Hey guys,
Can we talk about handling swerved bookings? Just ran my first session of WWW. Everything was going fine, till the Heel High Flyer and the Anti Hero threw down.
Ex-tag team partners, turned enemies, it was a hot angle. The Anti-Hero had pissed off management on a botched roll, so he was booked to lose the match. Booking gets revealed.
He plays the Heel move, spends his momentum to swerve the match his way.
The High Flier pays her momentum, and swerves the booking back to her win.
The Anti-Hero Breaks Kayfabe to swerve it back. Gets a 7-9, so after a lot(!) of back and forth, I made a call and said the match was declared a no-contest. Instead of getting back into it, the Anti-Hero rolls out of the ring and walks off up the ramp, leaving the High Flier standing in the middle of the ring.
Did I handle that right?
Hard to say! What was the player mood at the table?
Confused, mainly. According to the quick start, you can swerve a booking by breaking kayfabe, but I’m not sure how that works mechanically. Is the Break Kayfabe move just rolled instead of a Finisher?
Sounds fine.
The Heel Moves, while they swerve the GMs booking, are still “in the wrestling world” acceptable actions.
Breaking kayfabe goes against what was agreed upon between management and the other performers. It should have in game repercussions from both management and co-workers.
OUr group has had a lot of this as well. The players often want to “win the match.” Winning the match is not always the point of the story.
I always just let them spend all of their momentum and used all of their tricks until someone came out on top.
It worked out well enough.
we had a ladder match for our championship and the players wanted to win badly. So we played it like a competitive match.
It ended with a slugfest at the top of the ladder with two guys grasping for the belt while a third laid injured outside the ring.
The “Open Match” rules from Int Incident are great. Basically on a 10+ on the wrestling move you can get the momentum, the heat, or choose to go for the win (and go into your finishing sequence.)
It definitely looks awesome in print, like one of those legendary matches that’s rife with gossip and bad blood for decades afterward.
I think the no contest idea is good, especially with cascading break kayfabe moves
Personally, more than a couple swerves and I often roll it into a no-contest or a pull-apart brawl or something like that, especially when people start Breaking Kayfabe. The die roll for the Move controls how the Audience reacts/enforces some repercussions, but the fact that it happens at all opens the door to whatever on-the-fly repercussions come from the producers of the show doing what they can to control the situation from the back (like sending out someone to run in, or telling the referee to call for a DQ, or whatever)
Cheers guys. Appreciate the feedback.