What about the other moves from Chryckan's thread? You changed your mind about the other ones you wrote?

1) I have no idea wtf that picture is supposed to be.

2) Getting +1 from I Made You is booooring. I think this would be much more exciting: At any point, you can declare that a creature made in your vat has a weakness, and what it is. One weakness per creature.

3) The revised trait bank list and botanist move are good, although "crippled" and especially "insane" are a bit vague. I mean, you have players protesting against this vagueness in your example.

4) Have you read Vance's The Dying Earth?

Anyway, I like this. I should put something like it in World of Algol, it would make Blair happy.

1) I feel like most of the words in that phrase are redundant, even having both hard bargain and ugly choice. Also since a 7-9 is supposed to be more or less a success, it's not real clear what a "worse outcome" is, is it? I might reword this move to: "the GM will give you a choice between two or more consequences, which may including turning back. Pick one."

2) Not really, because it's still there. Here's a situation I wanted to be possible in the game:

Situation A: You have a bond with an NPC. You're doing something dangerous. You get the NPC to help you. They roll 7-9. You get a bonus to your roll, they die.

But then I realized that Situation B (where you get help, you roll with a bonus, you get a 7-9, and the NPC dies) is the same thing with one roll instead of two. Basically, the consequences of both rolls are condensed into one.

Also, turning bonds into a spendable resource allows for a whole new design space in terms of moves. A thief and a trader working together can become a steamrolling juggernaut!

That said, most of my playtesting so far has been 1-on-1 and I haven't properly put the teamwork, party-dynamic rules through their paces.

So, Go Into Danger isn't a catch-all "do something dangerous" move. It's for when the GM has described an obvious threat, and the player says "mm, no, I can tackle that head-on and come out on top."

Example:

GM: The palace is on fire. You can see the crown prince on the other side of a wall of flames. What do you do?
Player: I grab a tapestry to defend myself, run up on to the feasting table and jump up onto the side of the wall and over the flames. I grab the prince and cover us with the tapestry so I can run out the doorway without getting burned.
GM: Well, that's going into some hella danger all right. Roll+mighty.
Player: I rolled 9, and mighty+2 makes 11.
Since she rolled 11, that means her tactic works at warding off the flames, and will continue to work until the situation changes considerably, since that one Go Into Danger roll covers the whole danger, or as much as the PC's tactics are both reasonable and employed.

However, if you are not actually going into danger, then you can't make the move. There's a wide range of interpretation of course -- if you are trying to retreat but that means risking danger, that can be going into danger, but trying to maintain your cool and take cover in the face of suppressive laser fire is explicitly not going into danger.

Divergences from my original plans

Well, assess your situation was going to be a basic move, of course, and now it is not. I really, really like this move. It is such a noir detective move... but that's the problem. This is Planet Algol. And yet, here's the thing: I gave the Sage two really awesome special moves: you can study things that aren't people with the study a person move (other classes will be able to study gods and monsters, too), and you can assess someone else's situation. Which seems to me very much like a Sage kind of thing to do.

So the obvious solution after a lot of thought was to make assess your sitch a Sage class move and free up space in the basic moves so I don't have to abandon the three-by-three move organization. Besides, the guys who play the D&D version of Planet Algol will never use that move, so it's almost pointless. Some of them might study a person because they want to know if an NPC is lying, but it's only really the AW crowd who will be assessing any sitches, and if they can hack it back in if they really want to.

I also struggled with the move names and which moves they are associated with. I finally figured it out when I decided to go with careful as a stat. I used to have skilled instead -- it was still the technology and search stat, although tech was a peripheral move. But I like careful much better because it emphasizes a personality trait that helps you make those moves, instead of being a trait about those moves (or being about the tech move actually, which was especially weird since it was a peripheral move).

Injury and Curse

So the ratings have 2 purposes. First is so you know how serious a wound is, and how close it brings you to death. I want actual character death to be paced by the game and not by the GM. This is actually very similar to the way Chris Weeks described using countdown clocks in the AW-for-gamism thread. It is a countdown clock! You add up the ratings of all your wounds and if they equal 5 or more you have died!

It is also there so you know if you have stabilized a wound or not, because then the injury rating is reduced to zero -- it no longer contributes to your immediate death, but it is still a condition that can give you a penalty die.

And curse is there for stuff that isn't really harm, like magical curses and insanity and stuff. That part is a bit fuzzier than injuries, because while I playtested the injury stuff a bit, the curse stuff never really came up.

The main point of conditions and the doom and death countdowns is to remove hit points and make each wound an actual thing in the fiction, but at the same time retain the part where the game determines when you have died, so that the GM doesn't have to make judgment calls about it and doesn't have to think about how close the PC is to filling up all five circles.

So this is a thing I've had kicking around for I guess a couple years now, and recently I figured out how to make all the basics of it work. Since I've got a bunch of other commitments to attend to, this has to go back in the drawer, but I figured I should at least cobble together a playable draft. So here is the World of Algol Explorer's Guide.

There's no GM rules, so here is how you run it:
1. Prep like it's old-school D&D. You need to bring a dungeon or a hexmap for the PCs to explore.
2. Add in the PC backgrounds as you go. The PCs should feel like D&D characters of approximately levels 3-6 who have already gone on a bunch of adventures. You can use that stuff if you want, when they go back to civilization with their ill-gotten loot, but if they stick around in town, that's the intrigue mode and I haven't written the rules for that yet. So make them go back to the dungeon.
3. There's no "defy danger" move. If a move does not apply, you have to decide what happens. That is mandatory.
4. Injuries are always actual wounds, the numbers are there just to back them up. If you deal 2-harm to a PC and don't tell them what kind of wound it is, they don't have to write down shit. That also means: regularly check what condition the PCs are in (ie ask what conditions they have).
5. Read the Planet Algol blog for ideas.

The document's pretty rough, only some of it's been playtested. Probably somebody will enjoy reading it anyway.

Looks neat! The Illustrated is fuckin dope.

The instructions for rolling are a little confusing, because it says you keep 2 for the move and then you keep some of what's left over. I think it's supposed to be that if you miss, you get to keep all the Fate Dice you added, but on a hit, you only get to keep a few, right?

I ran Tower of the Stargazer. We had a good time. Couple things:

Playing to Find Out What Happens

This principle is pretty much the same in LotFP. The only difference is that because DW is an adventure game, you are allowed to make up the dungeon on the fly. You are not allowed to do this in LotFP (or old-school D&D generally). I think you might be falling for the idea that this principle means you should just make up everything on the fly, but no -- you can use a pre-written dungeon for DW the same as you would for D&D (and in fact there is nothing in the GM sections about using a module--just advice in that appendix).

The main thing is not to remember not to plan scenes in a linear order and not to decide the outcome of scenes, as this is a common failing in adventure-based games. But the wizard being a jerk is not a "thing that happens," it's just who he is. So you know that he will say whatever he has to in order to get free and then he's like "GTFO bitches." That is fine, you still don't know what will happen, and you will decide exactly what he does when the time comes. Will they even free him? My players decides to stand outside the circle taunting him and making fun of him for being a bad wizard. They onl freed him by accident and the first thing he did was drop death spells on them because why would he tell them to get out at that point? He was pissed and they knew they had it coming. Did I know that was going to happen? No idea, I just role-played the dude in the moment based on his description and we found out what happened.

You can run the adventure pretty much as-is and it will be fine. You don't even have to connect the PCs to it, as long as you get their input on the parts of the world that their PCs actually ARE familiar with, which is probably everything outside the tower.

Well, okay: as-is except for one thing...

Poison

The front door of the dungeon having a poisoned handle is a dick move. This kind of dick move is okay in LotFP, it is not okay in DW. Poison deep inside the dungeon, where players should damn well know better than to pick up things that look like they might be poisoned? Sure. You drink the wine in some wizard's tower? WTF are you crazy? You look deep into some wizard's magic mirror? Okay, buddy, roooooll them dice. You pull all the levers on his crazy huge machine? Now you're really asking for it!!! Sure. But not the front door.

Tower of the Stargazer is written for a game where the dungeon is the most important element. Nobody cares who your character is. He dies at the front door? Roll up another, it takes like 5 minutes. But Dungeon World is about the characters and their adventure, the dungeon is not the important part. Killing a Dungeon World PC at the front door to the dungeon is kind of like D&D PCs removing the front doors of the dungeon and selling them because they are made of gold and then retiring, without ever setting foot in the dungeon proper. You show up to D&D to explore a dungeon, but you show up to Dungeon World to play a character on an adventure, so if they die before they have any adventure, they're not really getting to play.

So, make 'em sick or something, sure, but don't kill anybody at the front door.