157. Hits and Misses

​What amazes me when I look at the line of Vincent’s published games and his blog posts on anyway as he works through them is how straight a path he travels as a designer, chasing after the same issues and building off of his own theoretical understanding to create the mechanics and approaches that address those issues.  Recently, Jason Morningstar mentioned that he based his Fiasco playset tables off of Vincent’s oracles from In a Wicked Age.  That revelation sent me back to In a Wicked Age, and the last page of that game sent me back to a set of posts in anyway in which Vincent addresses how you can create “situation” in a game.  Looking at those posts I could see how Vincent used those insights down the road to create a bunch of dynamic situations in AW through character creation and the other tools in the playbooks.  That little revelation sent me back to my curated collection of his anyway posts (yes, I’ve created a curated collection because 1) I’m that big of a nerd and 2) I wanted some kind of text book for my exploration of RPG theory and I couldn’t think of a better foundation for creating one of my own).

All of that is preamble to the little thought I have decided to explore today.  I am rereading those posts again, and I came across this passage from something Vincent wrote in February of 2004, concerning task resolution and conflict resolution:

In task resolution, what’s at stake is the task itself: “I crack the safe!” “Why?” “Hopefully to get the dirt of the supervillain!” What’s at stake is: do you crack the safe?
 
In conflict resolution, what’s at stake is why you’re doing the task: “I crack the safe!” “Why?” “Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!” What’s at stake is: do you get the dirt on the supervillain?
 
Which is important to the resolution rules: opening the safe, or getting the dirt? That’s how you tell whether it’s task resolution or conflict resolution.
 
Task resolution is succeed/fail. Conflict resolution is win/lose. You can succeed but lose, fail but win.
 
(http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html - I’m quoting from the 4th post on the page

​That post is obviously from a long time ago, and I know that Vincent and Meguey don’t worry themselves over task resolution vs. conflict resolution anymore, but that last line of passage I quoted, when I reread it this morning, got me thinking about the specific terms in Apocalypse World, namely hit and miss.  Task resolution is succeed/fail; conflict resolution is win/lose; move resolution is hit/miss.
 
If there’s one thing I know about Vincent it’s that he is very particular about his word choices in his game text.  And if there’s two things I know about Vincent it’s that he prefers natural language to jargon when it comes to describing how rules work.  So what does the language of hit and miss do for us?
 
Well, it most certainly isn’t succeed and fail and it most certainly isn’t win and lose, but it is related to both of them.  The language is most akin to baseball or archery, or some sport in which you trying to strike thing X with thing Y.  Perhaps a good way to look at it is that in order to know if you hit or miss, you need to know what you were aiming at in the first place.  Hitting and missing means that everyone involves knows the goal of the move before the dice are ever picked up, which is precisely what a well-designed move does.
 
Look back at that example from 2004, breaking into the safe to get the dirt on the supervillain.  What move would that be in Apocalypse World?  It wouldn’t be a move at all.  That fiction triggers none of the moves.  Now, if the PC was trying to break into the safe while being fired upon by Dremmer’s gang, then you are acting under fire.  Or if you are fighting with Dremmer himself to win control of the safe so you can break into it, then you are seizing by force.  And of course, if breaking into the safe is an important action in your game, you could create a custom move, but in doing so, you create a clear set of stakes and risks for breaking into that safe.  Maybe it’s a pick list that you can choose from a list like this: do it quickly, do it without triggering the alarm, do it without leaving a trace indicating that it was you who broke the safe.  No matter how you phrase the move, the act of phrasing it establishes what are the range of fictional stakes and potential results.  In other words, we all know what you are aiming for and we all know what a hit entails and what a miss entails. 
 
By their very nature, moves are not about winning or losing, or about succeeding or failing, which is why new language was needed to describe the way they resolve.
 
I’ve talked about people using the language of success and failure in discussing AW’s moves before, so think of this as part two to that post (no. 143, I believe).