Ironsworn: Starforged simulates the flow of a story

(In reply to a post on r/solo_roleplaying)

“In Ironsworn: Starforged, how do I make some weapons more powerful than others?”

I’ll come at it in a roundabout way, which for me made a lot of things in Starforged start falling into place. The breakthrough was reading someone here explain that I:S is not about “simulating a world”, but rather “simulating the flow of a story”. Thus whereas e.g. D&D arguably tries to answer a question of “objectively” how e.g. a fight would proceed “in a real world”, in Starforged you rather ask a question of “how many pages of your book you want the fight to take”; or, “how much focus you want to give the fight in your story”. A great example for me is the existence of the “Battle” Move in Starforged. From an “objective” point of view, it is confusing - when should I just use the “Battle” move vs. going full-blown “Enter the Fray” etc.? It doesn’t make much sense from a point of view of trying to “simulate the world”. But if you ask, “do I want to tell a story focusing on the details of a fight, it’s ebb and flow, or do I want to focus on other things and just skim over a fight,” then your answer will tell you whether to, respectively, “Enter the Fray” or just “Battle”. In the same way, how much narrative focus you want on a particular arc in a story (where one such arc could be “a fight with XYZ”) should tell you what “Rank” to give to its “Progress Track”.

I like to say that D&D etc. are doomed to fail in “objective simulation” attempts, because our strongest supercomputers cannot fully correctly simulate the world (i.e. they can’t simulate all the particles in the universe and their interactions). Arguably those RPG systems don’t really even truly attempt it, being more of a mashup of tropes and subjective interpretations of cherry-picked aspects of the world through the eyes of the authors of the rulebooks. OTOH, Starforged moves all those subjective interpretations back to you, and instead gives some tools for story pacing and stirring your narrative somewhat - giving you some degree of surprise by providing some random unpredictability when you decide ask it for that, to surrender some degree of control to dice.

If you are telling a romance story where the Character leaves their home town to take part in an overseas war, you could resolve the war’s result with a single “Battle” move - even though even in the fictional world it took maybe some 10 years; but your interest is rather in the subsequent interactions of the Character in the home town where their love interest stayed through all those years. The “outcomes” of this one move could in “objective” terms be humongous, maybe half the world was rewritten. But then you might use the exact same “Battle” move to resolve your Character’s encounter with the neighbour’s dog, with the outcome being maybe so tiny as torn trousers; in fact, you might actually decide to use “Enter the Fray” if that skirmish could lead to some social/romantic consequences for your Character in the town, or maybe to influencing the relationship with the neighbor. The same can happen even in an action movie - your Hans Soloist is maybe frozen in carbonite throughout some important weeks-long battle, but a 5-minute fight with his Darq Father will have you enter slow-motion and prolong it to the whole episode, because this is the part of the story you want to play more with.