So I slept on it and I realized that I can't really afford to lose this system in its entirety - because you often use gigs or whatever to answer the question, "What are you up to today?"

So I'm sticking with not tracking numeric barter, but I'm going to go with your recommendation, Paul, and retain the idea of gigs and earning-your-keep so that players know what their dudes are doing. Thanks for your advice, both!

So, I'm working on a very lo-fi hack for AW in the Dragon Age RPG setting*, and one of the things about it is, I'm not using barter. My reasoning is, wealth and scarcity don't enter into the source material's gameplay very prominently, and the PCs are not (in this hack) going to be landholders or other such persons that would be concerned with it as a core part of their character.

My question is, does this break anything big?

I know that it removes one way of provoking the PCs to action, and that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, but I do want to know if there are any other pitfalls that I should be wary of.

*: Which you can look at here if you're interested; I welcome your critiques and questions.

That is embarrassingly bad play advice and I think you know it. "When you do a thing, consider the result spaces of all the moves as specified, and if your thing has a result space that is similar, use that move," is an incredibly tedious and laborious procedure with a much heavier processing requirement than "When you do a thing, check if it's a thing in the description of a move, and in case it is, use that move."

You shouldn't advise play methods that are bad because they patch gaps in the text!

Well, it's multiply problematic, and I'll tell you why:

AW tells you that all its actions should be grounded in the fiction, right? You execute a move, mechanically, iff you perform an appropriate descriptive action.

Then it goes and like a lying serpent, it tells you that you should use Act Under Fire abstractly and people take a cue from that to abstract SBF as well - but no other move.

Consider: When in your entire life has someone been like "man I am so under fire from this one person's persuasion...?" That is a thing that no native English speaker would say. Note the parallel oddness of saying, "That dude was in between me and that chaise lounge, so I seized his life by force and had a nice long sunbathe in that son of a bitch." That and the previous are idiotic things to say, and that should indicate that they are idiotic ways to use your moves. Notice that "That dude was in between me and that mai tai, so I was forced to seize it by force," is still kind of stilted and odd, but it does not seem to be a shameful misuse of language. I think this is important! The moves are expressed in conversational language, so one should expect that, if described in conversational language, they make sense and don't sound stupid.

I think this gross contortion of language and the tendency to abstract the target of Seize by Force are clear and obvious indicators that something is wrong with SBF.

Usually that "something wrong" is that people misread the move, not least because like all the moves it lacks a procedural description of what you must do in the fiction, and leads players to believe that it's the move for "doing violence for its own sake." There's no move for that in AW; SBF comes closest, but systematically the game presents violence as something you do when you run out of easier options.

The move (along with the persuade/manipulate/act under fire precedent) lead to bad, principle-violating uses of the moves that lead to unsatisfying and confusing cases. By removing the license to abstract, or removing the move entirely, you eliminate these confusing cases. The latter is preferable! If you want to lay a siege, you still have the (entirely reasonable) peripheral moves for battle.

You lose exactly nothing, and gain clarity and elegance, by removing the move, so why use it?

(Edit: I find it equally damning that the only thing one can say in defense of SBF is, "But I'd have to have an even bigger and more awesome fight, if I don't have a move to charge in guns-blazing all on my lonesome! Because NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH is that move, buddy.)

The problem with these moves as-written is not that they do not dictate responses - if you look carefully, you will observe that the same thing is true of moves in AW.

The problem is that these moves are decoupled from the fiction in a profound way. There is no text at all that reflects what the fictional events are when you successfully shut someone down, for instance. Instead of creating constraints in the fiction (compare seduce/manipulate) they are creating mechanical tags. It's less good.

D&D4e, obviously.

IME, when a game of AW is over, you want to play something dissimilar for a while, in much the same way that after you eat a lot of mac & cheese, you want to go have some sushi and seaweed salad. Contrast contrast contrast.

Oh for god's sake. If this were any other game, wouldn't you just make an on-the-spot ruling?

"Well, okay, so you've spent half a session incapacitating this guy and succeeding, and now you're going to assassinate him? Okay. Nice work. He is dead on the floor."

gunlugger objects

"I guess you can wake up while bleeding out of both sides of your head if you want to, but you're not going to make it to ...a resurrectionist... before you run out of alive. How much of a ruckus do you want to make on your way down?"