146. Seize by Force

To seize something by force, exchange harm, but first roll+hard. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7–9, choose 2. On a miss, choose 1:
• You inflict terrible harm (+1harm).
• You suffer little harm (-1harm).
• You take definite and undeniable control of it.
• You impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy.

Seizing by force is the basic battle move. When someone wants something that someone else has, and both are able and willing to fight for it, use seize by force or one of its variations.

You can use seize by force alone for battles of any scale, but for large-scale battles, battles where several PCs each want to play their own tactical role, and prolonged battles with shifting tactical terrain, you can choose to bring the rest of the battle moves into play as well.

An impressed, dismayed, or frightened NPC absolutely must change their behavior, but it’s up to you how. For PCs, if they’re impressed, dismayed, or frightened, but they press their attack anyway, have them act under fire to do it (167).

This is one of the great moves of Apocalypse World. It is a single move that works for any fight over anything. It does so successfully because Meguey and Vincent looked at meaningful battles in games, literature, and movies and boiled it down to one central issue: one character wants something and another character is actively opposing them. In this light, a fight always has a goal, something the combatants are fighting over and a way to know when the fight is over.

Through this move, combat is always meaningful and narratively important.

For the move to trigger, the player has to make clear what the character is seizing, which means that the focus of the combat is always clear. The move’s picklist makes the possible outcomes of the fight equally clear. Harm will be exchanged, though the exact amount of harm can be affected by the player if they roll high enough. Note that because even a miss allows the player to choose one, the player always has the option to “take definite and undeniable control” of the thing seized. On the flip side, because even a 10+ lets a player choose only 3 options, the player always has the option to fail at their goal. The roll then doesn’t decide if you succeed or fail. The roll decides how much control you have over the combat, mostly. The worse you roll, the more you have to decide what is most critical for you at accomplish in the battle. Even on a great roll, you don’t have total control, of course. You can’t, for example, pull your punches as it were and deliver less harm.

The options to “inflict terrible harm” or “suffer little harm” let the player decide how aggressive or defensive a stance they are taking in the fight. The option to “impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy” gives the player another way to bring the combat to a close (as opposed to beating them to death). Each combination of choices creates a different fictional flavor for the exchange. Inflicting terrible harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent looks different than suffering little harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent, which looks different than inflicting terrible harm and suffering little harm while making no attempt to impress, dismay, or frighten your opponent.

Vincent has talked elsewhere about how picklist moves in Apocalypse World take the best feature of Otherkind Dice while streamlining the process. (I can’t remember at the moment where I read it – maybe on a Barf Forth Apocalyptica forum – so I can’t cite the comment. If someone has a link, I’d appreciate it.) Seize by force is a great example for how this works.

For those of you who either don’t know or need a reminder, Otherkind is an incomplete game of Vincent’s whose dice mechanic has been much praised. Vincent talks about it and summarizes the system in the post titled “The Magic Trick: Otherkind Dice” on his anyway blog. Here’s what he says:

In Otherkind, a combat roll is a pool of 5d6, and it decides four things. It decides (1) whether you advance toward your objective, (2) whether you hurt your enemy, (3) whether your enemy hurts you, and (4) whether your enemy hurts any of your friends and allies. Each of these is on a scale, like so:

Do you advance toward your objective?
1: You lose ground.
2-3: You hold ground.
4-5: You gain ground.
6: You seize your objective.

Do you hurt your enemy?
1-3: No.
4-5: Yes.
6: A lot.

Does your enemy hurt you?
1: A lot.
2-3: Yes.
4-5: No, but your enemy puts you off-balance or on the defensive.
6: No.

Does your enemy hurt your friends and allies?
1: Yes, badly, all who are exposed to danger.
2-3: Yes, but not badly, or only a few.
4-6: No.

To make the combat roll, you pick up 5d6, roll them, throw away the lowest number, and then assign the remaining four numbers one each to the four categories of outcome.

For example: you roll 1 1 3 4 6. This means that you throw away the first 1, and then choose how to assign the remaining 1, the 3, the 4, and the 6. Maybe you seize your objective with the 6 and hurt your enemy with the 4, but that means that now you have to choose whether your enemy hurts you badly with the 1 and hurts your friends not-so-badly with the 3, or vice versa. Make sense? (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/759)

You can see the one-to-one conversion of the system in seize by force. As fun as Otherkind dice are (and if you’ve played Psi*Run you know exactly how fun they are), seizing by force accomplishes the same goal, with the same excitement, while stepping away from the fiction for only a fraction of the time. The only difference between this example and seize by force is that instead of having to protect your friends and allies you have the option to impress, dismay, or frighten, which is I think innately more interesting. On a miss, the MC can always makes a move that hurts your friends and allies if they want.

Oh, and before I go, I just want to say how much I love the part of impressing, dismaying, or frightening your enemy as it applies to a PC. It incentivizes behavior without outright controlling the player’s character. It’s a significant risk to act under fire since a miss will result in a hard move and weak hit will bring with it some difficult decisions. It’s a great way to give the move teeth without taking choices away from players.

This is the last Daily Apocalypse of 2018 - happy New Year!