55. A Few More Things to Do

This is it. We’re at the end of the MC section. Up to this point, we have read all the rules for the MC when conducting her part of the conversation, always focusing on what the MC says. What you say, when you say it, what you need to achieve with you speak—all the rules in the section are about guiding the conversation. But this section isn’t “A Few More Things to Say”; it’s “A Few More Things to Do.” :

These aren’t principles or moves. They’re just good practice and I recommend them.

In traditional RPGs, recommended “good practice” is pretty much the entirety of the GM section. In Apocalypse World, you get 8 short paragraphs. But the question is, why are they recommendations instead of rules? Let’s look at them and see.

Make maps like anything. Have the players make maps like anything too. And sketches, and diagrams, and any kind of ephemera that seems good.

Making maps can certainly be a part of the conversation. Sketches and diagrams can make Apocalypse World seem real. Such ephemera can follow what honesty demands and what your prep demands. In short, making maps can follow your agenda items and your principles, so why is it just a recommendation?

Making maps is just another form of conversing, an additional way to ensure that the Shared Imagined Space is clearly defined. Some people will find helpful and others will find unnecessary, but nothing about the rules or the conversation requires the making of maps for the game to work. Maps do not interact with any other rules in the game. PC moves, MC moves, harm, threats, gear, character advancement—no system in the game requires maps, so there is no reason for the designer to insist on the practice.

The next three recommendations are similar. They are all ways to enhance the conversation, particular approaches that let you achieve your agenda goals but that are not required to make the game run correctly because they don’t interact with any of the game’s system.

Turn questions back on the asker or over to the group at large. ‘Good question, actually. What does the rag-waste outside the holding look like?’

Digress occasionally. Include details sometimes as though you were looking idly at a scene and some detail, something not at all the point, caught your attention. ‘She’s pinned rat furs to her wall. The pins are, like, souvenir push pins, the heads are tiny glass lenses with pictures of national monuments under them. Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial…’

Elide the action sometimes, and zoom in on its details other times. Play out a battle in precise and exacting detail, but in the middle of it say ‘so they keep you both pinned down there until nightfall.’ Sometimes pick one session up in the moments where the last left off, other times let days or weeks pass in between.

If I were to write an advice book on MCing Pbta games, I’d title it “The Art of the Conversation.” That’s what these recommendations are, ways to make the conversation as interesting and compelling as possible. Specifically, these are conversational techniques that are desirable but cannot be mechanized. (Well, maybe they could be mechanized, but they aren’t in Apocalypse World.)

This goes for moves, too. Making a dash under fire might mean crossing 3 meters of open ground in view of one of Dremmer’s snipers, it might mean crossing 100 meters of broken ground with his gang arrayed thereupon, it might mean crossing the whole damned burn flat with Dog Head and his grinning-dingo cannibals in pursuit. Let the moves expand and contract in time, all through the range from their smallest logical limit to their greatest.

This recommendation is about how the moves can be used to cover small details or whole sets of actions in one roll, which is part of the magic of resolution systems that don’t rely on task-specific rolls. Making you aware of how you can use and interpret moves is important to do, and obviously belongs in this section. You don’t need to do this, but you are needlessly limiting the game if you don’t.

The last two recommendations are different from the previous ones because following them will not help you meet your agenda goals or follow your principles:

Go around the table. Over the course of a session, make sure that everybody gets some good dedicated screen time. ‘While this is going on, Dune, where are you? What are you doing?’ When interesting things are happening simultaneously, cut back and forth between them.

Take breaks and take your time. Breaks are important, they let everybody reflect on what’s happened and plan a little about what their characters might do next. Little breaks in play when someone else’s character is on screen, longer play-stopping breaks for tea cigs or pee, breaks between sessions, even taking a whole session off now and then. A player worn out and at a loss now, after a break might have great ideas and enthusiasm. Better to call a break early, even, than to go past anyone’s endurance.

Making sure everyone gets time in the spotlight does not make Apocalypse World seem real, make the characters’ lives not boring, or play to find out what happens. It is designed to make the players’ lives not boring. This advice is about directing the conversation. It is not about what you say but who you say it too. Similarly, taking breaks is about knowing when to pause or end the conversation.

And that brings me back to where I started this post: the “Do” in the title to this section. Each of these items, even the ones focused on the conversation, are about things you can do as the MC to give everyone a shot at an awesome play experience. What can you do as an MC to make the conversation gripping and everyone at the table involved? What can you do to make the players’ moves reach their full potential? What can you do to make your part of the narrative full of surprises? These 8 things. That’s what you can do.