The Apocalypse World RPG has the following move:
When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll +sharp. On a 10+,
hold 3. On a 7–9, hold 1. While you’re interacting with them, spend
your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
- is your character telling the truth?
- what’s your character really feeling?
- what does your character intend to do?
- what does your character wish I’d do?
- how could I get your character to ____?
One of my favourite things about hyper aware characters in other media is the scene where they strike up a conversation with someone and instantly know how to pull their strings, and I love these sorts of moves for how well they let anyone play that kind of character.
Every PbtA system I've played has a similar move, but each system uses its own set of questions; Urban Shadows includes questions like "Who's pulling your strings?" and "What's your beef with ___?", supporting its fraught political drama. Antagonists in Monster of the Week need to be investigated, so it allows the players to ask "Where did the creature go?" or "What is being concealed here?".
These questions are well-tuned to their systems, allowing enough wiggle-room for the answerer to provide an honest-enough-to-be-useful, but vague-enough-to-be-tense response. If I'm designing my own PbtA system, I'd obviously want to make sure I set a similarly good question list.
How can I make sure I've done that? What techniques can I use to make sure that an individual question is good? How do I know when I've got enough questions to keep the move useful, but not so many that it trivialises encounters?
Best Answer
Let the specific genre of your game guide you
There’s some great advice in the other answers, but I’d add that one of the reasons for PBtA’s popularity and the number of games made with it is that it’s very good at providing an experience that fits a specific genre. A “generic” PBtA game wouldn’t really work because its moves wouldn’t tell you anything (and there are many parodies of what they might look like). All the power is in the detail. You recognise this in your question when talking about Urban Shadows’ focus on “fraught political drama”.
So I’d recommend you start by watching, reading, listening to and playing the kinds of stories that define your genre. (And if you don’t know what the genre is, pick the kinds of stories that you want to emulate and learn about it.) Make lots of notes, and include the kinds of questions they ask. Not just the ones the protagonists ask in dialogue, but those revealed by the things they say both during and after meeting someone.
For example, a PBtA version of family-friendly science fantasy would benefit from looking at Doctor Who. The Doctor frequently asks or otherwise works out that people they meet are scared of something, so “What are you afraid of?” would make a great question for such a game. They’re great at getting people to trust them almost immediately, so “How do I earn your trust?” is a good one that comes from the character’s actions rather than something they directly ask. They also manage to get villains to reveal their plans and motivations, either verbally or by observation, even when they are lying about their intentions, so “What do you really want?” or something like it would work. And they often find that aliens or old enemies are behind the actions of the humans they meet, so another one might be “Who are you working for?” By contrast, “What’s your greatest fear?” isn’t something the Doctor frequently uses against their opponents.
That’s just from one source, though, and most PBtA games benefit from drawing on a slightly wider pool of influences. For this theoretical family science fantasy game, you might also look at The Flash, where the characters spend a lot of time figuring out what they and their enemies need emotionally, so you might add a question like “What’s really making you feel this way?” or “What emotion is most clouding your judgment?” And there are plenty more you could look at.
Zoom out and look at the big picture of a typical story in your genre, too. Do protagonists try figuring out other characters - is it mostly antagonists? Do they ask about friends and allies? Are the people they’re asking about actually people, or are they monsters, ghosts, spirits etc? Are they interested in individuals or organisations?
This sort of analysis of the genre you’re going for will really help. Even if you’re not emulating existing media, you can think about the specific tone, mood and genre you’re creating, and about the information that characters might act on which will drive the kind of story you want to help players create. Once you have this starting point, test the questions (and all the other moves) out in play, and refine them as you go.
This will also help you pick the right number of questions: in the inspiration shows, do the characters ask a lot of questions or spend a lot of time figuring things out? Or do they go off half-cocked and then have to ask the right question to get back on track? Look at those circumstances and make sure there’s at least one that seems helpful in any given situation for your game’s genre. If a question isn’t picked during play, if it’s too hard to answer, or if the answers it provides don’t push the story in directions that serve the genre, it’s probably not right for your game.