Mystery vs. PbtA

Mystery vs. PbtA

Mystery vs. PbtA

In a lot of conversations, I’ve heard it ranging from implicit to explicit that part of PbtA’s narrative force has to do with not withholding narratively relevant information from players. On the contrary, players are given much more information and transparency than trad gaming, with the specific goal of enabling them to make hard/interesting choices.

Reading the City of Mist starter set made me wonder: how well does this jive with a game whose goal is to cultivate a feeling of mystery? My goal in asking this question isn’t to criticize CoM – PbTA isn’t the holy grail, and taking the mechanisms in a different direction isn’t blasphemy. The question, though, is “does PbtA work for mysteries? Does a mystery-centric build still support the pbta engine?”

CoM, in-text and in its g+ conversations, for instance, specifically calls out having players flag the direction of their interest in players’ mysteries but otherwise leaving it up to the GM (to enable the exploration of, well, mysteries). Its rules don’t really have anything with an equivalent heft of Discern Realities / Open Your Mind (though there are analogous, though it seems to me weaker, moves through Mythic intuition). The AW standard provides answers; the CoM version seeks to provide clues that prompt the exploration of more mysteries. Another example is when the player tries to push their powers – the GM explicitly hides the stakes from the player, and the player only gets to make a transparent choice on a 10+. A 7-9 is “you push, and you pay the price, w/o knowing what the price is.” A 10+ is “you get to know the price, and choose if you want to push.” It explicitly moves away from “players make narratively interesting choices” to “players go in blind.”

It seems to me that PbtA relies on a lot beyond the 2d6 tripartite outcome mechanic in order to work well, and the CoM starter pack seems to have stripped out a lot of PbtA except for that 2d6 mechanic. For instance, PbtA tends to focus a lot on “you can’t force the characters to do shit with moves, you can just carrot-and-stick them into certain decisions (e.g., no real mind control)”. CoM, otoh, has “Make a Hard Choice,” which on a fail, simply forbids you from undertaking the action you wanted to take – not failing to achieve a goal, but just outright forbidding an action. (“If you fail, your character is unable to muster the willpower to act against this aspect of herself and the MC makes a move as usual. “) Although it vaguely fits into the usual 3-part scheme of PBTA moves, it differs philosophically in that it’s not “failure to achieve a goal / suffer a complication,” because the goal you fail on is “choose to do this thing.” It forbids /the attempt/.

These decisions all seem thematically coherent to me, roughly speaking (except for the Make A Hard Move, to be honest – I get it’s the “acting against yourself” bit, but mechanically it seems off to forbid a narratively interesting action, rather than carrot-and-stick it): the goal of play in CoM doesn’t seem to be for only characters to explore mysteries, but for players to explore mysteries too. Therefore, they can indicate the sort of questions they’re interested in, but the answers aren’t going to be known to them. This seems to conflict with the sort of narrative authority that tends to define PbtA-style play, since it implies that the PCs are playing in the GM’s story, trad-style. It explicitly moves the story back into GM territory, taking player ignorance as a virtue.

Can the PbtA engine still hum in the absence of player knowledge and reduced decision-making about the story? The “players make interesting choices” mechanic would seem to be significantly mitigated here, leaving the players with a “make choices about your flags” mechanic instead. Can you construct stories in an interesting way if your input into the story has been restricted to the GM again?

Thoughts?

(Pre-emptive apologies if this reads like CoM bashing. I’m quite taken with the starter set and I’m currently a KS backer. If I wasn’t a presumptive fan, I wouldn’t be bothering to read the rules closely and trying to understand the game.)

26 thoughts on “Mystery vs. PbtA”

  1. Aaron Griffin I’m trying to set up a group to give it a shot, but let’s be honest: game design for an entire genre is one thing, and how well you execute on a new, partially-constructed specific example of that genre is another.

  2. I feel like “Make a Hard Choice” is a poor example in this case. In terms of carrot/stick, the actual move is “Convince” which is written in a pretty forgiving way: on a 10+, you include someone in your agenda temporarily, and on a 7-9 you give in a little but protect your agenda. No, there’s no carrot, but its not even that bad of a stick regardless of the success level.

    Make a Hard Choice, meanwhile, is buried deep in the game’s premise of the warring nature of your burgeoning divinity vs waning humanity. It is for specific decisions that would set you at-odds with your character’s identities and leaves it wild and unknown — to everyone, player and GM — how it will resolve. On a failure, being forced to do X is — in my opinion, in this very narrow move — not that distinct from an MC saying “okay, so the floor falls out from under you and now you’re trapped in the basement, far away from everyone else.” Its bad, its a pain, its a whole new situation, and its out of your hands. Like, yes, its an internal character thing, but “I didn’t want to give up on my Mystery!” isn’t much different from “I didn’t want to go down to the basement alone!” when a 6- and a Hard Move are involved.

    If City of Mist had any other premise besides how your body is a vessel for mythic imagination and its desperate to claw its way free and you’re just kind of along for the ride to some degree, I think I would be more bothered by Make a Hard Choice. But, with what its about, I don’t mind too much putting a move on this particular aspect. I mean, hey, mileage varies! And I understand giving it side-eye? But, for me (and maybe me alone!), it works.

  3. Alfred Rudzki

    You have a fair point. I think I dislike it on the basis of “if it’s narratively interesting to have a character fight (or embrace) his nature, then let them make that choice, and generate costs and consequences for it,” in keeping with the general PbtA cycle of “let PCs make hard choices, generate complications, let them make more hard choices dealing with those complications.” Instead of “make it tough for the character to choose to fight or embrace their nature, then watch them deal with the complications,” it’s “let them roll to see if they’re allowed to fight their nature.” It… doesn’t quite work the same way. It takes away decision-making ability in what seems to be the core area of decision-making for the PCs – do you embrace/explore or do you fight/ignore?

    That said, honestly, it was an off-the-top-of-my-head tangent to the core topic of “CoM modifies PbtA rules to support mystery play; is the core PbtA engine compatible with those sorts of changes?”. My interest isn’t in calling out CoM specifically, so much as CoM seems to be make reasonable changes to PbtA to enable mystery-for-players play, and the question is whether PbtA works with that goal at all. Can I have cinematic play with shared authorial control if mystify-the-player is a central goal?

  4. The traditional “GM witholds information”  approach to mystery leaves the Player and the PC on the same side of the epistemological divide: their positions are coterminous and covalent, even if not perfectly congruent.  IOW, the Player is just as “in the dark” as their character is, and therefore when the mystery is at last revealed or discovered, the Player’s surprise/shock has a better chance of resonating in a similar way to the (assumed) subjective feelings of the character itself.  This enhances the potential for immersion and bleed, and allows the Player to remain in “actor stance”.

    Some PbtA systems (and lots of other storygames) have an easy willingness to push the Player up into “author stance”.  While that’s a perfectly valid design choice and playstyle, I feel it falls flat where mysteries are concerned. 

    In a mystery it can be said that the primary obstacle is not a living foe, but rather the lack of knowledge itself, and victory against this obstacle arises when you attain that knowledge: i.e., “figuring it out” is literally “killing the monster”.  If you are the person who invented the knowledge that your character is about to discover, you violate the Czege Principle, which tells us right away it’s not going to be as fun.  It’s not going to surprise you.  Viewed from a trad perspective, by moving up to author stance, you have in effect robbed yourself of the potential for immersion and bleed.

  5. J Stein I see what you’re saying! And I hope I didn’t seem to be calling you out for a CoM fight, cause that’s not what I was going for! I guess, in my head, I just auto-answers you Q as “of course PbtA can do mystery, like a bajillion different versions of it do mystery right now.” I found myself much more wrapped up in the question of using moves to answer thematic questions vs leaving it up the fruitful void. Sorry that that wasn’t what you were looking for!

    On the mystery front: yeah, you can totally do mysteries in PbtA. The point of mysteries — from the level of a media consumer — is that they’re being unraveled, being dismantled and consumed. That is, they’re there to be answered, and PbtA is all about asking and answering Qs, right? Get at the heart of what matters to the PC’s yeah? And, I imagine, the role of the MC in CoM isn’t to actively deny answers, but rather to focus on the sensation of discovery and develop puzzle pieces of the world as the PCs go looking for them. Much like Gumshoe, for example, makes it clear that clues are really just pacing mechanisms and you have to give them out regularly and freely, I feel like CoM is saying something very similar.

    You’re building a mystery, but you’re not out to play stump the players and laugh at them. Which is very similar to Apocalypse World’s classic ‘I could just say rocks fall, you all take 10-harm, but that would suck wouldn’t it? That’s not what I’m here for’ thing.

  6. As If “Some PbtA systems (and lots of other storygames) have an easy willingness to push the Player up into “author stance”. While that’s a perfectly valid design choice and playstyle, I feel it falls flat where mysteries are concerned. “

    I think you did a great job with clearly restating the premise in more precise, Forge-like terms: CoM seems to make mechanical changes to the PbtA engine in order to facilitate mystery-exploring play.

    The question here, though, isn’t whether retreating from author stance is good for exploring mysteries as a player; I’m willing to treat that as a given, considering fore-knowledge of the answers to mysteries precludes mystery exploration as a player, tautologically. I hope I successfully communicated that in my original post; considering my tangents, I may not have. The question is whether mechanical changes oriented to actor-based play are compatible with a system whose virtues, as traditionally recounted, seem to flow primarily from the emphasis on moving players out of actor stance and emphasizing a director/writer stance.

  7. Agreed.  To be honest, however, I wouldn’t find it particularly difficult to fill a Front with clues, any time after the first session.  The only real difference is that the initial concept for the mystery will arise from something a Player said at some point, rather than springing fully-formed from my head.  I think this falls into rather the same area as you describe for CoM.  Regardless of PbtA’s reputation, my Players prefer to remain in actor stance, probably due to their own experience with more trad games, and because we’re a bleedy group.

  8. Mysteries are about finding the information to determine what has HAPPENED.

    One of the core tenants of PbtA is “Play to find out what happens”.

    These two things do not have to conflict.

    As Alfred Rudzki pointed out, mysteries are about a lack of information and following the characters as they discover this information. The mystery information is the Mcguffin.

    The Mcguffin is not what you use to make the hard choices, it’s the carrot dangling at one end of the hard choice. One carrot leads to another hard choice with another carrot, and so on. Maybe once you get all the carrots you realize they are lead to one BIG hard choice.

    This whole time you’ve played to find out what happens. The players haven’t invented the information they are about to discover, but they have (hopefully) made some hard decisions to get there.

    To paraphrase your refined question (to see if I understand it correctly), “Are actor-based moves in conflict with a system which emphasizes director/writer based moves?”

    I would say, “yes”. If you truly have a system that emphasizes one type of action you try to promote a different type of action that is not supported there is a conflict. The problem is, I would argue that PbtA is not a system that emphasizes director/writer based moves.

    Looking at the basic moves for AW, all them are actor focused. The player does not get to invent what happens. When asked to make a choice the character just as much as the player is making the decision. I fondly remember a certain phrase being pounded into my brain, “In AW, ‘To do it, do it.'”

    Maybe I have a different understanding of what you mean by “director/writer stance moves”.

  9. I think PbtA is as much a gaming philosophy as a set of game mechanisms. I watched a video of Tim Kask, TSR’s original editor this morning, saying that he found it mystifying that players complained when the GM took away their agency (with a wielder-posessing magic sword). Player agency is part of the PbtA philosophy, as is “play to find out what happens,” making failed rolls drive the narrative and having success with complications. Blades in the Dark is, in my humble opinion, PbtA even if the dice mechanics and a lot of other stuff are different.

    Apocalypse World is not a universal game engine like GURPS. The rules and moves, even the author’s voice, are designed to emulate a specific genre and to evoke a specific emotional palette in the narrative at the table. That is why it needs to be hacked when you want to change the genre or even just the mood at the table.

    So hacking AW always starts with, “What do I want the players to say and feel at the table?” The rules, game mechanisms and text of the game has to be built up from there.

    So your questions:

    What does the writer of CoM want the players to say and feel at the table? If sending the players in blind achieves that, then players should not have full knowledge. If taking away some player agency will achieve that, then it is ok. The rules will be successful in that respect if they achieve what the writer wanted to achieve.

    Whether players will enjoy it is another question.

  10. Hi everyone, this is Amít, creator of City of Mist. I am sorry to jump into the discussion so late, but running a Kickstarter seems to have this effect 🙂 On the other hand, the discussion that came up here is so incredibly awesome and illuminating that I can’t be too sorry!

    J Stein thank you for bringing up this subject, and very elegantly and clearly so. I have asked myself the question of “Mystery and PbtA” from the onset. I must say even though I am a huge fan and advocate of PbtA philosophy in RPGs, I did not limit myself to this philosophy in designing City of Mist. As a result, I think CoM is well beyond a hack; while it uses PbtA elements and philosophy, it does reconstruct them in a way that forms something new and independent of its parent.

    I particularly liked Yoshi Creelman’s take on the combination of mystery and “Play to Find out”: they do not contradict as a mystery is about what happened in the past whereas playing to find out is about the present or future. The MC prep definitely consists of creating the past (i.e. clues) in a more detailed fashion than most PbtA games, but that doesn’t mean the future is in any way not up to the players. I feel that in playtesting CoM Cases like “V is for Going Viral” or “Demons in Cross End” (recently released Halloween special) we achieved a good balance of both investigation and the explosive drama that can go in any direction, which I love about PbtA games.

    I think the real issue here, as it was pointed out, was mystery vs. the player agency aspect of PbtA philosophy. As As If said, you can’t write the story and be surprised by it. This is an issue mainly in the players personal mysteries. I was and am trying to create a game where the MC receives the direction the player wishes to explore (in form of Mystery/Identity and questions asked in Explore your Mythos under Photomontage move) and creates something for them to explore. Some MCs have already said they would leave the creation in the hands of the player. That’s totally acceptable and I would always allow it, but some of my players would throw me out the window if I that was the only option because they enjoy the discovery more that writing 🙂 So I think I need to write a section about this in the core book that will explain both options more clearly.

    Finally, while in my perspective it’s nearly there, Make A Hard Choice still needs some work. Actually, I don’t have a problem with its 6- outcome and I’m not attached to it. As said above, it’s not much different from a hard move. You can equate the failure to act with losing the inner struggle (in other words the part of you that wanted to act against your Mystery/Identity DID TRY to act, it just failed). Currently, my main problem is that it feels like the dramatic decision of taking Fade/Crack, which can eventually change your character’s themes, is a little side-winded by the roll and its outcomes. I need to figure this out.

  11. Here is a comment wrote deconstructing Make a Hard Choice on the CoM community ( https://plus.google.com/communities/113924020257745727937 ):

    However, re: MAHC, Paul, I don’t really think it should be a hard move. For me, ideally, it should be a move triggered by the player as they see that their intended action is coming into conflict with one of their Mysteries/Identities. The MC’s job is to set the scene so that such a dilemma is created, basically allowing the player to choose how important this theme is to his character, or which theme is more important. The MC can also remind the player of their M/Is, if they forget about it.

    At it’s core, the move should be: “When you act against one of the Mysteries or Identities, mark Crack/Fade.” Then, an MC can say:

    — “Are you acting against your Mystery/Identity of ____?”

    or even

    — “If you do ____, it will be acting against your Mystery/Identity of _____.”

    (this one largely depends on the style of MCing)

    Then I added a layer of complexity, which I’m not sure is needed, whereby PCs with more Logos find it harder to go against Identities and PCs with more Mythos find it harder to ignore their Mysteries. That introduced the roll and the outcomes of positive status at 10+ and weakness tags at 7-9.

    I can work with the 6- result to make it a little softer; perhaps the player can choose whether they actually act or not, and the MC makes a hard move on that. It doesn’t really matter, because the damage in the form of crack/fade is done.

    What do you guys think?

    City of Mist RPG

  12. Thank you, City of Mist for trying to clarify. I see now what you mean about the MAHC move, and I admit that I’m still not entirely on board. I’ll try to state why as clearly as I can, borrowing some phrases used elsewhere, and then at the tail I’d like to offer some hopefully helpful suggestions:

    The 2d6 mechanic’s core gameplay loop looks like “Players make choices. Choices have consequences; what do you do?. Players make choices about dealing with those consequences. New consequences; what do you do?”

    Choice > Consequence > Choice is the core, snowballing, engine.

    The 2d6 tripartite breakdown isn’t “here’s a die roll for great/okay/shitty outcome.” It’s a die roll to enforce the Choice > Consequence > Choice loop via combinations of goal achievement + complications. And it really has two elements: every action has a fictional outcome (the players feel empowered: at +2, they’re succeeding at their goals in one way or another 60% of the time, and often MCs let 6 still involve some sort of success if they can pair it with a hard move), and they’re constantly being asked to respond to those fictional outcomes.

    So, this pretty much means that every move needs to produce one of two things:

    Fictional consequences to deal with (or not)

    Fictional goal achievement (or not)

    I want to assert that the goal part tends to make players feel empowered narratively – they can affect things – but it’s the consequences part that tends to make the story interesting. For moves to be interesting, they should ideally be generating the result of Fictional Consequences > What Do You Do?

    The 6 result on MAHC seems like the narrative equivalent of constipation; the player strains and squeezes and nothing comes of it. The MC gets permission to make a move, sure, but it pretty much by definition can’t be related to a fictional consequence of what the character did/didn’t do, because the character didn’t do anything, right? I mean, if this were a scene in a comic book, it would look like:

    Panel 1: Character screws up his face, squints his eyes, squeezes his fists-

    Panel 2: Character cracks one eye open. Nothing happened?-

    They didn’t try something and create consequences; they … stood there. Once in a blue moon for comic relief, sure, maybe, regularly?

    This dice roll isn’t “here are consequences for acting against your identity” it’s “roll to see if you’re allowed to act against your identity.” Narratively, Batman stands on a rainy ledge, grasping the hand of a dangling Joker. Choosing not to let Joker fall, or rolling a 6, look the same here, right? He wanted to let Joker fall – we know he did, 6 or not – and ultimately chose not to, whether you want to describe it as “couldn’t muster the willpower” or “couldn’t force himself” or “thought better of it.” We’ve taken a choice away on a 6: if it’s important in the game for the player to choose between playing the identity or walking away from it, to choose between letting the Joker fall or saving him, the mechanics need to inform that choice with consequences – but not disallow the choice completely. Then it’s not really a choice. “I and my character really wanted to let the Joker fall. We weren’t allowed to because the dice came up 6.” The character didn’t fail at a goal; he was barred from making a decision.

    It’s “nothing happened; your character didn’t really want to try after all.” That’s not just narratively boring, it undermines the core Choice loop of the engine.

    (In effect, it’s a kind of Mind Control – you fail the roll, you’re not even allowed to try this action – which in PbtA is thus far universally handled with mechanics like “Mark 1 XP if you do what the controller wanted,” specifically because taking away player choice to commit an action violates the Choice > Consequence -> Choice loop that makes the 2d6 rolls feel interesting.)

    The 7-9, on a raw reading, actually feels problematic in a similar way. The outcome reads that the character gains a weakness. That’s alright, but the goal should still be to produce a fictional consequence that requires a reaction, right? That generally feels like it should be the focus of the 7-9, with “gains a weakness” simply being the mechanical manifestation of it.

    So, to offer some constructive criticism rather than just criticism:

    The goal is “Play To Find Out”, right? So, we need to revisit the question of what we’re finding out. Are playing to find out if the character chooses to ignore/act against his identity? I don’t think so. Playtesting with my group, they saw that racking up Crack just means you get a new themebook to slot in, and the first time it happened one of my players moaned a bit, like their character had died. My wife said, you’re not losing your powers – your character is just evolving along the priorities your character showed in action. Fantastic! But, while fantastic, it suggests to me: We’re not playing to find out if the character accrues Cracked. We’re playing to find out their priorities: what comes first? What will they put ahead of themselves? Which questions do they maybe not care about so much? What will they give up – or not – to answer those questions?

    MAHC addresses “Will they go against their identity” but I don’t think that’s what we’re playing to find out. They will at some point, generally: the question is why, what for, and what price are they willing to bear for it.

    So, what would MAHC look like if it addressed the questions we’re playing to find out?

    I think one version could look something like:

    The character acts against their identity/mystery/etc. Roll plus Logos. On

    10+: The character accomplishes acts “against” themselves, and their identity/Mystery surprisingly doesn’t fight back too hard. Have they truly understood it at all? Ask the player for three reasons their mythos/identity might have been OK with this. No one knows if any of those answers are correct; the character will need to investigate further to understand.

    On a 7-9: The character acts against themselves. Mark 1 cracked/fade, and add a tag reflecting for whom or what they’re willing to give up a piece of their soul. (“When it comes to the Joker, there are no rules.”) Make this tag matter.

    On a 6: The character acts against themselves, and finds themselves feeling lost: if they’re not above acting this way, who the hell are they? Mark 1 Cracked/Fade, burn the appropriate themebook’s tags, and the MC makes a move.

    I have similar feedback about Stop. Holding. Back. Along all of the same lines of reasoning, the “hidden consequences” thing goes pretty hard against the grain of the Choice -> Consequence -> Choice loop that makes 2d6 interesting. 10+ isn’t “you get what you want w/o complications,” it’s “you get to actually know what choice you’re making.” A 7-9 isn’t “you get what you want w/ complications,” it’s “you don’t get to know what choice you’re making, but you get to make it.” Without knowing what the stakes are, players can’t make a meaningful choice.

    I do hope that was more helpful than critical. I and my group are enjoying the Starter Set, and we’re looking forward to the finished product.

    Edit: I don’t know why parts of my post keep coming up strikethrough. I keep editing out all the hyphens, and when I hit Update, they come right back in the same places.

  13. J Stein I don’t know why parts of my post keep coming up strikethrough. I keep editing out all the hyphens, and when I hit Update, they come right back in the same places. I can’t even add an edit / my edits don’t seem to be coming through

  14. J Stein first off, thanks for all this feedback and taking the time to lay it out. I couldn’t agree more about Choice-> Consequence-> Choice.

    What I take away from your suggestion is that players should have the final choice about the decision their character takes, and that the move should only define the cost/consequence of going against your M/I, not whether or not it succeeds. I’ll admit that is a cool take on the move.

    However, if you take almost any move in AW, like trying to Go Aggro or Act Under Fire, normally 6- means your character blew it. Yes, the MC can say there was some degree of success, but mostly, you tried to threaten someone or keep your calm doing something stressful and you failed, i.e., that other person wasn’t threatened or you could not stay calm. What’s cool about PbtA is that there are always consequences, unlike the flat D&D “you failed”; but that doesn’t mean the move doesn’t to a great extent determine the narrative outcome of your attempt. You don’t get to say “yes, I did threaten him” if you roll 6- (not unless the MC leaves that choice to you).

    Following that logic, MAHC is just like any other move. It captures the moment when a character is trying to break one of her core aspects. She is struggling. Maybe if she rolls 6-, the MC would say she still succeeds to some extent, but as a baseline it means she blew it in some way. Did she hesitate for too long and the chance was lost? Did she give in to her fears? Did she act but her action was full of doubt? That’s the color that makes the outcome cool. Consequences then ensue as a hard move.

    The way you described the panels and Batman illustrates that we see things a bit differently here. For me, things happening internally inside the character are just as real as actions in the physical world and they can be very visual too:

    Panel 1: Batman screws up his face, squints his eyes, squeezes his fist. He is holding Joker by the throat over the edge of a building.

    — Panel 1a: We see a mirage of Robin urging Batman to kill the Joker, stating all the crimes he had done including killing Robin himself (just as an example) and the crimes he will do in the future.

    — Panel 1b: We see a flashback to the night Batman’s parents were killed, perhaps the core of his decision not to take a life.

    — Panel 1c: the images or Robin and his dead parents whirl around him, each stating their demand of him.

    [Player rolls 6-]

    Panel 2: Batman cracks one eye open. He throws the Joker to the roof floor, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead. The Joker laughs wildly. “You just can’t do it, huh, Bat?”

    No? 🙂

    So I personally don’t see why this moves would cause narrative constipation. I do agree that there are two ways to approach this:

    — The hard (current) way, where the game requires a success to even act against your M/I. This gives your M/Is a great deal of power over your character. And you suffer consequences just by trying.

    — The soft (your) way, This gives players more power in choosing to go against their own M/Is, allowing them to more easily override their M/Is if they are willing to pay the price.

    I like your idea, and would generally favor it, if it wasn’t for one thing: players choose their own M/Is, and I do want to hold them to it.

  15. G+ Typography Note:

    Just as asterisks delimit bolds and underscores delimit italics, dashes are used to delimit strikethroughs.  This causes some problems when you’re trying to draw arrows using text.  Probably better to leave off the dash and use “>>” or just “>”.

  16. (I’ll be using 6v in place of the hyphen to avoid strike throughs; go ahead and read it as “6 or less”)

    With all do respect, I think there’s a misunderstanding of PbtA going on here, Amit! You mention that even back in AW a 6v means you’ve blown it — and I can’t find any evidence to support that? A Ctrl+F search of AW for ‘fail’ never once shows it (or failure) associated with 6v. In fact, all that we get told about a 6v generally is “expect the worst.”

    Taking a step away from that, I also point out that AW teaches us two things: 1) to be a fan of characters and respect what their ‘deal’ is, and 2) MCs make their moves and misdirect about them. This second one is most important here: we make our moves, mechanically because of a miss, but fictionally they have nothing to do with the dice.

    Taken in sum, these three things are screaming that no, a 6v has nothing to do with whether or not the character blows it. What has to do with whether or not a character ‘blows it’ is the principles of the game. You could run an entire game of AW where every hard move does not stem from a character screwing up, and in fact you see this a lot in certain action movies… Its not that the heroes are incompetent, its that the bad guys are better, that kind of thing.

    I am posting all of this because if game design decisions are coming from a place of ‘well, classically, a 6v means you’ve screwed the pooch’ then I think there might be some other problems down the line.

    That said I am pretty big fan of MAHC as it is right now; it reminds me of all the chatter around Monsterhearts a while back and how you don’t get to choose your sexual preferences. That said, I would be interested in alternative takes on MAHC, because who knows, maybe one of them will really sing.

  17. City of Mist

    Thank you for engaging with the fans in discussion and feedback. I appreciate you taking the time.

    “However, if you take almost any move in AW, like trying to Go Aggro or Act Under Fire, normally 6- means your character blew it. Yes, the MC can say there was some degree of success, but mostly, you tried to threaten someone or keep your calm doing something stressful and you failed, i.e., that other person wasn’t threatened or you could not stay calm.”

    I believe this is a mis-reading of AW. As another poster pointed out, AW states that on a 6v you do not accomplish your aim – which is distinct from “blowing it.” A 6- is “you don’t achieve your goal, and a complication arises.” In fact, all basic moves read something along the lines of “On a miss, prepare for the worst,” (pg 14 of 2e) which is rather distinct from “you blew it.” It explicitly calls for an MC Move, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s directly slapping the player’s hand and saying “you suck at seduction.” It may as easily be “the character is successfully seduced… and tries to talk her angry, jealous, violent, homicidal wife into a threesome.”

    “To do it, do it.” Moves trigger in response to a character undertaking a fictional action, and determine the outcome of that action. As per pg 13 of 2e, “In order for it to be a move and for the player to roll dice, the character has to do something that counts as that move; and whenever the character does something that counts as a move, it’s the move, and the player rolls dice.” The character never has to roll Go Aggro to get mechanical permission to threaten someone: on the contrary, it’s explicitly “threaten someone, and then roll to see how it goes.”

    A few moves to illustrate:

    Go Aggro: “When you go aggro on someone, roll +hard. They have to choose: force your hand and suck it up, or cave and do what you want.” The move is triggered by the player threatening violence: they do threaten violence, and the move dictates whether that action achieves the player’s goal.

    “When you try to seize something by force, or to secure your hold on something, roll hard. On a hit…” The fictional trigger is attempting to seize: there’s no permission to be granted on whether you attempt or not, only on whether you successfully “take definite hold of it.” I’ll actually note that the phrasing “definite hold” for a 7-9 option suggests that 6- is “partial hold” – that is, you’re fighting for it, which is respecting the player’s established fiction. They need mechanical “permission” to predict consequences of their act, but not to undertake the act.

    “When you try to seduce or manipulate someone, tell them what you want and roll hot. On a 10+, you…” the usual. The move is triggered by the attempt to seduce; the dice predict the outcome, but they don’t retroactively go back and say “you can’t try seducing them.”

    This is true for every move except Do Something Under Fire. And even there, note that on a 7-9 which reads “you flinch, hesitate, or stall” that means there’s a complication but you get to attempt the action you wanted (in Vx’s example, “When it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. … However, remember that a 7-9 is a hit, not a miss: whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure.”) So “flinch, hesitate, or stall” means “things don’t go off smoothly,” but not that “you’re not allowed to do them.” A miss entails “prepare for the worst,” not “you’re not allowed to undertake the act.” In the example text, Marie fails a roll trying to drag someone to cover. “So you can’t drag him, he’s fighting you and trying to get his weapons. Do you abandon him? He can’t possibly get his guns and into cover. Or do you keep fighting to drag him, so you’re both exposed?” In other words, the actual example is, if I may paraphrase, “You can’t drag him easily nor safely. Do you abandon him, or do you expose yourself to gun fire to drag him away dangerously?”

    Every move is triggered by the character undertaking an action, and determines the outcomes of that action. Not a single one retroactively forbids an attempt.

    So, to address your example, yes, a 6- on Go Aggro absolutely means you get to say “I did threaten him” – it just also means that you didn’t succeed in getting them to “cave and do what you want.” The miss text reads, as it often does, “on a miss, prepare for the worst.” It predicts the narrative outcome. It does not retroactively forbid the narrative attempt. The attempt already happened – it’s the fictional event that triggered the move (“to do it, do it”) to predict the outcome.

    I hope the above examples help to illustrate how much MAHC is not like any other move, and in fact, by retroactively forbidding the fictional event that triggers it – how can a character try to do something, when the fictional sequence is “…can’t muster the willpower, doesn’t actually try to do it”?

    I like your panel description. I think it gives a great example of the stakes that a player telling a Batman story would weigh when considering whether to change the character’s path – after all, he wouldn’t be Bats if he killed easily (or at all), right? And yet, you make the core example for me, too: when or if the player decides to take the narrative turn, the narrative choice is taken out of their hands. They’re not rolling for the consequences of their choice; they’re rolling to see if they get to make the choice. They’re not seeing “What happens if Batman breaks his final rule? What’s left of him?” The mechanics are telling them: “You’re not allowed to tell the story of that character. You have to tell this other story, of a character that doesn’t make a horrible choice.”

    It’s right in the name of the move, right? Make A Hard Choice. Only they’re not choosing: the dice is choosing for them. Not the outcome, but the attempt.

    I see your comment about “holding” players to their M/Is. Can you elaborate a bit on that, please? In the Starter Set, and from the play experiences with my group, it felt very much like your design was oriented such that they weren’t supposed to hold onto their M/Is. Attention strengthened the themes they were interested in; Crack/Fade removed the ones that weren’t, and replaced them with new ones that the play group found more interesting. It acted as a really cool, organic, mechanism for evolving the characters. I thought that was intentional, but here it seems you’re saying “once you make a decision on a theme, you’re bound to it.” Can you help me understand (a) why that is, and (b) how that gels with the theme loss/gain evolution mechanic? Have we been playing it wrong?

    As to “narrative constipation,” it seems to change the usual flow of “My character did X. Oh, shit, Z happened in response. Well, I do Y,” to “My character does X. … or, uh, I guess they thought about doing X, but instead… uhm, didn’t,” followed by some tangential consequence I throw at them because I’m supposed to make a hard move, now, but my hard move is in response to “They, uh, thought about doing something” rather than a change in the fiction. I’m throwing a hard move in response to “the character does nothing,” which is … well, significantly less movement than the usual. The lack of a movement we might call constipation.

    I hope I’ve helped clarify the lens through which I’ve been understanding and playing the text. Thanks, Amit.

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