I’m thinking more and more of moves as rulings, and feeling more freedom to write custom moves as the situation demands – usually to satisfy one of the game’s principles, when an existing move feels inadequate. This includes coming up with moves as a player, and suggesting them to the GM.
For example, my PC has technology that can “remix” existing human memories, and this is how he produced his AI friends. It’s not a general-purpose memory editor, it only facilitates the creation or repair of living minds on their own terms. Another PC, and his NPC love interest, both shared plenty of experiences, but had also lost memories or emotional contexts. So we put this tech to use fixing that. Rather than Unleash Your Powers, I wanted a move that put control over those characters’ fates in their hands, and gave them as much authority as they could. The resulting suggestion to the GM (and adopted as written, and used successfully) was this:
When your memories are remixed with someone else’s via Newman neurotech, roll +Conditions. On a hit, the resulting connectome (a map of how a brain is wired) is stable, and the merge goes forward. On 10+, pick three side effects. On 7-9, pick one.
1. An important existing memory takes on a new form, or you get a new perspective on it
2. You get memories the other person would prefer you don’t get
3. You gain one of their goals or plans; if it’s something you wouldn’t have done before, mark potential if you do it
4. Your ego is in flux; the GM shifts your labels
5. Their relationships bleed into yours; give Influence to the other person, or to someone they give Influence to
On a miss, choose one: the connectome isn’t viable and the merge can’t take place and you must try again after time passes, or the merge succeeds but your ego is wildly in flux – the GM will rearrange your labels as they see fit and you take a powerful blow.
My only question is why the move mirrors the Take a Powerful Blow in roll but the miss seems harsh. It appears to have a bell curve of what the rolling player would want. I wouldn’t want a 10+ because too many side effects and I wouldn’t want a miss because of the inherent punishment of having to choose between no progress and GM choice. The 7-9 option appears to be the best outcome.
Is there something I’m not seeing in the move that ties into your game or the way the tech works in your fiction?
It’s part of our Doomed PC’s attempt to confront his Doom on his own terms (he’s got 2 points left on his track, so it’s down to the wire). I probably should have mentioned this earlier, sorry. 🙂
Because of that, the move ought to feel dire, and it ought to signal a new direction for the player no matter what the roll. We’re just deciding what that direction is through dice, because that’s what people asked for.
Even the miss gives you two options: “nothing happens but you lose time” (bad for this character at this moment) or “it works but you get hit hard” (bad, but it still means the end of his Doom, so hooray). So if you decide to go quietly after the last minute reprieve doesn’t happen, nothing bad at all happens. And if you cheat death, you pay a heavy price, but you live. You’ll be taking a new playbook anyway, so maybe new labels are actually better for you!
There’s no particular label that feels right for “sit there while my brain fixes itself with outside input”, and outside the fiction, we want the “best” (least impactful) outcome when you’re on edge and under stress (represented by conditions), so that’s the roll. The bell curve is there because more conditions shouldn’t yield better objective outcomes – you want some stress, but not total meltdown. I’d be okay if someone else decided to flip the 7-9 and 10+ results for themselves for consistency with other moves, but this made sense to me for a move that represented that truth.
All of the side effects are intended to give the player something to do once the procedure is finished. They’re a mixture of strictly fiction (new/altered memories) and mechanical impact, to let the player decide just what that is. The move is a healing action, so we shouldn’t be taking things away or punishing the player or PC, we just want to point the way to some new plot. “Shift labels” is our escape hatch if nobody can think of anything more interesting.
Hopefully that all makes sense. In short, it’s a move for a particular time and place, and if circumstances were different, it might look different too.
(Player in the game, so I might be biased.) I liked this because it represents an interesting space that I don’t see a lot in PbtA games: two bad options where you have a narrow middle ground that is the least bad option. It’s certainly a corner case, but that’s also what custom moves are for.
That clarifies things a lot, thank you for the explanation. I like the move and it seems to fit well with what you want to accomplish.
You said it was used successfully in your game… What happened? How did it play out?
There were two characters involved in the memory merge, one NPC (Alycia) and one PC (Jason). The player had decided to retire Jason as a PC and play Alycia, so we actually rolled for both characters. Jason got three side effects, Alycia rolled a miss.
Jason chose “other person’s memories”, “gain goals or plans”, and “relationship bleed”. The player is going to explore that outcome via fiction on the game forums, I think.
Alycia actually rolled a miss, so the GM is rearranging her labels. But she also rolled a miss on Take a Powerful Blow, so net outcome was that she got 2 potential in exchange for having her labels scrambled.
Fictionally, Jason got back a lot of memories his dad’s nanotech had stripped out of his brain (which was what was really killing him), and Alycia got back a lot of emotional context for her memories, which her father had stripped out (being a supervillain and Jason’s dad’s nemesis). The two fathers had been actively interfering with their kids, who were getting too close, so we got to heal both of them at once using each other’s memories. A nice, neat outcome.