134. Suffer Harm Move

By default, the harm & healing moves are in play. You can choose to forego them case by case, when you think that they’ll slow the action (158).

Each of the moves in the peripheral moves chapter is given a “default” status like this one. In this case, the game assumes you will play with these moves, usually, understanding that they can slow down the pacing and will sometimes be dropped in the interest of keeping things moving. I think it’s cool that the Baker’s recognize that there’s a natural tension in the suffer harm move between the development of interesting fiction and the fine tuning of the narratives pacing. We see this in every form of the narrative arts. Writers and filmmakers always have one eye on pacing, and they use descriptive detail to control the speed at which things move for the audience, slowing down with full details at this moment and speeding up by dispensing with details here. Of course RPGs, as narrative games, are subject to those same tensions. Sometimes skipping the harm move will be a purposeful decision by one player, and other times it will be an instinctive forgetfulness that makes the players simply mark their harm clock and jump to the next action. When you want to slow the action down or to have concrete details off which to bounce creatively in the cause-and-effect chain of play, the harm move is there for you.

The first harm move is unusual in that a hit is bad for the player and a miss is good. If you find that your players have trouble with this quirk of the move, roll it yourself against them, no grief (158).

I had somehow glossed over that second sentence in my earlier readings of the text. The reason that a hit is bad is because you are literally rolling against yourself, for the MC or whoever’s character is dealing the harm. I had not thought of it that way (in spite of it appearing clearly right there!). It’s even more obvious when you consider that the MC gets to make all the choices from the pick lists. So in every way, the move is made by the MC – so why have the player roll it?

I suspect that it’s for two main reasons. First, it’s a stronger rule to say the MC never rolls the dice than it is to say the MC almost never rolls the dice, but they do in this one situation. Second, the MC’s position in the game is structured as a curious observer who is constantly pursuing what interests them as the story unfolds. To throw the dice for suffer harm makes the MC, however subtly, care about whether they roll high or low, and the game doesn’t want the MC caring about the roll, only interested in how the results affect the fiction. Picking from the pick list is merely a case of saying, “Ooh! It’d be cool if this happened!,” while rolling the dice puts you in a position of thinking, “Ooh! I hope this happens!” It’s a subtle distinction, but a mildly important one. I say mildly, because the text itself says that it is “no grief” if the MC rolls the move. It’s not ideal, but it certainly won’t break the game.

And finally, we get to the move itself:

When you suffer harm, roll+harm suffered (after armor, if you’re wearing any). On a 10+, the MC can choose 1:
• You’re out of action: unconscious, trapped, incoherent or panicked.
• It’s worse than it seemed. Take an additional 1-harm.
• Choose 2 from the 7–9 list below.
On a 7–9, the MC can choose 1:
• You lose your footing.
• You lose your grip on whatever you’re holding.
• You lose track of someone or something you’re attending to.
• You miss noticing something important.
On a miss, the MC can nevertheless choose something from the 7–9 list above. If she does, though, it’s instead of some of the harm you’re suffering, so you take -1harm.

On a miss, do often choose something from the 7-9 list, even though it gives the player the -1harm. Those effects on the character are usually more interesting than the mere mechanical harm.

This is a great move. This is what keeps a battle or a one-sided attack from being a “mere mechanical” exchange of harm. We are all familiar with the I-swing-I-hit-I-do-X-damage-go phenomena that creeps into games whose combat is “mere[ly] mechanical.” But these lists do a lot more than just add color to taking harm. A lot of systems that attempt to get beyond mechanical combat do so by adding in (or rewarding players for adding it in themselves) color, detailing the way a character lunges into battle or screams when struck. That’s all cool, but it doesn’t affect the combat, just lays over it. The suffer harm move, on the other hand, changes the fictional landscape itself by shifting the character’s fictional positioning, which in turn limits or alters the character’s options going forward.

At the extreme end, the character can be knocked unconscious, become trapped, or become cognitively impaired. Unconsciousness and being trapped are pretty clear, but what does it mean in play to be incoherent or panicked? Note that there is no mechanical element to becoming incoherent or panicked. How you play that is up to you. Is there any greater sign that the fiction has meaning in the game, that the fiction is the “basis of play, not an appendix to play” (see post no. 100 for that quote)? It’s possible that players will treat that like being stunned, that to take any action at all is to act under fire (pg 218 in the book), or it’s just as likely that the player will describe their character being incoherent or taking a panicked action. The game doesn’t need to mechanize it because it has prepared the players to make the fiction the foundation of play.

Of course, since fictional positioning is what the game is all about, the move needs to give you ways to let a character keep their positioning if that’s what you as the MC want. In the case of a 10+, the game gives you the option to keep it purely mechanical by letting you deal an extra point of harm. In the 7-9 range, you can opt to have the character “miss noticing something important” or “lose track of someone or something you’re attending to.” These are great options to let the character keep their immediate position by losing something that will affect their position in the future, near or far. Even on a miss, the MC can either alter the character’s position or go for the merely mechanical damage.

The example drives home that these options are important for the MC to pursue what interests them:

Keeler’s fighting her way out of a situation that turned bad. At some point she takes a machete blow: 3-harm, minus 2-armor, for a sum of 1-harm. I have her roll the harm move, which, bad luck, she hits with an 11. I have no desire to put her out of the action, so: “it doesn’t seem too bad, but then you realize that blood is dripping steadily out of your jacket sleeve. Take 1 more harm” (159).

The important sentence for our purposes here is “I have no desire to put her out of the action.” As we’ve seen, the MC has a lot of options. They could have chosen 2 from the 7-9 list if they thought that would complicate the fiction in a desirable way. While I like that we learn from this example what the MC says to communicate the idea that “it’s worse than it seemed,” it would be cool to have an example of what it would look like if Keeler missed noticing something important or lost track of something she was attending to. Choosing those two options would still allow Keeler to stay in the action, keep her feet and weapons, and still complicate her positioning in the scenes to come. I know I’m just being greedy – there are few texts that give more or better examples – but what can I say; I’m greedy.

Together, the options available to the MC in this move make it a powerful tool to shape the fiction by having the suffering of harm affect the positioning of and options available to the characters.