Dungeon World is terrible and Sage LaTorra is charlatan

[silva]

Cant see how that relates to railroading.

In fact, I would say AW has one of the more anti-railroading systems Ive seen, because of 2 things: 1) the players moves can have enough status quo changing power to disrupt railroading-inclined GMs, and 2) the procedural gameplay structure dictated by Fronts and the "First Session Sheet" guarantees that everything the GM throws at the players will be based on their own input in the first place. In other words, Apocalypse World is one of the more player-driven games there is, both at a macro- and micro- scale.

[erik]

Cant see how that relates to railroading.

Whatever choice the players make, the MC determines the outcome. AW is the most empowering MC-railroader system I've seen. Even when players succeed (at a cost, yes, but still it is rated as success) as you have stated on last thread page a reasonable outcome is for them to have utterly failed.

All those wonderful choices...



Now, a good MC might not partake in such dickery, but a good MC can make any game good. One point of a rule system is to bring up the lower half of the curve, and AW doesn't do that.

The rules offer no consistency, and little basis for expecting what an outcome for a player's action may be. If you have no basis for knowing what your actions do, then you are literally playing Mother May I.

[silva]

What you´re failing to see is that all those rails were brought by the players in the first place, not the GM.

Contrast that to a typical game like D&D or Shadowrun where nothing in the system precludes the GM from pulling a entire story with points A, B and C from his ass - in other words, a railroad - and you will see what I mean.

[Whipstitch]

Silva, what you need to understand here is that having no real standards for outcomes makes it impossible to tell the difference between subtle MC dickery and a normal outcome--in this case, mostly because subtle MC dickery is the normal outcome. Yes, in D&D the MC can keep throwing new stuff at you and designs the sandbox you all start in. But things you do stay done and the spells you cast work they way they are written in the book unless the MC starts actively cheating in rather obvious ways. That actually makes the social contract relatively enforceable, whereas AW's mechanics are so blurred morons like you can't even tell that their actions don't fucking matter to begin with.

[silva]

Whip, Im not denying the AW system is looser and more prone to player/GM improvisation than more traditional games like D&D or Gurps - I acknowledge that, and understand those who criticizes the game on that base.

What Im refuting is the apparent conclusion by some people here that, since the system is looser, it automatically means nonsensical bullshit happening everywhere - this I cannot agree with, since the very author is explicit in the text that in-fiction logic and causality are important things upon which the gameplay should be oriented.

In this last case, I must default to Chamomile, who nailed in the very first page of this discussion: nothing precludes any GM from any game from being a idiot and throwing nonsensical crap in the players, be it D&D or Apocalypse World or Risus or whatever - if you dont trust your fellow GM and players to keep things coherent and logical while playing a roleplaying game, you should not be playing a roleplaying, no matter the title on the cover.

[Chamomile]

Okay, this has become a silva thread and therefore about as worthwhile as a shadzar thread, but there's a couple of things I feel like I should note before ducking out.

If I didn't play with assholes, I couldn't play Apocalypse World.

-Username17

This is trivially false and you know it. Is it incredibly easy to imagine a situation in which a game of Apocalypse World is being played and nobody involved is an asshole. If all of your criticisms of the game evaporate under those circumstances, you're criticizing groups with assholes in them, not the game.

You coming up with variations of "but it's supposed to make sense!" and "but you're not supposed to be a fuck head while playing this game!" over and over again doesn't make you witty or correct. It means you have no good arguments, because those arguments are actually fallacious. The first is non-sequitor and the second is Oberoni.

No it isn't. Oberoni is the claim that because the GM changed the system to fix a problem with it, the system has no problem. It has nothing to do with the GM abusing the system to railroad people, something he can do in any system ever created including 3.Tome, After Sundown, and it even happened to me once in Inspectres despite the fact that the rules text explicitly forbade the GM from undoing the results of a successful roll the way he had. It is fallacious to claim that a game is bad because a malicious GM can ruin it.

In other systems, either opposed rolls or failed checks would create this danger. In *World, it is entirely decided by the MC and the player can't call bullshit.

Yeah, but the MC can set the opposed bonus or the DCs as high as he wants, so in practice the results are identical. If the MC wants to put a check in front of your first level party that's a DC 35 save vs. bears, he can do that.

You have given no objective advantage to using AW over much better MTP systems like Munchhausen.

It's true that silva didn't, but I did back on page 1:

So really the only advantage AW needs over completely freeform roleplaying games is a random number generator arbitrarily wrenching the narrative into new directions. And that gives it an advantage over playing tug of war for control of the narrative because everyone being surprised together is a different and better experience than passing the ball of storyteller around the table. Giving certain players a single role to get attached to is also helpful...Plus, people can want their character to have certain weighted advantages in certain kinds of conflicts compared to other characters, and Munchausen does not give you that.

Also I can't find it but I know I saw a post where someone claimed that the point of rules was to stop the MC from being a dick which is the stupidest idea for the utility of rules and desperately needs to go and die. It would make me so incredibly happy if people would stop pretending that rules for a goddamn make believe fantasy game can change someone's personality, or that people willing to buck the social contract with their personal friends will seriously fall into line because of the words written in a book. RPG developers are not, despite your bizarre wet dreams, the kind of social force that commands respect amongst petty bullies worldwide. Even if a jerk does somehow find his ability to troll the party thwarted by some ink and paper, he'll just refuse to play that game and that'll be the end of it. It won't actually solve the problem of their being a jerk in the group, and the idea that RPGs can or should solve that problem is absurd to begin with.

And I'll also direct anyone whining about player agency to my thing about Super Smash Brothers. Player agency over victory, defeat, and what happens next is seriously optional.

Now, there is one person making a good point against AW in this entire thread and it is Whipstitch. Whipstitch points out that AW is unlikely to make mediocre GMs any better even if they are totally trying to do their job right like a normal, emotionally stable person, and that is a fair criticism because there are other RPGs with things like Adventure Paths or sandbox generators that do the same thing (though in the former case, it does it by being someone else's railroad, a thing which the Den seems to agree most players don't especially mind because that's kind of what you're signing on for when you play an AP). And it is true that you need at least one consistently creative and interesting storyteller to play AW, so that person can be your GM, and that gives it a disadvantage compared to a game where any reasonable person can run it and it'll turn out alright and not dumb, and boring, and lame. That said, if you have enough consistently creative and interesting storytellers that you're even considering a game of Munchausen, you have enough to make AW work, too.

EDIT: I'll also note that a GM mediocre enough to immediately go into railroad mode when asked what a logical and interesting consequence of failure is will probably also be mediocre enough to design his campaign as a railroad in the first place, because that's how most of those vidgima games the kids are playing work these days.

EDIT 2:

In this last case, I must default to Chamomile,

This is a good strategy and you should embrace it to its logical extreme by shutting up and letting the grown-ups talk.

[Mask_De_H]

Yeah, Cham, rules give the players an out to call others on bullshit plays. It isn't an unstoppable social force and I have no fucking idea where you got that from.

And Munchhausen has a deterministic way to affect the plot. It's called Rock Paper Scissors. Or flipping a coin. Or drawing cards. Or doing shots.

[Chamomile]

Yeah, Cham, rules give the players an out to call others on bullshit plays. It isn't an unstoppable social force and I have no fucking idea where you got that from.

If people were willing to call an asshole on bullshit plays, they would not be playing RPGs with him in the first place, nor would they need the assistance of rules to do so. You can say "that's stupid" without also saying "that breaks the rules."

And Munchhausen has a deterministic way to affect the plot. It's called Rock Paper Scissors. Or flipping a coin. Or drawing cards. Or doing shots.

But it only resolves disputes between existing players. It doesn't do the thing AW does where it says "on a roll of X, choose Y of the following" which is going to affect the narrative beyond just picking which of two competing stories gets to be canon. It introduces plot complications that previously nobody had thought of. Yes, someone can use the flexibility of the options to railroad the players if they are maliciously seeking to prevent the RNG or the players from having an impact on the story, but the idea that the same group wouldn't end up the same way in a game of 3.X is absurd.

[Username17]

The Apocalypse World "mechanic" of "roll the dice, you get to pick X vague declarative statements" is wholly worthless. The actual examples in the actual game include the MC's response completely negating the action being taken. Silva keeps bringing up the sabotage angle, and it's actually a great example of how completely fucked this whole thing is. You get to choose various facts about the action, but absolutely none of them are "you actually succeed at the general thrust of what you were trying to accomplish", and there are a thousand ways the MC could choose the interpret the undefined sections that they get to define in such a way that you're worse off than before you started.

And before you get into another one of your tired ass "don't play with assholes" shitfests, this isn't a straw man. The actual examples in the actual rules actually suggest that the MC do exactly that. A "success but" result on a "sneak in undetected" attempt includes the "but..." being that you totally fucking failed to sneak in undetected because you were fucking detected. That's the real fucking example in the real book. An unmitigated success on the looking around check gave the MC the opportunity to answer the question "What should I look out for?" and decided to answer it with "There are an arbitrarily large number of bears and you automatically fail the entire mission, we're setting up the new mission: escape with your life." That's not a straw man, that's not bad apples making the game look bad, that's the actual game text telling you how the game is actually supposed to be played.

If you play the game and allow players to define their "successful" rolls as actually bringing them any closer to succeeding at their actual goals, you are playing it wrong. The game explicitly and repeatedly tells you not to do that. And if the best you can come up with is that the MC shouldn't dick people around because that would be an asshole thing to do, then the game is by your definitions a game that is by and for assholes exclusively.

-Username17

[silva]

Silva keeps bringing up the sabotage angle, and it's actually a great example of how completely fucked this whole thing is. You get to choose various facts about the action, but absolutely none of them are "you actually succeed at the general thrust of what you were trying to accomplish"

On the contrary, Frank - as with most moves in Apocalypse World, it not only resolves the player declared intention (to wreak the gang boss motorcycle) but also adds more color/keeps the game moving forward/backward/upward/downward/etc, instead of just providing a binary pass/fail resolution like in most trad games (I think we discussed this on another thread here just recently).

[Chamomile]

The actual examples in the actual rules actually suggest that the MC do exactly that. A "success but" result on a "sneak in undetected" attempt includes the "but..." being that you totally fucking failed to sneak in undetected because you were fucking detected.

Depends on who it is you are trying to avoid being detected by. As it happens, the people he is trying to avoid being detected by is the camp in general. A single kid so pathetic that he can kill him simply by choosing to do so is not the threat he was trying to avoid. The camp full of actually dangerous gangsters is. So the MC offers a choice: You can successfully sneak past the people you actually care about, but only by killing this kid who fell in with the wrong crowd.

That's the real fucking example in the real book. An unmitigated success on the looking around check gave the MC the opportunity to answer the question "What should I look out for?" and decided to answer it with "There are an arbitrarily large number of bears and you automatically fail the entire mission, we're setting up the new mission: escape with your life."

And in After Sundown the MC can do the exact same thing, without having planned it out in advance. I am running an actual AS game in these very forums right now. Some of the characters are investigating a crime scene. I am not currently planning on having them ambushed at that crime scene (spoiler alert!). If I decided that I wanted to instead have them be attacked by bears, if I decided that the response that I go and post literally immediately after hitting the submit button on this one is that the cops watching the crime scene are secretly bears and are now trying to kill them, what rule stops it from happening? What roll can they succeed on to stop me from throwing bears at them?

[silva]

..and complementing Chamo post, its important to remember that the psychic cultists from AW "read a sitch" example were foreshadowed in the First Session sheet in the book, so they didnt come out of pure air like Frank suggests.

[Aryxbez]

Hasn't the whole arguing that a good ruleset prevents Jerks, always some false assertion that nobody ever truly makes? As the purpose is to allow Decent or otherwise DM's to run a successful and fun game for all (fun because of the game,rather in spite of it). However, if a jerk DM is breaking the rules, he can be called out on it, and things move on, or the jerk loses his players (worse, they continue, but the interest has been lost). Sometimes people are being jerks by the games design, or doing so inadvertently, not realizing their intentions having such crappy results (D&D's poisonous culture also is part of this).

Far as I'm aware, the difference in game like Shadowrun/D&D, to these World games, is the DM can be called out on his BS. While the BS of a World game can very well happen by its design, no maliciousness intended. As by depending on a person to generate content that isn't measured/moderated by much of anything, it will create scenarios of varying severity (EAT BABIES, lost a strand of hair, arm falls off, etc.). Something, this game isn't really special for, and has been shown, there's much better rules-lite games out there doing a better job.

what rule stops it from happening?

I don't know about After Sundown, though I'd imagine have to be some rules for werebears, bear-transformation, or intelligent bears, else probably breaking the rules somewhere. In terms of D&D, if made a EL 3 encounter into a EL6 vs. 3rd lv PCs, and still called it an EL3, then that would be against the rules, and a Jerk move at that. I suppose it is within ones power to change the unknown opposition last minute, if the challenge is still equal in the end (swapping out the Cr4 minotaur for a Dire Wolverine is roughly appropriate, or Rent-a-cops for Halloweeners as both 0-tiered in Shadowrun).

Lastly, Silva should stop being difficult, and respond to Kaelik's prior post.

[Username17]

In AS, enemies do not come into being because you succeeded at a perception check. That does not happen. The rules also do not at any point suggest that you add additional enemies to the world because players made a check or performed an action. Because that's retarded.

Even in games which explicitly do embrace the paradigm of adding enemies to the universe because of the results of a perception check, like for example FATE, the extra enemies are added because of failed rolls. You roll turning point dice, and they come up bad, so bears show up. You don't roll your turning point dice, get a "good" result, and have bears show up. Because that's totally fucked.

Now Chandler's Law stands: the MC can always have someone walk into the room with a gun drawn and explain it later. In every game. All the time. That's just basic narrative pacing. But having negative turning points generated by "good" results on passive actions is simply not fucking acceptable.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

In AS, enemies do not come into being because you succeeded at a perception check. That does not happen. The rules also do not at any point suggest that you add additional enemies to the world because players made a check or performed an action. Because that's retarded.

And again, until you demonstrate clairvoyance: Neither does Apocalypse World (not on a success anyway). Your entire argument here is predicated upon the assumption that the enemies mentioned in a single rules example were something the GM just barely dreamed up. That is it. That is the long and short of the evidence for your argument. The actual GMing section in AW does not say "never decide anything about any event that has not already happened right in front of the PCs," it just says "play to find out what happens."

[Username17]

And again, until you demonstrate clairvoyance: Neither does Apocalypse World (not on a success anyway). Your entire argument here is predicated upon the assumption that the enemies mentioned in a single rules example were something the GM just barely dreamed up. That is it.

Since literally the entire concept of the entire game is dreaming shit up as you go along, that's a reasonable assumption. In fact, you're going to have to come up with a quote that even calls that into question.

I mean, I could pull out more quotes where the MC is advised to be a total asshole, but I don't have to. Apocalypse World defenders have yet to make an argument that in any way lessens the impact of either the sneak fail or the spot fail example. The burden of proof is now in your hands. Find a quote that even hints that the bear attacks are generated at any point before the players make those rolls and we can start having a conversation again. Until then, no.

It really is your move. It's been your move for months.

-Username17

[ishy]

You all just don't understand *World.
The bear meme is not really a valid criticism. You're looking at *World like a traditional roleplaying game. *World is not that, it is colour / story first which must have internal logic and causality.

The *World toolset is for storytelling.
You can compare it to reading a book.
You create fonts / hooks etc. before play = you read the back of a book to pick an interesting story.
The storyteller tells you a story = you read the book.
You roll a dice once in a while, before flipping to the next page = you throw a dice once in a while before the storyteller continues with the story.

If you treat it like a traditional game where your dice rolling means something, that means you didn't understand the *World toolset.
Lets grab some of the examples the author of the game posted:

He rolls a 7, so he flinches, hesitates or stalls, and I get to give him a worse outcome or a bad choice. Fantastic!

he still hits it with a 7. A 7-9 on going aggro isn't the decisive win that AT was hoping for, but it's still a win. I have to choose from the list and I choose to have the guy get the hell out of AT's way. "When you open fire, he drops his gun and runs."

He rolls+cool and gets an 8. He flinches, hesitates, or stalls - and who can blame him! - and I get to give him a worse outcome or a tough choice. I go with the worse outcome, straight up

There's nothing in the rules stopping me from giving Berg a +1 for Clarion's help, and often in play I do, but the player can't look at the rules and expect one, if you see what I mean. It's up to me, case by case. I can include an example in round 3.

[Omegonthesane]

And again, until you demonstrate clairvoyance: Neither does Apocalypse World (not on a success anyway). Your entire argument here is predicated upon the assumption that the enemies mentioned in a single rules example were something the GM just barely dreamed up. That is it.

Since literally the entire concept of the entire game is dreaming shit up as you go along, that's a reasonable assumption. In fact, you're going to have to come up with a quote that even calls that into question.

I mean, I could pull out more quotes where the MC is advised to be a total asshole, but I don't have to. Apocalypse World defenders have yet to make an argument that in any way lessens the impact of either the sneak fail or the spot fail example. The burden of proof is now in your hands.

Nitpick: It's been said over, and over, and over, that "got detected by an unrelated bystander who you can murder with no practical consequence" is not the same as "got detected by the people you don't want to be detected by".

Even Kaelik's assumption that this leads to them completely changing their plans due to finding a body is not automatically true, as it could instead mean you go home with a body and they assume their kid's gone AWOL until proven otherwise.

That said...

Find a quote that even hints that the bear attacks are generated at any point before the players make those rolls and we can start having a conversation again. Until then, no.

It really is your move. It's been your move for months.

-Username17

You're right on this one, I've seen no indication that the plan was "fail perception and the psychic cultists get the drop on you".

[John Magnum]

Nitpick: It's been said over, and over, and over, that "got detected by an unrelated bystander who you can murder with no practical consequence" is not the same as "got detected by the people you don't want to be detected by".

He's not an unrelated bystander, he's a sentry of the camp. And even so this logic-chopping doesn't change the fact that while the player allegedly got a "success, with a cost" of the action "sneak in undetected", the player did not sneak in undetected.

[Omegonthesane]

Nitpick: It's been said over, and over, and over, that "got detected by an unrelated bystander who you can murder with no practical consequence" is not the same as "got detected by the people you don't want to be detected by".

He's not an unrelated bystander, he's a sentry of the camp. And even so this logic-chopping doesn't change the fact that while the player allegedly got a "success, with a cost" of the action "sneak in undetected", the player did not sneak in undetected.

"Sneak in undetected by an inconsequential, instantly murdered mook" =/= "Sneak in undetected by anyone with the sense to raise the alarms". I have the deepest sympathies if you must bash the game, but use the unmitigated horse shit example rather than the actually moderately valid one.

[John Magnum]

Oh, so the action he took was actually "sneak in undetected by anyone with the sense to raise the alarms" and the author just abbreviated it to save space?

[Chamomile]

Since literally the entire concept of the entire game is dreaming shit up as you go along, that's a reasonable assumption.

You seem to have lost track of the entire Fronts chapter (even though I have been referring you to it when prompted every time you have mentioned this for all of those months you claim it has been my move for), because while that is in fact just a method of organizing the stuff you have already dreamed up such that you do not lose track of it, it is also an entire chapter dedicated to stuff that happens off screen. So no, it really isn't a reasonable assumption to assume that succeeding on a perception check resulted in failing to not-generate an ambush rather than successfully seeing the ambush that was already there, because while there was a point somewhere in the campaign after play started when the psychic cultists did not exist and were not attempting an ambush, there is no reason beyond your implicit claims of psychic powers that it was made up as a result of the check.

In fact, you're going to have to come up with a quote that even calls that into question.

Well, there's plenty of general purpose "don't be a railroading dick" quotes:

They should also be things you’re genuinely interested in finding
out, not in deciding. It’s the central act of discipline that MCing
Apocalypse World requires: when you write a question as a stake,
you’re committing to not answer it yourself. You’re committing
to let the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven
by the players’ characters, answer it.

And one of the three mandates handed down at the beginning of the MC chapter is:

Play to find out what happens.

And trying to pretend that means "make it up as you go" rather than "let things other than yourself determine what happens" is obviously arguing in bad faith, because if you assume everyone means the worst thing they could possibly intend without contradicting themselves, you are strawmanning.

And there's the part where you're explicitly told to keep track of NPC actions the PCs don't know about:

Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions,
not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT future scenes
you intend to lead the PCs to.

While also again being explicitly told not to do any railroading (or, at least, told to avoid the pitfall that most commonly leads to railroading). Really, I'm reminded of the bit of Methods of Rationality where Lupin tries to convince Harry that "death is the final enemy that shall be defeated" means accepting death as opposed to overcoming it. The amount you have to cross your eyes to get that moral from that sentence is astounding, and you're claiming that AW supports exactly the kind of idiotic bullshit it repeatedly emphasizes you should avoid, for no other reason than because it never explicitly forbids you from taking the asshole route in the one very specific ambiguous case you found in the examples of "can a success result in spotting an ambush that wasn't previously there?"

But hey, you want a quote that explicitly tells you to keep track of what NPCs are doing when they're not on-screen? A quote that explicitly allows and encourages you to do shit like set up ambushes in advance? It turns out we have one of those too:

Think offscreen too. When it’s time for you to make a move,
imagine what your many various NPCs must have been doing
meanwhile. Have any of them done something offscreen that
now becomes evident? Are any of them doing things offscreen
that, while invisible to the players’ characters, deserve your
quiet notice? This is part of making Apocalypse World seem real
— and if you pay attention to your fronts, it’s part of making the
characters’ lives not boring too.

And as Omegon has already pointed out, we've already shot down your Spot example that you continue touting as meaning anything. You're plugging your ears and shouting about how you're not listening, you keep repeating the same mantras over and over again, you are, in a nutshell, about as compelling as Silva right now because you have nothing.

But feel free to keep playing the Three of Clubs and pretending it's an Ace.

[Omegonthesane]

Oh, so the action he took was actually "sneak in undetected by anyone with the sense to raise the alarms" and the author just abbreviated it to save space?

More or less - he wanted to get into the camp and get out of the camp without the camp as a whole being any the wiser. Assuming he did the murder, no one who was in the camp was any the wiser when he left.

[Chamomile]

But wait, there's more! An example explicitly demonstrating that "you are spotted by someone who matters" is not a valid result on a 7-9 roll:

He hits the roll with a 9, so I get to offer him a worse outcome, a
hard bargain, or an ugly choice. “Yeah,” I say. “So you’re holding
still and you can’t really keep them in your sight. They, um, they
spot you, but you don’t realize it.” I think about this for a second.
It doesn’t seem quite right, and Wilson’s player is looking at me
like I might be cheating. “Actually wait wait. You hit the roll, you
didn’t miss it.” “I was gonna say,” Wilson’s player says. “So no,” I
say. “Instead, they haven’t spotted you, but they’re getting closer
and closer. They’ll be on top of you in just a minute but if you do
something right this second you’ll have the drop on them. What
do you do?”

[John Magnum]

I fail to see the relevance. If "you get spotted" is an unacceptable result on a 7-9, that doesn't actually imply one way or the other that "you get spotted by 'irrelevant' people the MC pulls out of his ass" is acceptable.