90. Making Your Moves as Hard and Direct as You Like

There has been a ton of digital ink spilled on what it means to “make as hard and direct a move as you like” (89). Nearly every pbta book published after Apocalypse World spends time defining and explaining “hard moves,” by opposing them to “soft moves” or by placing them on a scale of hardness or by using any other technique to make the distinction clear to their readers. Apocalypse World is unique in leaving the matter without a strict definition. Why do that? Isn’t a rule book supposed to make everything unambiguous and easy to follow?

As I used to tell my students back when I taught literature, when something is unclear in a text and you trust the author to know what they are doing, that lack of clarity is the point. Is Hamlet mad or is he conniving? Find your textual evidence for each interpretation, but if you find that that evidence is inconclusive, then that ambiguity is purposeful and is itself worthy of analysis. In writing their 2nd edition, the Bakers had the choice to nail down the issue of hardness in MC moves, and they chose to leave it as it is. This is the way they want it.

There is no glossary to Apocalypse World. There might be cool use of words in the text, but there are no terms of art. Hx is unique to the game, but it mean “history” in the way it is commonly used. The stats are defined for us so we know what they cover, but the words don’t have special meaning. The lists of words that clarify the stats on page 71 are not presented as a restrictive list but as a representative live. They show you a range of meanings to help you understand the flavor of the words; they don’t set the words in concrete. When discussing MC moves, the authors make clear that “[t]hey aren’t technical terms or jargon: ‘announce future badness,’ for instance, means think of something bad that’s probably going to happen in the future, and announce it” (88). Similarly “hard” is natural language without a strict, in-game definition.

The advantage of natural language is that it allows the text (and rules of the game) to live and breathe, rather than suffering from interpretive ossification. We see the game delight openly in these broad definitions with a move like “Seize by force.” You can seize something physical like a box of ammunition or something more abstract like advantageous positioning or someone’s undivided attention. Only natural language lets one move accomplish so much. Moreover that broadness allows the players to think of things the game designers might not have anticipated, because so much can be “seized” in the fullest sense of the word. Same thing with “Act under fire”: it allows the “fire” to be anything that pressures or limits the characters when acting. What stories do you have of a creative use of “Seize by force” or “Act under fire”? Those cool stories exist because the designers created the room for your own imaginative applications, and they did that by avoiding jargon and technical terms.

“Making as hard and direct a move as you like” leaves the definition of “hard and direct” up to you. They want you to think about what that means. They want you to engage with the possible range of meaning. They want you to surprise yourself with the ways that hardness and directness can express themselves during play. Instead of worrying that there is a right way and a wrong way to make a move as hard as you like, you should explore the possibilities and know that there is no wrong way to do it when MCing Apocalypse World.

My textual evidence for this position is that there are three common ways to think about hardness, and all three are presented in the text without one being prioritized over the others.

The first way is to make the move irrevocably change the situation. We see this referred to on page 114: “If the players have handed you a golden opportunity (like if they blow a roll, or if they let you set something up and follow through on it), make as hard and direct a move as you like, the more irrevocable the better.”

The second way is to think about the hardness of the move in opposition to the typical softness of standard moves. This method often talks about “softer” moves giving PCs a chance to react while “harder” moves create a change before letting the PCs react. We see this approach supported on page 89: “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.” The idea appears again on page 114: “Otherwise, make your move to set yourself up and to offer them the opportunity to react.”

The third way is to think about hardness as emotionally hard or surprising. The best example of this is on page 149:

Marie practically keeps house in the world’s psychic maelstrom. She thinks ghosts live in there and maybe she’s right. She goes in there to consult with them, and (unusually) misses the roll. I’m tempted to capture her, but instead for my hard move I decide to announce future badness—not often a hard move, but in this case, it counts. We play out her conversation with the ghosts, but they aren’t helpful and she comes out frustrated. ‘Roark’s there,’ I say. ‘He looks happy, his face has this look of wonder on it. “Marie!” he says. “Marie, such a gift you’ve given me!” ‘I What?’ she says. ‘Roark, are you okay?’ ‘I’m not Roark,’ I say, and not in Roark’s voice. ‘It’s me, Monk!’

Every and all of these ways are good and fine ways to make your move as hard as you like, and each one is supported by the text. What constitutes a hard move is yours as the MC to decide.

The openness of the text is one of the things I love about Apocalypse World. The lack of jargon and insistence on natural language and its inherent flexibility is one of the things that makes the language of Apocalypse World feel poetic and oddly alive. A competent rule book needs to communicate who can do what when and how gameplay properly unfolds. A stellar rule book does that while letting you feel that the possibilities of the game reach far into the shadows beyond what the text can illuminate. To me, that’s what AW uses natural language to do, and it does it amazingly well. It’s a text that gives you all the tools and then trusts you to run with the game in ways that would surprise the designers as well as yourself.