156. Hunting Prey & Escaping a Hunter

​I’m back after a long hiatus, or at least I hope to be back for a little while.  Not only did life get complicated, but I was in danger of just retreading old ground going forward.  Recently, however, there have been a couple of posts that got me thinking about analyzing the character moves, which start on page 182 of 2e, and since I stopped at page 174, I thought I might hobble my way to the character moves and then hopefully take off running again.  Of course, I waited a little long into the lull of the pandemic, so life might get complicated again.  We’ll see what happens.
 
Hunt Prey and Escape a Hunter are obviously two sides of the same event, and their parallels are obvious enough.  What I want to talk about in terms of these moves is first, their scale, by which I mean how much of the action is accomplished within the fiction by the role.  In one of the comments to his “Creating a Situation: a practical example” post on anyway, Vincent talks briefly about the “ratio of action to interest,” or “How much doing does it take to resolve conflicts?”  He gives an example:

​GM: okay, Mitch, what do you do next?
Mitch: I need a body of followers, so I attract a body of followers.
GM: roll for it!
 
Vs.
 
GM: okay, Mitch, what do you do next?
Mitch: I need a body of followers, so I start by finding an old woman down on her luck.
GM: roll for it!
 
(For the whole post and comment, see http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/183. I’m quoting from the 7th comment)

​That little example shows us how scale of actions is manipulatable by any system, and Apocalypse World’s move structure is a perfect way to build that scale into the move itself.
 
Here’s Hunt Prey:

When you’re the cat, roll+cool. On a hit, you catch your prey out.  On a 10+, you’ve driven them first to a place of your choosing; say where.  On a 7-9, you’ve had to follow them where they wanted to go; they say where. On a miss, your prey escapes you

​This move encompasses the whole of the chase, asking the question of finality: Do you get away or don’t you?  A move or moves could be created to draw out the individual elements of the chase to play out the gains and losses during the chase itself, but this one cuts through that fiction and lands at the end of the chase. 
 
So how much fiction is demanded by this move? We can look at the example:

Keeler’s chased Dremmer’s Lieutenant Balls into a ruined skyscraper and is going door to door to catch him. She hits the roll with an 11.
 
“He can’t get out past you,” I say. “Where do you drive him?”
 
“To the roof,” she says, and so it is

​As we can see from the example, you still need to describe the fiction that triggers the move, how you are being the cat.  In this case, Keeler is “going door to door to catch him.”  That’s the information the MC needs in order to say “He can’t get out past you.”  Once that has been established the rest of the fiction comes easily: where do you drive him? To the roof.  And we cut to the roof where the chase has ended, but not the scene.
 
This move actually provides two different kinds of resolution.  On a miss, the move resolves the entirety of the conflict.  The prey escapes and you are empty handed.  The tension of the chase is gone and we return to the character, asking, now what do you do?  Same thing goes for Escape a Hunter of course: if you roll a 10+, “you escape clean and leave your hunter hunting.”  Full stop, conflict over.  But on any other roll, the move creates not a resolution of the conflict, but an escalation.  The chase itself resolves, but the tension, the conflict, doesn’t.  It escalates by taking us to a new location with new circumstances and new stakes.  In the example above, Keeler and Balls end up on the roof where they have a chance to resolve the conflict that was kicked off or continued by the preceding chase.  In the example to Escape a Hunter, Bran and Marie not only fail to escape Dog Head and his cult, but the scene is set for the following escalation: 

“You’re picking your way down this broken gully, right, and you hear this weird barking and chirping above you. There’s one of them, squatting on a rock, staring down at you. Pretty soon you hear, it sounds like there are a hundred of them barking back at him, converging.  You’re in a bad spot, I have to tell you.  What do you do?

That little trick, making the move result in conflict resolution of conflict escalation, is a clever way to avoid the all-or-nothing effect of pass-fail resolution quandaries.  The move could easily be reduced to the question I posed earlier: do you get away or don’t you?  But the Bakers use their move structure to complicate that division and explore more of the “don’t you” option.  If you get away (or if your prey gets away), then it’s over, something significant has come to pass, but if you don’t (or they don’t), then how do you resolve that move so that there is a feeling of escalation and not just moving the original confrontation from one place to another?  The solution here is the simple detail of who gets to decide where you end up, which is a matter of advantageous or disadvantageous fictional positioning.  If you are the one deciding, you get to choose the arena for the next stage of the conflict, which is quite a bit of power, and more importantly, it feels like quite a bit of power to the players.  Just look at the examples already cited.  To force Balls to the roof is to limit his options to end this confrontation non-violently, to make an escape, or to have friends called in to change the dynamic of the confrontation.  To lead Bran and Marie into a broken gully that requires “picking” through in order to move effectively corners Bran and Marie, removing movability from the equation.  Moreover, they are also apparently outnumbered.  It is indeed a bad spot, and the move allowed that to happen.