So here’s a little idea I had over in the comments of a post in DW community.
“Make your move, but never speak its name” or some variation of it is a pretty common MC rule in most *W games. What if it were a PC rule, too? What if it was against the rules to say “Go Aggro” or “Turn Someone On” or whatever, and you just had to describe what you were doing in sufficient detail to make it completely unambiguous before you picked up the dice?
I dig the idea, but I’m curious what you all think.
I don’t “make” people do it, but like the book says, any time someone says “I Go Aggro”, I say “Awesome, how do you do that?”. Same with any move.
Yeah. I just think that actually making the naming of the moves “forbidden” might streamline things a bit, skipping the “I (move name).” “Okay, how do you do that?” “Oh, (awesome description)” and go straight to “I (awesome description)”.
I have more of a problem with this with players from a Forth Ed backgrounds.
It lessens in time on its own. To me, banning the move’s name calls too much attention to them, if that makes sense. People get it after a bit and stop saying the moves.
I think it depends on the group? I’ve found some that actually fall into using the move names MORE often as they play more: they’re more familiar with the mechanics and how to use the system to get what fictional results they want.
I could see this being confusing with a group of inexperienced *W players. There are often troubles parsing through the Go Aggro/Seize By Force/Manipulate moves when it comes to violent intent. Once the players were all on the same page mechanically, no problem.
Oh yeah, definitely for mostly experienced. Although to a certain extent, inexperienced is interesting because you can just say “Okay, tell me what your character does, I’ll tell you when to roll the dice and let you know what choices you have based on their results, if any.” Maybe give them sheets of the basic moves with the names erased, just the fictional triggers and consequences?
I think the idea sounds great on paper bu there are some issues with it in a game. Lets say Butch the Gunnlugger wants the whiskey bottle. He could start shooting at anybody by it until he get’s what he wants. Is this a go agro because he’s threatening to hit them, or a seize by force because he’s doing harm in order to get what he wants. I think since there are no secrets between players in AW, being explicit with the move you use is not an issue so long as you describe the action of what your doing.
Isn’t this just “to do it, do it”?
Yeah, Jamey, it’s more an idea for a simple mechanic to remind PCs and MCs alike to actually do it rather than slipping into using move names as the entirety of the description of their action.
Go Aggro/Seize is not that intent based. It’s fine.
Making a game with a rule like this would have some cool effects, essentially mechanizing the “show, don’t tell” principle of good storytelling. AW and DW are not written in a way that this would work well. Spout Lore and Open Your Brain are the most self-evidently problematic ones: Jumping through a bunch of hoops to telegraph that you mean these will just highlight the artificiality of the gaming context, making it more difficult to keep in the right mindset to play effectively.
“Crap! Maggot-Squid! What did The Dire Bestiary have to say about them, again?” (picks up 2d6)
“I close my eyes. The world’s psychic maelstrom rolls in, a crazy mash of colors like the aurora that constantly plague our skies these days, but now accompanied by this strange inhuman singing, inside my head.” (picks up 2d6)
But yeah, “mechanizing ‘Show, Don’t Tell'” is a perfect phrasing of the intention behind the idea.
There was a discussion (on Story Games I think) about not giving new players a list of moves at all and the MC just telling them to roll when they triggered a move and describing the results.
I’ve also considered a “blackbox” AW hack where the MC does all the dice rolling and doesn’t tell the PCs the basic moves at all, just gives them the occasional choices. Be especially good for online pbf-type games, I suspect.
ETA: Character creation would be tricky, though.
Why?
I’m not saying it’s impossible to ever do it for those moves, but I can tell you from experience that it wears really thin really fast. When I first tried playing Dungeon World I thought you weren’t supposed to talk about the mechanical moves, but I had a high INT Fighter character so I kept angling for Spout Lore and it was tedious, tiring, and made me not have fun. Then I thought back to every AP podcast I had heard of AW and remembered that pretty much everybody just said “I open my brain” in order to start triggering that move and it wasn’t terrible. Then I reread page 12 of AW and realized that I was trying to impose my own aesthetic preferences on the game rather than playing the game as it was written. The moves aren’t crafted to all be easily-triggerable by never mentioning them by name.
The “mechanizing ‘Show, Don’t Tell'” concept is cool, and is a piece of game-design tech I’m trying to leverage from AW in my own game design, but I don’t think it’s something you can trivially impose on existing AW-derived games.
I think that if the player is forbidden from saying the move she is using, you are missing an integral part of the stakes setting. The active player, MC, and everyone else at the table should know the move that is being used, which informs, among other things, what stat is being used; the results on a miss, 7-9, and 10+; and the effect in the fiction.
There are practical issues too. Is a spoken threat some leverage for a Manipulate or is it Going Aggro? I’ve had this very problem! The MC just carried on as if the NPCs had misread too, but it was interesting to note. (turns out that, yes, some people WILL grenade your tent encampment… ick!)
But it’s already in the book.
“The rule for moves is to do it, do it. In order for it to be a move
and for the player to roll dice, the character has to do something
that counts as that move; and whenever the character does
something that counts as a move, it’s the move and the player
rolls dice.” (pg 12)
I’m with John Machin here
As far as additional practical issues go, how would helping and interfering work? Both because other players need to have some moment to respond to a move, but also because what the move is might entail whether they help, interfere, or do nothing at all, especially in the scenario of Manipulate with threat vs. Go Aggro.
Additionally, I think the idea of not giving players a moves sheet at all and just announcing when moves trigger is backpedaling a lot on A) being a fan of the characters and B) the transparency that I feel AW thrives on. I think it would also be a situation that is highly likely to deceive new players, because maybe they don’t realize that go aggro could mean inflicting harm with no way to back out. It really seems like a way for an MC to throw a harness on the awesome things their players want to do, and if you don’t give new players ownership of their abilities, they may never think outside the box that MC is putting those moves into.
Helping and interfering are interesting in the “do it to do it” sense. They’re almost always retroactive, in that we back up a second or two from the originally stated fiction. They’re not super elegant.
Doesn’t mean they’re not important.
Oh, yeah. But here’s my thing about the helping/interfering: lots and lots of times, whatever is being done to help would also be its own, different move, like Go Aggro or Act Under Fire or whatever. It breaks up the back and forth of the conversation.
I think it extends the back and forth. It is the way for a character to say, I care enough about what you are trying to do to expose myself to risk in order to affect the outcome. The rules provide us with help/interfere, in addition to Go Aggro and Act Under Fire, and, for me, that’s enough to give them a different weight, a different fictional effect, that makes it worth having them as moves and, to get back to the point at hand, giving help/interfere the time it needs to come into play.