116. Read a Sitch

When you read a charged situation, roll+sharp. On a hit, you can ask the MC questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC’s answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3. On a 7–9, ask 1:
• Where’s my best escape route / way in / way past?
• Which enemy is most vulnerable to me?
• Which enemy is the biggest threat?
• What should I be on the lookout for?
• What’s my enemy’s true position?
• Who’s in control here?
On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst.

You can tell me that this move isn’t brilliant, but then you’d be a liar, so don’t do it.

This move and its counterpart, read a person, are the two active perception moves that allow characters to assess their surroundings. Of course the situation has to be “charged.” As with all the other language in Apocalypse World, “charged” is not a special term with special meaning, but is simply natural English. So what a charged situation is is up to the players at your table to determine. That said, you can feel the edges of what the move itself thinks of as a charged situation by the questions it allows you to ask. Looking over those six questions, we can see that they fit naturally into any situation in which you or someone you care about is in or is about to enter a dangerous situation. Every question in the list allows the characters to determine how to identify dangers and their corresponding opportunities, yeah?

What blows my mind is how every situation worth assessing is reduced to six simple bits of information. As I noted in post no. 90, the advantage of using natural language is that moves are expanded by the inherent vagueness of the written word. Words like “situation,” “enemy,” “vulnerable,” “threat,” “position,” and “control” all provide enough wiggle room that this move covers dangers that are not only physical, but also emotional, spiritual, and social. The situation at hand could be a charged conversation, for example. Imagine how each of those questions can apply to someone trying to corner your character in a conversation, either an enemy or a lover. If a PC is vulnerable or has the opportunity to do something that will make them vulnerable, the situation can be read.

But why create a list of limited questions at all? Why not let the players come up with any question they want? I think there are a number of reasons to limit the questions in this way, but let’s hold off on that question for now. We’ll look at this again and in more detail when we get to “Reading a Sitch or a Person” on pages 147-148, where Vincent and Meguey talk more about it themselves.

Instead, let’s look at what reading a situation looks like in the fiction.

Reading a situation can mean carefully checking things out, studying and analyzing, thinking something through, or it can mean a quick look over the wall and going by gut. Depends on the character (144)

How you wrap this move into the fiction is entirely up to you. This could be a scene full of research, maps spread across a table with notes of intel and rumors. It could be like a scene from the super-combative Sherlock Holmes films in which Robert Downey, Jr. analyzes the scene around him in a split second with methodical and intellectual precision. It could be information gathered so fast it feels like a burst of intuition. “Depends on the character.” How does your character take in the world around her and process that information? What does that look like? You’re the one who has to do it in order to do it, so it’s your call. That’s cool.

And what about things from the MC’s perspective? How do you answer these questions? Following your principles, is the short answer. Say what honesty and your prep demands. If your prep gives you nothing, then misdirect, make up something and then present it to the players as though the fiction itself produced that answer. But whatever you say becomes true: “Either way, you do have to commit to the answers when you give them. The +1 is there to make it concrete.” That +1 is a beautifully elegant way to give teeth to what you say, and it ensures that your misdirection is only ever about the fiction, not about lying to the other players. The +1 makes it impossible on a hit for a PC to _mis_perceive the situation. As such, it builds trust between the MC and the players.

The +1 also acts as an encouragement to the players to read every charged situation they come across, for who can’t use a +1 in their back pocket? The game wants this move to go off often. Why? I find myself thinking of a passage from Dogs in the Vineyard: “I want them to figure out what’s wrong in the town. In fact, I want to show them what’s wrong in the town! Otherwise, they’ll wander around waiting for me to drop them a clue, I’ll have my dumb poker face on, and we’ll be bored stupid the whole evening” (pg 139). The more the characters assess the situation, and the more confident they can be about the answers they receive to their questions, the more they can act and stir up trouble and roll dice and create opportunities for some hard-ass MC moves. And all that is propelled by a simple +1.

Even when you aren’t making hard moves, even when you are just answering questions, you are advised: “Spring sudden unhappy revelations on people every chance you get. That’s the best.” That IS the best, and I love the Bakers for not only recognizing it but for saying it. Yes, those two sentences are also on my list of Favorite Passages in AW! Your first order of business as an MC is to follow your principles in pursuit of your agenda, so if you can drive those principles right to the door of making the PCs’ lives not boring, do it! The openness of the questions give you the quiet invitation to introduce “sudden unhappy revelations” whenever you see the opportunity. It’s your job to look for them and seize them.