Author: Michael Prescott

I’m trying to hack something together, and I keep getting the feeling it would be useful to understand the interplay between fiction and mechanics better, but I was having trouble articulating it.

I figured I’d start with a game that I know and love, which is Monsterhearts.

Originally shared by Michael Prescott

This is going to bear some explanation. I was curious about the internal economies of the game, so I made a diagram that shows the relationships between

Ovals are moves, rectangles are tracked quantities, and dotted ovals are fictional situations.

An arrow means ‘leads to’, either because a move creates that quantity or fictional situation.  Strings lead to advantages, for example.

More subtly, arrows can also mean ‘consumed or becomes’, as is the case when Conditions are removed by Share the Pain.

Double lines indicate a subject switch. So the single line between Fear and Hold Steady means your fear becomes a need to hold steady.  The double-line between a String and Fear means your String turns into someone else’s fear (the need to hold steady).

What the hell?

I’m doing this just to understand the interplay between moves, quantities and fiction.  I’m noodling on a hack of my own, and I wish I had a diagram like this for it, so I thought a diagram for a game that works well might help me along.

Caveats:

Forgive the arranging, I know it’s hideous right now.

This diagram obviously leaves out the enormously important role of “da fiction” which surrounds everything.

There are probably several errors.

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?

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?

Hacking. I’ve read in two places now: start with the GM agenda, principles and moves.  This seems daunting!

The AW MC section is huge, and it strikes me almost as a general treatise on GMing (e.g. “say what honesty demands”) broken into granules.  Writing my own equivalent or adaptation as a starting point strikes me as .. unlikely.

On the other hand, when I read the Dark Hart DW supplement (so good), I’m inspired – it has a laser focus on genre-specific differences (e.g. “give everything personhood”), ignoring general GMing advice completely.

This seems eminently manageable.

(As another random data point, I notice that The Regiment breezes through this with a bulleted list.)

I may be answering my own question, but I’d love to hear from others.

Finished our little three-session foray into Black Stars Rise, with Tim Groth at the helm.  We went even further into the surreality of our too-many-dimensional apartment building.

Ultimately a weird thing happened, those who had accrued the most insanities were kind of rolling with things.  I’d scrupulously avoided madness, clinging to my priest’s level-headedness, determined to be the rock of the group, but this session I started feeling more desperate. Nearly everything we tried seemed to be a vector for the madness to spread. How could we end this?

Then it dawned on me – when the madness escalates, the good guys gotta escalate too.  Going for the gas cans seemed like the obvious, inescapable conclusion.

There was an interesting bit of inter-PC tension here, because Sean Winslow’s artist character had really enjoyed exploring the madness with his art. What kinda dawned on us was that the art, though it provides valuable insight, can become an attack vector for the badness: anyone exposed to his art seemed to become an avenue to draw in yet more besides! And yet, my bit of arson was both dangerous (it turns out we hadn’t totally cleared the place of uh.. people) and worse, was going to claim his studio, the gateway to his coolest character power.

Fortunately (for me) the other sane character saw eye-to-eye with my crazed scheme, and fended off the artist’s attempt to stop me as I sloshed gasoline through the apartment building. Stephen Shapiro’s librarian went so far as to bring out the SWAT-issue taser he’d come into possession of – and that inadvertently settled the matter. It sparked during the struggle.

Woof.

So.. playtesting fiction-first games is a little weird (I’m working on a hack), because it’s like a handful of mechanics embedded in a free-form game. But yet, that free-form game play has a distinct character to it. So it comes down to trying to test how well your “GMing advice” essays are working. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.