39. address the characters

Our look at the MC’s principles continues with the 2nd of the 11 principles:

Address yourself to the characters, not the players. “Marie, where are you this morning?” not “Julia, where’s Marie this morning?” “A woman comes up to you, her name’s Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.” It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt, not exposition straight from you to the player.

The typical reading of this principle is that it is designed to achieve immersion. If I want you thinking and seeing things from your character’s perspective, then addressing you as the character is a good way to gently push you to do that. I think that’s a fair reading. But I don’t think it’s a complete reading.

Immersion is not an end in itself for Apocalypse World. Immersion has the specific purpose of keeping the Fiction front and center at all times. It’s not that the players need to keep their head in their characters but that they need to keep their heads in the Fiction. As I’ve already said, the game insists that the players make all their moves in the Fiction and the MC’s principles are designed to make that easy, natural, and instinctive.

The second example in the passage above is the key to this principle. “’A woman comes up to you, her name is Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.’ It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt.” The advantage of addressing the character here is that a piece of information moves from being exposition to being a part of the Fiction itself. Marie, like all the characters in Apocalypse World, is observant of everyone she meets. She reads body language, watches for telling glances and hidden desires, extrapolates from what she knows about people—all of this gives her insight into the non-verbal communication of her world. Pelt’s anxiousness moves from being a free-floating fact into a set of tangible tells in the Fiction, and while Julia is simply receiving those facts, Marie is interpreting signs and arriving at conclusions. We see this in books and TV and movies all the time. Smart characters knowing what other smart characters are up to and then filling us the audience in on their wisdom. By addressing the character instead of the players, the details of the conversation become a part of the Fiction itself.

As a side note, the unspoken hero of this example is “saying what honesty demands.” Here, the MC is being “scrupulous, even generous with the truth” by telling the player not only that Pelt is anxious but why she is anxious. Had the MC been anything less than generous, Marie wouldn’t know what Pelt wants and might not find out if Julia doesn’t ask the right questions or make the right inferences. The scene could wander with the MC giving clues in her description of Pelt and Julie potentially missing those clues. That kind of scene is both clumsy and un-fun. Instead, you can address the character directly , tell her what she deduces with honesty and move on to the meat of the matter. All of these principles lean on each other to make MCing AW what it is, as the examples in this section continually remind us.