72. Opening Section for Threats – Part III

During play, you leapt forward with named and motivated NPCs, you barfed forth landscapes and details of society. Now, between sessions, it’s time to go back through your notes and create those people, places, and conditions as threats.

Creating them as threats means making decisions about their backstory and motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care. You do it outside of play, between sessions, so that you have the time and space to think.

As I was saying last time, the game makes it incredibly easy to leap forward with named and motivated NPCs. It’s equally easy to barf forth landscape and any details about the world you want. You open your mouth, say it, and it is part of the fiction. The work comes later, between sessions, when you create them as threats.

Creating them as threats is an interesting phrase. Since you’re already created the characters during play, the phrase could easily be “Re-creating them as threats.” As it is, the phrase suggests that the NPCs are less solid, more phantasmagorical, before they go through the hardening process of being created as threats. Before they are created as threats, to what extent are they even created at all?

We’ll look at the formal threat creation process down the line. For now, let’s look at how this passage defines threat creation. Primarily, it’s about “making decisions about their backstory and motivation.” Those decisions that you make must be “real” and “binding.” You must make them with “creativity, attention and care.” And it’s important that these decisions be made when you have “time and space to think,” presumably so that you can devote the attention and care that is demanded of you.

It seems clear why you would want to be creative in your decision-making and why you would want to be attentive and careful. The question at hand is why do the decisions you make need to be “real” and “binding”? To be real and binding is to be final and unchangeable. What in the game requires that all the threats have a motivation and background that you as the MC are not allowed to fudge during play? I’ve mentioned this before, when discussing the MC “always say” rules that command the MC to always say what their prep demands and what honesty demands, and both the demands are related to the real and binding decisions that you make during threat creation. But that doesn’t answer the question why.

In the latest “RPG Design Panel podcast,” Vincent Baker and Jason Pitre discuss GM mechanics in RPGs, and Vincent said something that is pertinent here:

Q. One of the things that I really love about [Dogs in the Vineyard] is that the constraints that it places on the GM allow the GM to swing for the fences against the PCs without worrying about killing them all in a supremely unfun way. . .

A. Well that all, I think, hinges on what you are playing to find out. The game is at every stage—and I didn’t have this vocabulary when I wrote Dogs in the Vineyard to say, “Here’s what you’re playing to find out.” And I’m not positive I would have told you the truth in the text. I’m not positive I’m going to tell you the truth now about what you are playing to find out when you play Dogs in the Vineyard. I’m gonna tell you the truth: it’s can the player characters reconcile their actions with their faith. . . . Like the whole game is designed really to that, and there’s nothing else for that design to do than to drive play toward that question. And so with that focus in mind as I’m designing it, there’s sort of no choice but to provide ways for the GM to swing for the fences; there’s no choice but to create those systems of conflict resolution and escalation mechanics to make that possible, because you know the one thing that design can’t do is put its thumb on that scale (0:26:00 – 0:27:56).

Several times during the talk, Vincent makes it clear that the driving principle of his designs is what the game is asking the players to play to find out. Once that is known, the game needs to give everyone involved the tools they need to do that and to structure play such that that discovery is reliably made during play. To that extent, the game cannot place its own “thumb on the scale,” nor can it allow the GM to place their “thumb on the scale.” That thing that is being played to find out can only result from the players’ actions and decisions.

That brings us back to Apocalypse World and threats. These real and binding decisions that the MC makes between sessions when creating threats is a way of keeping the MC’s thumb off the scale during those crucial moments of play that the rest of the game is designed to build up to. The reason the MC must always say what their honesty and prep demand is to keep their thumb away from that scale. Each NPC (and landscape, and vehicle, and population—in short, everything the MC controls) must be given its own internal logic, its own momentum, its own desire, and as a result of all these things, its own trajectory. Then, like billiard balls, the PCs encounter these other elements on a crash course (because the game has set up a tilted landscape that guarantees crash course as well as enough balls that it will never be long before there is a collision). It is concerning the course and result of that conflict that the MC must keep their hands away from the scales. Play your NPCs as you have committed to playing them and watch what happens. Crosshairs are there to encourage you not to save your own game elements if the conflict says they are destroyed. Untenable Life decisions are there to let the PCs meet their own defeat if that’s what’s in the cards. Everything in the game is designed to make these collisions happen and then to allow them to happen honestly and naturally without your interference.

The natural follow-up question is this: now that we’ve discerned what moments the game creates and protects, what are we playing to find out? Surely it’s not just a matter of “what happens when these forces collide?”! Surely it’s something as monumental and important as the question answered through play in Dogs in the Vineyard as described above! Is it can these characters navigate this hostile world to a successful retirement? Is it can a place of hope and love be found amongst the detritus and rubble of this rotten wasteland? Is it can peace and beauty be achieved through violence and war? I hate to say it, but I have no idea. Well, I have ideas, but no answers, and certainly nothing I’m confident enough to say out loud.

That’s alright. This collection examines the text for all the wonders it holds. We’ve come a long way so far, so maybe we’ll be able to answer that question in another hundred posts. If not, no big. In some ways the Dogs in the Vineyard example shows us that that question is what Vincent designed the game to find out, even when the individual players are not thinking about that question when playing the game. So do you know what Meg and Vincent designed Apocalypse World to reveal through play? In the end, would it affect your own experience playing the game?