So sometimes, a hard move should like, really give it to the player.

So sometimes, a hard move should like, really give it to the player.

So sometimes, a hard move should like, really give it to the player. The MC should be looking to resolve the conflict, to end it in one way or another, swiftly and directly. But sometimes, a hard move is just an escalation. 

I’ve got to remember that.

20 thoughts on “So sometimes, a hard move should like, really give it to the player.”

  1. I know your feeling about the matter, but I think that’s what seize by force is for.  It will often end conflicts by either dishing out so much harm somebody is dead, unconscious  or decides it’s not worth it, or the reason for the conflict has been seized so strongly that the conflict has been won.

  3. Failures, really bad ones, are always a good time to put the boot in.

    It can be good to give a “reprieve” and “just” foreshadow some horrible future badness.

  5. More than once the worst thing I could think of to do to the player on a “failure” was let them succeed anyway, under my terms.

    Like, once a character wanted to jack another character up against the walls in Monsterhearts, failed her roll. So I said “Okay, you slam him against the lockers, a bit harder than you intended. He’s out, and bleeding from his head kind of heavily, what do you do?”

  6. Ugh. The OP is badly worded. I’m talking about circling conflict v driving to end conflict. Both are good. But I tend to always drive to resolution. It’s bad pacing.

  7. Well, keep in mind, neither “keep conflicts long” nor “keep conflicts short” are in your principles or agenda. What hard move seems interesting? What hard move flows logically from the fiction?

  8. Eh. I’m looking at the result of two years of AW MCing now. 

    If I run AW “as is”, I now understand that six sessions is the max I can go because I make my moves too hard; there’s nothing left. I’m MCing perfectly “by the book”, but I slow down and build drama, it’s better. As you said, there’s nothing in there about how hard to push. But there are scales of irrevocable moves to make from any one moment of fiction, from this NPC doesn’t trust you anymore to this NPC shoots you to this NPC heads down to the bunker and activates the nuclear bomb he knows is down there and then skips out of town.

    I lean a little too hard. It’s more better/interesting when I use hard moves to escalate conflict incrementally then to rush to resolve conflict. It’s not a contradiction of the principles or agenda; it’s a corollary on “make their lives interesting” that works for me. Just as you can add in custom moves, you can add in things to the principles or agenda that make the game work better for you or your group at the table.

  9. Yeah, definitely. You don’t even need to add anything, really. Failure says “make as hard a move as you like”, not “make as hard a move as you can justify”.

  10. Ben Wray, that’s a really key line.

    Chris Mitchell, I can occasionally lean the other way, and let my players get lulled into a false sense of security because their main problems are interpersonal or technological. Then when I hit them with raiders and illness and maelstrom, they freak out! It’s fun 🙂

  12. Relationship maps could be helpful in this. If you have a relationship map of the PCs and NPCs in that holding, you might be able to tug on interesting strings inside the hold for more subtle troubles, leaving you some room. Maybe I’ll hunt up and post my relationship maps thread form the AW forums and cross-post them.

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