Tag: T. Franzke

About “Narrative Control” for Players

Christopher Stone-Bush said 

“While I think Dungeon World really shines when the players have a lot of narrative input,” 

and that is true but I sometimes see people applying this incorrectly and thought I’d use that chance to bring it up. 

In short, I am talking about this article by John Harper: 

mightyatom.blogspot.de/2010/10/apocalypse-world-crossing-line.html 

In this he explains what players can and can’t be asked about. In short, you can only ask about things that are known to the character. You can’t ask someone what is in the Dungeon – only what they know and think is in the dungeon. If they have no knowledge about that you can’t ask. You can set them up by saying they have read about it – but normally we would think they don’t. 

So why can you ask a player about the characters hometown but not about what is in the locked chest? 

Because you are not asking the player. You are asking the character. 

“Hey Gunhard, what is the biggest problem in your hometown” 

“Those pesky Ratmen, coming out of the Sewers at night and multiplying by foul magic.” 

that works right. Cleary Gunhard knows about this. So let’s look at the chest, 

“Gunhard, there is a big golden chest behind the altar. What is in it?”

“Ahem… I don’t know?” 

The conversation doesn’t work like that. You as the GM are talking to the characters. You are addressing them, not the players. You could in theory ask Ashanti, the player of Gunhard what she thinks would be a great idea, but the book isn’t really advising you to do that. It is not Ashanti’s job to come up with these things. It’s yours. 

Does the game break if you do it in another way? Not really.

You are loosing some of the immersion, or at least narrative quality of the game though, if characters need to come up with things they don’t know. 

So how do you deal with this at the table? 

Crossposted from Story-Games – Moves Complexity

This is my theory about different kinds of complexity a move/class/playbook/game can have. What do you people think about it? 

“For World games I distinguish between different complexities.

Understanding complexity

How difficult is a move to read and understand. If it has a lot of moving parts it is harder to wrap your head around, especially when it refers to other moves, mechanics, items etc. that people are not familiar with usually. Also moves that make you choose a few things from a list can be harder to understand since you need to compare different combinations of things you can and can’t get to fully get what the move is doing. 

Handling complexity

How complex is the actual process of using the move at the table? A bad example for this might be Druid Shapeshift when it is a new form and now the GM has to come up with moves to give you. Another can be ritual or preparation of your spells. 

In short, the longer you need to spend on talking through the mechanical interactions of a move the longer 

Strategic complexity

How complex is it for you to actually trigger the move? When the move trigger is obscure or vague you might not find (or miss) opportunities for you to use that move. This is related to Understanding complexity but you still could have moves that you constantly forget to apply because their triggers are weird.

Ritual can also be a great example for this because ritual allows you to do EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING is hard to wrap your head around. 

Fictional complexity

This is also a bit arcane. 

How much does having this move change the things happening to you? When you take a move that gives you 2 loyal followers suddenly 2 new characters are added to the game and everyone needs to keep them in mind. If you get a minor godly power people might come and worship you. In a way the story gets more complex because you now have these capabilities. 

It is also strongly related to fictional effectiveness and potentially mindshare effectiveness.” 

Class explanations?

What do you think about Classes that come with extra explanation of how they are supposed to be played or how certain moves work/are meant? 

On the one hand it is great to get a glimpse the design thoughts that went into the class and they might help you to see things you didn’t see before or to understand certain moves better. 

On the other hand… It may lead to lazy design I think. If you need 2 extra paragraphs to explain how a certain move is supposed to work then you haven’t written your move correctly. If one feels that people might missunderstand a move then one should change the move language, yes? I know the feeling of just not getting the wording right and wanting to explain it in non-move language but that is a crutch I think. 

So where does this come from? Apocalypse World has a detailed explanation of every playbook move and what it can and can’t do in the core book. I think there it is okay. It was the first game to use this kind of language and mechanic so a detailed explanation is highly helpful. However; it is only in the book and not on the playbook. Basically all moves are perfectly understandable on their own. Also the expanded playbooks that came later didn’t had these (I guess because Vincent thought people had read the core book and know how moves work). 

It is comparable to how DW goes into detail about how the basic moves work. And that is okay too because you need to explain the main mechanics of the game to the reader. They can extrapolate to the class moves from there. 

Monsterhearts talks about ways to play a certain skin and what you can do with specific moves. That is a choice that was made in that game and is on every skin. Basically it is okay there because it is everywhere, you know? The way you write moves in Monsterhearts is simply different. You write Move + Explanation. That is how it is done. 

So why do people write these in Dungeon World? 

Do you like getting extra knowledge and explanation classes and moves? Do you have any great examples were it really made it click in your mind? 

[Disclaimer: “Explanations might lead to lazy move design” is only my opinion and not a stated fact. I happily change my mind about that too. Please don’t take it as a personal attack on your design if you use explanations. I just want to talk about it.]

Do you see any downside to changing Signature Weapon to say something along the lines of this:

Choose whatever weapon and effects you want and give it a cool name. 

?