Players calling up the GM on the rules is something that happens in RPGs too, largely dependent on the group's dynamic in question. In DW, just like any RPG, the base expectation of the GM is to be an impartial arbiter of the rules. However, in DW, like any RPG, the GM may change those rules if he or she thinks it is best of the group, and this results in exactly the same issues and potential fallout that results in that act for both.

The nomenclature may differ slightly but the result in play is identical. In DW, like any RPG, there is no mechanical benefit in strict adherence to the rules. You don't win by cheating. As such, the rules set a common expectation that each group will apply and modify as suits their needs to achieve the best result for everyone at the table.

Quote from: CRKrueger;674270So, in your view, the fact that the GM cannot present an option outside what the rules say he can in response to a player move essentially makes the GM just another player, albeit one who has more than one character.  Each player has complete and total control not only of their character's actions but also elements of the world about and around the character, while the GM has control of things only outside player control.  Is that a fair assessment?

I'm not quite sure I follow here.

If we're playing 3E and a goblin attacks me, the GM says "he gets a 12, you take 3 damage." If my AC is actually 15, I'd normally say "what, no he doesn't, my AC is 15!"

If I trigger the Hack and Slash move, with the move as written it includes the ogre's attack. If the GM says "oh no, you have to defy danger first" I feel like saying "what, really?" is the same as the 3E example above.

We use examples of it happening "wrong" because these are "mistakes" that people make. We assume that people reading the text want to learn to use the rules, and part of that is seeing how that particular rule doesn't work.

These aren't examples of what the GM can't do. The GM can do whatever, ignore the rules, change the rules, etc. They're examples of, if the GM is using the rules that exist, how to use them correctly.

That said, the volley one isn't great. Might look at how to make it better.

Edited to add: I realized I forgot to also mention that these were intended as examples of "mistakes and corrections" (that's what we called them while writing them). In my mind, the GM in those samples thinks they made a mistake. If the GM thinks they're right (or if they just want to change/ignore the rules on the fly) that'd be a different example.

Quote from: Ladybird;674030http://www.d20pfsrd.com/

Which is a mature system that is used by a large number of gamers.  You can rather more get away with that when you are Paizo, but not so much when you are trying to get people to notice your new game.  The PFSRD isn't exactly intended to be used as a volume of rules, either, but a resource to keep handy when you need to find out if an Elf has low-light or darkvision, or how many feats a 5th level Human Fighter will have.

QuoteDude, of all the things you could criticize DW for, "they used the wrong tool to write it" and "I don't like one of the distribution methods they used" are pretty weak.

But that rather points to a general lack of awareness, which is my point.  I am not demanding a slick, ultra-professional product, just a minimal understanding of the audience.  In general, I think most people make the assumption that competence at one task or subject correlates to some level of competence in related fields.  Not always accurate, of course, but a relatively safe assumption.

Hence, if the decisions on how to distribute or present the rules is wildly off from what the players need, the odds favour the rules themselves not exactly being what they say they are.  Again, one doesn't stumble onto xml as a format and post it to GitHub by accident.  It's as though the most intentionally difficult to use choices were made with zero justification.  If the industry was predicated on InDesign formatted files, or it was the de facto standard instead of pdfs, then hey, awesome.  To me that speaks of a gross misunderstanding.

Quote from: StormBringer;674277Which is a mature system that is used by a large number of gamers.  You can rather more get away with that when you are Paizo, but not so much when you are trying to get people to notice your new game.  The PFSRD isn't exactly intended to be used as a volume of rules, either, but a resource to keep handy when you need to find out if an Elf has low-light or darkvision, or how many feats a 5th level Human Fighter will have.

You're assuming our goal is "to get people to notice" Dungeon World, which it's not. It's not advertising. It's a free version of the game for people who can't/won't/don't want to pay for it. It's also a quick reference for people like me that don't want to dig out the PDF every time.

Which, yeah, is quite a bit like the Pathfinder SRD. I didn't claim this was new or innovative.

We do sometimes promote DW in some way. We have DW stuff on twitter, G+, and Facebook, but those are mostly for announcements. We did submit Dungeon World for an Ennie, mostly out of curiosity. That's not really where the free open version comes in.

Quote from: StormBringer;674277Hence, if the decisions on how to distribute or present the rules is wildly off from what the players need, the odds favour the rules themselves not exactly being what they say they are.  Again, one doesn't stumble onto xml as a format and post it to GitHub by accident.  It's as though the most intentionally difficult to use choices were made with zero justification.  If the industry was predicated on InDesign formatted files, or it was the de facto standard instead of pdfs, then hey, awesome.  To me that speaks of a gross misunderstanding.

I think you're misunderstanding our intention here.

The github repo is my personal working copy. It's main purpose is so I have versioned backups. It's secondary purpose is so other people can help improve the text, or make their own version of the text. I'd never point someone at the git repo and say "here's a free version of the game!"

The HTML version(s) are fan projects. They're pretty neat, and more accessible than XML mapped to layout. My current plan is to make one of them the standard DW format instead of the XML, now that my work on the text is minimal (i.e. my working copy isn't important).

I'd also say that InDesign is a standard format, just not the one that most people distribute. With the exception of a very few people with Word, Quark, or an OpenSource alternative, every game book is made in InDesign. Most people just don't see it because you export to PDF.

PDF is a more common format for sure, and I think there's a good case that if we really want free DW to be all a person needs we should make a PDF version as well. I'll look at doing that sometime soon.

Quote from: CRKrueger;674222Sage in Volley, your choices on a 7-9 are to...
Fire one arrow for low damage
Fire several arrows for normal damage
Move into a dangerous position and fire for normal damage

All of these options supposedly take the exact same time as each other and as a full success which hits for normal damage.

This method has been described as "the mechanics don't tell me what happens, they ask me what happens".

This depends on interpreting the mechanic as "Once the player rolls, the result has already happened, and any further steps are going back in time and editing the world."  That's not how a lot of other mechanics work, though, like rolling to confirm a critical.  

In-game, what is happening is:
(1) The character picks a strategy - move as needed to get the shot, keep firing to get the shot, or play it safe.  This is an in-character decision.  
(2) The player rolls.
(3) If he gets a 7-9, the results depend on the character's strategy.  

The choice of character strategy is not an out-of-character choice.  What Dungeon World does is wait and only asks the player to specify the strategy if the strategy would make a difference to the outcome.

Quote from: jhkim;674284In-game, what is happening is:
(1) The character picks a strategy - move as needed to get the shot, keep firing to get the shot, or play it safe.  This is an in-character decision.  
(2) The player rolls.
(3) If he gets a 7-9, the results depend on the character's strategy.  

No, that's not what's happening.  The player rolls first, then is presented with a choice of strategy, his intent is to hit and do damage, if he rolls 10+, he succeeds with this strategy, if he does not succeed, then he is presented with a choice of additional strategies.

If the GM asked him what are you going to do, the player says "Shoot the orc" and the GM then asks what if you can't get a clear shot, what are you going to do, then the player rolls, it at least is in the proper chronology between player and character.  You don't put roll before choice and then get to claim roll actually comes after choice and then get to say there's no time-warping, or you're IC, because if the player's chronology is different then the character's chronology then you're by definition OOC either using some kind of literary device like a flashback, or engaging the mechanics and making choices from a player's point of view, and then deciding what that means for the character after the fact, ie bog standard Conflict Resolution - determine winner of Conflict by player, narrate result for character.

Quote from: jhkim;674284The choice of character strategy is not an out-of-character choice.  What Dungeon World does is wait and only asks the player to specify the strategy if the strategy would make a difference to the outcome.

It could have been written like some other moves that would make it an in-character choice, but in this case the misaligned chronologies between player and character make this move's choices OOC.

In addition, there is no sense of absolute time between characters and moves, each move is relative only to that character.  One character does a move, another character at the same time does a move that would actually require 4x the time, then the first character is returned to to make up the time he lost. They have a term for that, it's called Speed of Plot.

As the characters play to find out what happens, the story unfolds and the spotlight is shifted from character to character as in a novel, not time segment by time segment as you would if you were simulating a real event.

This may be a roleplaying game in that roleplaying exists in it, but the roleplaying is the mechanism by which the storytelling occurs.

Quote from: CRKrueger;674286As the characters play to find out what happens, the story unfolds and the spotlight is shifted from character to character as in a novel, not time segment by time segment as you would if you were simulating a real event.

This may be a tangent, but isn't turn based initiative more about shifting the spotlight from character to character as in a tactical game, like a war game or board game?

I don't think either approach really simulates real events except the sense of time moving forward in both. In fact, I could see an argument that the greater GM discretion in DW in shifting the spotlight could give a more realistic sense of timing if the GM so wanted as the GM can balance a lot more contextual information than the artificially enforced equality of turn based initiative allows.

Actually, now I think about it, this suggests to me that there is no story imperative behind the lack of turn based initiative in DW IMO. There is a much simpler and more obvious imperative, being the ease of use and flexibility for the GM.

Yeah cuz a real gamer knows roleplaying can only be achieved by a chart. :rolleyes:

Quote from: Benoist;673917(I could go and dig the tweets you got in with the lol-band when Vincent took some potshots at the RPG Site for a similar thread, claiming we got our greasy Cheetos-stained fingers on AW or some such, hence my user title).

The only way this could be true is if Vincent Baker is actually Luke Crane and AW stands for Torchbearer.

What is interesting to me in the example of how the rules are used, that it seems assumed that the default choices for a 'move' are always available and the fiction is narrated based on that. A traditional setup has choices as well, but effects equivalent to 'moves' appear emergently as a result of detailed rules effects. So 'can I move back away from the ogre and use Manyshot' appears in both DW and D&D (some versions) but what options a PC gets will depend on exact distances, move speeds, obstacles and perhaps Balance checks etc.

(I don't know if that has any bearing on the core questions of the debate here, but I thought it was interesting).

Dungeon World is further down the abstract scale compared to something like AD&D, that's for sure. It does make it easy to run, but I can understand why someone may not like the level of abstraction.

Quote from: Noclue;674293The only way this could be true is if Vincent Baker is actually Luke Crane and AW stands for Torchbearer.

My mistake. Sage LaTorra joined the Luke Crane Lol-band throwing up on us over Torchbearer, Luke Crane who is known to have been oh-so-sympathetic to the traditional role of the GM and never in a million years said it was actually toxic to the hobby, but Sage, despite being buddies with Luke and obviously Vincent Baker, has NO IDEA what Forge theory, Story Now, etc, are AT ALL, just, you know, "happened to be there", didn't understand a word of what was going on but laughed on cue, because, you know, to make a good impression and all, and came up with a totally sleek Apocalypse World hack using all the buzzwords and exemplifying Forge design by complete random chance. My mistake. Thanks for setting me straight.

Quote from: Benoist;674334My mistage. Sage LaTorra joined the Luke Crane Lol-band throwing up on us over Torchbearer, Luke Crane who is known to have been oh-so-sympathetic to the traditional role of the GM and never in a million years said it was actually toxic to the hobby, but Sage, despite being buddies with Luke and obviously Vincent Baker, has NO IDEA what Forge theory, Story Now, etc, are AT ALL, just, you know, "happened to be there", didn't understand a word of what was going on but laughed on cue, because, you know, to make a good impression and all, and came up with a totally sleek Apocalypse World hack using all the buzzwords and exemplifying Forge design by complete random chance. My mistake. Thanks for setting me straight.

Don't mention it.

As long as we're being all accurate and stuff. Sage didn't say he had no idea about Forge theory. He said he didn't think much of GNS and couldn't stand Ron's essays. The reason DW uses the word Agenda is because Apocalypse World uses the word Agenda. However, there's no mention of the three Creative Agendas from the big model in either game, which you would know if you took a moment to check.

And, when you say "uses ALL the buzzwords" what do you mean? I think we've shown that the book uses the nefarious word Agenda and the secret code word Fiction. What other buzzwords does it use?

Quote from: jhkim;674284This depends on interpreting the mechanic as "Once the player rolls, the result has already happened, and any further steps are going back in time and editing the world."  That's not how a lot of other mechanics work, though, like rolling to confirm a critical.  

In-game, what is happening is:
(1) The character picks a strategy - move as needed to get the shot, keep firing to get the shot, or play it safe.  This is an in-character decision.  
(2) The player rolls.
(3) If he gets a 7-9, the results depend on the character's strategy.  

The choice of character strategy is not an out-of-character choice.  What Dungeon World does is wait and only asks the player to specify the strategy if the strategy would make a difference to the outcome.

But that does make a huge difference. In D&D, for example, a PC archer can (maybe) choose to fire more than one shot but at a penalty, or get a bonus if they put themselves in a more visible position or advance, but they have to choose that BEFORE rolling. And that means that they have to decide to take a risk that sometimes would be an unnecessary risk; maybe staying behind cover firing just one arrow would have worked, but they don't get to play "takeback" and do it over that way.  Likewise, if they play it safe and miss, they don't get to play "takeback" and choose the riskier move.

RPGPundit

It is worth noting that the Volley 7-9 result is unusual, even in DW. This is why CRKrueger focuses on it as his example, as it's the most obvious example of a rule arguably requiring a player perspective. However, it would be contrived to use this specific rule to make statement about DW's approach more broadly IMO