How is this move supposed to work?
Haunches
When something bad is happening (or just about to happen) somewhere that you aren’t, roll +Sharp. On a 10+ you knew where you needed to go, just in time to get there. On a 7-9, you get there late—in time to intervene, but not prevent it altogether. On a miss, you get there just in time to be in trouble yourself.
How does this work in game?
By a strict reading this move will trigger constantly. There is ALWAYS something bad happening somewhere. When a bomb is about to explode in Johanesburg and I roll a 10+, am I there?
So clearly that can’t be it. It must be somewhere you could be reaching in feasible time (you are the Spooky however, so magic…?). How do you know that something bad is happening though? Does it need to be on camera? Do I just have to wait for the Keeper to decide that something bad is happening now? So this move would be completely in the hands of the Keeper to just put a character somewhere if they want to?
That doesn’t sound fun to me.
How have you used this move in the past?
On a related note, how many Luck boxes would you give players in a one-shot?
I can’t answer your first question, but when I ran a one shot, three Luck boxes seemed right.
Hunches is a “danger sense” type move, basically a premonition. I’d use it to get characters to something bad that’s happening that’s relevant to the current mystery, or that a leads to the next one. Think Sam in the first few seasons of Supernatural.
And for one-shots I have coming up, I’m going to have everyone roll 1d6 to see how much Luck they’ve used up.
That move is absolutely wonderful, and I’ve had fun with it. I’m surprised you don’t find it fun, because it’s just an expanded form of a few AW moves where you mysteriously and for no reason teleport into dangerous situations.
So firstly: your example about Johannesburg is completely ridiculous. The move is about having a Hunch, so unless your mystery has lead you to suspect there is a bomb in Johannesburg, there’s nothing you can do about that. Keep in mind that this is a monster investigation game – its not the open-world wanderfest that DW and AW are. Whenever you see a move that looks like its condition is too wide open or supports weird things like teleporting to Johannesburg, try to bring it back around to the point of the game: dealing with monster mysteries.
Nextly, there’s two ways you could run this move. One way is where the Keeper, whenever they advance an agenda off screen that the character has some way of suspecting, they inform the character that they have a hunch and should roll. This isn’t the MC deciding they should roll, no more than the MC announcing that they’re being attacked is “deciding” they should roll. There is something happening in the fiction, so the roll has to happen.
The other way this move could be run is when the player makes the proactive decision to send their character into a dangerous locale or dangerous event, you can let them roll this move to see whether or not the fiction is dangerous when they arrive. Rather than, like you would normally, decide that the monsters are in the middle of their ritual, or about to complete it, or lying in wait… this move is rolled and it decides whether or not the hunter gets the drop on the situation.
I’ve limited experience running it the second way, although I’ve used it once or twice and it wasn’t a problem.
I would go for two or three Luck points for a one-shot. Depending on how deadly it is and how long the session will be.
I would use Haunches as a danger sense type move too. Or to use it only for events relating to the narrative. The bomb in Johannesburg would only be something that i would bring up if it is important or maybe as a way to flavor a failure description.
I can see using it as a beginning of session move though, to have the players be aware of the Monster.
Also it can trigger for scenes involving other players the Spooky is not involved in. Or for scenes cutting away from the hunters to describe what the monster is doing and foreshadowing something.
You could absolutely use it if you’ve got Hunter A doing research in a lab, they miss, you reveal the shadow monster was hiding in their shadow all along — and then the other hunter is like ‘oh shit, i suspected that, can i roll hunches?’ and you go ‘absolutely!’ and if they succeed then hey, now Hunter A isn’t quite alone.
Alfred Rudzki you would need to do tha for every miss where something bad is happening though and then rewind time a bit. I don’t know if I would like that in my game.
I wouldn’t do that in my game either, because there is absolutely zero reason to roll this for every miss.
something bad is happening though.
Someone missing on a move isn’t something bad happening, it’s me making a move. They don’t have to be the same thing, Tim.
I feel like you’re setting the Bad Bar too low here Tim Franzke. Yes, every miss is something bad happening, but having Hunches trigger for every missed roll is obviously silly.
Even though Kick Some Ass doesn’t actually say in the trigger that it only triggers when the enemy fights back, we all accept that is the intention behind the extremely short description of the move.
You need to accept that the intention behind Hunches isn’t to roll every time someone sneezes.
The trigger is not worded as good as it maybe could be. But if you stay with “to do it, do it” and have it only trigger when it is fitting in the narrative I think it should work out fine.
So who decides if something is “bad enough” then? I kind of get what the move is trying to do but I am not sure how that actually would work at the table.
The thing is, you could write
“When something bad is happening and you want to be there…” but that would require the character knowing that something bad is happening.
You could also just make it work like
The Woman (or Man) With The Plan but Hunches also triggers on Sharp so there is a problem.
Maybe this:
Hunches
At the beginning of the session, roll+Sharp.
On a 10+ the GM holds 2, on a 7-9 the GM holds 1. They can spend the hold to tell you about something bad that is about to happen in your area. If you want, you can be thereto try to stop it. The GM must spend this hold before the session is over.
in the area needs to be defined as appropriate to your campaign.
The Keeper decides, Tim – following their principals. This is no different from any other Keeper call when they’re determining if other triggers are met.
I actually kind of prefer Tim’s move to the one in the book. It’s smarter without damaging the intent of the original move. Plus it gives the Keeper one more tool to control pacing…prep can be made with the intention that “Okay, if this happens, this can trigger hold from the Hunches move.” I like it!
“When something bad is happening and you want to be there…” could apply to the player as well, wanting their character to be there. The character the knows by precognition.
Tim Franzke I think you are overthinking the move. The intend seems to be to insert yourself into a scene where you usually wouldn’t be, because as a player you didn’t know about it. It’s not made for inserting yourself into each and every scene, just some scenes that make narratively sense. I think that is something the table needs to decide and not the rules.
Markus Wagner I am definitely overthinking it.
The idea is for the move to allow the character to arrive in the nick of time to save her friends from the episode’s monsters.
In one shots, I give 1 and only 1 Fate point. I like to see at least a couple of hard moves in a 4 hour game. 😛
To recap:
The GM (maybe with input from the players) decides what counts as a bad thing. The bad thing must be related to the current mystery somehow
You can’t be in a scene somewhere else that is happening at the same time because it wouldn’t be feasible for you to get there in time (unless you can teleport or something).
I still wonder how this will actually go at the table.
(I am still overthinking it)
Example situation:
Tom and Jerr are sneaking around in a government research facility that experimented with Grey Goo. They open crates and other stuff in the big storage hall. Tom’s player rolls for Investigate a Mystery and fails.
Without the move:
The GM describes how they hear a clonk and then a flashbang goes of before their eyes. When they can see again they are surrounded by special forces in body armor with their assault rifles pointed at the hunters.
That is the GM Move.
With the move:
The GM imagines that scene above happening and turns to the Spooky. “Hey, you have a bad feeling. Roll hunches”.
On a 10+ the Spooky can negate what will be happening altogether right? The 7-9 says you are not there in time to prevent it. Implied from this is that a 10+ allows you to completely stop this from happening. Correct?
So this goes something like this maybe:
“So following your gut feeling you go after Tom and Jerr but you sneak into the fascility by a different route. You hear two army women talking about hearing noises from the storage hall. How do you stop them from going over there?”
At this point anything the players says basically is allowed to happen because that 10+ means she stops the bad thing from happening. An example would be to trigger a firealarm and run away to divert the guards to another part of the facility.
A 7-9 says you get there late—in time to intervene, but not prevent it altogether.
So you say:
“You enter into the storage hall and see special forces circling your friends. One of them is ready to throw a flashbang. What do you do?”
and then maybe the spooky can use her Jinx power to make the flashbang not go of or something.
On a 6- she is right there with them when the Grenade goes off.
Talking this through like that kind of helped me to understand this. I still feel like thinking about hunches before every hard move you want to make can be stressful.
On the other hand the move that I posted plays in the same area as Preminitions so that is not a good Idea either.
You could take a trick from cinematic editing too. Describing the bad thing happening with you hard move. If the Spooky wants in to prevent it, it is revealed that the description of the hard move actually was their vision. Than they can act to alter the outcome.
My Flake character who started off as a hacker eventually took that move, I justified it that his exposure to the weirdness in the world had altered him and he was able to jump through technology in dire circumstances (Affectionately referred to now as Technoportation) to stop the bad things from happening. This put limitations on the move but that made it more fun.