13 thoughts on “So.”

  2. Combat: If PCs die too often, your hard moves are too hard. If they hardly take take damage, they are too soft.

    Everything else: Hard moves should change the fiction significantly. They should have consequences or cause dillemmas. Soft moves should allow the PCs to change the fiction significantly. They should present them with choices.

  3. What Wynand said, with this caveat. All moves should change the fiction. Regardless of if they are soft or hard.

    If your hard moves are “too hard” that probably means you’re dealing damage too much when you could be using those moves on more interesting stuff.

    Remember to think of that move sheet as interpretative list of ideas. Not concrete concepts and broaden your horizons.

  6. This is interesting, as I’ve more often encountered the opposite problem.

    My feeling is that as long as you’re following your agenda and principles, no move is too hard. Even a very soft move feels bad if the GM isn’t being a fan of the characters.

  7. We make a lot of GM moves in a game, which means we can usually compensate for the mistakes we make as we go along.

    However, there are two moves that can prove difficult to correct without breaking the illusion of your game:

    – the ill advised death sentence

    – giving out an overpowered item

    The imminence of Death is an important part of the DW game. But, unless resurrection is a thing in your game, character death is very hard to correct if you call it wrong.  My personal rule to cover this is: character deaths should be heroic, never arbitrary.

    If a character ends up with an overpowered item or other loot, it can be very difficult to correct that without looking like you’re blatantly nerfing their new found power.

    Fortunately, overpowered items are less of a problem in DW, for the simple reason that DW games work fine without magic items, and characters don’t need them to be powerful.

  8. A move is “too hard” if it breaks the expectations of the players and you can’t point to some fictional justification. Like, if someone thinks “that came outta nowhere,” then you’re probably doing it wrong.  If you telegraphed and they hand you the proverbial golden platter, hit ’em.  Hard.

    Now, with that said, I’ve a general concern about fun and getting stuff done.  Hard moves (or hardish soft moves) can cause a situation to escalate and escalate and make a scene take longer to resolve than anyone is interested in it taking. Yes, we’re playing to find out, but it can get annoying when the more-or-less random “threat approaches the camp” encounter ends up taking a couple hours of game time to resolve. 

    I don’t have a great solution for this. Part of it is choosing the threats you bring to bear. Another part might be zooming out and letting individual rolls accomplish bigger things (though the system will fight you a little there, because the core combat moves operate so discretely). I’ve got a feeling that choosing more “success with a cost” hard moves might help as well, but you end up balancing principles against each other (like “be a fan” vs. “begin & end with the fiction”).

  9. We have a player in our current game who’s been carrying around a scrimshaw knife that was given to him by a servant of, or form of Death.

    The character, a Would-Be-Hero, has used it on occasion to stab at terrifying and otherwise-defended things (full-borne nightmares, a shambling wyrm that moldered flesh) and harmed them well.

    Then he turned the knife on himself as part of an offering for a ritual that required the “bones of one who matters to you.”

    He meant to give his arm, I think.

    Then I thought about it for a moment and said:

    “Alright, roll Last Breath.

    He failed, spectacularly. On a roll that we allowed Impetuous Youth (like the Barbarian’s Hunger; but for heroic foolishness).

    So he met with Death, in the rotting chapel where the dead wash to, and was given a quest that, should he fail, will have him meet an ignoble and all-but-forgotten end.

    What I’ve learned with the Hard Moves is that you have to take something from them; just be sure that when you do, you move the story forward in a way that’s compelling.

  11. “What I’ve learned with the Hard Moves is that you have to take something from them; just be sure that when you do, you move the story forward in a way that’s compelling.”

    – What Jarod Cerf  said ^

  12. If your players just shrug when rolling a miss or cheer for the XP they get, your moves aren’t hard enough. 

    If people are completely afraid of making moves because they might fail your moves might be too hard. 

  13. Jeremy Strandberg, Michael D

    What I love is how the players (and their characters) give weight to the world around them.

    And I’m immensely grateful that my players are open to what follows from that.

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