Manbearcat
Legend
To be fair, the battle rules in AW2e often have as baseline an exchange of harm. I get what you're saying here, but from a "what it tells you to do" perspective, it's baked into the battle moves and not offered as an option to the GM. I think this is where Reynard is coming from.
@Reynard, @Manbearcat has a point outside of the battle rules, in that harm is a consequence you can apply to other moves when you're making as hard a move as you like. There, it might often be a better idea to go with something else rather than just harm. But absolutely use harm if it's the thing that makes sense.
For sure, but I’m not taking about the player side moves of Do Battle and their personal decision-points within each of those moves. I’m talking about when the GM has a decision point to Inflict Harm. The “make as hard and as direct a move as you like” as a proviso that is always on so, if you don’t feel like the Harm serves play (interesting lives and barfed apocalyptica which brings Threats to life and puts characters in crosshairs while still “following through”) best in that moment, throttle it back to an alternative.
Obviously you need to do so with care. It needs to serve apocalyptica, make things not boring, be provocative/interesting and being the situation/fiction/Threat archetype “to life.” And you need to sufficiently follow through on a move made.
But if you’re Inflicting Harm most every time a situation could conceivably be Harm…well, that is almost surely a dynamic deadening of play. The reason Vincent put that proviso in there is to ensure that play features an abundance of apocalyptica dynamism and being a fan of the characters-dom; interesting lives instead of “always worse” or “dead and quick like”(rather than a high frequency of bang bang your dead…which the game can easily degenerate into…I saw a lot of complaints about this early in release because GMs didn’t know how to best handle this issue…same thing with TB where GMs are crappily just overburdening play with Conditions upon failed Tests).
Finally…oftentimes doing stuff other than Inflict Harm actually makes life more difficult for PCs. A bullet between the eyes or through the heart is an easy and boring way out when life under the specter of debt (real or metaphorical) or increased hardship is much worse.
Knowing when making their life harder and more interesting by doing something other than Inflicting Harm (again relationships and barter and having your stuff available is a big pressure point in play) is an important GMing skill (which is embodied in that proviso cited above).
EDIT - @Reynard , if you're looking for "Harm equivalents", there are entries in there that basically give you exchange rates for all kinds of stuff like falls or environmental Harm equivalent, damage to structures and "blow through" and stuff. And then there are other varieties of Harm; psychic, stun, vehicle, building, deprivation. You're going to need to familiarize yourself with that or ask specific questions about any of those concepts/applications for specific answers.
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