thread: 2012-06-18 : Moves as Jumping-off Points
On 2012-06-20, Josh W wrote:
Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm talking about, seize by force is an interesting move because of the threat of taking harm back, that's it's hard choice, but unlike loads of other moves, you have to rewind to make it fit depending on other people's attitude.
Seduce/manipulate evades this by having one set of results for npcs, another for players.
My thought was that you could interrupt a move with another, making it so that the "if it's a player character" clause of seduce manipulate is instead a move used by specific player characters.
But there's a problem I noticed while making those moves, and I think it's actually a bigger thing:
While that stuff about interesting player conflict is true, I don't think it's why the framework of apoc world is so good, and importantly, it's not what makes it good for making evocative hacks:
It's good because there are very very few "metarules". Very few rules that act mainly on other rules, rather than the fictional situation, and in addition, most rules in apoc world trigger then add stuff to complicate the situation.
If two rules trigger at the same time, you usually don't check their interaction, you just apply both, and they colour the situation in parallel, meaning that you can just add moves to the game to increase the detail level on the stuff you care about.
The only rules I can think of that really mess with other rules are help/interfere, the hx bit at the start, and the battlebabe's sex move. Another big example would be defending in dungeon world.
Moves that interfere with other moves obviously do that, or apply through the normal channels of +1 forward etc.
That's why you can just sit down with a film and write new moves based on what you see, because each rule operates in a focused and contained manner, and this modularity allows you to just keep adding stuff.
And not only do they act in a modular way, most of them act as a little bucket of that genre/narrative causality stuff that you've siphoned out by watching the film, spitting more fictional content into the situation, in a similar way to random tables, but more controlled.
The way I see it, apocalypse world embodies a unix-tool approach to game design, where every subsystem is composed of tiny nuggets of limited scope and coherent functionality, within a framework of broader principles. And just like in software development, this encourages hacks.
That's also why my moves above are not a good idea, because exception based design is a different framework, one that lives off subversion of expectations, and so makes development costs of adding or changing features exponentially prohibitive.
The only exceptions based stuff I can see working in apoc world without weakening it's structure is stuff that has to be pre-primed by previous or current action and has a limited lifespan, so that you can always keep tabs on possible interactions.
