Advancing basic moves

Yeah, we already had that thread, Daniel. Looking back from nowaday's perspective, we overplayed it, although the speed of advancement didn't match the pace of our game.

Which may (partially) account for my dislike of opening all seven moves with only two advances. It's too fast to really explore the implications of having only those particular three open.

Yeah, we already had that thread, Daniel.

Anyone got a link to that discussion? 

Advanced moves have just come into play in our tenth session and I'd like to see how other people have handled them.

Sure, it's over here. The thread is mostly about the 12+ manipulate result, which (to add some context to my contribution in that thread) used to be something you could only achieve by using an Unbidden Future advance -- like changing a playbook, for example.

I am still curious why this change was made, to be honest, and I'd love to hear Vincent's thought process on that particular shift. But I don't think I'm going to start a whole new thread about it, since there was already that one.

(Johnstone I will just have to ask you in person what you mean by 'overplayed', since I don't get it.)

I'm still thinking about "overplayed" and what that could imply.  Looking over the advanced moves and viewing them as being roughly comparable in scope, I think I see what that might mean. Advanced Act Under Fire, Seduce/Manipulate, and Open Your Brain seem particularly susceptible to being treated like superpowers.

Vincent, here's a thing I just thought of: are there examples in the book of players rolling 12+ results with advanced moves?  Maybe that's part of what's messing people up, not having as much to go on in this case.

A couple more specific questions:

On advanced Seize, you say "Taking doubly definite hold of it would mean, I dunno, marking it as the character's in some profound existential way."  And both the abstractness of that and the "I dunno" part make it sound like a mystical, intuitive thing, no so concrete.  Is that because it's so context-specific, depending on what you're seizing?

The other place I get confused is on advanced Seduce/Manipulate, where at the end you say "By now the players are bone weary from knowing that every single NPC is, at her heart, only a potential threat to them. Now, this one person, they can breathe." And that's really powerful, evocative language, but it only seems to describe the first time a character gains an Ally. But if they have Hot+3 and the advanced move, it could happen once a session or even multiple times in the same session.

The examples I gave in the other thread:

Our PCs are infiltrating an enemy compound. I've brought some NPCs along, partly because I want to transfer their loyalty from my boss to me so they can be part of my gang when/if I take that advance.

After one of the heavies gets killed, my PC Hellish puts the other one, Pierre, on point. He balks and I tell him who's boss. I get a 12+, he becomes my ally.

At the end of the line, another PC, Mule is trying to diffuse the tension between him/her/it and another NPC, Fauna. Mule gets a 12+, and Fauna becomes an ally.

So, in these situations, the MC can't just kill these characters off-hand. If the PCs put them in danger, they can die as a consequence, but not otherwise. That's how I interpreted the ally tag, anyway.

However, later on, the two of us (PCs only) have been captured by Parcher. I'm trying to set up my Eye on the Door move through some elaborate fiction, while Mule threatens Parcher with the retribution of my boss Cobra. So, in this case, if he rolls a 12+, Parcher becomes an ally? This dude who wants to poison us becomes an ally because dude threatens him with somebody else's wrath? I don't see it, in this case.

These are what Vincent's comments made me think of. I'd call them overplayed. The NPCs becoming allies in each of these situations doesn't feel right because rolling to manipulate in each case was inappropriate (in my opinion).

Daniel, the rules haven't changed. You still can get 12+ results only if youve advanced the move, which you can only do as an ungiven future improvement.

In our local games, we've had profound, game-shaking results from some 12+ hits.

We've also had cool, but totally normal results from some 12+ hits.

Guess which one gets talked about more?

I think you're right about "overplayed," Vincent. But! Even so, I am still crazy, because I really like one advanced move per improvement. :) I also really like the sound of "once advanced, advanced for all," though. That's REALLY interesting.

Daniel, the rules haven't changed. You still can get 12+ results only if youve advanced the move, which you can only do as an ungiven future improvement.

Well, the access to the effect may not have changed, but its cost has gone down in terms of advances and most importantly the control over the effect's target has obviously changed dramatically.

Are you saying that you don't think there's an important difference between 'you can choose one NPC to become your ally, and nobody else ever becomes your ally' and 'sometimes when you are manipulating an NPC they will become your ally, and so your primary means of control over who might become an ally is the frequency with which you manipulate them'? I mean those seem very different to me -- and they felt very, very different in play. Both in terms of not being able to proactively choose AND in terms of having the choice made for me unexpectedly.

What are you talking about? The cost has gone down since when? From what to what?

What are you talking about? The cost has gone down since when? From what to what?

I think he's saying that in the playtest rules a PC had to spend an ungiven future advance to get a single ally, while now they can spend an ungiven future advance to advance Manipulate and get as many allies as they want to roll for.  

So, in essence, the "cost", in ungiven future advances, has gone "down".

Yeah, Daniel's under the impression that the original rule was: "Spend an advance, pick an NPC, they become an ally," and he's been pining after it ever since that first game.

I remember discussing this, way back when, but it's not actually in the playtest rules we used (not that I bothered to read that section when I was running it or anything).

If that was a playtest rule, it was a short-lived one! I don't remember it.

I'm pretty sure that you guys should just write the custom move you want and go forward with happy hearts!

I remember discussing this, way back when, but it's not actually in the playtest rules we used (not that I bothered to read that section when I was running it or anything).

Oh weird. I am going to have to review the rules we were playing from to see where I got that impression, in that case. Because I really don't think that's something I would have made up out of thin air -- but then again, you never know!

But yeah, as soon as I can think of another thing for the 12+ manipulate to do, I will be 'reverting' (to the imaginary rules in my head, maybe!) future games.