35. Mc's agenda

Today we are looking at the MC’s Agenda as written on pages 80-81 of Apocalypse World 2e:

• Make Apocalypse World seem real.
• Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
• Play to find out what happens.

Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other. It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not fucking around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out.

Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.

The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline. When you find something you genuinely care about—a question about what will happen that you genuinely want to find out_—letting the game’s fiction decide it is uniquely satisfying.

I want to start with that last paragraph first, specifically this sentence: “The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline.” Here we learn that Master of Ceremonies was chosen to denote a specific way of GMing. We are used to GMs being given different titles, often as a way of bringing the game’s themes into its vocabulary (like _Call of Cthulhu’s Keeper of Arcane Secrets). There is nothing apocalyptic about a Master of Ceremonies, and the designation is not meant to be anchored to this specific game. It has to do with capturing this specific way of GMing. A master of ceremonies, according to Oxford Dictionary, is “a person who introduces speakers, players, or entertainers.” The master of ceremonies creates a space for the performers so that we are all prepared for the awesome things they are about to do. It’s a perfect style for this kind of GMing because, as we’ll see, most of the rules binding the MC are about creating and maintaining a fictional space within which the players can play their characters, drive the story, trigger their moves, and be awesome. Just look at those agenda items, every part of them is about the PCs.

Making Apocalypse World seem real is not for the sake of realism or cinematic flavor. It is for the sake of creating a fiction with “internal logic and causality” so that the characters can have a living, breathing story to exist within. Making the players’ characters’ lives not boring is about providing dramatic moments for the characters to bounce off, interact with, make decisions about, and ultimately not be boring themselves. Playing to find out what happens is about letting the characters control not only their own destinies but the very scope and focus of the story that’s told. It is all about the PCs, and if you as the MC are about the say something that doesn’t do any of that, hold your tongue. (I think the focus on “saying” is important, but we’ll look at that in the next section, in which we are told what to “Always Say.”)

The MC chapter methodically breaks down (and confines) the role of the MC. While the text eventually covers what the MC can do both within the fiction and without the fiction, it starts with the why governing those actions. You can only make a move or follow a principle if they meet your stated agenda. You cannot “take away their stuff” as punishment. You cannot “separate them” in an effort to control them and force the story to go where you want to go. You cannot “capture them” because Michael didn’t bring any drinks for game night for the 4th time in a row, or because Suzanne is refusing to follow a plot thread that you think would make for great drama, or because Darla keeps successfully forcing the fiction to roll with her +3 stat and messing with the rhythm of successes and failures you want to see in “your” game. As MC of Apocalypse World you need to govern your emotions and check your power in order to make the game do what it’s built to do.

But you’re only human, right? Everyone else in the game gets to have their bleed and play it too, why not you? Because, as the text reminds you several times, your power is too great to give in to those desires. That’s why the word “discipline” is key in this section. Here, “discipline” is applied principally to the “Play to find out what happens” element, because let’s face it. How your group works socially is nothing the game can control (or wants to). What the game can insist upon is that you play a reactionary role as the MC, responding to the characters rather than forcing them to go where you want. You will of course give them things to respond to, but how they respond and what comes of that response is up to them and the game, putting you back in a reactionary role.

And that’s the real challenge for the MC as it’s presented here. You have to “genuinely care” about what happens but not control it in any way. What this really emphasizes is the MC’s role as audience to the drama unfolding. In a lot of systems, the GM is set up as the storyteller and the players are actors and audience, learning about the plot as they take their non-plot-altering actions. In Apocalypse World, there is no plot except for what unfolds through play, and if played by the rules, everyone, MC and player alike, are audience members, each invested in what will happen but no one with their hands on the reins.

The language is strong because the idea is crucial to the game functioning. If any of these three agenda items are ignored, or if other items are added to them, the mechanics and rules cannot do what they were designed to do. They’re not fucking around and neither should you. Just look at where the game promotes innovation and where it doesn’t. There are plenty of rules in “Advanced Fuckery” for creating your own PC moves and threat moves, but there is nothing there that lets you rebuild the Agenda or mess with the MC’s principles. Those are not up for discussion. As they said before, “the whole rest of the game is built upon this.”