How do you handle Spout Lore?
I ask my players lots of questions and basicly they are building the world.
I can’t get around Spout Lore, that move doesn’t make sense to me.
Do the players have to use this move if they have no ideas so I come up
with something?
The move’s trigger is “*when you consult your accumulated knowledge about something*”. The “you” in the trigger is the character, not the player. So this implies, at least to me, that the character knows something about a particular topic, even if the player doesn’t. It’s a way to show that the character can have knowledge that is separate from the player.
On a 10+, your character knows something useful and on a 7-9 your character knows something interesting. The GM tells you what in both cases. The move gives players permission to say “My character potentially knows something that will help us in this situation because of who they are.”
The trigger is, “When you consult your accumulated knowledge about something,” so if the PCs are taking it upon themselves to figure something out about a location, person, item, monster, etc. that they don’t know about, or want to find out more, that’s where the move comes in.
As a GM, you can ask them about the ancient writing they discover in the crypt, or they can consult their accumulated knowledge and roll+INT, because one of them seems to recognize the alphabet. Then your job is to ask them where they got that information from.
Yes, but I call my players by their character names.
As an example : Tell me Ilgom, what rumors have you heard about the dwarves in the dragon mountains?
How does Spout Lore fit into this?
You may not ask players things about topics their characters don’t know anything about. Like “you open the door to the treasury, what is the first thing you see?” because you have to tell them what they see; they can’t make it up.
You can ask them what they heard about a place but if they never have been there they can’t give you clear information.
They can however Spout Lore about nearly anything as long as they say where they got it from.
Also Spout Lore is perfect to find out Monsters weakpoints and strategies. A Wizard Spouting Lore might be more ffective in an action type encounter then if he’d cast Magic Missile.
The main point is what Tim Franzke said. The character has to know something about the topic they’re spouting lore on. The move doesn’t trigger if the character doesn’t know anything about the topic.
If I can’t ask them certain things, how can I play to find out?
By giving them a situation and see how they react.
You can still ask questions, Loco Tomo. But the Spout Lore move won’t trigger and only the player will get to answer. You, the GM, will have to accept the player’s response.
One of the best articles explaining what you can and shouldn’t ask is this one by John Harper
http://mightyatom.blogspot.de/2010/10/apocalypse-world-crossing-line.html
Christopher Stone-Bush I don’t agree. The character might know something anyhow, maybe he has the right books with him…
When he looks it up in the book he is consulting his accumulated knowledge about the topic, that is why a book gives +1 to Spout Lore…
And why can’t the players make up what they probably gonna see in the next room, whats the point in leaving blanks on the map?
If I don’t like it I still can describe something different… 🙂
Because that is not their job. Their job is to play their characters. IF their characters can know what is in the next room before entering it they can know it. But they can’t make it up.
Also vetoing a players description sounds like a lot of unfun. I hardly ever do that. The only reason to do that would be if it conflicts highly with something already established in the fiction beforehand. And even then i would phrase it like:
“So how can X be like that when we already know Y and Z are true?”
If you don’t like the answer the player gives, you can toss in additions or complications, Loco Tomo. But you can’t change the player’s answer.
And also, it is not your job to load of everything to the players. You are as responsible for the world as they are.
To quote the book:
Everyone else will be players, taking the role of the characters in the game (we call these the player characters or PCs). As you play, the players say what their characters say, think, and do. The GM describes everything else in the world.
The thing is, you can ask the players what they want to have in the next room. But then you are not addressing the characters. Always address the characters. If you ask the characters things they can’t know the only in character response they can give you is “i don’t know” or “i’d wish it was X”, otherwise they are not doing their job correctly.
I would change an assumption, nothing else.
It looks like i didnt really play dungeon world as it was supposed to be but the players really like to have a great influence on the world.
It makes it even more their world they like to play in.
In the end of the day it doesn’t matter as long as everyone has fun 🙂
That is not only a slight change. That is changing how the conversation works in a big way.
Loco Tomo indeed, it doesn’t necessarily matter. But the advantage of carefully-developed and extensively-playtested games, played as designed, is that they capture ways of playing that many people have found fun and manageable over multiple sessions. 🙂
That doesn’t necessarily represent my gamer friends 🙂
For some of my friends even Dungeon World has too much rules 😛
Loco Tomo one thing that might help is to pull down the tab in the g+ community & find actual play recordings/videos. Give a few a listen from different groups (rather good one is flowery video titlescreen either for jessa or crafts, can’t recall name but she goes through lots of good tips on rules, peaches and hot sauce I posted here also good to listen to).
Get the feeling that hearing some GMs handling it in game might answer some questions.
On the “If I can’t ask them certain things, how can I play to find out?” question – you find out by seeing:
* Whether the PCs succeed or fail (i.e. you don’t fudge dice so that they win; you let them run away)
* What the PCs decide to do (i.e. you don’t railroad so that whatever they do, they get to the same plot points)
* What comes out of your head in response to the blanks in the maps or as your dungeon moves. (E.g. I knew that my Sands of the Sun Kings setting had pyramids, and that there was some kind of bright psychedelic thing going on, but I didn’t know until the game on sat night that the pyramids were all built on some kind of living matter that produced those colours. I still don’t know, really, what that “matter” is or does.)
Depending on what gaming tradition you come from, of course, you might that all already.
I let the players decide what things are about.
We have a Facebook group as well where they can discuss things until next session ( which usually takes at least a month)
From that I take my inspiration and come up with something thats based on their discussion 🙂
If the information is guaranteed interesting and useful, and the character might or might not actually know it, offer the subject up for people to Spout Lore about.
“What rumors have you heard?” assumes the character knows something, but the information isn’t necessarily interesting and useful.
If players offer up something that is immediately interesting and useful to them, you can ask them to spout lore about the details.
Like:
DM: “You enter the treasury. The first thing you notice is a waist-high pile of red sand. Rath, it makes sense that this is here, but what’s it used for?”
Rath: “It’s this kind of shimmering too-bright red — it’s astral sand! If you draw a circle with astral sand you can teleport anything inside it anywhere you want! We’re gonna be rich!”
DM: “Right, how about you Spout some Lore for me to make sure you remember how to do it?”