It's not just those two examples, though those are the most explicit. As name_here mentioned, there are a bunch of rolls where getting a middling good roll or a very good roll just allows you to make a couple of declarations off a list about what the results are. However, more than one of the declarations on the list are some variant on "there is a way in which you don't fail" or even "there's a way in which your circumstances didn't get objectively worse" with the strong implication therefore that not choosing those options implies that the MC makes you fail in those ways and/or makes your situation objectively worse in some way. And no implication at all that the MC doesn't make you fail and/or make your situation worse in some other way than the ones listed.RobbyPants wrote:It's supposed to, but there are two contentious examples in the rules of the game showing them working different than that. One example is the result of a success roll where the party discovers an unwinnable fight. The other is the result of a success, but roll, where the person explicitly fails at their task (they are sneaking, but they are discovered and offered a choice to kill the kid who finds them. Note that being detected is a nominal failure when attempting to not be detected).
Ergo, you can get a soft or hard success, and (by the examples in the book) have the GM flat-out make you fail.
And it's not like this is just bad example or two in the original apocalypse World book. All the *World books are like that. In Dungeon World, for example, the equivalent of a gather information check is called Carousing. And if you make a supposedly unmitigated success on that roll, you get to make three declarations off the list about what happens. And one of those declarations is "You don't end up cursed or enslaved." Seriously. What the fuck? Every time you go bar hopping, you have to waste one of your "success" points on not waking up on a slow ship to Maztica, but even if you do that there's nothing at all to stop the MC from introducing any other kind of bullshit that is just as bad. And that's success.
But of course, even failing utterly on the roll doesn't carry any specific edicts for the MC. If you don't get enough success points to demand that you don't get enslaved before the end of your night out, the MC is under no obligation to make that happen. He can of course, but if he wants to hand out important information and not have you Shanghaied, he can just do that.
So even on the passages where there aren't explicit examples of rolling success and ending up with total failure or vice versa, it's basically how everything in the whole game works all the time. Which is why I say that it is not a game.
-Username17
