Daily moves for imaginary games.
-
Nine Moves for a Game About Two People and the Time Between Them
The First Night
1. When you talk to a stranger who seems to be going the same direction you are, roll +curiosity.
On a 10+, the conversation opens naturally and keeps opening. Ask two questions from the list below; they ask you one.
On a 7-9, you have less time than either of you expected. Ask one question. They answer honestly.
- What are you travelling toward?
- What do you believe that you can't prove?
- What does your life look like from the outside, and how wrong is that picture?
- What are you hoping for without admitting you're hoping for it?
On a miss, the conversation bypasses small talk entirely and goes somewhere neither of you planned. The GM marks a Bond. You haven't agreed to this yet but the Bond doesn't require your agreement.
2. When you agree to spend the night in a city that belongs to neither of you, roll +the decision.
On a 10+, the night is yours completely - unscheduled, full of possibility, belonging only to the two of you. Take 3 Time. Spend Time to linger somewhere, to let a conversation go deeper, to stay past the point of comfort into something more true.
On a 7-9, the night is yours but you're both aware of when it ends. Take 2 Time. The awareness of the ending is present in everything, like weather.
On a miss, take 3 Time, but the GM also sets a Clock called morning. It is already running. It was always already running.
3. When you say goodbye knowing you may never see each other again, roll +what you're leaving unsaid.
On a 10+, the goodbye is its own complete thing. Exchange one true statement that you couldn't have made at the beginning of the night. Both players write theirs down. They will matter later.
On a 7-9, one of you almost says it. The other player chooses whether almost is enough. Gain a Thread regardless, something unfinished that belongs to both of you now.
On a miss, circumstances cut the goodbye short. The Clock runs out, a train arrives, the city intervenes. The Thread forms anyway, frayed at both ends, and the GM marks it without comment.
The Second Time
4. When you find each other again after years apart, roll +what survived the distance.
On a 10+, the ease returns quickly, underneath whatever has changed. Take a Recovered Closeness and begin.
On a 7-9, the ease is there but so is everything that happened in between. Take a Recovered Closeness, but the GM introduces one complication: a life that was built, a choice that was made, something that will need to be navigated carefully.
On a miss, the ease returns so quickly it frightens you. Something this familiar after this long is either very good or evidence of something unresolved. The GM marks both possibilities and does not yet tell you which.
5. When you argue about the life you didn't build together, roll +the years between you.
On a 10+, the argument clears something. It hurts the way honest things hurt, cleanly, in a specific place. Ask the other player one question about what they needed that you didn't give them. They must answer.
On a 7-9, the argument circles without resolving. You both know what's underneath it. Choose: name the real thing and spend a Closeness, or let it go back underground and let the GM set a slow Clock.
On a miss, the argument ends because something true gets said that neither of you was ready for. The GM decides what. The table sits with it for a moment before anyone speaks.
6. When you run out of time again before anything is decided, roll +what you're willing to risk.
On a 10+, one of you changes the ending. Describe how. The other player cannot refuse it, but they choose what it costs.
On a 7-9, the Thread from the first goodbye pulls tight. Look at what was written down. Whatever was left unsaid then surfaces now, here, in whatever form the fiction allows. It may be too late for it. It may be exactly on time.
On a miss, nothing is decided. The Clock runs out exactly as Clocks do. The GM describes the ending briefly, without sentiment. Both players add a new Thread. They are longer now, and more tangled, and the game knows it.
The Third Time
7. When you spend an ordinary day together as though it were ordinary, roll +what has been earned.
On a 10+, the day holds everything you've built and it's enough. More than enough. It is, in fact, the thing you were looking for in all the cities. Take 3 Ordinary Time. Spend it on the small things: a meal, a walk, a conversation that doesn't need to go anywhere.
On a 7-9, the day is good and underneath the good there is something unsteady. Take 2 Ordinary Time. The GM names what's unsteady, not as a threat but as weather, as the simple truth of long things.
On a miss, the day is ordinary in the way that only days with real stakes can be. Something small goes wrong. The GM describes it. It is very small. It lands very hard. Both players look at their Threads.
8. When the thing that has been underneath everything finally comes to the surface, roll +the accumulated weight of it.
On a 10+, you're both ready. It is hard and it is survivable and by the end of it you know something about each other and about yourselves that the earlier versions of you couldn't have held. Spend all remaining Threads. What replaces them is something cleaner.
On a 7-9, one of you is ready and one isn't. The ready one speaks. The other listens. The GM asks the listening player: what are you most afraid this changes? They answer. That thing changes. Something else, something better, becomes possible.
On a miss, it comes up sideways, the way things do when they've been waiting too long - in the wrong moment, at the wrong volume, dressed as something smaller than it is. Roll again. Whatever you roll, the conversation happens. The miss only determines how much ground you lose before it does.
9. When you look at someone you have chosen, again, after everything, do not roll.
Look at what was written down after the first goodbye. Read both of the true statements aloud. Consider what it meant to carry them through everything that came between then and now.
Both players describe one thing their character knows about the other that could only be known through time.
The game does not tell you what happens next. You have enough to go on.