16. Looks

Working our way through the playbooks of 2nd Edition Apocalypse World, we have arrived at “Looks.” The Looks section is a set of lists from which you choose the character’s body, face, eyes, clothes, and gender-presentation. Let’s look at the lists for The Hocus as an example:

Man, woman, ambiguous, transgressing, or concealed.

Tattered vestments, formal vestments, scrounge vestments, fetish vestments, or tech vestments.

Innocent face, dirty face, determined face, open face, severe face, or ascetic face.

Mesmerizing eyes, dazed eyes, forgiving eyes, suspicious eyes, clear eyes, or burning eyes.

Bony body, lanky body, soft body, fit body, graceful body, or fat body.

As any writer who has stared at a blank page knows, it is hard to start from nothing. These lists give you a place to start when creating your character. Even if you don’t find the right fit for your character, these items will serve as a leaping off point for you to create your own. (Though, as +Robert Bohl pointed out yesterday, the text says “choose name, look, stats,” etc., not “come up with” or “create.” Choosing is admittedly ambiguous since “choose from the list” is not explicitly said, and from Vincent’s own appearance in yesterday’s conversation, that ambiguity is a purposeful construction, designed to prompt questions and conversation within a play group.)

A lot of RPGs give you space to describe your character, but what are the most typical details prompted in such games? Gender, race, height, weight, eye color, hair color, etc. Those categories are clinical and scientific, suitable for textbooks and technical manuals. The lists provided in Apocalypse World focus on how one might be described in a novel. The first thing you see when you look at her face is that it’s an innocent face with forgiving eyes. Holy shit! That tells us oodles more than she has green eyes and long red hair. She’s not described at 5’8”; she has a bony body that juts out of her tattered vestments. This is about character (in the literary sense) not statistics. If you want to work out her hair and eye colors and all that, go for it, but if you never do, your Hocus is still going to leap into the Fiction.

An important aspect of these looks is that you meet your character from the outside in, like you were meeting a stranger. The first thing that catches your attention might be her dazed eyes, and then you start building inward and thinking about why her eyes are dazed? How does that reflect her personality or her behavior? Why does she have a graceful body with those dazed eyes? As I pointed out in the last post about names, this is all part of the AW design to discover our characters through play. We meet our characters from the outside and work our way in, knowing only enough to know how to play her, figuring out who she is as we go along and see what troubles she faces and who her friends are. That’s why the title “Look” is so appropriate—“look” tells us nothing about what’s on the inside unless we want it to.

The first list looks like a list of genders, but it is not necessarily gender or gender identity. It’s about presentation, looks. She looks like a woman. Or she looks like a man. Or he looks transgressing. Or it looks ambiguous. Or they have concealed their look entirely. It tells us nothing about how the character views herself, only how others view her.

So much of play in Apocalypse World is designed to imitate literature and cinema, and that approach is laid out for us from the moment we start building our character thanks to these lists.

And since I process things by repeating them, I want to restate something else Rob said in response to yesterday’s post about names. One of the themes running through Apocalypse World are limited choices, for all the players, MC included. This theme of limited choices ties directly into the theme of scarcity. How scarce are things in Apocalypse World? You have twenty names to choose from, that’s how scarce. You have five types of clothing to choose from, that’s how scarce. And as +Alfred Rudzki pointed out, introducing the theme of choice and picking-from-lists in the very first thing you do as a player acts as a kind of primer for the players.