"Discern Realities" in Stonetop & Homebrew World

Discern Realities is a move that is near and dear to my heart. It's one of my favorite moves, and I've written about it at length:

• In Defense of Discern Realities
• Discern Realities vs. Spout Lore vs. Just Describing Stuff
• Discern Realities: make the question part of the trigger?
• Many, many discussions on G+ (have fun)

I tried using that "make the question part of the trigger" approach to the move a couple times, but didn't really like how it worked in practice. Either the players had to keep the questions constantly in mind and intentionally ask them, or as the GM I had to keep them constantly in mind and watch for the players asking them. Also, a lot of my playbook moves add questions you can ask to Discern Realities "for free, even on a miss" and those don't jive well with the "ask first" approach.  

So, for Stonetop and Homebrew World, I use Discern Realities as follows. It's quite similar to the original, the key differences being:

• the trigger specifically includes "looking to the GM for insight"
• both games use advantage/disadvantage instead of +1/-1 forward
• "Who is control here?" has become "Who or what is in control here?" (with "their fear" or the like being legit answers)

The accompanying text is the first draft of what I plan to put in the Stonetop book. It'll probably get cut down a little to fit on one spread, but this is the text that I wish I had when I first started learning to run Dungeon World. I hope you find it useful, too. 

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Discern Realities 

When you study a situation or person, looking to the GM for insight, roll +WIS: on a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below; on a 7-9, ask 1; either way, take advantage on your next move that acts on the answers.

•   What happened here recently?
•   What is about to happen?
•   What should I be on the lookout for?
•   What here is useful or valuable to me?
•   Who or what is really in control here?
•   What here is not what it appears to be?

Player: "Uh... what should I be on the lookout for?"
GM: "Well, funny you should ask..."
(image by Jakub Rozalski)

There are two parts to triggering this move: closely studying a person or situation and looking to you for insight.  You ask “what do you do?” and they say that they’re doing something to get insight into the situation or the person, and look to you to fill in that insight. 

Discern Realities doesn’t trigger just because a player asks you what they perceive—that’s just them asking you to establish the fictional situation (a core part of your job, right?). It doesn’t even trigger every time they take action to get more information. If they toss a torch down a stairway, tell them what the torch illuminates. If they drop a coin down a well, tell them what they hear. 

No, Discern Realities happens when they ask a question that requires interpreting what they perceive, or when they do something to study the situation or a person, but look to you (and this move) to try and figure out something that isn’t obvious. In practice, it often looks like this:

“What’s on the bookshelf?”
“Oh, some old leather-bound tomes. They’re old and unlabeled. The upper shelve also has some crude clay pots. It’s all covered in dust.”
“Huh. Does anything look like its been handled recently? Or out of place?”
“Sounds like you’re Discerning Realities, yeah?”

Because part of the trigger is a player-to-GM action (looking to you for insight), the player can pretty much always back down and not make the move. But if so, you don’t owe them any information beyond what their character could perceive and their actions would obviously reveal. 

Remember, though, that they have to do something in the fiction to closely study a situation or person. If they just ask you for insight or say they want to Discern Realities, ask what they do, what that looks like in the fiction. It’ll often be subtle (“I scan his desk and his office while he and Vahid talk”) but it could also be quite overt (“I toss the room… taking the books off the shelves, looking in those clay pots, tapping the walls”).  

The trigger for the move (and the questions they can ask) scales nicely between immediate, here-and-now situations and broader, bigger-picture situations. It’s just as viable to listen closely to the strange noises heard from a campfire as it is to spend a few hours chatting folks up in the streets of Marshedge, getting a feel for the political situation.  

On a 7+, the player gets to ask one or more questions from the list. You’ll find that players often chafe against the questions, wanting to ask something else. The list of questions is there to ensure that players ask something meaningful, that they get actual insight into the situation or person rather than just detail. You don’t need to be a stickler about it, though. If they ask a good question, but not one from the list, you can ask choose to answer it or direct them back to the list. Alternately, you can accept the question they ask but answer a question from the list.

Answer their questions honestly, generously, and helpfully. Rely on your prep and sense of the fictional space to guide you. Sometimes (often), you’ll need to make up details on the fly in order to provide them with a good, useful answer. These details then become true parts of the fiction! If you aren’t sure how to answer the question, ask the player for guidance. “Well, the old coins are obviously valuable, but what sort of thing were you looking for?”

Remember to begin and end with the fiction. Don’t just tell them that Siowan is about to betray them; describe how Siowan is acting nervous and keeps glancing at the door, like he’s expecting someone to burst in any second. Alternatively: answer their question directly and simply, and ask them what details lead them to that conclusion. 

Adjust the detail and usefulness of your answers to reflect the fiction. The move isn’t magic; it doesn’t let the characters know things they’d have no way of knowing. Scanning the area while holding still should give less-specific and less-useful information than getting in there and interacting with the situation or person that they're studying.  

Sometimes the honest, generous, helpful answer is the obvious answer. 

“What here is valuable or useful to me?”
“Those gold coins that I described earlier. Everything else is basically junk.” 

The answer might even be basically “nothing.”  

“What should I be on the lookout for?”
“Honestly, not much. This place seems quite safe.”
...or...
“Who or what is in control here?”
“No one. It’s a damn free-for-all.”  

Such answers might seem like cop-outs, but they confirm the obvious and give the player good, actionable information. And remember—they get advantage on their first roll to act on the answer.

On a 10+, they get to ask multiple questions. Sometimes a player will ask their questions all at once, but it’s best if you answer one, and then ask them for the next question. The answer to one question might influence the question that they ask next. You can even let the player “hold” their additional questions, playing out the scene a little between each question.

If they do ask multiple questions, they only get advantage on their first roll to act on any of the answers; if they get a 10+ and ask three questions, they get advantage once, not thrice. 

When players Discern Realities and get a 6- during a tense, active situation (like a fight, an argument, or when something bad is lurking just out of sight), your move will often involve the character getting interrupted or surprised as they take time to study the situation and figure things out. 

But during a less-tense, seemingly-safe situation (like investigating the scene of a struggle, or searching a “safe” room in a ruin), you might find yourself struggling to come up with a good, meaningful GM move. Good options include:

• Revealing an unwelcome truth: “You find Bethan. Oh gods, someone slashed his throat!”
• Using up their resources: “You really don’t find anything else of interest, but by the time you’re sure, your torch has started to sputter; it’s going to out soon.”
• Telling them the requirements and asking: “You just can’t tell from here whether the passageway is safe; you’ll need someone to walk down there to be sure, do you go?”
• Introducing a danger (often aggressively so): “As you investigate the carcass, you realize the birdsong has stopped and you’re hearing these quiet trilling sounds from the grass, all around. You look up into the eyes of a hunting drake, and you know that means you’re surrounded.”
• Advancing a grim portent (from one of your threats): “You spend time asking around town but no one has anything to useful to tell you, just ill-founded rumors and speculation. But a few people mention how this is clearly all the fault of Annick and the other Hillfolk refugees. In fact, that night, as you’re heading toward the public house, a group comes staggering out, well into their cups and shouting about they’re going to teach Annick a lesson. What do you do?” 

Whatever you do, don’t lie and don’t take away player agency. For example, if they say they peer down the dim hallway, waving their torch around and looking for traps, you could tell them the requirements (“You can’t tell anything from here, you’ll have to further down the tunnel if you want to learn more”) but you shouldn’t tell them that it’s safe when it isn’t, and you certainly shouldn’t tell them that they step forward and trigger a trap! An NPC might step forward and trigger the trap, but if you tell the player that their character does something that they didn’t declare, without their permission, you’re cheating.

Examples

They’re in the Great Wood, staring up at what looks to be an enormous wasp nest, a good eighty feet up in the air—a crinwin nest. They ask questions about its size (“at least as big as a house back in Stonetop”) and the tree it’s in (“like a redwood sequoia, with a 20-foot diameter trunk and the lowest bough maybe 60 feet up”) and whether they see anything moving about the nest (“nope”). Then Rhianna asks “Can I tell if there’s been activity recently? Tracks or whatnot?”  That’s looking for insight, not just data, so I say “Sounds like you’re Discerning Realities, yeah?”   

She agrees and rolls +WIS (with advantage as her crew Aids her by poking around a looking for tracks) and gets a 10+.  “Is the nest still active? Like, are there any signs of recent activity?” she asks. That’s two questions, neither of which are on the list. “So you’re asking ‘what happened here recently?’ Or ‘what should I be on the lookout for?’”   

“Oh, yeah. What should I be on the lookout for? Specifically, should we be on the lookout for crinwin right now?”  I say no, nothing to be on the lookout for. The nest doesn’t appear to be occupied and actually seems to be damaged. Geralt (from her crew) calls her over and shows her the crinwin bodies he found, rotting away in the brush.  

“Whoa. Okay… what happened her recently?”  Not much has happened here recently (except for crinwin corpses rotting), but that’s a crap answer and not helpful at all. So I tell her that they find more crinwin corpses, and even find one or two crinwin that appear to have killed each other. “A few weeks old, at least. But, like, there aren’t enough corpses for a full a nest. And you find some signs of crinwin dragging off other crinwin, heading the same general direction they carried off Pryder.” 

“What the hell?” spits Rhianna. “Crap. Um… who or what is really in control here? Like… who or what is behind this?”  I know that Sethra the swyn (a hypnotic, monkey-headed giant snake) is behind the attack, having entranced some of the crinwin and ordered them to bring her the rest. But I don’t see how Rhianna could possibly deduce that. So I give her as useful of an answer as I think the evidence would allow: “Well, after searching all over the place and maybe heading down the path a little, you spot a… scale? Like a drake scale, but bigger. Flatter. More like a snake, maybe? And it’s got a golden shimmer to it.”   

“Do I recognize it?” Rhianna asks, and I say “I don’t know, sounds like you’re Spouting Lore?” And she agrees, and rolls with advantage for following up on an answer. 

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Blodwen finishes tending to Pryder’s wounds while Caradoc fends off crinwin at the door. He’s holding them off for now, but there are more and more coming. “Is there like another exit or anything?” she asks. I prepared a map, and I know that, yeah, there’s a hidden entrance near the top of the chamber that the swyn uses to get in and out of the barrow mound, but it’s not obvious at all. “Nothing obvious,” I say. “But it sounds like you’re closely studying the situation? Want to Discern Realities?”   

She agrees and rolls and gets a 7-9, and asks “what here is useful or valuable to me?” I know from my notes that there’s some treasure hidden in this room, but that’s clearly not what she had in mind. “You realize there’s another entrance, up near the ceiling, hidden by an edge protruding from the walls. How do you figure out that it’s there?” 

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Rhianna is interrogating a strange creature, like a man made of vines and thorns. They caught him trying to steal from Vahid in the night. He bemoaned how a swyn showed up and kicked him out of his lair and stole his treasure, and Rhianna just convinced him (in exchange for some trinkets from Vahid’s pack) to tell them more about the swyn, its crinwin minions, and the lair itself.   

He’s giving them the details in his high-pitched, whiny voice, but I also mention how his eyes keep darting back to Vahid’s pack (where Vahid has the Mindgem, of course). Vahid doesn’t trust this thing. “I’m sizing it up while Rhianna talks to him, trying to figure out what he’s up to.” That’s Discerning Realities for sure, but he gets a 6-. 

I’m thinking that I’ll turn their move back on them and reveal something valuable to the spriggan. “Okay, so I think you like, notice that there’s a lose strap on your pack and go to tighten it, but the pack like, um, spills out and the Mindgem falls out.”

Vahid’s player gets indignant. “Uh, like hell I do. I wouldn’t touch my pack while talking to this thing, and besides, the Mindgem is like packed away at the very bottom.” 

I’m taken aback, but he’s right. He said he was sizing the spriggan up, not poking around in his pack. “Shoot, yeah… you’re right, I’m sorry. How about this? He keeps staring at your pack, and licking his lips, and losing his train of thought as he stares at, finally shaking his head and finishing his tale to Rhianna. ‘Take youse to it, old Tomas can! Show youse the way in, secret and safe!’ But its eyes dart back to your pack, and Vahid, you just get this feeling like it knows there’s something in there. He probably doesn’t know what it is, but he wants to find out. What do you do?”