Reversing the harm move in AW

Reversing the harm move in AW

Originally shared by Patrick Henry Downs

Last night we played Apocalypse World using the Harm move in the opposite way as written. That is, the results for a miss and a 10+ were swapped. I'm writing about this here because Vincent Baker  asked me to report how it went, but the thread where he mentioned this has been closed to further commenting.
We found that the Harm move didn't feel very different but complications were more frequent. Only three PCs suffered harm during the session and most of that was either 1- or 0-harm. However, one PC got attacked by a gang and suffered 3-harm and the Harm move, when swapped like this, becomes very beneficial to the PC getting grievously injured because with a Harm+3 roll you would now have a 50% chance of getting the "miss" result, as written you would only get this result on a roll of 2 or 3.
The real purpose, I think, of the Harm move is to include a complication to the PCs' narrative positioning, and by swapping the results it means that PCs who would get seriously hurt can potentially have their harm lowered at the cost of a complication. As an MC, I thought it worked really well and it felt like a better use of the harm move from my side of the table.