As I've posted multiple times upthread, the technical genius of Apocalypse World is that the play of the game (following the rules) will produce a story - in the sense of rising action, climax/crisis, and character change/development -
without anyone having to sit down to tell a story, to create rising action, to change a character.
All the player has to do is play their PC, based on their understanding of the character's needs and desires. Contra
@Lanefan, they do not need to have a sense of the character's "story arc", and in fact that would be an unhelpful way to approach the play of the character.
All the GM has to do is to make moves in accordance with the rules of the game - soft moves most of the time, but hard moves when the rules permit and that is what follows from the established fiction.
(Vincent Baker has pages and pages of of blogs, easily accessible by Googling "lumpley" or "anyway", in which one can see the technical work being done. You can see one key one
here, in which Baker set out the relationship between the character, as an imagined person, and the "character sheet" which lists the mechanical resources the players are able to bring to bear so as to change the shared fiction.)
To each their own.
The first version of D&D that I owned was Moldvay Basic. In its Foreword, it offers the following picture of what play might be like:
I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up. Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes. Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers. The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave. . .
I unwrapped the sword which the mysterious cleric had given me. The sword was golden-tinted steel. Its hilt was set with a rainbow collection of precious gems. I shouted my battle cry and charged.
My charge caught the dragon by surprise. Its titanic jaws snapped shut just inches from my face. I swung the golden sword with both arms. The swordblade bit into the dragon's neck and continued through to the other side. With an earth-shaking crash, the dragon dropped dead at my feet. The magic sword had saved my life and ended the reign of the dragon-tyrant. The countryside was freed and I could return as a hero.
It's virtually impossible to produce play like that in Moldvay Basic: there is no rule for mysterious hermits giving dragon-slaying swords (the rules for acquiring treasure are all about taking loot from dungeon rooms); there is no rule for decapitating dragons with a single blow; the whole orientation of play has nothing to do with freeing the countryside from the reign of the dragon tyrant (cf the example of play in the text, in which the response to Black Dougal dying is to transfer useful gear from his backpack to the pack of a still-living PC: that
does capture the general orientation of play).
But for me that has always been the promise of RPGing: playing a character in a story that is reminiscent of the inspirational material.
Game systems that actually deliver that are, for me, not counter-intuitive at all.