29. character creation: the apocalypse

We are continuing our look at Character Creation and at the way a group is guided to communicate during that part of the game. Today, I want to start with “The Apocalypse” section on page 71.

This section is presented as a way to answer questions like “what are the details of the apocalypse?” and “what the heck is a psychic maelstrom?” There is no new information provided here (most of it was already said in the first “Apocalypse World” section back on page 8). It’s an easy enough section to skip past. What I want to focus on is what the text doesn’t say.

Notice that this section is treated like “The Stats” section below it. It is treated as basic information to impart, not a part of the fiction to discuss. Even though this is the closest we come to discussing setting as its own thing, there is no command here to decide as a group the nature of the setting for your particular Apocalypse World. You are not prompted to discuss if you are in a barren desert land or the ruins of a once-great city. Nowhere in Character Creation are you prompted to have that conversation as a group. Why not?

The answer—to my way of thinking—brings us back to questions; particularly, it brings us here: how a question is asked and of whom it is asked shapes the conversation that results.

Let’s look at two passages. The first is in “Character Moves and Crap” (73):

The character playbooks say things like ‘oddments worth 1-barter.’ Barter, as it appears in the playbooks and in these rules, is just an abstraction of whatever your Apocalypse World values for exchange. It might be barter proper (‘I’ll give you a dozen of my rock-turtle eggs if you’ll repair my Shoes’) or it might be some currency, some medium, hence ‘oddments.’ 1-barter is kind of a lot, it’s enough to live on for a few days, or to buy basically any normal thing.

Here, barter and oddments are explained so that the MC understands what they mean and how they work. If this were the only passage regarding oddments, you would think that the MC was supposed to relay this information when asked, just like she did when explaining what stats meant or what the moves were about. But instead, the MC is prompted to do something different when barter and oddments comes up in “Setting Expectations” (75-76):

Hey, see where it says you have ‘oddments worth 3-barter’ or whatever? Is there some medium of exchange you all use, or is it really one-time negotiated barter? Uncle, you’re the hardholder, is there something you use for currency in the holding? Or else Anika, you’re the maestro d’, what will you take for pay in your establishment?

Instead of having an open-ended conversation about what barter means in our particular Apocalypse World, the text prompts the MC to direct the questions at specific players whose characters have an interest in the world’s currency. Take your general question (Hey, y’all, what do we want barter to mean for our game?) and turn it into a specific question for a specific player (Hey, Uncle, how does your hardhold handle currency?). The benefit of this approach is that there is no danger of losing the details in abstraction because the person answering the question has an interest in the answer. The player playing Uncle is responsible for the details of the hardhold, and currency is important to the hardhold. Nothing prevents the player playing Uncle to source the table for ideas and nothing prevents other players from throwing ideas out, but the question confers credibility on Uncle’s answer. So the direct question helps us all negotiate what is “true” in the fiction and keeps us from having a wishy-washy non-committal conversation about how currency might work, giving us instead a definitive answer that affects us all.

This leads us back to what kind of Apocalypse World we are playing in. We are never asked to discuss that as a group because those details are going to come out 1) during Introductions and the questions asked by the MC at that time, 2) during Hx and the questions asked by the MC at that time, and 3) during play and the questions asked between players at that time. Decisions made about specific concerns will always be in sharper focus and more pertinent than decisions made at a general level.

As a final note, since we have touched upon “Setting Expectations,” we should note that questions are obviously not the only way to negotiate the boundaries and particulars of the games we play. Just as definitive authority is given to the MC over prosthetics and non-guaranteed vehicles, “Setting Expectations” allows the social agreement between players to be dictated via declarative statements. “Your characters don’t have to be close friends, but they do have to know each other and work together, and they should be allies. They might become enemies in play, but they shouldn’t start out enemies.” If we are all going to play this game, you must agree to this statement or have a conversation surrounding it to negotiate as a group what we are going to do. Actually, as I write that, it occurs to me that even declarative statements are just hidden questions, right? Because RPGs are entirely social experiences, every declaration is nothing more than an offer with an unspoken “Is everyone cool with that?” at the end. When no one objects, the declaration is assented to. If someone does object, then the group needs to find common agreement before moving on. So questions are really at the heart of all exchanges in an RPG and Apocalypse World simply seizes on that fact to bring a number of those questions out into the open. Every question, to some degree or another, negotiates assent between the players to either the fiction itself or the rules by which the game will be played and the fiction created.