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Everybody loves this part of Apocalypse World. In a game that wants the conversation to be as anchored in the Fiction as possible, questions are a phenomenal way to make that Fiction rich and layered.
Start simple: “What’s your living space like?” “Who’s known each other longest?” But as play proceeds, ask for immediate and intimate details of the characters’ experiences. In his playtest, Mikael made himself a list of question prompts: “Feeling, Sound, Detail: thing, thoughts, Pose, Smell, Need, Irritant,Texture, In sight, Relations, Taste, Detail: place.” They led him to ask questions like “Why can you only fit two people in the cabin of the Tank?” “How do the people of the Tent City make you feel?” “How do her lips feel under your palm?” Very good stuff (84-85) The key word in the principle is of course “provocative.” Asking questions is all good and fine, but the rich stuff comes out because of questions that provoke—provoke thought, introspection, examination, and details details details. Some questions look for narrative details that impact the story at plot level, such as the limited seating in a tank or the physical layout of a living space. But the really rich material is when we get a glimpse inside the heads of the characters, such as how the people in Tent City make you feel and how her lips feel on your palm. Those are the moments that we love because it makes the Fiction rich and real. “Immediate and intimate details,” that’s the secret. Talk about making Apocalypse World seem real! In these moments, characters are more than their actions show. In fact, we can have a productive tension between their feelings and their actions. A standard saying in story-focused RPGs is that if it doesn’t happen on screen, it doesn’t happen. But while these moments of insight don’t really happen on screen, they are every bit as real as actions because of the way that they enter the Fiction. The moments allow RPGs to go beyond the limitations of movies and TV and become more like novels. After you have played this way, not doing so feels incomplete. Once you have the player’s answer, build on it. I mean three things by that: (1) barf apocalyptica upon it, by adding details and imagery of your own; (2) refer to it later in play, bringing it back into currency; and (3) use it to inform your own developing apocalyptic aesthetic, incorporating it—and more importantly, its implications—into your own vision (85). The second half of the principle is to “build on the answers,” and this paragraph gives us three specific ways to do that. While all the players are contributing to building the Apocalypse World of the game, it is the MC’s job to bring the world to life. The MC has the prep work of daydreaming apocalyptica. The MC has final say over whether extra vehicles or prosthetics are appropriate to the world of the game. The MC, in short, is responsible for the overall vision and cohesion of the world—how can she “make Apocalypse World seem real” if she doesn’t have final say in the physics and details of the world? So barfing apocalyptica upon an answer serves three purposes; (1) it allows the MC to both let the answer stand on its own and fit into the world created; (2) it demands that the MC have Apocalypse World ever encroaching upon the characters, corrupting even their senses and thoughts; and (3) it makes the questions and answers a more complete conversation, bringing the MC back into the construction of the Fiction. Referring to the answers later demands that the MC make the answer have significance. Again, there are a couple of reasons for this. First, as a player, you want your invited contributions to matter. If whenever you answered a question you believed that the answer didn’t matter, you would have no motivation to invest anything into your answer. Your contributions would be meaningless. Second, if those “intimate and immediate details” were cool but pointless, they would have no weight in the overall story we are creating. If a novel gave you insight into a character but never did anything with it, it would be unsatisfying, and it would give you the sense that the author was trying to pad her word count. Bringing these details back into currency is just part of good storytelling, and Apocalypse World wants to make moments of good storytelling baked into the very act of playing the game. Even though the MC has final say in the aesthetics of the Apocalypse World in any given game, the MC is not allowed to have the only say. Incorporating the answers and their implications into your own vision demands that the MC allow the answers to alter the very DNA of the world in some way. Remember, this is a game that insists that you not bring a plot or storyline to the table. The MC has to react to the players, to both their characters and their answers to provocative questions. It’s especially important to ask, the first time each character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, what that’s like for her. Maybe it’s the same for everybody, maybe it’s different. And after the first time, always, always add details of your own (85) The world’s psychic maelstrom is a big question mark in every game of Apocalypse World. What is it? How does it work? Did it cause the apocalypse or was it born from the apocalypse? During character creation, the MC is given a couple of sentences to say about it to the player, but that’s it. It’s not something that is discussed in detail, and it is certainly not something that should be worked out before play begins. At no point are the players prompted to decide anything about the psychic maelstrom before someone triggers the move. Instead, those details are developed through the individual contributions prompted by provocative questions. The second player to trigger the move can agree entirely with what the first player said, tweak it in some major or minor way, or do something entirely different. The more the move is triggered, the more details we get, and the nature of the maelstrom slowly gets defined as the mystery is answered for us as it is for our characters. This method creates necessarily more interesting and compelling maelstroms than we would have cooked up as a group. More importantly, our play thus far will inform the maelstrom, which will in turn inform our play, which means that thematically, the maelstrom will fit more reliably into our world than if we invented it before play. That is the beauty and power of creating narrative through questions.
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We are at the 6th principle, and this one is all about NPCs, every character the MC controls. The three paragraphs of this principle cover everything you need to know about bringing NPCs to life in an RPG. They are, I think, one of the best sections in any book about NPCs. They boil down the essence what makes NPCs compelling in play and how to make a character you just created seem multi-dimensional.
So what’s it doing in a section about MC principles? NPCs are the A-number-one tools available to MCs to accomplish all the agenda items. Want to make Apocalypse World seem real? Populate it with characters who seam real. Want to make the players’ characters’ lives not boring? Give them driven NPCs who want something different from each character to poke and prod at their lives. What to play to find out what happens? Bring those triangulated relationships together and watch it all boil and roil. 9 times out of 10 when an MC goes to make a move in the Fiction, she is going to use an NPC to make it happen. When characters are getting separated, it’s more often than not a set of NPCs you use to separate them. When you are responding with fuckery and intermittent rewards, you are probably wielding a problematic NPC to fuck with the players. So how do we make that happen? There are three paragraphs in this section and each one discusses a different aspect of NPCs in Apocalypse World. The first paragraph is about making the NPCs “seem real”: The first step toward making your NPCs seem real is to name them. There’s a list of good NPC names on the 1st session worksheet, and feel free to scavenge unused names from the character playbooks too. Every NPC who gets even a single line or a single significant on-screen action, give a name (84). Naming NPCs is about two things. The first, as stated here, is to make them “seem real” (which shouldn’t surprise us since three of the principles so far are about making the fiction seem real). Giving an NPC a name turns her from being some woman to that woman. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. What isn’t stated here is that when you have a game whose Fiction can go anywhere the players point their characters, you never know which NPCs will become important and return in future scenes. If you name “every NPC who gets even a single line or . . . action” then the game is prepared to go wherever the tale leads. The second paragraph is all about portraying the NPCs to give them life within the fiction: Make your NPCs human by giving them straightforward, sensible self-interests. Take Roark, one of my favorite NPCs. Roark comes back from burning down the neighboring hold, unleashing chaos upon us all, and he’s beaming because he’s really just not that complicated. He wanted to burn it down, so he did, and now he wants a bubble bath because he’s all sooty, and that’s his entire deal. In your game, make all your NPCs just not that complicated. They do what they want to do, when they want to do it, and if something gets in their way, well, they deal with that now. What they do in life is follow their parts around—their noses, their stomachs, their hearts, their clits & dicks, their guts, their ears, their inner children, their visions. This is brilliant stuff. Like naming them, giving the NPCs “straightforward, sensible self-interests” also serves two purposes. The first is, once again, to make them seem “human,” real. This helps the conversation stay grounded in the Fiction and it gives the player characters focused NPCs to bounce off of. The second is equally critical to the way Apocalypse World is run. By making the NPC straightforward and “just not that complicated,” you are giving them an internal logic by which you can know how they will react to whatever the player characters dish out. If you know which body part controls them, then you can say what honesty demands. If you know what their self-interest is, then you can disclaim decision-making. If you know what they want to do, then you can say what you prep demands. If you haven’t figured them out, then you can’t follow the internal logic of the world, which the game demands in the name of fairness for the players. You can’t make Roark do what you want for the sake of the plot if you know damn well that Roark would never do that. Focus on the internal logic, and the “plot” will take care of itself. Then, you can make PC–NPC–PC triangles—and make your NPCs even more human—just by making sure that their uncomplicated self-interests involve the players’ characters individually, not as a group. Show different sides of their personalities to the players’ different characters. Roark loves Marie, who has ambitions, but he serves Uncle, who wants people in their places. Roark goes to Uncle to boast, to Bish to feel superior, to Marie for bubble baths. Foster wants to overthrow Uncle and take his holding, but would prefer everyone else—Bish, Marie, Damson, Dune—to stay on under her rule. These are the kinds of triangles that give the players’ characters something to talk about. This secret is what the best scriptwriters know. You can’t show a character being “complicated” or “complex” in a single action. It is the aggregate of that character’s actions that communicate their complexity. And the best way to reveal that complexity is through interaction with different characters. The key, as the text says, is to make sure “that their uncomplicated self-interests involve the players’ characters individually, not as a group.” If an NPC has a unique relationship with each character - and desires something particular from each character - those relationships and desires will exist at cross purposes. This setup not only makes the NPCs seem “even more human,” it also creates a rich and textured Fiction for the characters to chew on and work with. This is a surefire way to “make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.” The first principle is the overarching principle. The 2nd through 4th principles are about surrounding the players with fiction. The 5th principle is the first to tell us how to shape the Fiction:
Look through crosshairs. Whenever your attention lands on someone or something that you own—an NPC or a feature of the landscape, material or social—consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground. An individual NPC, a faction of NPCs, some arrangement between NPCs, even an entire rival holding and its NPC warlord: crosshairs. It’s one of the game’s slogans: “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” You can let the players think that some arrangement or institution is reliable, if they’re that foolish, but for you yourself: everything you own is, first, always and overwhelmingly, a target (83-84). Let’s take a moment to praise great writing. “Look through crosshairs” is another one of the book's great phrases. We have to be more than merely willing to destroy anything we own as MCs, we have to actively see them as targets, like cold-blooded snipers. I love the concision and the strong visual image it conjurs. The other standout sentence is the rhythmic overkill of “consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground.” Not only is that a fantastic list of destruction, it’s poetic in structure, rhythm, and even rhyme: each phrase in the list grows longer than its predecessor, the middle pairing plays off the opposing “down” and “up,” and it all slide into the delicious “burying it in the poisoned ground.” That conclusion is even more satisfying because of the unexpected rhyme of ground with down. Did I mention that I love that sentence? What is this principle all about? Why is it important to be willing—nay, determined—to burn to cinders everything in our purview? When a GM falls in love with her NPCs, her evil organizations, her plans for the future—that’s when the player characters are in danger of no longer being able to decide their own future. All this talk of destruction is about letting go of those things you love in order to let the story breathe and change, because change is really what is at issue here. “There are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” This is the first time we hear that slogan, but it really is the central idea behind looking through crosshairs. Apocalypse World is a game whose central propelling idea is that in this world actions have consequences, which beget actions that have their own consequences. Think of a chain of dominoes, a series of causes and effects. But if your love for one of those dominoes keeps it from falling, then we will never get the important chain reaction that is at the heart of the story we are creating. So when the players do a thing, let it have consequences. No, make it have consequences, because everything destroyed by their actions will propel the story irreversibly forward. This principle alone will allow the stories created through your game to mirror some of the great TV dramas that you know and love. What would Game of Thrones be like if George R. R. Martin was not willing to look at every one of his beloved characters through crosshairs? Pick an epic drama you love, and you will probably find a trail of broken and bled-out bodies, the fallout from irrevocable decisions the heroes have made. Be like that. Knock down those dominoes and play to find out what happens from there. Before we move on to the 5th MC principle I need to take a moment to amend yesterday’s post and tie it together with a post I made last week, No. 37. (I’ve started numbering the posts to make them easier to find and reference if necessary.)
Yesterday, I looked at why the PC’s moves and the MC’s principles forced the players to make their moves in the Fiction and cloak their moves in the Fiction, respectively. I proposed some theories that I stand behind, but I realized that I overlooked the main reason, a reason so obvious I am embarrassed to have missed it. Why does Apocalypse World force the conversation to always be about the Fiction? Because the designers of Apocalypse World want the conversation created by the game to be about the Fiction. Yeah, I know: duh. When the players make their moves, they have to do so in terms of the Fiction. The moves are written and structured so that all the conversation about the moves is about the Fiction. The MC’s principles demand that the MC present her non-Fiction-focused decisions as Fiction to the players, which means that the conversation continues to be about the Fiction. I would not be surprised to learn that one of the design goals for Apocalypse World was to create an RPG in which 97% of the conversation was about the Fiction. The moves all use the same die roll so what to roll does not need to be discussed. The stats are written in such a way that they are easily found and added to the roll without discussion. The results are standardized so there is no discussion about how to interpret the die roll. The character creation is ordered in such a way that conversations about negotiating assent and establishing the way the individual play group will navigate their conversation takes place before the group dives into the Fiction, so that once it does, it can keep the conversation there. This is not about immersion in the sense that you think and feel like your character, because the mechanics are popping up all the time to make players think authorially and directorally. But it is a kind of immersion in the sense that the conversation itself is immersed in the Fiction. And as I said before, that dedication to making the conversation as much about the Fiction as possible is the very thing that makes the game (and the system that has come from it) so popular. We’re looking at the next two principles together because they are closely related:
Make your move, but misdirect. Make your move, but never speak its name. The reason for these moves is plainly stated in the text: Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead (82-83). The players never have real-world reasons to make their moves; they are always responding to and working within the Fiction. The MC, however, is only allowed to make her moves because of real-world reasons, but for the sake of the players, she must present those moves as part of the Fiction. “Misdirecting” is a way of “pretending” that the reason for the move comes from the Fiction instead of the real-world reasons. Here’s the first example: Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun”—this was the PC’s move—“but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you. This is easy if you always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible. I find this phrasing very interesting. It could have easily said something like, “Choose a move that is closely related to what is happening in the fiction,” or, “let the fiction determine your move.” But no, pick whatever move you want, and then “make like” it’s the fiction that chose the move. Your job as MC is easier “if you always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible,” but that is not a requirement. I find the phrasing interesting because the text wants you to have no illusions as MC that what you are doing exists outside of the Fiction. It is important that you understand the process that is happening, that you are playing the game and not the other way around. I think this is the game designers telling the MC what honesty demands. These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect (83). And that’s the thrust of these principles. When these two principles are acted upon, the Fiction is seamlessly maintained for the players even as you are operating outside of it. Where your move comes from, what your move is called, what your move does—it’s all kept out of the conversation. The question that I keep coming back to as I look at the principles is this: why? Yes, immersion, but as I said last time, I don’t believe that immersion for the players is an end in itself for the game. It might be a lovely benefit that players really enjoy, but it is not the ultimate goal. I have been saying that since the players have to operate within the Fiction to trigger their moves, the MC’s principles are designed to surround the players with Fiction in order to make the players’ ability to operate within the Fiction that much easier and natural. I stand by that. But there’s still a why hidden in there, isn’t there? Why make the game work that way? What is gained by letting the players focus solely on the Fiction? The answer is, I think, in the way that story is created in Apocalypse World. Every RPG creates a “story” at some point, even if it’s only in the retelling of what happened during game play. Some games rely on the GM bringing a “plot” to the table and having the players move their characters through it. Some games rely on rules to structure game play so that there is a beginning, middle, and end. Some games impose a kind of act structure to make sure there are a setup, a rising action, a crisis, and a resolution. All of these things are notably missing—even forbidden!—from Apocalypse World. Instead, Apocalypse World takes a different path to create story. The players’ moves and the MC’s moves, when made in a fictional world bound by the principles in this chapter—all these things work together to create a narrative chain of events, a set of actions and reactions, causes and effects that will necessarily create a unique and incredible story. Neither the players nor the MC are encouraged to think of themes or overarching plots. If there is a willingness to have both the characters and world change due to this series of actions and reactions, then that story will naturally emerge without artificiality. All of the moves and principles of the MC, and all the moves available to the players, are designed to create the rhythms of that story, with highs and lows, successes and failures, and world-altering, character-changing drama. Because the rules themselves are designed to create this kind of story through play, the only thing the players need to think about (and should think about) when they play is their character as she exists within the Fiction. The first four of these principles—barfing forth apocalypse, addressing the characters, making your move but misdirecting, and making your move without speaking its name—are all designed to let the players focus on what they need to for the game to play correctly: their characters as they exist within the Fiction. With this foundation set, the rest of the principles will dictate rules for how the world will respond to and be shaped by (and put pressure upon and shape in return) the characters. This approach to creating narrative takes some time of course. This is why Apocalypse World is not typically a one-shot game, why the text says to expect things to really start flying around session 6. There is a cumulative power to letting this chemical interaction between characters and world brew and broil and react. After six sessions there are enough elements and enough history that everything is charged and crashing into each other. Let things bubble over, trust in the rules and principles, let the characters push, let the world push back, and play to find out what happens. That’s the goal and that is why these rules are established to let the players concentrate entirely on the Fiction of the moment. Okay, this post is already ridiculously long, so let’s wrap up these two principles: Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players, not to hide your intentions from them. Certainly never to hide your NPCs’ actions, or developments in the characters’ world, from the players’ characters! No; always say what honesty demands. When it comes to what’s happening to and around the players’ characters, always be as honest as you can be. Always say what honesty demands. You as the MC cannot fiddle with things behind the players’ backs. Your illusion is not one of dishonesty but for the sole purpose of letting the players focus on the Fiction. That honesty is an indispensible element of the MC’s rules because the world needs to react honestly to the character’s actions if the game is to create the kind of stories it is designed to create. Our look at the MC’s principles continues with the 2nd of the 11 principles:
Address yourself to the characters, not the players. “Marie, where are you this morning?” not “Julia, where’s Marie this morning?” “A woman comes up to you, her name’s Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.” It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt, not exposition straight from you to the player. The typical reading of this principle is that it is designed to achieve immersion. If I want you thinking and seeing things from your character’s perspective, then addressing you as the character is a good way to gently push you to do that. I think that’s a fair reading. But I don’t think it’s a complete reading. Immersion is not an end in itself for Apocalypse World. Immersion has the specific purpose of keeping the Fiction front and center at all times. It’s not that the players need to keep their head in their characters but that they need to keep their heads in the Fiction. As I’ve already said, the game insists that the players make all their moves in the Fiction and the MC’s principles are designed to make that easy, natural, and instinctive. The second example in the passage above is the key to this principle. “’A woman comes up to you, her name is Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.’ It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt.” The advantage of addressing the character here is that a piece of information moves from being exposition to being a part of the Fiction itself. Marie, like all the characters in Apocalypse World, is observant of everyone she meets. She reads body language, watches for telling glances and hidden desires, extrapolates from what she knows about people—all of this gives her insight into the non-verbal communication of her world. Pelt’s anxiousness moves from being a free-floating fact into a set of tangible tells in the Fiction, and while Julia is simply receiving those facts, Marie is interpreting signs and arriving at conclusions. We see this in books and TV and movies all the time. Smart characters knowing what other smart characters are up to and then filling us the audience in on their wisdom. By addressing the character instead of the players, the details of the conversation become a part of the Fiction itself. As a side note, the unspoken hero of this example is “saying what honesty demands.” Here, the MC is being “scrupulous, even generous with the truth” by telling the player not only that Pelt is anxious but why she is anxious. Had the MC been anything less than generous, Marie wouldn’t know what Pelt wants and might not find out if Julia doesn’t ask the right questions or make the right inferences. The scene could wander with the MC giving clues in her description of Pelt and Julie potentially missing those clues. That kind of scene is both clumsy and un-fun. Instead, you can address the character directly , tell her what she deduces with honesty and move on to the meat of the matter. All of these principles lean on each other to make MCing AW what it is, as the examples in this section continually remind us. I went back and forth between trying to cover all the principles in one mad post and tackling them each individually. For now, I’ll take them on one by one, primarily because this collection is about Apocalypse World as a text as much as it is about it as a game.
So let’s make with the text: Barf forth apocalyptica. Cultivate an imagination full of harsh landscapes, garish bloody images, and grotesque juxtapositions. In Apocalypse World, when the rain falls it’s full of fine black grit like toner, and all the plants’ leaves turn gray from absorbing it. Out among the wrecked cars, wild dogs fight for territory, with each other and with the rats, and one of the breeds is developing a protective inner eyelid of blank bone. If you get too close to them you can hear the click-click when they blink. Generally, I think the order of the principles is significant, and of course specifically, this principle is A-number-one. Everything you say as MC while playing Apocalypse World should have a little barfed up apocalyptica on it, right? Making a move but misdirecting? Smear some apocalyptica on it. Making an NPC human? Don’t forget to coat her with apocalyptica. Responding with fuckery? You bet your ass that is some apocalyptic fuckery you are putting down. What I love about this particular passage is the way it gets down to the cause-and-effect details of the apocalyptica being barfed forth. The plants’ leaves are grey because they have been absorbing the toner-like grit that poisons the rain. The rats’ eyelids make click-click noises because they are developing a protective inner eyelid because of the poisoned environment. It’s an unspoken lesson in daydreaming to create an internally logical world, one with cause and effect, because that internal logic is the root of playing the Fiction when you are the MC of AW. We will see this reliance on a world with its own internally consistent logic as a recurring motif in these principles, and it is subtly alluded to from the first principle, the principal principle, if you will. I know that it doesn’t need saying, but I am going to say it anyway because I never promised you original, insightful, or stellar commentary: “barf forth apocalyptica” is an inspired phrase in every way. The crassness of “barf” juxtaposed with the properness of “forth” and the academic obscurity and pretentiousness of “apocalyptica” is like Apocalypse World in a nutshell; it’s like having Shit head and Venus in the same crew together. It is itself a “grotesque juxtaposition.” Barf suggests an uncontrollable and sloppy spewing of details that might have been a conscious decision at one time but the autonomic system has kicked in and has spun out of control. Barf captures the messiness and unsanitary conditions of the post-apocalyptic world in which our poor heroes are struggling. When the players hand you a bit of fiction and you barf up apocalyptica on it and hand it back to them, they should say, “Ewwwww.” In a book full of brilliant and memorable phrases, this one is among the most brilliant and most memorable. In a game in which the fiction is king, it is only proper that the first principle is the thematic guide for what your fiction should look like. Give your players those details to visualize and grab onto and they will have their characters sliding through your muck and swinging from your jungle gym of apocalyptic imagery in no time. You won’t need to ask, “Cool, what do you do?” because they will be to busy wrestling with the fictitious circumstances you have piled upon them. We’re heading into the MC’s principles, but I want to talk for a moment about the primacy of the Fiction in Apocalypse World. As an MC, you have to check with your principles before saying anything, because everything you contribute to the conversation needs to follow what your principles demand. And as we’ll see, the principles are all about guiding the MC to cloak their moves and their decisions in the Fiction.
Every RPG has its play in the collective Fiction. Fiction is not only the result of play in an RPG, but it is also the medium of play. So an RPG does not need to center the Fiction in order to create Fiction—it’s gonna happen no matter what. A number of RPGs that inspired Apocalypse World have tried to incentivize players to engage with the Fiction when playing the game. Statements like “I swing” or “I make a perception check” are about metagame procedures more than the Fiction, and designers have looked for ways to make the players move beyond the perfunctory. Sorcerer, for example, allows the GM to award bonus dice to players who are clever in their use of the Fiction when describing combat or actions. Similarly, it permits GMs to punish dull play with penalty dice. Over the Edge does the same thing, as do a number of other games. In almost all cases, it’s the GM who is granted the power to decide if a player has engaged with the Fiction enough to be awarded or so little as to deserve punishment. In Apocalypse World not engaging with the Fiction is not an option. If you don’t ground your move in the Fiction, the move doesn’t happen. Carrots and sticks are removed from the equation as is the GM as arbiter. Apocalypse World goes to great lengths to force the players to constantly be thinking in terms of the Fiction. And the MC’s principles are overwhelmingly about constantly feeding the Fiction and presenting everything they do as Fiction in order to keep the players playing in the Fiction. Why is that important? Why do Ron Edwards and Jonathan Tweet want to incentivize that kind of play? Why do Vincent and Meguey Baker force that kind of play? Every RPG structures the conversation it creates in a certain way, demanding that you talk about certain things during play. What kind of conversation do you want to have when you play? What do I need to roll to hit? What’s her armor class? Which chart should I roll on? Ooh, a 14! Does that get me there? That’s one kind of conversation you can have. Or you can keep the discussion grounded in the fiction and talk about what cool and daring things the characters are doing. Every move is designed to make the conversation you have engaging and reliably entertaining. Every option you pick and answer you elicit make for rich conversation. So with Apocalypse World, players can’t make moves except through the Fiction. MC’s can’t make moves except by cloaking them in the Fiction. With these two halves of the equation, you get a self-reinforcing cycle of Fiction informing Fiction. And that cycle—and the conversation it creates—is what I think people are really responding to in embracing the system. That is a fun conversation to have. We continue our exploration of the Master of Ceremonies chapter. Today we are looking at what an MC must “Always Say” (pages 81-82):
• What the principles demand (as follow). • What the rules demand. • What your prep demands. • What honesty demands. Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters. Always be scrupulous, even generous, with the truth. The players depend on you to give them real information they can really use, about their characters’ surroundings, about what’s happening when and where. Same with the game’s rules: play with integrity and an open hand. The players are entitled to the full benefits of their moves, their rolls, their characters’ strengths and resources. Don’t chisel them, don’t weasel, don’t play gotcha. If you’re playing the game as the players’ adversary, your decision-making responsibilities and your rules-oversight constitute a conflict of interests. Play the game with the players, not against them. The MC’s agenda says that everything you say as an MC should accomplish one of those three goals. Now that you know the goals of your speech, you need to know what to say to achieve those goals. That’s what this section is for. And just so you know that the text still isn’t fucking around, these aren’t things you need to say some of the time or even usually. They need to be behind everything you say--always. Being an MC for Apocalypse World turns out to be a very demanding job. The principles, the rules, your prep, and honesty itself are all making demands on what you say, and you are beholden to them all. The first paragraph above tells you why without saying it directly. The roles of the player and the the GM are indeed “divvie[d] . . . up in a strict and pretty traditional way.” (I love that the text doesn’t actually say roles—it says “conversation” of course because that is all roleplaying is. Your role as MC is really just your part of the conversation, meaning what you are allowed to contribute to the Shared Imagined Space. That’s why this section focuses on what you “say” rather than “do” or what powers you have.) The players can say things about their characters’ actions and speech; their character’s thoughts and feelings; and, when asked, about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Everything else in that conversation is given to the MC. That’s why the MC needs to have all these rules governing their speech. Your power is too great to be left unchecked. Apocalypse World wrestles valiantly with the problematic role that GMs play in RPGs. Given the nature of RPGs, the rules need to allow for the unexpected at every turn, and games have traditionally turned to the GM to be the arbiter for all those moments. A number of games published this century have broken the GM’s powers and responsibilities into bits and pieces and distributed them among the players, or built them into the mechanics of the game (these are the GM-less/GM-ful games). But any game that adopts the traditional divisions of players and GMs needs to decide what limitations, if any, it is going to put on the GM. Apocalypse World’s solution is to methodically break down everything a GM does during the game and label those pieces. Then it tethers those pieces to a tri-partite agenda and a number of principles to make the MC aware of each individual piece and where possible corruption comes in. The genius of naming all these parts and dissecting what it is that the MC is doing is that to do so is to be able to exert control over the process. Other RPG’s GM’s sections resort to advice because what else could they do? GMing was so big and messy and everyone was going to do it their way anyway, so why bother to dictate? Uh-uh. Not so for the Bakers. They laid it all bare, and in doing so they can first and foremost make us aware of what it is we are doing and second of all dictate how we do it. Goddamn that’s smart. And it was a move with a lot of chutzpah. The GM and game designer have always had an alliance. The game designer essentially partners with the GM to make the game happen at the table. Without the GM (again, for games with player/GM divisions) the game is nothing more than a book. The GM takes that book and facilitates a conversation with the players to make the game happen. In fact, game texts are often buddy-buddy with the GM-reader, right? I’ve read many a text with jokes about power gamers or players who try to pull a fast one with the rules and plenty of winking aren’t-players-cute language. But Apocalypse World bosses the MC around. Don’t you fucking do that. Seriously, cut it out. And don’t do that either. You know this other thing you do, you can do it, but do it like this. No wonder a number of readers chucked their copy across the room and denounced the game! In one of his Ropecon talks in 2013, Vincent describes using a forceful tone in the book because he’s kicking a door down in a sense. You can’t introduce a major paradigm shift in something as fundamental as GMing without being forceful; hence all the “never do this” and “always do that.” Just look at that second paragraph in this section: “Always be scrupulous, even generous, with the truth.” “Don’t chisel them, don’t weasel, don’t play gotcha.” Bossy bossy bossy. Some people read that tone as befitting an apocalyptic world, but I think it is much more about function than it is about flavor. As a final note, I just want to say how much I love the call for honesty, giving the players real information they can really use, and playing with an open hand. That simple act alone says to the players that the MC is playing with you, not against you. As much as we all love a mystery and a surprise twist, there is nothing better than the drama of knowing the stakes and the risks and watching the protagonists figure out a way through it or around it by their guts and their wits. Playing with that honesty forces the drama to come from characters’ decisions and choices rather than from anything else, and that is what Apocalypse World is all about. 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.” Here we are, at the beginning of “The Master of Ceremonies” chapter (80). Let’s start with the first five sentences:
That’s you, the MC, Apocalypse World’s GM. There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this. Well there you go. Even in a text that likes to speak directly, those are some no-nonsense, get-right-to-it sentences. There are no subordinate clauses or poetic language to muddy the waters. Traditionally, the GM sections in RPG rulebooks are full of advice. Not Apocalypse World. There is one way in particular to GM the game and what you find in this chapter are rules, not recommendations. There is no room for misunderstanding here. The sentence that deserves a little attention here is that last one: “The whole rest of the game is built upon this.” The rules for MCing aren’t just a part of AW; they are the very heart of it. Let’s look at moves, for example. We get so caught up in the 7-9 and 10+ categories that it is easy to skip over what a “miss” means mechanically. The miss gives the MC the right to make one (and only one) of her own moves and make it as hard as she likes. Without these rules for the MC, moves for the PCs would only be half complete. PC Moves were built specifically to interact with these MC rules. I as a player can’t rely on reading a sitch if my MC doesn’t always say what honesty demands. I can’t manipulate, do battle with, or go aggro on an NPC if my MC isn’t looking at the NPCs through crosshairs and being a fan of my character. I can’t trigger my moves in the fiction if the MC doesn’t “misdirect,” grounding her own moves in the fiction. I don’t have the freedom to drive the narrative according to my character’s desires if the MC is not playing to find out what happens. The entire balance of the game depends on the MC following these rules as rules. If the MC does, then the gears of the mechanics governing players’ actions will mesh with the gears of the mechanics governing the MC’s actions and everything will play out as it should. If the MC does not, then all the player-side mechanics are for naught, spinning without any guarantee that the world will respond as it should, as it needs to for play to work. Apocalypse World does an amazing job of breaking down what a GM does, and a lot of people admire the way it is analyzed and presented. What several readers fail to appreciate is that it is not simply an exercise in analysis but the central, load-bearing pillar that holds up the rest of the game. We have worked our way through the first three chapters of Apocalypse World 2e and are about to embark on a close reading of the fourth chapter: “The Master of Ceremonies” (79-94).
This may seem silly to post about, but I want to take a moment to say how much I love the image selected for the Master of Ceremonies chapter. It’s the same image used in the first edition: the person with the wind-blown hair and sunken eyes who is clasping their hands over their nose and mouth. The expression might be one of shock or horror or simply disbelief. This person seems to me to stand in for the players, the MC, and the reader all in one. The most controversial paragraph in the entire book is on the next page (you know the one, the “I’m not fucking around” paragraph), and this graphic tells us that the authors are well aware of the explosive nature of the contents just ahead. The graphic is emblematic of the players who have rolled a miss or given the MC an “opportunity on a golden plate” and are about to be challenged with a move as hard as the MC likes. The person is the future MC about to be restricted to 14 moves, guided by 11 principles, and bound by 3 agenda items. The future MC is going to see in those restrictions and limitations endless possibilities of drama and fun. The future MC is about to be entrusted with elements of the game upon which “the whole rest of the game is built.” Every other chapter gets an image of badass people in badass poses doing badass things. But here we have this horrified/shocked/unbelieving character with no weapon and no defense. It’s striking and it prepares the reader for something . . . unusual. The very image sets us up for something big and strange. It’s a fantastic introduction to the AW MC. (OK, the “Threats” chapter is another unexpected graphic—and I think that one’s a brilliant choice as well.) We are wrapping up the chapter on Character Creation today with a quick look at “Highlighting Stats” (page 78).
Go around the table one last time. Every player finds the character her character knows best, the one with the highest Hx on her own sheet (resolving ties by whim). That other player says which of the character’s stats is most interesting to her, to highlight. Then, MC, you choose a second stat to highlight. It’s your choice; choose the stat you find most interesting for that character yourself. So: Marie, whom does she know best? She knows Keeler with Hx+3, so, “Keeler, which of my stats is most interesting to you?” Keeler’s player chooses Marie’s Weird, because sometimes the obvious choice is the good choice. As MC, I choose Marie’s cool, because I like to see characters act under fire. Marie’s player marks both on her character sheet. Whom does Keeler know best? Bran, with Hx+3. “Bran, you get to highlight one of my stats, which one?” Bran’s player chooses Keeler’s hard, I suppose hoping to see Keeler in fights. As MC, I choose Keeler’s weird, and Keeler’s player marks both on her sheet. This is our third time around the table. The first time we each played the role of actor and talked in detail about the personal history of that character. The second time we played authors and created pasts that were intertwined with each other, explosive events that will fuel our relationships in the future. This third time we are reminded that we have an audience and that we are ourselves the audience for the other players. The rule is to pick that stat that “is most interesting” to you because we assume the roles of not just audience members, but fans. As the fan of a series, we know what we want to see. In this upcoming episode, do I want to see sexy Tyrion wielding his charisma with lovers and friends? Do I want to see clever Tyrion talking shit to his sister and pulling strings behind everyone’s back? Or do I want to see Tyrion on the battlefield even as I shudder for his safety? By our choices we signal what we hope to see. By others’ choices we are told what our audience most wants to witness. Having both the MC and a player choose a stat reminds us that even though we they only have one really strong stat, we play multifaceted characters who are hot, weird, hard, cool, and sharp in interesting ways. Play up two sides of your characters for the reward of experience and be mindful that the fiction you create is both for yourself and for your audience. And for the last time (for now) I will note that the social interaction is guided by yet another question: which of my stats is most interesting to you? All the way around, everybody gets their hightlighted stats, and that’s it. Character creation’s done, time to play. Joke's on us. We’ve been playing this whole time. Let’s talk a little more about Hx today, shall we?
I’ve already given my overall reading of Hx in an earlier post. If you’re interested, you can find it in post #24. So today I want to focus on Hx’s specific role within Character Creation. So open your books to pages 77-78 and let’s get started. Every player’s character has Hx, history, with every other player’s character. Your Hx with someone says how well you know them. It’s based on specific moments or episodes in your shared past. Your Hx with them, written on your character sheet, says how well you know them; theirs with you, on their sheet, says how well they know you. It doesn’t say how long you’ve known them, how much you like them, how positive your history together has been, or anything else necessarily, just how well you get them. If Introductions are about the first point in “Why to Play,” then Hx is about the 2nd point: “Because hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together. Lovers, rivals, friends, enemies, blood and sex—that’s the good shit.” There is nothing vague or amorphous about Hx. The Hx stat rises and falls through specific moments of play that give you insight into other characters or reveals how poorly you really know them. Those specific moments are also the basis of your starting Hx, just as the text above says. Each player will choose a moment (or several moments) that they want to be a part of their character’s past, and then another player will volunteer their character to share that moment. The two players will then work out the details of that moment in a casual conversation. And what does it all start with? A question, of course. But this question (and all the questions orchestrated by the Hx section) is markedly different from the straightforward questions of the Introductions section. These questions are loaded, by which I mean, they posit a bit of fiction within the question that must then be negotiated by the players. To take the example from the book, one of the gunlugger’s questions is “Which one of you once left me bleeding, and did nothing for me?” Boom. Suddenly someone has left the gunlugger bleeding out. And what is the MC supposed to do during this part of the game? “MC, your job is just to oversee and give everybody their turn.” But no, that’s a lie. The text corrects itself after the example, prompting the MC to “pay attention as the characters’ Hx are developing, this is great stuff, and jump in with questions and contributions of your own: ‘hey, when Dune left Keeler bleeding, was that the time that [choosing a name at random] Preen attacked the holding, or a different time?” The MC is offering loaded questions as well. In fact, “questions and contributions” is a great definition of a loaded question—it is a question that simultaneously contributes. (As a side note, in this example, the MC is bringing in the third point of “Why to Play”: “Because the characters are together against a horrific world.” The MC’s questions are not clarifying who characters are as they did in “Introductions”; they are instead bringing elements of the world to bear on these historical moments.) Because the MC’s questions are a standard part of character creations, it seems disingenuous to say that the MC’s job is “just to oversee.” In this same vein, the section ends with this: “And so on, plus you’ll have good material to work with as you launch into the session proper.” That sentences makes it sound like that “good material” is an unintended bonus, when in fact it is one of the core purposes of Hx. I can only imagine that the dismissive tones of “just” and “plus” are intended to prioritize player interaction over the MC’s role in this part of the game. The characters should be doing the bulk of the fiction-building at this point, and the MC should only butt in when she has something meaningful to add to the fiction being built. All of these loaded questions are fun and seamless, so the players might not even be aware that capital-P-play has begun and the capital-F-fiction is already being spun. The reason it is so easy to launch into the session proper after character creation is because so much work has already been done before the first pair of dice has been cast. By this point in the game, the players have worked out how to interact with each other, how to negotiate the entering of ideas into the fiction, and the specifics of the tone and setting of the game they are playing. It all comes about so organically that the foundations of the fiction have been laid before the players even know how it got there. Here are these hot characters, bound up with one another in a colorful and living world of chaos and danger with everyone eager to see what will befall them. At the beginning of character creation, you have nothing but paper, pencils, a book, and some dice. At the end you are swimming in rich story possibilities and a world ready to explode. That’s the good shit. Shared publicly•View activity Today we are looking at the section “Introductions” in the Character Creation chapter (76-77).
Once everybody’s finished creating their characters, it’s time to introduce them. The introducing of the characters reminds me of the first point in the “Why to Play” section of the Basics chapter (14). Let’s take a moment to talk about how each character is fucking hot. Before they start, make it clear: they all know each other. If they’re traveling, they’re traveling together. If they live in a holding, they associate with one another. They’re friends, or at least good colleagues. If one’s a maestro d’, the others can be her regulars, for instance. If one’s a hardholder, the others can be her lieutenants. The Hx rules will help make this happen too, but get it up-front and make sure everybody’s on board. This paragraph tells us that even though only one player will be highlighting her character at a time, the other players need to listen attentively, thinking about ways that their characters might be connected with the character being introduced. And once again, that “make sure everybody’s on board” is a call to establish the social agreement at this stage of the game (which I have talked about plenty in the last couple of posts). Go around the circle. Have every player introduce her character by name, look and outlook. Ask each a couple of questions about her character. You’re after a relatively coherent picture of who these people are and how they fit together. I really love “outlook” as a category or description. The “look” of the character tells us how she appears to the world; the “outlook” of the character tells us how the world appears to her. Outlook is more than personality or attitude, right? It’s a way of seeing and approaching things. To me, outlook is one of the many linguistic gems in the text; it’s informative, evocative, and poetic. So, an important thing happens as soon as the first player introduces her character: the Shared Imagined Space begins to be created. This is the moment that the fiction takes flight off the playbooks. The way the game brings that fiction into the SIS is by having the player contribute directly while the MC prompts the player to reveal more information until we have “a relatively coherent picture of who these people are and how they fit together.” Once again, questions are the heroes of the hour, as the answers they pull from us bring the character’s details into focus. And while character creation is part of play simply because we are all together talking about the game, this is the moment that capital-P-play starts up as the fictional world takes shape. Examples: How old are you? What do you do for scratch? How long have you been doing that? How long have you two been working together? Where do you live? Who lives with you? So people, like, come to you all the time? So shit, you remember the apocalypse a little? So you two are sisters? The sample questions are very different from the questions we will be seeing in the “Hx” section. These questions are direct questions with the answers left up entirely to the player being questioned. In fact, a few of these questions would be at home on the playbook themselves. “How old are you?” is a question usually grouped on a character sheet with appearance and height and all that jazz. By leaving age off of the playbooks, the game gives us a few simple questions to warm up the question-and-answer period. These questions are the basic set of tools that any of us use when we are having a conversation with someone we just met. What kind of work do you do? Where do you live? Are you married? Oh, is that your sister I met earlier? If we are genuinely interested in the person with whom we are conversing (as opposed to simply making small talk), then this kind of introductory conversation is always enjoyable, and we all know how run-of-the-mill questions can yield a surprising answer that takes us on a new line of inquiry. If you can have a conversation with someone you just met, then you can play this game. That’s your whole model for this part of character creation, and it’s an excellent way to warm up the players for what comes next: Hx. If you have a straggler who hasn’t finished making her character yet, don’t make everybody wait. Have her introduce her character now anyway, she can finish up choosing her moves and crap as you go. This is reasonable, and it drives home that for all the questions asked and things learned at this stage of the game, a great deal of the characters will be discovered through play, so don’t sweat it. Anyone straggling to finish her character has either joined the session late or is overthinking her decisions. Get her playing and talking and the character will unfold before her. 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. I have already posited that character creation is a kind of testing ground and a playground for the group about to play Apocalypse World. During character creation, the design creates space for conversations that are driven primarily by questions. In pages 70-78, we can see all kinds of conversations prompted by questions.
1) Questions about rules. The section on “The Stats” (71) covers what the stats mean, what are the ranges and limits of stat scores, and what the standard notational practices are. Questions about these things will prompt discussions about the rules and the language of the game. 2) Questions about how this group will engage with the game. The section “Introducing the Special Moves” (73) says, “Every playbook has a special move for when that character has sex. These aren’t moves for playing out sex scenes—I’m easily embarrassed, personally, so when I’m the MC, or when it’s my character having sex, I always fade to black. . . . The special moves are absolutely only for mutual and consensual sex. If anybody isn’t into it, it plain doesn’t happen. Still, their presence in the game obviously forefronts the characters’ sexuality and sex between the characters. If you or any of your friends don’t want that, be responsible with one another. Agree to leave them out of play, scribble them out of your playbooks, or else find a different game that you’re all excited for.” By placing the sex moves on the character sheet, and by explicitly bringing the subject into this chapter, the game insists that the players have a conversation about the sex moves. How do you feel about their inclusion in the game? Would you like to fade to black like the authors suggest? Do you agree to have all sex moves result from consensual sex and consensual sex only? Would you rather scribble the moves out and not play with them at all? Would you rather play an entirely different game instead? The game prompts you to have these conversations. Nay, it insists that you have them. 3) Questions about permission. In the section “Vehicles and Prosthetics” (74), we are told, “The driver and the chopper always get vehicles, but it’s your call whether to let the other characters have vehicles as well. It’s always your call whether to let anyone start with a prosthetic.” This is the first time in the rules that the MC is given explicit power to say yes or no to a player’s request. The playbooks themselves raise the point with the players—if you want a vehicle or a prosthetic, get with the MC. This nudge prompts another conversation. Can I have a prosthetic? Can I have a battle bus? But now the MC can say yes or no. The player might shrug and comply, or the player might push back. Either way, the players are testing the waters for MC rulings. How will we agree or disagree to abide by the rulings? We learn together that the MC will occasionally have the power to grant or dismiss players’ wishes, and we get some practice in with that dynamic over a matter with overall low-significance. 4) Questions that prompt creation of the Shared Imagined Space. These are the types of questions we see in “Introductions” and “Hx.” I’m going to talk more about these particular questions in upcoming posts. All of character creation in Apocalypse World is an exercise in conversation that prepares us for the much larger conversation we are going to be having in the next 6 or so sessions. We love that character creation is play and that it is a big part of world-building, but those glittery gems are only part of what’s going on design-wise in this phase of the game. Beyond character creation, questions are a core part of the game. What do you do? Tell them the possible consequences and ask. Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost. Ask provocative questions and build on the answers. The multiple choice format used in the moves is simply another question in disguise—which do you choose? So why questions? Conversation can be started and carried on in a ton of different ways, so why does Apocalypse World embrace questions as its main vehicle for conversation? Focused questions are really a brilliant way to conduct an interesting conversation. Questions are equally engaging to the person asking the question and to the person answering the question. If the question at hand affects everyone at the table, then we are all invested in the answer. Questions are a smooth way to grant authority and credibility to who will contribute to the Shared Imagined Space. Questions and their answers are naturally exciting because the answer will always surprise you—otherwise you wouldn’t be asking the question. On top of it all, questions are simply a natural way for us to interact with each other. We ask questions all the time in every conversation we have—harnessing that skill to make for interesting and enjoyable game play only makes sense. This is one of those things that I am sure is just obvious to some, but it is pretty earth-shattering to me. By the time the players are done with character creation, they are all attuned (on a subconscious level at least) to the rhythm of the conversation of the game via questions and answer. We know what the game is about, what are own limits are, how the world will continue to be created through play, and how we will negotiate the fiction as a group. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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