I have a question about Get Involved that has been on my mind for quite some time.
Uncharted Worlds was the first PbtA game where I’ve seen help move that pushes the result entire category of success up or down. In my brief MC experience in UW it means that when two characters cooperate then most of the results end up being at least 7+, very often 10+ on whatever move was being made.
This gave the games I where I was the MC a more heroic feeling as there were almost no missed rolls, as a byproduct we had a lot of scenes with characters cooperating which lead to good fiction and fabulous Get Involved descriptions.
Question: what is the designer intention behind such power in Get Involved move compared to other PbtA games where help is usually a +1?
Two people rolling means twice as many chances for 9 or lower. 🙂
You could also ask why “help” (and to a lesser degree “interfere”) is so weak in Apocalypse World. Help only makes a difference if the combined roll was a 6 or a 9. In all other cases you potentially get yourself in trouble without any benefit at all.
Vincent Baker played around with something similar in the Dark Ages playtest and mentioned Hx was going to be under review for Apocalypse World 2nd Edition, but for some reason the only thing that changed was making Hx questions volunteer-based.
I think based on other changes in Uncharted Worlds and the Space Opera setting it works, but I wouldn’t want to just swap to the 1-tier help/hinder in any PbtA game. Part of the issue for me is that it dilutes the core mechanic. Sure, it’s a bit swingier with a worse worst case (two people in hot water), but it’s not like a Hard Move can’t have knock on effects for other characters even without the explicit opportunity on a plate of a failed help/hinder roll. And more than that, since it makes success so much more likely and players like succeeding … to me its just setting the baseline for making moves at “do it with a friend” and shifting probabilities of success higher across the board thus diluting those exciting middle cases.
There are all kinds of caveats and ways to design around this, but fundamentally in Apocalypse World and a few other settings I’ve encountered in PbtA games, I don’t know that I like either system. The vanilla system feels too weak, but shifting by tiers feels a little too powerful for what it costs especially since it’s a multiplayer game and players should be working with or against each other a pretty substantial portion of the time whether or not that always equates to a help or hinder roll on every Move.