How do you make an off-screen GM move in Dungeon World?

Question

In Dungeon World the GM makes moves according to a variety of situations. Without going into those trigger conditions, suppose a failure is rolled by a Cleric casting a healing spell and a GM move is to occur. One of the principles to guide GM action is:

Think off-screen too

Just because you’re a fan of the characters doesn’t mean everything happens right in front of them. Sometimes your best move is in the next room, or another part of the dungeon, or even back in town. Make your move elsewhere and show its effects when they come into the spotlight.

Now, suppose I (as the GM) make a move to Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities by re-animating a fallen foe earlier in a dungeon (The Cleric's abilities against the undead is what I'm trying to highlight), but then the players rapidly exit the dungeon. I have potentially two problems at hand:

• The fiction becomes simply "Your spell fizzles (insert descriptive stuff here) resulting in no apparent effect. What do you do?" This doesn't demonstrate that I even made a move; is that ok?

• The party is no longer anywhere near the re-animated foe. Is this move "wasted" until I have a chance to re-introduce the foe as the undead later in the game, supposing I have that chance at all?

In short, is it ok to have GM moves appear to do nothing from the players' perspective until a later time (with the possibility of never coming up again)?

Answer 1

The basic answer is "yes, it is OK." Smiling and making a note, possibly after looking something up, is optional.

If you don't want that to happen, your re-animation move is a soft move (DW, p166) that isn't immediately obvious to the characters. That gives you the chance to change it, if you decide it was wasted, and revise the fiction. This isn't a retcon, because the characters (and the players) never knew what was going to happen.

If you don't want to have the possibility of doing that, then you could have the re-animated enemy show up on the way out of the dungeon, or follow them. As it was reanimated because of the failed spell, it could be linked to the cleric in some way, maybe even regarding her as its master.

You have a lot of choices. The moves system in DW makes it easy to mistake for a strongly structured game, where there are "wrong" answers. As I've got to know it better, that idea seems wrong to me.

Answer 2

You can make a move elsewhere and still signal it to the players, even if it's not seen by the characters.

Somewhere in the dungeon behind you, a dead hand twitches, a dead leg jerks, as the unholy mirror of your spell finds a host...

Then move on. The players have seen the move and the danger has been telegraphed, but the characters are unaware.

Answer 3

I'm just hoping you haven't prepared dungeon levels, because if you did, you'd have to ditch them.

Whenever you make a move, you should have something to tell the players about it. It does not have to be directly about what just happened offscreen. For your example, I'd go for Reveal an unwelcome truth;

– Cleric, sometimes when you cast your healing spell, some of it seeps back to you. Not enough to really heal you but just enough to make you feel better. This is one of those times. And now that you feel better, you remember that the weird iron ring on the finger of that knight you killed two levels up terribly resembles the picture of the ring of reanimation you saw on a dusty tome in your master's library as an apprentice.

One other thing you can do is cut to the chase right away. There's nothing keeping you from just fast-forwarding the game time as a part of your move.

– So the healing is done and you just keep hacking and slashing through two more levels of the dungeon but down in the sixth level you hear a somewhat familiar sound of clanking armour. Cleric, your holy symbol begins to glow. What do you do?

As I said, hope you didn't prepare levels 4 and 5 ;)