I have a question about downgrading someone’s Partial Success (7-9) with a Failed Get Involved (6-).

I have a question about downgrading someone’s Partial Success (7-9) with a Failed Get Involved (6-).

I have a question about downgrading someone’s Partial Success (7-9) with a Failed Get Involved (6-).

The situation was Player 1 was inside a MechWarrior type of tank, called Hammer.

Player 2 was in their own MechWarrior tank called Anvil.

Player 1 rolls Interface & Expertise to hack an external computer system. They roll a Partial Success (7-9).

Before I got to describe the result and offer them a cost / complication, Player 2 seeing that Player 1 had only partially succeeded, jumped in to offer their assistance, by using their own Interface and Expertise in their own tank to help boost Player1’s partial success (call it joint networking!). Player 2 rolled 6- and completely failed.

I ruled that Player 2, in their haste and incompetence managed to send a Kill Command to Player 1’s mech, which promptly exploded in dramatic style, and ejected an injured Player 1 on to the ground outside the wrecked Mech. Player 1 survived, but with some injuries.

Player 1 said to me “I didn’t think my partial success could be downgraded or overridden by another players failure”.

I replied that it could in certain circumstances, and we moved the game forward, as we had an injured Player 1 and their co-pilot struggling to breathe in fractured and leaking void-suits on the planet surface, which was not breathable, and this immediate drama needed resolving and fast.

The game carried on and there was no bad feeling, but I just wanted to see what others thought ?

Thank you.

11 thoughts on “I have a question about downgrading someone’s Partial Success (7-9) with a Failed Get Involved (6-).”

  1. I would call weaksauce. Uncharted Worlds doesn’t feature a “turn their move back on them” GM Move, unlike Apocalypse World. In AW would be perfectly valid to take P2s move, turn it around, and then hit P1 with a downgraded success.

    However, in UW, you have these GM Moves: Foreshadow Trouble, Impose a Cost, Offer a Choice, Advance a Threat, Involve a Faction, Break Something, Hurt Someone. None of these specifically allow for taking a player’s Partial Success away from them because another player rolled poorly.

    You ought to have given P1 what they achieved before blowing them up.

    Besides all that, blowing up 1PC and then blaming it on the other being incompetent seems to violate a few GM principles, like being a Fan and following the rule of cool.

  2. (Side note, I believe you mean “Access (2d6) + Interface”, since accessing a system doesn’t use Expertise)

    While it’s entirely within the mechanics to do so, directly harming Player 1 and causing their attempt to fail and putting them in a bad position is quite a harsh consequence. Which is fine if you’ve built-up the tension through softer GM moves previously, and the stakes are high.

    My personal feeling is that I would have offered player 2 a choice. Something like: “In your haste to help, you’ve triggered a [Sci Fi Jargon Cascade] here, what do you do with it? You can let it go off and lock both of you out of the system, or you can take the overload yourself and let Player 1 get on with it. What do you do?”

    This way the failure creates a character-moment where Player 2 has a tough decision. They can choose to either cause the Access move to fail (as if they had used Get Involved as an interference rather than assistance) or they can suffer harm and not interfere.

    So yeah, verdict: you played it right, but that was a very harsh consequence.

  3. How are you rolling both Interface and Expertise?

    I think doing the opposite of Get Involved on a failure is fine, but I don’t think it’s explicitly allowed under a narrow reading of the rules.

    However! I also don’t like “oh it was all your fault” as a failure case. Anvil sending an accidental command to Hammer makes Anvil seem inept at his job. I’d consider external factors to be the cause of the failure, and it might sit better with the players.

    “Anvil hacks into their system too, taking a different pathway through the security subroutines. But what looks like an unpatched backdoor is a actually a trap. It’s a viral countermeasure and it’s going after all connected systems! Both of you, Face Adversity!”

    Edit: in keeping with the partial success from Hammer, you could even say “Hammer, you can disconnect now or have to Face Adversity”

  4. I’ve had that come up in my games, too. I haven’t ruled it that way so far, just because I don’t want to discourage players from helping each other.

    Keep in mind, in PbtA parlance, a “miss” doesn’t necessarily mean “failure” – it means “the GM gets to make as hard a move as they like.” The hard outcome can be causally unrelated to the events at hand.

    For instance (and something similar to this has come up in my games):

    Player 1: I hack the sensor network! (dice clattering) Partial success.

    Player 2: Hang on, I’d like to get involved by [describe something in the fiction]! (dice clattering) … um, a failure.

    GM: Great. Player 2, you dial up a schematic of the sensor network. Just as you launch the subroutines, you see a swarm of blips crossing the screen. Looks like Y’gnar fighter craft inbound! You try to shift out of the sensor network to go to comms, but you blue-screen your HUD, so I guess you can’t warn Player 1.” (GM Move: Involve Another Faction)

    So there’s more trouble coming, but the fiction is “we live in a complex world where trouble might show up at any moment,” not “I fragged you through my own incompetence.”

    Depending on tone, either could work. But you want to make sure the moves match the tone.

  5. Aaron Griffin  That is indeed something that I regularly worry about. Not even joking, I legit go over my book sometimes and go “Who wrote this? This could have been written so much better argh argh argh”.

    Such is life. 😛

  6. Thank you folks for your feedback, it’s much appreciated. I had been mulling it over all week and wondered about it. I shall refine my approach based on your excellent points.

    Yes, I did mean Access + Interface. Long day at work 🙁

    The Get Involved 6- result in other situations does make wonder how far you can go ?

    Eg, Player 1 makes a leap across a chasm, gets a partial success (7-9). Choice / Cost / Consequence.

    GM : You clear the jump, but only just, almost falling backwards as you land on the other side. In your frantic scamble to pull forward however, you dislodge some gear which goes plummeting in to the chasm. What item do you look on in horror as it descends in to darkness ?

    Player 2 : I want to get involved and help Player 1 make the jump without their gear falling out…I jump with them.

    GM : Ok, we’ll rewind and put them back in mid air as they are in mid leap….roll Get Involved and Physique.

    Player 2 : 6-. Oooops….

    GM : Ok, you don’t make it to the other side. You have choices. P1 still makes the jump and loses gear, but your options are :

    1. Fall spectacularly, but grab an overhang on the way down. Take minor wound.

    2. Fly through the air and grab that thing, before falling totally and taking a major wound. But the thing is safe and undamaged.

    3. Overshoot the jump and pitch you and P1 in a tumble roll down the hill on the other side, to the feet of the waiting guards at the bottom. They look at you somewhat…bemused.

    Sorry to ask so many questions, but it’s helping me refine what I should and should not be doing.

    Thank you !

  7. Honestly, in that situation I don’t see how Player 2 jumping will help Player 1 at all. Remember to follow the fiction. To Get Involved, players should keep their fictional positioning in mind, and establish that they’re ready to help (and how).

    Priority is also important here. It’s the difference between “going to happen” and “has already happened”.

    Going to happen is a new threat that the players can respond to (including a Get Involved). This is commonly called a “soft move”, because it can be avoided/mitigated/reversed by the players. “Player 1, something is coming loose from you pack, what is it?” The player is hanging on for dear life, but maybe another player can try to catch the object.

    Has happened is a cost/consequence, and the players can’t respond, only react to the outcome. In this case, the object is gone, and there was no opportunity to Get Involved. This is a “hard move”, you can only deal with the consequence, not prevent it. Usually you use a hard move after a few soft moves.

    At best, if the item was very important, Player 2 jumping to catch the item would be a Face Adversity (it’s a separate task from Player 1’s actions), which would have its own success/partial/fail events (and I’d say that even the success would result in a few minor bruises)

  8. Thank you for that clarification Sean. I realise that there is something I and my players have been misinterpreting…because of the narrative style play and our own particular playstyles in other games, we’d all assumed that “Get Involved” meant a minor “rewind” of time to a point where a G.I. could stop that thing from happening (if you rolled lucky).

    This makes a major difference to how we should be playing. I’d get several get involveds a session and have to do lots of micro-rewinds / adjustments.

    Thank you for pointing that out !

  9. If you feel that you, as GM, went too fast and didn’t offer the opportunity for anyone to throw their hat into the ring, then a minor rewind is cool. You go with the flow of your game.

    I often pause after a partial success or failure to look meaningfully at the other players, or outright say “is anyone going to come to their aid here, or are they on their own?” Especially if they’ve established that they’re in a position to help.

    Just be sure that the players know that, like every other Move, Get Involved is risky. It can push things to success, or it can create wonderful new failures.

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