4. The Basics: playbooks

Continuing our way through the Basics chapter, we are looking today at the “Playbooks” section. Here’s our text:

The game’s playbooks and reference sheets contain all the rules that the other players need to play: rules for creating and introducing their characters, having them take consequential action in play, and changing and developing them as play continues. Print them out before you play and bring the set with you to your first session. (page 9)

What I really want to focus on here is the word “playbook,” but let’s take a moment to look at the details of the passage. The first thing of note is the word “other” before players, which importantly denotes that the MC is also a player, as opposed to the common GM/player division we see in a lot of texts (and we already referenced in discussing the title Master of Ceremonies).

Because the setting for Apocalypse World gets defined by the individual play group both before and through play, and because all conflict, events, and actions are resolved through moves, there is nothing extraneous that players of PCs need to know or have before them while they play. Thus, “all the rules that the other players need to play” are on two or three printed sheet, which is fantastic. There is no Player’s Handbook or Setting Guides or anything else to burden the character players, letting those players focus on what their characters want/need and on how they are going to go about getting it. This approach is ideal for AW’s goals because the characters’ drives and decisions are what the game is all about.

There’s something really cool about “introducing” being a key element of the playbooks. I see that simple addition doing all kinds of work, suggesting that the focus of the game is not each character in isolation but in their relationships with each other. Yes, it alludes to Hx at the end of character creation, but it is totally unnecessary to mention that now, which is why it’s interesting to include it here. The same goes for the rest of the sentence, really. The Bakers could have said, “The game’s playbooks and reference sheets contain all the rule that the other players need to create and play their characters.” Just as “introducing” is slipped in there, so “play” is expanded to “take consequential action in play,” which gets to the heart of AW play. In this game, the characters will take actions that have narrative consequences, both in the short and long term, because those consequences will need to be reacted to and on and on. Those consequences mean that the character and the world impact and change each other, which takes us to the last part of that sentence: “changing and developing [the characters] as play continues.” We will discuss AW’s specific reward and advancement system later, but for now, suffice it to say that the characters are tools to tell story and explore themes that interest the players, so their development is about their place in the story, not about their hit points and thac0; characters here "chang[e] and "develop," not level up.

Okay, now to the word “playbook.” So far as I know, this is the first use of “playbook” in RPGs, but then, I don’t know much, so if someone else knows that the term was borrowed from elsewhere, I’d love to know. In the Ludography, we learn that the “character playbooks were inspired by XXXXtreme Street Luge, by Ben Lehman” (page 290). XXXXtreme Street Luge is a very enjoyable read (it’s available on Ben Lehman’s website for $1), and you can see how the character sheet inspired the choose-from-a-list/select-an-option layout of the AW playbooks, but Lehman still calls his character sheet a character sheet. I’m supposing that the term “playbook” was adopted in part because the character sheet were originally folded into thirds like a pamphlet or booklet. Still, “character sheet” would have worked just as well.

I love the word “playbook” because it declares that what the players hold in their hand is not merely a character—it is the thing through which the players play and enter the fiction, or Shared Imagined Space, to use the Forge’s terminology. It is the player’s tool by which they sculpt the fiction. That’s awesome, methinks.

Finally, it seems like a fitting term because a playbook is, to quote Merriam-Webster, “a stock of usual tactics or methods.” By listing moves and other character options, the playbooks echo that meaning of the word. The playbooks are a list of possible stock tactics and methods for this character-type to carve out their thematic place in the fiction we are all creating together.