​Just a short post inspired by another early blog post by Vincent, this one from March of 2004, called “A Small Thing About Character Death plus a mini-manifesto” (http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html -- specifically, look at the 6th post on that page).
 
Vincent begins by noting that “[w]hen a character dies in a novel or a movie, it’s a) to establish what’s at stake, b) to escalate the conflict, or c) to make a final statement.”  Of these, the death of a PC can only satisfy that final object: to make a final statement.  Moreover, that final statement is about dramatizing what the cost to the PC to fight for what they believe in. The death should never be meaningless in an RPG.  Or at least it shouldn’t be meaningless if you are designing the kind of RPG in which PCs don’t have meaningless deaths.  “In fiction, you never die for something you haven’t staked your life on,” as he says.
 
Then he quotes himself from Dogs in the Vineyard:

​So all of that put me in mind of when and how PCs die in Apocalypse World.  In AW 2e, when your harm clock fills up, your “life becomes untenable.”  Then of course you have four choices: come back with -1hard, come back with +1weird, change to a new playbook, and die.  So you can never die by accident in AW, and I always thought of that as simply a matter of giving the player a choice of when they want to let the character go, but in the context of Vincent’s other work, I am now thinking of it in context of making the death meaningful.
 
If your character dies from something dumb, you can bring them back free of charge.  In fact, you get one free character improvement via that +1weird.  It of course makes for great fiction, that +1weird improvement, because you came back odder for your near-death experience.  And when you bring your character to a point that they know they are in danger and they go into it anyway, hoping for the best but laying it all on the line, if they then fill their harm clock, you might think, no, that’s the perfect way for them to go out, dying for something that means something to them.  What makes this method an even better one than in Dogs is that the player never has to be willing to stake their character’s life, which some players might not have the will to do.  But they can push things knowing that they have options, and they can figure out when that time comes if it’s the right time or not.  You get the same power, the same effect, without any such determination by the player or any such heavy-handedness by the rules.  The game offers an opportunity, and it’s in your power to take it or not.
 
Better yet, even when you don’t choose death, your brush with death itself becomes meaningful through the options provided.  Whether you come back less hard, more weird, or entirely changed in who you are, you come back different.  Death and not-death are both meaningful through this construction.
 
Oh, and how fantastic that you “come back” at all! That could have easily been “erase all harm and give yourself a -1hard.”  No, no, though, the language itself forces you to understand that your character has “come back” from death, scarred, gifted, or altered.  And now that I think about it, that “come back” also means that when you choose death, you are choosing NOT to come back, to lay it all down, sword and shield, and rest—to be done.

​What amazes me when I look at the line of Vincent’s published games and his blog posts on anyway as he works through them is how straight a path he travels as a designer, chasing after the same issues and building off of his own theoretical understanding to create the mechanics and approaches that address those issues.  Recently, Jason Morningstar mentioned that he based his Fiasco playset tables off of Vincent’s oracles from In a Wicked Age.  That revelation sent me back to In a Wicked Age, and the last page of that game sent me back to a set of posts in anyway in which Vincent addresses how you can create “situation” in a game.  Looking at those posts I could see how Vincent used those insights down the road to create a bunch of dynamic situations in AW through character creation and the other tools in the playbooks.  That little revelation sent me back to my curated collection of his anyway posts (yes, I’ve created a curated collection because 1) I’m that big of a nerd and 2) I wanted some kind of text book for my exploration of RPG theory and I couldn’t think of a better foundation for creating one of my own).

All of that is preamble to the little thought I have decided to explore today.  I am rereading those posts again, and I came across this passage from something Vincent wrote in February of 2004, concerning task resolution and conflict resolution:

​That post is obviously from a long time ago, and I know that Vincent and Meguey don’t worry themselves over task resolution vs. conflict resolution anymore, but that last line of passage I quoted, when I reread it this morning, got me thinking about the specific terms in Apocalypse World, namely hit and miss.  Task resolution is succeed/fail; conflict resolution is win/lose; move resolution is hit/miss.
 
If there’s one thing I know about Vincent it’s that he is very particular about his word choices in his game text.  And if there’s two things I know about Vincent it’s that he prefers natural language to jargon when it comes to describing how rules work.  So what does the language of hit and miss do for us?
 
Well, it most certainly isn’t succeed and fail and it most certainly isn’t win and lose, but it is related to both of them.  The language is most akin to baseball or archery, or some sport in which you trying to strike thing X with thing Y.  Perhaps a good way to look at it is that in order to know if you hit or miss, you need to know what you were aiming at in the first place.  Hitting and missing means that everyone involves knows the goal of the move before the dice are ever picked up, which is precisely what a well-designed move does.
 
Look back at that example from 2004, breaking into the safe to get the dirt on the supervillain.  What move would that be in Apocalypse World?  It wouldn’t be a move at all.  That fiction triggers none of the moves.  Now, if the PC was trying to break into the safe while being fired upon by Dremmer’s gang, then you are acting under fire.  Or if you are fighting with Dremmer himself to win control of the safe so you can break into it, then you are seizing by force.  And of course, if breaking into the safe is an important action in your game, you could create a custom move, but in doing so, you create a clear set of stakes and risks for breaking into that safe.  Maybe it’s a pick list that you can choose from a list like this: do it quickly, do it without triggering the alarm, do it without leaving a trace indicating that it was you who broke the safe.  No matter how you phrase the move, the act of phrasing it establishes what are the range of fictional stakes and potential results.  In other words, we all know what you are aiming for and we all know what a hit entails and what a miss entails. 
 
By their very nature, moves are not about winning or losing, or about succeeding or failing, which is why new language was needed to describe the way they resolve.
 
I’ve talked about people using the language of success and failure in discussing AW’s moves before, so think of this as part two to that post (no. 143, I believe).

​I’m back after a long hiatus, or at least I hope to be back for a little while.  Not only did life get complicated, but I was in danger of just retreading old ground going forward.  Recently, however, there have been a couple of posts that got me thinking about analyzing the character moves, which start on page 182 of 2e, and since I stopped at page 174, I thought I might hobble my way to the character moves and then hopefully take off running again.  Of course, I waited a little long into the lull of the pandemic, so life might get complicated again.  We’ll see what happens.
 
Hunt Prey and Escape a Hunter are obviously two sides of the same event, and their parallels are obvious enough.  What I want to talk about in terms of these moves is first, their scale, by which I mean how much of the action is accomplished within the fiction by the role.  In one of the comments to his “Creating a Situation: a practical example” post on anyway, Vincent talks briefly about the “ratio of action to interest,” or “How much doing does it take to resolve conflicts?”  He gives an example:

​That little example shows us how scale of actions is manipulatable by any system, and Apocalypse World’s move structure is a perfect way to build that scale into the move itself.
 
Here’s Hunt Prey:

​This move encompasses the whole of the chase, asking the question of finality: Do you get away or don’t you?  A move or moves could be created to draw out the individual elements of the chase to play out the gains and losses during the chase itself, but this one cuts through that fiction and lands at the end of the chase. 
 
So how much fiction is demanded by this move? We can look at the example:

​As we can see from the example, you still need to describe the fiction that triggers the move, how you are being the cat.  In this case, Keeler is “going door to door to catch him.”  That’s the information the MC needs in order to say “He can’t get out past you.”  Once that has been established the rest of the fiction comes easily: where do you drive him? To the roof.  And we cut to the roof where the chase has ended, but not the scene.
 
This move actually provides two different kinds of resolution.  On a miss, the move resolves the entirety of the conflict.  The prey escapes and you are empty handed.  The tension of the chase is gone and we return to the character, asking, now what do you do?  Same thing goes for Escape a Hunter of course: if you roll a 10+, “you escape clean and leave your hunter hunting.”  Full stop, conflict over.  But on any other roll, the move creates not a resolution of the conflict, but an escalation.  The chase itself resolves, but the tension, the conflict, doesn’t.  It escalates by taking us to a new location with new circumstances and new stakes.  In the example above, Keeler and Balls end up on the roof where they have a chance to resolve the conflict that was kicked off or continued by the preceding chase.  In the example to Escape a Hunter, Bran and Marie not only fail to escape Dog Head and his cult, but the scene is set for the following escalation: 

That little trick, making the move result in conflict resolution of conflict escalation, is a clever way to avoid the all-or-nothing effect of pass-fail resolution quandaries.  The move could easily be reduced to the question I posed earlier: do you get away or don’t you?  But the Bakers use their move structure to complicate that division and explore more of the “don’t you” option.  If you get away (or if your prey gets away), then it’s over, something significant has come to pass, but if you don’t (or they don’t), then how do you resolve that move so that there is a feeling of escalation and not just moving the original confrontation from one place to another?  The solution here is the simple detail of who gets to decide where you end up, which is a matter of advantageous or disadvantageous fictional positioning.  If you are the one deciding, you get to choose the arena for the next stage of the conflict, which is quite a bit of power, and more importantly, it feels like quite a bit of power to the players.  Just look at the examples already cited.  To force Balls to the roof is to limit his options to end this confrontation non-violently, to make an escape, or to have friends called in to change the dynamic of the confrontation.  To lead Bran and Marie into a broken gully that requires “picking” through in order to move effectively corners Bran and Marie, removing movability from the equation.  Moreover, they are also apparently outnumbered.  It is indeed a bad spot, and the move allowed that to happen.