I think BitD’s position(controlled-risky-desperate) is a nice mechanic for determining the difficulty of the fictional positioning.
Has anyone tried to adapt this mechanic into PbtA? For example, I think it can be easily fused into the power proflie in Worlds in Peril(simple-difficult-borderline).
Quick response (going to bed in my zone) – i already think AW has positioning but in high(er) abstraction. BitD is a cheat sheet extravaganza, but nonetheless a good one.
Isn’t that what +1 forwards are? If you ask questions, and follow up on the answers, you’re in a more controlled position that you were.
I only have two sessions of BitD under my belt but I’m not so sure I really understand why people like that mechanic so much. Can you explain?
Personally, I don’t really think about the controlled-risky-desperate scale or the levels of effect, since there’s no mechanics on either end. Obviously the complications of a 4-5 may be more or less major depending on the situation, but I personally find it easier to just wing that without charts and labels. For purposes of xp, I say that a desperate action is anything with a Devil’s Deal, or where you have no dots in the relevant skill, or that’s extremely risky in the fiction, and if you meet all three requirements it counts double.
Sebastian Baker you are playing an interesting game, though I’m not sure it is Blades in the Dark… anyway, there are totally mechanics attached to your position. The chart of outcomes is different depending on your position, with Controlled having the greatest difference from the others. .. plus there’s trading position for effect.
Jakob Oesinghaus I don’t have the book with me right now, but when I read the section on positions and effect levels, all I got from it was that if you acted from a better position, you got a better outcome, with nothing to attach that to the rolling or the mechanical results. So to me, it looked like the charts and categories were just sorting things that, in my experience, most GMs already do organically and often subconsciously, and in fact when I tried to consciously sort actions into Desperate, Risky or Controlled, I found it just slowed our game down. I’m not saying it’s a bad mechanic, I get that some people enjoy having that level of structure, and if you do, more power to you. But I don’t.
Sebastian Baker I don’t want to convince that you’re having your fun wrong, and I’m sure it works fine for you, so please take this in the spirit of fruitful discussion rather than telling people what they’re doing wrong :).
But it doesn’t quite work like this: position is “how bad can it get when I don’t get a 6?”, whereas effect is “how much can I do when I get a 4-6?”. So the quality of the outcome of the roll does not get better as your position increases, you just suffer less consequences if you do not roll a 6 if your position is better. Effect is in some sense even more omnipresent, since a variety of mechanics interact with effect: quality, scale, and potency (and through potency, quite a few special abilities).
And then there’s the subtle differences; for example, on a Controlled 1-3, you fail, but do not suffer any consequences, you just lose the opportunity to do the same thing in a Controlled manner again. And on a Controlled 4-5, you get a choice of doing it with a consequence or refraining from doing the thing. That’s really different from Risky and Desperate, where you do suffer consequences in addition to failure on a 1-3, and where you do not get the choice to pull back on a 4-5.
We found it quite helpful to discuss position and effect explicitly before the roll, to answer the question “how bad can things get?” and “how much can I achieve?”, because it makes it clear to everyone involved what the stakes are, and the GM won’t hit the players with a hard move out of nowhere; similarly, we can see how far a success carries before we are rolling. Somehow, those are things you are discussing in fiction-first gaming anyway, so it doesn’t seem to slow things down a lot. But YMMV (in fact, it does seem to vary).
Jakob Oesinghaus Don’t worry, I didn’t get the sense you were saying I was “doing it wrong.” The only implication I got was that maybe I’d misread the book or missed some detail, which to be honest, I probably did 🙂
For example, I didn’t know that a Controlled action specifically had no consequences for a failure, although that might be in part because it’s very rare for any of my players to be in a Controlled position. That is a very interesting distinction from the other two, and it makes me think that maybe I should read that section again and try to think about positions more consciously.
Does the book say to discuss positions and effect levels explicitly? Because that sounds like a really smart move, to make sure everyone’s on the same page with what the stakes are.
The thing with risky-controled-desperate is that you set a difficulty beforehand, so the player knows how risky their action is. In PbtA it is more fuzzy and sometimes the player can get a surprise of the consecuences of a failure.
“As GM, you have final say over the position for the roll, but explain and clarify things as needed, especially when you’re starting out. By discussing the position (and how it might be better or worse) you’ll help everyone build a better view of the fictional situation in their minds’ eye and get on the same page about the tone of the game.” (p.20)
So yeah, you’re not just supposed to say what position and effect are, you’re supposed to discuss them, which opens the path to perhaps trying a different action (rarely) or trading position for effect (frequently) and making sure that the final position/effect meshes up with everyone’s view of the fiction and any effects that may have been overlooked (“But wait, I have potency when communicating with the supernatural from Ghost Voice, shouldn’t this factor into effect?” “You’re right, the effect isn’t Limited at all, it is actually Standard. So here’s what you get on a success: …”).
I would argue that PBTA does this during move creation rather than play. It’s pretty easy to see the pattern in moves. The default (risky) outcome spread is bad/mixed/success, but there are controlled moves (not too bad/effectively success/bonus!) and desperate moves (oh fuck/bad/costly). It’s not called that, of course, but it’s a recurring pattern in design that seems to line up well.
FWIW I think PBTA does generally encourage you to set out the risks and opportunities. E.g. in AW “offer an opportunity, with or without a cost” is basically doing that. But perhaps building it in as a separate step is helpful? I dunno, as a player I’m probably a bit more interested in the specific consequences of success or failure than I am in labelling them as desperate or controlled.
Rob Donoghue that’s a really good point. There are moves where a 10+ is a “success, and” and moves where a 10+ is “success, but”.
I also agree with Rob Donoghue.
Also, in my opinion, the BitD system is less basic than it may seems (I wouldn’t call it a “cheat sheet extravaganza” for example).
BitD resolution is not just a “Generic Defy Danger with 3 levels of severity in consequences”, it’s a deconstruction of the Move mechanic which requires the Actions (which are different than Stats), the Effect mechanics and, in some measure, the Resistance roll to work properly.
For me, the two ideas (PbtA-Moves resolution and BitD resolution) are really really close, but in some ways mutually exclusive.
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