Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Dan Maruschak

Pages: 1 [2] 3
16
Dungeon World / Re: Dungeon World is...
« on: February 26, 2012, 10:58:35 PM »
I don't think I have a really good handle on what Dungeon World is. The intro text in the character playbooks makes it seem like it's a bit of a crazy action-adventure lark, and there's grittiness but it's mostly an affectation. However, the low amount of starting resources (i.e. deciding whether you're bringing rations is an important decision) makes it seem like it's actually gritty. From the GM's side, the high monster damage makes it seem like characters should be treated as disposable but the GM advice seems to lean toward making the adventures relevant to the characters and players, which I think argues against disposable characters. Most of the GM rules make me think it's supposed to have a very sandboxy feel, but some stuff (like starting sessions in medias res) seems to run counter to that. I think I know what the GM's stance is supposed to look like (play it straight, no pulled punches, the monster damage is the monster damage), but there's sufficient vagueness in the rules to make me doubt that conclusion, and some of the vocal fans seem to have very different opinions about that and nobody says that they're wrong.

Personally I hope that DW is a strongly designed game that wants you to take it's rules seriously, not treat them as vague guidelines that serve as a springboard to freeforming. I worry that the hacking culture and the fuzziness of some of the rules and principles make it mushier than I want it to be. I also worry that the D&D legacy and nostalgia are too powerful for the moves list to effectively control people's frame of interaction with the fiction, i.e. people will play it like they would whatever their preferred flavor of D&D is regardless of how the moves are intended to guide them to play.

17
Dungeon World / Re: "The Enemy Makes An Attack Against You"
« on: February 21, 2012, 01:00:22 AM »
Quote from: noofy on February 19, 2012, 06:25:46 PM
I don't think that the DM is a 'neutral Arbiter' Dan. The rules explain what your role is, its totally on the side of the characters. Dungeon World calls you to act in a particular way as GM for the rules to work at their best. Sure, you are refereeing and adjudicating, but always with your agenda and principles in mind. Dealing damage to the players is a HARD move, one of the hardest you can make and you need to think if that is warranted fictionally (in or out of combat)?
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me. My read of the rules is that you're not on anyone's side, you're there to play it straight:
Quote from: Dungeon World
Be a fan of the characters
Treat the players' characters like characters you watch on TV. You want to see how things turn out for them. You're not here to make them lose, or to make them win, and definitely not to guide them to your story. You're here to portray the interesting world around them and see how interacting with that world changes everything.
My reading of the "be a fan" principle is strongly influenced by my experience with a different game where I found that eliminating any kind of "dynamic danger scaling" from my GM toolbox let me appreciate the players' contributions to the game in a way I couldn't when that lever was available to me (I talk about it in this blog post, in the indented quote section).

18
Dungeon World / Re: "The Enemy Makes An Attack Against You"
« on: February 19, 2012, 01:50:25 PM »
I've only GMed one session, but when I created my monster moves I didn't make any of them seem like they ought to directly cause damage since it seemed to me like they should be in a different category. On the 7-9 result I interpret the rules as "either do the monster's damage or do one of your pre-decided monster moves" and I try to do the one which makes the most sense from the flow of the fiction. With the high damage numbers in 1.1 seems to make the 7-9 H&S result have higher stakes than the miss result since the GM has more non-damaging choices on a miss, which I don't like. I think the high damage in 1.1 makes doing damage stand out as very different from any of the other choices a GM can make, which I'm not crazy about from the design perspective.

Personally, I try not to know what the PC's current HP values are, because that influences my decision-making in a way I don't like. I don't think a DW GM should ever be making a decision that translates easily into "does the PC live or die?". It seems like whether a PC lives through the dungeon should be one of those "play to find out" things, not something that's anyone's individual decision. With the high damage in 1.1 I think it's really hard to maintain that mindset because you know how scary a single hit can be. I think ideally a DW GM should be a neutral arbiter, not a thrill-ride-operator, but I'm not sure how possible that is in 1.1.

Quote from: Glitch on February 19, 2012, 07:12:04 AM
The fixed monster damage opens a big can of worms for the poor GM that I believe would largely be solved by deferring the decision to the dice ... let the GM roll the monster damage (and I don't mean vary it by a few d4s).  But, alas, I know, GM's don't roll dice in *W games!  This might be a legitimate argument against that convention.
One potential course would be to make PC armor into dice rather than a flat value (either as a polyhedral like player damage or as a roll+Armor move).

19
Dungeon World / Re: New AP podcast ep using DW beta 1.1 rules
« on: February 19, 2012, 11:52:17 AM »
Quote from: noofy on February 18, 2012, 08:12:12 PM
Sometimes you are having the conversation in the game and think 'gee we should be making a move here', but nothing fits. That's when gentle manipulation of Defy Danger comes into its own. The results (as listed) of the move are a very adaptable framework to hang your fiction on.
To me, this sounds like it's really contrary to the way moves are supposed to work. To my mind AW and DW aren't the type of game where dice rolls are arbitrary tension-injectors that the GM uses to orchestrate an entertaining experience. The "it's been a while, let me figure out if we can roll here" concept really rubs me the wrong way for the kind of game I think DW is trying to be.

Quote from: Mike Olson
To me, bluffing is a seat-of-your-pants, bullshit-my-way-out-of-this one kinda thing, which sounds like a very reasonable application of "quick thinking."
I think you're assuming more desperation being implicitly involved in bluffing than I am. The situations you describe sound like they're in the Defy Danger ballpark to me, but I think I was coming at it from a more "D&D combat power"-style concept of bluffing where it covers any use of trickery to impose your will on an opponent, even if you're already in an advantageous position. It's been a while since the session so my memory is pretty fuzzy by this point, but I don't remember Simon's character being in a desperate situation when the topic came up, so that may have colored the discussion.

20
Dungeon World / Re: New AP podcast ep using DW beta 1.1 rules
« on: February 18, 2012, 12:35:46 PM »
Quote from: Mike Olson on February 17, 2012, 02:44:28 PM
Bluffing is Defy Danger using Int.
While clever talking might be a Defy Danger in certain specific circumstances I don't think it's true in a general sense that Bluffing = Defy Danger. In my mind AW-style moves aren't about how you could cleverly manipulate an existing rule to arbitrate something, they're about intuitive pattern-matching on the fiction. To me, Defy Danger is supposed to be about reacting to some specific fictional danger. Bluffing, on the other hand, is a character-initiated action to achieve some specific intent. Those don't feel similar enough to me that they ought to be pattern-matched by the same move. I suppose "does the NPC realize that you're lying?" could be a Defy Danger but I think what people mean by bluffing goes beyond that.

21
Dungeon World / Re: Beta questions
« on: February 16, 2012, 07:40:36 PM »
Quote from: sage on February 16, 2012, 01:00:47 PM
Dan, your example is exactly what I'm making clear in the moves discussion chapter: you already offered a promise and concrete assurance in your parley, the GM doesn't have to ask for a different one (but they can).
OK, that makes sense. I don't think I would have guessed that's the way it's supposed to work from the current rules. With the current wording "they need some concrete assurance of your promise, right now", my intuitive read of the "right now" part is implicitly asking for a new thing to happen in the fiction, and I'm guessing that's how my GM was reading it at the time, too.

I think bargaining does have a place in this kind of game. In an earlier session of that game the other PC's halfling thief had died in a place only reachable by a small tunnel (although in-character I didn't know he was dead), so I used Parley to intimidate a goblin into going into the tunnel to check on him for me, and I think the mechanic worked well there. I also probably wouldn't have offered to let the lizardman retreat if the Parley move hadn't been on my sheet (it was with the old XP rules and I think I had CHA highlighted at the time) but it seems in-genre for that kind of interaction to happen so I think it's good that there's a mechanical prompt to suggest it.

22
Dungeon World / Re: Beta questions
« on: February 15, 2012, 08:41:50 PM »
Quote from: sage on February 15, 2012, 07:34:26 PM
Maybe I'm not understanding the example, but I imagine the exchange between lizardman and McGruff the fighter to be:
A little more like:

McGruff: (after killing a bunch of other lizardmen) If you want to run, I'll let you go.
GM: You've got leverage (killing him), something you want (him to leave), and he can understand you. Sounds like Parley.
McGruff rolls a 7.
Lizardman: Do you promise you'll let me go?
Dan (thinking): This is stupid. I already told him I'd let him go, if he wants to get away he should be running. If I had just killed him instead of offering to let him escape I'd be done with him by now.
Dan (out loud): I'm not going to say anymore to him than I've already said. If that's not good enough for him then I'll go kill him.
GM: Well I need some concrete assurance...
Dan: I think he should be able to tell from my body language that I meant what I said. I'm not going to say more than that. If that's not good enough for him then I'll just go kill him.
GM: Uh, OK, I guess... He runs away.

From my POV I had already given him concrete assurance by stopping the fight to talk to him in the first place. It seemed like the GM felt like the weak hit result meant he was compelled to explicitly negotiate something but that felt really silly to me, like the lizardman wouldn't take yes for an answer. Maybe it would have been different if he had asked for something else, but the way it actually played out really took me out of the game and made me regret trying to engage this part of the mechanics.

23
Dungeon World / Re: Beta questions
« on: February 15, 2012, 07:04:54 PM »
I like the idea of Parleying with NPCs staying in the game, but I think the "promise" wording in the move is causing some problems. In the Walking Eye AP, Kevin wouldn't let Troll Parley with Grundloch even though it sounded to me like Troll had leverage. In my own DW Basic play, near the end of a big fight with some lizardmen, I had my fighter say to the last one standing something like "if you run now, I'll let you go." I rolled the middle Parley result and the GM started roleplaying the lizardman talking with me trying to get me to articulate some more specific deal. I found it kind of silly since I had every intention of following through on my offer to let him go but I was playing my character as kind of gruff so I was more inclined to just kill the thing if he was going to make a big production out of it. I think "promise" wording makes the move hard to work with.

The few PC to PC parleys I did seemed pretty artificial in terms of the "leverage" I had (they tended to boil down to "I'll be grumpy if you don't do it my way") so I don't think the game will be losing anything important by taking away PC to PC Parley.

24
Dungeon World / Re: Turn Undead
« on: February 14, 2012, 01:14:51 PM »
Quote from: JBMannon on February 14, 2012, 12:43:38 PM
Dan,

Do you mind if we take this to a new thread? I seem to have drifted a bit from what we started talking about here.
Sounds like a good idea.

25
Dungeon World / Re: Turn Undead
« on: February 14, 2012, 11:28:46 AM »
Quote from: JBMannon on February 14, 2012, 11:11:25 AM
If you include that they want or need not to have my sword in their face...
Do all creatures want or need that? I can imagine a dragon that wouldn't care at all if you tried to get in its face with a sword, and a goblin that would care quite a bit. Look at it from the target's perspective. I can imagine a creature that thought it was winning a fight not wanting an opportunity to escape (why would it need that?) but a creature that thinks it's losing a fight could very easily want or need an opportunity to get away. "Leverage" isn't universal, it's contextual based on the fictional situation.

Quote
I had a player attempt to parlay with a ghost in my last game but I couldn't see what they had that it wanted or needed other than contenued existance.
Did the ghost believe that they had control over its continued existence? When you asked the player for clarification about what leverage they had for the Parley what leverage did they think they had?

26
Dungeon World / Re: Turn Undead
« on: February 14, 2012, 10:55:53 AM »
Quote from: JBMannon on February 14, 2012, 05:21:36 AM
Dan,
That looks like you took that quote from the book, do you have a page reference for that? That is what I remember leverage being but if that is the case then we have stepped away from the general useage of leverage and the need for definitive use in other moves is even more important.
That's from the Parley move, in parenthetical clarifying text right after the word leverage: "When you have leverage on someone (something they need or want) and you try to get them to do what you want..."

I don't understand why you think this is stepping away from a plain english definition, it seems pretty consistent to me with a common usage of the word "leverage". Have you had experiences where it was hard to interpret the fiction to determine if someone had appropriate leverage for Parley?


27
Dungeon World / Re: Turn Undead
« on: February 13, 2012, 10:17:14 PM »
Quote from: JBMannon on February 13, 2012, 09:01:54 PM
It feels like, if the rules are going to be specific that you need leverage, they should also be clear about what counts as leverage. Including leverage in the text of aproriate moves just makes sense. Saying, if it does then it does, puts the one and only social option directly in the hands of GM fiat and I am very uncomfortable with that.
GM fiat and GM interpretation of the fiction aren't the same thing. Leverage is "something that a character wants or needs". GM fiat is generally disliked because it's arbitrary and can be capricious. Trying to interpret the fiction based on what honesty demands isn't like that -- does the target character want or need the thing that the PC is offering? It's supposed to be grounded in the fiction and characterization that's been developed so far.

28
Dungeon World / Re: Turn Undead
« on: February 13, 2012, 06:29:23 PM »
Have you considered stepping away from the "area effect" way of thinking and making it a bit more like Going Aggro on a particular undead creature?

29
Dungeon World / Re: New AP podcast ep using DW beta 1.1 rules
« on: February 07, 2012, 01:10:36 AM »
@Glitch - Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.

@Anarchangel - When we played DW Basic we played it that way, basically you do your character damage regardless of whether you're punching or stabbing (which is probably why Simon assumed it would work that way and why I didn't see anything wrong with it). But like Glitch said, the rule in the beta is that you only do character damage with a weapon. It stuck in my mind when I read it because it seemed like a change from what we did before, but I only remembered it specifically when I was trying to think of reasons why the monster might not do its full damage.

@Mike - Might the rule be in there to give some mechanical teeth to GM moves that separate PCs from their weapons? If dropping your sword is merely cosmetic then it potentially sucks some dynamism out of fights.

30
Dungeon World / New AP podcast ep using DW beta 1.1 rules
« on: February 04, 2012, 09:21:35 PM »
I released a new episode of my playtesting-focused AP podcast Designer vs. Reality that features my group playing a session with the Dungeon World beta 1.1 rules.

Pages: 1 [2] 3