41. conversing in fiction

Before we move on to the 5th MC principle I need to take a moment to amend yesterday’s post and tie it together with a post I made last week, No. 37. (I’ve started numbering the posts to make them easier to find and reference if necessary.)

Yesterday, I looked at why the PC’s moves and the MC’s principles forced the players to make their moves in the Fiction and cloak their moves in the Fiction, respectively. I proposed some theories that I stand behind, but I realized that I overlooked the main reason, a reason so obvious I am embarrassed to have missed it.

Why does Apocalypse World force the conversation to always be about the Fiction? Because the designers of Apocalypse World want the conversation created by the game to be about the Fiction. Yeah, I know: duh.

When the players make their moves, they have to do so in terms of the Fiction. The moves are written and structured so that all the conversation about the moves is about the Fiction. The MC’s principles demand that the MC present her non-Fiction-focused decisions as Fiction to the players, which means that the conversation continues to be about the Fiction.

I would not be surprised to learn that one of the design goals for Apocalypse World was to create an RPG in which 97% of the conversation was about the Fiction. The moves all use the same die roll so what to roll does not need to be discussed. The stats are written in such a way that they are easily found and added to the roll without discussion. The results are standardized so there is no discussion about how to interpret the die roll.

The character creation is ordered in such a way that conversations about negotiating assent and establishing the way the individual play group will navigate their conversation takes place before the group dives into the Fiction, so that once it does, it can keep the conversation there.

This is not about immersion in the sense that you think and feel like your character, because the mechanics are popping up all the time to make players think authorially and directorally. But it is a kind of immersion in the sense that the conversation itself is immersed in the Fiction.

And as I said before, that dedication to making the conversation as much about the Fiction as possible is the very thing that makes the game (and the system that has come from it) so popular.