u/Jesseabe

I wouldn't stress too much about it. Canals can be anywhere you want them to be, more or less. If they've chosen hunting grounds that are obviously and specifically not near them, I'd probably have a conversation about it with them, and either collectively decide to adjust the map so there is a canal there, or to move their hunting grounds. That said, it doesn't have to be a big deal. Not every score happens in their hunting grounds, after all.

You could try one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lucky_symbols

He could also try prayer, if that's his thing.

Or just roll less.

The Actual Play AP of Band of Blades has some amazing combat.

Tom Bloom, the artist and designer behind Maleghast, designed two RPGs, Lancer, a Mech tactics game and Cain, an urban fantasy game where you play psychic death soldiers hunting monstrosities made of human trauma. The latter might be your speed, and share some vibes if not the premise of Maleghast? https://tombloom.itch.io/cain

There are a few things that can/should be done to avoid these kinds of situations.

1) Include content warnings in any game pitch, whether it's a casual pitch to friends or a formal pitch at a con. People signing up need to know what they're signing up for. 2 Include an "interested in" colulumn with your lines and veils, and have the relevent content pre-checked there. That provides a flag for players while they are setting up their lines and veils, and gives them an additional opportunity to raise the question. 3) Talk about it in your opening spiel "Feminine Horror is a core theme of the game and will be included. That includes x, y and z specific things. It is already flagged on the safety sheet as something we will be engaging with." 4) Provide an opportunity to talk through the specific issues before play, so the table can work out any narrower content issues, and express their concerns and wishes for play. 5) Make it clear that this isn't the end of the conversation, and let everyone know that as things come up there will be room for discussion. 6) Provide an explicit opportunity for players who, despite all of the above, want to opt out to do so.

The core idea behind all of this is to make sure players understand what the content is and why it is included and to provide explicit opportunities for conversation about it. If it turns out this isn't the right game for somebody, it gives them an easy out to leave. If it's not the game for everyone, you can pivot to something else.

Never Knows Best works almost exactly like this, except it uses its die pool for Apocalypse World style moves: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/292036/never-knows-best-ashcan-edition. It's also a VERY specific game in terms of content and themes, but it might be a useful model for you.

My advice for PbtA games is to ignore random advice you read on the internet (except from me). Read the book carefully, without bringing in ideas from other games, then follow its instructions. Though there are certainly some PbtA games that are sufficiently poorly written you'llhave a hard time, for the most part this will be enough for you to grok the game. AL has prep procedures and sample adventures. Follow them, and ignore random advice about quantum storytelling. You'll do great.

How long do you have? It should be that long.

It's a useful heuristic for many moves in many games for sure, especially games with a principle like "Be a fan of the player characters." I mistakenly thought you were articulating a design principle, my bad.

I don't think that's true by the rules of most games? They mostly tell you moves trigger when their triggers are hit. Some of them tell you not to roll if you think the outcome is 100% certain. I don't think any tell you not to roll if the outcomes don't make sense. I think that's more a kludge to get around poorly written moves.

A 10+ success on Go Aggro earns you certainty about what the person you are targeting will do and concretely either escalates or deescalates the situation. The 7-9 takes that certainty, the one thing you concretely get out of the move, away by allowing them to make other choices that extend the situation.

I find that I don't have this problem with well written moves, and if I find myself having this problem with a move, rather than skipping when it outputs nonsense, I'll usually rewrite it to be tighter.

My understanding has always been that a 7-9 cannot abrogate the success and that furthermore, the complication does not need to be linked directly to the undertaken action.

I mean, as Vincent says in the thread, it depends on the move? You're certainly right for Do something under fire. But there are certainly moves, even in Apocalypse World 2e, that don't work that way, even if it isn't typically. There's no success on the Harm move, just degrees of badness. The 7-9 on the Contaminated's Degeneration move is negative result for the character, just not as bad as a 6-. This next example is fuzzier, but a 10+ success on Go Aggro earns you certainty about what the person you are targeting will do and concretely either escalates or deescalates the situation. The 7-9 takes away that certainty, the one thing you concretely get out of the move, away by allowing them to make other choices that extend the situation. I think this "abrogates the success" though I'll admit it isn't straight forward and there is room for disagreement. 3e has extended this model to a few other moves. Once you move outside AW there are other examples. The Giant's daughter in Under Hollow Hills has a move "When you freeze in fear" which has no success, and in as much as a 10+ is better than a 7-9, the 7-9 takes away what little success the 10+ has.

I could step outside Baker games and find even more. This has never been a hard and fast rule, even if it is often, or even usually, the case. The coolest thing about 2d6 rolling three band PbtA moves is this flexibility. You can do alot of different things with those bands, they don't need to always look like Do something under fire.

Rebel Crown is about the heir to a throne involved in a succession crisis and their retinue who supports their claim. It's great, it's built to purpose to help the supporting characters also get their share of spotlight. For example, one of the main ways that the heir gets XP is by spotlighting members of the retinue. My short campaign is one of my all time favorites, I strongly recommend it if it sounds interesting to you.

I'm not convinced that's the standard, lots of games have "you get one question on a miss." AW (obviously), SCUP, Fellowship... that's just my quick run through a few games in my digital library.

But either way, I wasn't trying to disagree with you, I intended to support your general point that generalizing like this isn't useful. One of the cool things about the AW world style player move with dice is the way it lets you tinker with stakes in a way that complicates the transaction, and lets you think outside "success and failure", even beyond "degrees of success/failure."

I think many information gathering moves like this are a good example of moves where success and failure aren't the stakes. You get answers no matter what, it's just a question of how many, in AW3e, you even get an answer on a 6-.it just comes with an MC move. Is a 7-9 partial success, mixed success? It's nota framework that makes sense for the move.

No worries about being overwhelmed, a new hobby can be hard to grow sometimes! Girl By Moonlight isn't always easy to follow, but fortunately, it does offer step by step instructions for how to get started, with cross reference page numbers to places where rules are explained in more detail. If you're trying to figure it out, start on page 20, and just go step by step, looking at the cross reference if you need more detail. Take your time if you're struggling to understand, come back here and ask questions. You 've got this!!

"Hey friend, I think you'll find this fun. Why don't you give it a try? If you don't like it, no worries."

Pasiones has a bunch of tools to help you play in the relevant mode. First of all, the book comes with a bunch of playsets, scenario starters that include situations, NPCs and locations, along with some custom moves that help you get started and can also provide a model for setting up your own game. Some are straightforward Telenovella scenarios and some move the genre into space, or a fantasy world, or whatever. They are excellent. Once you get started, the games mechanic's drive play forward really effectively in an on genre way. PC playbooks help players build on genre motivations that they can pursue, and create relationships between the characters that can also help drive play. The core transaction of play, as in many/most RPGs, is a conversation where the GM describes what happens in the world and the players respond with what they do. GMs and PCs are playing a kind of asymmetrical game where they each have their own moves (that work very differently from each other) to help them tell the story, and the GM is given a set of guidelines as Agendas and Principles that they should follow when making their moves to keep them on genre. As a game it's really very supportive of GMs who want to lean into the kind of play the game invites.

Edit: I should say, I wouldn't call Pasiones a non-violent game. It doesn't have tactical combat, but all sorts of violence happens, there are moves to for it, it handles violence very well. There are a couple of playbooks with movs focused on violence. It's just interested in the drama violence produces, rather than counting hit points.

Good Society actually has a system of traits, or something like them. They're called reputation tags, and can be positive or negative, and one use for the tags is to prompt the players. Negative tags prompt problems and positive tags can prompt solutions. It's true, there's no randomization, instead it's a negotiation between players using tokens and tags, but it's certainly "a part of the system that prompts us" to introduce problems.

Or even to use a more direct mechanism, like offering her player a token to get a cold, rather than just deciding or randmomizing.

Like, it seems like the underlying assumption of the "rolling dice is fun" side of this argument is that it is also the only a best kind of fun for an RPG. But there are game mechanisms other than randomization that can be fun, and they might be better suited to some types of play than randomization, but aren't just freeform roleplay were we tell our story together (which is also fun, to be clear).

Rhapsody of Blood by Minerva McJanda is a Castlevaniaesque PbtA game where you play a family of hunters who go into dungeons to fight evil every generation. It has pretty good combat and boss mechanics. She iterated on these mechanics in Voidheart Symphony which does Persona 5 style stories, and drops the generational aspect. They're both crunchy as PbtA games go, but given that your comparisons are Traveller and Chronicles of Darkness I don't think these games are out of range.

I don't, not by myself, everybody does it together. It feels important because it is important, to the players and the characters. The games can help with this. Masks has a whole bunch of mechanics that can come into play around PC relationships.You establish history and relationships in session 0, each playbook has specific questions. Basic Moves like comfort and support, provoke, pierce the mask can be used on other PCs. You use influence on each other. And of course playbooks have stuff that makes it matter, features like the Bull's love and rival, which push the character to interact with those PCs.

But at the end of the day, all the mechanics do is help. These scenes matter because the players are playing their characters, who are interested in spending time with each other, learning about each other, pushing each other, fighting with each other, kissing each other... You know, being in relationship with each other.

I mean, the obvious answer that I don't think naybody has suggested yet is Dungeon World. It has ability scores between 3-18 like D&D, on some levels you get moves in some you advance a stat, up to 10 levels. Its descendants mirror this in some ways. Freebooters on the Frontier 2e has levels alternate between moves and advancing hit points, healing and some other stats. Your main stats advance via use in a few different ways.

Re: point 1, it's important to remember that everything is a threat. The game tells you to stat the chopper's gang up as a threat. Do that. I don't think it game breaking to let another player run that threat, but give them the threat type and moves and make sure they are also running the NPC as a threat. In Apocalypse World ,nothing is safe.

This is also true of the driver's vehicle, the Brainer's gear etc... All threats. The PCs use them, but you control them and they're not safe to use.

This is almost certainly a mistake, my guess is that it is a hold over from earlier drafts of the game that gave three hold for a 10+, which is what the parallel move in Apocalypse World does. By MotW 1e it was already 2 hold, but the example has three there, and the same example is in revised.