I prefer to offload the work of world-building to the players whenever possible, and would like to add a carrot to incentivize proactivity on their part. Does this seem like it might work?
I Forgot to Mention…
When you attempt to solve a problem by taking advantage of an interesting new addition to the established fiction, expound upon it and Roll + Fx. On a hit, gain +1 Fx. *On a 10+, that’s fascinating! You successfully solve the problem. *On 7-9, it’s a bit more complicated. The GM will tell you how complicated. *On a miss, there’s some fundamental misunderstanding that actually makes the problem worse.
If your Fx is higher than 3, gain +1 XP and reset your Fx to 1.
Can you give me a play example? I don’t really get how you intend out to work
My thinking was along these lines: the player can choose to spout lore and ask me to tell them something interesting and useful. With this alternative, they can choose to instead tell me something interesting and potentially useful, and then roll to see how useful it really is.
Either way, the result is now part of the fiction. The Fx is to provide an incentive to use this option over spout lore.
I already ask them for ideas and ask questions. I am looking for a way to encourage them to take the initiative.
This move would be used any time they might have used spout lore.
I think the language of the trigger isn’t clear. Maybe try to make the language more plain?
GM: “You come to a sealed door. There doesn’t seem to be any way to open it. What do you do?”
P: “The ancients locked their doors with tests designed to determine worthiness before admitting anyone. At a touch the door asks it’s question.”
P Rolls…
10+ GM: “The question is a riddle that you remember from your childhood. Something of the ancient’s civilization must have been retained through the generations.”
7-9 GM: “The door asks you to solve a series of puzzles. Roll to Defy Danger with INT.”
6- GM: “Unfortunately, it’s a call and response in a language you don’t recognize. When you don’t answer in a timely enough fashion, a klaxon begins to sound!”
I don’t know, that still sounds a lot like Spouting Lore to me.
The wording in all the DW moves strive to maintain immersion by wording them from the perspective of the character. I’d consider rewording your trigger to remove the “in the fiction” phrase and really make the trigger about what the PC does.
Peter J yeah, i could respond to spout lore with “you have any ideas?” but my players have played 3.X for more than a decade.
They treat spout lore like “give me a hint.” so its always on me to improvise. I am looking to add a mechanical incentive to encourage them to shift “wouldn’t be cool if…” mode.
Dion Kurczek good point. i don’t know how to phrase from the character’s pov (apparently i’m having a hard enough time phrasing from the GM pov) but i’ll think on it.
I’m with Peter J here. Your example is exactly how Spout Lore should work
Really? Neither my players nor I read the “The GM will tell you something…” to mean that the player should provide that something, and it’s completely contrary to the example in the book, in which the GM provides the new fiction. That’s how I want it to work, but it doesn’t seem like the most obvious interpretation of the rules.
The trigger of spout lore is “when you consult your accumulated knowledge about something”. You can’t just say “ok, GM, I consult my accumulated knowledge about this”. Thats not how it works. Instead you say “well hmm, I think these runes look really similar to the writing of a tribe I live with for three years. I wonder if I remember enough to read them?”. You need to explain how you’d know the thing, and that’s where your “interesting new addition to the established fiction” is – in explaining how you’d know.
I really want to understand this, so I’m not being argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. It’s just not clear to me what you mean.
so with spout lore, the player tells the GM how their character knows the something interesting to trigger the move. Got it. but the GM still supplies that something, right? And on a 10+ the GM makes it a useful something, right? The player is contributing some personal history for the character, but the GM is adding some information about the situation. Am I understanding it correctly?
My goal is for the player to contribute the something interesting and useful in the situation, but the character’s knowledge or relationship to the something interesting doesn’t come into play at all.
Aside from the character’s relationship to the something interesting, there’s also that higher the roll, the more the player dictates what the situation looks like. In a spout lore, it’s the other way around: a 10+ has the gm provide something interesting and useful, thereby setting the scene on a particular path. The player is just providing some embellishment to their character.
It may be that I’m phrasing it poorly, but those two do seem to make it a fundamentally different thing from spout lore.
Am I really misunderstanding the rule that badly?
I’m trying to solve a problem at the table. If the better solution is simply “L2P” then I can accept that. But I can’t explain to my players something that I
don’t understand myself.
In my example, the player created a tribe they lived with, and in rolling successfully they are effectively making what they’re looking at relate back to that tribe. All the sudden this dungeon is now somehow created by this tribe, or related to the tribe. The player contributed a ton.
If you want the players to contribute more, you should do it via normal questions. Asking that player “hey what sort of weapons did that tribe use?” or “what was their most important rite?”
Here’s an another example.
GM: “The last of the orcs towers over you, his spear raised for a death blow. You have 1 HP left and you’re prone, with a stone column across your legs. What do you do?”
P1: “I gasp as a crimson arrow streaks out of the darkess of the passage behind the orc, piercing it through the neck.”
[P1 Rolls…]
10+ GM: “The orc collapses in a heap and out of the darkness steps a solitary figure. He, too, seems to have been through a lot today. P2, do you recognize him?”
7-9 GM: “The orc collapses in a heap and a trio of adventurer types run out of the darkness, They seem almost to ignore you, and keep moving at full clip back the way you came. From behind them you hear the unmistakable sound of stone grinding against stone. The sound is getting noticeably closer. What do you do?”
6- GM: “The orc collapses in a heap, and several people in matching uniforms emerge from the passage. One of them spots P3, points and shouts ‘There they are!’ They being to approach menacingly. One of them, a grizzly veteran seargent type, reminds them, ‘remember, all we need is the scalps!’ P3, do you recognize their livery?”
This is very possibly a terrible idea, but I don’t think the problem is that it’s a synonym for an existing move.
It’s clear that the wording of the trigger needs to be fixed. There’s also probably a different name that’s more evocative of the intended use. I had previously considered “make it so” or “deux ex machina” but neither seemed quite right, either.
I think ill change it to “When you find a problem solved for you by something interesting about the situation, describe it and Roll…” and on reflection i think the Fx carrot might be unnecessary.
It sounds like you want “When you make up something completely new, unrelated to your character“.
I’d be wary of that as a trigger. You are giving players authority over the situation at hand unrelated to their characters. This is generally not successful in GM’d games.
I’m surprised to read that! As long as they’re not stepping on another player’s toes (e.g. the cleric is in charge of religions) I figured everything is fair game. Isn’t that the whole point to pbta games, that they’re more collaborative?
I certainly know the best moments at my table are when I’m simply facilitating or refereeing and the players are doing all of the making up stuff.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. Making me explain really forced me to think about what I was after, and Dion Kurczek’s comment about using the character’s pov helped me see where I was overthinking it.
I’ll give a revised version a try at my next session (under the name “Fate Intervenes”) and report back on the level of success or lack thereof.