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.)

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.

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"?

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.

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."

* 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.

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.