Hacking AW – the purpose of moves.

Hacking AW – the purpose of moves.

Hacking AW – the purpose of moves. My brain keeps coming around to this question: what are moves for? By which I mean, why should my hack include move ‘x’? What am I trying to accomplish?

Here’s what I’ve got as a tentative list of move ‘natures’:

Arbiter moves that resolve something contentious, settling a potential disagreement over an outcome or the fiction.  (Example: hack and slash)

Montage moves that skip play past something you don’t want to focus on (example: Regiment’s downtime move)

Scene-framing moves that plop you into situations with potential (example: Regiment’s engagement move). These can flip past time (like montages), but they focus on what’s next, rather than quickly resolving a bunch of time.

Opinion moves that inject ideas for genre-relevant outcomes that the participants might not think of (e.g. Go Aggro)

Moves that imply the key factors in genre-relevant situations (e.g. Regiment’s Assault move) – whether by making them mechanically relevant, or alternately implying that this is what the unstructured conversation should be about (the ‘fruitful void’)

Prompt moves that give players ideas for what their characters could do (e.g. Regiment’s Petition move), or differentiating characters with things nobody else can do (e.g. Battlebabe’s dangerous & sexy)

Moves that serve up meaningful choices (Seduce or Manipulate being one of many)

Moves can of course do several of these things (I notice that one of my favorite moves, Regiment’s Engagement move, falls into several of these categories).

(Two slightly problematic move natures pop to mind, where an interesting fictional situation is reduced to a mechanical modifier, or worse, made irrelevant by a resolution move that discounts preceding fiction, thereby discouraging it.)

If this is a useful list, then these might be useful questions:

What will participants (players, perhaps including the GM) disagree on?

What will they get bogged down on?

What won’t they think of doing?

What won’t they realize might occur?

What are the key factors in the important situations of the game?

What should participants be nudged into talking about?

What meaningful choices or trade-offs should be highlighted?

25 thoughts on “Hacking AW – the purpose of moves.”

  8. I think there’s also a big difference between exclusive Moves (mostly from Playbooks) and basic Moves.

    The basic Moves define the genre. They explicitly call out the actions that have weight whenever anyone does them. In base AW this is predominantly defined by getting in other people’s business (only Act Under Pressure and Open Your Brain aren’t moves that involve tense interaction with other people and what they’re doing; while Act Under Pressure is likely to arrive from such situations). This forces you to engage with NPCs and PCs to trigger the mechanics. Contrast with Tremulus where more basic moves focus on the clue / discovery economy.

    Because of the work they do in defining the genre, they have to be deeply tied to the fiction in terms of triggers and results. They need to have really good answers to all the questions you posted, not just because they’ll be used a lot but because they answer everything about the game itself.

  12. So, one thing that boggles my brain is how specific my questions are to a particular “they”. I’m reminded of the idea that rules are there to change how a group plays. You need to know the expectations of your target players!

  19. Federico Totti  A Montage move resolves something complicated in a quick way, skipping you past something you don’t want to focus on. A scene-framing (not cutting) move establishes a new scene with interesting ingredients. Here are two war moves to illustrate the difference:

    When you go to war, roll +Lucky. On a miss, pick the location where you got shot.

    When you go to war, roll +Lucky. On a hit, choose who has your back when the shooting starts.

  20. Sorry, my mistake. I can’t read the post while writing, on mobile g+. Now I got it thanks. Reading both the moves I initially thought to the “passage of time” move from Undying.

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