thread: 2012-06-18 : Moves as Jumping-off Points
On 2012-06-18, Gregor Vuga wrote:
I think the many hacks out there (either finished or not) are a testament particularly to the part where you say "They help you see and understand the genre you're working in. "
Once Apocalypse World gave us moves as discrete bits of modeling various forms of conflict, suddenly a whole darn lot of books, movies and other stories became much more easily accessible as source material for design. You just look at some story sequence and you go "Ok, so when a character does this, it depends on this, and these things can happen." It's friggin obvious in retrospect, but AW really opened that up.
And you only need to pay attention to the conflicts that interest you and are important to your source material. There is no need to design "universal resolution mechanics" or "world physics" to carry the fiction. Only the interesting parts (and different genres consider different things interesting). Each particular move might be considered a subsystem for the fictional moments that the game's genre finds meaningful. In that sense, yeah AW is and amazing jump-off point.
(I think the one thing that I've seen a lot of hacks stumble on was genres or fiction where there can be a very direct, duel-like confrontation between characters where both of their skills are important. AW's framework can handle that in various ways, but not in the ways people are used to.)
