51. Guidelines for choosing your moves

51. Today we are looking at the “guidelines for choosing your moves” in the MC section of Apocalypse World.

Here are guidelines for choosing your moves:

Always choose a move that can follow logically from what’s going on in the game’s fiction. It doesn’t have to be the only one, or the most likely, but it does have to make at least some kind of sense (89).

That the move must fit the fiction seems pretty obvious, but the bar here is set pretty low: “it does have to make at least some kind of sense.” What that low bar makes clear is that the move exists separate from the fiction as a thing unto itself, and moreover, that the move takes priority over the fiction. You need to clothe the move in sensible fiction, yes, but what comes first is the move, not the fiction. You do not, to continue the analogy, pick out an outfit and cram a move inside it. Of course, in actual play there is a mental back and forth between moves and fiction as you find the right one of each, but the text itself prioritizes the move. This makes sense by the rules of the game: while you can make a move that only makes “some kind of sense” in the fiction, you cannot say something that is great fiction but that is not a move (unless you are of course asking or answering a question).

Generally, limit yourself to a move that’ll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players’ characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion.

However, when a player’s character hands you the perfect opportunity on a golden plate, make as hard and direct a move as you like. It’s not the meaner the better, although mean is often good. Best is: make it irrevocable.

When a player’s character makes a move and the player misses the roll, that’s the cleanest and clearest example there is of an opportunity on a plate. When you’ve been setting something up and it comes together without interference, that counts as an opportunity on a plate too.

But again, unless a player’s character has handed you the opportunity, limit yourself to a move that sets up future moves, your own and the players’ characters’.

These four paragraphs are all about the hardness and directness of your move. (While “soft” moves entered the vocabulary from the first games to use the Apocalypse World engine, AW itself does not use the word, and the Bakers felt no need to include it in the 2nd edition, so we’ll follow suit here.)

The definition of a typical move is a great one: “A start to the action, not its conclusion.” It’s a little misleading because even the hardest move typically doesn’t end the action; after all, you still need to ask “what do you do?” no matter how hard and direct a move you make. That said, “a start to the action” refers to the dramatic build-up of a scene; the music is quickening and mounting because trouble’s at hand, but all the horns and cymbals have yet to come crashing down. The standard move should “set . . . up” further drama. Your move sets up two things, really. It sets up something nasty to befall the characters should they fail to act or fail in their action, and it sets up the characters to respond to your move and make moves of their own.

It’s that nastiness being set up that comes to bear when a “perfect opportunity on a golden plate” presents itself. Such an opportunity comes in two forms: (1) a missed roll, and (2) the characters’ failure to interfere with what you have been setting up. If you make a move that suspends some nastiness over the character’s head, and she doesn’t address it, bring that nastiness on down. If she tries to address it and misses, bring it on down. But outside of those two possibilities, your moves should keep the characters responding and making moves of their own. The kinesis of that back and forth is the engine that drives the drama of play. That back and forth is then punctuated with (1) your hard and direct moves should they PCs miss, and (2) the consequential results of a PCs’ strong hit.

The best thing to do when making your hard and direct move is to make it “irrevocable.” This is in keeping with the way Apocalypse World approaches narrative. Making your moves “irrevocable” follows the same line of thought that says “there are not status quos in Apocalypse World.” Making a move that’s “irrevocable” is part of making successes “consequential” and part of “looking through crosshairs.” The long-term play of Apocalypse World is based on the notion that the world itself changes in response to the characters’ interactions with it. The very rules prevent the game from becoming a serial tale in which everything returns to normal between episodes. To play the game according to its rules is to fill both the world and the characters with scars and reminders of what used to be and the promise of what could be. If a character is defined by her choices and actions, those choices and actions must have real and permanent consequences in order to have any meaning at all. Otherwise those choices are play choices and they put no pressure on the characters and reveal nothing real about them.

As a final note, I want to say that I love the final sentence quoted above, particularly the phrase, “unless a player’s character has handed you the opportunity.” Golden opportunities and hard moves are determined entirely by the PCs – they must hand the MC the opportunity for the MC to use it. This requirement is part of the same approach that keeps MCs from rolling dice or determining difficulty levels. The rules of Apocalypse World attempt to limit the destructive powers of the MC’s whim as much as possible and still have a functional game with a GM/player split. The MC can monkey with the fiction and create all kinds of trouble, but they are under strict orders to give the PCs what they worked for and to not make hard moves unless a golden opportunity on a plate has been handed to them by the PCs themselves. This is about as just as an unjust world can get.

But maybe that’s not right. How do you interpret “guidelines” as used in this passage? I have interpreted them as rules still, but it’s certainly a weaker word, suggesting things you should do rather than must do. It’s certainly stronger than “good practice” that is used to introduce the “Few More Things to Do” section on page 93, but is it as strong as “rules”? And then there’s that “generally” that kicks off the third paragraph I quoted. There’s a hesitancy to raise these guidelines to the status of rules, isn’t there? The softness of the presentation suggests that sometimes the story demands a hard and direct move even when the PCs haven’t offered up a golden opportunity. It’s an unusual position for a game full of hard rules.