145. Want and Surplus

Before we go further into the battle moves, I want to take a step back to look briefly at the concepts of want and surplus, especially as they pertain to the insight and augury moves.

The options that the hocus player chooses during character creation detail the nature of the hocus’s followers, telling us how they behave in times of want and in times of surplus. At the start of the session, the hocus makes the fortune move to find out how things stand now. I love these start of session moves for a number of reasons. First, thematically, the move drives home the vagaries of the Apocalypse World; sometimes you’re hard hit and sometimes you’re flush with goods. Moreover, the nature of the move disconnects that state of want or surplus from the actions of the characters or the fiction that came before this session. One session’s surplus might become next session’s want no matter what victories or defeats the characters experience. This is of course a recurring theme in the game as the characters continually try to gain or maintain control in this crazy world, but unless they have loaded dice that keep giving them a 10+, things are not going to go as they wish. By a little or by a lot, things will go sideways.

Second, the all-or-nothing state of want and surplus is in keeping with the rest of the game. There is no “enough” in Apocalypse World. Either there is not enough or there is too much. When there is not enough, you need to scrounge up more; when there is way more than you need, someone will soon be coming to claim it. The ups and downs and the extremes of these start of session moves line right up with the assertion that “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World” (97).

Third, the moves create productive situations no matter what the dice say. States of want create obvious and interesting pressures that can be brought in by the MC as desired. An example in the hocus playbook is “Your followers aren’t really yours, more like you’re theirs. Want: judgment” (52). Yeah, in times of want, your followers are going to hold you responsible. Other tags listed in the hocus playbook that come in to play during want are desertion, disease, desperation, and savagery. Any of these tags gives the MC license to create a whole swath of troublesome fiction to give the narrative a jolt.

States of surplus can similarly offer trouble, such as “Your followers disdain law, peace, reason and society. Surplus +violence.” Depending on what the player picks, they can get struck by either the left or right hand of fortune. When surplus doesn’t offer a problem, however, the narrative is still propelled forward by the opportunity it offers instead, such as the hocus’s insight or augury. The surplus will probably not last, so if a character is hoping to use her augury, then she needs to put her antenna to work now while she can. In this way, these moments of surplus are both exciting and pressuring in their own way, everything you want in a game of Apocalypse World.

Finally, I love the choice of the words “want” and “surplus.” “Want” communicates in a single word the physical lack and the emotional/psychological need. The word “surplus,” on the other hand, with its Latinate root is more clinical, communicating the state of excess but without an emotional satiety. Prosperity, flush, bloat, plenty to spare, satiety, rolling in it—there are plenty of words and phrases that carry an emotional valence, none of which were chosen by the Bakers. “Want” lets you feel the hurt, but “surplus” offers no comfort. That rocks.