64. Nudge the players to have their characters make moves.

Start with the characters with beginning-of-session moves: the hardholder, the hocus, the savvyhead, if you’ve got them. That’s now, the first beginning of the first session. Have them make those moves and follow what happens.

Then throughout the session, remind everyone to look at their character sheets to see what moves they might make. Especially, listen in on the characters’ conversations. As soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody. “So that was kind of a sharp thing to say. Anybody want to read anybody?” Situations too: “hey, this situation seems kind of charged to me. Want to read it?”

I almost skipped this section. Nudging the players to have their characters make moves only makes sense. It’s the first session, possibly even the first time they are playing the game, so use the first session of get everyone used to how it works. Get those moves triggering and dice rolling and everyone will quickly learn how the fiction and the moves go together. Of course you do that.

But then I started thinking about the suggestion that “as soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody.” What an especially great thing to have the players do! I have already spoken about how the character creation process is about learning to negotiate our conversation and our assent to the fiction being created (see posts 27-30). Here in the first session, we players are learning about the conversational possibilities that Apocalypse World presents, and one of the coolest things the game does is allow us to ask personal and insightful questions of our co-players’ characters through Read a Person and Read a Stich. Having everyone read everyone else means that characters will be asking each other what their really feeling are, what they intend to do, what they wish the questioning character would do, and what one character can do to influence the behavior of another character. With everyone talking to everyone, that would make for a meaty and revealing conversation, not only showing the players how insightful their characters are but showing them how they can engage with and think about the other characters in the scenes, PCs and NPCs alike. The conversation reveals desires, goals, inclinations, preferences—all the inside things that make a character exciting to us and that are sometimes difficult to reveal to others. Yeah, go and do that in your first session.

This bullet point does not contribute to the tilting landscape constructed in the first session. Instead, it helps create an exciting and exploratory conversation that will help the characters maneuver through that tilting landscape and identify charged situations and interactions.