92. Moves Snowball: Part II – The Conversation

Before we dive into the extended example that makes up this chapter, let’s take a moment to appreciate what it is an example of. It is not an example of fiction created, but an example of the conversation that the game structures.

Yes, fiction is created in the example, and the mechanics are demonstrated, but those things exist only within the conversation as they are presented in this chapter.

A lot of RPGs provide examples of the kinds of things characters can do or the ways mechanics function, but they seldom (in my experience) anchor them to the conversation itself. Since the medium of play is conversation, and since the rules of an RPG shape and govern that conversation, it seems only natural that the conversation itself should be the subject of examples in RPG texts. Moreover, part of the design philosophy behind Apocalypse World is that the rules of the game should make it likely that the players (and relatively easy for them to) say interesting things to each other in play. This extended example, then, is about the interesting things you say in the conversation that creates the fiction.

A related aside: In one of the recent RPG Design Panelcast episodes (“The Confused State of Rulebooks,” 1/6/18 release date), +Jessica Hammer tells the story of an assignment she gave to her students to design an app that helps novice roleplayers learn to play Pathfinder. To do that, they needed to research what impediments stood between the novice roleplayers and their ability to learn to play the game. The students found that the biggest concern for new players was . . . the conversation: “novice roleplayers had a really hard time understanding how to construct a sentence that was meaningful in the world. They literally did not know how to speak, what they were allowed to say.” (0:19:50). So, yes, an example needs to show what the players can do and how certain mechanics in the game interact with other mechanics, but what it needs to do above all is demonstrate the play itself, that is, the conversation. Demonstrating the conversation is the RPG equivalent of boardgame rulebooks’ pictures of the board and the pieces in demonstrating setup and play.

You will find that none of the examples in Apocalypse World exist outside of a conversation. All the MC example moves? Examples from the basic moves chapter? Examples in discussing harm and life becoming untenable? They are all presented as dialogue and conversational excerpts because in the end, RPG play doesn’t exist outside of conversation. No game exemplifies that understanding more thoroughly than Apocalypse World.