125. Knowing All There Is to Know

As to the good details versus the impressions, look to your threats to provide them. The “you already know all there is to know” clause is there, but I’ve never used it and I hope you never do too.

Open your brain is unique in that it asks the MC to have at her fingertips “something new and interesting” to say about any given situation or topic that the characters might open their brains to. Most moves call on the MC to react to specific fictional prompts, but opening your brain puts the MC on the spot. Thankfully, Apocalypse World might ask a lot from its players but it always provides the tools to do the job right. In this case, your threats preparation assures you always have something to say.

Your threat maps, your threat countdowns, your stakes questions, and your general “I wonder” questions give you a whole list of things to draw from to tell the players either what they asked for, something that is interesting to you, or something that they need to know if only they knew to ask. A fleshed out threat map and an inquisitive MC with an evergrowing list of stakes and things to wonder about will rarely find themselves in a position of having nothing to say, or not knowing something new and interesting.

If you have failed to do your prep or if the player has asked about a topic entirely off your threat map, you can of course always make things up and work that into your prep before the next session. The game is designed to be flexible enough for that as well.

Finally, you are given an out if your prep is incomplete and your brain is sluggish; you can say “you already know all there is to know.” I love both that the option is given and that the hope that you never use it is expressed. It makes me think of something Vincent says in one of his blogs: “In my imagination, a rule is like if you take a nail and scratch a line in dry dirt, and what people actually do is like where the water actually runs. Some water will run down the line you scratched, because you scratched it. Other water will run down the line you scratched but would have run there even if you hadn't. Other water will go wherever it goes. And (and here this picture breaks down, now I'm talking about bizarro-world water) some water will respond perversely to your line, bouncing off of it or testing its limits or sliding around it or flowing in the opposite direction out of plain orneriness” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/430). That water is going to run where it will, and it seems useless to tell the water it cannot run down the “I have nothing to say about this” path since some MC somewhere will inevitably feel the desire to say it. So the Bakers have scratched their line in the dirt to accommodate those fringe cases. The secret to a good set of rules of course is to make the players want to follow them, to make it so that following your rules is more rewarding than not following them. And that’s certainly what is going on here with open your brain. As the MC, it’s fun to have a way to tell the other players about the cool things happening off screen with your threats, and it’s fun to try to make the other players gasp or groan with some cool revelation that they had been ignoring or hiding from. The fact is, it is more fun to draw something from your prep or to make something up than it is to say, “I’ve got nothing. You already know all there is to know.”

Were that clause not there, I suspect some players would resent its absence and want to buck against the design “out of plain orneriness,” so including the clause is a psychological move. To then say “I hope you never do too” is equally psychological in that it suggests you’ll be letting someone down if you do. You’ll be letting your player down, you’ll be letting yourself down, you’ll be letting your story down, and you’ll be letting the designers down. It’s a pretty brilliant inclusion.