I’m running a short Sagas of the Icelanders campaign at the mo, and I’ve noticed a problem with the female moves. Two out of four of them (Raise your Voice and Talk Sense and Entice a Man) have their only mechanical effect (besides risking an MC move) as a bonus/penalty to a roll. Which means that, mechanically speaking, they don’t affect NPCs at all.
This leaves women, who in theory are good at achieving results by talking and working through others, with exactly one tool to get an NPC to do what they want: Goad a Man to Action. (The fourth and final move is Lie with a Man to Conceive a Child, which is interesting but rather specialised, not to mention infrequent use.)
They are at their most powerful when influencing male PCs, therefore. So what do you do if your game has very few such characters? (Or maybe none?)
In our case we have one Godar (not sure how to do the funky nordic characters here, sorry), and that’s the only man. He’s quite old and not that physically ept. So what I perceive as the normal model, of men going off and doing physical deeds or falling out with each other, and the women kind of herding cats to stop them from getting killed, doesn’t seem to work so well here.
In this situation it feels a bit like the engine of the system has lost all its friction. The parts are still there, but they’re not engaging with each other, and I’m forced to fall back on MC moves, which is kind of exhausting, or fudging the two PC-oriented moves to work on NPCs as well, which feels like it’s probably not how things are meant to work.
Anyone come up against this? Any advice?
