What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of naming moves?
I like the way the labels work as shorthand, but I’ve noticed some players latch on to those labels and take them from shorthand to shortcut.
For example, contrast:
“I get right up in his face and yell, ‘Give me the gun before I take it and ram it up your ass!'”
with
“I go aggro on him.”
I know any experienced MC will respond to the second with, “What do you actually do?”
My point, however, is would this situation be less likely to happen if the move didn’t have a label for the player to refer to? Do you think the time and clarity benefits of the label offset the potential decrease in immersion posed by the shortcut?
Sometimes it does. Not just “clarity” but in some cases a whole trope can be invoked by the title of a move. Other times, not so much.
I will say from a design standpoint it’s almost imperative that individual moves be given unique identifying labels, unless your system only has a handful of them.
“The GM not naming their move is good storytelling.
The players not naming their move is poor communication”
Paraphrasing i think Jason Morningstar.
However, the response to a player going
“I do [movename]”
is always
“okay cool! HOW?”
(and sometimes i offer a suggestion if i hve a cool image in mind)
sub, that’s a thing I was thinking about too. Me and Stras Acimovic are designing a game: one of the problems I personally thought about if naming the “moves” (they’re not moves as in AW, but they have a name too) was a good idea, a bad idea or just an option. Like:
1. it’s called ‘hunt them down’, but you can rename it anytime if you implemented it in a more specific narrative way (you decided you’re a troll hunter, so it would become ‘hunt Trolls down’);
2. name it whatever you wish, but it’s made to have outcomes when you hunt someone down.
3. it’s ‘hunt them down’, full-stop.
What would be best in your opinion?
A surprising number of the moves I’ve written are direct references (or quotes) to the media that inspired them. My theory is that that helps draw the player into the specific bit of genre emulation I’m going for with that move and increases the odds of getting good fiction out of that player.
I’m also very partial to the players never naming their moves, at least in a live game the GM should be calling out moves as they’re triggered and prompting for dice. The players seemed to like it, they got some free actions out of me by focusing on the fiction and what they were doing. If they’d started the “$MOVE_NAME, ‘ok, how do you do that ?’ cycle, they’d have faced more consequences than they actually did.
.
But Michael, surely you make an exception for OH YEAH!, right? 😉
i just read OH YEAH today and it is actually terribly written. The 7-9 result is messy as hell on my sheet.
I haven’t seen Oh Yeah!, but based on the name alone I like the design direction.
I mostly just plussed this whole thread, because Tim Franzke and As If have answered the questions well. The only point I have to add is that, from a writing standpoint, moves are going to have names. We writers will organize the text and give things names in order to frame what we’re talking about and break things down into parts we can clearly convey. So yeah, if you say “I go aggro”, I’m going to say “cool, what do you do?”
Giacomo Vicenzi i you could always record them the way specialist skills have always been recorded:
Hunt them Down(Trolls)
Or just the skill with a blank to fill in later when you first take the skill. In practice this sounds like Hunt Them Down(whoever pisses me off first). I like it.
And then you can also make puns! Like this one:
MASTER QUARTERMASTER
When you calculate the best route for a perilous journey reduce the needed rations of everyone by 1 per 4 rations distance. It can’t get lower then 4.
Also, when you go to buy travel or military equipment, reduce its cost by 4.
It can’t get lower then 1.
You can take this move up to 4 times.
probably only funny to me.
Also, imagine this conversation:
player describes what he does and rolls
“So i got a 10+” and looksa t the GM
GM: “what did you do? That roll with hard?”
“Yeah!”
“But not the one where you get to choose but the one where i tell you what they choose?”
Especially if multiple moves could be triggered in a specific situation you get into trouble if there are no clear labels.
Yeah, you’re going to have to elaborate on that reference,
Here’s a parody engine for ya. I decided to counter my own answer and demonstrate that move names can be important even if there are less than a handful. This system is called “Move and Do”. You have only one stat, called “Success”. Use whatever dice and scale you like.
Move
On a successful Success roll, your character transits, via any means specified in the fiction, from one place to another. Should your character decide to abort that transit at any point en route (for instance if they see something else they want to respond to along the way), they may.
Do
On a successful Success roll, your character does whatever you just said they were trying to do. This action may involve using any items or features currently stated to exist or justifiably assumed to be available in the fiction but come on let’s not be crazy about it.
Great stuff. Thanks everyone!
I think the root of my concern is that the group of players I usually game with have been conditioned by other games to restrict themselves to the things on their character sheets. I was thinking maybe taking away the labels would encourage them to think more “fiction first”, but I guess the better solution is to keep working with them and pushing the “yeah, but what do you DO?”
I like to say “Ok! HOW?” instead of “Yeah but”.
Michael Llaneza
You can take that move 4 times. So when you take it the first time you are a:
Quarter Master-Quartermaster!
These games may not drive you to worship Satan, but they can drive you to drink !
Whenever I introduce Apocalypse World games to players I tell them that they will rarely if ever ask for a move. I tell them to tell me what to do and I will tell them that they triggered the move. I introduce them to the moves but tell them that I’ll be in charge of calling for rolls. They don’t have to worry about it. They just narrate their characters actions along till I stop them to make a roll… SHOOT PEOPLE IN THE FACE! GRAB THE BRIEFCASE! F*** the rules man! DO AWESOME S***! I’ll say at intervals,’Sounds like you’re going aggro. Roll + HARD.’ After this kind of introduction I don’t have problems with people calling their move. The hard part is being SUPER diligent with asking for them to roll for moves. (Especially reading the sitch and read person.) But otherwise… give the players the power to narrate whatever they want and take the mechanics into your own hands.