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Just a short post inspired by another early blog post by Vincent, this one from March of 2004, called “A Small Thing About Character Death plus a mini-manifesto” (http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html -- specifically, look at the 6th post on that page). Vincent begins by noting that “[w]hen a character dies in a novel or a movie, it’s a) to establish what’s at stake, b) to escalate the conflict, or c) to make a final statement.” Of these, the death of a PC can only satisfy that final object: to make a final statement. Moreover, that final statement is about dramatizing what the cost to the PC to fight for what they believe in. The death should never be meaningless in an RPG. Or at least it shouldn’t be meaningless if you are designing the kind of RPG in which PCs don’t have meaningless deaths. “In fiction, you never die for something you haven’t staked your life on,” as he says. Then he quotes himself from Dogs in the Vineyard: Also, occasionally, your character will get killed. The conflict resolution rules will keep it from being pointless or arbitrary: it’ll happen only when you’ve chosen to stake your character’s life on something. Staking your character’s life means risking it, is all So all of that put me in mind of when and how PCs die in Apocalypse World. In AW 2e, when your harm clock fills up, your “life becomes untenable.” Then of course you have four choices: come back with -1hard, come back with +1weird, change to a new playbook, and die. So you can never die by accident in AW, and I always thought of that as simply a matter of giving the player a choice of when they want to let the character go, but in the context of Vincent’s other work, I am now thinking of it in context of making the death meaningful. If your character dies from something dumb, you can bring them back free of charge. In fact, you get one free character improvement via that +1weird. It of course makes for great fiction, that +1weird improvement, because you came back odder for your near-death experience. And when you bring your character to a point that they know they are in danger and they go into it anyway, hoping for the best but laying it all on the line, if they then fill their harm clock, you might think, no, that’s the perfect way for them to go out, dying for something that means something to them. What makes this method an even better one than in Dogs is that the player never has to be willing to stake their character’s life, which some players might not have the will to do. But they can push things knowing that they have options, and they can figure out when that time comes if it’s the right time or not. You get the same power, the same effect, without any such determination by the player or any such heavy-handedness by the rules. The game offers an opportunity, and it’s in your power to take it or not. Better yet, even when you don’t choose death, your brush with death itself becomes meaningful through the options provided. Whether you come back less hard, more weird, or entirely changed in who you are, you come back different. Death and not-death are both meaningful through this construction. Oh, and how fantastic that you “come back” at all! That could have easily been “erase all harm and give yourself a -1hard.” No, no, though, the language itself forces you to understand that your character has “come back” from death, scarred, gifted, or altered. And now that I think about it, that “come back” also means that when you choose death, you are choosing NOT to come back, to lay it all down, sword and shield, and rest—to be done.
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What amazes me when I look at the line of Vincent’s published games and his blog posts on anyway as he works through them is how straight a path he travels as a designer, chasing after the same issues and building off of his own theoretical understanding to create the mechanics and approaches that address those issues. Recently, Jason Morningstar mentioned that he based his Fiasco playset tables off of Vincent’s oracles from In a Wicked Age. That revelation sent me back to In a Wicked Age, and the last page of that game sent me back to a set of posts in anyway in which Vincent addresses how you can create “situation” in a game. Looking at those posts I could see how Vincent used those insights down the road to create a bunch of dynamic situations in AW through character creation and the other tools in the playbooks. That little revelation sent me back to my curated collection of his anyway posts (yes, I’ve created a curated collection because 1) I’m that big of a nerd and 2) I wanted some kind of text book for my exploration of RPG theory and I couldn’t think of a better foundation for creating one of my own). All of that is preamble to the little thought I have decided to explore today. I am rereading those posts again, and I came across this passage from something Vincent wrote in February of 2004, concerning task resolution and conflict resolution: In task resolution, what’s at stake is the task itself: “I crack the safe!” “Why?” “Hopefully to get the dirt of the supervillain!” What’s at stake is: do you crack the safe? That post is obviously from a long time ago, and I know that Vincent and Meguey don’t worry themselves over task resolution vs. conflict resolution anymore, but that last line of passage I quoted, when I reread it this morning, got me thinking about the specific terms in Apocalypse World, namely hit and miss. Task resolution is succeed/fail; conflict resolution is win/lose; move resolution is hit/miss. If there’s one thing I know about Vincent it’s that he is very particular about his word choices in his game text. And if there’s two things I know about Vincent it’s that he prefers natural language to jargon when it comes to describing how rules work. So what does the language of hit and miss do for us? Well, it most certainly isn’t succeed and fail and it most certainly isn’t win and lose, but it is related to both of them. The language is most akin to baseball or archery, or some sport in which you trying to strike thing X with thing Y. Perhaps a good way to look at it is that in order to know if you hit or miss, you need to know what you were aiming at in the first place. Hitting and missing means that everyone involves knows the goal of the move before the dice are ever picked up, which is precisely what a well-designed move does. Look back at that example from 2004, breaking into the safe to get the dirt on the supervillain. What move would that be in Apocalypse World? It wouldn’t be a move at all. That fiction triggers none of the moves. Now, if the PC was trying to break into the safe while being fired upon by Dremmer’s gang, then you are acting under fire. Or if you are fighting with Dremmer himself to win control of the safe so you can break into it, then you are seizing by force. And of course, if breaking into the safe is an important action in your game, you could create a custom move, but in doing so, you create a clear set of stakes and risks for breaking into that safe. Maybe it’s a pick list that you can choose from a list like this: do it quickly, do it without triggering the alarm, do it without leaving a trace indicating that it was you who broke the safe. No matter how you phrase the move, the act of phrasing it establishes what are the range of fictional stakes and potential results. In other words, we all know what you are aiming for and we all know what a hit entails and what a miss entails. By their very nature, moves are not about winning or losing, or about succeeding or failing, which is why new language was needed to describe the way they resolve. I’ve talked about people using the language of success and failure in discussing AW’s moves before, so think of this as part two to that post (no. 143, I believe). I’m back after a long hiatus, or at least I hope to be back for a little while. Not only did life get complicated, but I was in danger of just retreading old ground going forward. Recently, however, there have been a couple of posts that got me thinking about analyzing the character moves, which start on page 182 of 2e, and since I stopped at page 174, I thought I might hobble my way to the character moves and then hopefully take off running again. Of course, I waited a little long into the lull of the pandemic, so life might get complicated again. We’ll see what happens. Hunt Prey and Escape a Hunter are obviously two sides of the same event, and their parallels are obvious enough. What I want to talk about in terms of these moves is first, their scale, by which I mean how much of the action is accomplished within the fiction by the role. In one of the comments to his “Creating a Situation: a practical example” post on anyway, Vincent talks briefly about the “ratio of action to interest,” or “How much doing does it take to resolve conflicts?” He gives an example: GM: okay, Mitch, what do you do next? That little example shows us how scale of actions is manipulatable by any system, and Apocalypse World’s move structure is a perfect way to build that scale into the move itself. Here’s Hunt Prey: When you’re the cat, roll+cool. On a hit, you catch your prey out. On a 10+, you’ve driven them first to a place of your choosing; say where. On a 7-9, you’ve had to follow them where they wanted to go; they say where. On a miss, your prey escapes you This move encompasses the whole of the chase, asking the question of finality: Do you get away or don’t you? A move or moves could be created to draw out the individual elements of the chase to play out the gains and losses during the chase itself, but this one cuts through that fiction and lands at the end of the chase. So how much fiction is demanded by this move? We can look at the example: Keeler’s chased Dremmer’s Lieutenant Balls into a ruined skyscraper and is going door to door to catch him. She hits the roll with an 11. As we can see from the example, you still need to describe the fiction that triggers the move, how you are being the cat. In this case, Keeler is “going door to door to catch him.” That’s the information the MC needs in order to say “He can’t get out past you.” Once that has been established the rest of the fiction comes easily: where do you drive him? To the roof. And we cut to the roof where the chase has ended, but not the scene. This move actually provides two different kinds of resolution. On a miss, the move resolves the entirety of the conflict. The prey escapes and you are empty handed. The tension of the chase is gone and we return to the character, asking, now what do you do? Same thing goes for Escape a Hunter of course: if you roll a 10+, “you escape clean and leave your hunter hunting.” Full stop, conflict over. But on any other roll, the move creates not a resolution of the conflict, but an escalation. The chase itself resolves, but the tension, the conflict, doesn’t. It escalates by taking us to a new location with new circumstances and new stakes. In the example above, Keeler and Balls end up on the roof where they have a chance to resolve the conflict that was kicked off or continued by the preceding chase. In the example to Escape a Hunter, Bran and Marie not only fail to escape Dog Head and his cult, but the scene is set for the following escalation: “You’re picking your way down this broken gully, right, and you hear this weird barking and chirping above you. There’s one of them, squatting on a rock, staring down at you. Pretty soon you hear, it sounds like there are a hundred of them barking back at him, converging. You’re in a bad spot, I have to tell you. What do you do? That little trick, making the move result in conflict resolution of conflict escalation, is a clever way to avoid the all-or-nothing effect of pass-fail resolution quandaries. The move could easily be reduced to the question I posed earlier: do you get away or don’t you? But the Bakers use their move structure to complicate that division and explore more of the “don’t you” option. If you get away (or if your prey gets away), then it’s over, something significant has come to pass, but if you don’t (or they don’t), then how do you resolve that move so that there is a feeling of escalation and not just moving the original confrontation from one place to another? The solution here is the simple detail of who gets to decide where you end up, which is a matter of advantageous or disadvantageous fictional positioning. If you are the one deciding, you get to choose the arena for the next stage of the conflict, which is quite a bit of power, and more importantly, it feels like quite a bit of power to the players. Just look at the examples already cited. To force Balls to the roof is to limit his options to end this confrontation non-violently, to make an escape, or to have friends called in to change the dynamic of the confrontation. To lead Bran and Marie into a broken gully that requires “picking” through in order to move effectively corners Bran and Marie, removing movability from the equation. Moreover, they are also apparently outnumbered. It is indeed a bad spot, and the move allowed that to happen. When you’re the bait, roll+cool. On a 10+, choose 2. On a 7-9, choose 1: My favorite part about this move is the bit in boldface, the important caveat of the move: when you’re the bait. The player whose character is putting her neck on the line is the person who throws the dice. You cannot trigger this move by baiting a trap with anything or anyone else. At a strictly logical level, this makes sense because your character’s acting ability to lure in your target is at issue, but it also makes sense in terms of character agency and player safety. Since the bait is exposed to possible danger, only the player of that character can decide what risks they are exposed to via the pick list options. The philosophy behind Apocalypse World is always to give the power of decision to the person is the most vulnerable position. In going aggro, it’s up to the player whose character is being targeted to decide the effect that violence has. Here, it’s up to the player whose character’s safety is on the line to decide how the baited trap scenario unfold. If you wanted to talk an NPC into acting as bait, you couldn’t use this move; you would either need to construct a similar move (presumably with input from the other players at the table) or play it out some other way. I love the way the move specifies that when an option is not selected, the alternative is true, thanks the “otherwise” clauses. In similar moves, the “otherwise” is only implied. In seize by force, for example, not choosing to gain a hold on the thing means that you do not have a definite hold on it; if you do not choose to impress, dismay, or frighten your opponent, they are neither impressed, dismayed, or frightened. In baiting a trap, the spelling out of the alternative is necessary so that all players understand what is at stake in the scene. Laying it out acts as a visual reminder to the MC of what to work into the fiction of their own move in resolving this move, and it also lets the player see not only what they are choosing, but what they are choosing by not choosing the options they left unchosen, if that makes sense. This move is also a good example of how a move can make it so that every roll and every choice the player makes result in exciting and compelling fiction. Because a 10+ doesn’t allow a player to choose all the available options, even on a 10+ the player has to choose some danger to still exist in the situation. Is harm an acceptable risk? If so, your trap works perfectly, but only by putting your own safety on the line. If your safety is paramount, then you are sacrificing some aspect of your trap. I also love that the risk of harm is just that, a risk, not a certainty. If your prey doesn’t inflict any harm, then there is no downside, so a player has to calculate the risks, but with a limited number of factors so as to avoid analysis paralysis. On a 7-9, you have to choose what is most important to you. On a miss, you get one of these things anyway, but its up the MC to determine how that plays out, either by using the information known to them about the NPCs being lured into the trap or by simply deciding what would be the most exciting thing for them to see happen. Every result involves interesting decisions, and in each result the trap is sure to spring in a unexpected and exciting way. Note that all the results are about fictional positioning. Where the targets are, how prepared they are for tomfoolery, and how exposed the bait is—these are all about where the characters are as the move resolves. The move takes one situation, a set trap, into another situation, a trap about to spring. This is what I understand “putting a move’s results off into the snowball” is about. Each of the possible fictional positionings resulting from the move will factor into what player characters can do and what pressures the MC can apply, but things are far from settled. The example shows just how unsettled things can be after the move: Audrey’s driven out into Dremmer’s territory, stalled it out, and is pretending she can’t get it started again. Hooch the chopper is circling his gang around, ready to pounce as soon as Dremmer’s raiders show any interest. The question the example poses is will Hooch spring the ambush or let them go, but it’s more than that, right? Dremmer’s gang is here, watching Audrey and looking for a trap. Hooch is in a less than ideal place for an ambush, but if he decides to “let them go,” what happens? Audrey doesn’t just hop in her vehicle and drive off, take Hooch out to lunch. Dremmer’s gang is there and interested and must be dealt with one way or the other, whether it’s a fight or a guarded retreat with a possible battle of some sort. The move first establishes a fictional state, and the resolution of that move alters the fictional situation and sets it motion, forcing the characters to make further moves until the scene reaches some complete resolution. Just a small, hasty thought today. As I look at the battle moves in Apocalypse World, and specifically the subterfuge moves, I’ve been thinking a lot about the snowball, and the discussion on the Barf Forth forum that I mentioned back in post no. 149 about the changes that the Bakers made to seize by force for the second edition in order to make the move a battle move rather than a basic move. I link to and quote a lot of the forum thread in my earlier post, so I’ll just quote one small relevant passage here: It's not about simplifying seizing by force at all. It's about putting more of the move's consequences off into the snowball, like I've been saying, to create the opening for the other battle moves to lead and follow it. Explicitly follow on the miss, implicitly lead and follow on a hit. (reply #92, http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=8835.60) The thing that I’m interested in is the way moves are built to “put [their] consequences off into the snowball” rather than resolving the conflict or the situation entirely. What this reminds me of is the once-hot topic of task resolution vs. conflict resolution. (You can read Vincent’s early thoughts on this distinction on his anyway blog here: http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html (it’s in the fourth post, titled “Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution”)). Task resolution, at its most basic understanding, is that the thing being resolved is the success or failure of a specific action without a larger set of actions, such as a single sword swing in a battle, or an attempt to move silently over one defined area as part of a larger silent approach. The scale can be vast or narrow. In conflict resolution, the things being resolved is the entirety of the conflict at issue, the whole of that specific battle or of that specific infiltration. Moves in Apocalypse World resolve one situation into a different situation where the fiction has significantly shifted in one way or another. But the set of battle moves are designed to be interconnected as the fiction requires so that they can tumble from one into the other. For example, the subterfuge moves are specifically designed to “allow the players’ characters to get into or out of a battle on their own terms” (174). So when you are acting as the bait or the cat or the mouse, the move is designed to shape the fictional positioning at the start of a battle (or in the case of the mouse, to avoid an disadvantageous battle altogether). When you push the consequences of a move off into the snowball, you are saying to some extent that his action is potentially part of a larger set of actions, like a single task within a larger conflict. Moves that result in a resolved (and changed) situation are a kind of guided conflict resolution. Of course moves will snowball even when they aren’t specifically designed to lead into or out of specific situations. The snowball is then a result of the choices that the MC and the players make with their individual moves, riding the changing situation with escalating actions until they play themselves out to a momentarily stabilized situation. All that is just a thought. I’m not convinced it’s a very useful thought, but if I don’t write it down my brain is just going to keep playing with the idea and bugging me, so I appreciate your indulgence. I know that the concept of task vs. conflict resolution is no longer in any way important to the way the Bakers think about RPG design, so I’m not suggesting that this was a comment that they were making through Apocalypse World. The help or interfere move, being a basic move, is designed to work in any narrative situation, and as such it can easily work in battle too. But while it’s a functional move in battle, it’s not an especially sexy move, and it means that the supporting character is doing a lot less than the character being supported. Enter the tactical and support moves: The tactical and support moves allow the players’ characters to support one another in battle. Use them when, for instance, the gunlugger’s providing covering fire while the savvyhead’s getting the car running again, or when the battlebabe’s looking out for snipers while the brainer and the maestro d’ are making a fun for it, or when the skinner’s keeping her eyes open and telling the driver what’s coming and where to go. (171) The three moves under the “Tactical and Support Moves” banner—lay down fire, stand overwatch, and keep an eye out—all allow for the supporting player to have their own fiction-shaping move to make. Because seizing by force can cover a large swath of fiction in one move once “the action of the game tips over into battle” (166), in a scene with several PCs acting in unison, the move discourages everyone from making it. Either everyone has to attempt to seize something different (e.g. tactical position, control of an important object or person, etc.) or everyone needs something specific to do. This structure is one of the reasons that battles in Apocalypse World are so rich and varied, simulating cinematic fights and not a mere exchange of bullets and punches. While the collection of basic moves—going aggro, helping, manipulating, and reading situations and people—all work beautifully in battle, these additional tactical and support moves broaden the narrative elements available to the players. And while these three moves cover a lot of how characters will regularly support each other with shit is going down, they are also meant to inspire you to create similar moves if your playgroup craves other narrative possibilities. The question that these three moves raise for me is the idea of when exactly “the action of the game tips over into battle,” which is the point at which these moves technically become accessible to the PCs. We know from the in battle move that “when you’re in battle, you can bring the battle moves into play” (141), so at what point in the action can you lay down fire or keep an eye out? Let’s take a look at the keep an eye out example: Dust the skinner is riding shotgun with Audrey the driver. I’ve been keeping Audrey busy with driving, and Dust is keeping an eye out. She misses the roll with a 6, which means she gets to hold only 1. She holds onto it through a harrowing brush with bad terrain, and then… We don’t know what events precede this example. It could be that they are on the run from enemies so we are already in a battle, but “keeping Audrey busy with driving” suggests that the challenges the characters have been facing have not been battle-related ones. So what has tipped the action of the game into battle that allows Dust’s player to make this move? Have the players agreed in some what that they are “in battle”? Or does the player asking to make the move trigger the possibilities of battle? Or if the player said, “I think I’m going to keep my eyes out for trouble,” would there need to be a discussion about the possibility of whether they are “in battle” or not? So this is what we know about the way Vincent at least (and probably Meguey too, though I haven’t read enough of her games to know for certain) writes his rules: he is exactly as specific as he means to be. The phrases “in battle” and “tips over into battle” are purposefully vague phrases because no hard definition is actually necessary. What makes these moves battle-specific is that the fiction they produce will assume a battle is taking place, and the rules can never know when that is the case, so it is entirely up to the players. The results of the move involve taking harm or choices from another battle move’s list. To trigger keeping an eye out is to say that the fiction resulting will specifically involve “an enemy” and/or “an ally.” So, “the action of the game tips over into battle” literally means that the fiction the players are creating is combat fiction, either when the move is triggered or as a result of the move being triggered, and the game doesn’t care which. In many RPGs, the moment that play tips into battle is significant because special rules kick in at that moment. In D&D and similar games for example, the order of who acts when is critical when battle begins, but not otherwise. The time scale can change, going from minutes to seconds, and of course issues of to hit and to avoid being hit are specific to those moments. As Ron Edwards has observed, often surprise rounds work as a kind of patch to smooth the transition in games from non-combat to combat. That’s not the case for Apocalypse World, which makes no distinction between combat and non-combat in the first edition, and makes the distinction in the second edition only to make sure that the fictional outcomes fit with the fictional inputs. Moves can go in and out of combat fluidly, and are designed to do so, allowing you to make non-battle moves between battle moves and vice versa, so “in battle” only ever refers to the fiction that is being created right now with this move. This weekend, I came across a podcast that I was unfamiliar with called “Bear Swarm!” Episode 121.1 of “Bear Swarm!” is an interview conducted by the host, Rob Justice, with Vincent Baker at GenCon 2010 about the then-recently-released Apocalypse World. It’s a very short interview, just over 15 minutes in length, but there is something at the beginning of the interview that Vincent says about the origins of Apocalypse World that I had never heard before: “My wife really likes fiction about loyalty, but she doesn’t want to play games where we’re stabbing each other in the back all the time, so I wanted to design a game that was about loyalty that wasn’t about betrayal every single time, right?” (starting at about 0:02:55 and following, http://bearswarm.robjustice.net/episode-121-1-gencon-vincent-baker/) I had never heard of the subject of loyalty discussed in the context of the game, so the idea that it was central to the game took me by surprise even as I thought, “Of course it is!” There is plenty of talk of community when discussing Apocalypse World, and while I have always agreed that community is a focus of the game, it has never been a satisfying focus, mainly because it’s such a wishy-washy idea, and one that no individual can push for or create. The question of loyalty and the idea of community are obviously related, insofar as you can’t have a community made up of people who don’t trust each other, but community is something that exists only as an aggregate, whereas loyalty is particular to each individual. Who or what are you loyal to? Which desires and things do you prize above all others? Those are productive questions and questions that play can answer in a moment by moment way. Once I had the concept of loyalty in my head, I could see how all the mechanics and structures are there to test the loyalty of the characters. Let’s say you want to create a game that players play to find out the limits of the characters’ loyalties to each other. What would you need? You’d want to make sure that the characters begin aligned together; they don’t have to be best friends, but they need to be together in some say, or else the issue of loyalty and possible betrayal can’t be explored. You’d need to make sure that characters have some kind of a shared past, a history, if you will. You’d need to make sure that each character has their own interests and desires that can serve as handholds to be pulled on and shaken by the GM to test the character’s loyalties. And for that matter, you’d want a GM to do the exploratory testing, to play the world of possibilities competing for the characters’ attentions and loyalty. Once all of those things are in place, you’d need the game to create the pressures that test those loyalties. You can see how creating a world of scarcity and need would be an ideal testing ground. You can see how creating triangular relationships would be key for creating wedges between characters through opposed or orthogonal desires and pressures. You can see how avoiding “party play,” shared missions and quests, would be essential to letting the character’s interests diverge. You can see how spending a session exploring those beginning interests, conflicts, and NPCs would let you find out in what way the characters’ interests were aligned and in what ways they were at odds. You can see how you’d want multiple sessions of play to both feel out the borders of the characters’ loyalties and to bring them into a productive tension with each other. You can see how you’d want the characters to be skilled, capable of bringing things about for themselves in at least a limited way to be able to actively pursue their own interests and desires. It’s not that the characters are pitted against each other, but that their interests are. How will they negotiate those differences? Will they come together or fall apart? Will they betray each other, back each other up, or simply fall apart? The whole range of outcomes is made possible by the design, and every aspect of the design seems set up to create possible loyalties and then test them. When you do single combat with someone, no quarters, exchange harm, but first roll+hard. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose 1. On a miss, your opponent chooses 1 against you:
• You inflict terrible harm (+1harm). • You suffer little harm (-1harm). After you exchange harm, do you prefer to end the fight now, or fight on? If both of you prefer to end the fight now, it ends. If both of you prefer to fight on, it continues, and you must make the move again. If one of you prefers to end the fight, though, and the other prefers to fight on, then the former must choose: flee, submit to the latter’s mercy, or fight on after all. Single combat is strictly for times when two enemies meet head-on on neutral ground, with no purpose other than to harm one another, with no acceptable outcome other than injuries and death. If either enemy has any other objective, or any advantage of terrain, use seize by force or the other battle moves instead. Single combat is an interesting addition to Apocalypse World’s moves. Before, there was no clear way to simply fight someone. You would need to phrase it in terms of seizing something by force if both participants were ready for a fight, with “their life” or some equivalent as the thing being seized. As it is, single combat has some pretty restrictive conditions, as that first explanatory paragraph makes clear. And it’s neat to see how those limited parameters shape this variation of the seize by force move. Obviously gaining definite control of the things is out of the question because there is no objective other than injury or death. The removal of “impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy” is the interesting choice to me. It tells us that this battle will end under no other conditions than death or mutual agreement. If I want to kill you, you can’t soften my anger and determination by frightening me. We’re way past that by the time this move is triggered. So with only two options, how do you maintain the 3, 2, 1 progress of the strong hit, weak hit, and miss? By making it a 2,1, -1 progression instead. It’s a simple solution that makes the miss meaningful without letting the MC barge into the conflict with a hard move. I feel like this move is a capitulation to player demand, one that is occasionally useful, rarely necessary, and totally uninteresting to the designers. I conclude this by the accompanying example passage: Anika the maestro d’ conducts cage fights in her establishment, and Bran’s challenged Plover, an NPC, to meet him there. The terms are: no armor, crowbar vs crowbar. Bran hits the move with an 11, which, well done Bran. In the exchange of harm, Bran inflicts 2-harm for his crowbar, plus 1 for inflicting terrible harm, minus 0 for no armor, for a total of 3-harm. He suffers 2-harm for Plover’s crowbar, minus 1 for suffering little harm, minus 0 for no armor, for a total of 1-harm. 3-harm is enough to take Plover out. There’s no continuing the fight. Do you see what’s missing? Yeah, there’s no dialogue. The move and its explanation are all mechanics. There’s no reincorporating here of the die results back into the fiction for us readers. Bran and Plover have fight. Bran rolls. Ban wins. Cut and dry. And utterly unsexy. Since NPCs can only take 2-3 harm, and since you the MC need to look at them through the crosshairs, a straight fight will likely end in an NPC’s death, and a rather inglorious and dramatically uninteresting death at that. There is nothing in the presentation of the move to inspire the reader to bring this move into their game if any other solution is possible. (As an afterthought, I’ll add this. Since the exchange of harm is entirely a mathematical issue, and since the outcome is known to the players involved in the fight, there is no real need for them to turn to the MC for a fictional explanation of the results. If they don’t, there is no trigger or need for the MC to make a move. This could be part of the reason that there is no reincorporating of the mathematical results into the fiction.) This is our second section titled “PC vs PC.” The first one is on pages 132-133, and I cover that passage in post no. 104. Whereas the first PC vs PC section was about general opposition between PCs, this one is specifically concerned with two PCs attempting to seize the same thing by force. Everything here is straightforward, so I just want to make two quick observations concerning the example.
Here’s the example: Bran’s trying to kill Birdie but he’ll have to get through Keeler first. Bran’s armed with his 9mm (2-harm close loud) and is wearing his 1-armor welder’s jacket. Keeler’s wearing her 2-armor body armor, but she’s still not in a killing mood, so she’s armed only with her bare hands. Both roll. Bran hits the move with a 7, so he gets to choose 2. Keeler hits it with a 12, so she gets to choose 3. They commit to their choices before revealing them. Bran chooses to inflict terrible harm and to take definite control of Birdie. Keeler chooses to inflict terrible harm, suffer little harm, and protect Birdie from harm. In the exchange of harm, Bran inflicts 2-harm for his 9mm, plus 1 because he chose to inflict terrible harm, minus 2 for Keeler’s armor, minus 1 because Keeler chose to suffer little harm, for a total of 0-harm. Keeler inflicts 1-harm with her fists and boots, plus 1 because she chose to inflict terrible harm, minus 1 for Bran’s armor, for a total of 1-harm. Furthermore, they’ve chosen contradictory fates for Birdie, so those cancel out too. “It’s a standoff,” I say. “Bran, you shoot Keeler, but her armor takes it. Keeler, you land a couple satisfyingly crunchy body blows, but Bran’s not down or anything. Birdie’s still cowering behind you, but maybe she’s about to make a stupid run for it or something. What do you both do?” (169-170). The first observation is how little progress is made in the PC vs PC exchange. Even if one or both players missed their roll, they can still opt to get definite and undeniable control of Birdie, so as long as the goal is really what the fighting it over, it’s going to end in a standoff some huge percentage of the time. The only thing to be determined then is who is willing to get closest to killing the other. In the end of this exchange, Bran and Keeler are in the exact same situation as before, only Bran is down one harm. This example, then, serves to demonstrate not only how PC vs PC works by the rules, but also how the move doesn’t work to actively settle the matter. I like that. The second observation is that the MC makes a neat move when resolving the dice rolls by adding this detail: “Birdie’s still cowering behind you, but maybe she’s about to make a stupid run for it or something.” That little detail applies pressure to the conflict between Bran and Keeler. As the two of them are fighting each other, Birdie isn’t a thing to be simply fought over, but a character with decisions and impulses of her own. That simple statement makes the players have to keep one eye on Birdie going forward, complicating their decision tree for their next move. This keeps the players from simply rolling and rerolling rounds of seize by force combat. In reply to my last post, Nachiket Paktar linked to a thread in the Barf Forth forum that began in early 2017, here: http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=8835.60. It’s a lengthy discussion about the changes made to seize by force in the second edition. On page 4, Vincent joins the discussion and clarifies, through a conversation with Paul T. why seize by force was moved from the basic moves into the battle moves, and why in doing so, the miss was given a specific consequence rather than the “prepare for the worst” warning that comes with all the basic moves.
Here’s what he says in reply #64: I changed seizing by force in order to put it into position at the head of the new battle moves. This requires it to put more of its consequences off into the snowball than it did in 1st Ed, to make the opening for the other moves to lead and follow it. That notion of putting “more of its consequences off into the snowball” is I think a pretty mind-shaking idea, at least it is to me. He goes on to further clarify in reply #79: The basic moves have to work across contexts. You can act under fire, for instance, in battle, in the bedroom, trying to fix a car, trying to sneak away without causing any problems for anybody, trying to wait for a signal before you move. They can specify what happens on a hit, because those are the effects you're hoping to introduce into play, but they can't specify the miss because they can't presume the context. Imagine if acting under fire said "on a miss, you take harm as established," for instance. Now it only works when there's harm established, not when you're in the bedroom and not when you're waiting for a signal and getting impatient to move. The non-basic moves, all of them, contrariwise, have to specify or create the context in which they work. One of the ways they do this is by specifying misses. Another is by specifying who can make them (in the case of the character moves) and/or where you have to be to make them (in the case of the peripheral moves) and/or what has to be going on for you to make them (in the case of the battle moves). They have to do this because otherwise they would be basic moves: whoevs would be able to do them whenevs. In the 1st Edition, the battle moves were specifically flagged as "optional," meaning that they were presumed out of play unless you specifically chose to bring them in. Seizing by force was the basic move alternative to the whole set of battle moves. In the 2nd Edition, though, the battle moves are only the normal amount optional: presumed in play whenever you want to use one. This is why "do battle" appears on the 2nd Ed playbooks under hard. Doing battle, not seizing by force, is now the basic move. He continues this thought in reply #83: In 2nd Ed, seizing by force has a specific context. It's prescriptive and descriptive: you can only seize by force in battle; if you seize by force, that's great, now you're in battle. Since it has a specific context, the move no longer needs to work across contexts, so it's no longer a basic move and now it gets a miss effect. Its miss effect plays its part in creating what "in battle" means, along with all the other battle moves, the rules for exchanging harm, and a bunch of other stuff. So now. You can always resolve a battle with a single seize by force move, treating seizing by force as the basic move it was in 1st Ed. The move is written now with the presumption that you won't always do that, but in fact you can do it whenever you want, including always. That's no problem by the rules and I think we've been over that. Instead, can you imagine situations where, as the player or as the MC, resolving the battle with the single move feels kind of abrupt, or else feels kind of overreaching, or else doesn't give you the precise outcome you hope for, so you WANT to: - Turn the tables before seizing by force? - Hunt prey after seizing by force? - Escape a hunter after seizing by force? - Outdistance another vehicle before seizing by force? - Board another vehicle before seizing by force? - Etc? And reply #85: So, yes, exactly: seizing by force now has a more concrete, less abstract range of possible outcomes, explicitly on the miss, implicitly on the hits. But the broad range of possible outcomes still exists, in battle, not in the single move. Each of the battle moves has narrower possible outcomes individually, but when you consider how they might organically combine, you don't lose any of the possible scaling, any of the possible zooming. You trade away the range of outcomes in the single move, and in return you get, not the identical range of outcomes, but as broad a range, embedded in a broader range and diversity of possible battles. Plus better pacing. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. I wouldn't claim that it works perfectly and universally, because who knows. But from all I've heard, and from my own play, it works very well overall. The new battle moves get a million times more enthusiastic play than the old ones ever did, which means that seizing by force is doing its new job of leading people enthusiastically into them. That's where I was going! And finally (for my purposes), he sums things up in reply #92: It's not about simplifying seizing by force at all. It's about putting more of the move's consequences off into the snowball, like I've been saying, to create the opening for the other battle moves to lead and follow it. Explicitly follow on the miss, implicitly lead and follow on a hit. I don't want to oversell it as a big part. It's just one piece of it. But it does play its own small, definite part in making battles flow. The miss conditions in a move shape how moves connect to continued situations and other moves. In the case of battle moves, the matter of harm creates and clock that gives characters a limited time (and corresponding pressure) to achieve the overall goal of a battle, not just temporary goals. The specific narrative ramifications of an action shape the choices available to the player, and the player’s choices from the seize by force picklist shape the choices available to the MC. Seize by force can solve the whole battle in one roll as it always has been able to do, or it can easily fit together with the other battle moves that have now been put on an equal par with seize by force. The shape and particulars of a move’s miss condition (as well as it’s hit options, of course) determines how it fits in with other available moves. Snowballing is not an accident of narrative, but a structure of possibilities determined by a move’s construction. How much does a move resolve at all die results? How much does a move change the situation and leave new room for other actions, again at all die results? These are important things to think about when looking at moves. To assault a secure position, roll to seize by force, but instead of choosing to take definite control of it, you can choose to force your way into your enemy’s position.
To keep hold of something you have, roll to seize by force, but instead of choosing to take definite control, you can choose to keep definite control of it. To fight your way free, roll to seize by force, but instead of choosing to take definite control, you can choose to win free and get away. To defend someone else from attack, roll to seize by force, but instead of choosing to take definite control, you can choose to protect them from harm. In the first edition of Apocalypse World, the Bakers give this point of clarification: “Read ‘seize something’ broadly — a character can seize the upper hand, seize momentum, or even seize the moment — but ‘by force’ is strict” (195). In the second edition, they have restructured the presentation of the move for clarity. Personally, I miss the sentence I quoted, but I understand why that gave up the broad reading of “seize something” for these variants of the move. This new presentation does nothing to impair the way I read the move while at the same time makes the move more understandable to those who prefer their moves more literal. These four variants are probably the most reliably common ways that seize by force is used beyond literally seizing a thing. Offering the variants as variants is in some ways an invitation for players to create their own custom move in the form of a variant of seize by force, a baby step for players who are uncomfortable creating a whole new move but who can alter another move. Even a casual read of the variants reveals that the only things that shift with each variant is what you mean by “seize” and what you mean by “take definite and undeniable control.” The thing that you are seizing in each case is the character’s goal, what they want to accomplish through their use of force. In fact, the move could be called “accomplish a thing by force” and the result option could be “definitely and undeniably accomplish the thing.” But that would be shitty writing, and the Bakers don’t go in for shitty writing. The example is straightforward: Marie the brainer is stranded in the rag-waste and gets set upon by one of its not-quite-human habitants. She has no choice but to fight her way free. She misses the roll with a 4. She still gets to choose 1, and chooses to win free and get away. In the exchange of harm, she inflicts 3-harm for her scalpel (3-harm intimate hi-tech) minus 1 for her assailant’s hide armor, for a total of 2-harm. She suffers 2-harm for her assailant’s crude cutting blade (2-harm hand messy) minus 0 because she’s wearing no armor, for a total of 2-harm. “You cut into him and flee,” I say. “You’re bleeding, but you get away. You can hear him gasping somewhere behind you, but you don’t know whether he’s chasing you or letting you go.” Here we see that even on a miss, you can accomplish your goal, Marie winning free and getting away. Again, I have to admire the skill of the MC as they sew ambiguity into the fiction. Marie escapes, but she doesn’t know if she is being chased or not. If so, might the creature appear again? If the creature is letting her go, is there some reason for that? This construction leaves a lot of room for narrative tension now and creative decisions later. Seize by force has specific rules for a miss, namely, “choose 1.” Compare that with the rules for a miss with reading a stich and reading a person: “On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst.” The directions for seize by force could easily have been written, “On a miss, choose 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst,” but they weren’t. The only logical conclusion is that the MC does not have the invitation to make as hard a move as they’d like in the case of the miss. This example most certainly suggests that the MC doesn’t make a hard move in addition to Marie getting away. Huh. I didn’t realize that until just now. Keeler decides that enough’s enough and goes to take Birdie’s magnum away from her. (Who gave Birdie a magnum in the first place? Jesus.) Keeler doesn’t want to kill Birdie, so she’s not using a weapon, just her bare hands. She seizes the gun by force and hits the roll with a 9. She chooses to take definite control of it and to impress, dismay, or frighten Birdie.
In the exchange of harm, Keeler hits Birdie for 0-harm for grappling and restraining, minus 0 because Birdie’s wearing no armor, for a total of 0-harm. Birdie hits Keeler for 3-harm for her magnum (3-harm close reload loud), minus 2 for Keeler’s body armor, for a total of 1-harm. “As soon as Birdie realizes that she’s shot you,” I say, “and she sees the look on your face, she panics. She throws the gun down and runs.” “She better,” Keeler says (168). This example has it all: a clear dramatic situation with both humor and danger that shows the how the move works, what its limitations are, and how its results can be worked cleverly back into the fiction. By this point in the text, we know that Birdie isn’t right. We’ve seen Bran put her into his isolation chamber, and we’ve seen Marie try to read her to find out what she should be on the lookout for. The examples are not in chronological order, but they are clearly from the same storyline. What begins for us as a set of names become recurring characters, and the example act as highlight reels from a TV series that we’ll never get to see. The familiarity is a clever way to have the examples point to the larger storylines that the game can create. So the first sentence of this example bring together Keeler (whom we know from previous examples is a snarky badass) and Birdie, who occupies the difficult land between friendly and threatening, and who is now armed, much to Keeler’s displeasure. The character’s goals are simple: get the gun away from Birdie without killing her, so the player’s choices will be guided by those goals. The move is triggered by the simple declaration that Keeler “goes to take Birdie’s magnum” by using just her bare hands. The move forces the characters to exchange harm, so Keeler’s player’s choice to use only her bare hands reduces the risk of hurting Birdie. Birdie is equally bound by the move to fight back, which in this case means using the gun. If Birdie didn’t want or wasn’t prepared to fight back, grabbing the gun would be Keeler going aggro on Birdie. With a hit on a 9, Keeler’s player chooses two options. She gets the gun (her goal) and impresses, dismays, or frightens Birdie. By choosing to impress, dismay, or frighten Birdie, Keeler’s player is trying to end the conflict without further injuries to anyone. The math happens outside of the fiction, and then the MC works the results into the fiction. The MC can narrate the results anyway they like as long as Keeler ends up definitively with the gun and Birdie changes her behavior. I like the MC’s choice to have Birdie throw down the gun after shooting Keeler and seeing the expression on Keeler’s face. It gives Birdie agency in the shooting rather than having the gun go off during the struggle. I also love the phrase “sees the look on your face” because it leaves some ambiguity in the scene. Is Keeler pissed, or emotionally hurt, or offended? What did Birdie see on Keeler’s face, and did she flee because she was scared of what Keeler would do or because she was ashamed of what she herself had done? We don’t know, and there’s nothing in the example to suggest that the players know or choose to clarify. Finally, choosing to have Birdie flee the scene drives the drama forward. Where will she go? Will Keeler pursue? How awkward will their next meeting be? We want to know and the players will want to know, and only through play will we learn the answer. To seize something by force, exchange harm, but first roll+hard. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7–9, choose 2. On a miss, choose 1:
• You inflict terrible harm (+1harm). • You suffer little harm (-1harm). • You take definite and undeniable control of it. • You impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy. Seizing by force is the basic battle move. When someone wants something that someone else has, and both are able and willing to fight for it, use seize by force or one of its variations. You can use seize by force alone for battles of any scale, but for large-scale battles, battles where several PCs each want to play their own tactical role, and prolonged battles with shifting tactical terrain, you can choose to bring the rest of the battle moves into play as well. An impressed, dismayed, or frightened NPC absolutely must change their behavior, but it’s up to you how. For PCs, if they’re impressed, dismayed, or frightened, but they press their attack anyway, have them act under fire to do it (167). This is one of the great moves of Apocalypse World. It is a single move that works for any fight over anything. It does so successfully because Meguey and Vincent looked at meaningful battles in games, literature, and movies and boiled it down to one central issue: one character wants something and another character is actively opposing them. In this light, a fight always has a goal, something the combatants are fighting over and a way to know when the fight is over. Through this move, combat is always meaningful and narratively important. For the move to trigger, the player has to make clear what the character is seizing, which means that the focus of the combat is always clear. The move’s picklist makes the possible outcomes of the fight equally clear. Harm will be exchanged, though the exact amount of harm can be affected by the player if they roll high enough. Note that because even a miss allows the player to choose one, the player always has the option to “take definite and undeniable control” of the thing seized. On the flip side, because even a 10+ lets a player choose only 3 options, the player always has the option to fail at their goal. The roll then doesn’t decide if you succeed or fail. The roll decides how much control you have over the combat, mostly. The worse you roll, the more you have to decide what is most critical for you at accomplish in the battle. Even on a great roll, you don’t have total control, of course. You can’t, for example, pull your punches as it were and deliver less harm. The options to “inflict terrible harm” or “suffer little harm” let the player decide how aggressive or defensive a stance they are taking in the fight. The option to “impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy” gives the player another way to bring the combat to a close (as opposed to beating them to death). Each combination of choices creates a different fictional flavor for the exchange. Inflicting terrible harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent looks different than suffering little harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent, which looks different than inflicting terrible harm and suffering little harm while making no attempt to impress, dismay, or frighten your opponent. Vincent has talked elsewhere about how picklist moves in Apocalypse World take the best feature of Otherkind Dice while streamlining the process. (I can’t remember at the moment where I read it – maybe on a Barf Forth Apocalyptica forum – so I can’t cite the comment. If someone has a link, I’d appreciate it.) Seize by force is a great example for how this works. For those of you who either don’t know or need a reminder, Otherkind is an incomplete game of Vincent’s whose dice mechanic has been much praised. Vincent talks about it and summarizes the system in the post titled “The Magic Trick: Otherkind Dice” on his anyway blog. Here’s what he says: In Otherkind, a combat roll is a pool of 5d6, and it decides four things. It decides (1) whether you advance toward your objective, (2) whether you hurt your enemy, (3) whether your enemy hurts you, and (4) whether your enemy hurts any of your friends and allies. Each of these is on a scale, like so: Do you advance toward your objective? 1: You lose ground. 2-3: You hold ground. 4-5: You gain ground. 6: You seize your objective. Do you hurt your enemy? 1-3: No. 4-5: Yes. 6: A lot. Does your enemy hurt you? 1: A lot. 2-3: Yes. 4-5: No, but your enemy puts you off-balance or on the defensive. 6: No. Does your enemy hurt your friends and allies? 1: Yes, badly, all who are exposed to danger. 2-3: Yes, but not badly, or only a few. 4-6: No. To make the combat roll, you pick up 5d6, roll them, throw away the lowest number, and then assign the remaining four numbers one each to the four categories of outcome. For example: you roll 1 1 3 4 6. This means that you throw away the first 1, and then choose how to assign the remaining 1, the 3, the 4, and the 6. Maybe you seize your objective with the 6 and hurt your enemy with the 4, but that means that now you have to choose whether your enemy hurts you badly with the 1 and hurts your friends not-so-badly with the 3, or vice versa. Make sense? (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/759) You can see the one-to-one conversion of the system in seize by force. As fun as Otherkind dice are (and if you’ve played Psi*Run you know exactly how fun they are), seizing by force accomplishes the same goal, with the same excitement, while stepping away from the fiction for only a fraction of the time. The only difference between this example and seize by force is that instead of having to protect your friends and allies you have the option to impress, dismay, or frighten, which is I think innately more interesting. On a miss, the MC can always makes a move that hurts your friends and allies if they want. Oh, and before I go, I just want to say how much I love the part of impressing, dismaying, or frightening your enemy as it applies to a PC. It incentivizes behavior without outright controlling the player’s character. It’s a significant risk to act under fire since a miss will result in a hard move and weak hit will bring with it some difficult decisions. It’s a great way to give the move teeth without taking choices away from players. This is the last Daily Apocalypse of 2018 - happy New Year! Before we go further into the battle moves, I want to take a step back to look briefly at the concepts of want and surplus, especially as they pertain to the insight and augury moves.
The options that the hocus player chooses during character creation detail the nature of the hocus’s followers, telling us how they behave in times of want and in times of surplus. At the start of the session, the hocus makes the fortune move to find out how things stand now. I love these start of session moves for a number of reasons. First, thematically, the move drives home the vagaries of the Apocalypse World; sometimes you’re hard hit and sometimes you’re flush with goods. Moreover, the nature of the move disconnects that state of want or surplus from the actions of the characters or the fiction that came before this session. One session’s surplus might become next session’s want no matter what victories or defeats the characters experience. This is of course a recurring theme in the game as the characters continually try to gain or maintain control in this crazy world, but unless they have loaded dice that keep giving them a 10+, things are not going to go as they wish. By a little or by a lot, things will go sideways. Second, the all-or-nothing state of want and surplus is in keeping with the rest of the game. There is no “enough” in Apocalypse World. Either there is not enough or there is too much. When there is not enough, you need to scrounge up more; when there is way more than you need, someone will soon be coming to claim it. The ups and downs and the extremes of these start of session moves line right up with the assertion that “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World” (97). Third, the moves create productive situations no matter what the dice say. States of want create obvious and interesting pressures that can be brought in by the MC as desired. An example in the hocus playbook is “Your followers aren’t really yours, more like you’re theirs. Want: judgment” (52). Yeah, in times of want, your followers are going to hold you responsible. Other tags listed in the hocus playbook that come in to play during want are desertion, disease, desperation, and savagery. Any of these tags gives the MC license to create a whole swath of troublesome fiction to give the narrative a jolt. States of surplus can similarly offer trouble, such as “Your followers disdain law, peace, reason and society. Surplus +violence.” Depending on what the player picks, they can get struck by either the left or right hand of fortune. When surplus doesn’t offer a problem, however, the narrative is still propelled forward by the opportunity it offers instead, such as the hocus’s insight or augury. The surplus will probably not last, so if a character is hoping to use her augury, then she needs to put her antenna to work now while she can. In this way, these moments of surplus are both exciting and pressuring in their own way, everything you want in a game of Apocalypse World. Finally, I love the choice of the words “want” and “surplus.” “Want” communicates in a single word the physical lack and the emotional/psychological need. The word “surplus,” on the other hand, with its Latinate root is more clinical, communicating the state of excess but without an emotional satiety. Prosperity, flush, bloat, plenty to spare, satiety, rolling in it—there are plenty of words and phrases that carry an emotional valence, none of which were chosen by the Bakers. “Want” lets you feel the hurt, but “surplus” offers no comfort. That rocks. We are moving into the Battle Moves chapter, and before we get to seize by force, let’s look briefly at the chapter’s introductory paragraphs:
These are moves that you or the players bring into play when the action of the game tips over into battle. A battle can be between any number of combatants, starting with one-on-one. Most of the battle moves presume that there are two sides, but when you have three or more, you should be able to think them through and apply them anyway. You can handle most battles quickly and decisively by using seize by force and its variations. Call on the other battle moves for large battles, or when you want to draw a battle out and play through it in tactical detail. Always remember that during a battle, all of the basic moves are still in play. Remind the players to read a situation, and let them act under fire, help and interfere with one another, and even go aggro if they manage to get the drop on somebody. I like the language in that first sentence: “when the action of the game tips over into battle.” The verb “tips” suggests that the default state of the game is such a charged state of interpersonal relationships that physical violence is just a nudge away from happening. Violence is not the usual occurrence, but it is always an option and a temptation. When play does tip over into physical violence, the game offers a “quick[] and decisive[e]” move to throw the players back onto that tightrope, so that battle can happen in the span of one move and quickly return to the state of building tension. To linger longer in battle is a choice the play group has to purposefully make. This choice is both a matter of pacing and taste, dials that the whole group decides to turn together. The final paragraph points out that even during battle, especially during extended battle, all the basic moves are still in play. What this means in game is that even when physical violence is the focus of the game, it doesn’t supplant the other ways of engaging with and understanding other characters and world, but coexists. As a side note, I really like the tone of the second paragraph and the work it does. That final clause, “you should be able to think them through and apply them anyway” is a simple assurance to the players that the way moves trigger and work is driven by common sense, so don’t worry, you can’t work this all out. Rather than filling pages with expansive explanations of how to make the battle moves apply to multiple combatants on multiple sides, this single sentence assures the reader that it will work and leaves it in their hands. It’s much better than wasting room in the rulebook and simultaneously better than not addressing the issue, which would leave the reader to think that the rules are incomplete. It’s a clever solution, and effective. I want to talk about the idea of failing forward as its used when people talk about Apocalypse World and why I think its misapplied.
Failing forward apparently entered public discourse in 2007 by John C. Maxwell in his book by the same title. Maxwell uses the phrase to outline ways that people can utilize their shortcomings and mistakes as a foundation for moving forward and achieving success rather than letting them function as impediments. When applied to RPGs, the phrase generally refers to mechanics that prevent failed dice rolls (or whatever randomizer the game uses) from stalling the progress of the characters and the narrative. Apocalypse World is designed to allow forward movement of the story no matter what a player rolls with her two d6’s and is thus said to let characters fail forward. I agree that AW propels the story forward no matter what result the dice show, but thinking of it as failing forward inaccurately describes how moves work and what they do to make misses as productive as hits. RPGs with randomized resolution mechanics are generally structured to have some form of freeplay that takes the players to a point of uncertainty that the rules then let the dice resolve. This feature has its roots of course in RPG’s wargaming past. My army wants to fire upon your army, so we consult the rules, take the necessary factors into consideration, arrive at an appropriate probability of success, and throw the dice to see if my soldiers are having a good day. In early versions of D&D, the same type of questions were resolved in the same type of way. Do I hit? Can I find the secret door? Can I detect the trap? Safely disarm the trap? Detect the approaching wandering monster? Make the jump? In these games of strategy and accomplishment, these questions of success or failure are the key dramatic questions. Everything important to the play and experience we are sharing hinges upon that question of whether I succeed or fail. As RPGs have evolved, the centrality of success and failure has held fast. Even in games that want to focus on narrative and story, the assumption is that the dramatic question the dice should answer is that of success and failure remains. For example, Hero Wars, Robin Laws’s take on Glorantha published in 2000, has all kinds of rules and features that work to make gameplay resemble cinematic and adventure narratives, but for all the ingenuity of design, the point that the fiction stops and the dice come out is when a character has attempted to do something and we need to know if they succeed in their action or not. The core mechanic of the game is a d20 roll against a skill, trait, or quality that the character has. Rather than the roll resulting in a simple success or failure, Laws created a range of 8 possible results from from “complete success” to “complete failure,” moving through major, minor, and marginal levels at each end of the spectrum. It’s a neat feature, but even with this expanded set of possibilities, the dice still only tell us if an action is successful or not. The limitation of the success/failure binary is not that it halts forward motion (though it certainly can if not carefully managed) but that it becomes an uninteresting question (or at least a less interesting question) when the heart of the matter isn’t a question of winning, as in the matter of a wargame, or survival, as in the matter of a dungeon crawl, for example. For me, this is made no place more plain than in the examples throughout the Hero Wars text. Here’s a taste: Haral (Carpentry 5W) is commissioned to build a chest. Natural resistance is 14 (in this case representing the suitability of the wood, complexity of the task, etc.) (121) Checking to see who wakes up first is a simple ability test based on Light Sleeper, Nervous, or similar abilities. (126) Testing to see if your hero knows the name of the king of a far-away land is an ability test using Foreign Knowledge or Well Traveled, but probably will suffer a penalty for the distance between the hero’s land and the foreign kingdom (126) All three of these examples create a question where there is no guarantee of dramatic tension. Building a chest? Waking up first on the basis that you’re a light sleeper? Do you know the name of a king? Each of these could possibly serve as an important question in the game, but they are just as likely to be mere moments that dice are rolled and success or failure is achieved without impacting play itself. The problem isn’t that failing to make the chest stops Haral from doing something, it’s that that isn’t a very interesting question. We want to know what happens once the chest is built; does it please the noble woman for whom he built it, and does she grant him a favor? Once the characters are awake, what happens? What does the character do with the name of the king? The questions that follow the answers are where the dramatic tension lies, not in the answering of the questions. But when characters are structured around abilities and rolls are centered around success and failure in putting those abilities into practice, the game naturally creates these points of question and answer that are ho-hum. The focus on success and failure also leads the game’s rules to care about the likelihood of success and failure, creating all kinds of bonuses and penalties to the roll that add to the math of the moment but not the drama or importance. Rollo is in Prax, attempting to ride a bison. Kathy assigns a [minus] 5 penalty on his Ride ability, since he normally rides a horse. (123) Rollo is climbing a tree with plenty of handholds. Kathy gives him a +4 bonus. (123) Riding bisons and climbing trees are cool, but do you really want to roll to see if your character can climb a tree? Is that the best dramatic question your game can answer? Does the addition of bonuses and penalties make the players lean over the table to see the dice result? Rollo is sneaking over the wall into town late one night. The wall is rated at 20 resistance: While it is tall, it has numerous rough handholds. Rollo’s player declares that he is using Rollo’s Climb Walls ability (by now a respectable 15W), Rollo’s player throws a 14, a success, which is bumped up by his mastery to a critical success. Kathy rolls for the wall; a 12 – a success. Comparing Rollo’s critical success to the wall’s success, we see that Rollo wins a minor victory, easily climbing the wall. (128) Rollo tries to sweet-talk his way into the heart (or at least the arms) of a pretty girl. His Fast Talk is 12W; her Chaste is 16W. . . . They both roll and both fail. Rollo’s roll of 15 is lower than her 19, so his line is good enough to interest her, though not totally (121) These scenarios are the natural offshoot of basing a game’s dramatic question on the issue of success and failure. Rollo’s scaling the wall into town takes up a huge chunk of play (and math!), all to find out that he “easily climb[s] the wall.” Let Rollo climb that wall easily anyway, because the exciting shit is what happens after he gets over that wall. If he fails the roll, then the exciting moment isn’t heightened, just pointlessly delayed. Similarly, we care more about the interplay between Rollo and his love interest than the math of his sweet-talking. The roll will help the GM and the player figure out how to play the scene somewhat, but the dice delay the exciting moment, not improve it. These examples and their question of success or failure can, of course, impact the story significantly, but it’s not reliably the case. And these examples are from a game that openly cares more about cinematic storytelling than other more traditional RPGs. Moreover, when a game focuses on “story” rather than a mere sequence of events, like a classic dungeon crawl, the issue of failure becomes stickier, because failure could derail the story. We see this often in investigative RPGs, but the problem is certainly not limited to those kinds of games. Letting the dice decide success and failure (and only success and failure) means that sooner or later the rules will back everyone into a corner. The two major workarounds to this problem are the automatic success and bennies. The first lets the GM declare that the players don’t need to roll at this moment (even if they’ve rolled for similar moments), and the latter lets the player ignore, modify, or replace the die roll to ensure success when failure will seize up the game. Both solutions are designed to undercut the dice rather than support them. Now, back to Apocalypse World. When people use “failing forward” to describe how a 6- result works in AW, or “success with a complication” to describe the 7-9 result, we are seeing the prominence of the success/failure binary in the minds of roleplayers. The dramatic question posed by a move in Apocalypse World is not about success or failure. In all the barter moves, for example, (see posts 136-138), your character is going to get what she seeks. The dice don’t decide success or failure; they decide how much you have to offer, risk, or endure to get what you seek. That’s the dramatic question posed by the move and resolved by the dice, and it is what makes us lean over the table to see what the dice say, knowing that whatever the answer, it’s going to be exciting and rewarding. We saw this in our discussion of going aggro, that the dice do not determine if you hit or not, but how ignorable you are to the target of the move. Reading a sitch will let you ask one question no matter what you roll. The question is how observant are you and how much will you learn. Moves are narrative pivot points, those moments of dramatic action that can send the narrative spinning off in a number of structured directions. The designers decide what these pivotal moments are when they create the triggers for the moves. They decide what directions the narrative can go when they create the results of the move. It’s then up the MC to take that general direction and turn it into specific fiction that carries the story forward. Apocalypse World doesn’t need or want rules for “automatic successes” because the trigger for the move is the trigger for the move: if you do it, you do it. There is no way to side-step a dramatic moment if your character does what the game considers a dramatic thing. Nor does the game want or need bennies because the move is going to take you some place exciting no matter what you roll. In a 2008 post on anyway called “Rules Vs. Vigorous Creative Agreement,” Vincent says: “As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. . . . No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/360) Yeah, that’s what moves in Apocalypse World give you. You have to abide by the roll of the dice and make your moves as players and MCs when the rules tell you to. And to make you abide by the roll, the game has to make it rewarding and fun to abide by them, which is what moves are designed to do. Of course, the solution that moves provide are not for every game. Apocalypse World uses moves to create a chain of charged situations to keep things moving and evolving without requiring the MC to plan out anything on a grand scale; in fact, the game’s rules mandate that the MC not plan out anything because the moves will make those decisions for her. AW wants narrative pivot points built into the moves of the game. In classic D&D, pivot points are built into the dungeon itself, since each room or encounter provides a situation to which the characters react. In such a game, success and failure are the exact thing that the dice need to decide to make that game exciting. In Hero Wars, as becomes clear when you read the published campaign material, the pivot points are supplied by the metaplot of the narrative, and in turn the GM, who has to translate the successes and failures of rolls into narrative thrust and to provide fresh pressure on the characters. So, it’s not failing forward, and it’s not success with a complication, that happens during a move, because moves don’t ask if an action is a success or a failure; it asks what can happen within the narrative when a character takes such an action. Moves, more than any other innovation in RPGs that I can think of, break the primacy of success and failure as the central question addressed by dice when a character takes action. But of course, I have a limited understanding, so if you can think of other mechanics and other games that create interesting questions for the dice to answer, I’d love to hear about them. At the beginning of any session, or at the end if you forgot, anyone can say, “hey, let’s change highlighted stats.” Any player, and you can feel free to say it too as MC. When someone says it, do it. Go around the circle again, following the same procedure you used to highlight them in the first place: the high-Hx player highlights one stat, and you as MC highlight another (163).
Like the session end move, this move is a rule of play rather than something triggered by the fiction. There’s something so clean about presenting rules of play in the same format as the fiction-driven moves that I find exceedingly satisfying. They have triggers, when-then structures, procedures to follow, and they read like any other move. It’s a brilliant way to give weight to a procedure, a way of saying this rule is as important as any other move in this section. This is not a suggestion for play, but a rule to follow, one that’s important to the proper functioning of the game. Of course, this particular rule is categorized with the peripheral moves, which means that you can bring it in or not as you remember it and enjoy it. You can hear that lax presentation in the rule itself with the casualness of the phrases “or at the end if you forgot” and “feel free.” The hard and fast part of the rule is that when someone remembers it and suggests it, “do it” – there is no hemming or hawing in that part of the move. When you’re highlighting stats, highlight one that you genuinely think will be interesting – and you can tell the players this, it goes for them too. If the character never rolls, or can’t roll, a stat, it’s obviously not going to be interesting to highlight it, so don’t. That first sentence is super important to the way highlighting stats is designed to work. Remember, highlighted stats are inspired by fan mail in Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures; they are there as a tool for everyone to be a fan of everyone else’s character, a means of telling another player, I really dig seeing your character act like this. It needs to be genuinely interesting to you to have meaning. I see a lot of people talk about not highlighting bad stats because it’s not fun for the player to have to lean into a bad stat, but that shouldn’t be your motivation, as is made clear by this passage. Don’t highlight a bad stat if it’s one the character never uses because nothing interesting will come of it. This is why, in the final paragraph of this section, the Bakers talk about open discussion and negotiation during stat highlighting: As a group, you can negotiate highlighted stats as explicitly as you like. “Hey, would somebody highlight my cool? I’m sick of having my hot highlighted when I’m not into anybody that way.” “Oh, yeah, sure thing. And I think we’re about to get serious with Dremmer, so MC, would you mind highlighting my hard?” “Nah, but I’ll highlight your cool. I think you’ll get to roll it just as much.” Just because highlighting is a way of signaling what you want to see doesn’t mean that those desires can’t be explicitly stated as well. The designers don’t want you to be coy with each other; they want you talking to each other, and the rules around highlighting stats is designed to get you doing just that. I think it is precisely because this rule is important to communication between players that it gets written up as a move rather than shuffled into the text where an inattentive reader could easily miss it. This is something that should be a part of every game. Of course, if your game is humming right along and everyone is in the zone, then you might forget the move, and there’s no problem with that because the purpose of the move is already being met. But when the game falters, and you’re irritated that your hot is highlighted when you want to be going aggro and seizing shit by force, then the move is there to help you have the conversation you need to have with your fellow players. That is some sharp and considerate design. The last thing I want to focus on here is Vincent’s (at least, I’m assuming the “I” in this passage is Vincent, so Meg, forgive me (and correct me) if I’m wrong) “personal rule” for “highlighting stats so that they can shine”: “unless I have a specific reason to highlight a specific stat, I highlight sharp, weird, or their best stat.” Picking the best stat makes a ton of sense because presumably that is the stat that the player most wants to be using anyway. Highlighting sharp and weird lines up with other comments in the text, such as “It’s fine to give her what she wants, much of the time – after all, you want everybody to be opening their brains, you don’t want to chase them away from it” (148). Hot and hard both give characters a way to proactively engage the world around them, but sharp is how characters understand the state of that world around them and how to purposefully and effectively engage with it. Reading situations and persons create all kinds of textures and details in the fiction against which characters can play. The more players have their characters trigger those moves, the more information the table has to know what is happening and what is at stake. At any time, then, and especially when the situation is uncertain, play is sharpened by characters reading the world around them, so when you aren’t interested in seeing a character do anything in particular, highlighting their sharp is a great way to make sure interesting things are happening and being discussed. Opening your brain works in a similar way, dealing with the matters of the maelstrom rather than the physical world. In a game that is fueled by the desires and actions of the main characters, encouraging the characters to analyze and take in the world (and its psychic maelstrom) around them is central to driving play forward. It is technically possible to play a series of Apocalypse World sessions without any reference to the world’s psychic maelstrom. If you’re inspired by the Mad Max movies or any number of the books and films listed in the “Immediate Media Influences” on pages 291-292, you might not even give the world’s psychic maelstrom much thought heading into the game. For you, it’s about hard times in a hard world where brutal characters have to make the best of a shitty situation. If no one plays the brainer, or the hocus, or the savvyhead, and no one opens their brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, your game can conceivably go from start to finish without ever accessing the weird and wonderful maelstrom.
But I’ve never heard of that happening. Have you? What I’m interested in today is how the game ensures that the world’s psychic maelstrom is a part of the game without ever making it a requirement. In a lot of ways, the thrill of the world’s psychic maelstrom is discovered through play unlike any other element of the game. We know what violence is going to look like in the game. We know what hotness and seduction are going to look like in the game. The range of possible acts of violence and social interactions are naturally limited, which is why the moves involving them can have a few reliable picklists and fail to create appropriate and rewarding fiction only rarely. Augury (162-163), on the other hand, has to outline five different ways a character might interact with the world’s psychic maelstrom and four variables of how that interaction could play out. Opening your brain can’t even create a pick list because the move has no real limits but the players’ imaginations. You ask a question and get asked questions, and that’s about as close to nailing things down as the game can get (or rather wants to get). It’s the same on the MC’s side of the game. There are 7 kinds of threats, and they all lead to potential violence or social interactions. The designers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even create a generic threat type for the world’s psychic maelstrom, asking the MC instead to think about “what kind of threat is the world’s psychic maelstrom” (107). But for all the vagueness surrounding the world’s psychic maelstrom in the rules of the game, the text itself – both for the MC and the players – is constantly reminding you what the world’s psychic maelstrom is there. The back of the book, the two-paragraph introduction at the front of the book, the “Why to Play” section, the character creation chapter—they all put the world’s psychic maelstrom front and center in their description of what Apocalypse World is. Another way to make sure the world’s psychic maelstrom naturally comes up in play is to make sure that the playbooks bring it with them. The three characters who naturally have weird+2 are very different in nature, increasing the possibility that someone will play one. There’s a huge gap between the brainer and the savvyhead in both flavor and playstyle, not I think coincidentally. And even if none of those three playbooks is chosen, there are weird-based moves on the angel’s playbook (healing touch and touched by death), the skinner’s playbook (lost), and the battlebabe’s playbook (visions of death). So six of the playbooks draw your attention to the world’s psychic maelstrom and invite you to choose moves that call upon it. Moreover, because the way the playbooks are chosen from a pile at the start of play, even when players don’t choose any of the playbooks that have weird moves or that have a weird+2 stat option, those players have seen the playbooks that do and are made aware of the existence of the world’s psychic maelstrom. No matter what playbooks the players choose, the MC is encouraged to have the world’s psychic maelstrom intrude upon the characters’ actions. In addition to all the ways that the book naturally gets you thinking about the maelstrom as an MC (e.g. examples, threats, etc.), the game makes weirdness one of only three ways to effectively interact with Apocalypse World. There are five basic stats. Cool is almost entirely reactive, responding to the fire of the world. Sharp is all about perceiving and assessing what is going on. So when characters take action to shape the world around them, they are relying on hard, hot, and weird. Hard is the road of physical violence, and hot is the road of social manipulation. Imagine if these were the only two options available to characters in Apocalypse World? Weird gives the characters a third and critical axis to interact with the world. And of course, it is a third and critical axis available to the MC to apply pressure to the characters. In a thread on the Barf Forth Apocalyptica forum, Vincent talks about the trap that the hardholder presents to players who believe that the apocalypse can be fixed by an individual with a plan, a bunch of guns, and an iron rule. Here’s what Vincent says about why that’s a trap: “Then in play, for the hardholder to actually make her hierarchy function on her own strength, (a) she has to roll 10+ on every single wealth roll, AND (b) the MC has to present no threats that violence can't solve, AND (c) the MC has to offer no opportunities that violence can't seize. As soon as there's a threat or an opportunity that hot or weird is better for than hard and sharp, the hardholder's relying on the anti-hierarchy - the skinner, the brainer, the hocus, the savvyhead - for help” (see reply #9 at http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=5823). The MC has to present no threats that violence can’t solve and no opportunities that violence can’t seize. The three prongs of the game – hardness, hotness, and weirdness – give the MC enough angles to always apply pressure and dangle opportunities to propel play in difficult and enervating directions. So even if no players choose playbooks that embrace the weird, the MC is encouraged to exploit the weakness naturally present in the characters. My point is that you cannot separate the world’s psychic maelstrom from a game of Apocalypse World any more than you can remove violence or social interactions. But unlike violence and social interactions, the expression of the world’s psychic maelstrom and what it reveals will always surprise you. Opening your brain takes both the MC and the players into unexpected and unforeseeable territory. Augury will likely “call for you to make snap decisions about the workings of the world’s psychic maelstrom,” and the game encourages you to embrace that: “Do” (162). The text to augury calls the move “big exuberant fun,” just as the text to open your brain tells you that “you want everybody to be opening their brains” (148). Neither move pressures you to use it; they both want to entice you instead. Why do that? Why have the world’s psychic maelstrom be something the players discover in play, knowing that once they begin the process of discovery the more they will lean into it? It seems to me that that’s part of the point of play. No, not just part of—it may be the main point of play. You learn about who the characters are by the choices they make to individual pressures, but you learn about the world and the apocalypse and the themes of your own game through the choices you make as players about the world’s psychic maelstrom. In that same thread on Barf Forth Apocalyptica, Vincent says something else worth quoting: “In the first ever playtest, after a few sessions the players asked me when the Apocalypse had come. Like, 10 years from now, in (then) 2018? 20 years from now in 2028? I said that nah, I figured it had been Reagan-Bush” (see the footnote to reply #5 in the same link above). The apocalypse of Apocalypse World was never really about the physical dissolution of society, but about the moral and spiritual dissolution that came with trickle-down economics, the repeal of regulations that insured people’s safety, the growth of our private prison system, and the insistence that ketchup could be considered a vegetable. And that dissolution doesn’t play out primarily in the physical violence and manipulative social interactions of Apocalypse World. That’s what’s howling away in the world’s psychic maelstrom. As Vincent and Meguey write on the back copy of the book: “the world’s psycic maelstrom, the terrible desperation and hate pressing in at the edge of all perception, it is the world now.” By default, nobody has access to augury, but a hocus’ followers, a savvyhead’s workspace, or other circumstances might give it.
When you are able to use something for augury, roll+weird. On a hit, you can choose 1: • Reach through the world’s psychic maelstrom to something or someone connected to it. • Isolate and protect a person or thing from the world’s psychic maelstrom. • Isolate and contain a fragment of the world’s psychic maelstrom itself. • Insert information into the world’s psychic maelstrom. • Open a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. By default, the effect will last only as long as you maintain it, will reach only shallowly into the world’s psychic maelstrom as it is local to you, and will bleed instability. On a 10+, choose 2; on a 7–9, choose 1: • It’ll persist (for a while) without your actively maintaining it. • It reaches deep into the world’s psychic maelstrom. • It reaches broadly throughout the world’s psychic maelstrom. • It’s stable and contained, no bleeding. On a miss, whatever bad happens, your antenna takes the brunt of it. You know what’s strange about this move? Its name. In ancient Rome, augurs were the dudes who interpreted the flight patterns of birds to divine the will of the gods. We commonly use the word augury to mean the act of reading physical signs and omens to predict what will happen. Now look at that list of things you can choose from on a hit. None of them have anything to do with reading signs or omens, and they certainly don’t have any predictive powers. The choice that most closely resembles this traditional meaning is to “open a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom.” Presumably you then would get to see the omens and signs within the world’s psychic maelstrom to then interpret. But the other four options are ways to interact with or control the world’s psychic maelstrom in some way--to pull something out of it, to put something into it, to protect something from it, or to reach something through it. So why use the word augury for this move? It’s a really interesting choice, and for some reason it feels like an important choice to me, even a revealing one. The Bakers are smart folks with impressive vocabularies and a poetic command of the language, so I have no doubt they could have found another word or phrase if they wanted. But no, they chose the word augury. The latinate root of augur is the verb augere, which means “to increase.” Nothing in the move seems to suggest that “increasing” is an important aspect of it, so the root is probably not what they were after. What I do think is important is that augury was performed solely by priests, people who bridged the gap between the desires of the gods and the actions of mortals. Similarly, all the acts of augury in this move bridge the space between the howling maelstrom and the mortal world. By using the word augury, the game signals that the augurs of Apocalypse World are priests and the world’s psychic maelstrom is something extra-human, perhaps a kind of primordial and spiritual paste made from the crushed and ground together parts of a pantheon of gods. There’s a whiff of the religious about the world’s psychic maelstrom, but not some Judeo-Christian religion. Augury points to Roman mythology, and what were the Roman gods but extensions of humanity, powerful beings with all the emotional turmoil and social drama that mortals possess? They are the most human-like of gods. The religious overtones of augury are nothing like those of Dogs in the Vineyard or Poison’d, but it’s there nonetheless. It’s a humanitarian and rather secular religion, but all the same it smells of souls and morality and life beyond this mortal coil. So if that’s the case, who are the priests of Apocalypse World? The hocuses, certainly, with their followers and their ability to perform augury if they have the right kinds of followers. Brainers are gifted with a high weird, but they don’t really act as any kind of go-between, do they? They use the world’s psychic maelstrom for their own ends. An angel with the touched by death move can use the body of a dead or unconscious character to perform augury. And then there are the savvyheads of Apocalypse World. Other than brainers and hocuses, savvyhead is the only basic playbook that insists that each character has weird+2. What the hocus can do with her followers, and the Angel can do with an unconscious body, the savvyhead can do with machinery. I like the idea of the savvyhead being a kind of priest without a flock communing with people through the things they create rather than with them directly. Following this line of thought there’s an interesting analysis to be made about the relationship between humans and machinery in Apocalypse World. As a side note, the only other basic playbook that even has the option to start with a weird+2 is the gunlugger. Why the gunlugger? What does that say about Apocalypse World? And is it significant that to gain a high weird the gunlugger must give up their cool? By default, nobody has access to insight, but a hocus’ followers or other circumstances might give it.
When you are able to go to someone for insight, ask them what they think your best course is, and the MC will tell you. If you pursue that course, take +1 to any rolls you make in the pursuit. If you pursue that course but don’t accomplish your ends, you mark experience (161). This is a simple move, and one that will not occur often. As the passage says, no one can access the move by default. You can ask for insight from anyone you’d like, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to give it, but that advice will just be a lot of hot air. Unless you create a custom move or custom circumstances, this move is only available to the hocus and even then it’s only available if the player chooses followers who “are rigorous and argumentative.” And even if you have a hocus who has rigorous and argumentative followers, she only gets access to the move if her fortune roll gives her a surplus. That’s pretty fucking peripheral. So why include it? Why take up the space in the rulebook for a move that will occur in only this rare circumstance? First, I think, it’s a great way to characterize the Hocus’s followers. There’s a lot of variety packed into the choices available to the Hocus player. Always there is a give and take between the Hocus and her followers; sometimes she has to come to them, and sometimes they come to her; sometimes she has something for them, and sometimes they have something for her. With insight, the Hocus comes to her followers for advice and wisdom, which makes them sound more like advisors or counselors than followers (which goes along well with the characterizations of “your family,” “your staff,” and “your court”). This move allows that fictional relationship to have mechanical presence in the game. More importantly, that mechanical presence has teeth so that the advice the followers give has meaning in the game. Just as Reading a Sitch makes what the MC says true by giving you +1forward, so this move gives you +1ongoing in pursuit of the followers’ recommended course. Here of course is the added bonus that if your followers have led you astray, you get to mark XP, so no matter what the outcome, you gain something. Second, the move models the way that typically non-gamish events can have mechanical significance. Ten years out from its own publishing and a hundred published games inspired by it later, it seems silly to talk about the moves of Apocalypse World modelling what moves can do, but there is a wide variety of moves as Vincent and Meguey explored the ins and outs and each individual element of moves’ structures. In insight, we see that something as simple as seeking advice can have mechanical juice and a way of ensuring that what the MC tells you is most likely true. Functionally, the move is a way for the player to ask the MC for direction. The move is written specifically to answer the question “what is my best course of action.” If you ask for insight into something about which you cannot take concrete action, the move will technically trigger I suppose, but you’ll have nothing to put +1 towards. So you need to ask about something actionable, and the MC has to give you an action to take. The MC is directed specifically to draw the advice from their threat map and other prep: Unless there’s a good reason for the followers to be in the dark, you should use your behind-the-scenes knowledge to give good advice. If the player has enough on her plate, she might have her character go to her followers to get a +1 on her actions in pursuit of her already existing goals, but if the story has slowed down, the move is an opportunity for the MC to point to movement on the threat map and potentially launch another set of character-driven events. In either case, the move is a moment that the player and the MC can come together and direct the drama without ever stepping outside of the fiction. We see this in action in the section’s example: Dust the hocus makes it her habit to consult with her insightful cult early in every session. This time, I quickly skim my threat map and tell her that her cult’s pretty concerned about Jackabacka’s interest in her water. They think she should make an effort to secure it. Imagine that conversation without the move. Dust’s player says to the MC, “I don’t know where Dust should focus her energy now. Is there something you think she can do that would be good for the story?” “What if she starts shoring up her defenses around her water because Jackabacka’s going to launch an attack?” “Oh cool! Let’s do that!” As it is, without ever breaking the fiction, the MC has told Dust’s player that Jackabacka is going to make a move on Dust’s water supply and that if she doesn’t secure it there will be trouble. Of course, thanks to the other rules and mechanics, even if she does secure it, there is likely to be trouble; she’ll just be in a better position to defend it when trouble comes. And moreover whatever it takes to “secure” the water is likely to be troublesome itself. In this way, the move adds something extra to the fun, yeah? Without this move, Jackabacka would very likely have made a move on the water and the ensuing struggle would hopefully be fun; but with the move, there is not only Jackabacka’s attack, but the anticipation of the attack and the struggle to secure the water before the attack in addition to the attack itself. Insight is a peripheral move because the game functions perfectly well without it, but some players might like the way it affects play. Those players have the option of playing the hocus and making their followers rigorous and argumentative. If players want to be the ones to give meaningful insight, they can play the savvyhead and choose the oftener right move. If the MC wants to see more insight in her game, well, that’s what custom moves are for. The MC can create those “other circumstances” that “might give it.” When you make known that you want a thing and drop jingle to speed it on its way, roll+barter spent (max roll+3). It has to be a thing you could legitimately get this way. On a 10+ it comes to you, no strings attached. On a 7–9 it comes to you, or something pretty close. On a miss, it comes to you, but with strings very much attached.
As MC, you’re the judge of what’s legitimately available this way. “Strings very much attached,” of course, is just another way to say that you can make as hard and direct a move as you like (161). I like this move as a companion piece to the marketplace move since they both arrive at the same end via different paths. As with the marketplace move, this move will always end with the character getting what they sought. The fact is, the answer to whether you can get a thing or not is necessarily a dull answer, and to spend a dice roll to figure that out is a waste. Either the item can be got or it can’t, and the MC can determine that. If it can, why not give it? A more interesting question, and the one that the marketplace move asks, is what are you willing to do and what risks are you willing to take to get the thing. This move asks a different interesting question, which is what complications might arise from the getting of the thing? The answers to both questions are naturally interesting because they offer to shape the narrative in unexpected directions. This move allows the player to control the likelihood of whether the item will come with strings attached by letting them roll+barter. This is also a clever way to demonstrate that moves with rolls don’t always have to depend upon a stat, and it shows how well thought-out the barter rules are in the game. The move caps the amount of barter you can spend at 3, because no bonus in the game can exceed +3 without unacceptably reducing the possibility of a miss. But nothing about that decision feels arbitrary when applied to barter because the game has already established that 3-barter is an exorbitant amount of jingle. I don’t know if this move is the reason that barter scales the way it does, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it is. To me, the 7-9 result of this move is tricky ground for the MC. What’s the difference between “it comes to you, no strings attached” and “it comes to you”? There’s no middle ground between strings attached and no strings attached. The “or something pretty close” suggests that you can offer a less-than-ideal substitute, but of course it still needs to be close enough to be a hit, so there’s not much room to fuck with the result. The difference between the weak and strong hits seem to be tonal, more than substantive, which makes it a tricky distinction. It would be nice if the accompanying example delineated this distinction, but it focuses instead on the miss: Audrey needs gasoline and lets everybody know. She spends 1-barter to speed it on its way, but misses the roll. I tell her that Joe’s Girl delivers a canful. “She’s happy to donate it to the cause! She just expects you to bring Fleece back with you.” This is a great example that puts a lot of punch into a short passage. The fiction surrounding the move is quick and light, but the impact is meaningful. “She expects you to bring Fleece back” is indeed an MC move, offering an opportunity with a cost. And just like that, the characters have a complication and obligation for the narrative ahead. I love the simplicity and elegance of that effect. The “expects” in the MC’s statement makes the move feel harder than it otherwise would because it is clear that there will be consequences if Joe’s Girl’s expectations aren’t met. Perhaps one way to think of the results is that on a strong hit, the character gets what they want and the MC doesn’t make an impactful move. On a weak hit, the character gets what they want and the MC makes a softer move, perhaps announcing some distant future badness. And on a miss, the character gets what they want and the MC makes as hard a move as they want. Taken together, the three barter moves define the relationship between jingle and the goods and services they can get you. Jingle is powerful stuff, and the recurring theme in these moves is that if you drop the barter, you will get what you want. Period. But getting what you want doesn’t mean getting it the way you want it. As the MC principle says, respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards. These moves set you up to do just that. When you go into a holding’s bustling market, looking for some particular thing to buy, and it’s not obvious whether you should be able to just go buy one like that, roll+sharp. On a 10+, yes, you can just go buy it like that. On a 7–9, the MC chooses 1:
• It costs 1-barter more than you’d expect • It’s not openly for sale, but you find someone who can lead you to someone selling it. • It’s not openly for sale, but you find someone who sold it recently, who may be willing to introduce you to their previous buyer. • It’s not available for sale, but you find something similar. Will it do? On a miss, the MC chooses 1, plus it costs 1-barter more. When it’s obvious whether the character can just go buy the thing, it might be obvious that she can, or obvious that she can’t. “Obvious” is for you to decide, but do remember that your agenda is to make Apocalypse World seem real and to make the characters’ lives interesting, not to arbitrarily deny them things they want or would find useful (160). On the casual once-over, this looks like a move that helps the MC decide whether the player characters can find something that they want at the local market. Can you find that? I don’t know; roll the dice and see. But that’s not what this move is about at all. Even on a miss, the MC chooses one from the list, so once the player throws the dice it’s a foregone conclusion that their character can find what they are seeking. The real question this move asks is “whether you should be able to just go buy one like that.” Like all the moves in Apocalypse World, you need to be sure you’re trying to answer the right question before you go to the dice. If your question is whether the player characters should be able to find such a thing at all, then the game tells you to fall back on your agenda: “make Apocalypse World seem real and . . . make the characters’ lives interesting.” If finding the sought-after item would break with the reality of the world you’ve created, then say no. The make-their-lives-interesting agenda item is the tricky one; that’s why the authors warn us that it is not our job “to arbitrarily deny them things they want or would find useful.” If the item solves all their problems and puts the world to rights in one go, then yeah, that makes everyone’s life much less interesting. Short of that (and just about everything is short of that), don’t worry about the item being useful; the game, and this move in particular, have got you covered. The beautiful part of this move is the set of choices. First, we’ve all seen movies and TV shows that have employed each one of these narrative devices. The item will cost more than you hoped (or have); how badly do you want it? This guy knows a guy, so follow him; is it worth the risk? I just sold my last one, so you can go talk to this guy about reselling it to you; do you want it badly enough to face that uncertainty? Nope, but I’ve got this thing here; can you make it work? Each one of those options pose great questions to the characters, and their answers are naturally interesting and revealing, Second, the choices together act as a set of dials that gives the MC control over how the market visit develops the narrative. There is a reason that the game gives that choice to the MC and not the player making the roll. Take the option that it costs 1-barter more than you’d expect, for example. If you know the character has the barter to spend, this could be a way to quickly get the item in the character’s hands and move on with the narrative. Perhaps barter is a hard thing to come by in your Apocalypse World and the characters are consistently fighting against poverty. Then selecting this option becomes a way to push that theme and see what the character will do for that extra jingle – beg, borrow, or steal. The option that the item is not available but something similar is is a way to throw an interesting curve ball to see how the characters work around the interesting strengths and weaknesses of the replacement. If you are looking for something interesting and potentially explosive right now, you can select the option that someone can take them to someone selling it. That little quest could eat up a whole session and take the story in all kinds of interesting directions. Every option can be as big and consequential as you like, or as small and inconsequential as you prefer, which is ever a blessing to the MC . Like the gig moves, this barter move can give you the gas your game needs or it can trigger and resolve without much disruption if that’s what you’re looking for. Moves like this are what makes the game feel so versatile and full of endless potential in play. Here’s the example for the move: Keeler, in escaping from a raid turned bad, left III’s night vision goggles behind, and feels like she ought to replace them. She goes looking in Barbecue’s bustling market. She hits the roll with an 8. I decide that sure, one of the barge people has night vision goggles on offer, but that they’re going to cost +1barter. Night vision goggles are both valuable and hi-tech, so let’s say that they’re worth 3-barter normally. Does Keeler have 4-barter to spend on them? All we get here is the question, not the answer, so we don’t get to glimpse all the possible ramifications of this move. Keeler might say, Fuck it, I’ll deal with III’s wrath instead. She might have the money but spending it will hurt, prompting her to get a gig or plan another raid. She might not have the funds but not want to return empty handed, so she has to either get money or take it from the barge person without paying. Anything can happen from here, and the MC will be aware of the pressures she’s applying and excited to see what Keeler’s response is, which is the whole thrill of MCing Apocalypse World. Oh, and don’t forget that the trick to making a 10+ meaningful is to make it consequential. Even if the characters stroll into the market, find what they want at a great price, and march off, that action creates ripples in the fictional world. Perhaps the item they bought was stolen and the original owner is looking for it. Perhaps someone else is looking for the same thing and arrives just after the PCs and wants to buy it off them and doesn’t want to take no for an answer. Perhaps the seller is an informant and will report on the PCs activities. Send those ripples out and play to find out what happens. By default, characters have access to the barter moves, but you can limit or ignore them if you think they might not suit your Apocalypse World (160).
Since Apocalypse World is designed to let the players create the details of their own setting, the designers have to choose what aspects of the game they will insist upon and which are up for grabs. Barter is one of those things that the game anticipates you’ll want rules for but doesn’t insist upon them. As we saw in the lifestyle move (pg. 151), the game leaves the matter of the economics of your particular Apocalypse World entirely up to you, so use what you want here, ignore what you don’t, and create your own as needed. Of course, even if you don’t use the moves, they are suggestive about the general or default nature of the Apocalypse World created by the game. When you give 1-barter to someone, but with strings attached, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required. Example: Marie needs Dremmer to let Roark go without a fight. She offers to buy Roark from him for 1-barter. Naturally, he’ll make the deal (160). This move always surprises me with the strength of its conviction! It says a lot about the importance of jingle in Apocalypse World. When you hit with a 10+ while manipulating someone, “they’ll go along with you.” So, essentially, when 1-barter is the leverage applied to manipulate someone, they don’t say no. Jingle is a leverage that, in Apocalypse World, is fail-safe, no need to roll. In fact, when 1-barter is the leverage, your hot doesn’t even enter into it. No matter how hot you are, your jingle is much hotter, always rolling a 10+. By default, this is an aggressively capitalist world, no matter what particular form the currency takes. I love the move as commentary. But. Other than making a statement about the economy (ours and the post-apocalypse’s), I don’t see the immediate point of the move. The particulars of the move are covered by seduce and manipulate, since the reason you give can always be 1-barter. So why make that be an automatic 10+? Why give a way to sidestep drama and complications? If the MC and players want to create such a workaround, that seems easy enough to do without the aid of this move. And why fix the price to 1-barter? Why not say something like, “When you want to buy your way around a problem, ask the MC how much barter it will cost and who you have to pay; if you pay the price, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required”? As it is written, it seems to suggest anything can be got for 1-barter, which we know is not the case. Hell, the night vision goggles in the next move’s example cost 3-barter. So, in the example given for this move, does the MC have the ability to say, no, Dremmer won’t go for that, or no, Dremmer wants 2-barter ‘cause he can see how badly you want Roark? It’s unclear to me. Is it intended to fight an MC’s impulse to “arbitrarily deny them things they want or would find useful” (quote taken from later on that same page)? The other barter moves are about trying to locate a thing your character wants and the price they are willing to pay to get it. Cool. This barter move, however, is for when you know who has the thing you want and you want a move to get it. What’s weird about that is that almost all the basic moves are designed to allow for a solution to that very problem. This guy’s got something I want; how do I get it from him? I can go aggro or seize it by force. I can try to manipulate or seduce him. I can read him and see if there’s something I can do to get it from him. This particular barter move is not only superfluous, but it runs the risk of short circuiting the narrative developments the other moves are designed to create. (I posed a couple of questions about this move to Vincent and Meguey earlier today on Twitter to see if I’m misunderstanding the move. If they respond, I’ll let you know what they say.) 135. Inflicting Harm On and Healing Another Player
When you inflict harm on another player’s character, the other character gets +1Hx with you (on their sheet) for every segment of harm you inflict. If this brings them to Hx+4, they reset to Hx+1 as usual, and therefore mark experience. When you heal another player’s character’s harm, you get +1Hx with them (on your sheet) for every segment of harm you heal. If this brings you to Hx+4, you reset to Hx+1 as usual, and therefore mark experience. You can remember these two moves like this: when you hurt someone, they see you more clearly: now they know what you’ll do to them. When you heal someone, you see them more clearly: there’s nobody so uniquely vulnerable and exposed as an injured person in your care (159) There is a sub-theme in Apocalypse World about how we act when others are vulnerable to us. We encounter it first and primarily in the unique special move that every character has, their sex move. In triggering the special move each character must make themselves vulnerable to another who is in turn made vulnerable to them, which is just how intimacy works. For most characters, sex adjusts the Hx between the characters to varying degrees as each character is either willing to open themselves to others or attentive to their lover when the lover opens themselves up to the character. (I discuss special moves in post no. 22, if you’re interested.) These harm and healing moves are directly related to the special moves, not because the game equates sex and violence – good lord, it does anything but that. They’re related because they are all concerned with how your character treats the vulnerabilities of others. If you take advantage of that vulnerability (or force vulnerability when it isn’t offered), you learn nothing about the person you violate, but they learn about you, and they learn in direct proportion to the harm you do them. If however, you use that vulnerability to care for and heal that person, you learn about them, and in direct proportion to the amount of healing you do. In light of these moves, you can see an intimate sexual encounter as an act of healing, even if it doesn’t touch the characters’ harm clocks. If the angel has an Hx=0 with a lover before the special move triggers, then the Angel understands that lover as well as if they healed that person 3 marks on their harm clock. When the gunlugger gets +1 to their Hx with their lover, they are as good as healed that one point in their very soul. It may only be a suggested equivalence, but it’s a beautiful one. By default, the harm & healing moves are in play. You can choose to forego them case by case, when you think that they’ll slow the action (158).
Each of the moves in the peripheral moves chapter is given a “default” status like this one. In this case, the game assumes you will play with these moves, usually, understanding that they can slow down the pacing and will sometimes be dropped in the interest of keeping things moving. I think it’s cool that the Baker’s recognize that there’s a natural tension in the suffer harm move between the development of interesting fiction and the fine tuning of the narratives pacing. We see this in every form of the narrative arts. Writers and filmmakers always have one eye on pacing, and they use descriptive detail to control the speed at which things move for the audience, slowing down with full details at this moment and speeding up by dispensing with details here. Of course RPGs, as narrative games, are subject to those same tensions. Sometimes skipping the harm move will be a purposeful decision by one player, and other times it will be an instinctive forgetfulness that makes the players simply mark their harm clock and jump to the next action. When you want to slow the action down or to have concrete details off which to bounce creatively in the cause-and-effect chain of play, the harm move is there for you. The first harm move is unusual in that a hit is bad for the player and a miss is good. If you find that your players have trouble with this quirk of the move, roll it yourself against them, no grief (158). I had somehow glossed over that second sentence in my earlier readings of the text. The reason that a hit is bad is because you are literally rolling against yourself, for the MC or whoever’s character is dealing the harm. I had not thought of it that way (in spite of it appearing clearly right there!). It’s even more obvious when you consider that the MC gets to make all the choices from the pick lists. So in every way, the move is made by the MC – so why have the player roll it? I suspect that it’s for two main reasons. First, it’s a stronger rule to say the MC never rolls the dice than it is to say the MC almost never rolls the dice, but they do in this one situation. Second, the MC’s position in the game is structured as a curious observer who is constantly pursuing what interests them as the story unfolds. To throw the dice for suffer harm makes the MC, however subtly, care about whether they roll high or low, and the game doesn’t want the MC caring about the roll, only interested in how the results affect the fiction. Picking from the pick list is merely a case of saying, “Ooh! It’d be cool if this happened!,” while rolling the dice puts you in a position of thinking, “Ooh! I hope this happens!” It’s a subtle distinction, but a mildly important one. I say mildly, because the text itself says that it is “no grief” if the MC rolls the move. It’s not ideal, but it certainly won’t break the game. And finally, we get to the move itself: When you suffer harm, roll+harm suffered (after armor, if you’re wearing any). On a 10+, the MC can choose 1: • You’re out of action: unconscious, trapped, incoherent or panicked. • It’s worse than it seemed. Take an additional 1-harm. • Choose 2 from the 7–9 list below. On a 7–9, the MC can choose 1: • You lose your footing. • You lose your grip on whatever you’re holding. • You lose track of someone or something you’re attending to. • You miss noticing something important. On a miss, the MC can nevertheless choose something from the 7–9 list above. If she does, though, it’s instead of some of the harm you’re suffering, so you take -1harm. On a miss, do often choose something from the 7-9 list, even though it gives the player the -1harm. Those effects on the character are usually more interesting than the mere mechanical harm. This is a great move. This is what keeps a battle or a one-sided attack from being a “mere mechanical” exchange of harm. We are all familiar with the I-swing-I-hit-I-do-X-damage-go phenomena that creeps into games whose combat is “mere[ly] mechanical.” But these lists do a lot more than just add color to taking harm. A lot of systems that attempt to get beyond mechanical combat do so by adding in (or rewarding players for adding it in themselves) color, detailing the way a character lunges into battle or screams when struck. That’s all cool, but it doesn’t affect the combat, just lays over it. The suffer harm move, on the other hand, changes the fictional landscape itself by shifting the character’s fictional positioning, which in turn limits or alters the character’s options going forward. At the extreme end, the character can be knocked unconscious, become trapped, or become cognitively impaired. Unconsciousness and being trapped are pretty clear, but what does it mean in play to be incoherent or panicked? Note that there is no mechanical element to becoming incoherent or panicked. How you play that is up to you. Is there any greater sign that the fiction has meaning in the game, that the fiction is the “basis of play, not an appendix to play” (see post no. 100 for that quote)? It’s possible that players will treat that like being stunned, that to take any action at all is to act under fire (pg 218 in the book), or it’s just as likely that the player will describe their character being incoherent or taking a panicked action. The game doesn’t need to mechanize it because it has prepared the players to make the fiction the foundation of play. Of course, since fictional positioning is what the game is all about, the move needs to give you ways to let a character keep their positioning if that’s what you as the MC want. In the case of a 10+, the game gives you the option to keep it purely mechanical by letting you deal an extra point of harm. In the 7-9 range, you can opt to have the character “miss noticing something important” or “lose track of someone or something you’re attending to.” These are great options to let the character keep their immediate position by losing something that will affect their position in the future, near or far. Even on a miss, the MC can either alter the character’s position or go for the merely mechanical damage. The example drives home that these options are important for the MC to pursue what interests them: Keeler’s fighting her way out of a situation that turned bad. At some point she takes a machete blow: 3-harm, minus 2-armor, for a sum of 1-harm. I have her roll the harm move, which, bad luck, she hits with an 11. I have no desire to put her out of the action, so: “it doesn’t seem too bad, but then you realize that blood is dripping steadily out of your jacket sleeve. Take 1 more harm” (159). The important sentence for our purposes here is “I have no desire to put her out of the action.” As we’ve seen, the MC has a lot of options. They could have chosen 2 from the 7-9 list if they thought that would complicate the fiction in a desirable way. While I like that we learn from this example what the MC says to communicate the idea that “it’s worse than it seemed,” it would be cool to have an example of what it would look like if Keeler missed noticing something important or lost track of something she was attending to. Choosing those two options would still allow Keeler to stay in the action, keep her feet and weapons, and still complicate her positioning in the scenes to come. I know I’m just being greedy – there are few texts that give more or better examples – but what can I say; I’m greedy. Together, the options available to the MC in this move make it a powerful tool to shape the fiction by having the suffering of harm affect the positioning of and options available to the characters. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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