This discussion is so interesting 🙂 It’s great to see the differing perspectives on the topic.

I’m a massive fan of AW, it’s probably a good contender for my all time favourite RPG. I just always have so much fun playing it. For me its still the strongest PbtA game out there (at least of the ones I have read and played) and I personally love the way moves like Go Aggro and Seize By Force limit what you can do.

However there is one area where I find this frustrating. Broadly speaking its the “info gathering” type moves. I have to agree with Ralph Mazza that Read a Sitch is very annoying. I rarely if ever am that interested to discover the answers to the very specific questions the move allows. And what I also find interesting is that this feeling is common across most of the “info gathering” rules in PbtA games I have played. DW’s Spout Lore and especially Discern Realities share this issue. MotW’s Investigate a Mystery is another example – we had to house rule that you could ask any questions you liked for it to work.

I’m not sure why, but I feel like I’ve not seen a satisfactory “lets establish info my character knows or perceives about the world” move in a PbtA game so far. Is this something intrinsic to the way PbtA games play, or am I just seeing a pattern where there is none? Or something else?