I recently became interested in PBtA games, and Monsters of the Week was the first game I’ve run using this engine. I tend to be the kind of GM who plots and plans obsessively, and it can really lead to some bad habits. I was wondering if you could help me get a bit of feedback, or maybe help me iron out a few kinks I’ve had over the course of the learning process?
I’m running the game for a single player, and so far its been fun, but there are a few things that kind of aggravate me. He went with the Chosen template and I believe one of the moves he took was “Invincible,” so his hunter always has 2 armor. I don’t want to make it feel like he took that move for nothing, but it kind of aggravated me that anytime I made a hard move against him, I had to deal with his character’s invincibility constantly soaking up harm. At one point, a vampire savaged him with its claws, but the player was put off by the fact that his character took 2 whole harm. But during instances where the character was shot at by witch hunters or smashed in the head by a rifle butt, he took no harm whatsoever.
I’m still learning to use tags, generally struggling to deal with the distinction between hard moves and soft moves, and just…trying to navigate the whole PBtA system. I know it can play exceptionally well under the right circumstances, but I often feel like I’m missing something crucial.
Any pointers?
Okay, first up, don’t worry that it’s hard to hurt an invincible chosen one! That’s the whole point of the move, after all. Perhaps look at challenging the hunter in other ways than direct harm, e.g. require a hard choice to activate a monster’s weakness, or perhaps they need to hurt themselves to do something?
Hard and soft moves is easy. It’s soft if the player has a chance to react and deal with it, it’s hard if they don’t. “The vampire tries to bite you” is soft. “The vampire bites you, take 4 harm” is hard.
Let your player enjoy being impossible to hurt directly, highlight it with monsters that shred his clothes but do no physical harm to him, play it up and make it awesome.
Then shake it up and threaten innocents instead of the Chosen. Sure, the monsters can’t hurt YOU, but your girlfriend/boyfriend is fragile.
Does your mom know you go out hunting monsters? How freaked out will she be to find out? How long will she shut you out in fear after watching you take damage that should have killed you, but you walked away unscathed?
Are these monsters too easy? You know, no matter what, you can take the big bad down, so you’re bored and overconfident? Two monsters. Not in the same place. Attacking two different things you care about. Which thing are you going to save, which are you going to sacrifice? And what is everyone going to think about you because of that choice?
Turn his best friend into a werewolf, and then see if he helps her cope with her condition or kills her. Either way, make it hard.
Possess a little kid and see whether he’s willing to take the kid out to save the world; and if he does, let the world see and never forgive him let alone thank him.
The Chosen’s weakness is his family and friends. If he doesn’t have any family or friends, focus on how lonely that is and make him feel like he’s just another monster by surrounding him with mundane life he can’t be a part of.
Remember, MotW isn’t about the monsters, it’s about the hunters. Give them things to care about and see what happens when those things get threatened or harmed. Give them emotional consequences.
Sounds like a) you’re not being a fan or the character and b) your hard moves are always just straight harm
Exactly what Michael Sands and Grey Kitten said: put other things in danger and see what the Chosen does. If the monsters can’t physically harm the character, the smarter ones will find other ways to hurt them. That being said, the player chose that move because they think it’s cool. Don’t constantly look for ways to negate it. A special ability that the player “paid” for but never gets to use is no fun.
Also, as Aaron Griffin says, constantly having 2-armor doesn’t negate hard moves, unless the hard move is just physical damage. Any number of other things can be hard moves. Having the monster get away. Revealing a secret to the wrong person. Having an innocent bystander blunder into the scene. Having a weapon or piece of gear destroyed.
As Michael said, the difference between a soft move and a hard move is if the character has a chance to prevent the bad thing from happening. A soft move is just the set up. A hard move is the set up and follow through all in one go.
“You suddenly hear the elevator behind the vampire rumble to life. Someone is going to come out of those doors into the hallway in a second. What do you do?” Is a soft move. The character can take action before the thing you’ve set into motion happens.
“You suddenly hear the elevator behind the vampire ding as the doors open and a young man steps out into the hallway. Faster than your eye can follow, the creature spins and sinks its fangs into the poor guy. Blood sprays across the white hotel wallpaper. What do you do?” Is a hard move. You’ve not given the character a chance to react, and now they have to deal with the bad thing you’ve set in motion.
“Oh you rolled a 4? The Vampire punches you in the chest, sending you flying out the window, as you crash to the ground below. Thankfully you’re Invincible, so you’re left with nothing but cosmetic scrapes, but the screams from the woman inside have stopped. What do you do?”
In PbtA games, every Move should progress the story. Even a miss “fails forward” – so when Move results in 0 Harm, it still needs to leave its mark on the scene and/or force a reaction.
In addition to the other fantastic feedback, i’d recommend you look again at the Harm moves listed on page 212 in the book. There is a big difference between not taking any harm, and taking 0 Harm.
If The Chosen’s armor reduces incoming Harm to 0, they aren’t ignoring the incoming attack. You cannot inflict accumulating Harm and the mechanical effects are shaken off immediately, but you can mess with them. Look at the other tags on the incoming attack for inspiration on how the attack messes with the PC, even though 0 Harm is caused.
The attack may cause superficial injuries or temporary debilities that explain why the PC was Momentarily Inhibited, or Dropped Something, or takes -1 forward:
Momentarily Inhibited
Perhaps you can make the 0-Harm attack a surreal backdrop to something else going on – the interesting thing in the moment isn’t the attack itself, but some vignette between the Vampire and the PC. Perhaps the hero is momentarily entranced by the vampire’s feral, desperate attempts to draw blood, or choking on the fetid breath of the monster. The claws are surprisingly not the real worry, but avoiding mesmerism or drawing a clean breath should pressure The Chosen to act!
Drop Something
The Vampire savages The Chosen with its claws; presuming they are Messy, what other than the PC can be torn up? Their clothing/gear? Or perhaps they take 0 Harm, but their skin is still shredded, causing intense pain and bleeding. They can tough it out because they’re The Chosen (depending on how Invincibility has been interpreted in your game), but their weapon slips from their blood-drenched grasp, or is torn away during the clawing attack.
-1 Forward
If nothing else, the Hard Move that resulted in a successful, though 0 Harm, attack against the PC has brought the Vampire up in their face and attacking, so it should be easy to grant -1 forward if the PC tries to do anything while the Vampire is still scrabbling away at them.
This resulted in a Mystery Starter: drive.google.com – drive.google.com/file/d/0B7cav44145d9UXZYSk9LMWMtNEk/view?usp=sharing 🙂
Others have given some excellent advice about moves and dealing harm, so I though I would add something about your observation about obsessive planning.
While, on the surface, MotW appears like a mystery game —there is a move called Investigate a Mystery— it need not —maybe even should not— be played that way. That move has some specific mechanics; you could not, for instance, use it to work out that “it was professor Plumb, in the library, with the candlestick”, it only reveals what it reveals, and only when it makes sense.
I tend not to plan the mystery before the players get to the table. I do not know what they are facing, or what its weaknesses are, or what it wants. All I have is a massive list of potential weaknesses and some quasi-plausible reasoning why they might make sense; plus an adequate knowledge of some mythological creatures from other stories.
I present the players with a scenario, if they Investigate and ask “What sort of creature is it?” I turn the question back on them, “What do you think might have done this?” Then I say, “Exactly, that is what it must be.” Same with the weakness, if they come up with something that sounds interesting, I make that the weakness and (if we care enough) try to work out why that makes sense. No planning, just riffing.
A long campaign might just start as a rough collection of rumours, the player will only (have time to) investigate the ones they find interesting. As time goes on, a pattern may emerge as to how they fit together, the ones that do not fit may just have been red herrings (a scary bad guy), or they may have not discovered enough to understand the complexities of my ‘planning’.
I think MotW is an excellent game to practice those improve GM skills. Don’t let the apparent needed prep work fool you into over planning a full story, or any more detail than you have to have. This is slightly easier if there are more than one player so they can riff off each other, but the two of your are equals when it comes to this work during the game. Although you have to come up with something if they do not, keep your ideas a the second choice.
This is for Dungeon World but it might help https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8_Fz4m5hcoiTXpTbklDOF9iUHc
I wanted to reply sooner, but I got a bit sidetracked. I appreciate that all of you took the time to respond. Some of the answers were a bit frustrating, but I’m struggling to find the language to convey why that is exactly. My player is someone who likes action games, and he likes to tear through battles, whereas I tend to grow bored of a game very quickly if I can’t really challenge my PC’s. To my mind, if I’m going to “be a fan of the character,” there needs to be some reciprocity; some sense that the character is actually worth rooting for and doesn’t just have it easy.
Much of the game seemed to unfold as a result of me threatening the lives of the NPC’s, so I don’t think I had much trouble on that front. At the end of the day, however, there were times when “you take harm” seemed to be exactly what followed from the fiction.
To give you an example: there was one scene where the character was trying to stealthily scale up a water tower, where a religious “witch hunting” zealot was standing sentry over a large, open farm. I decided this was an attempt to Act Under Fire, and the player rolled a seven, so I went with a hard choice: the zealot noticed him in time to smash his rifle butt at the Chosen’s skull, and the Chosen could catch the rifle and yank, sending the zealot off the tower, but the zealot would alert everyone to his location as he fell screaming to his death; otherwise, the Chosen could grit his teeth and probably get up to the ledge in time to end the zealot before he cried out, but he’d get clubbed once or twice in the act.
Chosen decided to vault up the ledge. I ruled that the rifle butt was 2-harm/hand/heavy (or 1-harm/hand, +1 heavy), and figured that if he landed two solid strikes as the Chosen was vaulting over the ledge, he’d probably deal at least 1 harm, despite the Chosen’s invincibility. The player took issue with this, and although we talked about it after the fact, it seemed to me that there was something funny about the mechanics of it. I wrote it off as, “he inflicts great harm because he has you at a disadvantage,” and that seemed to be satisfactory.
But it left me thinking: what is the hunter’s invincibility intended to replicate in fiction? Buffy is strong and resilient, but if you shoot her with a bullet, she’ll still be wounded. Maybe she could take someone cracking a baseball bat upside her head…but could she take it without suffering any harm, or would it just be reduced? It’s not obvious to me what should be armor piercing and what shouldn’t, especially as that tag can apply to attacks that bypass armor as well.
I’m glad I was able to inspire a mystery out of my question! And I think the answer about 0-harm was particularly useful, especially as this was easy to overlook. Judging from the way my session went overall, I didn’t seem to have much trouble intuitively using hard and soft moves where appropriate, but I was still very shaky about what actually constituted a hard move and what didn’t. That seems to have been nicely clarified.
If the player enjoys combat and built a character that makes combat a non-entity there may be a disconnect with their desires. However if the player is still enjoying the combat you give them, and if they can ‘tear through it’ as though the enemies were all mooks then maybe there is not a problem at all?
Your example with the water tower and a 0-harm move could have been to have the thing that gets dropped, be the player. Sounds like having them fall would have been better than trying to inflict more harm. The fall itself may well have done armour ignoring harm.
Speak to the player and ask them if they want to continue plowing through enemies that can not really hurt them (they chose to be invincible) or if they would prefer for you to challenge them with stronger enemies that can hurt them. Making the enemies stronger defeats the choice they made though, this would be less of an issue if they were still tougher than everyone else, but in a solo game (am I remembering this correctly?) they have no one to compare themselves to. Maybe just let them be a god, illustrate their toughness by showing the damage the enemies do to bystanders, (maybe before they get there if you do not want to keep giving them moral choices of helping the NPCs).
Again, taking away that special thing they chose by making the enemy able to get through their protection does not seem like the right plan to me.
That’s just not always practical. Sure, the character is part of a group, and much of the story focused on a sort of faction war between his group — “the Covenant” — and an enemy sect. Much of the second session emphasized rescuing a member of the Chosen’s group who had gone missing. The first ended with their lodge being set on fire after the enemy sect used the blood toll extracted from the vampire to help them interrogate one of the player’s allies.
That said, sometimes the best play and the thing that makes the most sense within the fiction is that the player-character suffers harm. I think perhaps I phrased the question incorrectly, though. I’m more interested in how the Chosen’s invincibility should be depicted; what does it represent? Or better yet, how have you represented it in your games? What does it look like in other media involving monster hunters? Is it the resilience of someone like Buffy?
I think this is where I was getting hung up. I couldn’t map the move to anything else I’ve seen in the genre, and this was causing me to become a bit frustrated.
I usually ask the player how it looks.
I have a Vessel in a Urban Shadows game that has 3 armour when recklessly attacking in the pursuit of one of their Instincts. Since they are a construct of knowledge (feeds on the written word, have changing tattoos on their body based on those recent words) I represented the shrugging off of 3 harm as the claws and bullets passing through them with no purchase, leaving blossoming trails of blood that quickly reformed and flow back into them. But that is based on that character’s form.
Dependent on how your player’s chosen represents themself it could be harm bouncing off, or them not caring about the damage even though we can see the scrapes and bruises for a few days. The rifle butt to the face could just cause them to grimace and spit out blood. Or it could be that they move around the damage, they just don’t really get hit, glancing blows and near misses.
How did the player describe it? Both when they introduced the character and when the attack happened. You said ‘You take 4 harm.’ And they said … ?
That’s a pretty cool idea, vague. I wouldn’t have thought to represent armor that way. That’s the move where your vessel counts as a crowd, correct?
My initial reaction was that 3 armor is way too damn high, but if it’s contingent on your instincts, my guess is that the intent is for you to be legitimately nigh-invincible while you’re in pursuit of them, so I can at least wrap my head around it. There are also a lot of moves in various US playbooks that make it seem as though this ability could be easily countered under the right circumstances (e.g. the Fae can deal 3 harm ap with one of their powers). I was just much more hesitant to use the armor piercing tag with MotW’s Chosen, because I didn’t want to disregard the player’s invincibility.
My player described his character’s invincibility as general toughness, and he mentioned Buffy as a frame of reference. I think that’s largely what threw me off; I can’t recall Buffy or other characters in these genres ever having that level of invincibility. Then again, I suppose Castiel might have had something like this. I guess I just had it in my head that hunter invincibility represented something specific, like extra resilience and toughness in the face of supernatural strength, so it left me wondering what would suitably bypass it (e.g. “Messy attacks do not count as messy, but bypass your invincibility” seemed like it’d make sense in some contexts but not in others.)
It’s difficult to really internalize this “fiction first” notion, especially when you still have so much control over the fiction, you know? I have it in my head that there’s a tight correlation between the mechanics and the way the fiction is represented, when in fact the fiction can be completely different even the mechanic is the same: it isn’t necessarily true that a character who spits blood has taken harm, it could be that his “invincibility” is actually a kind of supernatural resolve that allows him to take damage, as you mentioned, and that’s not easy to drill into my head after years of D&D and GURPS and Silver Age Sentinels and BESM d20,
I believe the Chosen wound up gritting his teeth, hanging onto the ladder for dear life, rolling with the blow as the butt caught him in the side of the jaw, and then vaulting up onto the ledge as the witch hunter drew back for another strike. The actual dialogue went something like this:
“You’re at a bit of a disadvantage here, and he’s gonna hit you pretty hard, so take 3 harm.”
“That’s a lot. How is he doing 3 harm?”
“I figure the rifle butt is like 1 harm, +1 heavy, but it’s straight to the face and he’s putting all his muscle into it.”
“I don’t think it works that way, dude.”
“You could always just throw him off the ledge. What do you do?”
Then he flipped through the rulebook for a few, I decided to rule that he took terrible harm, and we kept going. Afterward I explained some of my frustration to the player, and he’s pretty cool with idea that some villains are just going to be crazy powerful, but I think the crux of the issue is that I don’t want his invincibility to complicate my ability to give him tough choices every time. I’m fine with giving him less tough choices (or at least not using “you take harm” as one of the potential choices), but I want to emphasize that he isn’t completely immune to harm, either.
When the only tool you have is DnD, every solution looks like “damage!” 🙂
That Vessel’s armour comes from ‘Only Flesh’, and the Wolf move ‘Reckless’, they do also have ‘Tireless’ (counts as a gang) and ‘Erase the Shem’, so yes, impossible to kill. It is worth noting that, even with this combat-focused appearing build she has only been in two fights after maybe 7 sessions, the GM gleefully declared that I would take 3 harm, and I reminded them that ‘no, it passes right through’. They were not disappointed at all and were thrilled to ask me ‘what does that look like?’
My two points there are that it did not matter that they did not get to hurt me and that combat is not the only thing we do in PbtA games. If you are worrying about the harm move, maybe avoid combat for a bit? That way you are ‘forced’ to practice using other moves.
As you say, switching to armour ignoring damage is a dick move since it invalidates the player’s choices. But, maybe, having the enemies do their own Investigate a Mystery and learn the Chosen’s weakness, and THEN start using secret armour ignoring stuff would be an interesting twist?
Don’t forget to telegraph this to the player so they can have their character try to stop the research and then later remove the guys who know about the weakness. I.e. Make it a soft move before you hit them with it. If they take action to prevent it before it happens, you can always do it again later (much later, preferably).
This is assuming the player is still having fun with the pointless combat, and that you can have fun throwing mooks at them.
You could always have their main character have to leave on personal business and have them play someone else for a bit. Let them see what it is like to be less invincible (vincible?), let you both get some variety. Just try to avoid accidentally killing this new softie in the first battle.