63. look for where they're not in control

 . . . but do . . . Look for where they’re not in control.

If yours are like mine, they’ll want to be in control of everything, all tidy and secure. Of course they can’t be. What’s on their perimeter, on their borders, their horizon? What reaches into their little slice of world, what passes through it? What does it depend upon? Who do they need, and who else needs what they have?

“I wonder what they’ll do when their neighbors get hungry.” “I wonder what they’ll do when the weather goes wrong.” “I wonder what they’d do to protect their well.” “I wonder what will happen when Dog Head stops taking orders from Keeler.” “I wonder what would happen if Bran couldn’t get power to his weirdshop.”

And . . .

Push there. The MC move for pushing is announce future badness. “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning.” “Keeler, Dog Head does what you say, but, it’s like, he keeps looking at you for a minute after you give him the order. What do you do?” “Bran, while you’re working, just for a few seconds all your lights dim and the constant low hum of your workspace? You hear it just start to slow. Everything kicks back in after just a second or two and you can keep working. What do you do?” (99-100)

There is no drama or mystery in those places that the characters have control. Those are their spaces to control as they please. But through the playbooks and Hx, everything the players construct at the beginning of the first session, a world beyond the characters’ control comes into being. The game makes it so that we always open on “a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements” (97). That is necessarily a world in which the characters have very little control. It’s a world of vulnerabilities, interdependence, and resource scarcity. That gives the MC a near endless supply of places to “push.”

The list of MC wonderings is a beautiful thing. It’s like watching Act I in a movie or the first episode of a TV series and noting all the plot potential of the story about to unfold. There are all these places that things can go wrong, paths that the story could follow. But unlike those other art forms where the story is crafted long before we actually experience it, here everything is still wide open, and each possibility is as likely as any other to make it into the story. So we are encouraged to write it all down in this first session and even to start pushing right away on that which is most interesting to us. And it’s an intuitive process turning your wondering into a push; what would they do to protect their well? To find out all you have to do is threaten their well. Done.

That’s the heart of playing to find out what happens, yeah? By structuring the MC’s engagement with the emergent story as wondering observation, the game demands that the MC play to find out what happens. You have questions, the answers to which can only be discovered through play. The MC may surprise the players by threatening the well, but then the players get to surprise the MC by their reaction.

“The MC move for pushing is announce future badness.” This is one of those statements that seems super obvious once it is said. Of course you push on characters by announcing future badness. The question this statement (and paragraph) raises for me is how scenes are framed in Apocalypse World. There are no explicit scene framing rules laid out in the text. And since the MC’s powers are governed by the text, it seems odd that scene framing power is not a designated authority given to the MC. This passage seems to suggest that “announce future badness” is a scene setting tool as well as a move to pull out in the middle of a scene. To say, “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning,” is to set the scene via announcing future badness. Presumably, when the time for a scene change comes the players will look to the MC to say something, which lets the MC make a move. That move can simultaneously set a new scene. In fact, I suppose any move can be incorporated into a scene setup, though “announce future badness” seems like it would be the most common move to use in this way. You could also slide into a scene with a question (say, “okay, where do you go looking for Dog Head?”) and then introducing some future badness in response to the answer. Either way, it seems interesting (I really want to say “important,” but I’m not sure that’s right) that scene framing is approached in this way.