73. Opening Section for Threats – Part IV

The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your threats, which means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do (106).

Accordingly, when you create a threat, follow your own inspiration. Choose the things that are suggestive to you, that put you in mind of apocalyptica, romance, violence, gore, danger, trauma. Choose the things you’d just fucking kill to see well done on the big screen, and skip the things that don’t spark your interest.

Here we are with to the final two paragraphs of the section.

In the last post, we looked at how threat decisions are instrumental in keeping the MC’s thumbs off the scales during the PCs’ encounters with NPCs in order to truly play to find out. The other benefit to making “real” and “binding” decisions is to “give you interesting things to say.” If the medium of any RPG is conversation, then the rules of the RPG direct the flow and control the parameters of that conversation. The key word, then, in the first paragraph quoted above is “interesting.” It appears three times and in all but one sentence.

Threats are your half of the conversation, and in playing them (“saying what they do”), you are creating opportunities for the players’ characters to do “interesting things”; in turn, you respond to those “interesting things” in “interesting ways.” And back and forth, on and on, action and reaction, creates, ideally, an interesting conversation at every turn. The MC keeps the conversation grounded in the fiction, which allows the players to trigger their moves by constructing the fiction on their end. When it’s the MC’s turn to speak, they have to take their move, which exists outside of the fiction, and clothe it in the fiction to send it back across the table for the players. So there are two halves to the MC’s action, the move itself and the fiction into which it is packaged. The threat-creation process is designed to give you interesting things to work with for both halves of what you are doing. As we break down the different threat options in future posts, we’ll be looking at how the game achieves that.

But nothing is just interesting on its own; it must be interesting to someone. And the direction given again and again throughout the text is that what you create as the MC needs to be interesting to you. I have called this direction positioning the MC as the primary audience for the narrative that unfolds during play. Now it’s time to ponder what a bold move this direction is. Often in RPG texts, the GM is directly or indirectly made responsible for everyone else’s fun when playing. GMs have been tasked in the past with learning what everyone wants from play and trying to dish out a little something for everyone. But not Apocalypse World. If “interesting” is the key word from the first paragraph, “you” is the key word from the second: “follow your own inspiration,” “choose the things that are suggestive to you, that put you in mind of apocalyptica,” “choose the things you’d just fucking kill to see well done on the big screen,” and “skip the things that don’t spark your interest.”

How does that work? How can everyone be assured of a good time if all the MC is concerned about is what they want to see? The playbooks allow the players to construct the characters they want to play. The move selections let the players choose the abilities and the types of narrative moments they’d like to see in play. Because the players have total freedom to pursue what their characters want to do, the MC cannot force their hands and railroad them. All the MC can do is present possibilities, and the characters can react according to their players’ desires. Moreover, as an unquestioned fan of the characters, the MC is going to want to see the characters do all their cool tricks, so the MC will want to set them up to see how they choose to be awesome. With all these other systems in place, the MC is free to chase after their own questions and wonderings. No, they are more than free, they are expressly urged to do so. It is precisely because of that back and forth between character moves and MC moves that the MC needs to create situations they want to see resolved. The more both sides push for what they want, the more dynamic and “interesting” the game will be—to everyone.