Actual Play Deep Dive 1: Moves & Progress Trackers

Despite having played a handful of Ironsworn sessions already, I'm still somewhat confused by Moves, Progress Trackers, Debilities and other statuses, and something called a Scene Challenge. As mentioned in my previous post, I have a fairly straightforward plan: I want to go through the entire rulebook with a mission to test out all of these principles that confuse me using actual play. So here we go! 

Moves & Progress Trackers

My first test actual play resulted in a few adventurers completing a journey progress track, and I rolled the Reach Your Destination progress move when they were at a progress score of 6. To some extent, this progress move felt like, "I already narrated their entire journey, so it feels pointless to roll for them to complete the journey." And when I got a weak hit as the result, I didn't feel any sense of inspiration by the introduction of complications to their success, instead I felt like it was unnecessarily burdening their success. Was I attempting to roll too soon at a score of 6, or was something else going on? For that matter, why was I using a progress move anyway? These are things I wanted to investigate. 

My feeling of confusion around moves and progress trackers seems to somewhat stem from not fully grasping the mechanical aspects, so my first task is learning more about the hard mechanics. The way I've been using moves is purely narratively driven and I think I'm missing some detail on the mechanical aspect. 

Right down the middle: the 6 score

I started my research from the Basic Probability in Ironsworn blog post by Marx Shepard, which I replicated in Excel to get a sense for the probabilities. Using his post's first table of action score probabilities, my eye was drawn to the 6 column: at a 6 action score (or progress score), the likelihood of each result is balanced around the weak hit result: 

• Chance of Miss: 25%
• Chance of Weak Hit: 50%
• Chance of Strong Hit: 25%

I want to keep this in mind for the future, because I have a tendency to seek to complete a progress tracker for a higher chance of success, which results in a much lower chance of a narrative turn of events from a miss or weak hit. This easy-to-remember statistical probability helps me understand that I am still quite likely to succeed a progress move even at a 5-7 score, and this may be the better option for many progress trackers to give a greater possibility of unexpected changes. However, it's not enough to help me get out of the "miss=bad" mindset that tainted my actual play, so I have more to look into. 

Progress tracks are for compounding individual moves

Thinking about the statistics specifically brought into focus an aspect of progress trackers: when you attempt a progress move, you already know exactly your current progress score and you can weigh the odds accordingly. On the other hand, when you make regular moves, there is the additional randomness factor of the action die. This introduces even more randomness to the outcome, making it less intuitive to predict the chance of success for each individual move. 

Considering this, I started to wonder what is the reason for progress trackers existing in the first place? And I think I arrived at the answer: progress trackers keep record of the results of multiple moves that contribute to one final move - the progress move. Indeed, this is supported by the various forms of progress all having a distinct progress move to finish them off:

1. Journey tracker → Undertake a Journey → Reach Your Destination
2. Vow (aka quest) tracker → Swear an Iron Vow → Reach a Milestone → Fulfill Your Vow
3. Fight tracker → Enter the Fray (or Draw the Circle) → Strike/Clash → End the Fight
4. Bonds tracker → Starting bonds → Forge a Bond/Test Your Bond → Write Your Epilogue

Each type of progress tracker starts with its own move (for bonds, it's just the three starting bonds), continues with another move, and ends with its own progress move. This is how the results of many moves are rolled up into one score that can then be applied to a final move and resolve the progress tracker. 

I can see now how this makes sense for the progress moves, which are typically more narratively impactful than other moves. Whether you fulfill your quest or not and in what manner is a very influential moment in the story, so it makes sense to me that rolling a single move and being hit with a miss might feel unsatisfying. Although I think the level of complexity is a little high, I can appreciate that there's really no other way to have a connected series of related moves culminate in something resembling the payoff for all that hard work. 

Narrative Distance for Moves

As my last focus point, I've noticed that playing Ironsworn requires a certain amount of narrative distance from the player character, especially when moves are being rolled. Personally, I really enjoy this distance and prefer to orchestrate the story from behind the scenes, stepping into specific moments to add drama to the characters' experiences. There's a bit of a back-and-forth, zoom-in and zoom-out effect while playing. 

For me, the zoom-in is driven by which scenes are more entertaining to play through. When I'm inspired by the conflicts and encounters going on, I want to engage with it and see the scene for myself. The zoom-out is driven by a narrative need for impactful changes to the current situation - which in other words is a move! 

It occurred to me during this deep dive that making a move is a perfect opportunity to pull back from the character's perspective. You want to briefly become more invested in the story itself rather than wanting what's best for the character. There's been nothing so demoralizing in my experience than rolling a weak hit or a miss while being zoomed-in to a character-driven headspace where my automatic reaction is, "Aw man, I was really hoping for a strong hit" instead of "Great, this is an opportunity for an interesting change of pace." 

I'd even take this a step further for progress moves. If I can reliably get myself out of the character's headspace for non-progress moves so that a miss isn't something to be feared from the narrative perspective, I can do the same on a larger scale for progress moves which typically have much larger stakes than the individual moves that they're constituted from. 

A good comparison is the way Google Earth zooms in and out at a certain point. You start at the satellite perspective, getting a bird's-eye-view of the landscape. Zooming in further to a specific road will turn the camera parallel to the earth and land you in the street-view perspective. Zoom in again and now you have a close-up image of the objects in that view, such as a building or pedestrian. These are like the three levels of narrative distance in Ironsworn: 

1. Satellite view: for rolling progress moves, have a far-off perspective of the story's narrative and be willing to go to a wildly different location than you expected depending on the result
2. Street view: for rolling normal moves, maintain a distance from the character where you are able to change direction in the immediate vicinity of the narrative
3. Zoom-in View: for role-playing as your character, enjoy the duration of a scene where you're not worried about actually making moves at the moment, just doing what feels natural or developing the setting further

Conclusion

Now all this is not to say that I couldn't just railroad the narrative to whatever is the most fun to me at that moment, because I can certainly do that. But I wanted to get to the bottom of how I could enjoy a weak hit or miss on a progress move in the future. 

The answer seems to lie in this narrative distance concept. When I next make a progress move, I'm going to take a large step back from the characters' internal feelings and refocus on the overarching story being told. I believe it's necessary to absorb the influence of the dice well and allow the game to add to the story.