112. Sucker Someone

When you Attack someone unsuspecting or helpless, ask the MC if you could miss. If you could, treat it as going aggro, but your victim has no choice to cave and do what you want. If you couldn’t, you simply inflict harm as established (140).

I love the elegance of turning this rule, which could easily have been tucked into the text of Go Aggro, into its own move. Doing so prevents the reader from having to scan each move for all the exceptions and possible applications when using the text as a reference book and makes this common-enough occurrence easy to find. It’s one of the things that makes moves such a beautiful and concise way of presenting rules. The In Battle move works the same way. The rule says that battle moves can only be made when in battle, but the move says when you’re in battle, you can make the battle moves. The rule becomes a move. Generally speaking, people are awful readers, and that is doubly the case with rulebooks. I may love all the ways Apocalypse World treats its readers with respect and invites them to engage with its text, but the book functions perfectly well as a rulebook even if you don’t care about the hows, the whys, the language, and the poetry. Presenting rules as moves where possible allows the quickest and sloppiest reader to grab the rules and go. Smart.

It’s your job to judge whether the character could miss, but there’s no need to agonize over it. If it’s not perfectly clear, go ahead and have her roll to go aggro.

The thing that strikes me about this brief paragraph is how seldom the phrase (or the meaning behind the phrase) “It’s your job” shows up in the text. Much of the game is set up to make it easy and natural to negotiate assent between players rather than dictate responsibilities to solely one player or another. This moment shows that when there is no value in negotiating assent, and when a simple decision is needed to move the game forward, the game will step in and assign authority.

Finally, I want to point to two things in the two examples.

Here’s the first:

Bran’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, he’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of a borrowed rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” Bran’s player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” “You might miss,” I say, “so it’s going aggro, but if you hit with a 10+ he has no choice but to suck it up.” He hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have Balls barricade himself securely in: “you don’t blow his brains out, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note, on my threat sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again.

Those last two sentences are where the gold is at. Having Balls barricade himself could be a lousy move. It has the potential to not be a victory of any sort if all it does is make Balls hide for now and just surface later, which could be seen as undermining the hit that a 9 represents. More importantly, that’s not consequential. What the MC does here is not only send Balls into hiding temporarily, but possibly permanently. If we ever do see him again, we can be certain that he’s going to remember this moment that had such an impact on him. That’s good MCing.

The second example is exceedingly clever:

Plover is groveling at Keeler’s feet, and Keeler’s standing over him with a crowbar. “No, seriously, I have no need to talk, fuck this guy. I smash him in the head. He’s at my mercy, right? How much harm does a crowbar do?” He sure is, and it does 2-harm messy. Shit. A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover.

See what they did there? This example picks up where the Go Aggro example left off. Keeler came after Plover, and Plover fell to groveling, promising to do whatever Keeler says. To do so, answers an unasked question: what happens when your character decides that there’s nothing she wants so much as a blood reckoning? A sucker attack that can’t miss.

And I’ll say it again: “A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover” is one of my favorite sentences in the book. The violence carried out by the characters in these examples – and they are casually carried out, more often than not – was pleasantly shocking to me on a first read, and I like that the MC shares the surprise. We can feel the MC as audience, learning about these characters through their decisions and behavior. That’s part of the thrill of playing to find out. There’s also a hint of sadness at the loss of Plover, and the MC feels that even while looking at poor Plover through crosshairs. It’s touching and funny and a rare treat in a rule book.