Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

Listened to "The Choice", which is one of the fan made spin-offs.

It... wasn't as good as I hoped. In several scenes, I was rather confused as to what was actually happenning, and the tone kept rapidly switching back and forth between "comical" and "intensely dark".

@00dani I believe it's the most "crunchy" game in my collection, so do be warned of that

@00dani something I like about Burning Wheel is that whenever a roll is made, the GM explicitly has to tell the player what the consequence of failing is BEFORE the player rolls anything, giving the player a chance to change their mind.

@00dani oh yeah, in play I encountered several situations where I came up with a "success with a cost" that the player thought was a failure, and that meant we had to negotiate what they were actually trying to do in the first place.

And while that happenned more frequently than it did in other games (mostly because other games don't have partial successes), my AW players were much more willling to point out when I made a mistake than other people I've played with.

@00dani I think "getting detected but immediately killing the person who detects you before they can sound an alarm" still counts as success in the task of "infiltrating into the compound without alerting everyone"

If this was a video game, yeah, that would break your "ghost the level" achievement, but the character's still achieving the goal.

@00dani I can't find that first example, but that second one was trying to be "you can still sneak into the *camp*, but you have to kill this kid to do it".

from experience, though: it is very easy to turn a "success with a catch" into "a less-crappy failure"

@00dani @nightpool@cybre.space I guess it's highlighted a bit more with moves like "go aggro", where the GM decides if the NPC gives in to the player's demands or takes the harm

@00dani @nightpool@cybre.space I'm not sure I quite understand. The way I interpret the rules is "the actual in game result is determined arbitrarily by the GM, *but* within the confines of what the roll got".

which.... is exactly the same as every other game I've played where the GM narrates the outcome of a dice roll.

FATE feels equally arbitrary to me, for example.

@00dani @nightpool@cybre.space this doesn't match my experience at all!

I find the systems of Apocalypse World (and many derivatives) to really help me as a GM/facilitator to create an engaging experience.

I know people (including one of my players from last time) who don't like the games, but I don't think that makes it unsalvageable.

(also sorry if this feels like I'm piling up on you or something...)

@00dani and now that I'm thinking about freeform games I really want to play Archipelago again...

@00dani FATE is great, and I want to run a game of it soon, but it's far less interesting to me. I'm also interested in trying Genesys, which is in a similar vibe (a generic system, with a focus on empowering storytelling without becoming fully freeform).

I used to run my own variant of Risus (which used dice pools) and while that was great for single session games, it didn't provide a framework for telling a story, so it wasn't any simpler than playing a freeform game.