More rules questions.
I’ve been thinking about the nature of the concept “move” as opposed to D&D’s “action” or “turn” in other RPGs. My question is “What constitutes a move?”
In one of his posts, Vincent Baker mentioned something similar to the idea that basic moves are what define the core of what a game is. So what makes a move, what should be a move, and what shouldn’t be?
It seems better to me to have fewer and broader basic moves that can encompass a wide variety of actions the way go aggro can be both violent and social or how cool under fire can be practically anything you do while under fire.
I was watching Pretty Little Liars with my girlfriend and I thought a game based on that show would never have a fight move or even perhaps a go aggro type move. It’s more “investigate” or “avoid” and done properly investigate could even come to include actions like finding a way to get someone out of a locked death trap (usually action sequences in the show are someone trapped and someone else trying to save them).
As I work on my AW hack I wonder how broad to make it so it both fits all the potential player actions but also reinforces the genre.
Moves don’t have to provide 100% coverage! Only the moments that you want to highlight, or provide game-specific direction for… making choices about what those situations/moments are for your game is a great way to get started on a hack 🙂
I would define a “move” as a codified story beat that moves the story forward or adds interesting information.
“Codified” because, at least on the PC side it consists of “if-then” statements. “Story beats” because it is based in the narrative and lives in the narrative. “That moves the story forward or adds interesting information” because anything else is boring and should not exist in a game.
So, moves are, essentially, bits of fiction in the game. Except that they are special bits of fiction, and thus we apply procedures and mechanics to them. These have, in a way, three effects:
-they create engagement by introducing uncertainty (if there is a roll) and hard choices for the players
– they build momentum, because whatever the result of a move, something interesting will happen
– they ensure consistency in tone and themes, because they partially define the fictional outcomes
The last point is super important! Thanks to the turn someone on Move, you can’t play monsterhearts without touching upon the theme of sexuality. Similarly, AW is in your face with scarcity, hard choices, and forcing your hand to commit violence. This is hardwired in the moves, so you’ll have to face it! And this is what is great, good moves make for an engaging and interesting story, and subtly steer it towards the genre and themes you want it to hit! Because of that, I actually think that very broad moves are often bland and uninspiring.
As another example, Sagas of the Icelanders has a load of basic moves, divided in different social roles, but these both push you towards the themes, and ensure that your character will face the behaviors and dilemmas that characters in Sagas faced: men being insulted in their honor, women cutting out the conversation to deliver sharp bits of wise, practical sense, etc. With a few broad moves, it would be bland, and you could play it as just another pseudo-viking RPG. with its many laser focused moves, it really plays like one of the Icelandic Sagas of old!
Also, as they say, you don’t need to cover everything. Moves are also a spotlight: they tell you which behaviors, which actions, which types of scene are important in your game, and again reinforce the game’s structure. If moves are super broad, then everything is important. If everything is important, then nothing is important. For the moment when things are really tense, but it’s just not a move, you’re still covered by GM moves and principles.
Agreed on both counts. It seems less that moves cover “all actions” but rather “all actions that are important to the story”.
At least so far most of the best story beats (and moves by me as an MC) have come from a failed roll or a partial success as opposed to most RPGs. There’s no “bland outcome” only “succeed, succeed for a price, or fail then something happens).
If a cop game has no focus on gunplay… then maybe no gun related moves? Especially if it’s all information gathering or investigation? Whereas the pro wrestling game I’ve read about has a very different list of moves?
The genius of the AW moves is that while they are broad enough to be applicable in many situations (e.g., Act Under Fire any time you are being pressured), they are also specific enough to reinforce the AW genre.
Also the names of the moves themselves are artful. You don’t ‘attack’ or even ‘get in his face’ — you ‘go aggro’. You don’t ‘figure stuff out’ or even ‘read a situation’, you ‘read a sitch‘. These words seem deliberately chosen to convey AW’s tone.
I was rereading the intro to dungeonworld and its discussion of what a move is seemd relevant. In that explanation, moves aren’t things you do. Instead they are game events triggered by things you do. “When you attack someone with a melee weapon, this happens.” “When you try to do something while in a dangerous situation, this happens.” That seems like a good way for my brain to approach it at list and it works well with the moves in original Apocalypse World that are sometimes on the table and sometimes off (like augury or the detailed combat moves i’ll never use). When the move “augury” is available, doing something triggers the effects of the move, otherwise it doesn’t.
Under that logic it seems like there is a baseline move of “When you do something and another move doesn’t apply, you succeed.”
Maybe this couples with the threat specific moves as well. I’m reminded of the sniper and the zombie that came up earlier in this group (but not this particular thread). Under how I explained it there, the killing of the zombie works. If it was dungeonworld, there’s a move that governs how the gunning works so you roll. If it was a superzombie then maybe you’d have to perform a threat specific move like “hit the weakspot” that might let you snipe a zombie perfectly on a 10 and reveal your location to the other zombies on a 7+?
You could use that also to make genre specific things like “if no move applies, you succeed.” and a complementary move that is “if the move is violent, you fail and the mc makes a harm move against you” (this would be maybe for the Pretty Little Liars game I was discussing earlier since the characters never succeed when they go aggro).
This is getting lengthy but another way to use that is “if you attack, the gm tells you what ill fate befalls you as the price for your success.” This would mirror a fiction where every tie there is a fight it ends up causing bad for the pcs (in Pretty Little Liars everytime they actually attack someone it worsens their position since there is more evidence to convict them)
Incidentally I don’t really want ot make a Pretty Little Liars game. It occured to me as a thought experiment after I read about the guy working on an ER style game and how else you could implement the moves.