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Here’s my big plan, by the way. Isle’s listed in the cast for a threat called Isle’s family, which is a brute: family (naturally enough). Its impulse, accordingly, is to close ranks and protect their own. What’s most fun is that I’m acting on that impulse but I’m using Plover, Church Head, and Pellet – members of Keeler’s gang! – as Isle’s family’s weapon. It’s just like when Keeler uses them to go aggro or seize by force, only I’m the one doing it.
If Keeler lets me, that is. Keeler thinks about imposing her will upon her gang to stop them, her player thinks about it too. She twists her mouth around, thinking about it. Finally, instead, “knock yourself out,” she says. Marie’s player: “damn it, Keeler.” I really like this entire interlude with Keeler and her player. Why is it so great? The MC has a “big plan” and is excited to see it unfold. If she wanted to, she could cut straight to Marie pacing inside her home behind her triple-locked door and get right to it, but she doesn’t. She detours to Keeler instead, giving her every chance to scuttle the big plan! That seems like a crazily bold move by the MC. Well, yes and no. It could definitely mean that Plover and his buddies leave Marie alone, but it won’t mean that they’ll forgive or forget. Because you create a world with a meaningful chain of cause and effect, the fallout of Marie’s attempted manipulation of Isle would only be postponed by Keeler’s intervention, not dissipated. In short, the rules of the game make it so that no matter what happens, the players will create interesting and dramatic stories. If Keeler makes her pack alpha move, she’s going to have to roll dice. On a miss or a 7-9, there is immediate tension between Keeler and her gang that temporarily overrides Plover’s concerns with Marie. On a 10+, Plover and the others obey Keeler without confrontation. But even then, a 10+ doesn’t threaten to kill the dramatic momentum, because now Plover might get to wondering why Keeler is protecting Marie, wondering why she’s siding with Marie over her own biking brothers? Plover, Church Head, and Pellet might become a disgruntled group, and far from extinguishing the dramatic possibilities, the 10+ has multiplied them. This scene with Keeler pulls the PC-NPC-PC triangle into the forefront. Keeler has one relationship with her gang, and Marie now clearly has a different relationship. By bringing Keeler into the dustup, the MC uses that triangle to make everything fraught! Keeler has refused to step in, and now Marie’s player knows that she left Marie out to dry – drama! We can easily imagine how tense their future meeting will be, especially when at least two of the three gang members are dead at Marie’s own hand. The actions of one character have a direct impact on the world of the other character because of the PC-NPC-PC triangle. I love that we don’t get any insight into what Keeler’s player is thinking. Is she afraid that a low roll puts her into a confrontation she doesn’t want? Is she thinking about whether Keeler’s character would care one way or another what happens to Marie? That “knock yourself out” line is gloriously non-committal. No matter what happens at Marie’s home, things are going to be awkward afterwards. One last bit of praise for the MC. Plover could have gone to face Marie alone, but the MC latches onto the “close ranks” impulse of the Isle family to have Plover gather together Church Head and Pellet. Three dudes with an axe to grind is a much more daunting enemy than one badass with a shotgun. It’s because there are three gang members that Keeler has to pause. It’s because there are three gang members that Marie’s player is nervous about the impending confrontation. Apocalypse World doesn’t have challenge ratings or anything that forces the MC to consider how big a threat a player can face. The rules are flexible enough that the MC can throw whatever she wants at the players and know that it will work out. Besides, Plover probably just wants to beat the crud out of Marie to teach her a lesson—although he might well want to kill her. There are systems in place to prevent the random killing of a PC, so the MC can push hard at a player with NPCs to see what she will do without having to worry about doing something "unfair." The other line I want to acknowledge is the MC’s “What’s most fun . . .” That is how you should feel when you are MCing Apocalypse World! Using Keeler’s gang as Isle’s family’s weapon should give you joy because you are tugging on those PC-NPC-PC triangles and have no idea what will happen—and you know whatever does happen is going to be awesome and entertaining. Playing to find out means wandering into the unknown with the other players and being psyched to watch the explosions and chaos.
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”Cool. Keeler – “ turning to Keeler’s player “ – you’re passing by your armory and you hear some of your gang people in there. It’s Plover, Church Head and Pellet, arming themselves. What do you do?” I’m_ announcing future badness_.
”Hey, what’s up?” Keeler’s player says. ”Marie attacked Isle,” I say, in Plover’s blunt, heavy voice. And in my own: “he stops what he’s doing and looks square at you, he’s still got a shotgun in his hand. Church Head and Pellet, you know they’re going to back him up.” Let’s talk about free play and how it works in Apocalypse World. Free play is not a term that’s used in the text, nor is it to be found in Ron Edwards’ Provisional Glossary, but I think it’s a common enough term to use here. Free play, as I think it is commonly used – at least it’s how I’m going to use it here – is the part of RPG play that is not governed by mechanics or procedural rules. It’s the part of play during which we talk to each other in our characters’ voices and build up fiction together without rolling dice or engaging any mechanics of the game. Way back on page 8, Vincent and Meguey talk about the way the rules of the game “mediate the conversation”: “They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after.” Free play is that time before the mechanics of the game “kick in.” It’s perhaps overbroad to say that free play is unique to roleplaying games (under which umbrella I am including larp and games like Once Upon a Time – any game that has a shared fiction that must be agreed to to some extent for play to happen). At no time during a board game or a card game are you doing things that affect the game but that are not regulated by rules and mechanics. In roleplaying there are these free-flying moments that we all partake in by the grace of our own imaginations and social agreement. Then when we get to a part of the game that has mechanical teeth, we lock into those rules, follow the event through, and then go off soaring again. I think we can all agree that free play is one of the most incredible parts of roleplaying. But free play is also a huge challenge to designing RPGs, in that the designer has to be mindful of where things can go during that free play and how to smoothly transition from free play to mechanics and back to free play. Even when mechanics are not engaged, there might be procedures (or not) that keep the free play focused, keeps players in the proper tone, or themes, or whatnot. How intrusive do you get as a designer? How do you help the players get the most out of free play without hindering them in the process? What I see in Apocalypse World is half an answer to those questions and half an analysis of what actually happens during free play in order to identify the natural procedures playgroups adopt in mediating their own conversations. The Bakers then use that analysis to provide a soft structure for free play (or at least to identify and point out the soft structure we unconsciously use). Now back to the passage quoted above. Let’s start with that “what do you do?” I have talked about “what do you do?” as a reminder to the players that their characters are the heroes of our story, that it is their actions that drive the narrative, as opposed to some preexisting idea or plot presented by the MC. I have also talked about “what do you do?” as a tool for clarifying the fiction so that moves can be made without confusion. Here we see a third use. Here, even as the “what do you do?” accomplishes those first two goals, it also serves to mediate the conversation taking place at the table. Back to page 8: “You and other players go back and forth . . . Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right?” With this “what do you do?” and every time it occurs, it is a way of passing the conversational conch to the other player. The MC has made her move (announcing future badness) and now it is the player’s turn to describe Keeler’s actions. And how do we know when the player is done with her turn? Page 88: “whenever there’s a pause in the conversation and everyone looks to you to say something,” make your move, Ms. MC. These are the basic building blocks of conversation in Apocalypse World. I make an MC move and ask “what do you do?” You describe your character’s actions, either triggering a move or not, and then looking at me expectantly, at which point we can repeat the exchange. In our example here, the MC makes her move, announcing future badness, and the player slides effortlessly into character and free play, engaging Plover with a question, “what’s up?” The MC joins in the free play, and although the text doesn’t specify, it looks like the MC lands on another move, for when she says that Plover has a shotgun in his hand and Church Head and Pellet are going to back him up, the MC sounds like she is telling the possible consequences and asking, or possibly offering an opportunity (to interfere), or maybe just continuing the announcement of future badness. Either way, there’s an unspoken “what do you do?” a clear challenge to Keeler’s player to get involved or step aside. During free play, the natural restrictions on the PC players is to stick to the fiction, say what their characters do and think, ask questions about the fiction, and answer questions asked of them. There are no mechanical or procedural limitations to their end of the conversation stated in the text. The conversation on the MC’s side is much more explicitly structured. Moves, for example. One of the things Apocalypse World does by structuring the MC’s side of the conversation with MC moves is that it forces free play to be productive narratively one way or the other. The MC is doing one of a few things at any given moment: 1) asking questions to create fiction or make the current fiction concrete; 2) answering questions by the players to create fiction or make the current fiction concrete; 3) creating fiction in response to a move that has been triggered, rolled for (or not), and needs resolving back into the fiction; or 4) making a move. You could make a case for a fifth option in engaging as NPCs in a dialogue, but I suspect that even then, the MC is making (or building up to) some kind of move or another. Now this limited range of MC participation in the conversation is never explicitly laid out like that, but it structures the conversation at all times all the same, and it’s one of the reasons game play runs so smoothly and eventfully. The back and forth and inevitable escalation of situations is built right into what is traditionally free play. Mind you, I still believe it is free play because the MC’s actions are governed by procedural rules rather than the hard teeth of mechanics. The Bakers have merely, to my understanding, analyzed what free play consists of and broke it down into its parts in order to shape the conversation in a way that gives the players the best possible chance to create a compelling, engaging, and interesting fiction. ”Plover thinks she’s just leaning her head on his shoulder, but she’s bleeding out her ears and eventually he’ll notice his shirt sticking to his shoulder from her blood. Do you stick around?” I’m telling possible consequences and asking.
”Fuck no.” ”Where do you go?” ”I go home, I guess.” ”So you’re home an hour later?” Se me setting up my future move! I’m thinking offscreen: how long is it going to take Plover to get a crew together? ”Hold on, it was only 1-harm – “ ”I know. She’ll be okay. It’s Plover who’s the biggest threat.” This is what honesty demands. “Are you home an hour later or where?” ”Shit. Yes, home.” ”Having tea?” Always ask questions! ”No tea. Pacing. I have my gun and my pain grenade and the door’s triple-locked. I wish Roark were here.” Let’s jump to the middle of this passage to talk about the moment that the MC says “what honesty demands.” Marie’s player is concerned about whatever the MC is planning here, but we never know what she’s thinking exactly, only that she protests that she did “only 1-harm.” To her concern, the MC responds, “I know. She’ll be okay. It’s Plover who’s the biggest threat.” This, we are told, is what honesty demands. I find this to be so interesting because it is not immediately clear which part of the MC’s response is the honest part. That Isle will be okay? Did Marie’s player think that the MC had killed Isle because of Marie’s brainer move? Possibly. Or did Marie’s player think that Isle herself was coming after Marie because of the attack and the MC is honestly telling her that no, it’s Plover who will be coming for her? Also possible. What I propose is that whatever Marie’s player thought was going on in the MC’s mind, it’s the statement “it’s Plover who’s the biggest threat” that is the honest statement . This is fascinating because a moment ago (see post no. 94), Plover’s being the biggest threat was a little bit of misdirection, a “fact” the MC capriciously made up in answer to a question. How can Plover’s threat level be both misdirection and subject to what honesty demands? How do you resolve the tension that exists in having misdirection and honesty apply to the same statement? This moment I think is at the crux of how fiction is handled by the MC in Apocalypse World. There’re plenty of times when the text (as I have pointed to again and again) urges the MC to follow the “logic” of the fiction, to follow through on the logical chain of cause and effect that the players create in the fiction. The MC preps threats and NPCs and sends them all out on their trajectories to see how they interact with the players’ characters. That method is one of the key ways the MC keeps her thumb off the scales and can play to find out what happens. So there’s that on the one hand. On the other hand is what I was talking about in post no. 94, that the MC is constantly making decisions based on real-world factors and then using misdirection to present those decisions within the fiction as though the details of the fiction are actually responsible for those decisions. How do those two things coexist? Where do they meet? In this chapter, they meet in the statement “Plover is the biggest threat.” When Marie’s player asks that question, the answer doesn’t exist and the MC has to capriciously decide. That’s the misdirection. But once the MC decides and lays out the misdirecting fictional details, that decision becomes a fact within the fiction. So when we get to who is coming after Marie, “Plover is the biggest threat” has moved from misdirection to fact and created something of a trajectory for Plover that the MC is bound to follow through on, even though it was mere fancy moments ago. Now, pursuing Plover’s reaction to Isle being psionically attacked is what honesty demands. Trajectories begin as mere MC-driven whim, but once they are in motion, the MC principles demand that they be seen through on their logical course. The other thing to note in this passage are all the questions being asked by the MC. Does Marie want to stick around? Where does she go? Is she at home an hour later, or somewhere else? Is she drinking tea or doing something else. As the MC asks questions trying to make the fiction concrete for her upcoming move, you can feel Marie’s player trying to squirm into a protective positioning. Fuck no, not here. Home. What a minute, are you being fair? Okay, home. Not tea. I’m alert and waiting. I’ve got my gun. And my grenade. And a door that is triple locked. It’s cool whatever her answers are. The MC just needs to know, not to fuck over Marie, but to have a concrete fictional setting in which to establish Plover’s efforts to settle the score. The asking of provocative questions (and the MC’s questions here certainly provoke Marie’s player) is to establish an agreed-upon fiction. The questions themselves aren’t a move by the MC, but a necessary precursor. If the fiction is not clear, the MC cannot make a move. The player has the right to decide where her character goes, so the MC cannot make a move placing Marie someplace Marie’s player hasn’t agreed to. Questions are the means of bringing the concrete details into focus in a way agreed upon by all concerned players so that the MC can make her move. These questions are a more focused form of “what do you do” that we saw in the last post (no. 96), but they leave the answer no less under the control of Marie’s player. ”Okay. I do direct-brain whisper projection on Isle.”
”Cool, what do you do?” ”Uh - we don’t have to interact, so I’m walking past under their feet where she can see me, and I whisper into her brain without looking up.” She rolls +weird and hits a 10+. ”What’s your whisper?” ”Follow me,” she says ”Yeah,” I say. “She inches her butt forward to drop down behind you, but then tips her head like she’s thinking of something – “ Don’t do it,” Marie’s player says. ”She forces your hand,” I say. “She takes 1-harm, right? Loud-optional, right? So, loud or not?” ”Isle, god damn it. Not loud.” ”Sweet”(127-128). Now that Marie has assessed the situation, she has to decide how she’s going to get to Isle to “visit grief” upon her. She wants to lead Isle away from Plover and Mill in order to be able to deal with her alone. Cool. So she uses her brainer move. But of course the move is triggered by the fiction, so the MC asks, “Cool, what do you do?” Note in Marie’s player’s response, the fiction doesn’t have to be elaborate, merely clear. In this case, the fiction needs to establish where Marie is in the scene and that Isle can see her (as dictated by the move). No one needs to describe the dirt caked on Isle’s boots or the heat radiating off the garage. If the players wanted to embellish the fictional details, the game certainly allows it, but nothing in the game requires it. In fact, when Marie makes her whisper, there is no elaboration of what that looks or sounds like. Perhaps this isn’t her first time making the move so that detail has already been established, but perhaps not; perhaps this is the first time. In that case, we can assume that there is nothing to be seen from the outside. No one watching Marie would have any idea she was whisper projecting. I draw attention to this only because a lot of players love the rich fiction that comes out of playing Apocalypse World or other games powered by the Apocalypse. It is worth noting that while the game grounds play within the fiction, it doesn’t actually make a lot of demands on the richness of that fiction. Enough fiction needs to exist and be concrete enough for moves to trigger and for MCs to be able to make their moves, but how rich you get in your play is entirely up to you and beyond the push of the game’s mechanics. Note also that the game is not particular about the order in which the fictional details are created. Technically you can’t direct-brain whisper to someone without whispering something in particular, some action you are trying to force your target to take. What was whispered wasn’t specified before the roll, but it’s no big deal. If she had, great; since she didn’t, it needs to be clarified now, so the MC asks, “What’s your whisper?” If Marie’s player had rolled a miss, the MC would still need to know the whisper in order to make her move as hard as she liked. So the MC is asking questions here like she did earlier (“You do? It’s charged?”). That first set of questions (see post no. 93) was about negotiating assent surrounding the triggering of Marie’s read the situation move. This set of questions is about clarifying the fiction for play to move forward. See all that damn work that questions are doing during play? (I’m currently a little obsessed with the purpose of questions between players in roleplaying games, so expect more analysis of questions in the next couple of posts.) Finally, let’s take a moment to appreciate that the entire scene of play that follows is born from a strong hit, a 10+. As I’ve observed before, strong hits don’t get much love in the Apocalypse World community, often overlooked by the heart-filled eyes that players have for the 7-9 result. The text tells us that the way to make a strong hit meaningful is to make it “consequential” (pg 86), and that’s what the Bakers demonstrate in this extended example. Isle doesn’t just resist, take the damage, and Marie tries to find some other way to visit grief upon her. No, Marie’s move permanently changes the situation, and the MC has the NPCs actively respond to that changed situation. That’s MCing like a boss. ”Hm, now I want an escape route. Can I read the situation again?”
”Of course not.” Once is what you get, unless the situation substantially changes (127). This is just a quick post to praise the excellent dialogue in this example. As I said in post no. 92, this chapter is an example more of the conversation created by the game than of anything else. As such, it needs to represent a conversation we can imagine ourselves having. Here, the “Once is what you get” could easily have been part of the spoken statement rather than as an aside for us the reader. Instead, all the MC says is “Of course not,” because these are all experienced players and friends. You can already picture how horrible this dialogue could be if it were written only to teach the rules: “Can I read the situation?” “Sure, as long as it’s charged! How is it charged, do you think?” “Well, I came here to pick a fight, right? So wouldn’t my simply being here charge the situation?” “Absolutely!” “I roll both dice, right? And add . . . let me see . . . my sharp stat! Oh no. Looks like I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed! 5+5 would be a strong hit, but my -1 takes it down to a 9. Darn! At least it’s not a miss.” Oy. It could have been more wooden, condescending, and didactic than an after-school special. We have all read samples of play like that in other RPG texts, so it wouldn’t have been shocking if it happened here. But instead, we get dialogue that hews pretty closely to lively table talk. Yes, the rules are certainly being taught in the example (otherwise there would be no need to include whether the situation could be read again at all), but that goal is secondary to demonstrating the conversation itself. “Which of my enemies is the biggest threat?” she says.
”Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard fucker. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.” (See me misdirect! I just chose one capriciously, then pointed to fictional details as though they’d made the decision. We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.) (127) I like this moment in the example, because I wouldn’t have thought of answering the question that way - with shit you just made up - as misdirecting. Isn’t that just what you have to do to answer the question? By calling it as an act of misdirection, the text emphasizes what misdirection is. Any time you as the MC say a thing about the fiction, whether you are aware of it or not, you are making a decision about what you say based on real-world concerns. You might be thinking about dramatic possibilities or how to put pressure on the scene or how to add to the tone or themes you’ve been playing with - whatever. Even if your decision amounts to “wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” you are deciding the thing outside of the fiction. The command to misdirect is to present that made-decision to the players as fiction. So what I think is cool here is that the example takes a moment that most of us would just do instinctively and points out that we are following a principle just by doing it. Being mindful of that is not necessary to MCing the game, but it is an important insight into how the game functions. It’s easy as an MC to think that you are playing only within the fiction, that sometimes you aren’t picking moves so much as the moves are practically picking themselves. The players are giving you fiction and you are responding by giving them fiction. That’s how it can feel, especially if you are excited by the fiction unspooling before you. But as the example shows us, the choice to make Plover the biggest threat is actually a capricious one. The fictional details are pointed to “as though they’d made the decision,” but they didn’t. The MC could have easily said that Isle was the biggest danger and have come up with fictional reasons why, or Mill as well. Truly, the answer could have been anyone and it would have been just as good. What “misdirect” means here is cloaking that capricious decision in fictional details. In fact, it is the fictional details themselves that constitute the misdirection. If the answer had simply been, “Plover,” with no explanation, there would have been no misdirection, just an incomplete answering of the question. It’s the grounding of the decision in fictional details that makes the answer appear to have come from the fiction itself. Why is that important? Because those fictional details are what the player needs in order to make her next move. Those fictional details are used by the player to decide what her character does, how she approaches the scene. If the answer had been, “Plover, but not by much, they all look sickly and unable to put up much of a fight,” that changes everything, right? And that’s the magic of Apocalypse World. The fiction isn’t just something that comes out of play; the fiction is critical to play, the substance of play itself. Details can’t be glossed over in a couple of vague statements because the players need those details to say what they do, need those details to trigger their moves. And the MC needs those details from the players to know what MC move to pick and how to detail the fiction of the move back into the scene. Back and forth, each player requires concrete fiction from the other player in order to do her thing. Without that fictional detail, play grinds to a halt. When that happens questions need to be asked back and forth until that fictional details are properly established and play can move on. Now you don’t need to know any of that for the game to function. The game will force you to misdirect with fictional details whether you like it or not because the players will ask for clarification in order to trigger their moves. But while you can MC without the understanding, I suspect that you can MC more powerfully with it. The details that misdirect in this example all affect the encounter. We know that Plover is a hard fucker and that he is currently without his armor, but has a gun in his boot. We know that Isle is no push over. And we know that there is a kid present, who if not innocent, isn’t violent. And Mill isn’t just any kid, he’s Isle’s little brother. That collection of people makes knowing what to do tough for Marie’s player. She might be okay getting in a fight with Plover, but does she want to do so in front of Mill? Even if Marie’s not sensitive to possibly traumatizing Mill, could Mill run off to get more of Isle’s family? The MC is only answering the player’s question, but she is doing so with details that make the next decision of what to do a hard one. You as the MC are in control of the fiction in these moments of misdirection, not the other way around. Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs).
”I read the situation,” her player says. ”You do? It’s charged?” I say. ”It is now.” ”Ahh,” I say. I understand perfectly: the three NPCs don’t realize it, but Marie’s arrival charges the situation. If it were a movie, the sound track would be picking up, getting sinister. She rolls+sharp and hits with 7-9, so she gets to ask me one question from the move’s list. (126) First, it’s notable that we begin with Marie’s player pursuing Marie’s own agenda. The MC has not thrown an encounter or a crisis at the character but is instead responding to the player’s actions. It’s a subtle choice to have the extended example begin this way, but an important one to understanding the way the game was designed with character agency in mind. Second, the first move we encounter in the example is Read a Sitch. It’s an interesting choice for a first move since it doesn’t have much fiction surrounding it. My instinct would be to start with a move that drives home the importance of “to do it, do it.” Instead, to make the move, Marie’s player just has to declare she’s reading the situation. Well, that’s not really all she has to do, is it? The MC asks for clarification, not of the “cool, what do you do?” sort, but of the “let’s clarify the fiction” sort all the same. The only situations that can be read by the move are charged ones. “Charged” would have been a great word to add to my “natural language” discussion – post no. 90 – since the word is both consistently used and not technical or jargony in its use. What is a “charged” situation? That’s for the players to agree on among themselves, but to me it means filled with potential energy on the verge of becoming kinetic. So the MC asks how the situation is charged. I read, “You do? It’s charged?” not as a challenge, but as a surprised inquiry. The scene the MC painted was not one of conflict, but one of relative peace. The three NPCs are having a quiet moment sitting in harmony and eating peaches. The player can approach this scene in any way she wants, so there is no reason to assume the situation is charged—and it’s not, until the player says it is. Remember, Marie is here “to visit grief upon” Isle. Note that the MC does not say, “No, you can only read charged situations. How is it charged?” In other words, the MC is not making the player justify the triggering of the move, with the player making a case and the MC being the arbiter of whether the move was triggered or not. Instead, this is a subtle negotiation between the players so that they agree about what is happening, and with that agreement, the move can trigger. The MC’s inquiry is met with “It is now,” which is in turn met with “Ahh.” That “Ahh” marks the assent from the MC to the situation being charged. Everyone involved in the scene understands the fiction, “understand[s] perfectly” even. Because the fiction of the situation is clear, Marie’s player rolls without further checking in or discussing what’s happening. I don’t really know if this is the case, but in my head, the Bakers began the example this way because that relationship between players and the way the game structures communication and assent are critical features in the way Apocalypse World functions at the table. Before we can get to “cool, what do you do,” we have to understand that state of the fiction is determined not through MC fiat but through shared assent. As a final observation, let’s take a moment to praise the MC for constructing a scene with the potential for conflict. Presumably, Marie’s player said she was going to find Isle. The MC could have had Isle alone in her quarters or anywhere else, but instead she created a scene in which Marie is accompanied by two other NPCs, one of whom is in Keeler’s gang, as we’ll later find out. Whatever Marie wants to see Isle for, having to deal with 3 people is a much more complicated affair than having to deal with one person. Not only that, but they’re all on the roof! Now Marie has to either shout up to them, or climb up on the roof if she wants to have a direct encounter with Isle. That’s a pretty brilliant construction for a scene. (Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder what move the MC made to create the scene. Since she is surprised that the scene is charged, and given the peach-eating quiet of the whole thing, she almost certainly wasn’t announcing future badness. I suspect she was offering an opportunity (to talk to or confront Isle) with a cost (of having to conduct that exchange in front of Plover and Mill).) Shared publicly•View activity Before we dive into the extended example that makes up this chapter, let’s take a moment to appreciate what it is an example of. It is not an example of fiction created, but an example of the conversation that the game structures.
Yes, fiction is created in the example, and the mechanics are demonstrated, but those things exist only within the conversation as they are presented in this chapter. A lot of RPGs provide examples of the kinds of things characters can do or the ways mechanics function, but they seldom (in my experience) anchor them to the conversation itself. Since the medium of play is conversation, and since the rules of an RPG shape and govern that conversation, it seems only natural that the conversation itself should be the subject of examples in RPG texts. Moreover, part of the design philosophy behind Apocalypse World is that the rules of the game should make it likely that the players (and relatively easy for them to) say interesting things to each other in play. This extended example, then, is about the interesting things you say in the conversation that creates the fiction. A related aside: In one of the recent RPG Design Panelcast episodes (“The Confused State of Rulebooks,” 1/6/18 release date), +Jessica Hammer tells the story of an assignment she gave to her students to design an app that helps novice roleplayers learn to play Pathfinder. To do that, they needed to research what impediments stood between the novice roleplayers and their ability to learn to play the game. The students found that the biggest concern for new players was . . . the conversation: “novice roleplayers had a really hard time understanding how to construct a sentence that was meaningful in the world. They literally did not know how to speak, what they were allowed to say.” (0:19:50). So, yes, an example needs to show what the players can do and how certain mechanics in the game interact with other mechanics, but what it needs to do above all is demonstrate the play itself, that is, the conversation. Demonstrating the conversation is the RPG equivalent of boardgame rulebooks’ pictures of the board and the pieces in demonstrating setup and play. You will find that none of the examples in Apocalypse World exist outside of a conversation. All the MC example moves? Examples from the basic moves chapter? Examples in discussing harm and life becoming untenable? They are all presented as dialogue and conversational excerpts because in the end, RPG play doesn’t exist outside of conversation. No game exemplifies that understanding more thoroughly than Apocalypse World. Any given conflict between characters, one move alone probably won’t resolve it. Very often it’ll take several moves and countermoves, a whole back-and-forth between them. Hitting rolls on a 7-9, especially, usually leaves a whole lot unresolved, primed for followthrough or a counterstrike (126).
That’s the first paragraph of the chapter Moves Snowball, and it seems to me to be carefully worded to conjure of the issue of conflict resolution without ever calling it conflict resolution. The word “conflict” only appears in one other place in the whole text, and that is in reference to the MC having a conflict of interest with the players if the MC plays her part adversarially (top of page 82). Resolve appears not once, but twice here, both times letting you know resolution is not the end result of a single move. Added all together, this paragraph states that moves are not about conflict resolution. Why not just say that? While conflict resolution is a common term or art, it is still a term of art, and the Bakers don’t seem interested in having the game burdened with preconceived ideas of RPG theory, even casual ones. In this paragraph, then, if you are sensitive to the theory, it’s there for you to see. If you’re not, then you just read the paragraph as meaning exactly what it means. Easy enough. For those of us who look at an RPG and think in terms of resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks, we are told here not to think of moves in Apocalypse World in terms of conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is about seeing how the conflict as a whole is settled, if the goal of a character is achieved through the conflict. I want to subdue this woman and get the information out of her. I state my goal, work out the stakes with the other players, roll the dice, and interpret them to decide whether my goal was achieved or missed, and translate that into the fiction. But moves in Apocalypse World aren’t designed to resolve conflict but to generate and perpetuate it, as the rest of this chapter shows us through the example of play. Moves are not designed simply to denote success or failure but to permanently alter the situation from one state to another. The moves cascade very naturally. Holds overlap, outcomes nest and double up and flow seamlessly into the new moves. Just remember the rule - if you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it - and see their logic through. That “see their logic through” is the part that permanently alters the situation into a new situation. I have spoken many times in past posts about how internal logic and causality within the fiction are the backbone of play in Apocalypse World (posts 27, 35, and 47 in particular, I think). A 10+ is as permanent a change as a 6-, and when followed through logically, should have as much impact on play as a 7-9, even if it is potentially not as immediate or frenzied. (Remember: “the way to make a character’s success interesting is to make it consequential. When a character accomplishes something, have all of your NPCs respond. Reevaluate all those PC-NPC-PC triangles you’ve been creating. Whose needs change? Whose opinions change? Who was an enemy, but now is afraid; who was an enemy, but now sees better opportunities as an ally? Let the characters’ success make waves outward, let them topple already unstable situations. There are no status quos in Apocalypse World” (86).) Now, a skilled GM can take an RPG with resolution mechanics and make those results alter the fiction in permanent ways that simultaneously push the story forward by pressuring the characters and demanding actions and reactions from them. The brilliance of Apocalypse World is that its moves mechanize the creation of unstable situations out of other unstable situations. Moves are situation-propelling mechanisms rather than resolution mechanisms, which is precisely what the opening paragraphs in this chapter point out, and ultimately what the whole of this chapter demonstrates. There has been a ton of digital ink spilled on what it means to “make as hard and direct a move as you like” (89). Nearly every pbta book published after Apocalypse World spends time defining and explaining “hard moves,” by opposing them to “soft moves” or by placing them on a scale of hardness or by using any other technique to make the distinction clear to their readers. Apocalypse World is unique in leaving the matter without a strict definition. Why do that? Isn’t a rule book supposed to make everything unambiguous and easy to follow?
As I used to tell my students back when I taught literature, when something is unclear in a text and you trust the author to know what they are doing, that lack of clarity is the point. Is Hamlet mad or is he conniving? Find your textual evidence for each interpretation, but if you find that that evidence is inconclusive, then that ambiguity is purposeful and is itself worthy of analysis. In writing their 2nd edition, the Bakers had the choice to nail down the issue of hardness in MC moves, and they chose to leave it as it is. This is the way they want it. There is no glossary to Apocalypse World. There might be cool use of words in the text, but there are no terms of art. Hx is unique to the game, but it mean “history” in the way it is commonly used. The stats are defined for us so we know what they cover, but the words don’t have special meaning. The lists of words that clarify the stats on page 71 are not presented as a restrictive list but as a representative live. They show you a range of meanings to help you understand the flavor of the words; they don’t set the words in concrete. When discussing MC moves, the authors make clear that “[t]hey aren’t technical terms or jargon: ‘announce future badness,’ for instance, means think of something bad that’s probably going to happen in the future, and announce it” (88). Similarly “hard” is natural language without a strict, in-game definition. The advantage of natural language is that it allows the text (and rules of the game) to live and breathe, rather than suffering from interpretive ossification. We see the game delight openly in these broad definitions with a move like “Seize by force.” You can seize something physical like a box of ammunition or something more abstract like advantageous positioning or someone’s undivided attention. Only natural language lets one move accomplish so much. Moreover that broadness allows the players to think of things the game designers might not have anticipated, because so much can be “seized” in the fullest sense of the word. Same thing with “Act under fire”: it allows the “fire” to be anything that pressures or limits the characters when acting. What stories do you have of a creative use of “Seize by force” or “Act under fire”? Those cool stories exist because the designers created the room for your own imaginative applications, and they did that by avoiding jargon and technical terms. “Making as hard and direct a move as you like” leaves the definition of “hard and direct” up to you. They want you to think about what that means. They want you to engage with the possible range of meaning. They want you to surprise yourself with the ways that hardness and directness can express themselves during play. Instead of worrying that there is a right way and a wrong way to make a move as hard as you like, you should explore the possibilities and know that there is no wrong way to do it when MCing Apocalypse World. My textual evidence for this position is that there are three common ways to think about hardness, and all three are presented in the text without one being prioritized over the others. The first way is to make the move irrevocably change the situation. We see this referred to on page 114: “If the players have handed you a golden opportunity (like if they blow a roll, or if they let you set something up and follow through on it), make as hard and direct a move as you like, the more irrevocable the better.” The second way is to think about the hardness of the move in opposition to the typical softness of standard moves. This method often talks about “softer” moves giving PCs a chance to react while “harder” moves create a change before letting the PCs react. We see this approach supported on page 89: “Generally, limit yourself to a move that’ll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players’ characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion.” The idea appears again on page 114: “Otherwise, make your move to set yourself up and to offer them the opportunity to react.” The third way is to think about hardness as emotionally hard or surprising. The best example of this is on page 149: Marie practically keeps house in the world’s psychic maelstrom. She thinks ghosts live in there and maybe she’s right. She goes in there to consult with them, and (unusually) misses the roll. I’m tempted to capture her, but instead for my hard move I decide to announce future badness—not often a hard move, but in this case, it counts. We play out her conversation with the ghosts, but they aren’t helpful and she comes out frustrated. ‘Roark’s there,’ I say. ‘He looks happy, his face has this look of wonder on it. “Marie!” he says. “Marie, such a gift you’ve given me!” ‘I What?’ she says. ‘Roark, are you okay?’ ‘I’m not Roark,’ I say, and not in Roark’s voice. ‘It’s me, Monk!’ Every and all of these ways are good and fine ways to make your move as hard as you like, and each one is supported by the text. What constitutes a hard move is yours as the MC to decide. The openness of the text is one of the things I love about Apocalypse World. The lack of jargon and insistence on natural language and its inherent flexibility is one of the things that makes the language of Apocalypse World feel poetic and oddly alive. A competent rule book needs to communicate who can do what when and how gameplay properly unfolds. A stellar rule book does that while letting you feel that the possibilities of the game reach far into the shadows beyond what the text can illuminate. To me, that’s what AW uses natural language to do, and it does it amazingly well. It’s a text that gives you all the tools and then trusts you to run with the game in ways that would surprise the designers as well as yourself. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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