154. Subterfuge moves, Snowballs, and Resolution

Just a small, hasty thought today. 
 
As I look at the battle moves in Apocalypse World, and specifically the subterfuge moves, I’ve been thinking a lot about the snowball, and the discussion on the Barf Forth forum that I mentioned back in post no. 149 about the changes that the Bakers made to seize by force for the second edition in order to make the move a battle move rather than a basic move.
 
I link to and quote a lot of the forum thread in my earlier post, so I’ll just quote one small relevant passage here:

It's not about simplifying seizing by force at all. It's about putting more of the move's consequences off into the snowball, like I've been saying, to create the opening for the other battle moves to lead and follow it. Explicitly follow on the miss, implicitly lead and follow on a hit. (reply #92, http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=8835.60)

The thing that I’m interested in is the way moves are built to “put [their] consequences off into the snowball” rather than resolving the conflict or the situation entirely.  What this reminds me of is the once-hot topic of task resolution vs. conflict resolution.   (You can read Vincent’s early thoughts on this distinction on his anyway blog here: http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html (it’s in the fourth post, titled “Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution”)).  Task resolution, at its most basic understanding, is that the thing being resolved is the success or failure of a specific action without a larger set of actions, such as a single sword swing in a battle, or an attempt to move silently over one defined area as part of a larger silent approach.  The scale can be vast or narrow.  In conflict resolution, the things being resolved is the entirety of the conflict at issue, the whole of that specific battle or of that specific infiltration.
 
Moves in Apocalypse World resolve one situation into a different situation where the fiction has significantly shifted in one way or another.  But the set of battle moves are designed to be interconnected as the fiction requires so that they can tumble from one into the other.  For example, the subterfuge moves are specifically designed to “allow the players’ characters to get into or out of a battle on their own terms” (174).  So when you are acting as the bait or the cat or the mouse, the move is designed to shape the fictional positioning at the start of a battle (or in the case of the mouse, to avoid an disadvantageous battle altogether).  When you push the consequences of a move off into the snowball, you are saying to some extent that his action is potentially part of a larger set of actions, like a single task within a larger conflict.  Moves that result in a resolved (and changed) situation are a kind of guided conflict resolution. 
 
Of course moves will snowball even when they aren’t specifically designed to lead into or out of specific situations.  The snowball is then a result of the choices that the MC and the players make with their individual moves, riding the changing situation with escalating actions until they play themselves out to a momentarily stabilized situation.
 
All that is just a thought.  I’m not convinced it’s a very useful thought, but if I don’t write it down my brain is just going to keep playing with the idea and bugging me, so I appreciate your indulgence.  I know that the concept of task vs. conflict resolution is no longer in any way important to the way the Bakers think about RPG design, so I’m not suggesting that this was a comment that they were making through Apocalypse World.