48. Sometimes, disclaim decision-making.

In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. The game gives you four key tools you can use to disclaim responsibility: you can put it in your NPCs’ hands, you can put it in the players’ hands, you can create a countdown, or you can make it a stakes question (86-87).

This is the only principle that is directly concerned with playing to find out what happens. Making everyone human, making your move but misdirecting, responding with fuckery—they all concern themselves with making Apocalypse World real and the characters’ lives not boring. Asking provocative questions demands that you use the answers to inform your understanding of the world, so in a sense it prevents the MC from controlling all the details, forcing them in the direction of playing to find out. But this final principle is the only one that tells us how to play to find out and what playing to find out looks like.

According to this principle, it is all about “decision-making.” Specifically it is about letting the Fiction, the characters’ actions, the rules, and your prep work inform your decision-making rather than simply relying on your “personal whim and will.”

Putting “it in your NPCs’ hands” is about “saying what your prep demands”:

You can (1) put it in your NPCs’ hands. Just ask yourself, in this circumstance, is Birdie really going to kill her? If the answer is yes, she dies. If it’s no, she lives. Yes, this leaves the decision in your hands, but it gives you a way to make it with integrity.

Who an NPC is, what she wants, and what her attitudes toward all the PCs are—those are all things that the game wants you to nail down between sessions so that they have their own trajectory and momentum within the Fiction. Then you can turn to your NPC and ask, what would you do in this situation? Following their answer allows you to make the decision “with integrity,” which is just another way of saying what honesty demands. Saying what your prep demands and what honesty demands is the way you play to find out what happens. This is why the game text says several times over some version of “you have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality” (80).

Let’s jump to the 3rd tool:

You can (3) create a countdown. . . . Just sketch a quick countdown clock. Mark 9:00 with “she gets hurt,” 12:00 with “she dies.” Tick it up every time she goes into danger, and jump to 9:00 if she’s in the line of fire. This leaves it in your hands, but gives you a considered and concrete plan, instead of leaving it to your whim.

I love the distinction that’s drawn here between leaving it “in your hands” and leaving it “to your whims.” As the MC, the impact that the PCs have on the world is always in your hand, but the “discipline” needed to be an MC (to borrow a word from the first section of this chapter—page 81) keeps you from deciding on a whim when it’s important. That “when it’s important” is a crucial clause because the text itself suggests that you can decide on a whim when you want. But remember: declaring things on a whim is still subject to what you must always say; you can only declare something on a whim if you are not going against what honesty, your prep, the rules, and the stated principles demand.

There is a delicate and difficult line to walk as an MC, and the rules do everything they can to equip you to walk it. On the one hand, you have to be an invested audience of the tale being played out. You have to be a fan of the characters and care about the NPCs and the world you all have pieced together. On the other hand, you have to resist using your awesome MC power to override the internal logic of the Fiction. This is where that discipline comes in. As the text says earlier: “You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside” (80). This principle is all about how you walk that line.

Stakes questions are presented as a separate tool, but they are really the starting point for the first three tools in this section. Making a stakes question is about being willing to see what happens rather than making determinations about what happens:

Or you can (4) make it a stakes question. . . . “I wonder, will Dou live through all this?” Now you’ve promised yourself not to just answer it yourself, yes or no, she lives or she dies. Whenever it comes up, you must give the answer over to the NPCs, to the players’ characters, to the game’s moves, or to a countdown, no cheating.

That question – “I wonder, will Dou live through all this?” – is a question you ask yourself when watching a movie or reading a book, when you are consuming fiction rather than creating it. In the text, to ask that question is to “promise” to play to find out.

You can think of each of these tools as really the same tool, just implemented at different times in the Fiction. At the start of the session, if you know Dou is in a precarious position, you can make a stakes question. If in play, you start noticing the danger to Dou, you can whip up a countdown. If in the middle of the action, Dou gets hurt, you can leave her survival up to the players’ actions. And if Dou finds herself in Birdie’s hands in the thick of battle and you have a hard move to make, then you put the answer in your NPCs’ hands. They are all versions of the same thing and they all start with the willingness to let the Fiction dictate the course of events rather than MC fiat.

As a side note, I also like how this principle exists in tension with looking through crosshairs. Together they say that you need to be willing to destroy any- and everything you create, and when decision-by-whim is permitted, go for it. But you still need to play to find out in those cases that deciding something by whim contradicts what honesty, the rules, and your prep demand. That’s actually quite a bit of tension for the MC to maintain, and I think that tension is one of the things that makes being an MC of Apocalypse World so exciting and rewarding.