[RPG] do to trigger Spout Lore or Discern Realities

dungeon-worldspout-lore

So, in Dungeon World, I've been trying to trigger Spout Lore and Discern Realities more as those moves seem to fit my character (a Druid) well. However, my efforts at triggering both of those moves fall rather flat:

With Spout Lore, I tend to wind up trying to provoke it by well, having my character spout lore, but what happens is that my character winds up saying their piece in order to trigger the move, leaving nothing for the move to act on.
With Discern Realities, I find myself trying to trigger it by asking questions of the GM about the world, but I get the sense that I'm asking the wrong questions: what I ask winds up concerning low-level details, if you will, of the in-character environment, while leaving the move's built-in, higher-level questioning to after the move. However, this leaves the triggering questions, the IC narrative points, unanswered, and also doesn't convey clearly that my character's trying to Discern Realities vs. just the reality in front of them at the moment.

Should I be looking to different approaches when trying to trigger these moves?

Best Answer

Neither of those are the moves' triggers, so not triggering makes sense. It sounds like the problem generally has been that you're trying to do the title and result of the move instead of its trigger. Focus on the trigger instead, and the moves will more reliably trigger.

Discern Realities isn't triggered by asking the GM questions, it's triggered “[w]hen you closely study a situation or person”. So instead, have your character investigate, peer, and otherwise attempt to discern what reality is by closely studying something or someone. Save the questions for after the move has triggered and the group is resolving it.

Similarly, Spout Lore isn't triggered by declaring facts and spouting lore. That happens after! Spout Lore is triggered “[w]hen you consult your accumulated knowledge about something”. Consult first, patiently let move trigger, then spout. So have your character wrack their brains, declare “I studied this for my thesis!”, ponder deeply with chin on fist while sitting upon a rock, dig in their scroll notes, and otherwise consult your existing knowledge through explicit player narration. Then let the move trigger, and then the spouting happens.

Related Solutions

[RPG] How to encourage players to Spout Lore

Using Spout Lore to reveal a detailed, pre-created world is contrary to the rules.

There is a caveat I should make here. I'm going to talk about rules the GM has to follow. You're welcome to not consider them binding rules, but DW as designed does. If you don't follow the GM rules, you're "voiding the warranty" on the game and it will not operate as advertised. You're on your own then. (Incidentally, this is a close paraphrase of the designers [on p. 159 and in various conversations] – it's not just me saying so.)

For reference, these are the GM's responsibilities:

Describe the situation
Follow the rules
Make moves
Exploit your prep

… plus following the Agenda and Principles.

So part of your job is to "exploit" your prep, as in mining it and twisting it for the benefit of the current game session. You also have to follow the rules, which includes your agenda. And your agenda is (p. 161):

Your agenda makes up the things you aim to do at all times while GMing a game of Dungeon World:

Portray a fantastic world

Fill the characters’ lives with adventure

Play to find out what happens

Note that doesn't say create a fantastic world – "portray" is a very deliberate word choice, as we can see by continuing the same quote (emphasis mine)…

Everything you say and do at the table (and away from the table, too) exists to accomplish these three goals and no others. Things that aren’t on this list aren’t your goals. You’re not trying to beat the players or test their ability to solve complex traps. You’re not here to give the players a chance to explore your finely crafted setting. You’re not trying to kill the players (though monsters might be). You’re most certainly not here to tell everyone a planned-out story.

So that's the trouble you're having: Spout Lore does let you, the GM, reveal a detail, but Dungeon World itself doesn't permit you to have revealing a big pile of pre-crafted details to be part of your agenda. Spout Lore isn't a opportunity to infodump on your players. In fact, it encourages the opposite with the agenda "Play to find out what happens." That includes about your world.

So why does Spout Lore not work well with pre-crafted worlds? Because in many subtle ways, the answers that players get won't be as interesting to them. The setting detail revealed existed before the PC did, so it's only maybe relevant or interesting to them and their adventures. (Note that Spout Lore requires the GM to say something interesting about the subject.) You are quite understandably going to be way more excited by pre-created setting details you reveal than the players are. If the Spouted information isn't as interesting as it could be, their motivation to use the move decreases. If it decreases below a certain threshold, they'll start seeing it as a "dead" move – one not worth taking when the risk is getting a miss. Other moves become much better value propositions for the same amount of risk.

Something created on the spot or quickly adapted to current circumstances and the flow of the game will be much more relevant and interesting to the players and their characters. By holding your world lightly in your mind and being willing to kill your darlings, you are serving the GM's agenda better. You're serving your players better, too. You can more easily come up with details that are pertinent, and more easily adapt the loose details you do have in your prep to your players' current game input, and as a result come up with something that's way better because it's leveraging the collaborative-narrative design of Dungeon World.

[RPG] Dungeon World after much D&D (3.5E, 4E and 5E) – struggling with what degree of “fiction first” applies to moves

It isn't OK. I don't mean in the sense of “oh no everything is broken now!”, but in the sense of “yeah, Dungeon World is way less fun, and it will fail to be awesome in ways you wouldn't even know could have been awesome.” That sense of the game being ‘off’ is what Dungeon World feels like when its heart and guts are missing because some core rules aren't being followed.

Put another way, the game fails to live up to its promises when played that way. It can be played that way though — you just get a pale imitation of Dungeon World instead of the real deal.

How to fix it and make Dungeon World sessions gently unfold like a spring flower of awesome

This is something the players are doing, but the fix is super effective and entirely within the GM's control. It's easy to miss, but the rules say literally what the GM must say when the conversation takes this kind of turn, and the GM must say it in order for the GM to be actually following the GM's rules.

Here is it (p. 180):

When a player just says “I hack and slash him” be quick to ask, “so what are you actually doing?” Ask “How?” or “With what?”

It's that simple, but the GM has to be consistent for it to work.

Doing it in practice

Remember that Dungeon World's rules are all based on dictating legal conversation subjects. Weird, I know, but it works and it's important to remember so that the GM can see where and to what the rules apply during a session. This is one of those situation, because the players are attempting to skip steps. It would be like if the player of a 1st-level single-class fighter in D&D 3.5e says that they cast a fireball at the villain and start rolling 10d6. If that D&D 3.5e DM is all like “uh, okay, I guess they die” instead of “what, no, you're not a spellcaster” then D&D 3.5e isn't going to really work properly, right? Same thing here: when players just call out the moves and the GM acquiesces, Dungeon World doesn't work properly.

So in practice, when a player names a move and you say “OK, what does that look like?”, there are a few ways they might respond.

The best case is they pull up short mentally, think for a moment, and then start describing what their character is doing instead of what move the player hopes to trigger. This is awesome and lets the game roll on pretty quickly.
The middling case is where they're confused by the question and you have to elaborate. So you say something like “I mean just that: when you cast a spell, what does that look like for you, Cleric?” and “Well, you're hoping to spout lore, so what does consulting your accumulated knowledge about something look like for the Wizard?”

The key here is that you, the GM, are not allowed to contribute the results of what they do to the conversation yet. You keep asking question, talking about the fictional situation and what they are or would do, possibly resulting in events progressing in-game with no moves triggering yet, until a move (player or GM) is triggered and you have to follow its rules. If the player in question keeps trying to skip ahead and execute a move without triggering it, they're going to keep looking at you for the result and you're going to keep not conversing about the move, 'cause it hasn't triggered yet. Keep bringing it back to asking them to describe what they're doing, and watch for move triggers in the description.

Be prepared for the description to actually trigger a different move, because moves matching the fiction regardless of what move a player wanted to have happen is a powerful and core part of the feedback loop the whole game is designed to create.
The worst situation is where they argue, especially if they pull out a half-baked understanding of the game and claim that Dungeon World lets them do anything and the GM has to go along with it.

You're still the GM, and the world is basically in stasis until the GM converses about it changing, so misguided, arguing players can't really force the game forward without your cooperation. That means: Don't Panic. It's fine, the game is fine, and you just need to chat reasonably with them and rest confident that the game reality will wait patiently for you. There's no rush, so you've got time to correct the misunderstanding without actually getting into a heated argument.

In practice argument is actually unlikely, but it's good to have some ideas for keeping the game from being sucked into the Argument Black Hole. So there are a few ways to handle an argumentative player.
- Get back to game basics. Remind them that to do a move, they have to trigger it, and just saying the name isn't a move trigger. This backs everyone up a step away from playing the game to discussing the rules of the game, which some people might have misunderstood. Then ask them, “So what do you do?” to nudge everyone quickly back into playing mode.
- Switch to another PC. Smile kindly and say “OK, we'll get back to the Fighter in a sec. Ranger, you see [situation summary], what do you do about that?” This keeps the game moving the way it's designed to, and as a bonus gives you a chance for you and another player to demonstrate how it's done.

But all this is a long-winded way of saying that the GM's job when someone just declares a move's name without actually describing their character doing anything is to somehow get someone — anyone — at the table to tell you what they're actually doing in fictional terms. If it's the player who just named the move, that's great, but there's no initiative and you can flip over to someone else who'll help you keep the conversation about the fictional events moving instead of stalled.

Get people saying what they do in game, and only call moves that match after they match the triggers, and Dungeon World will deliver the subtle awesomenesses it promises.