The next basic move is Pulling Strings, and it is set across a double-page spread that also includes a few paragraphs headed ‘Harm’. Here, we’ve moved out of the standard pbta ‘roll 2d6 plus stat, 6-/7-9/10+ results’ type of basic move and into moves that work differently and dicelessly.
Strings are an in-game currency that represents emotional power; Pulling Strings gives us the four mechanical ways PCs can use them. These are:
Something notable about the way these are written are that of the four, the last three all directly reference mechanical effects where the first only describes what happens in the fiction. This is true even though the text immediately explains that there is a mechanical effect when you choose this option: “When you tempt another player’s character, it counts as offering them an experience point if they do what you want”. I think this is maybe because “offer them an XP if they do what you want” is a little more abstracted from the fiction (“tempt them”) than Alder would like in the move text, where with something like “add 1 to your roll against them” it’s kind of immediately obvious what is happening in the fiction (I’m pushing extra hard because I hate/love you or whatever). It also has the benefit of making the move more exciting to read; not just a set of mechanical effects and +1 bonuses, but a range of ways to use our emotional power over someone else. It means the move leads off with the verb ‘tempt’ with its suggestions of corruption and lust, and perhaps subtly implicates the wielder of the string, tempting us to use (abuse?) our emotional power over others.
Alder writes that “The first two options on that list are your proverbial carrot and stick”, and I can see that, but isn’t it really a carrot followed by three sticks?
The Harm section tells us “When characters get hurt, they take harm.” It explains the difference between 1 harm (a fistfight, a hard push, “the kind of stuff that people gossip about in the change room”), 2 harm (claws, weapons, fire) and 3 harm (“If it’s worse than all that, it’s 3 Harm”). The examples given here all refer to physical harm; there is no allowance for taking emotional or psychic harm when someone is, like, really mean to you.
Is it strange that game so interested in how the character’s feel, their volatile emotions, is so focused on harm as physical harm? But the game’s idea of Harm is never far from the feelings mixed up with injury, and does something more subtle than is immediately obvious. This is clear, in part, from the way the physical layout of the book directly associates Pulling Strings and Harm, emotional power and injury:
Most pages in the text just aren’t laid out like this; each topic gets its own page or spread. Harm, although it seems to only represent physical injury, is subordinated to Pulling Strings, even though plenty of harm in the game has nothing to do with strings. Meanwhile, the most physical damage you can do at a time is 3; PCs can take 4 Harm before they die. This relevantly tells us that nothing you can do to another PC will be enough, in itself, to kill them, unless they care what you think of them. If they do, you can kill them outright. I realise killing the other PCs outright isn’t like a central feature of MH gameplay, but it’s still telling regarding the game’s conception of the way physical and emotional harm connect.
The Pulling Strings section ends with a Buffy analogy to explain why you can use a String to add to Harm dealt to another character. “They circle one another, taunting. They drag up old history between high kicks.” It’s tempting to think that MH‘s use of a numerical Harm score is a kind of throwback to early pbta design or even older games, and that if Alder was making a third edition now it’d adopt something more like the Conditions of Masks, Apocalypse Keys or Brindlewood Bay to track (emotional, physical, whatever) damage to the characters. But this last use for Strings, and the way the physical layout of the pages connects Pulling Strings and Harm, implies an understanding of Harm as always also emotional, even when apparently physical.
On the next page, we get the Healing move, another contender for the greatest basic move in any pbta game, confirming the game’s concept of physical harm as not only implicitly emotional but also implicitly erotic:
Amazing, genius, unbeatable.
Turn Someone On, Shut Someone Down 