AW GMs: When you’re running the game, how conscious are you of your use of specific GM moves or principles?
Is the list something you refer to between sessions and try to internalize, but then run the game more or less intuitively, perhaps singling out one or two underused moves to emphasize? Or are you generally aware of the move name as you’re speaking?
The Principles (make a move, but misdirect, be a fan of the player’s characters’s, etc.) are things I’ve tried to internalize. To me, so much of the tone/feel/point of the game stems from the Principles that I am constantly thinking about them.
When I make a GM move, I let it flow from the fiction without really worrying about which move it is. Often times that comes easily, as the actions the characters have taken present logical consequences. When I get stuck about what should happen, that’s when I refer to the list. Reading them again usually makes something jump out as the obviously “correct” GM move. When a move doesn’t jump out or when I am totally stuck, then I choose a move that I haven’t used in a while and make it happen.
Hope that helps. 🙂
Really all Vincent’s done here is give a name to things we were already doing in other games, with other groups – it’s just now got this confusing jargon and weird names attached!
Just read what it wants you to do, then mull it over. You’ll find it’s really not that difficult at all! “Make Apocalypse World seem real?” Well duh. Of course you try to make these things consistent and authentic. You were doing that with other games, right? “Be a fan of the players?” Of course you are, why else are any of us here?
Point is, see what each principle, each move, each agenda is actually saying – then just let it flow!
Also: you’ll find that with moves, you can’t really do anything that doesn’t fall under one of them, by definition. Name something you can say to the players, then check the list. Chances are, you can find a match.
Don’t worry about being too technical about it. I don’t look at the list much, save for threat-specific custom moves. I just know, basically, what the moves want me to do: cause trouble in a fun way, and complicate things to spur the players to action.
“Now Gnarly’s in the tank, and he’s raining hellfire on your people [causing trouble, but we’re all at the table grinning, going “Awwww shit!”] and he’s heading towards the bunker where you’re keeping Partridge [things are sticky now, and we’ve given the players something to do.]”
I
wing itinternalize most of the time, but I admit to keeping a GM Moves sheet on hand. When the players look at me with that look, and I feel myself looking back at them, it’s helpful for me to glance down at the table, past the dice I don’t ever roll but draw comfort from, and flick my eyes over the list. Mostly, this keeps me from defaulting to Future Badness. “O hay, i could totally put them in a spot here instead of spouting gibberish about distant smoke or an outbreak of shit-lung in the barracks.”I am definitely aware of move names as I’m making them – they hover just out of easy vision, like a poorly-calibrated HUD. That kind of ritual language just sticks with me.
I’ll second what Caitlynn Blocker said. The Principles and Moves are things lots of GMs do already, they just might not realize it and probably haven’t had it laid out the way AW does. I didn’t realize this at first, but then I went “Holy shit. This is stuff I already do, I’ve never called it [GM Move X].”
A.W. was groundshaking for me, as GM. Before that, it was simply “roll for action: success means ok, failing mean you are in a locked position, take damage, retry, retry, retry, try another road”.
Now I have a whole new world in front of my eyes.
Now a failed roll can be a success for the immediate action, but THERE ARE ALWAYS consequences. Maybe in the future. Maybe for other characters, maybe on your equip. Now every roll is meaningful, and all the system is made to create story, to advance, to add details etc.
So, I HAVE TO CONCENTRATE and keep myself thinking about “what can I do now with that roll?”. Sure, now it’s easier to find an answer, however I like to re-read the whole GM principles/moves list, so I have time to catch a breath while thinking, AND finding something unespected, forcing me to choose some anwer I’d avoid normally.
However, as ever, a big thanks to Vincent Baker for opening a new RpG world to me, after 20 years passed with “roll to climb, fail, you fall for 15 feet, roll Agi to catch a ledge, roll to climb again…”
The principles are something I try to understand first, and to amalgamate into my feeling of how this game should work. I might have a look at them when thinking about the game outside the game, to see if I still follow them, but otherwise they get blended into the “This is what this game is about” general frame of mind. For the moves it’s a bit different: While I generally run the game from my intuition as GM, I am aware that I have this list of moves which is there to make the characters’ lives interesting, and may occasionally check it during the session, in particular during a break or when I’m a bit stumped as to what happens next, because it’s not very clear to me from the fiction how to proceed interestingly. (Sometimes maybe those should really be also the moments when I should wrap up scenes, but that also comes from the moves, I guess.) And I often sit down after a session, marking which moves I felt I used, and looking which ones I may have neglected, trying to think of situations for those moves.
Thanks for your comments, everyone. Apart from Gary Montgomery’s HUD, I figured it would be mostly intuitive, so glad to see I’m not way off in my thinking.
It’s interesting that while the triggers for player-side moves need to be noticed in real time so that you can engage the mechanics, GM moves needn’t be realized for what they are .. ever.
In a way, GM moves are about when to stop talking and ask the players what they do. As in: When you reveal future badness, ask the players what they do.
Andrea Parducci, Burning Wheel was the game that did that for me, I totally get that.
i want to point out that, while they are generalizable to an extent, you can’t just go dropping the AW principles into other games and expecting them to work. they are designed for AW in particular.