Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="thefutilist" data-source="post: 9840921" data-attributes="member: 7044566">There are generic narrativist principles that Apocalypse World doesn’t spell out that are far more important than most of the principles in the actual text. I’m not saying that a text necessarily should spell them out but how that hole gets plugged determines a whole load about play.Say you have an NPC Hardholder is using their brutish strength to make a better world. In their background you’ve decided that this is mainly because they want a better world for their lover. One of the PC’s kills that lover and there is a lull in the conversation.The MC thinks off-screen. News of the death will reach the hardholder, what’s he’s going to make of it? How will it change his plans, if at all?The advice in the book is ‘think about what they would do in that situation.’ Which I’m all for but it leaves the whole ‘how to play a character’ thing down to the MC. Which maybe it should because this is some fundamental role-play stuff but, eh, theory around playing a character and what that means goes a long way. Sorcerer annotated for instance, pretty much says a similar thing but it takes pains to say. NPC’s can only ever really do three things: continue with their priority, escalate/double down, change priorities. Is that extra bit of advice helpful? Could be. No in itself I don’t think but in terms of how the artistry around character expression and what means for how theme manifests (premise is addressed), it’s a good model.Or how about the stuff we’ve been talking about recently. How the constraints of fictional positioning work such that prompts and inspiration seem to give the appearance and sense of a non-contrived fictional causality. The AW book even flat out states that it’s the goal (and kudos to it). Does make AW seem real, never say the name of your move, disclaim responsibility actually get you there?Or what about play to find out, play to find out what and how do I do that? Yes it’s in the text but I’m one of the very few people I know who can immediately point to the various bits to explain what it means. Not because I’m a good reader of texts but it’s just so obvious what must be in there given it’s a narrativist game in a specific family.Although it’s possible the crux is, Apocalypse World tells you how to play it but only 12 people read and understood the rules.Now I changed my mind about my main argument an hour to two after I wrote it. I was thinking about our conversations around fictional positioning and how it’s brought even more clarity to me and what I’m doing. In part these conversations were inspired by Apocalypse World but they were inspired by it in reference to DnD4, Champions and role-playing more generally. So yeah, it’s good for games to have principles but they don’t exist in a silo, they exist as part of a general art, narrativist roleplaying in this case.I’m almost certainly straw-manning your position a bit here but it allows me to rant so...</blockquote>

Verification