I've solved PBTA's terminology problem

Hubris, meddling in things man wasn’t meant to know, an ill-advised fool speaking of what he knows not, etc etc. Bear with me. This was spawned from a bluesky thread by old friend of the blog Emily Allen, quote:

"to my mind, the core of pbta is not "2d6+stat with mixed successes", it's the system of "when x trigger happens in the fiction, apply y specific mechanic". Codified, genre specific moves are its main innovation. 

If you think pbta is just 2d6+stat with varied levels of success, you missed the point" 

**

For a long time, I never gave PBTA games a second thought because of a specific misconception I had about their mechanics, a misconception founded on one word: move.

When I hear the word “move” in an RPG context, my brain goes immediately to Pokemon: here are your four moves, they are a button you press that executes a thing you do to another party. They have a limited number of actions, a single delineated outcome, and heaven help you if you want to interact with the world in any way outside of a move used in battle. They are brute-force actions used to bludgeon obstacles into submission.

Moves in PBTA games, however, aren’t intended to be buttons that you press; they’re meant to be character actions triggered by outside circumstances. But this fed into the misconception: I looked at the mechanics and thought “What the fuck, you give me like four buttons to press and then tell me I’m not supposed to press any buttons? Why the hell would I play this game, if you won't let me press the buttons that you gave me!”

It took me a while to realize that I had it wrong, and I think it’s a safe assumption to say I wasn’t alone in the boat, but I'm not letting PBTA the system off the hook entirely: this sort of misunderstanding is a two way street, but it is solvable with a little bit of applied semantics.

(Ha ha! You've fallen directly into my cunning trap! It was a linguistics post the entire time!) 

Beyond any mental links to Pokemon (which while probably common, are hardly universal) “move” carries broader connotations that, consciously or not, are going to affect how a reader responds to it. Namely, movement is tied up in animacy. Inanimate objects, being inanimate, do not move (well, as far as human perception is concerned); they are moved by other forces. Animate entities are able to move of their own accord and thus the process of movement is tied to the agency of that entity in our minds. There are languages out there that will use entirely different words for the same action depending on whether or not the doer of the verb is animate or inanimate (this is called Active-Stative alignment, fascinating stuff.) English doesn’t make that distinction in text or speech, but we still make it in our brains because we are categorization machines and our austrolopithicine ancestors found it extremely useful to clock whether or not something moved on its own.

Player characters, despite being wholly imaginary, are still simulacra of animate entities. They possess agency within the fiction we have constructed in our heads, so when we say a character moves, there is an implicit agency that goes along with it. The character is choosing to do an action.

So when moves are described as “oh you don’t press the button, you wait for something else to activate it”, the little goblin that lives in our brains is liable to freak the fuck out because we’ve been given a word that says “your character (and by extension you, the player) have agency within this fantasy” and a definition that says “oh no no no, you need a trigger for this action, it’s not up to you.” Goblin freaks out because it thinks agency has been violated (offered and then retracted, even when this is not actually the case), misconceptions are made, stupid arguments start, fodder is shoveled into the disc horse’s eight maws of eternal blight blah blah blah tale old as time forever and ever in saecula saeculorum amen.

How To Fix It

Replace the word “Move” with “Response”.

That’s it, that’s all you need to do. CTRL+F > replace all.

Because that’s what moves are supposed to be, right? They’re an action your character does in response to external stimuli. There’s still the same amount of agency within the fiction wrt your character moving around and taking action, but the brain-goblin sees “response” and understands “oh yeah, that’s not a button you can press whenever you feel like it, that’s a thing you do when another thing happens around you”. No one ever worries about when their panic response kicks in while playing Mothership, because it’s right there in the name: it is your response when you panic. Not panicking? You’re not going to do the panic response, that’d be silly as hell.

Nothing changes mechanically, nothing changes functionally, nothing changes conceptually except using the right word to describe the mechanic so as to shut up the brain goblin.

Problem solved. I’ll see you all at the Ennies to accept my trophy for lifetime achievement.