert to make the roll. The player of the Psychic decides that she's using her psychometry skills to try to spot anything the police might have overlooked or that the Expert might otherwise miss. The Keeper decides that this constitutes help and has the Psychic's player roll that. She succeeds. With the Psychic's help, the Expert gets a 10, which gives him 2 questions. First, he asks, "what sort of creature is it?"
Knowing that it's a murderous ghost, the Keeper needs to come up with some way to communicate that. Being incorporeal, the ghost can pass through walls, so the Keeper describes how the workman was in the house by himself, but in the police report all of the doors were locked; the rest of the work-crew had to break in the following morning prior to discovering the body. Other than the front door they broke, there are no other signs of forced entry. So whatever this thing was, it's the kind of creature that doesn't care about locks or walls. NOTE: the Keeper doesn't simply say, "it was a murderous ghost," because while that is true, it is also not interesting. By saying what he did ("the kind of creature that doesn't care about walls or locks"), the Keeper is answering the player's question honestly and providing them with information, but not necessarily taking all the mystery out of it. At least not yet.
Deciding to throw the Keeper a curve ball, the PC's now ask their second question: "what is being concealed here?" The Keeper knows the ghost is angry about the changes to its environment, and decides to communicate a hint of this to the players. So maybe the Keeper decides to get the helping character involved and says something like: "As Carla the Psychic is running her hand along the wall the workman was demolishing, she gets an overwhelming impression of joyous, childlike laughter. When Gunner the Expert examines the wall, he sees that it's many layers of paint over a couple layers of wallpaper over the original lath-and-plaster. On one particular fragment of the wall lying in a pile of debris, those layers are hanging loose. There, under all those years of coverings and drawn on the original plaster are fragments of little doodles. Ripping off paint-covered paper from a part of the wall still standing reveals more, including a little heart drawn around the words 'Cassie loves Daddy.'"
Man. No wonder the ghost was pissed. But at this point, the PCs have some clues as to what the creature might be and some insight into the motive behind the murder of the workman, but they don't know for sure that it's a ghost. Could be something else.
Or we could go a different way. Say instead the players decide that they want to cut to the chase and try to find this monster as quickly as possible. Right, so it can get in (and presumably out again) with ease. That makes tracking it hard, maybe. So maybe instead for their second question they ask, "where did it go?" The Keeper knows that the murderous ghost is tied to the house, and it hasn't gone anywhere. It's right here. Right now. Maybe paying attention to them, maybe just chilling on the ethereal plane endlessly reliving its last days in a fugue state. But the Keeper looks at the situation, again sees that the Psychic is helping out, and just goes for it, narrating: "As you move around the house, you encounter cold spots. Or rather, spots that are sometimes cold and sometimes not. Weird. But then, while touching the old mantle over the fireplace and using her psychometric abilities, Carla hears clearly as a bell a low, gravelly voice saying, 'Get. Out.'"
The PCs can look around the room and see that there's no one else here! Oh, shit! The monster is definitely paying attention to them now! And in answering the second question honestly, the Keeper has actually reinforced the answer to the first. Further, this situation has just snowballed in a way that it might not have had they asked a different question (e.g. "what is being concealed here?"). So now they might know (or strongly suspect) that it's a ghost, but by not asking the other questions, they have no insight into its motives. They might also have a fight on their hands, one for which they are probably ill-prepared.
Now you are saying it should be limited. If we're just poofing up whatever evidence we want, then surely then can run some test to figure out exactly what monster it was, or the victim just happened to drop their diary describing exactly the monster they were hunting, or something like that.
Not at all, and I hope the above example clarifies that. You are giving the players clues, not revealing the entire mystery. Which questions they ask help you decide which clues to give them and how. You can be as vague or specific as you like given the fictional situation, but you always have to be honest. If the creature is a ghost, don't answer "what sort of creature is it?" by describing puncture wounds in the neck and a serious lack of blood. Talk about ectoplasm, or cold spots, or weird electromagnetic effects, or the presence of limestone. If you want to be vague, talk about eyewitness accounts of someone seeing a shadowy figure standing at the foot of their bed. Ghost? Demon? Or maybe some creature that manifests not in the real world but in dreams? Leave as much uncertainty as you like, but don't lie.
And, again, you seem to be saying that all the PCs should declare all their actions up-front before starting resolving things. That really isn't how I'd pictured it working it all. I'd figure "Help Out" would go something like:
Beth's player: "I'm going to dig through the files and look for anything unusual about the murders".
Jasper's player: "OK, I know the organization of this place well, so I'll help with cross-referencing details and stuff".
GM: "OK, sounds like Jasper is "helping out", so roll to see if you help Beth.
Whereas two characters investigating would look like:
Beth's player: "I'm going to dig through the files and look for anything unusual about the murders".
Jasper's player doesn't interrupt.
GM: "OK, Beth, roll to Investigate a mystery" (rolls, asks some questions)
Jasper: "While she's doing that, I'm going to go down to the lab and run analysis on those scrapings I got earlier".
GM: "OK, Jasper roll to Investigate a Mystery" (rolls, asks some questions)
So do you go with declaring all actions first?
Typically I would, yes. If one of the PCs is doing something that might be involved or difficult or time-consuming, it's totally fair game to say, "Hang on a sec. Before you roll, what are the rest of you doing while Gunner starts walking the scene and comparing it to the forensic photos?" Get their input and decide what sounds like helping and what sounds like an entirely different "investigation."
And what would keep them from just investigating some more (assuming there isn't an immediate pressing time limit; ie, the creature only comes out and night and they are investigating first thing in the morning)?
Because the fictional situation hasn't changed.
IMPORTANT: Here's something you need to understand about PbtA games: "I do it again" is almost always the wrong thing to say. Once you've made the move to investigate a mystery, you've investigated it. You will note that there's no move to "re-investigate a mystery," so there is literally no mechanism in the rules to "just roll again and ask more questions." You've found what you're going to find, and no amount of poring over those files or photos or transcripts or physical evidence is going to turn up fresh insight.
You should also note that there is no "duration" mechanic at all in MotW. How long does it take to investigate something? As long as it takes. Could be minutes, hours, or days. Mechanically speaking, it doesn't matter. But fictionally speaking, it does. And once it's done, it's done. You can't just do it again, because the fictional trigger that led to you making the roll in the first place no longer applies.
But if the fictional situation changes - a new body turns up, the players meet someone who gives them new information, new evidence is found, etc - well, that's a new mystery, and it can be investigated. And this gets to your earlier question about multiple investigative scenes within a story.
Is this making more sense now?
That's why when you say things like...None of the mechanics actually cause unexpected things to happen - its just all based on player input and GM fiat
...I quite literally have no idea what you're talking about. Because it's not just "GM fiat" if you're doing your job well - it's a consequence of the fiction. And because the players have input into that fictional landscape, the results of following that fiction can come as a surprise to everyone involved - including the GM.
GM fiat is the GM making a decision, as opposed to a rule or mechanic doing so.
A pistol doing 2 damage is a rule.
A collapsing bridge doing 10 damage is GM fiat.
Don't get confused between rules and mechanics.
Sure, the book says your garden-variety semi-auto pistol does 2 damage. But under what circumstances do you apply it? If your character is struggling over the pistol with some NPC and misses the roll? If your character is struggling over the pistol with some NPC and gets a partial success? If the NPC has made it clear that he'll shoot unless the PC backs up and gets the fuck off his front doorstep and the PC insists on continuing to try to sweet-talk his or her way inside?
By the rules as written, these are all valid applications of the rules for applying the damage mechanics. The first is a player miss for a move (with struggling for the gun being a pretty standard example of doing something under pressure), which presents the "golden opportunity" for a "hard move" (i.e. a Keeper move where the fictional situation and its consequences are narrated at the same time). Not only did you not get the gun, you got shot. Suck. The second is a partial success on doing something under pressure, for which the Keeper can offer a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice; a hard bargain is something that comes at a cost. Well, you managed to get the gun away from the guy, but not before he shot you with it. Ouch. Now what? And the last is the result of the Keeper setting up the fictional situation. The guy warned you. You didn't get off his porch. So he shoots you. Man, Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws are a bitch.
In all three cases, the Keeper is making a move - inflict harm as established - which the rules say he or she can, and lay out guidelines for the circumstances under which it's appropriate. In some sense it's GM fiat, but circumscribed by the GM's Principles and Agenda.
But how is that any different than the GM fiat involved in deciding in the first place whether that NPC had a pistol or a shotgun? How is it any different from the GM fiat involved in placing the players in a situation with an armed, angry NPC?
Constructing a setting entails scads of GM fiat; making that setting realistic (make the world feel real), engaging (make the characters' lives not boring), heroic (be a fan of the characters), and surprising for everyone involved (sometimes, disclaim decision making and play to find out) entails putting boundaries on that GM fiat. That's what people are talking about when they say, "follow the fiction."
Does that help?
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Wow, its been over two months since I posted here. I keep reopening this thread and trying to post, but I just get so frustrated that I don't bother. I've never gone back to the game we were playing; just left it frozen mid trying to disarm the guy. I would really, really like to finish up the game. It is driving me mad. I mean, I am literally losing sleep over this stupid game, but I feel like it will just be a disaster if I try to go back to it. I haven't the faintest idea how to play - I feel like I have even less of an idea than when this all started, with so many conflicting and confusing answers. I keep thinking I should try the individual move topic threads, but I'd be asking about all sorts of very specific details and I'm not even sure I understand the underlying concepts.
There's a lot of things that have been said that I really disagree with, but I don't think arguing will get anywhere. Munin, I'm sorry, I get that you are trying to be helpful, but I think we are just so out of sync that we're not even communicating with each other.
I'm going to try to revist an example that got made here, but I want to remind people (since this has been a long time) what the context originally was for this example. I posted this example in response to this comment:
The main purpose of the rules is allowing you to keep things moving in a fun direction, where you'd have no clue how to do so otherwise.
Let's again take an example; in our last session, a character attempted to lash out with her chain-blade and disarm the poacher who was pointing a rifle at her. She rolled in the 7-9 range, and the game came to a crashing stop because we just couldn't figure out what should happen next - ie, what would keep things moving in a fun direction. Its been several weeks now. We just haven't gone back because this got so frustrating.
What was actually happening here? Was the poacher threatening to shoot the character? Were they trying to get away? Were they trying to kill someone else?
What was the PC trying to accomplish? How were they doing it?
OK, so more details: Things are going on out on a wilderness wildlife preserve, that a supernatural creature is now stalking. The first thing the PCs found indicating something was going on was a mangled body, which belong to a poacher who had run afoul of the creature. The other poachers had come in a group to find out what happened to their teammate. One was scouting ahead, and she ran into the creature. The PCs heard her screams and managed to get there in time to save her life (though her leg was badly mangled). They fought the creature briefly and it fled. While they were applying first aid to the badly injured woman, the rest of the group found them. The poacher's leader assumed they'd attacked the woman; the PCs tried to explain how a monster had done this and they were all in danger, but didn't succeed (failed Manipulate Someone). The poacher leader demanded that the PCs drop their weapons and come along. Beth wasn't willing to drop her weapon. The poacher approacher her, threatening her with the rifle. Her weapon is a mystical artifact; a set of blades built into gauntlets with an extendible chain allowing them to be whipped out at a distance. Since they were retracted when the poachers showed up (plus its a really odd weapon), he had no idea that he'd come within her reach, and she lashed out the chain to try to grab the rifle out of his hands. The PCs don't want a fight, nor do they want to have to go with the poachers.
Again, what I was trying to figure out here was not "what are things that could POSSIBLY happen", but "how do I use the rules to get to something fun happening?" Because I'm just not seeing that.
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Back on actual example, I really have no idea what to do after this bit gets resolved. They'll probably try to get back to the main complex, getting the injured person to medical aid. They took a jeep out, but wrecked it (on a mixed success when they heard the scream, I gave the option to either get there in time to help but damage the jeep or get there safely but probably too late), so it will be on foot. Should the creature attack them and harry them along the way? Trying to get through wildlands with an injured person and some hostile traveling companions sounds like, in theory, it would be pretty interesting, but I haven't the faintest idea how to run a situation like this in the game.
Or, since my countdown didn't include "creature stalks the PCs while they travel" (which, obviously it wouldn't since I didn't know the PCs will do this) should it just keep heading towards the main base and eat a bunch of people. That's a possibility, but I think it would be pretty boring and basically make the PCs "fail" when they had practically no info to go on yet.
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StormKnight,
It's possible that this game is a little more freeform than what you're used to playing. It won't give you hard, rulebook-based answers to "how do I handle this particular situation"? Part of it is the group cohering together around the rules (e.g. over time you establish, together, what exactly it means to use "Act Under Pressure"), and part of it is you using your own MC (GM) instincts to create the game you want to play.
In every case, establishing in more detail what is happening will help you.
For instance, in the scene with the poachers, we have a character using an item/ability to disarm an approaching poacher (who is clearly on the defensive enough to have drawn a rifle, but not aware of the actual threat the PC represents just yet). Well, how alert is the poacher? What are the others doing? Where are people standing, who's got weapons drawn, who's ready for action?
It's a perfect opportunity for "Read a Bad Situation", because rolling that move tends to nail down a lot of these questions for you. ("Read a Bad Situation" is built for these kinds of circumstances, exactly!)
However, if the player doesn't want to do that, then what?
You have a few options, but here are the most obvious ones:
* Let the PC do their thing, then respond with an MC move.
"You pull the rifle from his hands, catching him totally off-guard. He's just standing there, slack-jawed." [narration, description] "The other poachers yell and draw and level their guns, rushing forward to surround you. What do you do?" [MC move: put someone in a spot]
* Tell the PC that they're in a tense situation and they need to "Act Under Pressure" if they want to do that.
How do you decide which? A part of it is instinct, experience, and going with the group's current "vibe" or attitude.
Another part, though, is figuring out if there is, indeed "pressure" at play. What are we afraid of here? You always want to nail that down before rolling "Act Under Pressure", so that it doesn't feel weird when the dice hit the table (you know that feeling, when there's a miss and you're stuck wondering what to say? you don't want that).
Maybe it's been really clearly established that the poacher is paranoid and trigger-happy, and that the PC's item/ability takes a moment to work. Under those circumstances, it's obvious to everyone that what the PC is doing is *dangerous* - this guy has the aggression, the intent, and the time to pull the trigger.
On a 10+, whew! Maybe the gun goes off, but the danger does not come to pass.
On a 7-9, offer a hard bargain: maybe the PC has grabbed the poacher's rifle, but he ain't letting go of it, and now the other poachers are drawing weapons, too. If you don't let go, you might get shot or worse!
On a miss, you make a move - but the most obvious one is usually the right one: she gets shot before she can do it.
If none of that is clear before you roll, spend some time talking about the situation and establishing those details. If you haven't and everyone suddenly wants to roll, it might be as simple as, "Hey, how does that item work? Is it fast, is it slow? Does it make sense? How well can you control it?", or maybe it's just, "Ok, sure! But you can see this guy's really nervous, and the knuckles are going white around the rifle - he's THAT close to just pulling the trigger. Still want to do that?"
On the other hand, maybe this poacher is nervous and he doesn't have the guts to pull the trigger. In that case, snatching the gun from him is not the challenge. Is something else? Maybe the other poachers are more determined than he is, and snatching the rifle will spur them into action. Then THAT is the pressure that she's under.
On a 10+, she pulls it off, and she's got the initiative. What does she do next?
On a 7-9, she pulls it off, but something bad happens, too. She grabs the gun, perhaps, but the poachers open fire and hit the Hunters' car! Now we're in a fight.
On a miss, she pulls it off (remember, we decided it wasn't the challenge here), but you make a hard move on behalf of the poachers. Maybe she gets shot, if that's the most obvious thing, for example.
The exact outcomes are up to you; that's how you MC a game like this. It's possible that it's just too loose/freeform for you! If so, that's very understandable; a more strict by-the-book kind of game (D&D4E?) might suit you better.
You could also make it a little stricter for yourself by stating the possible outcome of a miss before the roll, though ("You've got to Act Under Pressure if you want to do that. This guy is ready to shoot; miss and he'll be faster than you!")
Again:
* The game works best when you establish as many of the fictional details as you need, first.
* Reading a Bad Situation could help answer a lot of these questions for you before you even do anything. This is exactly what it's for!
* If not, describe what's happening in more detail, nail down what the deal is and what threats there are. In the process of hashing it out, you'll get a sense (as a group) of what the best move or choice here might be. ("Ok, so he's not dangerous, but there's two guys in the back who look like they're ready to fight/run/do something stupid? Cool. You'll have no trouble getting his rifle, but what are you [looks at another player] going to do about the two at the back? You're closest to them.")
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I'm with Paul on this one - I'd treat the situation with the poachers as acting under pressure, making it clear that failure (or even partial success) is going to tip the situation into a full-blown fight. And as a side note, giving this option to the player is a Keeper move - you're offering an opportunity (sure, you can try to use your blade-lash to disarm the head poacher...) with a cost (...but if you fail, someone will probably get shot and it is likely to be you). Make sense?
Also, taking a step back in time, I'm not sure I'd have had the PC try to manipulate the head poacher, as that move is predicated on having leverage. Now if the PC said, "Lower your weapons now and I promise I won't kill every one of you where you stand using only my brain," then maybe manipulate is appropriate (as it's an empty threat). But trying to talk down an excited, trigger-happy poacher might find act under pressure as a better fit - you're just trying to be super cool, super calm, and super clear to convince him you're not a threat before he starts busting caps.
The thing about PbtA games is that the triggers to the moves are super important. Look at them carefully. If the fictional situation doesn't fit a move's trigger, then DON'T ROLL. But if the PC is doing something that reasonably sounds like the trigger, then you MUST ROLL. The move's rules simply tell you what happens next based on the results of that roll.
Here's something to keep in mind - the rules of PbtA games don't model reality or simulate physics or anything like that. They serve only to drive the story. They are used to find the key dramatic moments and give the players and the Keeper ways to add interesting and unexpected complications to the narrative that you're forming collectively.