Of all the pithy sayings in Apocalypse World, perhaps the most often repeated is “fiction first”: the idea that an action taken during play should begin and end with narrative, starting with a player saying what their character does in purely diegetic terms, the MC taking note of that description triggering a rule-specified move, then framing the outcome of the roll back in diegetic terms again. Passing from mouth to mouth and text to text gradually gilded this guideline into a sacred mantra of the Powered by the Apocalypse style, a cynosure that separated it as a distinct mode of thinking about roleplaying games.
However: this phrase does not appear in the text of AW. The co-creator of the game confirms that the whole concept was not of his making1:
This sort of philosophy seems to have crept in through a chain of derivations such as Dungeon World, that played a game of telephone about what the intentions of the original rules were. The book does name the principle of “to do it, you do it”, but this only means that moves must be grounded in specific actions the character takes (and that rolls cannot be avoided when a move is triggered), a solid piece of advice but one that applies to D&D as much as PbtA. Another likely contributing factor is the listed MC principle of “make your move but never speak its name”, that directs the gamemaster (and only them) to frame their own moves as pure narrative without reference to the name of the move they are making. This, once again, is a fairly orthodox paradigm – virtually no TTRPGs before AW even bothered to systematize things the GM did into PC-like “moves”.
Crucially: it doesn’t matter if later games of the lineage diverged from the source material. Apocalypse World is not a Q document from which deviance is heresy. One person extrapolating another’s work in experimental new directions is a fundamental function within the grand project of human art. However, this line of thought has, I would argue, strayed in the last fifteen years. It forgot its practical grounding in effective communication during play to transform into a shibboleth of roleplay-theoretical purity. I do not suggest any ill-intention on the part of the people who propagated the variant understanding and can appreciate the desire for free-flowing creativity it represents, but in practice it can present a stumbling block to fluidity of the group conversation roleplaying operates as.
The primary problem “fiction first” creates is that of what might be called “move fishing”. Because players are expected to not explicitly invoke their moves, they must instead narrate doing things and hope the MC recognizes their intent. In many cases this goes smoothly (it’s hard to misunderstand “I swing my sword at them”) but in more complicated situations it can result in players resorting to wink-and-nod indicators of what they want to get things going. This adds one more task onto the shoulder of the person at the table already dealing with by far the heaviest workload.
On a broader level, the phrase encapsulates a dogmatic approach to play that seems implicitly uncomfortable with “playing a game” at all. The slogan treats the mechanics of the game as unsightly things that obscure the true Platonic form of Narrativism the players ought to summon during a session. Intriguingly, it wraps around, horseshoe-like, into the OSR concept of avoiding rule reference as much as possible in favor of detailed description of what is said and done, to be arbitrated by a GM employing their own understanding of how the world works – “the answer is not on your character sheet”. Clearly both strains of thought are reaching for something commonly desired, but difficult to triangulate.
Certainly, game mechanics can (and very often do) get in the way of fun. Everyone remembers a time when a random table produced an illogical outcome for the situation at hand, or the complexity of a subsystem ground play to a halt. Streamlining systems into simpler, sleeker forms for the sake of speed has constituted much of the TTRPG design program of the last two decades. How little one has to think about rules while using them acts as an admirable indicator of their elegance. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:
“…in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfill its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats – and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.”2
I do not believe we have perfected tabletop roleplaying games yet. Game design as a field is relatively new and much work remains to be done discovering those ideal natural patterns. However, I think we must accept as a bedrock premise: to play a game, you play a game. We don’t need to run an RPG through the additional emulation layer of a game of pretend, feigning that we don’t actually like assigning numbers to things and bouncing them off of each other. Let people say what moves they’re making! Give them big colorful buttons to press, and let them play to find out what happens.
I won’t assert this as an absolute, given that the word “game” is a Wittgensteinian phantom that defies all but the haziest of definitions. Serious LARPs, for instance, often operate along quasi-ritual lines that encourage prior internalization of how play proceeds so as to minimally break the magic circle of role absorption during play. Even those, however, accept that when significant confusion and distress would intrude, they must fall back on out-of-character communication.
Which is, ultimately, “the conversation” of a roleplaying game, at the very least the sort where people sit around a table and scribble notes on paper. The procedures given in the book provide rules of order for those assembled to carry on their discussion about what happens next. Some games even embrace that distinction between the players and the player characters, espousing the group as akin to a writer’s room hashing out the next episode together. One doesn’t have to go that far, though – it’s fine to stay in close third person, so to speak. Narrate what your character says in as close an approximation of their imagined voice if you like, but don’t feel guilty for wanting to roll dice every once in a while, too. It’s normal to cycle between the two modes; if you didn’t want to use rules, you could be writing a screenplay or a novel instead. In fact, you should, if the inclination strikes you! There’s a freedom to dictating precisely what you want to happen without needing the go ahead of a flowchart, and a satisfaction of creating something all your own.
What you shouldn’t do it feel ashamed of not writing a story, and choosing to play a game with your friends. Each option is its own format with its own merits. Likewise, when you design a game, be willing to indulge yourself a little and admit that you enjoy making games. Mechanics are good, actually! Well-written procedures efficiently guide play toward interesting interactions and away from acrimonious disputes. We should expect games to offer us rules that we’re excited to manipulate, not burdened with the necessary evil of. “The fiction” is well worth maximizing, but it’s not zero-sum with mechanical engagement.
There’s an old contestation that TTRPGs are not about telling a story so much as doing things in character that can be interpreted as a story in retrospect. While the weeds of that formulation are best left for getting in to in another post, the end state of a session is the same regardless: you look back and see that you’ve collectively created a story. Everything you did during the session, game mechanical or not, contributed toward crafting it. Fiction is always the final product.
Footnotes
1 https://bsky.app/profile/lumpley.bsky.social/post/3llkfqyha7k2p
2 Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), trans. Lewis Galantiere
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