136. Barter Move: Giving 1-Barter with Strings Attached

By default, characters have access to the barter moves, but you can limit or ignore them if you think they might not suit your Apocalypse World (160).

Since Apocalypse World is designed to let the players create the details of their own setting, the designers have to choose what aspects of the game they will insist upon and which are up for grabs. Barter is one of those things that the game anticipates you’ll want rules for but doesn’t insist upon them. As we saw in the lifestyle move (pg. 151), the game leaves the matter of the economics of your particular Apocalypse World entirely up to you, so use what you want here, ignore what you don’t, and create your own as needed.

Of course, even if you don’t use the moves, they are suggestive about the general or default nature of the Apocalypse World created by the game.

When you give 1-barter to someone, but with strings attached, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required.

Example:
Marie needs Dremmer to let Roark go without a fight. She offers to buy Roark from him for 1-barter. Naturally, he’ll make the deal (160).

This move always surprises me with the strength of its conviction! It says a lot about the importance of jingle in Apocalypse World. When you hit with a 10+ while manipulating someone, “they’ll go along with you.” So, essentially, when 1-barter is the leverage applied to manipulate someone, they don’t say no. Jingle is a leverage that, in Apocalypse World, is fail-safe, no need to roll. In fact, when 1-barter is the leverage, your hot doesn’t even enter into it. No matter how hot you are, your jingle is much hotter, always rolling a 10+. By default, this is an aggressively capitalist world, no matter what particular form the currency takes. I love the move as commentary.

But. Other than making a statement about the economy (ours and the post-apocalypse’s), I don’t see the immediate point of the move. The particulars of the move are covered by seduce and manipulate, since the reason you give can always be 1-barter. So why make that be an automatic 10+? Why give a way to sidestep drama and complications? If the MC and players want to create such a workaround, that seems easy enough to do without the aid of this move. And why fix the price to 1-barter? Why not say something like, “When you want to buy your way around a problem, ask the MC how much barter it will cost and who you have to pay; if you pay the price, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required”? As it is written, it seems to suggest anything can be got for 1-barter, which we know is not the case. Hell, the night vision goggles in the next move’s example cost 3-barter. So, in the example given for this move, does the MC have the ability to say, no, Dremmer won’t go for that, or no, Dremmer wants 2-barter ‘cause he can see how badly you want Roark? It’s unclear to me. Is it intended to fight an MC’s impulse to “arbitrarily deny them things they want or would find useful” (quote taken from later on that same page)?

The other barter moves are about trying to locate a thing your character wants and the price they are willing to pay to get it. Cool. This barter move, however, is for when you know who has the thing you want and you want a move to get it. What’s weird about that is that almost all the basic moves are designed to allow for a solution to that very problem. This guy’s got something I want; how do I get it from him? I can go aggro or seize it by force. I can try to manipulate or seduce him. I can read him and see if there’s something I can do to get it from him. This particular barter move is not only superfluous, but it runs the risk of short circuiting the narrative developments the other moves are designed to create.

(I posed a couple of questions about this move to Vincent and Meguey earlier today on Twitter to see if I’m misunderstanding the move. If they respond, I’ll let you know what they say.)