5. the conversation

5. The passage in Apocalypse World that I’m looking at today is old hat to some and mindblowing to others. It’s the “What is a Roleplaying Game” section of the book, which the Bakers call “The Conversation”:

You probably know this already: roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine.

These rules mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right? (page 9)

If that doesn’t hit you hard, then you were probably a part of the Forge when all this was being hashed out. Or you didn’t really pay attention to the passage. Or you’re weird. And that’s cool.

I remember reading that passage the first time in the 1st edition, and getting such a rush. I had never really thought about what was happening at the gaming table in that way. Roleplaying is not like a conversation; it is a conversation. Conversing is the very act of playing, and everything else—the rulebooks, character sheets, dice, everything—are merely tools to facilitate, guide, and otherwise make that conversation possible. The substance of that conversation is of course what is now popularly called “The Fiction” or the Shared Imagined Space. Once again, this text is the very model of concision.

I love the writing in this passage, and in particular I love the tone that is struck. First off, there are those two questions, which I find oddly disarming. No, it’s not like taking turns even though it is like taking turns, isn’t it? I can’t think of a better way to characterize the orderly chaos that takes place during a game session. There is something so reassuring in the tone, like we’re being let in on a secret that we are supposed to already know, or like they are trying to jog our memory of a shared experience that we seem to have forgotten. And then there’s the “All fine.” All that messy stuff that happens, it’s cool. Relax and enjoy it, it seems to say.

I read this tonal shift—the shift from casually informative to casually reassuring—as a lead in to the subject of how the rules interact with The Fiction. The next section (“Moves and Dice”) is one of the key passages of the whole text, and “The Conversation” introduces it, textually and topically. Come in close, it seems to say. This may all seem a little overwhelming at first, but you’ve got this, right? Yeah, man, we’ve got this.