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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8416790" data-attributes="member: 6993955">Something to keep firmly in mind here as we slide back and forth between AW specifically and PbtA more generally is that the design choices made for those games are not all the same. The decision about, for example, what moves to include is a direct design choice based on what kind of conflict the designer wants to be the focus of the game. Baker makes this pretty clear is his series of blog posts on the <a href="https://lumpley.games/2019/12/30/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-1/" target="_blank">AW engine as a design tool</a>. So for AW, the kinds of conflict Baker wanted the game to focus on is not at all mystery solving, and so the moves available reflect that. What Baker did want the game to focus on is interpersonal conflict (among other things), and the moves again reflect that design choice. He describes moves, as an idea in Powered by the Apocalypse, thusly:I also said that the basic moves give structure and a certain order to the players’ conversations: who asks questions and who answers them, what you should say yourself and how you should treat the things that the other players say. I called it “permission and expectations.”Anyway, my point was that with different design choices come different ways the 'conversation' of the game is shaped.  PbtA certainly can do things like persuade and some of the less aggro social interaction type things when that's something the designer wants it to do. Even then, the focus is still going to be about conflict though. In terms of what that looks like for a police procedural I think it's helpful to think about a show like Castle, or really any decent investigative show. What moves the narrative along (the conversation of the game for our purposes) is interaction between the characters as they bounce off each other, and conflicts that arise in the course of solving the mystery. Pretty much any example of an episode will feature rising stakes and snowballing complications. These conflicts sometimes take the form of tension with superiors (like in X-Files, say) or could be direct conflict with a bad guy (too many examples to mention). Even when the characters find clues, there are stakes. Will they find the killer in time? Will side character X get got? How many rules will be broken and what will happen as a result? And so on and so forth. PbtA can do all those things just fine, and in a game specifically designed to spotlight them would do extremely well.That's my two cents anyway, and I hope my explanation is cogent. I haven't had my coffee yet, so no promises.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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