Category: Powered by the Apocalypse: Discussion

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.

The Cloak & Dagger show has lots of great examples of opening-your-brain-to-the-psychic-maelstrom-type symbolism and imagery. The characters are able to see people’s fears and hopes (respectively, as depicted below). These are always presented as hallucinations with metaphorical-but-clear impressions.

I personally find it difficult to come up with that kind of imagery on the fly when running a game, but the scenes here are so well done that I think it’s teaching me.

So, presented as an MC’s tool: Cloak & Dagger on Freeform (and Hulu).

In the Threats section of AW 2, the threat moves for each type start with “push X move.” Does that mean when you make an MC move, it can be to push players toward invoking the stated move? Or is it a call to make them immediately make the move, rather than encourage them?