Kind of. The moves "trigger" by the fictional situation, not the other way around.

Right, I'm thinking "to do it, do it", and if the MC doesn't know what happens they'll ask you to make a roll.
Some things have a rule to always be "uncertain" in this way so that the MC just can't decide something.

For example, there is some sorta corridor with a red/white checkerboard floor where the red squares are made out of very thin glass with poison pools under them. The MC tells the player about how the floor looks but not what it's made of. What do you do?

And the player goes "I'm scared, I'm just gonna run through it as fast as I can" and the MC says "after a couple of steps you hit a red square hard and it shatters, and you smell poison. What do you do?" and the player goes "I try to pull my foot up from there before getting hurt" and the MC says "OK, roll act under fire" because she doesn't know how successful the foot-up-pulling is going to be.
7-9 get hurt by glass, 6- get poisoned
But if the player described themselves as like throwing in some hard rocks in the corridor, there would be another outcome and another move engaged, or maybe no move would need to be engaged.

Has this observation already been done?

Another cross post from another forum but I thought it was interesting to hear you gearheads' take on it:

[In Apocalypse World and Dungeon World] every single action is like how saving throws work in D&D.
In D&D, you're talking along, describing what you're doing, how you're walking down the dungeon corridor etc, conversation style, everything's dandy... then whoops, you step in some sort of poison hole, there might be some trouble involved with that, make a saving throw and that'll tell us all the consequences.

In Dungeon World (and AW), every single thing is like this. You're talking describing how you're fighting the monster, chopping along, having fun fighting this horrible giant ogre but whoops, you put yourself in danger in the fight, make a "Hack&Slash" check to see whether you are hurt.

It's All Saving Throws, All The Time. My friend Trix described it as a "consequences system" rather than a "task resolution system" (and rather than a "conflict resolution system" that The Shadow of Yesterday uses), but I think of it as ASTATT.

It works because the action economy is built around it. Monsters deal damage when they deal damage. If you say "I go stand in front of the ogre and look at it intently in the eyes", well, you might get smashed straight up. Similar to how there is no saving throw in D&D if you just go jump off a cliff deliberately. But if you go "I go stand in front of the ogre and then I bring up my dagger and try to cut its fingers off before it can smash me [whoops, that got a little graphic, I apologize]", well, you've got to make a roll and the consequences of failing that roll might be that you get smashed because you weren't fast enough or good enough with the dagger.

Given 2097s hilarious GDNS post on Storygames, I just figured they were on an epic trolling spree.

It's easy for me to take this comment as invalidating and hurtful, though I hope that that's not what you mean. I said explicitly (in this Fudge/PbtA post) that I was serious, that I wasn't kidding.

I'm glad you found the GDNS post funny because that one is HHOS - "haha, only serious". In other words, I've expressed the philosophy of play that I really believe, and believe is important, in a way that's meant to be funny to read as well. I was feeling self-conscious about having the gall to post some sort of theory so I cranked it up, exaggerated the "ex cathedra" nature of writing something like that, to lighten it up. So, yeah, a joke, but a joke with a purpose. I did seriously want to clarify some of the conflicts and overlaps in the way we approach roleplaying games. And I did want to be funny while I did it.

I'm trying hard to find ways to express myself and to take myself seriously. I've been trying other approaches too, like this thread and the "Spatial relationships in verbal games" thread. I have this sort of self-hatred when it comes to fancy words and academia.

The other day on RPG.net, I wrote "Correct. My objections to vector space / range band are presupposing a verbal-only/word-only setup. If you do sketch up a map, my objections aren't relevant [and a whole new set of objections would enter into it, but that's another thing entirely]." Then a few moments later, I edited the post, struck it out and replaced it with "That's right. I don't like using maps at the table, for other reasons, but it solves many problems with rules that rely on distances." I was such a bookish kid and got a lot of garbage for that. I'm trying to write clearly and plainly but I have to remember to do that, it doesn't come naturally like the awkward syntax and cumbersome words do.

I think Ron could be taken seriously despite his carnival barker humor (with jokey names like "Step On Up" and "The Right to Dream") because of two things: he had become central to this important creative community that he had worked hard to build and manage, and this new strain of narrative games were new and unlike anything the threefolders had ever seen (Theatrix doesn't come close), and Ron had made one of them (Sorcerer).

I don't have those two things. But... I also have thoughts on how to play these games. So :/
I guess this post might take all the wind out of the GDNS official, canonical theory and dour the mood; I don't want that, I want that theory to thrive. But I want to be taken seriously as well. Don't know what to do really.

Cross post from S-G:

You can change Apocalypse World to not be so numbers-focused like this:
First of all, get fudge dice, you know the ones that have an equal number of pluses, minuses and blanks. Also known as fate dice.

Then change the playbooks and basic move sheets as follows:

When I refer to "the ladder" below, I'm talking about this list:
Unflinchingly
Intensely
Very
Kind of
A little bit
Not really that
Far from
The least

Unbeknownst to the players, but known to you, the converter, this scale is:
Unflinchingly: +4
Intensely: +3
Very: +2
Kind of: +1
A little bit: 0
Not really that: -1
Far from: -2
The least: -3

Do not show those numbers  to your players. I'm not kidding; do not let them start taking about +3 and -2 and stuff.


Then make new playbooks such that:

Choose one set:
• Cool+1 Hard=0 Hot+1 Sharp+2 Weird-1
• Cool+1 Hard+1 Hot=0 Sharp+2 Weird-1
• Cool-1 Hard+1 Hot=0 Sharp+2 Weird+1
• Cool+2 Hard=0 Hot-1 Sharp+2 Weird-1

Becomes this:

Choose one set:
• Kind of cool, a little bit hard, kind of hot, very sharp, not really that weird.
• Kind of cool, kind of hard, a little bit hot, very sharp, not really that weird.
• Not really that cool, kind of hard, a little bit hot, very sharp, kind of weird.
• Very cool, a little bit hard, not really that hot, very sharp, not really that weird.

Teach your players how to roll like this (I'm serious, follow this procedure, it'll become fast after a while and you'll use the scale in your head after a while, but be careful about shortcutting it in the beginning):
Let's say you have to roll to act coolly and that you are a little bit cool.
Put your finger "A little bit". Roll four of the dice. Remove any + - pair because they cancel out. Then for each remaining +, move your finger up once, and for each -, move your finger down once.
Let's say you rolled ++_-. The minus and the + cancel out, leaving +. Move your finger up once on the scale for the remaining +. It ends on "Kind of" You acted kind of coolly.

Before you teach them that (but I wanted to explain it to you, the converter, first), change the moves so that this:

DO SOMETHING UNDER FIRE
When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire,
roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7–9, you flinch, hesitate, or
stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or
an ugly choice.

becomes:

DO SOMETHING UNDER FIRE
When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll to
act coolly. If you act very coolly or cooler, you can do it. If you
act kind of, or a little bit cool, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the
MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.

(Uh, maybe that phrasing needs a little work.)
Anyway, the point is to change all 7-9 results to "Kind of" and "A little bit", all 6- results to "Not really that" and lower, and all 10+ results to "Very" and higher.
It's a lot of work converting or redoing all the playbooks but once that's done, your players won't see any numbers any more and you'll be happily in "word land".

Put that ladder right on every playbook near the stats, or on laminated cards. Use the version that does <em>not</em> have the numbers. I'm serious. Do not show it.

I've worked on the probabilities and they match pretty well from the start and across the advancements. You'll get pretty close to the same percentages of successes, misses, and 7-9:s.


----
I'm not saying "Do this" or that it's a particularly good idea to do it for all groups. It's just an option for some who hate adding small numbers together, to make those numbers even smaller and less numberlike.

Game design:
Yeah, it's liberating because it's like a whole open field where we can try things out and learn and experiment. Design space is wide open.

On the other hand, I just gotta believe that some best practices -- or even awareness -- about this issue will be invented in the future. Maybe by me (Sandra -- the best!) or one of you guys.



Apocalypse World:
As you might know I'm always the hardholder, it's my favorite class by far, and so far they haven't been very human (when they have power). When they are powerless the humanity comes out.
I know that's not what you meant maybe.
Just a random "let me tell you about my character" blurting out. :p
They usually start out as these really weird charicatures and only after time they become human -- often in spite of me fighting it tooth and nail.

Munin:
Putting a lot of energy into identifing a specific instance of duty collision and providing a "patch" on that (like post-hoc "Save your ass"-points) can sometimes be futile and remove the nerve, the tension of the game.

Vincent is, if I've got it right, suggesting a general method of identifying not only a specific instance of collision, not even a whole type of collisions, but collisions in general, in play, via (for example) built-in troubleshooting that still keeps the game exciting and motivating. Acknowledging the conversation, and conversational techniques (asking questions, facilitating new perspectives in dialogue), as the primary interface and mediator and medium itself. Sorry to put words in your mouth if I haven't gotten it right, Vincent, I'm kinda groggy right now.

While I'm day-dreaming about doing the same already at the design stage.
So far without success :p


So we're talking about three sorta different takes on the same problem, I dunno.

I think we're talking past each other, Munin. One is misunderstanding the other, or both.

I get what cues are and how they work.
If you're saying that they are an effective tool for resolving conflicting duties in a participant's role, I'm not seeing it (but not counterstating it either -- I just dunno).

I'm gonna go abstract to see if that can help me understand this issue better.

In Go, both players' goal is to have their pieces survive on the board and take up a lot of room.

In Gonnect, both players' goal is to have their pieces make a contiguous line from two opposite edges of the board.

Both games otherwise use pretty much the same rules.

What if one player had as a goal to primarily think about making a contiguous line, and the other player had as a goal to survive on the board and take up a lot of room?
Both players would use the same "interface" to the game -- alternating placing stones on the intersections -- and they sometimes engage with each other when sub-goals ("I want to be alive near the root of heaven", "I want to be alive around the north west star" -- yeah, it's a dorky game, I admit it) come into conflict.
But sometimes they would be completely not engaging, completely just being boring and un-there for each other.
"Why are you building up such a strong textile pattern [moyo]? I am over here building a strong line of connections undisturbed. C'mon, engage me!"


However, the conflict would be resolved if the players actively took an interest in the other player's goal.
The "take up a lot of room"-player needs to actively sever or prevent the connecting-players connection. (Usually by making a connection of her own, or a cross-cut.)
The connecting-player needs to actively shrink or prevent the "take up a lot of room"-players growth. (Usually by also growing -- one way to do that is to choke and capture the other persons pieces).

The game would revert back to being functional [albeit with the long back-filling phase of gonnect] by the players being actively aware of and engaged in each others goal and game.


To bring this back to AW -- what are the implicit agendas (agenda in the AW sense, not in the GNS sense) for the players? To make a hot god-damn mess, and clean it up (or die)? To engage with a vivid world? I dunno