56. The First Session

The players have it easy. They have their playbooks to go through and then they’re ready to play. Your job is harder, you have a lot more to set up than they do. They each have one character to create, you have the whole bedamned world.

So let’s be fair. You have the whole world to create, you get the whole first session to create it in. You’re supposed to make their characters’ lives not boring, you get a whole session to get to know them.

Apocalypse World is a game of discovery. The world is discovered through character creation and the characters are discovered through play. NPCs are introduced and PC-NPC-PC triangles are formed. Plot and character develop simultaneously as one element shapes the other. And the whole process is begun during this, the first session.

The first session is a design element of Apocalypse World. This section doesn’t exist merely to introduce the new player to playing the game in a step-by-step manner (although it definitely does that, too). The first session is a necessary part of the game when playing it as designed. If Apocalypse World is a game of pool, then character creation is the racking of the balls. At the end of character creation and Hx, you have a web of characters and world elements and NPC all existing in tension with each other. And then the rest of the first session is the break, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy.

This passage is our introduction to the first session, and as such, it lays out its purpose. You can’t accomplish any of your agenda items if you do not know the world that you need to make seem real and if you do not know the characters whose lives you need to make not boring. I love that this gives the MC directed goals during the first session. The MC is already playing to find out, only in the first session, they play is to find out who the characters are, what they want, what the world is like, and what the world wants from the characters.

The one thing that seems off in this opening is that the first paragraph is a little unfair to the players. They don’t just create their one character; they are creating crucial elements of that whole bedamned world every time they select details about their character and answer questions about their Hx. They usher forth NPCs, build hardholds, form cults and gangs—in short, they give the MC the bulk of the raw material needed to put the story in motion. The MC will certainly create more elements as play progresses, but the character players do a lot of the heavy lifting at the start . . . which is of course by design.