The Touchstone and the Quarantine - questions

1. Why the Touchstone's sex move? It has you scribble out possible advancements if you screw someone you don't love. Where does that fit in with the character? I'm not saying it doesn't! I'm saying I don't quite understand the angle.

2. The Quarantine can ask questions about the past at the beginning of each session. The MC answers questions on a hit, but on a miss, the player answers instead. Why? Specifically, why is that the miss option?

1. Because the Touchstone has a certain idealism and purity (or something like that) that other characters don't. When that's compromised for the sake of expediency, it bring the Touchstone one step closer to burning out and losing that spark that burns for a better tomorrow. Eventually the Touchstone ends up being "just" a Gunlugger, Hardholder or whatever. All characters have that sort of countdown, where they eventually run out of advances, its just that the Touchstone gets there faster based on the sex move.

2. No clue, really.

I never know how to answer "why?"

1. The touchstone and the quarantine both have sex moves that bring love into the question - the touchstone explicitly, the quarantine implicitly. They're also both alienated from the world's psychic maelstrom. The difference is that the touchstone draws a hard line, and the quarantine has to navigate an unclear path.

2. That's a side effect, almost a coincidence. The more significant feature is, on a hit the quarantine gets to choose the question that's answered, and on a miss the MC does.

Followup questions welcome! (Understand that "but why?" eventually leaves me shrugging. I dunno. It seemed right?)

The Quarantine beginning-of-session move is one of my favourite things in Apocalypse World. It not only models something potentially in-fiction (the amnesiac Quarantine's gradually returning memories) but also frames a very interesting group process where we, as the players, collaboratively discover/invent more and more about the nature of the apocalypse, one little step at a time.

Most game-changing move in the game, potentially.

What I've found is that, while the Touchstone sex move looks like it discourages sex, in practice, that's not the case. It encourages love.

Just to add about the countdown nature of the Touchstone sex move: in a hack we're playing now, about urban fantasy god-type beings, there's a playbook for the Mimic, an infiltrator who wants to end the world. His sex move goes like this:

"When you make love to another character, ask yourself whether you could live with killing them. If not, scribble out an advancement option you haven't yet taken. Don't scribble out "Change your character to another playbook".

I imagine the kind of move goes well for different types of "going native" scenarios.

(The funny thing is that the Mimic in our game has killed and taken the place of the God of Love...)

2. The Quarantine can ask questions about the past at the beginning of each session. The MC answers questions on a hit, but on a miss, the player answers instead. Why? Specifically, why is that the miss option?

Look at the questions list! If you're a player, what questions do you want to ask? If you're the MC, what questions do you want to ask?

The MC answers/player answers framework works because of the different questions. When a player gets answers, he gets to know what the Apocalypse is like, what it's causes and effects are. When a MC gets answers, he gets to know just how nasty and destructive the Apocalypse was.

So the mechanic alone seems odd somewhat (did to me, too), but if you take the list of questions into account, it is not different from any other AW move (i.e., on a miss, the MC gets to make a move).

As the Quarantine, It's fun when you miss and the MC asks a question because you're essentially making the answer up. It's like a lapse in the character's memory. Something he remembers meh....kind of, so he fills in the gaps with his imagination.
People do it in the real world all the time.