54. Rules and Your Prep

The game’s rules give you things to say. When a player’s character goes aggro on someone and the player rolls 7–9, for instance, the rules give you a list of things to choose from. Choose one of them, and that’s what you say. Say it according to the principles as always. For instance, for they get the hell out of your way: “she dives into the mucky ditch and elbow-crawls away.” Or, for they give you what you want: “she puts the night-vision goggles down in front of you. ‘Fine, I didn’t realize you needed ’em so fucking bad,’ she says. ‘But don’t come over tonight, asshole, swear to god.’”

Your threat map gives you things to say, too. When a player’s character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, for instance, the rules might tell you to reveal something interesting. Something interesting? Look to your threat map: Joe’s Girl has joined the water cult, I’ll bet they didn’t know that. So say that, and of course say it according to the principles. Maybe “deep under the brain-howling, you come to hear … is it chanting? A list of people’s names, chanted over and over by a hundred subliminal voices. ‘Tum Tum … Gnarly … Fleece … Lala … Forner … Joe’s Girl … Shan …’” (Player: “wait, Joe’s Girl? Shit FUCK.”)

Up until the discussion of the MC’s moves, the Master of Ceremonies chapter focuses on the ground rules for everything the MC says as her part of the conversation. Whatever the MC says, it has to accomplish at least one of the agenda items and satisfy what the principles, rules, honesty, and prep demand. Discussing the MC moves is the first time the text looks at the actual substance of the MC’s share of the conversation. But of course, the MC doesn’t just make moves or ask provocative questions; and that’s what the rest of this chapter is about. In this section, “Rules and Your Prep,” we look briefly at the MC’s conversational role when the PCs are making their moves.

The key phrase in this passage is that elements of the game “give you things to say.” How comforting is that?! There’s a lot of pressure on the MC, and the game goes out of its way to never leave the MC high and dry for what tho say. Either the game will explicitly “give you things to say” or you can make a move, which is just another list of “things to say.” Stick to your agenda and principles and you’re good to go. But it’s not really just things the game gives you to say, is it? The game is designed to give you interesting, compelling, and dramatic things to say. For both the MC moves and the PC moves, your part of the conversation is guided by the rules to create exciting talk at the table. The examples in this passage, like the examples of the MC moves, exemplify the conversation created by the moves as much as they exemplify how the moves work from the MC’s perspective.

Threats are referred to several times in this chapter. The “prep” that makes demands on us has plenty to do with threats, one of our MC moves is “make a threat move,” and here we learn that our threat map exists in part to give us “things to say.” I have already talked about how the threat map helps the MC say what honesty demands by working out in her prep along what trajectories different elements in the game world are travelling. What this passage drives home is that the threat map is a vital tool in the conversation to let us know what to say at all. In a recent interview with Jason Pitre, on his excellent podcast RPG Design PanelCast, episode 119, “Powered by the Apocalypse,” Meguey and Vincent Baker share a ton of thought-provoking insights. At one point, they are talking about the construction of PC moves, and Vincent says the following: “So one of those ghost moves allows you to ask the GM, ‘what does the ghost tell me?’ And I wouldn’t choose to use that move unless I was confident the GM would have an answer. Right? The GM has thought about it or can answer by gut or the GM is properly set up. . . . So that doesn’t put the GM in the uncomfortable spot of ‘I don’t know what this ghost tells . . . you!’” (0:48:44 -0:49:17). In light of this, we can see that the Open Your Brain move puts the MC in just such a spot, but the rules of threat maps supply you with the necessary material to answer the questions. It’s easy to think of the threats section as advice, a good way to organize your NPCs and storylines, but as we can see here, the game as written expects that prep work to be done in order to you to hold up your end of the conversation. ​