GMs, a player triggers Discern Realities and rolls a 7+ when examining a location (say) which in your mind was unimportant or incidental. How do you tend to answer their questions? Turn the location into an interesting or significant one through your answers, or give answers like “nothing much is about to happen”?
The latter puts less pressure on you but risks devaluing the risk the player took of making the move in the first place (they may have missed the roll and allowed you to make a hard move). So I often feel pressure to do the former.
Super interested in answers to this.
I tend towards the first.
But I tend to see this move especially in the context you describe as the player indicating they see an interesting shared story moment here. So I try to go with that.
Ben M Can you give a real-life play example? Or at least a contrived one?
Because my first thought is: if the location is unimportant or incidental, why is there a scene set there? What move(s) did you make immediately before the player triggering Discern Realities?
Part of playing to find out what happens is not know what’s going to be important. When players go in a direction, that’s the important direction.
Jeremy Strandberg Jonathan Beverley I find that the pressure on me for any place or person to be suddenly interesting because a player decides they might be is too much. The player (at least my players) sometimes trigger the move to find out if there is anything they should know; note, not because they want the place or character to be interesting.
I can come up with very simple – you might say trite – examples of this. A pig pen in the edge of the farm the party is sneaking towards. A waiting room in a castle were they have just spent time having an audience with a noble. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes these locations will offer up plausible ways in which they can suddenly be made more interesting. Other times the players are just checking they haven’t missed something. It’s the wording of the trigger for DR I think.
I feel like that’s the difference between “should” and “do”. Everyone plays suboptimally. It’s hard to always have good responses to all situations. That doesn’t change the ideal.
Also, as GM you’re the one who decides if a move is triggered. If the player is asking you questions about a boring pigpen (probably because trad GMs have trained them to explicitly look for ambushes), just answer the question.
Players are allowed to ask questions about the fiction at any time.
I’ve given the answer “nothing”, and it’s actually a useful answer. “Shelter”, “observation point” and “running water” are good answers as well.
If they ask and it’s not important, I just tell them: “It’s just a campsite, it’s not uncommon. The Ranger will tell you that you’re supposed to restock with firewood and not steal anything , unless you need it for survival.
If a player asks: “May I look around for something useful, I really want to roll, I’d let them, but a miss will probably mean a monster appears. I’d probabky give the answer: “There’s 1-3 useful adventuring gear people have left here, if you want to be that kind of person…”
Well the trigger for DR is explicitly “closely study a situation or person” and honouring the trigger text precisely has served me well on other moves. So I wouldn’t want to decide that it didn’t in a situation. I don’t know what I’d prefer the trigger text to be, but it has never felt quite right to me…
Michael Esperum Yes, good point, I’ve used “nothing” for DR on occasions because the fact a place is safe or boring is often useful to players.
I’ve been thinking some more about this (thanks for the comments, it’s helping me pick apart my difficulties with this move in play). It seems to me that DR is a move whose relevance applies – more than most moves – on to what extent the group wants to “play to find out”. What I mean is, you can apply that agenda at different levels of detail. For example, are we playing to find out what every room is like, or are we playing to find out which plot the players engage with. I think my group veers more to the latter (although by no means completely) than is intended. So maybe DR doesn’t always deliver (even though a move like H&S does) .
Lots of good answers here.
For me, when a player thinks an element of the setting is interesting enough to make the Discern Realities move, I either make the location interesting, or I tell them there’s not much there before they roll.
I do the first option more often than the second, because I feel that’s more fun and keeps the game moving.
But sometimes it’s OK to say “yeah, there’s nothing here”.
Ben M so, in my experience, players Discern Realities either:
1) Because the situation is already genuinely tense and interesting, and they want some insight into it (in which case, not a problem, right?)
or
2) Because you’ve dropped them into a scene and asked them what they do, without really making a move. In this case, they’re Discerning Realities because they
2a) suspect you’re holding out on them
or
2b) they honestly aren’t sure what to do next and are are basically asking “HEY GM WHERE THE GAME AT?” I.e. They’re asking you to make a move.
Like, taking your example of the PCs sneaking up on a farmhouse and discerning realities about a pig pen. There’s a situation there, right? They are sneaking, which means they care about avoiding detection and they care about what’s inside the farmhouse. Maybe they’re focusing on the pig pen, but if they Discern Realities, there’s all sorts of good answers you can whip out about the situation.
What should I be on the lookout for? Well, pigs make an awful racket when they squeal. You don’t want to disturb them, and they’re probably just inside the barn.
What here is useful or valuable to me? Well, nothing in the pigpen, but scanning the farm house itself, you see a pair of cellar doors… that might be a good way to sneak in. or Well, if you want to cause a distraction and lure them out of the house, there’s a bunch of pigs in the barn. Get ’em squealing and running out of the pen and you bet everyone would come running after them, at least the menfolk.”
What is about to happen? Not damn much, they’re all asleep. or oh, crap, there’s a light moving through the house, like a candle or lamp, and it’s heading toward the back door. Someone’s about to come out, maybe to use the privy?”
Etc. etc. Point being… I’m using their questions as prompts for my creativity, but if there’s a situation, and it sounds like there is, then the whole thing is already interesting.
Now, considering the “in the waiting room after speaking to a noble,” I’ve got to wonder why you set the scene there and then asked “what do you do?”
If you really just wanted them to be done with the audience and back to whereever and discuss their next play, you probably would have been better up smash cutting straight to that place. And if you realize that they are fixating on this waiting room because they think this is where the game’s at, then there’s nothing wrong with correcting it and being like “I think y’all are making this waiting room out to be more important than it is… let’s talk about the big picture… where do y’all go to discuss what just happened?”
But if you put them in that waiting room and asked them “what do you do?” because you’ve got some moves you intend to make there, well, that sounds like a situation and I bet there’s all sorts of interesting stuff to discern.
And if you’re not really sure why you put them in that waiting room, it just sort of seemed to be what would come next naturally, and the players take an interest in it and Discern Realities and you don’t have any better plans… then hell yes, let their questions guide where the story goes from there. Make the waiting room a situation.
Oh, and one other thing: I think it’s super important to distinguish “asking for more details that would be immediately apparent” vs. “closely studying a situation or person for insight.”
When they sneak up to the pig pen and ask “are there pigs in there? you just answer them. When they ask “is there a back door?” you just answer. When they ask “what sort of stuff the waiting room furnished with?” you just make it up and tell them.
Or do some other trick like Jason Cordova’s “painting the scene” approach: “Well, why don’t you tell me, Ragnir… what about this room speaks to the Count’s arrogance and insecurities?”
But when they ask for insights (like, oh, “what here is not what it appears to be?”), and do something (even if “something” is just “I look over the furnishings with a discerning eye”), then, yeah, that’s Discerning Realities.
Yeah, to echo Jeremy Strandberg and Ben M, much of the power of the DW mechanics comes from the strict adherence to move triggers. When a player does X, we roll Y dice and Z happens. The GM doesn’t have to make a complex judgement about relevance, or about what’s best for the game right now — they just have to agree that the trigger is met.
So when a GM makes starts making adhoc exceptions to the trigger text, it’s suboptimal — you’re losing that simplicity (and the player power that goes with it), and shifting more responsibility back onto the GM (who, as in every GM’d rpg, is already saturated).
Of course, you can houserule the move outside of play, and maybe then propose that change to the wider community. That can have great results, especially given the obvious design talent in this community now.
Those are great answers guys. Thank you for giving it so much of your attention and time.
They might help me. I’ve been gming DW for a couple of years now and I absolutely love it but I’ve never been able to fully get over my sudden feeling of dread when a player triggers DR on a person or place that I wasn’t expecting. I know I don’t play DW fully as intended so maybe I can enjoy it more with a DR move customised to our play style.
Ben M if you want to read more of Jeremy’s thoughts on Discern Realities (including discussing that sometimes, saying “nothing” is totally legitimate), this essay is great.
spoutinglore.blogspot.com – In Defense of Discern Realities
I think it’s important to remember that the GM* can, and should, ask questions as well.
GM: “So you sneak up behind a pig sty. The sun is just about to rise. Oink, oink noises is coming from a happy pig and the rooster suddenly crows.”
You’re thinking it’d be cool if they asked for food at the farm and maybe told a tale or two of their exploits, and maybe talk about the time The Fighter saved the Thief from that falling rock, and then a player starts asking lots of questions about the pigs, the sty and the farm.
Before you tell him honestly that there’s nothing here and you thought it would be a great place to make camp With NPCs to instigate talk, ask him: “Hey, you seem to know a lot about pig farms, did you grow up on one?” or “Hmmm, you seem reluctant to approach the farm, have you had a bad experience once?”, etc-
Whatever the answers, we’ve all learned something, and well, having them roll DR and tell them that this seems like a good for a cheap and safe Make Camp-spot, and on a miss you set off an off-screen Grim Portent or fill the woods with goblins.
—- —-
—*) I wish we could Call it Delve Master™ 😛
Robert Rendell Thanks, I saw Jeremy’s post when it first did the rounds. On paper it sounded like it would help but at the table DR often feels forced to me. I don’t think my players like it much.
I’m going to give DR another shot though. I want to like it and these comments have helped give me ideas for managing it better.
Ben M I’m kind of confused about how you describe your players.
You state early on that your players “sometimes trigger the move to find out if there is anything they should know; note, not because they want the place or character to be interesting.”
But then later you say “are we playing to find out which plot the players engage” rather than “playing to find out what every room is like.”
So… it sounds like you’re having scenes in places that aren’t important to the plots that the players have decided to engage with, and then the players are Discerning Realities to make sure that, no really, this room isn’t important.
Is that accurate?
If so, it sounds more like an issue with scene framing and expectation setting than with Discern Realities.
If that’s not… maybe talk about why you don’t think your players the move very much? I get why you don’t (it’s a lot pressure to come up with interesting stuff), but what do you think they want it to be doing that it’s not?
(edit: cross-posted with Ben)
Yes that’s accurate. I don’t frame scenes aggressively – they like to unpick things (taking small actions if that makes sense). I enjoy hearing them puzzle things out and theorise amongst themselves so I don’t consistently shove them along by throwing GM moves their way. I suppose I let them dawdle more than I should.
But having said that the rest of the game seems to tick along nicely.
Fantastic responses so far. I would add that a big part of gaming is the conversation among players, too, including the GM as a player.
It sounds like your group often uses “Discern Realities” as if it is simply a spot check. As Jeremy Strandberg has noted, you might be dropping them in scenes without any apparent excitement/tension/purpose, and they cast about for a way to find something interesting to do.
If that’s the case, work on how you frame scenes to make your GMing more exciting, as per the principles and agenda. Think about each scene as if it was in a movie. Would THIS scene make the final cut, or would it be on the editing room floor. If it would be edited out, end it soon, and get on to the next interesting bit.
Finally, as far as being put into the position to have to improvise/add “interest” when you don’t expect it – I feel like i have grown most as an improvisational GM by throwing a number of innocuous bits of information into scenes, or asking provocative questions of players and/or their characters, and then simply following whichever direction the players jump. If the players look to the pigpen to find something interesting, then reward their investment in the game. Look to your prep – what is going on that brought them by the pigpen. Perhaps that is where the treasures, or bodies, are buried. Perhaps the pigs are polymorphed dissidents. Perhaps there are no pigs, and the pigpen is a ruse to disguise something else….
I often think of the players each holding a spotlight of their own – by paying attention to where they shine their lights, i can determine where i ought to spend more of my creative efforts. This way i don’t spend a lot of time on stuff that won’t see the day of light, and i’m working with the players to “play to find out what happens.”
I dunno, I get what people are saying but “someone examined it, therefore it’s significant” doesn’t sit well with me. My players aren’t always (or often!) asking because they wish or think that, say, the pigpen should be significant – they’re just making sure they didn’t miss something.
Maybe we just dont need the move at all? The players can just ask specific questions and I’ll say what honesty demands. If there’s something amiss I can always DD it.
I think my problem with DR is this…
DW teaches us to be very particular about the wording of moves. DR is triggered “when you closely study a situation or person” which means that a player deciding to closely examine something makes it a thing, even if they don’t want it to be. If the trigger wording wasn’t totally under their control (they just say “I’m examining X”) then it would be possible for the GM to justify why the move didn’t trigger (say the trigger included some allusion to the significance of the thing).
Compare this with Defy Danger (“when you act despite an imminent threat”). The player performs some action and the GM has input into whether this triggers DD because they can rule that there is “no imminent threat”. In the case of DR it doesn’t seem to me, written the way it is, that the GM can rule at all. And once the move is triggered the player is risking a hard move, so it’s hardly fair for the GM to make a habit of saying “yeah you hit your DR but there’s really nothing to tell”.
I’m interested in whether people have any examples of DR re-writes that might suit a game where the GM is the arbiter of the “interesting things”? (That’s in danger of making me sound a bit power-mad. I’m not though – I just feel there are plenty of ways for my players to indicate what they are interested in during our games – we don’t need a move to encode it.)
Ben M I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, actually. How about this?
When you study a situation or person, ask the GM one of the following:
• What happened here recently?
• What is about to happen?
• What should I be on the lookout for?
• What here is most useful or valuable to me?
• Who or what is really in control here?
• What here is not what it appears to be?
If the answer isn’t obvious, roll +WIS: on a 7+, the GM will answer honestly; on a 10+, you can also ask two more questions and get honest answers. Either way, take +1 forward to act on the answer(s).
It makes the triggering of the move a little more meta-level, because the trigger involves the player doing something to intentionally engage the mechanic.
If they describe studying the situation and don’t ask one of those 6 questions (or something close enough), then whatever, the move never really triggers. They’re just looking at you to see what happens.
If they study the situation and ask one of the questions, they’re asking for insight. Then the GM gets to decide if the answer is obvious or not. If it is obvious, just give them the answer. If it’s not, roll. On a 10+, you get greater insight and can ask two additional questions (the answers to which might or might not have been obvious; doesn’t matter, the questions are “free” at that point).
(I added the “*most*” to the “useful or valuable” question to help make the question relevant when there’s obviously useful/valuable stuff.)
The other variant that I’ve tossed around is:
When you closely study a situation or person, ask the GM one of the following questions:
• What happened here recently?
• What is about to happen?
• What should I be on the lookout for?
• What here is (most) useful or valuable to me?
• Who or what is really in control here?
• What here is not what it appears to be?
If the answer isn’t obvious, roll +WIS: on a 7+, the GM will answer honestly; on a 10+, also hold 2 Insight, which can you spend during the current situation, 1-1, to:
• Ask another question from the list and get an honest answer
• Take +1 on a move you make to act on the answer(s)
This makes the 10+ less “daunting” for both player and GM, because you get to keep playing and spend the hold as desired. It also makes the bonus for acting on the answer(s) more of an intentional use, and something special, because you only get it on a 10+ and it’s in place of more info.
Anyhow… you think either of these would address your concerns?
Jeremy Strandberg Those are thought-provoking indeed (this has been on my mind a lot recently as well, as you can no doubt tell). I particularly like the “holding insight” idea on your second move. But I wonder whether that hold would commonly get forgotten about? It sounds like it would certainly reduce the “make it interesting… now!” pressure that I feel.
I too tossed around some ideas and came up with something that ended up looking a little like Spout Lore…
When you try to work out if there is something unusual about a place or person, roll +WIS. On a 7+ the GM will tell you what honesty demands. On a 10+ if there is nothing to tell, you choose 1. On a 7-9 if there is nothing to tell, the GM chooses 1.
* You form your opinion instantly
* Take +1 forward when dealing with this person or taking action in this place
If the GM tells you anything explain how you notice it.
My intent was to give the player something in the case where there is not much to tell so that the risk of miss is offset slightly by the benefits of a hit.
Hmm, maybe better:
When you try to spot anything unusual about a place or person, roll +WIS. On a 7+ the GM will tell you anything unusual there is and you explain how you notice it. If there is nothing unusual, on a 7-9 choose 1, on a 10+ both:
* You form your opinion instantly
* Take +1 forward when dealing with this person or taking action in this place
EDIT: and I was also thinking that even if there’s nothing unusual to spot, taking a moment to asses them justifies the +1 forward in the fiction.
Jeremy Strandberg And with your moves I’d probably be interested in changing the initial questions so that they are phrased more naturally for players. For example “what is about to happen here” is a kind of odd question – in my experience it’s not the sort of question a player would naturally ask, they’re just choosing it because it’s one of the options. But with your moves I think the questions could now be made more natural, like “are there any signs of recent activity here?”. What do you think?
Easy. I let the players decide what they perceive by asking questions of them about their questions. “What do you think you see?”
In fact, I should mention, we removed “Discern Realities” from the playbook as we shifted more and more towards a game where every player has the power of a GM if they want it. The move we use is roughly based on Jason Lutes’ Establish, itself a variant of Spout Lore… except as I mentioned, we’ve integrated Discern Realities/Perceive and even woven in a few bit of Parley/Negotiate.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lT6hA4vQISoRt7MrBOpoRzvo-kGnT2RDR10twmeqsg2l7xkqbAhqOkeHatpM6Em6UsS8Q8h_EVl8r_spVM0tcWqpaU_YSUzGX3M=s0
Ben M that’s pretty neat, though it still has an extremely broad trigger, right? It’s going to kick whenever the PCs are at all suspicious of a situation, even if you didn’t think that there was anything unusual.
(Also, I’m not sure why you’d limit the pick 1/pick 2 to kicking in when there’s nothing unusual. Those are useful if there is or isn’t anything unusual, and the choice that’s forced on the 7-9 is particularly delightful.)
Thinking more basically, what you’ve done here is limit the scope of possible questions that the move can answer to “what here isn’t what it appears to be?” That actually feels a lot less useful to me as the GM, from an improvisation standpoint, because the more specific questions that the players would ask give me something for that creativity to crystallize on.
“Who or what is really in control here?” Oh, crap… who IS in control here? Huh, well, the Dark Lord of course, it’s his citadel, but who’s in control right here? Oh, maybe these soldiers are mercenaries? Yeah! So there’d be a lieutenant or a captain that these soldiers were reporting too. “So, you realize from the gray cloaks these guys are wearing, and their accents… they’re not from around here. In fact, you think they’re a mercenary company. Sure enough, the one you just knocked out has an insignia pin. Fighter, you recognize it… what’s the name of the company, and what do you know about their leader? Because he’s in charge right now!”
Whereas “I’m trying to spot anything unusual here” is super wide open, and less provocative too me, the GM. Like, would that question prompt me to determine, on the fly, that these soldiers were mercenaries?
Maybe more importantly, if I had already determined that they were in fact mercenaries, but the players didn’t know that… would it even occur to me that it was “unusual?” Barring a bunch of other established fiction, I kinda doubt it. And so that detail goes unmentioned and undiscovered. Whereas “who or what is really in control here?” is much more likely to make me think about “oh, yeah, these guys are mercenaries, so I should reveal that.”
Maezarsure, but that is a very specific style of play, where there’s almost no line between the GM’s narrative responsibilities/authority and the players’. Some people really enjoy that style of play, but others loathe it.
Ben M I like your move ideas.
They edge the game towards a more traditional model where the GM has a privileged view (i.e. some things are true “facts of the matter” even if they haven’t been established in the conversation), but I suspect there are many people that want that.
Jeremy Strandberg I think this comment exposes the difference in what we as GMs want DR to deliver:
Thinking more basically, what you’ve done here is limit the scope of possible questions that the move can answer to “what here isn’t what it appears to be?” That actually feels a lot less useful to me as the GM, from an improvisation standpoint, because the more specific questions that the players would ask give me something for that creativity to crystallize on.
Personally I often don’t want improvisational fuel. Rather, I want some shit to sometimes go down as they’re uncovering something hidden or secret.
Rob Alexander Yes, that’s what I’m going for. I think it’s possible for DW to be approached in either fashion. I’ll smarten up the move and see how it works at my table. As Jeremy Strandberg mentions in his recent blog write-up of DR, I’d have to check that any class moves that piggy-back on DR aren’t broken.