I've been looking over recent/best-of threads at storygames.com and found this one:
http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/18490/dungeon-world-one-book-two-games

Currently I...don't understand at all what the OP is going on about (something many storygames threads have in common). What was interesting though was this, from 'HyveMynd':

QuoteGM moves don't always have to be immediately evident to the players or to their characters. Continuing with the Owlbear example, let's say the PCs are back in town, trying to find out all they can about Owlbears before they trek off into the forest to face one. The Wizard Spouts Lore while searching through the library of the town's College of Magic, but rolls a 6. The PCs are currently nowhere near the Owlbear. They're safe and sound behind the thick wooden walls of the town where nothing can happen, right?

Wrong. Obviously the GM isn't going to narrate an angry Owlbear busting through the library's door to attack the Wizard (although that would be kind of awesome). Instead, the GM is going to make another move. Maybe the GM will Reveal an unwelcome truth. Turns out this particular species of Owlbear can only be harmed by magical weapons, which the party doesn't currently have. Or maybe these Owlbears form breeding colonies, meaning that there's not one monster, but a whole bunch of them. Maybe the GM will Use up their resources. The College of Magic's library is horribly unorganized. It's going to take at least three days to go through everything to find useful information. Or maybe this is the last favor the Wizard can get from the College of Magic for a while, since the PCs have already asked for so much. Maybe the GM will Turn their move back on them. There's another bad of adventurers in town, and they've already armed themselves with Owlbear knowledge. They're all ready to head off into the forest to deal with the menace, stealing the glory (and the gold) from the PCs.

The point is, there is nowhere the PCs can "hide" from the GMs Moves. If they make a Move, and there needs to be a consequence, then there is one, regardless of where the PCs are. Sometimes you'll have to be creative about what happens, but something needs to happen. If there is absolutely nothing that can possibly happen as a result of the characters messing up, then it's not a Move. There's no need to roll dice, and whatever the characters are trying to make happen just happens.

To me this reads as a strange form of meta-gaming, where the DM is using a poor roll as an excuse to re-write unrelated world details just to fuck the PCs. So is this guy just suggesting some really bad DMing ? Or is this a valid & accepted rules interpretation from AW/DW?

Live by a Move, die by a Move.

QuoteOn the other hand, your traditional DM will wait for the players to possibly trigger the move

Your traditional DM will not touch DW to begin with.

Dont know DW that well, but in AW if you miss your roll (6- on a 2d6) shit happens. No matter how safe you are, how barricated you are, how isolated you are. Shit will happen.

BUT the way this shit will happen is informed by the move at hand, and the fiction logic at hand. So, in the case above, the player tried a Lore check and missed. This mean the GM must, by the rules, make some shit happen. He can give the character wrong/mistaken info about the subject of the Lore, or he can make a hard truth about the subject (only harmeable by magical weapons) or other related shit.

Another factor that should be taken in consideration is if the subject of the Lore check pertains to a pre-created Front - is thats the case, its advisable not to mess with its nature, for not breaking the internal logic that conceived it in first place.

But take everything I said with a grain of salt, since I dont know DW that well. My knowledge is based on AW.

BTW, I created things on the spot my entire life as a GM, with games like Shadowrun, Gurps and Vampire. Are you implying that this feat is exclusive of storygames ?

(and frankly, I still dont understand why people call AW a storygame. Ive seen no argument that backs that up )

Quote from: silva;662782BTW, I created things on the spot my entire life as a GM, with games like Shadowrun, Gurps and Vampire. Are you implying that this feat is exclusive of storygames ?

I think a DMing could run a traditional RPG that way- have a failed Knowledge add hordes of extra monsters - since the DM has the power to do whatever they like. That'd count as shitty DMing in my book though, since it runs contrary to the idea that the fictional world has its own reality, and that the PCs are just inhabitants of it. Misinformation from a failed roll, sure, but the roll is for the knowledge and its illogical that going to the library would increase the number of owlbears or make them weapon-proof.

I'm interested in if the GM moves for AW/DW are in conflict with this since I know they're meant to directly limit the DM. I guess the question is, are there cases where a move the GM makes has to involve retconning the world?

Quote from: silva;662782BTW, I created things on the spot my entire life as a GM, with games like Shadowrun, Gurps and Vampire. Are you implying that this feat is exclusive of storygames ?

I came up with a lot of things on the spot as a GM over the years, and obviously still do. As a matter of fact, I would think of this faculty to internalize the setting and comprehend it until it becomes an extension of your being to be a critical GMing skill, especially when it comes down to running dynamic, alive settings of your own, like an actual sandbox. Whatever I am coming up with is the extension of my role playing the game world, just like feelings and actions I did not plan for organically come up from role playing a character in the game world, as a Player.

If a player fails a roll, something bad happens as decided by the GM. It need not be directly connected to what the roll was about on a literal interpretation of RAW, but it often will be (and sometimes will always will be).

DW doesn't require the GM to stick to one approach or the other, or even mix the two, so it's really the GM's call how they use the rule.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;662789I'm interested in if the GM moves for AW/DW are in conflict with this since I know they're meant to directly limit the DM. I guess the question is, are there cases where a move the GM makes has to involve retconning the world?

If by retfonning you mean going back and changing already established/declared facts, no, its not possible by the book.

In AW, one thing the book suggests when a pc misses a read a sitch roll is to turn the move back on him. In this case it woulld be the GM asking questions and the NPC acting on the results.

Quote from: Skywalker;662840If a player fails a roll, something bad happens as decided by the GM. It need not be directly connected to what the roll was about on a literal interpretation of RAW, but it often will be (and sometimes will always will be).

DW doesn't require the GM to stick to one approach or the other, or even mix the two, so it's really the GM's call how they use the rule.

Yup.  In some sense, this is part of the general approach that the GM doesn't roll for anything on his own - events like wandering monsters, NPC or monster perception or tracking rolls, and other events are folded into the player rolls.  

Personally, I find it difficult to stick to the strict GM move pattern, but I'm still getting used to it.

So everyone thanks for replying. I'll assume you're correct unless I get further information.

Quote from: silva;662877If by retconning you mean going back and changing already established/declared facts, no, its not possible by the book.

Just to clarify, 'retconning' is possibly not an accurate word for what I'm trying to describe (I don't think there is a word for it) since what I'm not necessarily talking about a shift in the game universe that's actually detectable to the PCs. More a shift from what the GMs notes/what the GM intended.

I'll try and give an example something from one of my own games, where I was very bad man.

This is a lengthy 3.5/Pathfinder game run on rpol with one player in a sort of megadungeon. His character is a town guardsman who was captured by yuan-ti and turned into a yuan-ti 'tainted one'; and is returning to the nest with a shipment of new human slaves from the surface, along with a pureblood sorceress who is the clans 'recruiter', a goblin scout, a couple of histacii servitors and two half-orc mercenaries.

The slaves are starting to think about escape, so I (secretly, as GM) roll a Sense Motive check for the PC - natural 1. OK, fumble...I decide that he falsely suspects the half-orcs of plotting something. After some time, one of them loudly explains that he is going down a side tunnel to take a shit and the other one goes to accompany him for protection.
The PC decides this is suspicious (player comment - "are they gay or something?") and follows them, in the meantime, I roll a chance of a random encounter - 1 in 6 - get a 1. I roll up what specific creature and get an ogre.

At this point the PC flees back to the wagons crying out ambush. It seems more plausible after all the other unlikely checks that the whole thing WAS a setup so, I give in and decide that OK, the half-orcs WERE actually plotting the thing all along. In the subsequent battle the PC kills both the orcs, while the ogre is webbed and fails to break out repeatedly and gets cut into chunks as well. Fun encounter but...I have a guilt at having revised the world since, up until the PC blew their roll, the half-orcs were essentially trustworthy; at least I hadn't planned a specific betrayal, and it was a sufficiently important detail that its something I should've planned in advance and likely foreshadowed somehow. The subsequent chain of events effectively re-wrote the 'natural 1' Sense Motive into a really successful Sense Motive, which bothered me despite the PC not knowing a dice was even rolled.

Tsk tsk, Bloody Stupid Johnson. Tsk tsk.

*hangs head*

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;662999*hangs head*

That'll be three smacks with the Wooden Board of Redemption.

I was somewhat kidding of course - I'm certain I have done something like that myself (though I cannot recall a specific occasion). It's those problematic bits, when you need to decide whether to keep the world coherent, or give something that adds to the story/emotions/enjoyment/action, so to speak.

One example of my action as such was hastening an arrival of an army by 2 days, so that their leader (a dragon PCs knew) could participate in a battle with a high - level wizard.

Regardless of the game, it's only even possibly bad if you've unnecessarily denied the players access to a toy they could've had if you'd stuck to your original plan, or made some detail you gave them meaningless (which is a bad precedent for next time--suddenly not everything matters.

In this case what you nullified was, essentially, the result of that PC's Sense Motive score being not all that great, or the PC not being that lucky. In the long run of the PCs estimation of what s/he can and can't do (his/her "toy") you didn't really do much to move the needle there.

If the PC walks away still thinking "Sometimes Sense Motive works and sometimes it doesn't..." then you've really done no damage to the way s/he interacts with the world or will in the future.

As for Dungeon World, Vincent (and other people) have said something about DW and AW which makes advice like in the OP make way more sense in retrospect:

"Of course Zak didn't like it, it wasn't really a conversation directed at GMs like him who are used to Old School games"

Basically: the GM moves in the World games are largely advice codified into rules for GMs who don't really have the kind of holistic sense of how to make a world seem "real" while simultaneously making the game flow forward when using a trad RPG set up. They are mechanical aids for what most GMs do intuitively.

I would just have that failed Spout Lore roll mean something that matters. DW gives a list of the kinds of things that you could do and calls it "GM moves". And calls it a rule, rather than advice.

Yes, never reveal the machinery. Especially if you replaced a part of it with smoke and mirrors.