(whatever)-World: Finally read it, here's my veredict

[silva]

Are you claiming that they don't have an argument after they've been over the same arguments with you in excess over many pages and across different threads?

Yup. They dont have a single evidence for their argument, as it was already shown in this thread by those who actually played or have read the full thing. Lemme recap the "evidence" they brought for you:

1) "in the book example, psychic bodyguards are appearing from nowhere!". BUSTED, since the example simply shows the GM answering Read a Sitch questions, not producing anything from zero.

2) "in the book example, the player gets a "success at a cost" but the GM make them fail!". BUSTED, since the player intention was infiltrating the camp without putting it on alert, and he manages to do it by killing a kid.

3) "the book suggests the GM can make hard moves wherever he wants!". BUSTED, as evidenced by the extended play example in the book, where the GM only do hard moves when setting up a soft move first, or when the players give him an opportunity (as in missing a roll).

Sorry, but repeating the same things over and over dont make it true.

[Atmo]

Sorry, but repeating the same things over and over dont make it true.

[silva]

[PhoneLobster]

They dont have a single evidence for their argument,

Quick! Danger of being exposed as some sort of intractable serial internet troll... repeat all the most contentious bullshit to try and provoke a response and keep the thread alive!

In the mean time. My theories as to why Silva Silvas and what is wrong with Silva to make Silva Silva all over everything.

1) Paid shill trying to advertise a product. Badly.
Seems unlikely. He is kinda bad at it. It doesn't look like a normal advert shill would. The dedication and time seems too extensive and I doubt a small indi could afford it.

2) Raw Internet Troll
Possible. Certainly theRPGSite story indicates a strong possibility and that is the opinion expressed by some people over there. But then again others over there expressed the opinion that Silva was so stupid that he didn't even know, and could not stop himself from being the endless thread train wreck he is. I suspect his resorting to troll images and behaviors is more in line with the final resort of many internet failures when they are cornered. "Er ah, oops, um, no wait! Tollololololol! Yeah..."

3) Silva is the actual creator of *-World. Shilling his own shit.
... is actually alarmingly possible. But again, not entirely consistent. I'm sure if he WAS the creator he would be attempting to leverage authority based arguments and attempting to use that to quash "authors intent" criticisms (poorly). He could reasonably be a deranged family member or immediate friend of the author.

4) Silva is the rabid fan base of *-World
Note I say "is the" not "is a member of". This is my favorite theory.

So you know how every RPG/Edition has it's particularly rabid fan boys. Not just the fans or the casuals, the really rabid nutters. Like those 4E fan boy shills who turned up here in various waves over the years in which 4E shilling was a thing. Remember how they are? How they argued?

Now every game has such rabid fan bases. But *-World has a really small fan base. Small enough that the rabid portion of that fan base, if it even exists is probably unreasonably small. So small in fact that it might just consist of one single person.

That person is Silva. And the pressure of being a one man rabid fan base must be pretty incredible. The 4E guys had buddies, a support network, like minded extremists. Silva is on his own. It has driven him even more insane than rabid fan bases usually are.

That explanation is the best I have.

[Atmo]

1) Paid shill trying to advertise a product. Badly.

It is probable, as "aliens fans" do exist and have crazy hairstyles, always talking about aliens and... you know the drill. If they aren't paid by the Government, i don't know why it is so funny.

2) Raw Internet Troll

A theory so strong and true that i can't see otherwise, but...

3) Silva is the actual creator of *-World. Shilling his own shit.

...is TOO CRAZY. And, as you guys proved his behavior on other forums through the internet (as in this one, a brazillian "RPG" forum) he is too incompetent to make a game "so good".

4) Silva is the rabid fan base of *-World

And as rabies animals, he needs a vaccine/remedy/OHKO to internet go back to it's true and nice way of life.

[Cyberzombie]

You know what? No. We don't actually have to assume that, because in Apocalypse World, that is the opposite of true. See, the thing you keep doing is assuming that Apocalypse World isn't a crime against humanity and instead runs exactly like every other RPG.

Well I watched the youtube video an AW session and it seemed like it ran like every other rules-lite RPG I've played.

The biggest drawback I saw was that AW felt very antiquated. It had a definitely noticeable inability to set actual DCs for different actions. Even BESM had ways to determine easy, hard, average actions, and AW just didn't have that.

I also didn't really like the terminology, since the names of the moves didn't feel all that immersive. When you have abilities like "Insano like Drano", it makes me wonder if the tone is supposed to be dark or silly. From the "murder a kid or fail your stealth" choice, I'm guessing the game is supposed to have a dark feel, but everytime I hear terms like Insano like Drano, I can't help but think the game is supposed to be comedic.

That being said, I didn't see any of the supposed GM dickery, quantum bears or any of the other hypotheticals that people are claiming here.

[Dean]

Shut up Cyberzombie no one cares.

I personally like theory number 4 with a dash of number 2 mixed into it. There is a certain poetry to 4 but on top of it he is also a multi-forum troll. A nice thing about completely ignoring Silva's bullshit from now on is that unlike other trolls like Roy he won't be able to rename himself and start anew. Silva has been proven to be an assembly line posting troll which means there is literally no value in speaking to him and his posting style is SO singularly focused that any new poster that came and started talking about this great new game called shitworld could be called out instantly.

Basically Silva is like chicken pox. It sucks when you had to deal with em but now we are immune forever.

[erik]

Shut up Cyberzombie no one cares.

I personally like theory number 4 with a dash of number 2 mixed into it. There is a certain poetry to 4 but on top of it he is also a multi-forum troll. A nice thing about completely ignoring Silva's bullshit from now on is that unlike other trolls like Roy he won't be able to rename himself and start anew. Silva has been proven to be an assembly line posting troll which means there is literally no value in speaking to him and his posting style is SO singularly focused that any new poster that came and started talking about this great new game called shitworld could be called out instantly.

Basically Silva is like chicken pox. It sucks when you had to deal with em but now we are immune forever.

4 with a dash of 2 sounds bout right. I take it to be the 4 where he isn't the only bat-bitten fan since I think there were others, but I cannot recall who.
Or maybe 5) Silva is Roy.


No.
Sorry Roy, wherever you are. I was just kidding but that was mean and uncalled for. Also I believe Dean needs to apologize to Chicken Pox.

[...You Lost Me]

That's a seriously interesting find, PL. How did you come across that?

[PhoneLobster]

Google and about 5 minutes a pop.

[tussock]

In fact thats something that happen to a lot of new GMs to the game.

Yeh. Make-believe, clearly. That's how I write when I'm making shit up too.


I did like how he used the Oberoni fallacy to defend himself from the Oberoni fallacy though. That was good stuff. G'dnight Silva.

There is even a GM principle related to this thats exaustingly repeated through the book: be honest.

Heh. In a game where nothing even exists until the GM says it's just about to punch you in the face (or sometimes just did), and any interaction with it by the players causes new things to exist, what would honesty even mean?

It's like how in D&D if you walked into a room and there was a door at the back and an Orc eating a pie, the DM would have to tell you about the Orc, the door, the pie, and whatever else might be of interest, without even fucking rolling anything most of the time, and if you didn't open the door the Orc is still there eating his fucking pie. Because there are things which exist that one can be honest about, and endless rules for discovering the same without getting totally screwed for it 42% of the time.

Unless, obviously, the GM ignores the anusWorld rules and does anything else instead.

[MGuy]

I'd say its probably a combination of 4 and 3. I'd say 3 only in assuming that he's probably had direct or close to direct contact with the author.

[TiaC]

In one of the linked threads it was mentioned that the author came into a thread and disagreed with him and he continued to argue the same point.

[momothefiddler]

At this point the discussion turned full dishonest mode, so Im ignoring everyone except Momo, cyberzombie, Ice9, mLangsdorf and other honest posters.

I'm curious, how do you determine your capitalization?

[TiaC]

At this point the discussion turned full dishonest mode, so Im ignoring everyone except Momo, cyberzombie, Ice9, mLangsdorf and other honest posters.

Not like it matters, you have made it clear that you still read people's post's after ignoring them.

[silva]

At this point the discussion turned full dishonest mode, so Im ignoring everyone except Momo, cyberzombie, Ice9, mLangsdorf and other honest posters.

I'm curious, how do you determine your capitalization?

By rolling 2d6. On a success, its all upper case, on a miss, its all lower, on a success at a cost, its a mix of both.

[GâtFromKI]

2) "in the book example, the player gets a "success at a cost" but the GM make them fail!". BUSTED, since the player intention was infiltrating the camp without putting it on alert, and he manages to do it by killing a kid.

MC: "OK, so while infiltrating you run accross a kid! you kill him and then..."
Player: "No, I don't do that."
MC: "OK. So the kid trigger the alarm and..."
Player: "No, he doesn't do that because I succeeded at infiltrating the base without raising any alarm."
MC: "... OK. So what do you do about the kid?"
Player: "nothing. I succeeded the roll, I can enter unnoticed... What does he do, except triggering an alarm?"
MC: "ERROR N°452698. PLEASE RESTART THE MISSION."

I'm quite sure that Frank and other people are exagerating and that the system is usable; and it seems to contain some ideas I never saw elsewhere.

But you didn't debunk this example because the example is a divide by zero error. Either the MC railroad the player into killing the boy, either he makes makes the mission fail because of the succeeded roll. Since according to you, the game is not about railroading players and not about transforming success into failure, it is a divide by 0 error : the game you're describing can't support this example of play.

[silva]

Gat, I admit the author has a problem in the writing deparment so it gets confuse sometimes, both in the language and the actual examples.

In the example, see it this way: "sucess at a cost" is not the actual word in the move steucture. If I aint mostaken the words used are "give them a hard choice" or something. I would personaly treat it as "adding a complication". It gets much more clear this way.

[Username17]

GâtFromKI, stop responding to the troll. That little quote you quoted is an outright lie. The example in question does not say what the player's intention was. All we have is the raw absurdity of a situation where the character is "sneaking" and the "ugly choice" is "they have failed to avoid detection." That's really the entirety of the example, and silva claiming any special knowledge of what the player's intentions were, or even what their declared action was is a bald faced lie.

This is the entire description of what's going on:

Keeler the gunlugger’s taken off her shoes and she’s sneaking into Dremmer’s camp, armed as they say to the upper teeth. If they hear her, she’s fucked. (On a 7–9, maybe I give her an ugly choice between alerting the camp and murdering an innocent teenage sentry.) She hits the roll with an 8, so the ugly choice it is. “There’s some kid out here, huddled under this flimsy tin roof with a mug of who-knows-what. You think you’re past him but he startles and looks right at you. You can kill him before he makes a noise, but you’ll have to do it right this second. Do you?”

That's it. Anyone who claims to know any more of the backstory to that action from reading the book is a liar whose pants are on fire. Ergo: silva is a liar. Seriously, PL got the scoop here: silva is a weirdly obsessive lying troll who is possibly a sock puppet or an ad bot. It does no one any services to respond to him as if he was a human being.

Although yes, as you've noted: if one of the branches of the lemma for the action "don't alert the camp" is "alert the camp," then by definition the result must be a railroad towards the other branch or a failure on a roll that was nominally a hit. This is why I and many other people have determined that Apocalypse World does not fit the minimum requirements to be a game at all.

-Username17

[Previn]

I'm quite sure that Frank and other people are exagerating and that the system is usable; and it seems to contain some ideas I never saw elsewhere.

Well, you can use Monopoly to have a rip-roaring RPG game about robber barons, back room deals and political maneuvering to put yourself as the head land owning tycoon, in much the same way you can use *world games to have a great RPG session in a post apocalyptic world, or a world that's just one giant dungeon.

Which is to say it has nothing to do with the game and it's rules so much as the group of people you're playing with.

I'm also curious what you think that *world games put forth as unique ideas?

[Atmo]

I'm quite sure that Frank and other people are exagerating and that the system is usable; and it seems to contain some ideas I never saw elsewhere.

Risus Companion. Read it. Please, do it.

[mlangsdorf]

I agree with you on all accounts, Langsdorf. The moves structure are too one-sided so they feel completely inapropriated on PvP situations.

What the fuckity-fucking fuck? I posted a rant about your supposedly favorite game, which included these observations:
* there's no generic mechanical way for 3 PCs to have a foot race, a cooking competition, or to cock block each other while trying to seduce the hardholder's daughter
* Even two player competitions are fucked
* the rolls for Act Under Fire or Read the Sitch are completely independent of the opposition
* It's a bullshit design and it's a puzzling bullshit design
* Because if you didn't playtest by having an Arena Night at some point, I don't believe you playtested at all.

And you agree with me on all accounts? You agree that AW is a bullshit design that has never been playtested and lacks mechanical support for PC vs PC contests and that has fundamental mechanics that are completely independent of the opposition? Really?

'Cause if you do agree with me about all that, then the idea you think AW is some kind of pinnacle of game design is simply insane. You're a liar or a troll.

And stop invoking my name like I in some way think that AW is anything other than a stinking pile of dogshit that made me stop meeting up with my F2F group for 3 months.

[momothefiddler]

At this point the discussion turned full dishonest mode, so Im ignoring everyone except Momo, cyberzombie, Ice9, mLangsdorf and other honest posters.

I'm curious, how do you determine your capitalization?

By rolling 2d6. On a success, its all upper case, on a miss, its all lower, on a success at a cost, its a mix of both.

A terrible cost indeed. And yet even on 'success', you would have failed to reference people properly... hm.

stop meeting up with my F2F group for 3 months.

F2F = face-to-face?

[silva]

I agree with you on all accounts, Langsdorf. The moves structure are too one-sided so they feel completely inapropriated on PvP situations.

What the fuckity-fucking fuck? I posted a rant about your supposedly favorite game, which included these observations:
* there's no generic mechanical way for 3 PCs to have a foot race, a cooking competition, or to cock block each other while trying to seduce the hardholder's daughter
* Even two player competitions are fucked
* the rolls for Act Under Fire or Read the Sitch are completely independent of the opposition
* It's a bullshit design and it's a puzzling bullshit design
* Because if you didn't playtest by having an Arena Night at some point, I don't believe you playtested at all.

And you agree with me on all accounts? You agree that AW is a bullshit design that has never been playtested and lacks mechanical support for PC vs PC contests and that has fundamental mechanics that are completely independent of the opposition? Really?

'Cause if you do agree with me about all that, then the idea you think AW is some kind of pinnacle of game design is simply insane. You're a liar or a troll.

And stop invoking my name like I in some way think that AW is anything other than a stinking pile of dogshit that made me stop meeting up with my F2F group for 3 months.

Your points are concerning to PvP, which I already agreed is problematic. I dont agree the game being bad as a whole just because of that. But apples and oranges, right ?

And sorry to hear about your hiatus. Hope you recover soon.

[Ice9]

I have, in fact, heard of the Oberoni fallacy. But that would be if I was implying the rules were flawless. Which I haven't, because it would be stupid.

I think the "sandwich" analogy is actually a pretty good one, although with a different conclusion. If there are no other recipes for a ham and cheese sandwich, and you really want a ham and cheese sandwich (and since we're in an analogy, you do need a recipe), then your options are:
A) Use the recipe, but omit the feces.
B) Eat some other kind of sandwich you don't enjoy as much.

And in terms of option A, for AW in particular, I have to say that "crossing out the feces" is pretty damn easy. It's a fuck of a lot easier than making my own system from scratch or trying to hack a different system into doing the same thing.

Incidentally, I already have a lot of practice removing feces from recipes, because I also play Pathfinder.