Fiction’s requirements as a constraint in Apocalypse World
[W]hen you write a question as a stake, you’re committing to not answering it yourself. You’re committing to letting the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters, answer it.
— AW 2E, p. 116
It feels like this is meant to be a moderating influence against MC self-dealing on behalf of beloved NPCs, or preferences for story direction. I can see it serving a small effect towards that end. Asking someone to be conscious and attempt mental discipline has to be helpful in getting them to do it.
However, when you evaluate the story’s internal logic and causality, isn’t it your brain doing it? It seems like it’s not really going to keep you honest, like it’s meant to. As MC, I’m a flawed, limited person. I’m not certain of what the story’s logic requires all the time.
You see similar things around “disclaiming decision making to the fiction” and language like that in other parts of the text. The game tells you to commit to things psychologically that are meant to keep you from being self-interested or railroady. It doesn’t seem to me that this can have a very strong effect, though. Am I off-base?
“Play to see what happens” seems akin to this, but that doesn’t give me pause. It makes sense as a straightforward rule that would be really easy to follow and effect monumental change on the game if obeyed. So why is this “disclaim decision making to the fiction” stuff not working for me?
This is one of the parts of AW that I logically struggle with the most.
It’s like illusionism, but you do it to yourself!
If I were to say, “Replace the parts that are confounding you with ‘Play to see what happens'” would that help?
I’m not being specious.
When I read “[W]hen you write a question as a stake, you’re committing to not answering it yourself. You’re committing to letting the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters, answer it,” my brain translates it into..
“When you write a question as a stake, you’re saying, play to see how the Players answer the question.”
If I’m handing the keys to the results to the Players, then any self-dealing I might have had in mind is out the window. Sorcerer taught me this, actually. I might be fiercely curious about how things will turn out. But the foci of the curiosity is the PCs and what the Players choose to do with them.
Not sure if that helps. But when I read your post these are the things I think of. I come up with questions as the MC… and then I eagerly await the Players to come up with answers.
Christopher Kubasik – That helps a lot. I need to think it over, but I may be able to deal with all instances of this with that swap.
Okay… Let me try, with an example.
in my most recent campaign, one of the biggest stakes questions ever answered was “Will Cocaine the orphan escape the spider-tunnels alive”.
the gunlugger, chopper, and faceless had fought their way through a nest of Wolves, and found where the orphans (including Cocaine). a phlebotomist-Wolf who they had cornered in the orphan-lab pulled a knife, and threatened to cut the kids throat if they didn’t lower their weapons… the faceless decided to try to blow him away before he could kill cocaine… and 6-‘d.
The games internal logic slew Cocaine, but because it was a stakes question, I had agreed to a few things 1.) he had no plot armour/I would let him die, and 2.) he was alive and savable when they entered the tunnels. once they had gotten in there, I could kill him if it made sense (a guy has a knife to his throat a fire starts in the Orphan-lab and is not extinguished, they make a roll that costs them too much time, and the transfusion is complete.
does this help?
josh savoie – So, for 2, the stakes question was actually “once they enter, can Cocaine make it out alive?” Is that why you couldn’t kill him before they entered the tunnels? You knew they’d be heading for the tunnels or wrote it up in the moment before they went in?
I can see how stakes questions could prevent certain things from happening until they’re resolved, if they’re “worded” right. Thanks.
josh savoie with those stakes in play, and with the mantra “play to find out”, I say that Cocaine should be alive in the caves, IF the players hadn’t lose too much time before arriving. Then, knife menace VS. gunlugger intervention, and a 6- result, they are a good example of “play to find out” and “narration AND dice told you the truth”, where the truth is “Cocaine is slaughtered by the wolf’s knife”.
Yeah, totally fair. what I meant there is, I don’t pull a “haha, he’s already dead/A Wolf” unless they do something that costs them time. puts him in danger that fictionally justifies him dying or joining the pack
I appreciate the above answers and am mostly commenting to see what others will say, but I’ll try to make myself useful as long as I’m here….
I read these sorts of things not as foolproof, programmatic rules that will work flawlessly, but as guidelines that will help move stories in a different direction from what you might get if you are either entirely new to RPGs or coming in with a lot of baggage from latter-day D&D, World of Darkness, or other RPGs (mostly from the 1990s and after) with more directed storylines. I feel like the Ur-rule of PbtA is that play is a conversation, albeit a conversation with rules, so what participants want from it will always figure into it in various ways – but reminding yourself “play to find out what happens” and “disclaim decision making” encourages a lot of inspiration and idea fodder you might not have if you go in already planning “it will always end one of these pre-planned ways” like a video game design. This has led to many games that surprise me as the GM, which is not something I got nearly as often before I learned to MC Apocalypse World.
It’s just a way of giving yourself a different mental model that may help you correct your biases, but there are no guarantees. Just like making a pro/con list might help me be more rational when buying a car – but it’s still my brain making the call.
Hi Rob, this makes me think of a lot of things! But I think one of the most concrete of these is that “the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters” is most definitely not “you”, the MC. It’s a kind of abstraction, like a character is an abstraction, or a nation, or a scientific theory. It’s a thing that has its own internal reality quite a part from whatever any one of us might think or want. It springs, not from your mind alone, but from all the participants’ minds. You (the MC, that is) have a generating influence on it, certainly, but it is the players who “drive” it, who collectively determine where it ends up.
So I read this as saying to the MC, “yes, this story is your baby, but you don’t get to determine who she is when she grows up — that’s up to her.” And I mean “her” in the “Inside Out” sense of the word, where each player character is a different “emotion”, if you will, pushing and pulling the story to its own end that it determines for itself. Each player is like another finger on the Ouija Board’s ring, moving it here and there, spelling out words that surprise everyone, even though they themselves are the ones moving it — it seems to have a life of its own, and, in a figurative sense at least, it does. In other words, “Don’t be that overbearing parent that ruins your kid’s life — guide and set certain healthy limits for her as appropriate, but let her make her own choices and find out who she is for herself.” The “child” here is an abstraction arising in part from your participation, yes, but it is not you at all, nor is it any one other person. Having input from all these different kinds of sources makes it something else entirely.