Hello!
We just rebooted our Monsterhearts game after a 3-years hiatus and it’s like starting anew: rediscovering the rules and all that. For example, everybody had forgotten that the MC didn’t roll dice.
Which caused a problem when she wanted to test me and see whether I succumbed to the charm of the most popular guy at school (a NPC).
Since she couldn’t roll for him, what we did was make me roll Cold and inverse the success ladder on “turning someone on”. 10+ was “resist”, “7-9” was a reaction or a string (the same as turning someone on), and 6- was a string + a reaction.
It worked well. Do you guys do other things like that? We would be interested to get a few ideas so that NPCs are less “passive” and subject entirely to what the PCs do. (because I have to point out, we’re very bad, as a group, to play characetrs who act against each other. We tried and didn’t like it, but don’t want to stop playing MH…)
That’d be a Keep Your Cool roll, so you did it right.
We considered keep Your Cool, but the wording was so very vague and unsatisfying that we looked for an alternative. Also there was no “plan” or anything, just know whether I would react or not… Didn’t feel right 😀
NPCs can be active as shit, but the dice only get involved when the players choose to respond. For the above situation, if you resist, it is a roll based on what you do (I’d guess 90% is either shut someone down or keep your cool) and if you choose to go along, no roll, just a MC move.
Think of it this way: NPCs are ridiculously active, so much so that you never have to roll for them; they just do stuff. Jock punches you? You go down. Teacher’s interrogating you? You spill the beans. Werewolf’s tearing the school down? It gets trashed.
Unless you step up to stop them. But to do that, you gotta roll.
NPCs don’t roll because they don’t have to. They just get to do stuff automatically. They’re not subject to you, by default. It’s almost the other way around. The dice are how you win control back.
Andy Hauge that was the hardest part about GMing Dungeon world at first. Not just waiting for the players to do stuff
I’m starting to understand I think. But in that situation it was difficult because I didn’t want to shut him down, he wasn’t doing anything, we just needed to know whether I liked him or not (because “you don’t control your lust” is cool but as is, can’t be applied from npc to pc with that nice uncertainty brought by a roll of turning on). So I’m pleased with our makeshift solution. But I’ll be sure to relay your answers, they make some things clearer !
I played in a game with an npc magic user and the mc adopted a similar approach of having us roll our dark as a custom move to resist the effects of a spell thrown at us (which I then failed 🙂 ) Custom moves (which is what it reads like your mc did) are a good tool for this as they can be tailored for the situation.
I’d say that there were three options here: 1) do some version of Keep Your Cool, which is basically what you did 2) have the MC use a string on the PC to tempt them 3) just have the PC’s player respond as they please – just because you can’t control all of your attraction doesn’t mean you can’t control some of it.
Michael Phillips, it reminds me of that scene in The Matrix: “stop trying to hit me, and hit me!” That push generates pushback from PCs, and there goes the snowball.
Someone on a forum told me that it was basically a soft move on the MC’s part, and that only if I DIDN’T want to be turned on despite myself, should I roll the dice (probably with Cold).
Since the point of what we did was to allow the dice to say whether I was turned on or not (to keep the principle of not being entirely master of our own sexual urges) I think we found a good solution (especially since it pleased everyone, which is probably the most important) 🙂
Yep! That definitely makes sense to me!