12. why to play

And with this entry, Beloved, we conclude “The Basics” chapter. You’ve read the overview of the game by this point and have a sense for the setting, the basic mechanic of moves, the stats that define a character, the nature of gear and crap, how harm and healing are tracked, the things that are incentivized in character improvement, and the general structure of play at the 30,000-foot level. Now we get “Why to Play” (page 14). I love the way each item builds off the item before it:

One: Because the characters are fucking hot.

Two: Because hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together. Lovers, rivals, friends, enemies, blood and sex—that’s the good shit.

Items one and two are about the characters you’ll play. Each individual character is hot (let’s remember our definition from “The Stats”: “attractive, subtle, gracious, sexy, beautiful, inspiring, exciting—they will seduce and manipulate you!), but the sparks of the game start flying when the characters have relationships and history. The characters are not a party of adventurers off to accomplish a common goal—things here are going to get messy, and that messiness is part of the point.

Three: Because the characters are together against a horrific world. They’re carving out their little space of hope and freedom in the filth and violence, and they’re trying to hold onto it. Do they have it in them? What are they going to have to do to hold it together? Are they prepared, tough enough, strong enough and willing?

Item three brings in the post-apocalyptic setting and places the messiness of those relationships into the context of the larger world in which they exist. While there will be friction between the characters, the true antagonism of our stories will come from the outside.

Four: Because they’re together, sure, but they’re desperate and they’re under a lot of pressure. If there’s not enough to go around (and is there ever?), who’ll stick together and who’ll turn on whom? Who do you trust, and who should you trust, and what if you get it wrong?

Item four is my favorite for the way it brings items two and three together. You can’t live in a world of scarcity and not have that impact your personal relationships. We were already promised that things would be messy, and even as our characters fight together against the apocalypse world, the corruption and need can’t help but infect our home group. The possibility of betrayal will always cast a shadow over the group. The story is the characters and the characters are the story; the characters impact the world and the world impacts the characters.

Five: Because there’s something really wrong with the world, and I don’t know what it is. The world wasn’t always like this, blasted and brutal. There wasn’t always a psychic maelstrom howling just out of your perception, waiting for you to open your brain so that it can rush in. Who fucked the world up, and how? Is there a way back? A way forward? If anybody’s going to ever find out, it’s you and your characters.

Item five then goes one step beyond the physical world into the psychic maelstrom. In doing so, it points to a thematic possibility in play. Can we piece together through play what brought humanity to this state? And is there a way out of this mess? Not a lot of instances of play will go there, but it’s a fascinating option.

The last three points are full of questions, what will later be called Stakes. These are the things we will be playing to find out in any given game of Apocalypse World. The specifics of the questions will change because AW grounds itself in the particular characters fighting for existence in their particular post-apocalyptic world, but the conflict will almost always be instigated and propelled by the limited resources over which they fight. These questions both stir our imaginations now and exemplify what we will be asking ourselves in just about every game. It’s a clever send off into the main body of the text.

That’s why.

Yeah, that’s why. If none of that gets your juices flowing, then this is not the game for you.

As a side note, this is the first time that there is swearing in the book, which of course is a common—even defining—feature of the text. There is an element of fair warning to this, I think. I know that some readers are turned off by the authors’ tone, but I love it. To me, it walks the line between reflecting the subject matter and being rewarding in its own right. To me—and again this is all a matter of aesthetics—Vincent does an amazing job of being simultaneously poetic and direct, explanatory and emotive. The swearing also warns that this is an adult game dealing with adult content and adult themes.