Help Me Get "Apocalypse World" and PbtA games in general.

[andreszarta]

Well.... I quoted @Manbearcat from early in the thread. It seems that there are 'non-move things' which GMs do in AW (PbtAs generally) which don't really have the theoretical status of moves... OTOH, @andreszarta fairly convincingly argues that there is no 'scene framing' as such in AW (and this may differ from other later PbtA games, which sometimes specifically use this kind of terminology and process description).

So, its a bit ambiguous. Is it a 'move' every time the GM in AW describes some new fiction? I'm not sure it is all that productive a discussion overall, and not really answerable. I think its better to consider that when Vince wrote AW (and certainly the authors of DW state this) the idea of 'GM moves' was described as "doing what GM's normally do." It isn't really correct for us to think of these things in terms of it being a move or not a move, etc. GMs do what GMs do, and PbtA can describe these things as moves, but the more important concept is that the GM is following the agenda, principles of play, and techniques and process in order to actually play (or not) the game as it was envisaged, or maybe in a different way.
Click to expand...

I'm gonna push back just a tiny bit on this particular issue. We're not fully disagreeing, but not fully agreeing either:

I think its better to consider that when Vince wrote AW (and certainly the authors of DW state this) the idea of 'GM moves' was described as "doing what GM's normally do."

I'm not gonna speak about how Dungeon World thinks about this. Different game, possibly different goals.

I think there is some oversight in suggesting that Vincent wrote AW with the idea that 'GM Moves' is just doing what GM's normally do. Here's an interesting thread about that: anyway: The MC, a GM

Vincent:

"MCing" is a way to GM that I didn't invent, I'm just explaining it and providing some good tools for it. I expect lots of people, encountering the game, to say "but this is just how you GM any game." I hope to win them over with the quality of the tools it provides—and just wait until you see them, they are some high-quality tools—but still some people won't be impressed. That's fine too. They don't need it.

I hope to win them over with the quality of the tools it provides.

Vincent and Meguey didn't just reframe with different words all the stuff GMs normally do. They created different tools for that type of stuff. Tools have specific functions to solve specific problems.

MC Moves are a tool that helps us achieve our Agenda and Principles of play. We may play without them if we want, but we would be missing out.

Vincent actually calls it out here: anyway: Concentric Game Design

Forget your MC moves? That's cool. You're missing out, but as long as you remember your agenda and most of your principles and what to always say, you'll be okay.

MC moves exist at the second layer of AW's structure. You can ignore and fall back to "The Conversation", just like @AbdulAlhazred says, and you will be ok. You'll be missing out on some great tools to achieve your Agenda and Principles, but you are free to substitute if you have a better solution in mind.

I wouldn't, however, agree with @AbdulAlhazred in that it isn't correct for us to think in terms of things said being a move or not a move.

After all, MC moves are the one tool Vincent and Meguey provide us with to solve the problem of: "How do I contribute meaningfully to the fiction while pursuing my agendas and principles?" It's their solution to "Should I be thinking about what each of my contributions means in terms of the game's structure? Are there certain things that I shouldn't say?" They release you from a lot of the cognitive effort that monitoring your own contributions to the fiction would normally take.

They are an immensely important part of the game unless we decide not to use them, but then we have to solve the question of "How do I contribute meaningfully to the fiction while pursuing my agendas and principles?" for ourselves with a different tool or directive.

 

[Manbearcat]

I will try one more time to explain myself. I am talking about "suffer harm" not the move "Inflict harm (as established)".

This is the passage I am referring to, from page 206 of AW2E under the heading "The Harm Moves":
----------
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 -1 harm.
The suffering harm move adds a wrinkle, a little unpredictability, to the baseline of harm above.
----------
It appears this is optional by the text, so I was asking for insight on when to use it versus not.

Alright, that isn't what I thought you were asking at all.

You said "when do you roll a harm move?" It wasn't clicking that you were asking "when do you make the when you suffer harm" move?" Now that you've clarified I got you.

So you always make the when you suffer harm move when the trigger has been met. The trigger is met when you actually suffer harm (meaning the Harm is greater than your armor so 2 Harm - 1 Armor = 1 Harm suffered). Its not optional. What is optional is if you want to make the suffer harm move when 0 harm or -1 harm has been suffered (so no Harm has actually been suffered).

Personally? I never make the move on that occasion (again, technically it isn't triggered).

Again, as I said prior, what I might do is just outright trade Harm 1 for 1 for Complications (like it says at the bottom of the move is the GM's call on a 6- roll), but I do that before we even get there (I do the math in my head about what harm would be left over after armor and trade some or all of it 1 Harm for 1 Complication).

 

[Reynard]

So you always make the when you suffer harm move when the trigger has been met. The trigger is met when you actually suffer harm (meaning the Harm is greater than your armor so 2 Harm - 1 Armor = 1 Harm suffered). Its not optional. What is optional is if you want to make the suffer harm move when 0 harm or -1 harm has been suffered (so no Harm has actually been suffered).

I was under the impress that "can" I highlighted was doing some work, since the language tends to be specific. That is, it doesn't say "Choose one" as other moves do, it says "can choose one." But fair enough. Always do that thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was under the impress that "can" I highlighted was doing some work, since the language tends to be specific. That is, it doesn't say "Choose one" as other moves do, it says "can choose one." But fair enough. Always do that thing.

Yeah, I'd tend towards the less draconian outcomes at first, and see what happens. You can always turn the screws a bit tighter later on if it feels like the PCs are getting off lighter than they should. I mean, PCs do get some 'plot armor', but its a brutal world out there, and as Hobbs put it, life is "nasty, brutish, and short." lol.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yeah. If we're at a point that the MC is making moves against the players, then it's either to frame in new conflict because we're already in a conflict and it makes sense to do so (golden opportunities and the like). If we're doing free play, outside of pressure, and no one wants to include pressure, we're good. This is, however, outside the procedures of play given in AW. It's just something you're doing. I'd still say that blocking based on GM fiat even here is poor implementation of the agenda/principles of play.

I would say if there is daylight between on us on Apocalypse World its the bolded.

The A Few More Things To Do on p93 (121 if you're looking at AW1) and The First Session on 96 - 104 discusses these things. You're:

• probing and prodding to see if they'll be provoked to make a move (and take the lead).
• wondering and wandering aloud and together.
• digressing and seeing where that goes (does someone pick it up a detail and run with it, charging a situation?).
• focusing on worthwhile ephemera for subsequent play to feature (like maps).
• asking questions but saving the answers for later (basically surveilling and taking mental notes that may turn into Threats).

There is elaborate intel gathering and subtle encouraging of folks to, effectively, make their own kickers organically as you play. Its certainly within the scope of play of AW. Its effectively the Info Gathering/Free Play portion of Blades that orients and nails down subsequent play (its just that you don't shift to a new phase of scene-based play like in Blades' Scores...you just enter charged situations and make moves that snowball until the situation resolves which leads to new content > rinse/repeat). EDIT - I think this is probably as good as any way to think about the loop of AW where we go from "not-conflict charged" to "conflict charged." Its like the IG/FP portion of Blades (not-conflict charged) where we're meandering around Duskvol/Crew interests until we make some moves or frame some scenes and settle in on where our conflict will be tonight (and then move to a conflict-charged Score). Its just that this happens without a "phase-shift" like in Blades.

I would say the other disagreement is probably around what constitutes "GM fiat" and "blocking" here. In my mind, GM fiat is contingent upon a measure of anarchy or opacity or lack of codification of constraining agenda and principles such that a GM is making situation framing, consequence, win con/loss con decisions in a vacuum or based on some massively zoomed out and amorphous ethic (like "fun"). Jonathon Harper's diagrams are helpful here (if you remember them). GM fiat is basically the inverse of best practice constrained and principally constrained GMing. Best practices and principles that effectively amount to "find the fun" are neither constraining nor particularly guiding in any meaningful way; they're basically "GM feel (exclusive) constrained." If no one can articulate the process (because its all "feel"), you're almost certainly there. It becomes compounded (or perhaps revealed) when play becomes increasingly unmoored to and unmediated by "system's say."

Hence, why I don't think GM fiat is applicable here with AW.

"Blocking" is a another (more complex imo) subject. It intersects with the above, but its also system dependent. Apocalypse World grants the GM significant framing and zoom leeway and responsibility. However, at the same time, the agenda + principles + conversation structure + move structure both lets and encourages players to immediately wrest control of situation from the GM and effectively NOPE it into another direction. Grabbing a piece of situation and focusing on it via conversation and/or answering a question purposefully in a particular way and/or Working Gigs (and filling out the Gig-space and resolving) and/or dealing with Barter stuff and/or Reading a Sitch/Person and/or Opening Up Brain and nail down the topic gives players huge "kicker" or player fiat capacity to wrest control of trajectory of play before we even get to playbook-specific stuff.

So if we have a situation that doesn't feel particularly charged or it feels like the zoom isn't where the player wants it to be or the player feels like their "block-ish meter is going off" (lets say) because of any of that...well, the players can aggressively change the zoom or "charge the situation" or alter the orientation of the unfolding situation toward a desired bent by overt conversation or by making moves. The game is designed to basically allow player-authored kickers to just emerge organically through play (from handling lifestyle at the opening of the session to Working Gigs to making moves in order to create situation framing to making moves or engaging in overt conversation to orient or reorient framing or charge a situation that isn't sufficiently charged to their liking).

---

Outside of that, I definitely agree that you can GM Apocalypse World better or worse from one session to the next (same goes for playing it). I'm just not sure "fiat" and "blocking" are the things that come to mind. The things that come to mind for me are things like:

• Not knowing the rules
• Crappy or dynamism-challenged apocalyptica (from threat handling to scarcity vs abundance to stat/relationship/playbook stuff)
• Leading an uninteresting conversation (provocative situations, interesting decision-space, consequences-space that compels and haunts)
• Not being good at following players leads and handing off situation authority to them as they step up
• Not being curious enough or aggressive/bold enough or disciplined enough (or all 4 simultaneously)

 

[pemerton]

if we have a situation that doesn't feel particularly charged or it feels like the zoom isn't where the player wants it to be or the player feels like their "block-ish meter is going off" (lets say) because of any of that...well, the players can aggressively change the zoom or "charge the situation" or alter the orientation of the unfolding situation toward a desired bent by overt conversation or by making moves.

That last bit - by making moves - seems to serve the same sort of function, in AW, as in BW when a player uses a Wise or Circles to reframe the situation to something more interesting to them. Different techniques, both in terms of how the player does it (fictional positioning matters more in AW) and how it's resolved; but both allowing the player to seize control of the shape/direction of the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

Vincent didn't just reframe with different words all the stuff GMs normally do. He created different tools for that type stuff. Tools have specific functions to solve specific problems.

MC Moves are a tool that helps us achieve our Agenda and Principles of play. We may play without them if we want, but we would be missing out.

<snip>

MC moves are the one tool Vincent and Meguey provide us with to solve the problem of: "How do I contribute meaningfully to the fiction while pursuing my agendas and principles?" It's their solution to "Should I be thinking about what each of my contributions means in terms of the game's structure? Are there certain things that I shouldn't say?" They release you from a lot of the cognitive effort that monitoring your own contributions to the fiction would normally take.

They are an immensely important part of the game

Upthread you linked to the forum post where Baker says this:

The text says, p9, "like any conversation, you take turns, but it's not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others' ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine."

You know how a normal conversation works, that's how Apocalypse World works too.

The only time the rules impose a structure on the conversation is when multiple players want to have their characters do things at the same time, especially when they're at odds with each other. You can read about that on p132-133.

The lists of MC moves are there to remind you to say more things, a wider variety of things, not to limit you to saying a strict set of things.​

How do you see what Baker says here as fitting with the importance/centrality of MC moves? Does it adequately capture that centrality to think of them as pointers and reminders?

(This isn't a gotcha. I think there is a mild tension between what I've quoted Baker as saying, and the concentric diagram with the conversation on the outside and MC moves one step in; and I'm interested in how we should resolve that tension. The notion of points/reminders would be one way of doing that, and isn't meant to trivialise the role of MC moves. But there might be other resolutions that I'm not thinking of.)

 

[andreszarta]

Upthread you linked to the forum post where Baker says this:

The text says, p9, "like any conversation, you take turns, but it's not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others' ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine."​

​

You know how a normal conversation works, that's how Apocalypse World works too.​

​

The only time the rules impose a structure on the conversation is when multiple players want to have their characters do things at the same time, especially when they're at odds with each other. You can read about that on p132-133.​

​

The lists of MC moves are there to remind you to say more things, a wider variety of things, not to limit you to saying a strict set of things.​

How do you see what Baker says here as fitting with the importance/centrality of MC moves? Does it adequately capture that centrality to think of them as pointers and reminders?

(This isn't a gotcha. I think there is a mild tension between what I've quoted Baker as saying, and the concentric diagram with the conversation on the outside and MC moves one step in; and I'm interested in how we should resolve that tension. The notion of points/reminders would be one way of doing that, and isn't meant to trivialise the role of MC moves. But there might be other resolutions that I'm not thinking of.)

Very interesting question! Before I'm able to answer I just want to make sure we're both reading the diagram in a similar way and I'm understanding you correctly.

The diagram is like an onion, right? At the center (its core): the conversation. Closer to its surface, playbooks, character moves, custom moves etc... If we DON'T plan on using some of these thins, we look inward to find support in the game, yes?

I guess I'm just a little confused when you say:

the conversation on the outside and MC moves one step in

I would think of it in exactly the opposite way; the conversation in the inside and the MC moves one step out.

 

[andreszarta]

I suspect, though, that my answer will probably make reference to these two diagrams of Vincent's.

 

[pemerton]

Very interesting question! Before I'm able to answer I just want to make sure we're both reading the diagram in a similar way and I'm understanding you correctly.

The diagram is like an onion, right? At the center (its core): the conversation. Closer to its surface, playbooks, character moves, custom moves etc... If we DON'T plan on using some of these thins, we look inward to find support in the game, yes?

I guess I'm just a little confused when you say:


I would think of it in exactly the opposite way; the conversation in the inside and the MC moves one step out.

Sure. I wasn't particular focused on the direction of movement. Going back to your picture, the conversation is kind-of at the bottom and we step "up" to the other layers. (My directional metaphor was probably shaped by thinking about what we start with, and then what we add on - I wasn't focused on the metaphor of "collapse" that Baker uses, which, as you say, requires the directional metaphor to be inwards to the core.)

What I'm curious about is articulating, with some precision, what it is that MC moves add to the conversation. As I posted, I have one thought - pointers and reminders - which I don't think is trivial. But maybe there's more to say than that?