Praying

For some reason I don't now recall, I thought that the 7-9 result was really funny and appropriate as is.

On 7-9, the gods tell you whether they will or will not accept your offering. If they accept it, they also reveal to you what you might do.

-Vincent

I like it how it is I wouldn't change it. 7-9- god ambivalence and a maybe almost.  I sure we'll do it type of thing.  It would be the freakiest result to get I believe and would make for great play at is.  Because now a player has to risk on trusting the gods.  I wouldn't' change it.

For some reason I don't now recall, I thought that the 7-9 result was really funny and appropriate as is.

On 7-9, the gods tell you whether they will or will not accept your offering. If they accept it, they also reveal to you what you might do.

-Vincent

We had a bit of a discussion about it since he 7-9 wasn't clear at first. But then I realised that when the gods accept your offering they also help you in some way. Revealing the way in some shape or form.
A bita of guiding on when to accept or not would be helpful though. I went with no when the DH sacrificed something because I wanted to make clear that so etching terrible was coming and that the dragon wanted more destructive things from her herald.

I'm not a fan.  It basically reads like: You get the 10+ result, or the miss result, MC's choice.  I think that makes "Weird" pretty meaningless for most people, given that there are no other basic moves tied to it.

What about making the 7-9 result as the 10+, but also something worse as per a miss?  They gods you prayed to accept your offering, but the gods you did not pray to are jealous.

I say instead treat 7-9 as is.  7-9 The gods may or may not approve you don't know.  That's seriously awesome.   Ambivalence is great.  So maybe the MC does decide to answer or maybe they don't.  You don't know you have to make your own decisions which is the scariest and trues belief of faith sometimes.  Take for example real history with king Clovis I he prayed to god to win a battle, and he would convert to Christianity if he did.  Yet God didn't give him a sign he just kept fighting and got a second wind and won the battle.  He didn't know though.  Imagine that happening in the game.   You pray you get a 7-9 and you just don't know.  Well now what should happen, should the character risk it or not. that's a wonderful scene in game, and can make for beautiful decision making with fear and a lack of faith driving issues, however maybe the god did decide to help and in the end they do get the bonus faith is suddenly reclaimed and that leap of faith is there.  I think keeping it the way it is great.  Changing it to be too rules descriptive would take away from this decision making.

I'd be tempted to run it so on a 7-9 the gods demand some greater sacrifice or service. If you give it to them then treat your result as a 10+. If you don't, you miss.

It's basically the same because the capricious gods can demand whatever arbitrary and unreasonable thing they want, from "say please" to "your kingdom", but it involves the player more in the middle ground between those two extremes.

Don't forget, that on 10+ gods REVEAL you, how make it come to pass, they do not HELP you.
I think it looks like this:
Jason, outlaw heir: - O mighty Athene, how do I get back the throne of my father this bastard Pelias usurped?
I offer thee this mighty boar's heart!

10+: Athene the Wise sends you a dream of a land far away. 'There you see the wondrous Golden Fleece is, get it, present it in your father's throne room, and throne will become yours"
(see that she does not help Jason GET the Fleece - he's the PC, after all. This is just info.
7-9, MC sees sacrifice as acceptable: "The owl-eyed Athena accepts your sacrifice, but offers no direct guidance". This might be phrased better in play, but idea is - Jason KNOWS that goddess ACCEPTED his sacrifice, so she "silently approves". Also, in certain cases, like in this one, I believe other people can tell if sacrifice was accepted or not. This does not become direct mechanical effect, but believe me, Argonauts would rather have Athene approving their quest, then not
7-9, MC sees sacrifice as unacceptable. Here there're variations. Maybe she just disapproves:"Quiet is the temple, and fires do not consume the boar's heart. Seems, that Athene is not on your side with this". So Athene disapproves, but does not directly punish Jason - he might still try on with his quest (but now we know, that Athene disapproves, and this is interesting - do others disapprove as well? Is there a feud between her and some other god?), he might try to remove Pelias by military might (which is realm of Ares, always jelous of his sister goddess, so trying to sway him this way might work), or do something else
OR, as others seem to play in playtest threads, maybe she disapproves of sacrifice, and asks for something more. This is around the lines of "make them pay" MC move.
OR
"Show them evidence of what's coming" - vision of darkness coming to the area, on the lines of "your way of thinking is wrong, that's no time for feuds, THIS will consume everyone if you're not united"/
OR
...

I like Guns_n_Droids take, but I think more guidance might be helpful, because I was reading it the way arscott did: " You get the 10+ result, or the miss result, MC's choice.  I think that makes "Weird" pretty meaningless for most people, given that there are no other basic moves tied to it."

For Guns_n_Droids' take to make sense, we have to believe that whether a god favors your doings or not has some kind of ongoing ficitional effect. If "the Argonauts would far rather have Athena on their side" but the result of the prayer isn't public and the players know full well that the game's fiction does not generally involve the gods directly influencing events, but only showing up in the Pray move, then the PC may be cowed by the gods' refusal of the sacrifice but it's not going to feel very significant to the player.

While I think kkbrick's point about ambivalence and not knowing is *fictionally* interesting (that is, if this were a book, not a game), I am a little dubious about how it translates into the fiction. A brilliance of AW's design is that when you roll the dice, you get immediate feedback about the future -- the details are in the MC's hands, but you know immediately if it's win, conflicted win, or fail, and that gives what happens next emotional backbone and makes you care about the rolls and stats. "Not knowing" is kind of a default state -- "the MC will tell you later" -- in context I think it's kind of deflating, and threatens to put us back in participationist "storyteller" mode, with the players waiting passively to see what the GM comes up with. For Clovis, it was terrifying to go into battle without knowing if he had God's will behind him, and if we can evoke that terror in the fiction, that would be awesome. But I think the mechanics of "I roll; okay, 7-9, so I don't know what will happen" will, given that it's players sitting around a table, not evoke that terror; rather, it'll be like "well I guess finding out what will happen is just deferred to when I make my go into battle roll... why did I bother rolling this again?"