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Interfere vs. custom Parley in intra-party conflict

Interfere vs. custom Parley in intra-party conflict

Something weird came up in our Planets Collide session tonight that I wanted to comment on.

At one point, they narrate that they make camp on the beach. The Bard has two relics he got from Death’s domain, so he stays awake longer than everyone else to make sure no one messes with them.

He puts one on, and goes to sleep after everyone else.

When the others wake up, he’s sleeping still, so I tell them they have a chance to try to get his stuff. They don’t act decisively, and he wakes up before anyone takes anything. (I’m not picking on this player. In the fiction, the Bard betrayed the party once, and they do not trust him with this power.)

But the Bard is suspicious, and he and the Barbarian get into a verbal clash. During the argument, the Druid takes one of the relics that was left in the sand.

The Bard’s player wants to roll to spot this, and the Druid’s player asserts she’s being sneaky.

We all instinctively go to the dice, and it seems like Interfere is being triggered, so we try it out with the Bard “interfering” with the Druid holding out. He get’s a 7–9.

That’s when it breaks down. “✴On a 7–9, they still get a modifier, but you also expose yourself to danger, retribution, or cost”. They read it to me several times, because they all have the Basic Moves in front of them and I don’t, but none of us can resolve this into a plausible fictional scenario.

I mentally turn it around and think “maybe the Druid is interfering…” but then it dawns on me. The Bard isn’t Defying any Danger by looking—and the Druid isn’t Defying any Danger by holding out. I say we made a mistake, this isn’t Interfere. The Druid just has the item, and the Bard didn’t see it.

Right after that, another situation cropped up that seemed like a trigger for a move. The Bard accused the Barbarian of taking his thing, and he demanded to have it back! He pressed the Barbarian by threatening to drag her to Hell, which is a possibility. This seemed like a possible trigger for the revised Parley move by Jeremy Strandberg. (Except, in hindsight, even the revised Parley move only triggers for NPCs.)

https://plus.google.com/+JeremyStrandberg/posts/gUbwzudRooB

The Bard rolled a 10+, and the Barbarian picked 1 requirement, as per the move: She wanted the other relic in exchange.

He refused to give it up, though; and out of character, the player knew she didn’t have it.

Anyway, the contrast was stark between these two resolutions. Even though both were triggered by haphazard thinking, the Parley resolution felt more authentic and meaningful, and it didn’t strip anyone of their agency.

I recognize that this version of Parley could still cause problems if used to resolve an intra-party conflict—what if the Bard gave in to the Barbarian’s request? She couldn’t give him what he wanted. But my gut tells me there’s something robust and flexible there to work with.

This might be the first time Interfere came up in this campaign, and we’re 17 sessions in. Interfere triggered again later in the session, and the second time it handled a lot better. But hitting the snag with it makes me think it’s more of a meta-move, that relegates it to a more abstract, and thus less accessible layer of the game.

What I mean is, the trigger for Aid & Interfere seems clear at first brush: “When you help or hinder someone…” But in actual play, it requires more abstract considerations to trigger: “When you help or hinder someone who is rolling to resolve their own move, which must be identified and triggered already. “

Encumbrance already acknowledges this in the move: “When you make a move while carrying weight you may be encumbered.” In other words, the trigger is not really a trigger.

I don’t have a solution, I’m just reflecting on a bit of actual play and considering how we might do better next time.

When the players make all the GM moves against themselves?

When the players make all the GM moves against themselves?

After another pulse-and-pulp-pounding session of Planets Collide, I can finally share some of the stuff that has been a long time boiling in my campaign.

But first, here’s a new thing: This session, almost all my GM moves were provoked by misses and golden opportunities. Usually, I’m making GM moves left and right, snowballing the moves, which pushes the players to take decisive action.

This time, the setup gave them a few charged situations and it was the players who escalated and ratcheted up their own tension.

The party was so overwhelmed by the weight of the choices before them, and so conflicted about what to do, that they spent much of the session laboring and disputing in character about their power and responsibility.

It did trigger their moves, which gave me a string of misses to deliver hard moves with. (They don’t always bring their own dice, and they blame my dice for the heavy hits they endure, and consequent XP gains.)

And sometimes their deliberations triggered golden opportunity moves, as the fiction changed around them. There were also times when they looked to find out what happens, but the intra-character conflict was coming so thick that I didn’t make nearly so many moves with that prompt. I mainly had to interrupt a few times to show how the world didn’t stop because of them.

The upshot is: The tension still reached a crescendo and prompted decisive action from every player. Each adventurer not only had a character-defining moment, but those moments changed the campaign irreversibly.

Previously, there was a witch who took the Bard’s heart.

✴The Bard just watched while the witch used his heart to kill Death right in front of him.

✴The Ranger shattered a relic that could destroy that same witch, in order to break the lock on the Black Gate. The dead were crowded outside, unable to enter—including the Barbarian’s ward, who was killed last session.

✴The Bard donned Death’s golden crown, taking the role of Death in Last Breath from now on.

✴The Barbarian, who vowed to put the Bard’s head on a stick for his past betrayals, demanded the crown, and then repeatedly backed down when he refused.

✴At the moment of highest tension, the Druid used Death’s abacus to restore the Barbarian’s child to life. But the Barbarian’s closest NPC ally fell dead in her place.

✴And then, the Druid gave Death’s abacus back to the Bard, while telling him to his face that he is not worthy to hold it!

✴The Bard left in disgust through the Black Gate, as it opened to take the Barbarian’s ally.

✴And the Ranger followed him through the Gate!

As the GM, I’m usually a lot more involved in bringing the danger. I can hardly believe how much tension and drama there was while I exercised such restraint in making GM moves.

Here are the custom moves I brought to this session. Each was based on the situation in the fiction before we began:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tcb-52tH9pzK0-LDlzQwjeeApqewp6SWSB-kHVOkHcs/edit?usp=sharing

But now the situation is so different. 😉

What is the last known version of Inglorious?

What is the last known version of Inglorious?

I was reading Anglekite[1], and it mentioned mass combat rules in Inglorious. I thought, “hey, I wonder how that’s come along since last I looked it over?”

I checked the Adventurer’s Guild link, but it was no longer available. My copy is labeled “Inglorious Preview 2”, and I think it was downloaded 20 July 2015. It’s entirely character options though—very cool stuff, now that I know the game better. But it does not have mass combat rules.

Does anyone know if a more recent version of Inglorious circulated before the Adventurer’s Guild page went offline? (Or ever?)

Thought experiment: Druid’s homeland while the Druid is away

Thought experiment: Druid’s homeland while the Druid is away

[Spoilers for Plantes Collide]

Suppose the Druid is away from her homeland, when an already established cursed place starts consuming everything there. Obviously, the Druid’s spirits would make an effort to alert her and try to get her to come back home.

But what if the Druid ignores their pleas?

Since Shapeshift requires the Druid to call upon the spirits, it seems like they could take her powers away until she began the journey home. But that seems heavy-handed. I wouldn’t want to do that unless they were utterly desperate.

Also, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in different places. I want the character to feel pressure, but I don’t want to force the players to go that way.

How would you handle it as the GM?

This issue may not come up, but I don’t want to be unprepared.

#Druid

Has anyone created a hireling skill akin to Arcane Assistance for the Druid?

Building the dungeon on the fly

Building the dungeon on the fly

“Dungeon Moves are a special subset that are used to make or alter a dungeon on the fly.” (168)

http://www.book.dwgazetteer.com/gm.html

Do you successfully use the dungeon moves listed to create dungeons on the fly as the players explore?

I haven’t done that. In my last campaign we successfully used dungeon modules, like Keep on the Borderlands, Death Frost Doom, and others. And my current campaign has focused on world travel—I keep some Dyson-drawn dungeon maps handy just in case, but we have only used map-based locations a few times.

But part of the appeal of dungeon exploration for me, as a GM and as a player, is having a convincing and internally-consistent alien (or at least hostile) environment. As a player, I like knowing that pulling a lever in room A has a designated effect in room C, even if I have to figure out what it was. As the GM, I feel clumsy presenting a convincing and internally-consistent environment for exploration without some prior investment in thinking through its terrain, hazards, resources, and puzzles.

I don’t need a detailed location key, and I’m a lot more comfortable working with Fronts than before. But having a map on the detail-gradient of a one-page dungeon is just about perfect: The broad strokes of how everything fits together are established, but there is also enough ambiguity and blankness for the player-facing questions and a few grim portents to add dynamism and suspense. But even the one-page dungeon is a bit much to ask my brain for on the fly.

I remember once playing in a game where it was obvious the GM was making up the dungeon on the fly, and it felt like nothing we did mattered. We explored his maze, but we were going to find the same encounters whether we turned left or right. That was very unsatisfying, and I prefer to avoid it.

If you use DW’s dungeon moves to successfully create convincing dungeoncrawls, I’d love to hear what I’m missing, and how. I know there is a Perilous supplement that addresses “dungeoneering on the fly” directly, but I’d like to focus first on Dungeon World core.

What is your experience?

Dungeon World Session Prep: How I do it with less confusion

Dungeon World Session Prep: How I do it with less confusion

I did not get how to set up Fronts in Dungeon World for a long time. I can’t remember when or how it clicked, but I wanted to write up what I’m doing differently now:

https://d6.beardedbaby.net/the-flameghoul-reloaded-dungeon-world-session-prep

GMing really complex action scenes

GMing really complex action scenes

Our last session had the most complex battle I’ve ever seen in Dungeon World. We had a skirmish at sea between two imperial destroyers. The battle involved hundreds of NPCs and monsters, boarding action going both ways, player characters fighting on both vessels—there was a lot going on.

Dungeon World handled it gloriously smoothly. As the GM, I simply did like always: Set up some action, asked someone what they were doing, listened, and repeated until a player-facing move was triggered. In most cases, it was obvious which PC should be in the spotlight.

But at a certain point, it got so complicated, with immediate threats for everyone, that it wasn’t obvious which PC to cut to next. In the moment, I simply asked the table “Who haven’t we checked on in the longest?” It was all happening pretty rapidly. Someone piped up, I described the immediate threat in their perspective, and we kept things moving.

It’s my understanding, and the way I have always played Dungeon World, that it’s the GM’s job to take the role of “movie director” most of the time. The game text doesn’t use those exact words, but the concept of making GM moves + beginning and ending with the fiction, followed by asking someone “what do you do?” seems to imply it.

The play examples of Defend in the rulebook offer a perfect illustration of how the GM moves the spotlight from one PC to another in the middle of conflict. Usually, it’s just the natural flow of events in the fiction. Sometimes one PC gets a few more narrative beats, sometimes less. One thing I like to do when the action is scattered is make a GM move that sets up a minor catastrophe or cliffhanger and then cut to someone else before letting the player react.

But when I reflect on this particular instance, I wonder if that one moment might have been a good time to use something like “popcorn initiative”. Popcorn initiative is when the player in the spotlight gets to choose which character the spotlight goes to next. In Dungeon World, it would be a case of asking the players and using the answers.

I’m curious what other people do in the GM seat in situations when the action is scattered, the threat is everywhere, everyone is in immediate danger, and it’s not obvious who goes next.

I don’t think that it was a big problem, I just thought it was an opportunity to improve my play.

It’s funny because a few weeks ago I posted a question about what a certain magic item should do. One person, who has gone on record as a Dungeon World critic, replied “It tracks initiative because the Dungeon World does not”. I laughed out loud. I have played a LOT of Dungeon World, and I never needed to “track initiative”—but I never ran into a battle with this many characters in motion either.

(That said, I’m sure the most common methods of “tracking initiative” would have turned this skirmish into a tedious nightmare and taken double or triple the table time to resolve, at least if they were applied to Dungeon World.)

Cheers!

Origin of Big Hit Points, Big Healing?

Origin of Big Hit Points, Big Healing?

In the discussion on Rob Alexander’s post “What I like about Dungeon World, and what I do not”, Jeremy Strandberg brought up a point about DW:

> 1) PCs tend to have a lot of HP

> 2) It’s mechanically easy to restore them

As far as I can tell, this stands in stark contrast to the earliest version of the game, in which you determined your hit points by rolling a die. New characters could have a range of hit points from 4–13, based on their class, with most classes getting a lot less than the maximum. Healing seems to have been granted only by magic or (one supposes) appropriate fiction.

Even the “Dungeon World Hack” PDF that came out a few years later seems to have kept Hit Points much lower than the current game, using “base HP +CON” instead of “base HP +Constitution”, but leveling up could rapidly improve your situation.

The current rules keep HP static except for increases in Constitution or advanced moves, but you generally start with a lot more HP than the earlier drafts.

I’m curious if anyone here was involved in the early playtests or discussions about the early rules. Does anyone know what precipitated such a drastic change?

I agree with Jeremy that inflated Hit Points does foster a disassociation between numeric damage and the fiction. At my table, we mitigate this by tying most hits to other consequences in the fiction. Last week, our ranger was hit by a pistolshot in the hip, so it took her a while to get up and go again. (It might have been a good time to use the “Stun Damage” rule, but we didn’t think of it—the action was fast and furious enough that she was just left out for a few minutes while stuff happened around her.)

But we don’t always remember to do this. Since the Ranger took two pistolshots, she was more beat up in the fiction than the other PCs, but two others came within a few Hit Points of Last Breath, and we didn’t narrate how their injuries were hobbling them. The players still felt the screws tightening, because their Hit Points were low AND they were hemmed in by other circumstances.

I’m planning to adopt Jeremy’s suggestion to use Deal Damage only in concert with other moves. That’s usually what I do anyway, but not always.

Title

Here’s my session report for the last episode of Planets Collide, in which I used the advice given on this forum about seafaring combat. Thank you all!

https://d6.beardedbaby.net/the-flameghoul-reloaded-dungeon-world-planets-collide-session-16

I didn’t get a chance to dive into the mechanics in this post, but I’ll do a follow-up post shortly analyzing how all this came about.