Serious question: why does AW (and by extension PbtA in general) even have a GM. It seems like the role as defined above could be performed by a set of charts governing situations and die roll results.
The way I understood his explanation was that the GM in AW does not have the same authority to conduct the trad loop of explain-listen-explain. So I was musing and thinking that the model seems like a reasonable base for a GM-less game, since you can use procedural generators to "make life hard for the PCs."
I do think most trad players would balk, with good reason. I think most trad players would prefer to play out the consequences of that failure, rather than be told the story of what happened.
There's a degree of tension here: who do you think is going to come up with narrations like the one
@Campbell suggested - of the tables being turned when a roll to Go Aggro fails - if not the GM?
So anyway, the function of the GM in AW is spelled out in the rules. There are two main components to the GM's role (I'm quoting from pp 109, 116-7):
Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters. . . .
Whenever there’s a pause in the conversation and everyone looks to you to say something, choose one of these things [a GM move] and say it. . . .
Always choose a move that can follow logically from what’s going on in the game’s fiction. It doesn’t have to be the only one, or the most likely, but it does have to make at least some kind of sense.
Generally, limit yourself to a move that’ll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players’ characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion.
However, when a player’s character hands you the perfect opportunity on a golden plate, make as hard and direct a move as you like. It’s not the meaner the better, although mean is often good. Best is: make it irrevocable.
When a player’s character makes a move and the player misses the roll, that’s the cleanest and clearest example there is of an opportunity on a plate. When you’ve been setting something up and it comes together without interference, that counts as an opportunity on a plate too.
But again, unless a player’s character has handed you the opportunity, limit yourself to a move that sets up future moves, your own and the players’ characters’.
I don't think that a chart makes for very good conversation! Or is very good at extrapolating from established fiction to new fiction.
I agree with all this, which is one of the reasons I don't understand the need for or like the PbtA method of GM constraint. It is unnecessary and limiting for no benefit.
I understand where they come from, I just don't think they are necessary. Systemic attempts to bind the GM to a prescribed set of outcomes feel like either trying to turn the GM into a processor, or trying to defend the players against some mythical viking hat bad GM. I get that people like PbtA games, but I can't abide the basic design goals as you articulated them.
I don't think you are really appreciating the significance of the rules that govern what a GM of an AW game says, as set out in what I just quoted above.
Think about how often, in typical D&D play, the GM makes hard moves (ie irrevocable consequences for the players)
without anyone having failed a roll, or otherwise handing an opportunity on a plate: for instance, a player says their PC walks through the doorway and the GM calls for a save because they triggered the trap; or the player looks in the chest hoping to find something-or-other, and the GM tells them it's not there; or the player asks the NPC, "So what's going on with <something or other the PC cares about>" and the NPC replies "I don't know".
And now imagine a game in which the GM can't make those hard moves, and has to make soft moves instead. Think about how that would ramify everything else in the game: the significance and function of prep, how consequences flow from action resolution, who gets to decide what is at stake in the fictional situations.
That's what flows from the rules for GMing AW. You can't get those benefits without the rules.
