Why haven’t games been codifying session moves? I mean, there are GM moves, player moves, monster moves, but session moves are a thing too.
Apocalypse World has love letters and countdown clocks. Dungeon World might have a custom monster, or dark portents. There are custom moves that are only meant for one session, and questions you want answered/situations you want to throw at people (I’ve heard about Bangs from Sorcerer but haven’t read it). These all seem like specific moves picked out for a session, split between the GM and players.
One thing that worked well was I created moves for a session (one for each character and I think a general one), put the triggers as public, and they’d find out the effects when they triggered it. “Sketch, when you explore the derelict ship alone, roll +weird.” “Whenever someone gets bitten by the jungle, roll +cool.” It did a great job of driving characters towards things in the same way highlighting stats does. Basically they were love letters that the characters could work towards, if they wanted. And why wouldn’t they want to find what was hidden on the other side of that paper?
What other games have session moves? Are they something that should be in games?
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Urban Shadows has session movies.
This idea never occured to me. But now it looks very good. Thank you. If out Urban Shadows campaign gets started this weekend I’m going to try it.
Blades in the Dark has session moves. 😉
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If you don’t trigger it, would it go away at the end of the session? Otherwise, might be an overlap with moves attached to settings or fronts.
James Stuart really?
It feels inspired by enough to me to mention with a winky face. Pay it no mind though and don’t let it distract!
Although, I’m referring in both these cases to “start of session/end of session” moves. The “moves created for a specific bit of fictional play” is a bit harder to find in rulebooks.
Kevin Farnworth ! Those are marvelous!
A lot of games use a question to frame a scene or drive play. Could you combine session moves with questions derived from play/fronts? For example:
Is this the session where Inch breaks things off with Rolfball? If so, roll+…
This could be a way for the MC to flag things they might like to see during this session.
Those are brilliant examples listed. I love this idea, though am way too lazy to implement them.
That’s a great idea!
WWWRPG actually has you vie to use the move. Whoever’s the most over (AKA crowd pleasing) gets to call people out, book a match, and starts with 2 momentum.
End of session moves, yes! The standard Dungeon World ones just don’t apply to every Dungeon World game, I feel like they’re meant to be overwritten once a campaign settles in to direct play.
Also, to follow up on Andrew Medeiros ‘s comment: how can we offload creating custom moves to players?
I think in most cases you shouldn’t. That is not a player job in typical world games.
I dunno, as a player I would love the opportunity to create some custom moves, probably ones that are more likely to affect my fellow players’ characters and not my own.
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Players are no less capable of making moves but moves that you add to the game are powerful. In my game, I put it to the table to discuss and create new moves as a group.