2nd Edition and Seize by Force (and similar moves)

Vincent,

Yes! Absolutely. Makes total sense.

Of course, 2nd Edition has so many "peripheral moves" that it seems to be a much more "visible" issue.

If it helps to understand where I'm coming from, I'm pretty sure that I never (or almost never) saw any peripheral moves used in all my experience of playing AW. (And playbook moves rarely have misses specified, except for moves which really need them for clarity.) That experience may be colouring my attitude here.

Please go back and check again. Every single playbook move that calls for a roll, says what happens on a miss. Without a single exception.

Right?

-Vincent

Oh, man, we used to use the 1st Edition peripheral battle and barter moves all the damn time. I actually miss the old clock-based battle structure a little bit. But given that our current campaign is decidedly "Mad Max" in flavor, we've been using a shitload of the new peripheral moves too. I'm a big fan of the vehicle and subterfuge moves, for instance. And while in 1st Edition you could easily handle most of that stuff well under the auspices of "doing something under fire," I think the new peripheral moves are interesting in that they both give the players some inspiration or ideas of what's possible (and what can go wrong), while also giving MCs a framework for how to narrate stuff.

Vincent,

Well, I'll be! You're absolutely right, of course.

I guess I've been playing too many other AW-based games (e.g. Monsterhearts), which tend to be written the way I described.

So, then, what makes basic moves special, and why did you make the decision to make Seize by Force function in this rather different way?

Good!

The basic moves have to work across contexts. You can act under fire, for instance, in battle, in the bedroom, trying to fix a car, trying to sneak away without causing any problems for anybody, trying to wait for a signal before you move. They can specify what happens on a hit, because those are the effects you're hoping to introduce into play, but they can't specify the miss because they can't presume the context. Imagine if acting under fire said "on a miss, you take harm as established," for instance. Now it only works when there's harm established, not when you're in the bedroom and not when you're waiting for a signal and getting impatient to move.

The non-basic moves, all of them, contrariwise, have to specify or create the context in which they work. One of the ways they do this is by specifying misses. Another is by specifying who can make them (in the case of the character moves) and/or where you have to be to make them (in the case of the peripheral moves) and/or what has to be going on for you to make them (in the case of the battle moves). They have to do this because otherwise they would be basic moves: whoevs would be able to do them whenevs.

In the 1st Edition, the battle moves were specifically flagged as "optional," meaning that they were presumed out of play unless you specifically chose to bring them in. Seizing by force was the basic move alternative to the whole set of battle moves. In the 2nd Edition, though, the battle moves are only the normal amount optional: presumed in play whenever you want to use one. This is why "do battle" appears on the 2nd Ed playbooks under hard. Doing battle, not seizing by force, is now the basic move.

With me so far?

-Vincent

Vincent,

Absolutely! With you 100%.

(Although saying that "doing battle" is a basic move seems a little bit like a cop-out. But that's no biggie!)

It's also interesting that the Augury move doesn't *really* have a miss clause. (That's one of the details which convinced me peripheral moves didn't have specific miss clauses, in fact! I was wrong, of course.)

Uh oh, Paul. You're not exactly filling me with confidence here!

I'm going to ask you to show me that you've followed what I'm saying. Please limit yourself to a sentence or two: what does augury's miss effect specify about the context in which augury works?

-Vincent

If you're saying that the miss effect is a way to specify the context for the move itself - the presence of the psychic "antenna", and its vulnerability to the possible blowback of a failed Augury move - while also constraining *what a miss for that move can look like* by association, then I'm totally with you.

Cool.

In 2nd Ed, seizing by force has a specific context. It's prescriptive and descriptive: you can only seize by force in battle; if you seize by force, that's great, now you're in battle. Since it has a specific context, the move no longer needs to work across contexts, so it's no longer a basic move and now it gets a miss effect. Its miss effect plays its part in creating what "in battle" means, along with all the other battle moves, the rules for exchanging harm, and a bunch of other stuff.

So now. You can always resolve a battle with a single seize by force move, treating seizing by force as the basic move it was in 1st Ed. The move is written now with the presumption that you won't always do that, but in fact you can do it whenever you want, including always. That's no problem by the rules and I think we've been over that.

Instead, can you imagine situations where, as the player or as the MC, resolving the battle with the single move feels kind of abrupt, or else feels kind of overreaching, or else doesn't give you the precise outcome you hope for, so you WANT to:
- Turn the tables before seizing by force?
- Hunt prey after seizing by force?
- Escape a hunter after seizing by force?
- Outdistance another vehicle before seizing by force?
- Board another vehicle before seizing by force?
- Etc?

-Vincent

Vincent,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to engage in this conversation. It's starting to get really interesting, and I'm really glad it's happening. For me, at least, this has been very fruitful.

I'm with your last post here, 100%. Makes total sense to me. Here was me earlier (a page ago):

"I'm not sure how changing the way its miss clause operates changes how other moves might lead into a Seize by Force. What about following?"

So, yes, I'm nodding along.

Edited to add, some idle musing: One of the things that occurs to me is that the nature of open-ended misses, in AW, is part of how the general stakes of play are set and manipulated. For instance, more "difficult" or threatening challenges are often represented not by a penalty to a roll, but by the scope of potential "miss" results.

As a group playing AW, we can use that consideration to pick appropriate "scales" for the moves. In particular, this is really important for "open your brain", which, otherwise, would be very difficult to "scale" - if the move were assigned a predictable miss result like "suffer 1-harm", a group could easily get into arguments about what is possible to accomplish with that move and what is not, since, both strategically and dramatically, we need to maintain balance with the scope of that miss result.

A move with a specified miss clause, therefore, implies things about the move's scope.

I always found the open-ended miss useful with "Seize by Force", since it can be rather abstract in nature. Sometimes the move can be "zoomed in" or "zoomed out" to focus on or to expand the action happening. A player has incentives to act on a smaller scale, however, since they don't always want to risk larger-scale fallout from a missed roll. I'm not sure what they dynamic will be like now, however, with a 'set' miss attached to the move.

Anyway, you (Vincent) seem to be headed somewhere, so please carry on. I'm musing to myself here; not trying to derail your train of thought.

So, yes, exactly: seizing by force now has a more concrete, less abstract range of possible outcomes, explicitly on the miss, implicitly on the hits. But the broad range of possible outcomes still exists, in battle, not in the single move. Each of the battle moves has narrower possible outcomes individually, but when you consider how they might organically combine, you don't lose any of the possible scaling, any of the possible zooming.

You trade away the range of outcomes in the single move, and in return you get, not the identical range of outcomes, but as broad a range, embedded in a broader range and diversity of possible battles. Plus better pacing.

That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. I wouldn't claim that it works perfectly and universally, because who knows. But from all I've heard, and from my own play, it works very well overall. The new battle moves get a million times more enthusiastic play than the old ones ever did, which means that seizing by force is doing its new job of leading people enthusiastically into them.

That's where I was going!

-Vincent

Very interesting, Vincent!

How do you see things pan out differently in your games because of this? Can you give an example? (I'm not looking for high detail; just a sense of what you observed in players which made you think the change might improve the game, and how you saw it happen or pan out - if you did.)

Like, one time the angel used his infirmary rig as bait for the raiders, but they weren't drawn all the way into the ambush, so the chopper chose to break cover and expose his gang in open terrain to attack the raiders. Despite the angel calling out warnings and the quarantine laying down substantial fire from the top of the angel's rig, the raiders smashed into the chopper's gang, scattering them and inflicting no little carnage. The chopper had gone into the fight already wounded and his life was made untenable, but his bikemate - I forget why, but all the chopper's gang doubled up on their bikes - got him back to the angel's rig. The angel got his rig out of there in time, and the survivors of the chopper's gang filtered back into the hardhold over the next day. The angel brought the chopper back with a prosthetic jaw.

It was a big complicated battle in which everyone got to participate fully, not just by rolling+hx to help. It had big complicated consequences. The battle moves suggested avenues of action and then followed through on the ones people chose. They kept the non-combat character, the angel, fully engaged; in fact it was his show. Compared to the old battle moves, they were concrete and effortless. Compared to just having the chopper roll to seize by force with help from the angel and the quarantine, it was satisfying, cinematic, and dramatically paced.

-Vincent

Do you happen to recall the difference in size for the Chopper's gang and the raiders? I'm having a hard time figuring these numbers adding up to that sort of dynamism. In my experience, its rare that a single source of NPCs threatens the full player group together without having a significant advantage. In this case, it sounds like bait got the gang into play, and the charge got the chopper downed because... he lead from the front rather then use his hard to send his gang instead with the exact same numbers...

Vincent,

Thanks! Great example.

I have little doubt that the new formulation of battle moves is helping with that kind of situation - there are a variety of ways to set up and interact with a battle situation, which is really nice. (I won't comment on Ebok's questions, although I wonder the same, because my games have seen almost no gang-on-gang battles.)

What I'm missing, though, is how the miss clause of the Seize by Force move played a role in all of that. Did the lack of open-endedness, or its more forgiving nature, or something else, somehow help that situation play out as you describe?

I can certainly see how the variety of moves help to lead *into* the battle nicely, but I'm less sure about how the less open-ended miss result changes the dynamic of play. That's what I was hoping to get out of this thread in the first place!