131. Working Gigs

Most of the playbooks include a move like this (from the angel):

If you_ need jingle during a session_, tell the MC you’d like to work a gig. Your gigs:
• Tend to the health of a dozen families or more.
• Serve a wealthy NPC as angel on call.
• Serve a warlord NPC as combat medic.
• Others, as you negotiate them.

When a player tells you that her character would like to work a gig, ask her what she has in mind. She might pick one from the list, or she might suggest a new one. It’s up to you to decide whether to say yes, no, or not yet, like “that’s a good idea, but first you’ll have to…” (153)

Working gigs obviously goes hand in hand with the lifestyle move. If there were no financial pressures in Apocalypse World, then characters would not “need jingle during a session.” Things cost in this world, so it only makes sense that the game provide you with a move to secure jingle for your character.

Like the lifestyle move, this move is new to the 2nd edition. In 1st edition, there was a character called “The Operator” who was a mover and shaker in the Apocalypse World, making deals and working jobs. But of course everyone in Apocalypse World is fighting to survive, so it makes sense that they all have to be movers and shakers to some degree. So the character was done away with and her gig move was democratically redistributed.

Even if you have a game in which your character never works a single gig, its presence on the playbook sheet, like the lifestyle move, makes clear that these are the pressures in the world. And the list of potential gigs indicates what role your character-type plays in the communities they call home. In this example here, the player of the Angel can see that she might be acting as a community doctor, a private doctor for someone of means, and a combat medic for one of the warlords. This is what other medical professionals in Apocalypse World do, and these are some paths for you. Of course you are also invited to create your own. Like the other tools in Apocalypse World, gigs are meant to inspire and support you, not limit you.

The gigs move is versatile in play, able to expand or collapse to meet the needs of your game:

Once you’ve settled that question and the character works the gig, you have to decide or find out how it goes. Successful? Unsuccessful? Dangerous? Easy?

Suppose that Bish the angel is serving a warlord NPC, Jeannette, as a combat medic:

• You can just decide. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders all the time come back burned and smoke-poisoned, so you set up beds and lung-pumps and stuff. It’s hard work on those nights but on other nights you’re free.”

• You can play it out in full. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders are going out tonight. How do you set up? What do you do?”

• You can call for a move, or a quick snowball of moves, to summarize what happens. Like “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders with the smoke inhalation and the terrible burns. After midnight they start pouring in. Act under Fire to treat them all!”

These three examples show that the gigs can enter play as anything from two sentences of narration, to a couple of moves, to a full session or more of play. Do you just need to get some jingle in the hands of a character and don’t want to sidetrack the fiction? Give the summary. Do you want to have some dramatic ramifications in the fiction of what exactly went down during the gig? Make a move or two to set up the fiction. Are you in a lull in this character’s narrative and looking for something to focus on? Make the gig the focus of play for a while. The game doesn’t know what exactly you will need from it at any given time, so it gives you the options and tools to control your own pacing and scope.

Another thing that changed from 1st to 2nd edition is how profitable gigs are. The Operator would typically get 1-barter for a job well done. She’d have to commit murder to get 3-barter from a gig. Now, 3-barter is the standard:

No matter which way you do it, the baseline for pay is, when they work a gig, they get 3-barter.

You’re allowed to pay 2- or 4-barter when you feel like you should, but save them for exceptional outcomes. Far more often than you pay 2-barter, you should say “it went really poorly, and you can see that Jeannette resents it, but take your 3-barter.” And far more often that you pay 4-barter, you should say “it went fantastically well, better than Jeannette would have dreamed. Take your 3-barter, and she’s totally delighted with you.” (153-154)

Why the change? As Christopher Wargo pointed out in the comments of my last post, 1-barter can no longer sustain a character for a month. In the 2nd edition, 1-barter is “enough to live on for a few days” (73). I guess even the Apocalypse World can’t escape inflation. Between that and the lifestyle move’s demand that you pay your barter’s worth of living every session, you need to make enough from a gig to sustain for a few sessions so that play doesn’t become simply a neverending series of gigs. 3-barter will let you avoid having to worry about gigs for a couple of sessions so you can build up steam in other parts of your narrative.

The rules strongly encourage you not to vary from the 3-barter payment. Allowing the MC to go as low as 2 or as high as 4 suggests that the game will not break with these numbers, but that they will affect the game if used regularly. The reason for making the payment reliable is so that players know what their character will get by taking a gig. How you do and how it all comes out might be up in the air, but you can count on your payment. Without that standard, players could get financially punished for a bad roll, which encourages players to find a more reliable way to secure some jingle.

What the game proposes instead of varying the payment is to work the relative success or failure of the job into the cause-and-effect chain of the narrative. Jeanette’s resentment or delight is a much more exciting (and meaningful) variable for the game than the payment. Moreover, if you stick to 3-barter generally, then when an NPC does short change or overpay it has punch.

So, yes, gigs are about making money to sustain your characters, but that’s not what they are really about, are they? Like everything else in the rules, they create arenas in which PC-NPC relationships can flourish and bear dramatic fruit.

Now for the ending of this section, an ending that I love:

If you make it easy and safe for the characters to find and work paying gigs, they’ll be rich. The harder and more dangerous you make it, the more desperate the characters and the more desolate the world.

Choose intentionally. Make Apocalypse World the way you want it.

I love the simplicity and directness of “choose intentionally” as a standalone sentence. The gig subsystem is a kind of dial, and where you set it affects the rest of your game. The good news is that none of the settings on the dial will break the game, so don’t worry about that. But not breaking the game and giving you the game you want are two different things.

I also love the idea that the Apocalypse World you create could be a land of plenty, at least for the PCs, with jobs and jingle always in easy reach. So much of the game is about scarcity, but that doesn’t mean the PCs have to be on the suffering end of that scarcity. What do the PCs make of the world when they are profiting from the system while others in the larger community are not? It’s its own interesting question. What you are exploring is up to you as the MC, and the gig move is one of the tools the game gives you to control that.