Awesome! I haven't had a chance to play this, so if you use, let me know how it goes. My only thought on your move is that I'm a big fan of "on a 10, pick 3 (or 2), on a 7-9 pick 1" type of moves, as that means the situation is always challenging (not boring), but the player gets a say in how it goes well. So I'd probably flip it around where you pick 3 or 1 and make it stuff like "it's not a crap location" and "it's not inhabited" and such. Unless you're planning on this snowballing into the regular scavenging roll.

So, this topic is largely continued from "The Problem(s) With In a Wicked Age" but a) the most recent post to that topic seems to be from a spam bot, and b) I wanted to touch on a wider scale here. I wasn't positive which forum this should go in, so please move it somewhere more appropriate if this is off topic. But enough introduction:

Vincent has mentioned that "In a Wicked Age" suffers from the resolution mechanic not having enough connection to the fictional events of the conflict. You *can* go blow by blow and you *should*, but you don't *have to*. Dogs and Apocalypse World both do pretty good at this in a couple different ways, as Vincent has talked about elsewhere: Dogs conflicts plain don't work if you don't describe your raise actions, because it leaves the other side with nothing to respond to, and AW roots the moves in concrete fictional cues, and then has mostly fictional consequences that are spelled out rather than straight mechanical consequences.

So, my question is: what are some other games that *succeed* in tightly linking the fiction to the resolution (and other) mechanics, and how do they do it? Also, if anyone wants to delve deeper into how AW does it, I'd love to hear that too. I'm starting to get a rough idea for how this works, but am having trouble visualizing what it looks like other than the specific examples of moves and DiTV resolution.

This sounds really cool! How realistic are you going for? Cos I feel like if you go with playbooks, your options will sort of be limited to "hunter" and "gatherer", since specialization was not the name of the game in primitive groups. You could always add in a "chief" and a "shaman" type, and the gender-based playbooks in "Sagas of the Icelanders" might have some useful material.

I think the focus on tools is really sweet, though.

As to the not using a move all the time, I've noticed that the moves list is pretty darn good a covering "what you do when you GM AW", so even though I often don't look at the list and go "ah yes, this is the move I'm doing", when that's the case I almost always am able to look back and go "oh, well I suppose that was ____ move".

Yeah, I didn't figure you meant "narration authority", but as I started trying to address what you *were* talking about, I realized that no examples came directly to mind, so I tried to get my brain going by coming at it sideways-like.

At any rate, I haven't yet played Mouse Guard either, just given a read through, but if my understanding of the rules and some of the actual play reports I've read is correct, then basically a session has a "GM's Turn" and a "Players' Turn". The GM's turn is the actual mission, and the dialogue is structured pretty traditionally with the GM setting scenes, describing dangers and challenges, and asking the players what they do and otherwise prompting them as necessary.

The Players' Turn, on the other hand, is the sort of end of session/between mission downtime. The players are explicitly instructed to describe their own undertakings to heal, train, and other "taking care of business" actions. The number of actions you get is affected by checks you earned during the mission and goes round robin between the players. In this phase, the players frame scenes (with some help from the GM if they want it) describe what they're up to, and call on the GM to oppose any tests they make for things like training. Again, this is just from my remembering what I've read through once, my rulebook is at home in another state.

I also haven't played Archipelago yet, but it's pretty exciting to me. Thinking about it some more, I believe that even more significant to the "flow of conversation" thing you're talking about than the round robin scene framing might be the ritual phrases. If you're not familiar, they're things like "That might not be so easy. . .", "Try another way", and a few others. What it seems like they do (anybody more familiar with the game, please correct any deficiencies I put forth) is to give specific permission to do things that people collaborating creatively will do - interrupt to offer better versions, ask for more detail on something that seems cool or unclear, and so forth. I feel like that will have a more subtle but important impact on the way the player to player interactions go than the more "story significant" rules that have each player take turns framing a scene and controlling the extras.

I think my somewhat glib answer would be as you alluded that there *are* moves for this, they're just the MC's instead of the players' :) I feel like the "pull play along" can be accomplished pretty well by responding with MC moves guided by the principles, being part of a prepped front/threat, or whatever.

On the other hand, it would be a way to a) emphasize sharp as a representation of what your character knows, rather than just relying on what makes stuff not-boring, which may be a direction you want to go, and b) to prod the MC into doing more than "Oh, well, they're, um, salty, and flat, and they're over there".

I'd view the "b)" up there as potentially more useful, but perhaps not necessary for everyone. I'd see that as a way to prompt the MC "hey, I care about this thing enough to want more than what you're giving me". I'm not sure that's necessary (again, I think the principles/agenda/moves point the MC towards figuring out what players want more of and delivering in interesting and unexpected ways) but it would be explicit.

Oh, and I just realized that the opportunity to give the MC permission to spread falsehoods on a miss might be pretty awesome, so I lied, I think that's probably the most interesting/valuable aspect of a move like that :)

This is a concept I've had in mind as well! Some approaches to it that I've seen so far include:

* Discussion of "tiers" in Vincent and John Harper's Knife and Candle hack (will probably have to wait for it to be published to see what comes of that, and using it in your own hacks might be less permissive since it will be a licensed game). In this approach, at least in what's been discussed publicly upping a stat to +4 resets it to +1, but you're in a new tier. When acting against people on the same tier, no problem, it's the same. Acting against people or things on a lower tier, you either just succeed flat out, or else anything on a 10+ counts as a 12+ or some other "wow, great success!" way of doing it. When acting against a higher tier, you need a 10+ for a usual 7-9 result and a 12+ for a normal full success

* John Harper's Eye of Chaos has a peripheral move where you get +1 when contending with something beneath you, -1 for out of your league, and -2 for beyond the pale. This might be where the 'tiered' thing ended up going since he's admitted that Eye of Chaos has some 'test' stuff for Knife and Candle

* In "Beneath a More Auspicious Star" (basically a Romance of the Three Kingdoms hack) Stuart Chaplin talks about personal scale and strategic scale moves. I think his going idea is that some moves work on both scales, but have different effects depending on the scope of your conflict. This is meant to capture the whole 'one guy leveling armies' thing from RoT3K

* My own hack, "A Song of Ice and Fire" (yay plugs!) takes the approach you suggest of going totally loco with the gang scaling and adding some special caveats, like a group of men on horseback fighting a group of men on foot counting as one size bigger. Basically you have multiple tiers of "small, medium, large". On the personal scale it goes from a few guys, to 10-12 guys to 15-20 guys, say, then on the unit scale it goes from 20-30 guys to 40-50 guys to 60-70 guys, and then on the army scale, et cetera et cetera. When a group from a larger bracket acts against a smaller tier group (like an army-scale group against a unit scale or personal scale group, for example) they just win. I haven't tweaked or playtested this yet, and it's meant to be more gritty than epic, so it probably won't suit your needs

So, that's all that I can think of off the top of my head for scale stuff, but if you poke around a little (especially in the hack forums and blood and guts) you'll probably find some other interesting stuff.