Watching the Roll20 game, and in my own experience MCing The Sprawl, I’ve noticed that the Access move (and the Research too, I suppose, but it comes up less often) can be a difficult move to resolve satisfactorily. More than any other moment in play, it’s the move that seems to bring some tension to the table, because the player feels that they are entitled to more than just “you cannot determine that” or else what good was their hold?
So what’s your opinion. Is the hold a guarantee of an actionable answer and the MC has to make the magic (fan of the players and all that)? Or is it the player’s responsibility not to ask a question they should know better isn’t going to produce the goods? Or maybe it’s somewhere in between.
What about there is no answer try another?
The move reads “Take +1 forward when acting on the answers.” This means you need to give them answers they can act upon. Remember that you can always ask the player “How do you know/learn/realize this?” if you can’t come up with something you’re happy with yourself
They are guaranteed an answer; they are not guaranteed an answer they like. Still, there should be enough context around a negative reply that they learned
something. In some cases, the negative replyislearning something (“who is in control here?” “No one,” is absolutely enlightening)John Carroll I don’t disagree. I’m inclined to let them try again, rather than “waste” the hold. But Adam, for example, seems to take a more “too bad” stance. This essentially is the essence of my question about how others approach it.
Niklas Wiklund Excellent point.
J Stein is absolutely correct! You don’t need to invent things that you don’t think would exist, but you do need to give an answer that has value. “This facility has no other entrance than the front door” is still something the player can act upon. They now know there is no other escape route, they know where any re-inforcements will be coming from. The important part is that the answer is ACTIONABLE.
FWIW, when this came up on the Barf Forth Apocalyptica forums, Vincent’s answer was a firm ” ‘Portray the world honestly’ is an MC principle. If the answer to a question like, ‘How are they vulnerable…?’ is ‘They’re not’, then they’re not” (I’m quoting the example from memory; the first half is a more or less direct quote, though.)
So if the OP’s question is: “Do I screw with the world to provide a vulnerability for the player to exploit?” the answer is definitely no. But Niklas has the exact right answer: just because it’s not “producing the goods” doesn’t mean it’s not actionable. “Actionable” is defined mostly by how much information you provide, not on what action the PC would ideally like to take. To elaborate on the “How are they vulnerable…?” example, the actionable answer might look something like, “They’re not vulnerable to attack here: they’ve reinforced the window bars and doors, and got men at both. You’d need to bring at least 10 killers to get in here.” Well, now they have enough info to know what they’d need to target, and how many people to bring, and they get a +1 when they do.
When it comes to “How are they vulnerable?” specifically I’d probably be sure to actually give them something clearly helpful. I think it’s telling that Portray the world honestly is not in The Sprawl, but Be a fan of the player characters is. To use +J Steins, example: Maybe something like “They aren’t vulnerable to attack here, they’ve spent an absurd amount of resources to protect this place. Which probably means there’s some other avenue of attack where they’ve had to skimp on security.”
“player feels that they are entitled to more than just “you cannot determine that” or else what good was their hold?”
That line only just sunk in.
No, you can never say “you cannot determine that.” The move is triggered fiction-first: the fact that the move triggered means “you have undertaken a fictional act that gives you access to the following information.” Granted, you might have been inspecting them in way X and asking a question about Y… one has to walk a bit of a gray line between being honest to the fiction and bearing in mind it’s a game abstraction, but bottom line is that the move triggering means you can determine that. You undertook the fictional action to give you that information.
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