130. Lifestyle

Most of the playbooks include this move:

At the beginning of the session, spend 1- or 2-barter for your lifestyle. If you can’t or won’t, tell the MC and answer her questions.

Imagine that there are three (or more) qualities of life available. The first is the typical quality of life for your Apocalypse World, where the PCs are, how most people around them live. What do they eat, drink, wear? Where do they sleep?

If the player pays 1-barter at the beginning of the session, that’s the quality of life her character’s had and can generally expect. The same as most people around her.

If she pays 2-barter at the beginning of the session, she has a quality of life that is substantially, notably better. Whatever other people eat, drink, and wear, she’s eating, drinking, and wearing better. She sleeps more comfortably and safer, and has more control over her personal environment.

She doesn’t get any other benefit, so make it clear: she shouldn’t spend 2-barter unless this is precisely the benefit she wants (151).

The lifestyle move is new to the 2nd edition, and I think it accomplishes a great deal within the game.

First, it’s important to note that the move triggers at the beginning of your first session. For the text we have to jump forward to page 154, under the title “Lifestyle and gigs at the start of play”:

At the beginning of the first session, have everyone make the lifestyle move, but tell them that in session one they have to pay 1-barter. Tell them that their starting barter is calculated to include this. It’s true.

Each playbook starts with at least 2-barter worth of oddments (except for the hardholder, who’s a special case all around), and some playbooks start with 4-, 6-, or 8-barter (the Brainer’s got bank!). Because the move triggers in the first session, it necessitates a conversation about what life is like in your Apocalypse World. When the MC asks how much you are spending on your lifestyle, it prompts a group discussion of what 1-barter gets you in our world, and what 2-barter would look like. It also forces the question, what are you bartering with in your Apocalypse World? What is being traded? What is valuable? Like the playbooks themselves, and the Hx questions you ask each other, answering these questions about lifestyle helps us organically create the world in a loosely-guided conversation, on small, manageable step at a time in fun bursts of creative discussion.

Additionally, the lifestyle move raises the specter of not being able to pay that barter cost. It says that your character could be destitute, and that there are undoubtedly others in your world who are already destitute. What are their lives like? Where do are they huddled? Even if you don’t answer those questions, they haunt the edges of your conversation. You have 1-barter now at the beginning of the game after having paid for your living, and if you don’t spend another oddment, you have enough to cover one more session. That’s it. And that’s a kind of world-building too, right? This is a world of limited supplies, where you need to pay your own way, either with oddments or favors, or you face deprivation.

If that were the only purpose of the move, it would be enough. But of course there is more.

If she pays 0-barter, this should mean that at the beginning of the session she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst, but hold off. It could turn out that way, but she has to answer your questions, right?

As MC, your first question is to the other players: “okay, so who’s going to pay 1-barter to keep Keeler alive?” If one of them springs for her, cool; they can work the debt out between them and you don’t need to think about it any more.

If none of them can or will, though, you get to choose:

• Go straight to, yes, she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst. Inflict harm as established. Take away her stuff.

• Choose a suitable NPC—Rolfball, for instance—and say, “oh, that’s okay, Rolfball’s got you covered. That’s good with you, yeah?” Now the debt is between her and your NPC, and you can bring it into play however you like. Given the NPC’s threat type, impulse, and general nature, how eager are they to be repaid, and on what terms?

• Say, “well, okay, who do you think should pay to keep you alive? Rolfball? Fish? Who?” You can either negotiate an appropriate arrangement in summary, or else jump into play: have her read a person, seduce & manipulate, go aggro, or whatever she needs to do to get her way.

Apocalypse World is a game whose story and movement are created entirely by the players through the actions of their characters. Remember that whole “DO NOT pre-plan a story line, and I’m not fucking around” thing? Well, the game can’t demand that of you and then not give you the tools with which to build a story. I mean, it could do that, but it would be a shitty game, and Apocalypse World is not a shitty game. The playbooks go a long way in character creation to creating a complex community full of named NPCs and personal pressures for the characters. Those make great starting points, and in some situations, that’s all that’s needed. But if those initial leads fall flat or prove to be less interesting than hoped, the lifestyle move is built-in fuel, there whenever you need a complication to explore. The move puts pressures on characters to have jingle, which could push them toward gigs or other risky ways of sustaining themselves.

I love that the first question is to the other players. The game doesn’t necessarily want PCs at each other’s throats (although it’s cool if that happens), but it does love to have them tangled in each other’s shit. Throwing this option to the other players is a way to let them have first say in generating this narrative drama. If they pass, then the MC can look over the landscape and decide what would be most productive right now: starvation, indebtedness to a particular NPC, or a choice made by the player of the broke (or freeloading) character. However it works, this is a moment for the players to decide what dramatic pressures they want on their characters to drive the story forward from this point. It’s an incredibly flexible tool that provides drive and direction in whatever you see fit.

You’ll note that 1-barter, whatever it is for your world, is defined by the game as providing a month of expenses, yet the move is supposed to be triggered at the beginning of every session, even if the last session of play took only an hour or two of in-game time. The move doesn’t prompt you to trigger it at the beginning of session only if a month of in-game time has passed. And it doesn’t provide you with reasons why the move would need to be triggered if little to no time has elapsed since last session. That’s left entirely up to you and your table to explain the necessary costs, or to leave it unexplained.

But what if you want to just forget it? What if you’ve got plenty of drive in your story already and you don’t want to futz with gigs and financial pressures right now? Then forget it. Lifestyle is a move that is there to catch you when you need it and to be painlessly overlooked when you don’t. The lifestyle move hangs out in the “Barter” section of the playbooks without so much as a bullet point to even draw attention to it. It is designed to slip into the background and be forgotten. If it’s important to you and your vision for your Apocalypse World, then you’ll call for it. If you’ve got so much going on that you forgot about it, the game will gladly let you forget. But when you go searching your sheet for something to do because the game has run out of gas for you, there it will be to get things moving again.

The bookend to the lifestyle move is the end of session move. One kicks you off and one meets you at the end of each session. This is what it says in the text about the session end move: If you forget to do this at the end of session, be sure to do it at the beginning of the next. It’s important. No such sentence appears in the lifestyle discussion. The rules don’t insist that you go back and rectify your barter matters if you forgot to do them, because if you forgot to do them, it most likely means that everything is working alright for you already.

The lifestyle move is fantastic at every stage of play. Like a loving guardian, it’s there for you at the beginning of your journey and then it gets out of your way, but is always there to catch you when you need it.