So, in play testing, I seem to have either ran into a problem or I don't understand the relationship between the...
So, in play testing, I seem to have either ran into a problem or I don't understand the relationship between the Journey move and Iron Vow progression. Let me know your thoughts:
A PC has an Iron Vow to go from Village A to Location B and retrieve an item and return to Village A. To get there, PC triggers the Journey move, triggers the Arrival move to Location B, obtains the items, rests, triggers the Journey move to head home, and is now back home.
In this abridged run down, how and when should the PC male rolls towards progressing and concluding their Iron Vow? Is it redundant to have the player make rolls for the journey and the vow, as the journey was the vow? Should I have managed or written things differently? Is it a bad vow to go somewhere to get an item and return it?
Thanks for the feedback!
A PC has an Iron Vow to go from Village A to Location B and retrieve an item and return to Village A. To get there, PC triggers the Journey move, triggers the Arrival move to Location B, obtains the items, rests, triggers the Journey move to head home, and is now back home.
In this abridged run down, how and when should the PC male rolls towards progressing and concluding their Iron Vow? Is it redundant to have the player make rolls for the journey and the vow, as the journey was the vow? Should I have managed or written things differently? Is it a bad vow to go somewhere to get an item and return it?
Thanks for the feedback!
Hi, Andrew Huffaker. Let me see if I can help....
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, for the sake of your sanity, here's a tldr which addresses your example
1) Swear an Iron Vow; give it a rank and a progress track
2) Undertake a Journey, and give your journey a rank and a progress track
3) Make however many segments of your journey are necessary to Reach your Destination
4) When you Reach Your Destination, and the journey was worthy of a milestone (see the Reach a Milestone move), then mark progress on your vow
5) Ditto for the return trip.
6) When you're all set, Fulfill Your Vow
The journey progress tracks are mechanically separate from the quest progress track, but the journeys can act as milestones for the greater quest
And here's the very long version of my response...
First, take a look at the Reach a Milestone move. This is the move that enables you to mark progress on a quest. When you Swear an Iron Vow, you give the quest a rank, and create a progress track for it. When you feel like you've marked enough progress, you can Fulfill your Vow.
If I get somewhere important to my quest, and that journey was dramatic or challenging (or both), then I'd probably count it as a milestone when it's done (when I successfully Reach Your Destination). You'll note that the Reach a Milestone move even calls out a perilous journey as a potential milestone.
But, to complete that journey, you probably would have created a progress track for the journey itself, and given it a rank.
Same goes for overcoming a foe in a fight. The fight itself has a progress track as a way of measuring your foe's power, health, vitality, fighting spirit, etc. Was that foe someone or something that stood in the way of your quest, and it was a tough fight, worthy of a milestone? If so, you'll make the Reach a Milestone move and mark progress on your quest when you defeat them.
Let's take your example and play it out.
So your vow is to travel to a place, retrieve an object, and bring it back. I don't know the specifics, but I'll just riff off that....
Let's say that that a community performs a religious ritual before the spring planting, in order to ensure a good harvest, and this ritual requires an important and rare component. Perhaps it's an Old World artifact -- the crown of some long-dead deified queen -- which is said to contain great power. This crown, carried by priests, makes the rounds of the villages in this region every year, but the bad weather has kept them away. Someone needs to go fetch the crown.
So, relatively mundane thus far. Swear an Iron Vow: "Bring the Queen's Crown back for the Spring Festival". We'll make it a dangerous vow. The plan is to travel to where it's being kept, convince the priests to give it to you, and get back in time. Easy-peasey.
Right about now, if you are playing solo (or are the GM), your story instincts should be kicking in and starting to look for ways to mess up your character's life. Why? Because in order to Reach a Milestone, you have to overcome a challenge. In order to Fulfill a Vow, you have to overcome enough challenges to fill some boxes on your progress track. The journey to get the crown and the journey back can each be a milestone, but those don't add up to much in terms of marking progress, and it's a bit meh from a fiction perspective.
So what else? What's really going on with the priests and the crown? Will they ask something of you? Does someone stand to gain something if this village suffers a poor harvest or loses faith? Unless your quest is merely troublesome, you're going to need to overcome some obstacles in order to Fulfill Your Vow. Drama = conflict.
But, let's just start with the journey. We're traveling to the priest's enclave. Luckily, it's relatively close. Let's call it merely troublesome. We create the progress track for the journey and hit the road.
ReplyDeleteWe make the journey, and encounter some peril on the way. When we arrive at the enclave, we make the Reach Your Destination move. If it's successful, good news, we also get to Reach a Milestone and mark progress on our quest. If we get a miss on the Reach Your Destination move, then -- holy crap -- maybe the crown isn't even here. Why not? What's going on?
Even if we arrive and the crown is there, who is to say the priests are going to trust me with it? I'm sure there is a Compel move involved, but even then Compel doesn't work unless you've got some leverage or something to offer. What will they demand from you? How will that create new challenges you need to overcome, and new opportunities to mark progress on your quest?
I've probably muddled the whole issue with my overly-long blabbering, Apologies.
Obviously Shawn Tomkin's explanation covers it better than I could, but for me, I'm thinking of a Vow as a "Quest" or a "Mission" and a Journey as either a "move" or "travel" (don't confuse move for Moves here, as you will be making several Moves during your travels - Okay probably making this worse, so I'll move on). In short, I may have to travel or move several times to complete my quest or mission, depending on how hard I set the quest/mission vs how easy/hard I set each move or travel segment. Every time I do move or travel, I get a tad bit closer to completing the quest or mission. And, by the way, for me, I read "Take Action" or just "Action" when I see Move.
ReplyDeleteWow, I've probably made a big mess of things...
I don't know if that helps, and I sure hope it doesn't make it worse. I have just noticed following the posts in the group that we don't all register things the same way, especially for me :( I realize it is just semantics, but sometimes a single word of phrase has me confused or second guessing myself.