FrankTrollman wrote:There are absolutely no innovations in it that make it better than Munchhausen in any metric or subjective standpoint.
I do feel I should note that I cannot contest this on technical grounds: I have never actually played Munchausen, but I have done freeform roleplaying and assuming Munchausen is actually like that then AW does indeed have advantages over it. And to talk about that, we need to talk about Super Smash Brothers. Not as in the thing you do go and do because you won't be needed at the table for like half an hour, but as in an actual game of Smash Brothers.
Specifically, my little brother visited earlier today, and we fired up tourney mode on SSB Brawl so that we'd fight like 30 1v1 matches with random characters in a row, and then as we played we invented a narrative stringing the whole thing together. And that narrative was driven almost completely by the fact that we happened to have two Meta Knights who started in nearby brackets, and a bunch of the characters happened to be using black-and-white or grey palette swaps that made them look like mildly creepy or depressing, or that the Mushroomy Kingdom stage happens to look like World 1-1 from SMB if it got nuked. We didn't have the slightest impact on any of these decisions.
Really, we didn't have the slightest impact on
any of the narrative decisions, because we're pretty evenly matched (we both suck) and the only thing we especially controlled was the personalities of involved characters and how we fought. Since who would win any given match was
mostly a toss-up, weighted only slightly by things like the two of us having separate sets of favored characters, the amount of control we had over the narrative was pretty much limited to deciding what kind of characters would be in it, one set at a time, and half the choices were eliminated halfway through our descriptions of why they were in the tournament in the first place (notably, I spent all forty-five seconds of Dark Link's life trying to build him up as the main villain only for him to be killed in the first of five rounds).
It turns out, so long as you have at least one creative human being in the room and all of them are friends, you can create narratives out of the statistical noise of an unweighted random generator. Any meaningful influence over victory and defeat is, it turns out, completely optional, all you need is the barest of illusions to the contrary (like the illusion that a one-stock battle between randomly selected characters on a randomly selected arena with randomly spawning items between mostly-evenly-matched opponents is anything other than a coinflip in practice).
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.
The bear problem is not only real, it's hard coded into the actual examples of play. It literally says that the way you are supposed to play the game is for a character to succeed at a roll and then have the MC arbitrarily declare that they fail at the current mission because bears.
So far as I know, this argument is contingent upon your being clairvoyant. The example you are referring to is of a player succeeding at a roll and uncovering an ambush. You assume the ambush was made up on the spot by the MC as a result of the successful roll, but there is no indication of this in the text and that is kind of the opposite of what "successful" means, a fact which your own argument is contingent upon. So when you demonstrate the ability to reliably read the mind of AW's author, this will be something other than bullshit.
On the other hand, you could quote some of those rpg.net posts and maybe he does, in fact, reveal that the game is aimed at GM-worshiping cultists (which sounds like a hyperbolic attack but it's not like those don't exist; 2e's entire modern playerbase is pretty much just cultists). As it happens, that doesn't change the fact that the game he actually produced is still perfectly good fun in the hands of reasonable people.
And empowering and encouraging one of the people at the table to make any player succeed or fail at any mission regardless of whether their action nominally succeeded or failed because bears is one of them.
And this is where the failure to understand basic human interaction comes in. While it is undoubtedly true that there exist groups that will play AW with the GM effectively writing the entire story themselves and everyone else just along for the ride, it is also possible and not at all discouraged by the rules to
not do that. To have the successes just be actual successes, the failures to be actual failures, and the in-betweens to be a success with drawbacks. And exactly what each of these things means will vary from group to group but so long as everyone within the group agrees on them that does not actually make a difference. So AW is best played by a group that knows each other already, rather than one specifically assembled to play. It turns out,
this stuff happens sometimes.
In all cases, if someone wanted to play a *World game we would all be better off if they played FATE
It is sometimes the case that someone feels better about picking a pre-determined archetype like AW classes than generating from scratch like with FATE. It is also sometimes the case that people do not want to deal with the fairly large amount of rules understanding FATE demands, since you must be able to not only know how the rules work but also understand them well enough to
modify them if you want the system to actually work halfway decently.
or Munchhausen
See above, the utility of a random number generator and etc. etc. 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. This desire is not mutually exclusive to having a small amount of rules.
Do you have any argument against AW that cannot be resolved by refusing to play with assholes?
