7. stats

We’ve reached “Stats” in the “Basics” chapter of the 2nd Edition of Apocalypse World (pages 11-12).

-Cool, meaning cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, unfazed. Roll+cool to do something under fire.

I don’t see any need to quote the entirety of the passage, so we’ll dive in from here. As a reminder, the stats are Cool, Hard, Hot, Sharp, Weird, and Hx.

Stats are of course not a mandatory element in an RPG, especially for the more narratively-focused games. Fate’s aspects, Dread’s character questions, etc. A lot can be done with simple descriptors and trait lists. But stats are critical to Apocalypse World because of moves. The key mechanic of the game requires you to have numbers to add and subtract from what you roll in order to propel the Fiction. In fact, as the Bakers point out in the “Advanced Fuckery” section when talking about using the AW engine to create other games, “A game’s characters, stats, crap, and whatnot all exist to serve its moves” (page 281). Everything in that playbook, then, is there to make the moves work and do their thing to create the Fiction.

When I first read AW, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the stats merely because they were phrased as adjectives instead of the usual (because of D&D, I suspect) nouns (strength, courage, dexterity, etc.). I think the adjectives are an interesting choice, serving to treat the stats as traits and descriptors. There is a difference in feeling if not strict meaning between saying, “My guy has a high IQ” and “My guy is sharp.” “I have a high constitution” vs. “I am hard.” “Whoa, check out my character’s charisma!” vs. “Damn, this dude is hot!” Yeah, it’s a minor difference, but I think it can affect the play all the same.

Why are there 6 stats? Because there are 6 basic moves, one for each stat. Okay, there are actually 7 basic moves, but Read a Person and Read a Situation are two sides to the same coin, both together making up a character’s “perception.” I’ll look at the moves in detail when we get there, but here in this section, each stat is connected to its relevant move. Going back to the notion that every part of a character “exist[s] to serve [the] moves,” every stat’s relevance is determined by its usefulness in serving a move, so you wouldn’t have more stats than you have moves.

Nor would you have too few stats, because the balance of play depends on each stat being equally useful. If there were 4 stats and 6 moves, with two stats affecting one move a piece and two stats affecting two moves a piece, that encourages players to favor those two stats in order to make their characters more effective. As a game designed to facilitate narrativist play, Apocalypse World wants to avoid incentivizing stat selection based simply on character effectiveness. The stats you select for your character are ideally the result of what narrative and themes you want to explore through play. If you give your character a high weird stat, you are interested in opening your brain to the psychic maelstrom and seeing how that affects the story and play. The special character moves that let you use x-stat to make x-move may not be especially sexy, but they are crucial to letting your sharp Angel still be able to explore the psychic maelstrom without sacrificing his sharpness, etc. A player is encouraged to pick their stats to match the moves they want to make and not the reverse. Nor are players given any way to min-max their characters via their stats or the moves they use.

We’ll save discussing Hx and highlighting stats for later. The one last thing I want to hit are the explanatory lists for each stat. I admire all the lists, but I particularly love weird’s list:

Weird, meaning a weirdo, psychic, genius, uncanny, lucky, strange, prophetic, touched.

The list allows for (and actively suggests) all kinds of tone and approaches to be employed during play. I can make a dark and twisted Brainer or lucky and lighthearted Savvyhead, or anywhere in between of course. The lists act like little character seeds that invite you to make your character’s hotness about inspiration rather than something physical if that's what you want to play and explore.