115. Examples of Seduce or Manipulate

I really love looking at the examples in Apocalypse World.

Marie draws Roark a bath and joins him in it, with dandelion wine. She wants him to bring Joe’s Girl to her. She misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to separate them. “As soon as Joe’s Girl comes up in conversation, he sees what you’re up to,” I say. “He shoves you out of his way and stomps out of your rooms. He takes his shotgun with him but doesn’t even bother to get dressed. He’s muttering the whole way down the hall, like ‘fuckin Marie, shoulda known, fuckin trusted her, fuckin Joe’s Girl…’”

This is my favorite example of the bunch here. I love that Marie and Roark are most likely already a thing. Roark’s not shocked by the bath and the wine and the special treatment. It just looks like a loving setup. Marie is definitely seducing/manipulating Roark, but it’s not heartless, or so it seems to me. She can both want to get naked with him and have him bring Joe’s Girl to her. Two birds and all that! Seduce and manipulate can sound pretty shitty, but it doesn’t always have to look like that in play, so I appreciate this example.

And let’s appreciate that hard move. On the one hand, it just looks like he left. She doesn’t get what she wants and also gets no sex. Not so hard on the surface. But, man, his not putting on clothes! Leaving butt-ass naked, with just his shotgun shows how distressed Roark is (and how a part of him his shotgun is!). On top of that, his mumbling about how he should have known better than to trust Marie – it’s all a perfect picture of a man who feels betrayed at the deepest level. Marie and Roark weren’t just separated physically; there’s a deep fucking divide between the two now and you can tell that things are permanently changed hereafter.

The second example shows something I said in the last post, that the person being manipulated when this move is made against another PC is the player, not the character:

Bran wants Keeler’s backup in an ill-considered raid on Jackabacka’s junkyard. Keeler knows how ill-considered it is, though. “Oh come on, it’ll be fun,” Bran’s player says. He hits the roll with a 7. “So, the carrot or the stick?” Keeler’s player says. “The carrot,” he says. “You’ve got hard highlighted, yeah? The way I figure it, with that, plus one from me, this raid could give you enough experience to get a whole improvement.” “Hm,” Keeler’s player says. “That’s an interesting point.”

The conversation here is between Bran’s player and Keeler’s player, not between Bran and Keeler. Presumably the players will go over how Bran convinces Keeler, but that part is less important for the sake of this example. You can see plain as day Bran’s player is trying to align Keeler’s player with their own self-interests so that Keeler’s player can play Keeler’s aid in the raid with enthusiasm.

The final example is rather straightforward:

Keeler’s gearing up for some ill-considered raid or other. “Hey, MC, do I remember right that one of the outguards has night vision goggles? III, maybe, or Joe’s Girl?” “Sure, III does,” I say. “Cool,” she says. “I drop in on her…” She proceeds to offer III a cut of the spoils in return for the borrow of them, and hits the roll with a 10. “Yeah,” I say, “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.”

“On a 10+, they go along with you.” Yep. That’s what happens here. The strength of a 10+, as I’ve pointed out before, is that the result consequentially affects the fiction. The consequence of this roll will only play out after the raid, when III’s goggles are scuffed, lost, or returned in perfect condition, or when Keeler squelches on her deal or lives up to her deal. All that comes later and is really outside the scope of this example, so for now, it looks a little dull: “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.”