Custom Move for creating NPC-PC-NPC triangles.

As much as delving and monster slaying and derring-do is all the rage in Dungeon World  (and rightly so), sometimes players want to get embroiled in the town, in the city, in some machinations a bit closer to home. Sometimes they need something you can't get in the dungeon: Love, respect, control, safety. Loved ones get involved, folks you know, hate or revere. Tangled webs get woven.

Harnessing my players love of collaborative story telling and also firmly embracing the principle of playing to see what happens, I've been tinkering on the following move:

When you want to introduce a new NPC to get a specific need, and it isn’t obvious you can just do that, tell us what you want from them. Roll + CHA

On a 10+ Choose 3, on a 7-9 choose 1:
*Introduce the NPC: name them and describe three distinct details about them
*They have what you want
*Say where and when you encounter them
*Choose a bond you have with another PC (on your sheet or theirs) - The NPC is actively your ally in this bond, not theirs
*You are not in their debt

An option not chosen is decided by the GM, whom will most likely ask many questions of you and the other players.
In their debt means you owe them something significant: Your life, vast sums of treasure, your faith, your magical power, your soul.....

Notes: I have been playing around with this sort of move for a while in our games, mainly inspired by Burning Wheel’s Circles mechanic and the fun it can bring via the enmity clause. Players love authorial control, but I wanted to design a move that was less ‘open’ in scope and more narratively targeted than just Defy Danger using CHA.

This got me thinking about a mechanical way of creating PC-NPC-PC triangles in DW since the players are more often than not ‘a unified party’. Bonds are already narratively established, so why not add the NPC straight into the bond?

It seems to be working well so far :)

I like that! I think I'll try it in my post-Christmas gaming.

As you may have noticed, I've been thinking and playing around with the whole concept of making adversity in DW personal to the players. Of making their choices squirmy, of making monsters more human. Identifying flags and allowing players to establish their own advanced fuckery through the PC-NPC-PC triangle move concept has helped, but I was re-reading Thor's old blog posts
http://urdwell.blogspot.com/search/label/Technique
and something struck me about group collaboration on character adversity based on player Beliefs (from Burning Wheel).

To identify a conflict that resides within a character through the conversation of play and try to take that conflict, and show it with an obligation to a NPC relationship. The GM should encourage the player of the character to look for an external factor to represent the obligation; a creed, an oath, a membership to an organisation, allegiance, a moral standpoint, a burning desire...

Once the group has that, they can start adding weight to the obligations. They can use their own moves and scenes and characters to push the player's buttons for his character. You are fans of the characters right? So put their obligations in jeopardy. Force the players to make difficult narrative (moral) decisions as a result of moves (rather than just mechanical disadvantage/advantage).  Provide antagonism to what they care about, but give them more than just binary options for success/failure. Yes you can have what you want, but......

Treat relationships / contacts / memberships / priviledges as resources, they give the characters (and the players) more story options right? So as a GM move, deplete their (relationship) resources whilst seeking to give advantage the other players! The nature of their NPC-PC-NPC relationships will have to change.

The group should also play up the 'human' side of their antagonists (monsters). Show that they have their own obligations to family, tribe, rulers, to their kin; the 'normal' things they do. And juxtapose it with scenes of the moral dilemma as they threaten a Player Character's obligation (whatever that is).

All this works best when the entire group is on board to make this stuff happen; to bring that character or whatever into center stage whenever appropriate.

So what I've been doing is (through asking lots of provocative questions) is seeing what the players really care about and putting the characters in adversarial positions where one desired outcome is dangled in front of them at the expense of another character's. We all then work as a group to share in the story telling that come out of these difficult choices and see just where our Dungeon World goes.