Okay, well into our little playtest.

11 thoughts on “Okay, well into our little playtest.”

1. General rule of thumb for my *World games: You can attempt any move once per scene. If something significant happens during the scene that fictionally would allow them to try again, sure they can try again. Otherwise you could have people just rerolling over and over until they get what they want.

2. Yeah one of my players also tried to use intimidation, but since the other player was trying to use manipulate I only allowed the manipulate roll, with the threatening player assisting the other player. In AW games I only allow one roll for any issue, and just ride with the results unless there is some significant change in the situation. Players just trying over and over again to get a success is kinda meh.

   Maybe if the players get under a 6 while interrogating someone you can say that the guy won’t talk…yet. You can tell the players that if they torture the guy for a couple o days, kidnap his wife, etc it will work…just not right away. Then again maybe the guy is crazy and just won’t break no matter what. Whatever is best for the story. 

3. Hi Henry de Veuve – glad to hear you guys are going well! I am going to give a look at the forum in the next days, hopefully, to see how things are going.

   Reg. the Face Danger: yes, it gets a lot of use especially when there is not yet a full commitment to action. Note, though, that the results are usually quite definitive.

   In other words, unless something changes as also the others wrote previously, there won’t be a lot of re-trying. More specifically, if there is an attempt to threaten someone, on a 6- the situation will escalate quickly according to your GM move, while on a 7-9 there’s a bunch of options that will somehow re-shape the situation. In other words, the players will get some words out of their victim (a 7-9 is still a decent success), but the situation will change (a call for help? others getting involved? etc.)

4. Yeah, Delos, that’s exactly what’s going on–and while I’m unlearning a lot of my GMing skills, I’m sweating this.

   So if I understand correctly, the second roll doesn’t get to happen, and our Sellsword is likely to murder the merchant outright (which seems to be the tone of the conversation thus far).

   EDIT–okay, that isn’t what he did, since I just popped over to read the next post, but the repeated application of the same move worries me…

5. Well I think that’s up to you. Granted things have moved along a bit so resetting might be a huge pain at this point. I think if an intimidate check fails that basically means that the target is not impressed with the aggressor and will not do what they ask. Since mechanically the Sell sword got the 7-9 result I would say it would be fine for the target to back away slowly (which the sell sword has to allow since that is the consequence of the roll), have him jump for cover and the sell swords cross bow fires but misses, or the target just give the sell sword something the target thinks the sell sword wants.

   Though to be honest we might need to chalk this up to a learning experience and move on at this point. Mistakes happen. Especially with learning a new system.

6. Henry, I believe that in AW the final say of what move is used is the GM’s. The players can suggest moves, like the ones on their sheets, but if the GM thinks there is a better move to represent the action then they use that. This is something that I had to get my players used to, as they would sometimes tell me “I’ll roll and then just pick a move”, but AW doesn’t work that way. In fact there are times where I will just flat out tell the players they succeed, especially if failure is not interesting. 

7. Definitely not going to force a reset at this point, but I think maybe a note in the OOC is in order.

   Thanks for the advice, guys.  Definitely a bit of a learning curve with this–it’s cool, but I have so very much to unlearn.  I get the concepts, but putting them into practice is harder than it looks!  (Thus Delos, who MC’d our AW game, already had my sympathies.  Now he has more of them!)

8. Another bit of feedback, paraphrased thusly (and in the voice of David Spade reprising his role as Emperor Cuzco at your option): “What’s up with the secret modifiers to the End of Mission move?  *World games seem to work better when everything (or at least most everything) is open.”

9. Yeah I’m not too fond of those secret modifiers either.

10. Shifting to that kind of felt like it threw a monkey wrench into our pace in a way that our Sorcerer being AFK for a few days didn’t.  Just one of those things.

    Oddly enough, the only person who got dinged by anybody else for any reason still rolled well enough to clear the 10+ level in spite of that modifier.

    I guess that the idea was to introduce a bit more intrigue into the PCs ground state.

11. You guys are not the first group to complain.

    Yet another reason to try to re-work that one into something different (maybe related to the Conflict move). If you play another mission, feel free to give the values openly to the GM.

    (did it really disturb or did you just feel strange at doing it differently than you expected?)

    Background:

    NOT all my groups – when in “play-mode” – deal well with OutOfCharacter information.

    Despite their efforts, they still bring that info in character.

    Plus some will never ever have the guts to give a minus one to a friend, even when the story screams “do it!”.

    They can do Hx in AW, because it’s mechanic.

    The secret helped some of them with the minus one…

    (how we did it: we all passed a note to the GM with plus one or minus one to another player, and then everybody rolled and the GM gave the result range back to the players)

    If you have enough feuds among characters, someone is getting some -1 and getting a 7-9 when you rolled a 10+ gives it away: someone is talking shit about you with the Magister. Usually you know who, of course…

    The point of the secret is more to force certain things to emerge in fiction (“what did you say to the magister?” instead of “why do you give me a minus one?!”)

    And even more: it gave me some minus one while when done openly I usually received plus plus plus all around.

    It worked decently – but just decently – for us and almost for us only, so I am probably going to rework it.

    Richard Sardinas how did you guys do End Of A Mission? did you do it secret or openly? did you get some minus one or plus one all around?

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