86. Custom Moves

There is an entire chapter devoted to making custom moves in Apocalypse World. In interviews, Vincent Baker has said that it became immediately clear to him that people were going to hack the game, so he wanted to give them the proper tools for doing so, even going so far as to create a variety of moves to demonstrate different ways to build them.

But here in the Threats chapter, Vincent and Meguey don’t just give permission to the reader to build new moves, they actively encourage it, even insisting upon it:

Whenever you make a disease threat or a disease-like threat, you should create a custom move for it like “when you use an angel kit to treat someone infected . . .” (119).

In this section, the text makes it clear that building custom moves for threats is an integral part of being an MC. The primary explanation is that you’ll want to “punch . . . up” some threats:

For some threats, you’ll want to punch them up with their own custom moves. You create them.

Punch them up is a way of saying breathe life into them. Punch them up is a way of saying give your idea and flavor mechanical weight. Punch them up is a way of saying use the language of the game to make your threats a structured and interactive part of the conversation. The examples show us that a custom move takes a facet of the threat and puts gears and teeth on it:

When you go into Dremmer’s territory, roll+sharp. On a 10+, you can spot and avoid ambush. On a 7–9, you spot the ambush in time to prepare or flee. On a miss, you blunder into it.

When one of Siso’s Children touches you, roll+weird. On a 10+, your brain protects you and it’s just a touch. On a 7–9, I tell you what to do: if you do it, mark experience; if you don’t, you’re acting under fire from brain-weirdness. On a miss, you come to, some time later, having done whatever Siso’s child wants you to have done.

If you drink the water out here, roll+hard. On a 10+, spend a few minutes barfing but you’ll be fine. On a 7–9, take 1-harm (ap) now and 1-harm (ap) again in a little while. On a miss, take 3-harm (ap) now and 3-harm (ap) again in a little while.

What’s the thing about Dremmer’s territory? It’s crawling with Dremmer’s gangs ready to ambush invaders. The move turns that idea into a mechanical reality. What’s the thing about Siso’s Children? Damn, they can exert a kind of mind control on those they touch. The move gives you a way as MC to make that idea happen within the rules of the game. What’s the thing about this landscape? The water is dirty and dangerous. The move lets the players interact with that fact rather than just being told, “hey, the water out here is brown and nasty – you have to be pretty desperate and hardy to drink it.”

The basic and character moves that form the backbone of the player-facing rule can cover just about every typical situation, but threats are unique to your game and cannot be anticipated by the designers. You as the MC need a way to make your threats more than narrative elements, and the custom moves give you the means to do that. In this way, custom moves are the equivalent to the OSR refrain, “rulings not rules.” The notion behind “rulings not rules” is that a game cannot cover every action players might take. Instead, the game gives you the basic rules and it’s the GM’s job to extrapolate rulings from those rules to cover the uncovered situations. Custom moves accomplish the same goal. There is no move for drinking dangerously contaminated water? Make it up. There’s no rule for spotting an ambush? Make it up.

In the context of this section, custom moves are created in between sessions when you are working on your threats, but there is nothing prohibiting an MC from making up a move on the spot when the situation calls for it. How can everyone at the table be sure that a move is fair and just? First, you have the repeatable structure of the 10+, 7-9, 6- division so that a move provides for hits and misses. But more importantly, the strictures of the MC agenda, principles, and always-say demands apply to everything the MC says as her part of the conversation. If your move doesn’t make Apocalypse World seem real, make the PCs’ lives not boring, and allow you to play to find out what happens, you can’t say it.

As a final note, the other thing these example custom moves do is serve as inspiration to the reader, to give them a glimpse of all the wild ways you can take the game. I don’t know what a “hollow daughter” is, but damn, I desperately want to bring them into the game! My favorite move in this section is this one:

When you try to read Monk you have to roll+weird instead of rolling+sharp. Fucker just does not have normal body language.

That fucker not having normal body language is so evocative and intriguing that I want to see how an MC plays Monk in a scene to communicate that. The simple act of changing which stat to roll with has a huge impact on the fiction that unfolds from the move. After reading that move, you can’t help but think about how the different basic moves change merely by switching the stat rolled. That’s the kind of inspiration that leads you to reexamine the rules and the possibilities. That’s hot.