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

Ebok, I don't recall, but I'm not shy about either (a) big and well-armed enemy gangs or (b) having a PC's gang demand actual leadership from the PC. You shouldn't be either.

Paul, as it happens, I'm pretty sure that it was a missed seize by force roll that took out the chopper. He chose to have his gang suffer little harm, because even though he was going to be at 12:00 either way, he was only willing to take a few casualties in his gang, not many casualties. I don't agree with you on "more forgiving," and neither would you if you'd done the math on those other hypotheticals like I asked you to.

So that's the role it played: it did its thing like it was supposed to, supporting and being supported by all the other battle moves and putting the chopper in a position to abandon his attack to save lives in his gang, or not. It flowed with the battle, it didn't tie my hands, and the chopper didn't feel like it let him off easy AT ALL.

-Vincent

Hmmm! I see. My games have very rarely featured gang-on-gang warfare (and particularly against well-armed and organized enemies), so that's not something I've particularly seen.

Your earlier answer, though, made it sound like this change was a big part of making battle flow; a necessary improvement. Now, from this example, it just sounds like it's... not harming anything. ("See? It's not too easy.")

If I read between the lines (correct me if I'm wrong!), it sounds like you're saying that the variety of battle moves and options have led you to want to simplify the use of Seize by Force (by not requiring the MC to think up a move on a miss), because there are other moves and options which can take place afterwards. Is that about right?

Is it also part of your intent to create more situations where the group will want to roll "Seize" a second time?

From your statement that the move still creates difficult choices (and not forgiving ones), I read that you're balancing the value of "take definite hold" (or, sometimes, "dismay") against the potential harm. Is that right? It seems to me that in the examples we've seen so far, it's all been a question of "do I let my men die for this goal, or not?" Is that the dynamic we're going for, here, and one that wouldn't exist with an MC hard move?

Sorry, Paul! Yes, you're wrong. It's not about simplifying seizing by force at all. It's about putting more of the move's consequences off into the snowball, like I've been saying, to create the opening for the other battle moves to lead and follow it. Explicitly follow on the miss, implicitly lead and follow on a hit.

I don't want to oversell it as a big part. It's just one piece of it. But it does play its own small, definite part in making battles flow.

-Vincent

I'm still pretty new to AW, but I think my personal "aha" moment with seize by force was when I started seeing the fourth option — "You impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy" — come into play more.

That's the one that lets you turn to the gang boss and go, "Now let's talk about the terms of your surrender," or scare off the raiders so much that they don't come sniffing around later when you're trying to sleep off your wounds, et cetera. Sometimes, it's pretty clutch for making that "definite and undeniable control" you just seized actually last longer than this scene.

Even in the world of "gunlugger math" (numbers just work different when you've got 2-armor and Rasputin), that's a huge reason to care about landing that 7+.

Vincent,

Ok, cool. So, then, that is the part I'm trying - and failing - to grasp.

What does that look like, in play? Can you give an example?

What does it mean to "put more of the move's consequences off into the snowball"?

Alex,

You're absolutely right that "dismay" is an important tool (assuming the MC understands its intent, of course)! I wouldn't downplay that by any means.

Has this conversation gone dead? That would be a shame, since it was really interesting.

I asked how the new miss result helps to move the action along or create space for moves to lead or follow. Are there any examples of this? How it feels or looks different in 1st Ed vs. 2nd Ed?

(Anyone can answer, not just Vincent!)

To understand this a little better, how would this kind of rewrite affect play, do you think?

* On a miss, choose one option you don't want your adversary to pick. They get the remaining three against you.

I've already discussed that particular example at length in this thread. You can read back if you wanna know how I see it effecting play.

(Very true, Ebok! You wrote about various outcomes and possibilities, at great length. I assumed you were writing about hypotheticals, not real play experience. In either case, how would you summarize your position/opinion/experience now?)

First off, I dont think such an explicit miss statement is warranted, a general one works far better. There will be times you dont want to simply up some numbers, it ties your hands when you could do thing that are much cooler. As this thread has demonstrated, you've essentially free reign for hitting up harder then usual moves after a miss already.

About half of the time in my games I've been willing to reverse the move on a hard roll, (though that means something different with the harm hacks in play). Those were the cases I described at the start. It works fine, so long as they know it's possibility ahead of time. I would never reverse 3 though, that's too much (also no variety), 2 works better and is more then enough to get the effect across. I am most likely to do this in situations where the player has a significant advantage, in order to dent any feeling of invulnerability. I'd never use it in a case where the player was disadvantaged already, at that point it's better to use tactical movements to divide, trip up, or raise the stakes instead of simply "deal more harm". There's not much else to it. It works.

I for one don't like the battle moves, any of them really. And discarded them completely even in the last few 2nd edition games I had run. We could do everything we ever wanted with a free wheeling seize or help, and I often allowed help to do more then just +1 or +2, (they could spend the bonus as hold be more strategic) So really I already had all the battle moves already mapped into play. Dunno, I'll have to play it again with Lumpleys suggestions and reconsider things.

I'm sorry if this feels like harping on an old topic, but my personal aha moment from reading this thread is this:

If a player rolls for a move, hits the roll, we resolve the hit, and then the player just looks at me asking what happens next... I make a move.

Even if it's immediately after the roll. Even if it was a hit.

After all, the principle is that when the players look at you, expecting you to say something, you choose a move and make it.


A misconception I've had for a long time (unaddressed and unarticulated) is that this can't happen. On a hit, the "hit effect" happens. On a miss, the "miss effect" happens. And on some moves, the "miss effect" includes getting an MC move in the face.

This ignores the time period immediately after a hit. What's the MC doing then? In my case, now that I look back on it, the answer has been "relying on mystical MC skills (i.e. not the game's rules) until the situation has changed a little and I start looking at my moves list again".

This model is (if I read this thread correctly) wrong. Some moves have a miss effect; if so, that happens, then if you turn to the MC they will make a move. Some moves only have "prepare for the worst" – which as a player sort of automatically improves looking at the MC saying "okay, so how fucked am I?" And that's what triggers the MC move.


Now, I'm not saying that the right thing to do is to throw the hardest moves you can think of at the players every time they hit a move. You still want to follow the dramatic rhythm you've got going. And more importantly, when I hit a roll as a player, I'm not likely to look at the MC and ask "so what happens?" Instead, I might go "okay that's great, so now that I'm in the car I wanna..."


I don't think I'm alone in this misconception. And by changing Seize by force from one that doesn't have a miss effect ("the miss effect is a hard move") to one that does ("so what, now we can't do a hard move on a failed Seize?") brought it to the forefront.


Does this seem reasonable?

Jonatan,

Yep.

-Vincent

Absolutely. We covered that a few pages back.

I was still hoping to dig a little deeper into the implications of designing miss clauses with different levels of "openness"; as far as I know (I could be wrong), this isn't something that's been discussed (at least not publicly) at all, and would be highly relevant to PbtA hackers.

There have long been certain assumptions made about move design among hackers, and it's interesting to see Vincent deviating from that somewhat.

So Paul, where are you now on the idea of putting more of a move's consequences off into the snowball? You weren't grasping it before, but do you have a better handle on it after a couple days' reflection?

-Vincent

I'm on board with the concept, yes. It makes a lot of sense now.

However, I'm not 100% sure I understand how this *particular* design decision does that. Hence my question about a hypothetical variation where the opponent gets choices against the PC, or any other similar variations.

Did you go through any other iterations when dealing with this move, or was it a straight jump from an open-ended miss to the current 2nd Ed version?

Thanks for sharing! It's been very interesting.


Edit: I see that in the Preview documents for 2nd Ed, you had this rule in place when there were three "versions" of Seize by Force (seize, defend, and assault). These were somewhat interestingly different, in that their design required two choices for a "full success" on any given move - choosing 1 meant that you got what you wanted, but not quite (you seize the thing, but not undamaged; you thwart the attackers, but they can regroup and attack again; you make it into the position, but you don't control it yet). All suggest the possibility of a pyrrhic victory or further fighting.

In what way is the final version an improvement on those moves? Or was it just a sacrifice made to streamline the rules?

As I recall, the preview versions muddied the move up. The variations overlapped in some fictional circumstances and left gaps in others, I wasn't satisfied with how they carved them up. The current version is cleaner, no sacrifice.

Do you see how the current version also suggests the possibility of a pyrrhic victory or further fighting?

-Vincent