So I’m finding that although I love PbtA games, I really hate the GM Moves lists. I feel like these are probably great for new GMs, but as someone who’s been playing and running games for 20+ years, I feel like they are restrictive or a hassle.
I don’t mind the whole part about reacting to 6- rolls or when they play gets stagnant, but the GM moves themselves bug the heck out of me.
Does anyone else just basically ignore them and focus on the player’s moves and the Agendas/Principles stuff?
Yup. Constantly. They really are just suggestions. I may use one when I’m stuck.
The GM moves are more like suggestions rather than rules.
I don’t hate them, but I do only use them by name when the mood strikes me. Given that not everyone is an improv maestro, they have a place.
What’s with all the roadsigns I see around town? I know where things are, I don’t need a sign.
They are there so, when you look down and don’t know what to say, BOOM there are ideas.
What I’ve found, at least in the case of AW itself, is that anything I would do fits into one of the moves anyway. (I mean, put them in a spot covers a lot.). What the list does so for me is give me options when I’m looking for something different. And frankly expands my scope a little (I think we all have favored reactions.).
Do I formally look at and pick from the list every time? No. Once I realized that almost all my reactions fit the MC move list anyway.
In addition to being a pick-from list, the GM moves do also suggest the flavor. May be a worthwhile takeaway even if you do not use them specifically.
I greatly enjoy the GM moves list when I’m a player, because between the fiction and that list, I always know what’s at stake for any roll without having to negotiate it.
Adam Goldberg When the signs are confusing and cause me to second guess what I thought I already knew, I would be better off without them. Haven’t you ever seen instructions for something that were less helpful than just knowing how to do something?
If you feel like they’re restrictive, then you’re not grasping them well enough. Literally any consequence can be mapped to the moves, they’re just phrased in a way to encourage genre appropriate actions.
Maybe not restrictive, but like I have to check if how I want to react as a GM is on my “allowed” list. It slows me down and I get caught up in reading the list rather than just running the game.
Here’s a protip: it is on the list.
Give me an example (and PbtA game), and I will break it down
It’s not a list of allowed reactions. It’s a comprehensive list of colorful suggestions.
The gm moves list also act as the explicit stakes when you roll. They are the unwritten 6- text for every move.
Apocalypse World 2nd Ed., p. 80: “There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this.”
Dungeon World, p. 159: “The GM’s agenda, principles, and moves are rules just like damage or stats or HP . You should take the same care in altering them or ignoring them that you would with any other rule.”
So, in these two PbtA games at least, they are not guidelines. They are indeed rules, no matter what your experience in GMing may be.
I can’t speak to every PbtA game out there, but if you don’t feel comfortable using a game’s moves, maybe the experience that game is aiming for just isn’t your cup of tea.
I think the point is that if you are struggling with the GM moves and such, you can play the game still using the basic mechanics, as Vincent Baker says the game is concentric by design. Look for the spirit of the GM stuff and run with that. While they are RAW I’m betting they are not intended to be a showstopper, and it takes time to gain system mastery.
If you don’t like looking at the list, it can still be your game. If you don’t like the experiential insinuations of the moves and principles and agenda, then maybe it really is not your cup of tea.
But also authorship isn’t owned by anyone when a game gets to the table, not even the designer. If experiencing the game as intended isn’t important to you and your table (personally, everything about AW blew my mind as a gamer, storyteller and designer), you can ignore rules and have a great time playing with the some of the bits and pieces.
Ignore whatever you want, of course. It’s your game.
That being said, like Aaron Griffin, I find it hard to see the mc moves as restrictive.
Put them in a spot
What can you not do with that move?
I’ve found Moves really help in those obnoxious in-between spots: there’s not a dramatic thing happening right now, and the players are Role-playing, and the GM is setting scenes, and describing NPCs, and… it’s all boring-ass shit. Everyone is spinning our wheels. Everyone is suddenly a talking head. No one is going forward.
Why? Because nothing is snowballing right here, right now, everybody is just talking, like every other RPG. Going to the shops, talking to their NPC buddies, but none of it has any kind of meat or stakes, nothing is escalating.
This is where I’ve found Moves to be most useful: when the players do something, and I feel an answer coming up my throat that doesn’t escalate or move anything forward anything, I bite my tongue. I look at my list, and I make a Move instead. That’s the point of making a Move “when they look to you,” and that’s the best trigger for making one… when the momentum is draining, things are winding down. The Moves always help me when these lulls get the drop on me.
See I’m getting two opposing views on it. Some people say I can ignore them, others say if I don’t use them, I should play something different.
Aaron Griffin and Tony Tucker I don’t doubt necessarily that there isn’t a GM move that might cover something, but with that list, it makes me feel like I have to know which one it is, even if I never say it out loud.
As Marshall Miller and Christian Griffen have said, they see it as a specific list of results from their 6- rolls, so it weighs on me to make sure what I’m doing is on the list.
Colin Spears That’s pretty much the usual dichotomy when it comes to these kinds of game conversations though: I don’t need rules to tell me how to play a game and The game is made of rules, if I don’t use them then I’m not playing the game.
If you want to be super technical, though, everyone saying ignore them is wrong because the PbtA books tend to call out Moves as actual hardbound rules. But also there’s no RPG Cops coming for anybody, so it doesn’t really matter?
I don’t think anyone should tell you what to play or not 🙂 I would just say if you’re going to free form it, make sure your players are on the level about it. Aligning expectations and such.
Alfred Rudzki Hitchcock I’m less concerned about “RPG cops” as I am worried that not consulting the GM Move list is going to have a detrimental effect on the PbtA games I run. They seem like they aren’t really needed, but as you said, the books make them out to be a hard coded part of the actual system.
Total agreement with Christian Griffen here. I feel like it would be super crappy to get into a game only to be surprised by the GM deciding they just weren’t going to follow the rules. Absolutely align expectations.
Colin Spears I’d say they’re needed in the sense that they structure the game you’re playing, the scenes you set, and how NPCs solve problems/engage PCs, yeah? And that different stories have different scenes. People get tortured in Daredevil, but not in Steven Universe. Action violence by the cart load in Altered Carbon, but light on the ground in Grace & Frankie.
The best way to dissect this would probably be to compare and contrast the move lists between two games of similar genre and see how their Moves (read that as “expectations for GM play”) differ. So, say, compare/contrast Legacy with AW, and Headspace/Veil/Sprawl.
Alfred Rudzki Hitchcock But that kind of stuff shouldn’t need a rule. Knowing what is or isn’t genre appropriate isn’t a game mechanic. That’d be like saying I need a rule in D&D that says don’t have aliens and laser blasters (don’t get me started on that one adventure).
I think you should try to understand what they are trying to accomplish and what kind of experience they are driving. If you find them frustrating or a showstopper, you don’t need to actively reference them. It’s a concentric design and the GM moves/principles/agenda are not at the core.
These games are authored with intent for creating a certain kind of story and experience. That is why all of these rules exist. You can play a PbtA game without them, it just may not perfectly be the PbtA game in the book or which your players are expecting.
Realistically, it’s not practical to expect to be able to follow the GM stuff perfectly. It won’t happen. It takes time to learn but there’s also times where inspiration strikes on its own. If you are just in the mindset of the GM stuff, you’ll be in a good place.
Like others have said, what you do can pretty much always be retrospectively associated with a specific GM move. This isn’t useful, of course. However it does insinuate that you can’t really break these rules if you stick to the roads, even as you ignore the road signs.
Phillip Wessels I think that is the best answer to the issue I guess I should have more clearly enunciated in the beginning. I wanted to see if people felt I was missing something crucial to the game if I just winged it, rather than getting bogged down with checking the list over and over.
The jist seems to be that as long as I keep to the themes/genres of the game, I’m probably following the GM Moves anyways and it’s not a problem as long as no one is expecting anything different from me.
You can wing it, but yeah I’d definitely read the GM stuff closely first. It’s not just genre stuff. It’s attitude and themes and mood and color. They really are trying to steer you towards the specific experience intended by the author. You’ll be doing the game justice if you do your best to understand what kind of story it is meant to tell.
You make it sound like I’m not even looking inside the cover of the book before running it. Isn’t knowing “what kind of story is meant to be told” a given? That advice seems like telling me to make sure I know what dice I’ll need. Pardon my tone and maybe it’s because it’s late, but no shit.
It does seem like it would be common sense, but I wouldn’t say it’s a given. If you read the book, cool, you probably get the nuance then. But really, a lot of people run and play this stuff using the printed materials alone, which is ok. And it actually isn’t that hard to go off track. E.g., when Monsterhearts turns into a kill-the-big-bad mystery.
Phillip Wessels That just seems bizarre to me. I guess I’ve been fortunate to not experience this kind of GM. Probably because I’m usually the one running and I’ve been reading and rereading the book for a week or two.
I see the GM moves also as a measure of how hard I can go down on PCs.
If I’m making a Move that doesn’t fit anything in the list, I’m going too light on them.
If I’m doing something that fits two or more Moves at once, it’s too much. (ex.: in AW I can either take away something from the PCs – or – inflict harm as established. “He shoots you, 3-damage, and then he jumps on your bike and runs away” it’s not a good Move. It’s two. Don’t do that.)
Colin Spears I think, your understanding of rules is different from the book. Think of Vincent’s old bonmot: System is the means by which players negotiate etc.
With this understanding genre, the game world, agendas, principles are all parts of the system.
That’s the school of storygaming at its core. System does matter. And everything is system. So of course you should consider carefully to change any part of the game. You are also totally free to do it.
What AW tries to do is present a complete system for playing the game, from the moment you start planning it as the MC, the moment you sit at the table to create characters, to the moment you start packing up. That includes how to actually MC the game. Early D&D players struggled with how to play the game because there was so much it didn’t tell you. One of the explicit goals in AW is to provide a complete, consistent end to end play experience if you follow the instructions, including how to GM the game. It actually says this in several places.
Of course that does not mean your game is guaranteed to break if you stray from the instructions, or that you can’t do anything else, or adapt the game to your style and preferences. Of course you can, but if you do your taking responsibility for that, which is fine. In fact AW gives various illustrations of that in the examples, including creating and logging custom moves for your campaign, for example. Once you start playing, it’s your game.
Practical Advice: After the game, look back at particular moments and consider what could have happened by using different MC moves. That may help in identifying what the game is really asking of you.
I’m curious about how you feel they’re restrictive and which game specifically you’re having problems with? Maybe an example from play would help. I would say that in general the idea is that they shouldn’t slow down play, sure early on or if you’re inexperienced then you might refer to them, but I feel like they work best when you’ve internalized them and just seamlessly work them into the fiction.
Hi Colin Spears! I can give you a definite answer.
No, you’re not the only one.
Apocalypse World presents, as thoroughly as Meg and I could manage in this vain world, one way to GM. It’s a way to GM that’s existed for a long time, in the wild, you might say, alongside many others.
We wanted to lay it out so that people who had never encountered it, or who couldn’t reliably get it to work, could learn to GM this way.
A certain number of GMs, encountering Apocalypse World, already know how to GM this way. Some of them like having it laid out like this, but others are like, “this is annoying. Isn’t this just GMing? As an experienced GM, I know what to do and I trust my instincts, I don’t need these dang lists.”
That’s you! That’s fine.
Recognize that it’s not a matter of the number of years you’ve GMed, it’s a matter of the particular approach to GMing that you’ve practiced and mastered. People who’ve practiced and mastered other approaches to GMing than this one, need the techniques laid out for them, same as people who’ve never learned to GM before.
I relate to these sentiments so much that I feel like I agree with nearly everyone in this thread, especially those who seem to disagree.
The first time I run any new game, I try really hard to run it by the book. This was challenging for me in Apocalypse World, though, because there are a lot of MC moves and principles. Before you really internalize them, it can be overwhelming to consult that list of them every time someone rolls under a 10, or whenever they look to you to see what’s going on in the world.
So, early on – maybe my second or third AW session – I stopped consulting MC moves entirely. I just GM’d it like I would GM any other RPG. And it went great, mostly, but did stall out a couple times as I wasn’t sure what to do.
Afterward, I went back and looked at the MC moves and suddenly felt like they made sense to me. Most MC moves are just a codified list of what good GMs have been doing for years already. I already intuitively knew to announce future badness, separate them, activate their stuff’s downside, and so on. Those times that I stalled out, though? That’s when I did something that I couldn’t trace back to any MC move. I said and did things that didn’t actually give the players anything to use, anything to move action forward.
Now I go somewhere in between. I keep GM moves handy when I run AW hacks, and I read them carefully before play. I don’t always look at them during play because I’m already doing them. And, come on, you can’t really tell me the game is a conversation and then expect me to stall the conversation to read a shopping list every couple minutes. But when I feel stuck, and tempted to just make something up that I feel kind of iffy about, I quickly consult the moves list and use the first inspiring thing I see as a prompt. And that’s usually enough to give me an idea of something that actually would move things forward.
All of that said, I feel like I can get away with this because none of my players run any PbtA games or read the MC/GM rules. If even one actually did either of these things, I’d be more nervous about deviating from their understanding of what might happen when they act.
And to be honest, given how often I see this exact conversation come up—”these moves make the game,” but “holy crap that is a hard list to scan and pick through”—I’m starting to think MC/GM moves might be brilliant game design presented with unfinished user experience design.
Vincent Baker Thanks!
I’ve been ignoring GM moves for years!
Yes ~ See my PM via hangouts 😉
Colin Spears well you already got lot of feedback. My experience? I’m a GM, I GMed almost every system, and I have 30+ years of experience. Apocalypse World TOTALLY changed the way I saw and I played RpGs. TOTALLY. A single game gave me a whole new way to look at RpGs. Today it’s easy to tell “ehi, GM moves are useless” or “ehi, every GM do this at his table”. Well, I didn’t. Also, I never had a game that told me “These are rules. Not stupid advices chapter you can skip when reading the book”. Before, if a character was climbing a cliff, and he failed, my reply to that was “You fall”, with more or less crunch, depending on what system I was GMing in that moment. Tell me, Colin, is this true for you too? Now I know that it’s pretty stupid to make the character falls (or risking the fall), when I can say “you can climb, but on top you find a well hidden handful of enemies: they were waiting for you!” or “You can climb, but your backpack is heavily stuck on a rock. You’ll have to cut the straps, freeing yourself from the burden, before you can press on, and arrive on the top”. Or “You can climb with few hassles, but now that you are almost on top, you see a mimetic lizard climbing right behind your friend bard: he apparently noticed nothing about that, so you have few second to do something about. What you do?”.
All those situations are my GM move in response to the 6- result of the first character climbing.
Honestly, if your system (or your experience) have you react in that way BEFORE Apocalypse World, then, ok. You were a good GM and you had a strong narrative method. About me? As I said, my mindset was totally revolutioned by AW, and I have to say another thing: you can’t use those kind of replies in every system. It’s a cool way to play that it’s hard to replicate in other systems. In the dice rolls you need total success and mixed success, you need freedom in the failed rolls, etc. A difficult alchemy to export (i tried with Savage Worlds, a “traditional” system that I still love, with mixed results… ).
Seconded, Andrea Parducci. If you are NEW to PbtA games, you should absolutely pay attention to the GM moves. Those of us who have run these games for many years have likely internalized them to the point that we no longer really need them.
But isn’t that the central conceit of AW? That the game is a conversation and the rules of the game address how we have that conversation, as opposed to how many metres you can run in 6 seconds or something of that nature?
Having said that, whenever I’ve MC’d, the move list has gradually faded into the background as we get into the rhythm of the game, and only referred to directly when I need a prompt. I usually try and read over and internalise them before a session.
That’s weird. I could only see about half of the above comments when I replied, even though most of them had been there for days, apparently.
Apologies if I appeared to be Dog piling