Hi guys. Now, I’m playing DW by forum for the first time and we already encountered some issues.
Thief: I sprint forward to lure the bad guy!
GM: ok, he runs after you, giving his shoulders to you fighter, what do you do?
Fighter: I try to smash him, and my Defying Danger on strength is 7.
GM: what the what?! That’s automatic damage, buddy!
Fighter: oh yeah, then 5.
Now here it seems all almost perfect, but it actually consumed us a bunch of posts. Player describes action, gm says what move is it (if it’s a move), player rolls, then if needed gm describes…
How do you tighten things up when playing by forum?
The issue with PbP and story-ish games like *W or FATE is that there is an conversation needed to run those games and the back and forth can take a lot of posts. Generally those extra posts are cases where people are not on what move corresponds to their action.
Best way to steamline this is to make agreements with your players that (1) they post what they do in narrative detail (2) you can and will edit posts to indicate what actually happens. To speed things up you can also make the rolls indicated by the move if that is acceptable to them.
Since you can describe multiple events happening simultaneously by forum, it may be an idea to deal with all players simultaneously?
The flow my games have fallen into is:
GM: Ok, here’s what happens. What do you do?
Player: I do X, which triggers move Y, and I rolled N, so I’ll choose Z from the move’s options.
GM: Ok, here’s what happens. What do you do?
Nine times out of ten, players will be able to apply the correct move or lack thereof. The other time, it’s easy to ask them some a clarifying question and suggest a different move. It helps if players generally build off existing posts rather than all trying to act at once (tell them so). Because players can end up acting independently, it helps if the GM regularly (maybe every other week) posts a quick summary of what’s going on in the fiction, just to keep everyone on the same page. Overall, trust your players to be awesome and apply the rules on their own so that you can all keep the fiction rolling along.
Marshall Miller yeah, thanks. I was thinking the best way is to just get used to each other. Sorta like, gradually getting better into decoding the other player’s (including the gm’s) words into moves (including gm’s moves) by just playing with them and knowing them better and better. So that at the end, everyone will agree about your decision about rolling on not rolling almost always.
Tim Noyce that doesn’t sound like a solution. I mean, maybe I told it wrong; the same would apply if I, as a gm, do something that every other player disagrees upon. Then they should be able to edit my posts… It seems an unsolvable loop.
James Gibson that was exactly what I was trying not to do! I think it would be a mess to have moves all around, and a bunch of work on my part. Also, I think I would like to have a gameplay experience as close as it gets to tabletop dw (that is: one move at a time)
Here are a few rules I’ve made for running by forum.
Angel Rule: If you roll a 6 or a 9, somebody else can retroactively try to Aid you to bump it up. Actually coordinating Aid moves is a little too much back-and-forth by forum, so this lets the move survive and maybe tones the harshness of the world down a little.
Better to Ask Forgiveness: If you think a move applies, roll the dice and make decisions. Even if it doesn’t, that’s still less time back and forth.
Every Part of the Die: When you roll the dice and didn’t need to, that’s your next roll.
Paul Arezina Spot on! Retroactively applying the Aid move breaks nothing. It’s more like, “I see that you’re struggling, here let me lend you a hand,” rather than, “It’s worth the potential risk to myself to increase the odds that you’ll succeed.”
thanks Paul Arezina ! I’ll present the first two to the players. The third rule seems a bit of taking out the “play to find out what happens”, I don’t know.