109. Go Aggro

When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose 1:
• Force your hand and suck it up.
• Cave and do what you want.
On a 7 – 9, they can choose 1 of the above, or 1 of the following:
• Get the hell out of your way.
• Barricade themselves securely in.
• Give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear.
• Back off calmly, hands where you can see.
On a miss, be prepared for the worst.

Going aggro on someone means threatening or attacking them when it’s not, or not yet, a fight. Use it whenever the character’s definitely the aggressor: when the target isn’t expecting the attack, isn’t prepared to fight back, doesn’t want to fight back, or can’t fight back effectively (138-139).

First I want to look at going aggro as a tool for exerting your will on another character.

Going aggro is one of three moves that can potentially get someone to do something specific. The other two moves are Seduce or Manipulate and Read a Person with the question “How could I get your character to_____?” For good reasons, none of these methods is fool proof; you can’t just make a roll and then have an NPC (or a PC) obey your desires. Doing so would undermine the realness of the NPCS, and the game can’t very well give you the agenda item to make Apocalypse World seem real if the game itself isn’t going to back your play. More importantly, being able to solve any given problem with a single roll to control an NPC is bad game design. But, still, these are characters who are trying to make something of the world, and one way to do that is to try to exert their will upon others.

When a character goes aggro on another character to affect their behavior, they commit some form of violence on that character and hope it works. But in Apocalypse World, violence is an imprecise tool at best. Even on a 10+ the other character can say, “fuck you,” and take the damage you’re dealing out. On a 7 – 9 roll, they have the option of doing what you want, but they’d have to be pretty inclined to do it anyway, given all the other options they have.

Apocalypse World makes it very hard for violence to be meaningless. You can lash out at anyone for any reason, and go aggro will be there to see you through, but what the move does is make that violence a kind of social exchange. I want something from you, and I’m using violence to get it. That thing might be as simple as for you to come with me or as bloody as for you to die. But after I make my request with violence the response is left entirely to the recipient. It’s important in the move that the target of the violence gets to choose their own response, whether they are PCs or NPCs. The person committing the violence gets no say in what happens after the attack. The recipient can return the violence, in which case a battle starts up; they can yield, in which case you get what you want; they can try to reason with you to keep it from becoming a battle while not giving in to your demands. The aggressive attack is merely an opening salvo in a conversation between the characters.

I would argue that this is one of the reasons why there is no simple “throw a punch” move. Violence always exists in a context, and specifically a social context. In Apocalypse World, throwing a punch is always about more than just exchanging damage, not just because that’s uninteresting, but because it’s not true to human experience. Even when we are filled with rage and lash out blindly without understanding our own motivations, there is something we want out of that attack.

Note that there is no requirement in the move to state what you want your aggressive attack to accomplish. To seduce or manipulate, you need to “tell them what you want them to do [and] give them a reason” (142), but there is no such instruction for go aggro. You can declare your attack and roll the dice without ever knowing or stating what you want from your victim. The MC or another player might ask what is it that you want the character to do in order to know if she caves or not, but it’s not necessary. Two of the three examples involve situations in which the aggressor doesn’t have a stated desire. Bran threatens to push Fleece off the roof, but what he wants beyond that is unstated. Keeler just wants to beat Plover’s head in, but Plover, liking his head as it is, caves. The MC doesn’t seek to clarify what Keeler wants and simply has Plover beg for mercy. So not only do you not have to declare your reasons, you don’t have to even know your reasons, because as I say above, isn’t that how anger and violence often work? You lash out with the intent to hurt without even understanding the emotional undercurrents that brought you there?

As a tool for getting what you want, go aggro is pretty piss poor. But again, that’s how violence works in Apocalypse World. There is no move that lets you use hard to seduce or manipulate, and no way to use hard to read a person. If you are going to engage with the world the hard way, you only have so much control over what comes of it. Of course, if you keep brutalizing the world with your hard, eventually you can advance your go aggro move so that on a 12+ your target doesn’t have the choice to force your hand. You have proven through the last 25+ experience marks that you are willing to pummel your way through any opposition and they can see that now. Shy of that, you’ve got a long bloody road ahead of you.

As a final note, another thing go aggro does – and I love it for this – is make torture as useless in Apocalypse World as it is in real life. If someone doesn’t want to tell you something, they won’t. If you’re expert enough, you’ll more likely than not just kill them. If you’re not expert enough, they’ll “give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear.” It’s always going to be more effective to seduce or manipulate someone, where a 10+ guarantees that they’ll go along with you as long as you don’t give them a reason not to. Better yet, asking someone you’ve read how you can get them to do the thing you want will always get you an honest answer from the MC. Now, the answer might be, “you can’t,” but at least then you know not to waste your ammo or hand bones trying to beat an answer out of them.