26. character creation

26. We are back and approaching a new chapter: Character Creation (70-78). The opening section of the chapter outlines the things you as MC need to print out, gather, and bring to the table for the first session of play:

Print out a set of the character playbooks and pass them around. Have everybody choose one, no duplicates. Set the rest aside and keep them handy.

Print out the players’ reference sheets. Put them on the table where everybody can reach them and pass them around.

Print out your playsheets: a threat map, a threat sheet. You can print more threat sheets as you need them, after the first session.

You’ll also need notepaper, pencils, and at least two 6-sided dice.

For the most part, the players should be able to create their characters fine just by working through their playbooks, so let them. Your job for now is just to answer questions and think about what you’re going to bring to the game (page 70).

The first thing that stands out is the instruction that you cannot have duplicates of the playbooks among the players. This idea is expounded upon in the “Setting Expectations” section of this chapter: Your characters are unique in Apocalypse World. There are other medics, and they might even be called “angel” by their friends, but you’re the only angel. There are other compound bosses and warlords who might be called “hardholders,” but you’re the only hardholder. Why have this limitation at all? If there are other angels and hardholders in the world, why can’t the players play them?

In RPGs with character classes and skills, the desire to have diversity among the characters usually comes down to niche protection (which helps ensure balanced time in the spotlight) and greater survivability for the party (I’m of course thinking of D&D here where modules expect you to have a rogue, a cleric, a wizard, and a fighter of sorts— and where any missing ingredient can cause problems for the group as a whole). But in a game with no pre-planned modules and a spotlight controlled by the MC and the players’ willingness to move the story through their actions, there is not the same need for that diversity. Niche protection gets closer to the point, but in a game like Apocalypse World that niche is not defined by a skill set; it is defined by Character Moves. The moves, as we’ve noted before, drive the story by allowing the characters’ actions to impact the narrative and change it irrevocably, which then sets the characters up to make more moves, etc. If you were allowed a party of gunluggers, it’s not so much that the characters will steal each other’s thunder; it’s that you drastically limit the moves available to the players, which limits the breadth of the narrative that can unfold through play. I would argue then that banning duplicate playbooks protects not the individual players and characters but the narrative itself by ensuring that the players have a variety of moves and approaches for interacting with their Apocalypse World.

In addition, because so much of the character is baked into the playbook, duplicate playbooks would lead to repetitious characters. See for example my posts on Hx and sex moves, through which the game tells you how these characters feel and behave to some extent. Four drivers will have a hard time interacting since they are all built to have intimacy issues. Three skinners? Five battlebabes? The characters would have a difficult time interacting with each other—and the game is made to have the characters interact with each other as well as the world around them.

Finally, the Hx section does a ton of work in creating the particulars of the Apocalypse World and the portion of it that the characters inhabit. The wider variety you have in those questions, the more you will be able to learn about the world during the character creation portion of play. To limit those questions is to hamper the building of the world.

Now let’s turn our attention to the final paragraph of the section. If “the players should be able to create their characters fine just by working through their playbooks,” why is it important to make character creation a group activity? Obviously, the players need to come together to do introductions and Hx, but before that, why is it important that the rules explicitly state (several times, in fact) that you “start the game with character creation” (8)? In the rest of my discussion about this chapter, I am going to be looking at character creation as a pivotal part of play, especially as a time for each group of players to learn how they can negotiate the building of the Fiction as equal contributors. It is during character creation that the characters take shape, the world takes shape, and the way this group of players will interact and build the narrative together takes shape. It is during character creation that the players will learn how Apocalypse World shapes the conversation that is the very act of roleplaying the game.

That’s what we’re going to be looking in the next handful of posts, but even now in this opening section we are given a clue: “Your job for now [as the MC] is just to answer questions.” It turns out that questions are one of the major chambers of the conversational heart of Apocalypse World; questions from players to the MC, from the MC to the players, and between players. The entire Character Creation chapter is set up to help the MC answer the questions they players will ask and to help the MC figure out what questions she needs to ask in return.