44. Ask provocative questions and build on the answers.

Everybody loves this part of Apocalypse World. In a game that wants the conversation to be as anchored in the Fiction as possible, questions are a phenomenal way to make that Fiction rich and layered.

Start simple: “What’s your living space like?” “Who’s known each other longest?” But as play proceeds, ask for immediate and intimate details of the characters’ experiences. In his playtest, Mikael made himself a list of question prompts: “Feeling, Sound, Detail: thing, thoughts, Pose, Smell, Need, Irritant,Texture, In sight, Relations, Taste, Detail: place.” They led him to ask questions like “Why can you only fit two people in the cabin of the Tank?” “How do the people of the Tent City make you feel?” “How do her lips feel under your palm?” Very good stuff (84-85)

The key word in the principle is of course “provocative.” Asking questions is all good and fine, but the rich stuff comes out because of questions that provoke—provoke thought, introspection, examination, and details details details. Some questions look for narrative details that impact the story at plot level, such as the limited seating in a tank or the physical layout of a living space. But the really rich material is when we get a glimpse inside the heads of the characters, such as how the people in Tent City make you feel and how her lips feel on your palm. Those are the moments that we love because it makes the Fiction rich and real. “Immediate and intimate details,” that’s the secret. Talk about making Apocalypse World seem real! In these moments, characters are more than their actions show. In fact, we can have a productive tension between their feelings and their actions. A standard saying in story-focused RPGs is that if it doesn’t happen on screen, it doesn’t happen. But while these moments of insight don’t really happen on screen, they are every bit as real as actions because of the way that they enter the Fiction. The moments allow RPGs to go beyond the limitations of movies and TV and become more like novels. After you have played this way, not doing so feels incomplete.

Once you have the player’s answer, build on it. I mean three things by that: (1) barf apocalyptica upon it, by adding details and imagery of your own; (2) refer to it later in play, bringing it back into currency; and (3) use it to inform your own developing apocalyptic aesthetic, incorporating it—and more importantly, its implications—into your own vision (85).

The second half of the principle is to “build on the answers,” and this paragraph gives us three specific ways to do that. While all the players are contributing to building the Apocalypse World of the game, it is the MC’s job to bring the world to life. The MC has the prep work of daydreaming apocalyptica. The MC has final say over whether extra vehicles or prosthetics are appropriate to the world of the game. The MC, in short, is responsible for the overall vision and cohesion of the world—how can she “make Apocalypse World seem real” if she doesn’t have final say in the physics and details of the world?

So barfing apocalyptica upon an answer serves three purposes; (1) it allows the MC to both let the answer stand on its own and fit into the world created; (2) it demands that the MC have Apocalypse World ever encroaching upon the characters, corrupting even their senses and thoughts; and (3) it makes the questions and answers a more complete conversation, bringing the MC back into the construction of the Fiction.

Referring to the answers later demands that the MC make the answer have significance. Again, there are a couple of reasons for this. First, as a player, you want your invited contributions to matter. If whenever you answered a question you believed that the answer didn’t matter, you would have no motivation to invest anything into your answer. Your contributions would be meaningless. Second, if those “intimate and immediate details” were cool but pointless, they would have no weight in the overall story we are creating. If a novel gave you insight into a character but never did anything with it, it would be unsatisfying, and it would give you the sense that the author was trying to pad her word count. Bringing these details back into currency is just part of good storytelling, and Apocalypse World wants to make moments of good storytelling baked into the very act of playing the game.

Even though the MC has final say in the aesthetics of the Apocalypse World in any given game, the MC is not allowed to have the only say. Incorporating the answers and their implications into your own vision demands that the MC allow the answers to alter the very DNA of the world in some way. Remember, this is a game that insists that you not bring a plot or storyline to the table. The MC has to react to the players, to both their characters and their answers to provocative questions.

It’s especially important to ask, the first time each character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, what that’s like for her. Maybe it’s the same for everybody, maybe it’s different. And after the first time, always, always add details of your own (85)

The world’s psychic maelstrom is a big question mark in every game of Apocalypse World. What is it? How does it work? Did it cause the apocalypse or was it born from the apocalypse? During character creation, the MC is given a couple of sentences to say about it to the player, but that’s it. It’s not something that is discussed in detail, and it is certainly not something that should be worked out before play begins. At no point are the players prompted to decide anything about the psychic maelstrom before someone triggers the move. Instead, those details are developed through the individual contributions prompted by provocative questions. The second player to trigger the move can agree entirely with what the first player said, tweak it in some major or minor way, or do something entirely different. The more the move is triggered, the more details we get, and the nature of the maelstrom slowly gets defined as the mystery is answered for us as it is for our characters. This method creates necessarily more interesting and compelling maelstroms than we would have cooked up as a group. More importantly, our play thus far will inform the maelstrom, which will in turn inform our play, which means that thematically, the maelstrom will fit more reliably into our world than if we invented it before play. That is the beauty and power of creating narrative through questions.