Halceon

Making games, rarely finishing


We had a longish talk over on Roll+Bond about this, but I wanna summarize some stray thoughts I had. The question was whether or not the specific language of pbta moves actually encourages/teaches players to "start and end with the fiction".

  • I like using the scale make decisions <---> make shit up, but in a more meaningful sense I think it maps to a "try to look up an answer" play style and a "try to think up an answer" play style. DnD and Pathfinder, e.g., have exhaustive rules trying to cover every eventuality. If you want to know what to do or what happens, you look through the rules and see your options. Dread has approximately 7 rules and when you wanna know what specific effect an action has, you primarily think about the story.

  • Productive voids are fun and it's a good idea to sometimes say "this game does not mechanize those interactions". Especially doing saying it in the published text. Such that people don't get the idea that the rules are the hard limits of the fiction.

  • There is a justified frustration with discern realities type moves, where people sometimes need to see things about a situation that don't seem to be coverable by the questions given. And in my gamerunning I've started straying away from "can you spot it" to "who among you has the best eyesight?". Because if I already know the information, there's often little reason for the players to not have it. I'm now calling for Discern Realities when I want to make new shit up.

  • I like Stonetop, because the book is very much show AND tell. It tells you "keep the narrative in mind", but then it also shows in a variety of ways how, say, getting hurt isn't just about HP. There's multiple examples in the rules explainer as well as a play example. So you know, when you're looking at mechanical outcomes and trying to put them into a narrative, you've seen some version of how that can come together. So putting narrative first isn't just a wish, but a goal that's been actually worked towards.

  • Conversely, I've grown to dislike Dungeon World (for author reasons, but also:) because it assumes a familiarity with DnD and seems to be attempting to translate the play style into a 2d6 dice system. It's doing more of a "start with the numbers and add fiction to them" approach.

  • Everyone loves Night Witches


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