So, I had some severe problems with Monsterhearts that killed my enthusiasm for the game. This thread talks about it some. I never felt I got satisfactory responses to my questions, and I’m wondering if anybody else had similar concerns, or had good experiences with these sorts of situations without drifting the rules (although I’m probably planning on doing that). My main problem was that in the rules as written, and as explained by Joe, the basic moves just dance around the other PCs. I think I want some sort of mechanical help with taking the bottle from a PC other than: convince the MC that you took it, beat the PC unconscious, choose a skin that can make them give it to you. Anybody?
#monsterhearts
I’m also more and more confused when we talk about things in the game, and when I read the long example. Joe Mcdaldno, the long example says that Cassidy chooses to keep her cool while grabbing the bottle, meaning she does it without a struggle. Why does it mean that? What struggle? With Vanessa? An internal struggle? Hold steady doesn’t say anything about a struggle on a 7-9, just that one of two things happens: you keep your cool, or you get the condition terrified and you ask the MC a question, remove a condition, or carry one forward. So no matter what, she still grabbed the bottle, right?
Yep. She did. Remember 7-9 is a success with complications not a failure. I think a lot of people get so caught up in the conditions that they forget this.
How about the other part, if Vanessa is actively holding the bottle tightly? Then what happens?
Or, what if Cassidy hadn’t chosen to keep her cool, what is the struggle?
I read the thread you linked to and Joe’s answers made perfect sense to me conceptually. Monsterhearts is a fucked up game about highschool drama…why would you expect the moves to ever give you cut and dry what you want?
Caveat…I haven’t played it, so I’m just riffing on what my expectations for the design would be based on reading other’s experience.
But, it seems to me that if your goal is to recreate the never ending cycle of bullshit that is the social pit of despair of highschool…the LAST thing you’d want your game design to do is give concrete resolution in a nice easy to digest roll and done package.
As a fan of design that attempts to use mechanical chicanery to give players a glimpse of what their characters would be going through I rather like the notion of making the mechanical resolution just as messy as the real situation would be.
Here’s one tip I’ve learned from playing other *W games: Not all the time but far more than most other RPGs, the moves are about the reaction not the action.
Its less “What do you do” and roll to see if you do it
and more “What do you do” do it (or start doing it) and then asking the other person “What do you do in response to that” and then THAT’s the move you roll.
I think that’s consistant with Joe’s answers in the linked thread.
Dragging to the woods is not the move, its a gimmie. The move is to try and stop it*. Taking the bottle is not the move, its a gimmie. The move is to try and stop it*
*stop it or respond in some other way.
Actually, that’s the problem that I never really got the answer to. The move is not to try to stop it, since there’s no move for that either. As written, I say I drag you into the woods, you say you stop me, step 3: profit?
But “I stop you” isn’t a sufficient thing to say in any *W game. First you need the details of exactly what they’re doing…then you check to see if a move is triggered by that, if so you run the move, if not…shit just happens.
The way I think its supposed to work is like this:
A: I do this horrible thing to B.
MC: B what do you do.
B: I don’t want A to do that horrible thing to me, so I’m going to do this horrible thing to A.
MC: A, B is doing this horrible thing to you…is that going to get you to stop doing the horrible thing you’re doing to B?
A: No, I’m going to now be even more horrible.
and so on…you know…like stupid teenage highschoolers…
Remember, players don’t say “I want to do a thing” and then say “What move do I use for that?” That’ll fail in all *W games.
Instead players say “I want to do a thing”. The MC’s job is only to see if that thing actually hits a Move Trigger, or does not hit a Move Trigger. If it does not hit a Move Trigger…then there is no move and there are no dice rolled and there is no randomized “did I succeed or did I not succeed”.
Success and failure is based on “does it seem reasonable for that to work” if yes, it works and you ask the target what they do in response. If it doesn’t you ask questions that lead to something that either does seem reasonable or hits a Move Trigger.
Moves (even more so in MH it would seem than in other *W games) is less about arbitrating success / failure and more about how shit gets messier. But its never a matter of players avoiding using the moves…because Move Triggers get hit or don’t get hit based on described actions…whether they want to make the roll or not.
Yeah, I think that was where our game broke down. Two people wanted different things, and there were no rules for those things, other than if you say it, it happens. Also, it turned out to be incredibly easy to avoid using the moves, as long as you want to force somebody to do something instead of hurt them, and if you don’t care if they get turned on or shamed.
Yeah, you say you take me in the woods, and then I:
…say no, I punch you. Lash Out.
…say no, I break free and run away. Run Away.
It’s pretty cut and dry.
Lash out only works if you deal enough harm to kill me, there isn’t a part of lash out that includes “they stop doing it,” which was part of our problem.
Then they don’t stop doing it. Like, if you grab me and then I punch you in the throat. What do you do? “I still hold on”. I punch you again. Etc.
I’d worry more about what’s happening in the fiction, moment to moment. I think what you want to happen fictionally is covered in the rules, but it’s not covered the way you want mechanically.
In other words, there isn’t a move to make someone let go, but you can make them WANT to let go. Or not, depending on how the dice fall and stats and what not.
But it’s a choice to give up.
i think the key weakness in monsterhearts is that 10+ rolls on many basic moves don’t have direct fictional consequences. compare with apocalypse world.
I think that a lot of this is helping, the problem I always have with MH is that I have a lot more questions than answers, and also that a lot of the answers are “just roleplay that part.” Also, yes Adam, that’s exactly right. Also the 7-9, really. After I roll for a move, I know if I have a condition or a string or took harm, but I don’t know what happened.
For who? If you lash out physically, you lash out physically. That’s what happens. It’s its own consequence. The consequence, in your example, is “stop doing this thing or I’ll continue to hurt you”.
So basically this is the carrot and stick discussion from IAWA, but with no carrot and the weakest stick known to man?
it’s kind of like saying “i attack you!” in D&D
great, you’ve done 10 damage with your broadsword. and?
“And” is exactly the point.
Moves snowball. They don’t resolve.
I would really like to figure out these problems one by one, since I think that they’ve become muddied. First of all, two characters are in a conflict, one starts dragging the other into the woods. According to most of the things that have been said, that just happens, right? The other doesn’t want to go to there, so she drags the first away from the woods. Still cool?
I you might have an easier time having these discussions if you didn’t ask the questions using the short hand of intent. Forget intent. Intent doesn’t matter. What are these people doing?
“I drag her into the woods” can work as a thing if and only if everyone is already dialed in to *W mechanics and understands the shorthand. But if not…as in the problems you’re describing, than it won’t be.
Instead, at this point, the MC’s job is to ask “Ok, how do you do that?”
Similarly with “I don’t want to go into the woods”; “Ok how do you stop it”.
This is a conflict v task res problem.
As an MC, when the first player was like “I grab her and start dragging her towards the woods,” I’d probably turn to the second player and say “Okay, she’s about to grab you, what do you do?” Odds are good it’d be a Run Away move called for if she’s trying to avoid that fate. I mean, just because a player expresses an intention to try to do something doesn’t mean that the other players can’t interrupt if their characters would have a reasonable opportunity to do so.
Obviously fiction might take some precedence there: if the first character is acting from surprise or with vampire-speed or something, then yeah, grabbing and starting dragging might happen automatically, but either way trying to escape is pretty clearly triggering the run away move, not just “she drags the first away from the woods”.
Ah, see, that’s the problem I had, since everyone kept saying that dragging the person into the woods “just happens” or is “a gimme” which, when I hear it, means what the words mean.
Well, it’s a valid interpretation for an MC to make, but personally I’d definitely, assuming that the other PC could reasonably see it coming and have a chance to, y’know, NOT stand there and let it happen, do something else.
And this conversation is treating moves, in any AW game, as if they resolve conflicts.
In AW, if you Seize by Force, then you’ve seized it. Next roll, I Seize by Force. Now I’ve got it. You don’t the thing perma-style. You do it to do it and if you’ve done it, then it happens.
In MH, the move is the opposite of AW. Vincent was trying, I think, to avoid doing damage for the sake of damage. He tells a story in various places about watching Attila and how Attila didn’t want to kill people, they were just in the way of his goal. In route to Seizing something, he killed someone. That’s AW.
In MH, you’re an immature ass who doesn’t want to achieve anything through violence. In other words, YOU CAN’T ACHIEVE ANYTHING THROUGH VIOLENCE OTHER THAN PHYSICAL HARM. You can’t drag someone somewhere mechanically. It’s not how the genre, as Joe sees it, works.
You can only do two things:
– you can make them WANT to go, either through coercion or violence.
– or you can disable or kill them. And then raise them from the dead to be your sex zombie. Or whatever.
The “gimmies” isn’t that it automatically happens. Its that it automatically happens unless someone else stops it.
Unless something I say hits a “Move Trigger”, I don’t have to roll to make it happen. And if it does hit a Move Trigger the roll I make may still have less to say about it happening / not happening than it does about what additional complications get added.
It’s kind of the continuing evolution of the “oh no you fucking didn’t” school of design seen brilliantly in In A Wicked Age and Polaris and more subtly in Dogs.
Ah, yes, I thought that it might be similar to IAWA. Too bad.
IaWA = one of the most brilliant rpg designs ever. I will knife fight you for suggesting otherwise 😉
Eh. Even Baker doesn’t seem happy with IAWA.
I’ve heard and to an extent agree with some of Baker’s complaints about his own design, but IAWA still definitely has a lot of good bits in it and it’s a game worth playing on its own merits. Not sure if I totally agree with the monsterhearts comparison, though?
I mean, “oh no you fucking don’t” is a formal invocation of conflict in IAWA. “Oh no you fucking don’t” doesn’t get you anywhere in Monsterhearts: you have to back it up with action (action with a plausible chance of success, no less: no trying to, say, run away from the superfast werewolf with only your mortal deliciousness to propel you forward).
Hence “continuing evolution” rather than “same as”
And there’s nothing wrong with IaWA that a second edition that included the actual how to play advice posted to the Forge Lumpley forum wouldn’t fix. IaWA text as written was an experiment in rules writing that largely failed…every time I (and others I know) tried to play from the book it was meh at best. But once the secret knowledge was unlocked and we played Rules as Intended it produced 10 sessions of unadulterated awesome and one of the best campaigns I’ve ever been a part of.
(sidennote – Ralph Mazza has now made me want to play IaWA…)
Drew Harpunea I’m not sure what the current state of the Forge Archives is, but if you do, try to find the big IaWA post Vincent did. IIRC it had like 10 numbered things you needed to do / ways you needed to approach play to make it work. I didn’t save a link to it but perhaps Vincent Baker did.
I will look for it, I hope I can find it 🙂 I just bought the game. Interestingly I think it might have been the only one of Vincent’s games I didn’t already own.
Damn… I thought I had a decent understanding of things, and then I read this part about run away (emphasis mine):
In such a situation, it’s up to MC discretion whether or not you can roll to run away. Instead, the MC might judge that the other party can attempt to lash out physically before you have a chance to run away, thus holding you captive.
Does this mean that lashing out physically can dictate a fictional result? Is this only in this case, against running away? Or just because it makes sense in the fiction? I would understand it if it was just a chance for the aggressor to get a parting shot in, dealing harm as the runner ran, but it’s the “thus holding you captive” part that threw me.