100. Putting the A in PBTA

This is going to be a long one, so get yourself some refreshments.

One of the conversations surrounding Apocalypse World that I love is the continued attempt to nail down what is at the heart of Apocalypse World. If you are creating your own game and declare that it is “powered by the Apocalypse,” what does that mean? There are plenty of opinions, and I thought I’d use this, my hundredth post on the game, to offer my own definition.

In various interviews, Vincent and Meguey have made it clear that there is no "system" behind Apocalypse World that can be imported into other games to make them powered by the Apocalypse. Here's what they say in the first slide of the Metatopia presentation "Powered by the Apocalypse: Using Apocalypse World to Outline and Draft Your Own RPG": Apocalypse World offers a powerful, flexible framework you can use to outline, draft, and potentially finish your own role playing games. . . . It's not a game system, it's an easy approach to game system design.

Here I am less interested in how to use the design elements of Apocalypse World to design a game of your own, and more interested in the particular ways that Apocalypse World structures play, because it is there, I believe, that the heart of the game lies. We all know that a game can be powered by the Apocalypse and lack every single mechanic that the game comprises. 2d6+stat; misses, weak hits, and strong hits; moves, MC moves, threats, harm clocks, pick lists -- none of those individual elements is crucial to making something the offspring of Apocalypse World because all of those elements were specific answers to questions Vincent and Meguey asked in order to make Apocalypse World specifically. Instead, we need to look at the approach to RPG play that the game embraces and enforces, the philosophical underpinnings that support all the individual mechanics and rules.

Vincent has done us all a favor by charting the progression of his thoughts about game design all over the internet, from threads on the Forge to his own blog "anyway" (at lumpley.com) to here on G+ and now over at dice.camp on Mastadon. The time I have spent on the Forge threads have been very rewarding, but they are difficult to navigate, and there is a lot of stuff you want to wade through to find the gems you’re looking for. So I have decided to focus for the moment on "anyway," where everything is laid out chronologically. Vincent might not have written us a text book yet, but "anyway" gives us something far richer and more valuable if you have/make the time to read through them: a diary of his thoughts and guesses about RPG design.

If you read through his posts on RPG theory on "anyway," you will see a lot of posts that he calls "clouds and dice" posts. In these posts he maps out the relationships and movement between the fiction created during play and the physical, real-world items, such as your character sheet, the dice, and all that jazz. The posts have diagrams, in which the fiction stuff is represented by a cloud and the real-world stuff is represented by dice (or sometimes boxes). See, clouds and dice. Anyway, fictional events can have real-world causes or fictional causes and can lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Similarly, real-world events can have fictional causes or real-world causes and lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Good?

In his 4/7/2009 post, "3 Resolution Systems" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427) he looks at the cloud-dice set of cause and effect for three different games (an unspecified traditional game, Dogs in the Vineyard, and In a Wicked Age). He observes that in his diagram of In a Wicked Age play, the real-world elements have fictional and real-world effects, but that the game creates very little movement from fictional causes to real-world effects. He notes in a comment to that thread: There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows [meaning fictional causes with real-world effects], but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have the discipline as a practice of habit, having learned it from other games (comment 4). In short, the game can be played mechanically without necessarily investing in a rich and well-defined fiction because the game doesn't force or reward (mechanically) the concrete development of the fiction.

Jump ahead to his 6/8/2009 post, "Restating: Fictional Causes and Realization" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/454). He begins the post by quoting Frank Tarcikowski from a Forge thread: I'm saying that one should invest in the SIS [shared imagined space], and specifically, in Situation, moment-by-moment. Who's there, what's going on, what does it look like, sound like, feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still sound great in a write-up but to me, they're leaving a bad taste, like reading a book way to fast. To this, Vincent says:

And here's me in agreement: if you have a game whose rules don't adequately depend upon fictional causes, it's easy and easier to let the game's fictional details fall away.

'Adequately' can mean both quantity and quality. If you have a game whose rules don't often enough depend upon fictional causes, yes; if you have a game whose rules don't significantly enough depend upon fictional causes, too.

A game needs to mechanically depend on the fiction regularly and significantly in order to ensure the fiction stays developed, detailed, and what Vincent in comment 4 calls "concrete." In fact, let's look at a great example he uses in that same comment: Like, we're playing a stakes-setting game from 2006 that was never actually published that I'm just making up. I say, 'okay, what's at stake is, do you lose your temper and burn down the orphanage? I'm rolling my Provocative, you roll your Calm . . . I win! Bye bye orphanage!' And you say, 'actually I'm going to bring in my "cucumbery" trait, which is listed under Calm, for a reroll . . . Dang, you still win. You've provoked me into losing my temper, I burn down the orphanage.' . . .

All with no reference to what my character does to provoke yours, or what. Things happen - orphanages burn - but it's just like Frank says. Sounds good in a writeup, leaves a bad taste in play.

Actually, let's stay with that post for one more moment. In comment 8, Vincent notes how all of this fits into trends of RPG design:

[T]he fashions in indie RPG design right now [remember, this is mid-2009] don't offer good solutions to game designers trying to develop games at this end of the spectrum.

For the past year, I've been having conversations with my designer friends that go like this:

'I've noticed that when people play my game, the fiction is pretty, like, low-cal. It's too summary, it's not really realized. Sometimes that's fine and sometimes they've been unhappy with it, but either way I've noticed it. So . . . I want the fiction to be more rich. I think I need to add more fictional effects to my fundamentally real-world causes, real-world effect rules, wouldn't you say, Vincent?'

My answer is: 'I wouldn't say that, no. I'd say that people's investment in the fiction will gravitate to the fiction's value, so I'd say you need to make the fiction more valuable. I think you need to add more fictional causes to your fundamental rules, so that they treat the game's fiction as the basis of play, not an appendix to play.'

Right?!?! It's easy in this post-Apocalypse World world to overlook what problem in RPG design Vincent and Meguey were addressing with Apocalypse World, but here it is (or one of the problems, I should say). The fiction needs to be the basis of play, not an appendix to play. Write that in your design notebook.

And that I think is the philosophical heart of Apocalypse World, and it has nothing to do with 2d6, stats, scaled outcomes, or any other specific mechanic. It has to do with your game forcing the fiction to be the basis of play. The rules of the game demand that the fiction be detailed and concrete for the game to even be played; that means not just making the fiction primary in importance but foundational in its very purpose.

Vincent goes on to call games that make it so that play cannot happen without a developed fiction "self-enforcing" (6/15/2009's "Lazy Play vs. IIEE with Teeth” - another great post that I highly recommend). Apocalypse World is of course reinforcing. In fact, you can't activate a move if it doesn't happen in the fiction. If you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it, right? No one can know what happens until the fiction is fleshed out fully. How can the MC pick her move if she doesn't have the fiction clear in her mind? And when that move is expressed, you're not to speak its name, because you need to speak in terms of fiction. If the MC is sloppy in her fiction, then players won't know what their characters can do to activate moves. Everything in the game runs on the fiction. And from this light you can see all the principles preparing you to speak in terms of fiction rather than in terms of game play or mechanics. The fiction is always the cause of real-world effects, such as picking up your 2d6 or marking your harm clock. And if it is ever unclear what the fiction is, the players and MC have an open invitation to ask questions, which allows the fiction to be clarified so that it can continue as the basis of play.

And now we come back to where we began: what does it mean to have your game powered by the Apocalypse? There are three parts to my definition:

1) It means first, that your game is inspired either by Apocalypse World itself or by one of the games that can trace its lineage back to Apocalypse World. (I know: duh.)

2) Second, your game has rules and mechanics that make fiction the basis of play in a self-enforcing way, in such a way that play itself cannot happen without the fiction being fully and concretely described.

3) Third, your rules and mechanics need to make it likely that the conversations generated by play is interesting.

This post is long enough as it is, so I’m going to pick up this third part of the definition in my next post. We’ll look at another of the “anyway” blog posts and the next section of the Moves Snowball chapter to see what it means to make it so your players say interesting things.