57. There Are No Status Quos in Apocalypse World

We’re going to jump ahead a tiny bit because “Before the 1st Session” talks about things we’ve already discussed and I’m not smart enough to have new things to add. In fact, we’re going to slide a little into “During the 1st Session” as well to get to the meat of the matter:

Then I’d just say it outright to your players: ‘your setup’s easy and now you’ve already done it. Mine’s harder so I’m going to take this whole session to do it. So no high-tension kick off from me, let’s follow the characters around for a day and get to know them. Cool?’

A couple of you groaned, I could hear you from way over here. Oh great, getting to know the characters, that’s a recipe for will anything ever happen? Following the characters around for a day and getting to know them, it could mean establishing a whole unwieldy mass of status quo, right?

It could mean that but it doesn’t. Say it with me: there are no status quos in Apocalypse World.

What it means instead: it’s your job to create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements. A dynamic opening situation, not a status quo you’re going to have to put your shoulder against and somehow shift, like pushing a futon up a ladder. No: an unstable mass, already charged with potential energy and ready to split and slide, not a mass at rest.

Here’s how.

First and always, do everything it says to do in the master of ceremonies chapter (page 80). This is crucial. ‘Let’s just follow the characters around for a day’—in Apocalypse World, that’s automatically dangerous. It’s automatically a bad day. (97-98)

There are no status quos in Apocalypse World. We first learn this slogan of Apocalypse World when explaining the MC move Look through Crosshairs (pg. 83). Status quo means the existing state of affairs, so to say there is no status quo is to say that the situation never holds still long enough to become a state of affairs. Relationships, desires, power structures—none of it is in a state of rest. So the MC’s job during the first session is to take all of that raw material created during character creation and arrange them at impossible angles to each other to “create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles [and] untenable arrangements.” That is, I think, one of the most important sentences in the book. Once you make that happen in your first session, you can sit back and watch the characters react to the world and world react to them, each trading force and energy as they collide off each other in a festival of narrative physics. (Throughout the rest of the game, the characters will fight to stabilize their world, but the MC principles will help us make sure that that stability doesn’t arrive until the story comes to a conclusion—but that’s a discussion for later)

This simple notion that there is no status quo in Apocalypse World is the thing that makes Apocalypse World what it is, narratively, and all of the mechanics of the game are built to enforce the ever-changing nature of the world. No status quo is where the interpersonal drama comes from; it’s where the action comes from; it’s where the clarity of character comes from; it’s where the plot itself comes from.

Robert McKee has a fantastic instructional book about screenwriting called Story. In it, he talks about the belief that stories are either plot-driven or character-driven. In a well-written story, there is no such distinction, because the plot can’t exist without these particular characters, and these particular characters cannot exist without these particular events and forces acting upon them. Here’s how he says it:

The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.

The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naïve, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combinations of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does.

Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices the characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change the one, you change the other. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure to express the character’s changed nature. . . .

For this reason the phrase ‘character-driven story’ is redundant. All stories are ‘character-driven.’ Event design and character design mirror each other. Character cannot be expressed in depth except through the design of story (105-107).

To me, the thing that makes Apocalypse World amazing is that it is built to create exactly what McKee is talking about. It’s design creates the pressures that impact the characters and allow the characters to respond and impact the world in return. The world and the character are built together from the very beginning, and before the first pair of dice is rolled, plot and character are inseparable. And the rules make that happen.