65. Give every character good screen time with other characters.

Bring them onscreen in pairs and triples, in obvious groupings and unlikely ones too. Play with their natural hierarchies and bring them into circumstances where they might have something to say to each other. Here are a few ways you can do it:

Build on what the players said when they introduced their characters. “So Keeler, Marie, you two have this raiding thing out on the wilderness road, where Marie stands lookout and Keeler attacks travelers in the night? Let’s see that. It’s before dawn…”

Invent bad news for one character to give to another. “Marie, you’re walking past the armory (Keeler, you’re in charge of the armory, of course) and you notice the lock’s been smashed off. What do you do?”

Make a pairing or tripling that you like, then ask the players to justify it. “Marie, Bran, you two are trapped outside of the holding, you’re hunkered down inside an old gutted RV. Outside, six of Dremmer’s gang are setting up camp, looks like they’re settling in. They don’t know you’re there, they just blundered in on top of you. What are you two doing out here, anyway?”

It’s common knowledge of course that you need to make sure every character gets good screen time in any given session. The important phrase in this title is “with other characters.” Remember our “Why to Play” section back on page 14? The number one reason is that these characters are fucking hot. The number two reason is that “hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together.” This bullet point is about putting them together. Apocalypse World is a game about community and relationships, and the only way to get at those themes is to play out those relationships and that community.

There are a lot of hierarchies built into the character playbooks. If there is a hardholder in the group, odds are most other character are under her leadership. Characters have not only relationships with each other but responsibilities to each other. “Play with their natural hierarchies” is about seeing how that status relationship plays out when it’s more than just a note in a playbook. The situation you put the characters in, according to the text, is important not because the situation itself is important but because the situation makes it so the characters “might have something to say to each other.” Situations in Apocalypse World are about revealing and propelling character, not about creating plot. As those characters are revealed and propelled, a plot will naturally emerge and take care of itself.

This of course ties into our other bullet points. Playing with their natural hierarchies is another way to see where the characters are and are not in control, giving you things to push at and wonder about. It is all part of the grand experiment being conducted by the MC through play, looking for interesting chemical interaction within the group as well as from outside the group. Bringing them together gets them to trigger those Read a Person and Read a Sitch moves as the interactions and situations become charged. And of course we are springboarding off character creation, as evidenced in the first example with Keeler and Marie performing one of their raids.

The paragraph here that gave me the biggest thrill when I first read it is the last one. I was like, What?! You can just put characters in a scene like that and then ask them to explain what they’re doing there?! This takes us back to how there is no independent scene-framing mechanism in Apocalypse World. Here the MC has put Marie and Bran in a spot to kick off the scene. The players playing Marie and Bran are going to come up with a much better answer to the MC’s question than the MC could have come up with, and just think of all the great information this scene will bring forth. We’ll learn about Marie and Bran, both individually and as friends/lovers/rivals/whatever. We’ll learn something about what they do in the group that would get them here in the first place. We’ll learn something about their relationships with any of these six gang members. PC-NPC-PC relationships might be revealed. Grudges might develop. No matter what happens, this set up will give the MC material to pursue and wonder about. What more can you hope for from a first session scenario? And all that from one MC move. Wow.

As a final note, one thing putting characters together in interesting combinations makes room for are PC-PC-PC triangles. Just as NPCs have different relationships with different PCs, PCs have different relationship with different PCs. These two might be lovers, and these two might be sisterly with each other, while these two might have a mentor/mentee relationship. Such triangles reveal complexity of character for PCs and NPCs alike, so mix them up and see what develops.