When exactly do you roll to Take To the Sky? Everytime you say “i want to fly over there”? When you just fly to get a view of the area you don’t roll it? #inverseworld #skydancer
When exactly do you roll to Take To the Sky?
When exactly do you roll to Take To the Sky?
Doesn’t it depend more on when you, as a DM, want to create tension?
Also you only roll if you fly somewhere otherwise out of reach, so that limits it a bit, doesn’t it?
No it doesn’t, it depends on if the trigger is triggered or not. GM bias on tension has nothing to do with it. The question is “what is out of reach”.
I should reread these playbooks, but…
The mental image I get is from Bastion, every time the Kid takes a Skyway to get to a new island. As sort of a transition move from one area to another.
Perhaps the key is “otherwise”? So if you could get to the location via another method, say walking or swimming, then the move might not be triggered?
Hmm. Good question.
But everywhere “up” is normally out of reach…
If you mean “up” as in island to island I’d think the move is always triggered. If it’s “up and over” to overcome an obstacle like a wall, river, or a crumbling staircase maybe no roll is required.
I don’t have any concrete experience with IW, so I’m just trying to suss out the intent from the playbook.
Take to the Skies should trigger whenever you use it to get somewhere no one else could. However, like all moves in Dungeon World, you do not need to roll if there is no danger. If you’re flying up on top of a building because the ladder’s out and you’re not waiting for it to get fixed, there isn’t really any danger there, you don’t need to roll. Now, if the building is on fire, or you have dogs nipping at your heels, or the town guard is firing arrows your way, or you are in enemy territory – roll it!
I think the most similar comparison in the core rules is the myriad of examples about how you don’t need to trigger Hack & Slash if you’re ambushing a guy, or if he isn’t defending himself. If there is no danger, you do not need to roll – if there is, throw the dice.
That’s a really interesting point, actually. In Fate, you can view Aspects as establishing a fact in the fiction. Could you likewise view moves as doing the same thing, then? “I have the move Take To the Sky, so that opens up this possibility for a Say Yes moment.” (Only, much less explicit.)
Jacob Randolph I strongly disagree that you can say yes to a move. When the trigger is met you have to roll or choose a different action if you don’t want to. You can’t for example say yes to a cast a spell move, even if its light
Sure you can. I’ve told a wizard his spell just works when he was casting it during a safe moment under no pressure and I had no threats prepared. They’d already conquered the dungeon, and he wanted an unseen servant to help haul the loot. I said “sure, he helps haul.” and that was that.
It is okay to sometimes just let moves go.
Can you give me a page number for that?
I don’t have a page number for a personal anecdote or for how I GM my games. But one of the GM Principles is “be a fan of the characters” – let them do their cool thing, and the sky dancer’s cool thing is they can fly everywhere. They don’t need to roll if they’re just flying across the room while everyone is walking, that’d be stupid.
And one of the GM moves is “give an opportunity that fits their abilities” – when you have a sky dancer, give them ledges to fly up to, give them chasms to cross, give them hidden things they can reach. And when they go for those things, that is when they roll. If a sky dancer goes anywhere unknown or unreachable, there might be danger there. Roll the dice. If it’s somewhere known, if the route is confirmed to be safe, it is pointless to roll the dice. That won’t come up all the time, but when it does, you’d be a dick to leave it up to the dice.
But I leave blanks and play to find out so I don’t always know if its safe or not.
A sky dancer flies into the centre of a big hall (to shoot arrows at orcs/to discern realities from above). Normally you don’t get to that place. Take to the sky or not? If you want to fly somewhere and it’s dangerous but would be normally reachable, isn’t that defy danger?
Tim Franzke in your scenario I think you’d generally roll Take to the Sky to “find out”, as the situation is generally considered dangerous, but we don’t yet know what that danger might be. However, since there’s not a specific danger defined in spite of which the sky dancer is acting yet, it does not seem to be Defy Danger at the moment.
Let’s say Bob the Sky Dancer, who flies about in a magic cauldron, lives in a village. And in that village the sheep have all gone missing down a mysterious sinkhole that just opened. Bob calls his adventurer buddies and they investigate. The first room in the dungeon is a cavern opened by the sinkhole. Tracks indicate that the sheep have crossed a very unstable floor to wander deeper into the caves. Additionally, the smell of burnt mutton indicates that some of the sheep were not agile enough to avoid the lava that bubbles up through the unstable floor.
If the adventurers were to carefully cross the floor avoiding weak spots and lava, they would be Defying Danger for certain. However, Bob decides to take his cauldron up for a spotting mission to see if he can find a safe path across. This is a generally dangerous environment, and the other verbiage of the move is met, so Bob rolls for Take to the Sky. Let’s say Bob rolls a 5. For whatever reason, the GM chooses to Reveal an Unwelcome Truth. It wasn’t written into the dungeon, but Bob has discovered a nest of Caldera Spiders in the roof of the cavern! The GM put those in on-the-spot, because the blanks we leave don’t have to be between drawn spots on the map, they can also be inside already drawn spots. If Bob chose to try to fly past them, then that would certainly be another Defy Danger.
Let’s assume the adventurers are a healthy mixture of lucky and competent, and bring the sheep home to the grateful villagers, who immediately want to slaughter all of the returned sheep for a feast to honor the adventurers. shrug That’s villagers for you. As the final decorations are applied to the giant fir tree at the center of the feast grounds, Toonces, the unlikeable cat owned by the one sour villager who hates fun of any sort, is found trying to get into the lamb offal. Bob, in a fit of pique, grabs the critter by the scruff of its neck and flies it up to the top of there tree where it remains miserably stuck for the remainder of the feast, and everyone has a great time. Except Toonces.
There really didn’t need to be a Take to the Sky roll here, in my opinion. There was no immediate danger, no pressing front, the characters weren’t “in dungeon.” One could assert that any move requires a roll, but I think there’s plenty of latitude for us to make some judgement calls.