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I have talked a lot about the examples in Apocalypse World throughout these posts because they are unique and thoughtful in what they demonstrate. Every time I plan on not talking about an example, I find something about it that is too cool to pass up.
The examples from Act Under Fire do everything we have come to expect from examples in the book. Namely, they exemplify not only how to MC the game and how the rules work, but how the conversation looks in action. The coolest element here is the decision to show what “a mistake and correction” look like in play. I can’t think of another RPG that does this, but it is an inspired part of the text. If an RPG rule book should communicate not only the rules of the game, but give the players the tools they need to have the conversation in which play exists, then showing that mistakes will be made and easily corrected is a real gift to the players. Here’s the passage: Audrey the driver’s blundered into Dremmer’s territory and gone to earth. She’s lying up against a wall amid the debris with a plastic tarp over her, trying to look like not-a-person-at-all, while a 2-thug patrol of Dremmer’s gang passes by. If they spot her they’ll drag her to Dremmer and she wants that zero at all. She hits the roll with a 9, so I get to offer her a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. “Yeah,” I say. “So you’re holding still and you can’t really keep them in your sight. They, um, they spot you, but you don’t realize it.” I think about this for a second. It doesn’t seem quite right, and Audrey’s player is looking at me like I might be cheating. “Actually wait wait. You hit the roll, you didn’t miss it.” “I was gonna say,” Audrey’s player says. “So no,” I say. “Instead, they haven’t spotted you, but they’re getting closer and closer. They’ll be on top of you in just a minute but if you do something right this second you’ll have the drop on them. What do you do?” I really like that description of things going sour – the feeling that something’s not quite right, the unhappy-not-in-a-good-way look from the player, the realization of the error, and the player’s “I was gonna say.” But once the problem is identified, the fiction’s wound is healed with two words: “no, instead.” And that’s all it takes to correct the mistake, rewrite the fiction, and build the momentum back up. By the time the MC gets to “What do you do?” no one at the table cares about the moment before. So two things are accomplished in this one example. First, it takes an earlier general warning (“remember that a 7 – 9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure”) and lets us see a specific expression of what that looks like in play. The example makes concrete the difference between a worse outcome and a failure, which is infinitely more useful than an abstract warning. Second, it shows us how the conversation surrounding such an error works and how small a deal making such an error is. That’s comforting and instructive to inexperienced and experienced MCs alike. We don’t need to go into the other three examples, but we should note that it’s clever how the Bakers not only worked in examples of a strong hit, a weak hit, and a miss, they did so while simultaneously offering examples of a worse outcome, a hard bargain, and an ugly choice. I don’t think that needs any analysis; it’s just cool, and deftly handled. Examples can be tricky to write because they need to be instructive, but not patronizing; immediately understandable, but not obvious. And on top of all of that, they should be inspiring, portraying exciting moments that let you envision what play looks like and make you want to get your friends together as quickly as possible to have similar experiences. That is, I think, precisely what these example do.
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We’re back to look more at the Act Under Fire move. I am particularly interested in the way that the “fire” is characterized. Here’s the explanatory text that follows the move itself:
You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. I often say things like “okay, roll to act under fire, and the fire is just how badly that’s going to hurt,” “…and the fire is, can you really get that close to her without her noticing?” or “…and the fire is, if you fuck it up, they’ll be ON your ass.” Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first. On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure. First, there is no rule that says you have to define what the fire is; instead, we get a recommendation: “I often say . . . .” The Bakers do not make something a rule unless it is necessary for the game to do what it is designed to do. It never hurts to name the fire, but it is not always necessary. What does naming the fire accomplish? It clarifies for all the players why this move is being triggered. If you can’t name the fire, then the fiction doesn’t have someone “requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care,” and they can probably just do it without triggering the move. The move triggers when there is something unknown about the possible outcome: “how badly that’s going to hurt,” “can you really get that close without her noticing?” and can you do this without fucking up and having them “ON your ass”? By clarifying the fire, the players are identifying the question being asked that the roll will answer. Or, to put it differently, defining what the fire is sets the stakes for the roll. Really, what are stakes other than a shared clarity of the fiction? If the fiction is well-established and the situation is dramatic, then everyone at the table is already asking themselves the questions posed by naming the fire. If everyone is asking separate questions, then the fiction itself is probably muddled. Naming the fire, then, is a quick checking in rather than establishing something new, which is why it’s less of a rule than a suggested practice. It’s important that the fiction be detailed and clear (and hence the stakes be detailed and clear) going into the roll, but it is just as important on the other side of the roll, especially for the 7 – 9 result, for that’s when you need to “look at the circumstances and find something fun.” If you’ve done it right, “it should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice.” If you’re having a hard time finding some fun way to fuck with the situation it’s either because the fiction itself is unclear or because there’s no actual fire under which the PCs are acting. In this way, the move is self-regulating. If you don’t clarify things before the dice hit the table, you are forced to do so afterwards in order to work those dice results back into the fiction. Act Under Fire: roll+cool
When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7-9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. On a miss, be prepared for the worst (136). It’s very easy to see this as Apocalypse World’s “do a thing” move: “Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first” (137). The results of the roll are generally applicable to any situation – on a strong hit, you fully succeed; on a weak hit, you are given a complication; on a miss, prepare for the worst. It is the most stripped-down structure for a move, and as such it served as the inspiration for Dungeon World’s Defy Danger move, which in turn led John Harper to make it the foundation of the only move in his World of Dungeons. Between the Bakers’ “come here first” and the popularity of Defy Danger, it’s tempting to overlook the specificity of Act Under Fire. Defy Danger and the World of Dungeons move both require the players to figure out what stat the acting character is tapping into to solve her problem, because the move applies to all stats, so you are rolling+whatever-is-relevant. Significantly, that’s not the case with Act Under Fire. Everything about Act Under Fire is about the cool stat. In fact, while the authors might define the cool stat on page 11 (“meaning cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, unfazed”), it is really this move that defines what coolness means in the game. In other words, cool as a stat only exists to give this move a mechanical variable. Without this move (and a handful of other moves tapping into the same character trait prominent in the main characters inhabiting Apocalypse World) cool wouldn’t exist as a stat. The written definition of cool orients us to the meaning, but Act Under Fire shows us what that actually looks like in the game world. All of the language in the move itself and the passage that follows the move, is about the characters’ ability to remain calm and focused in the face of “serious pressure.” I’m struck by the oft overlooked phrase “or dig in to endure fire” because sometimes acting under fire means keeping from mis-acting under fire. The endurance referred to here is not a physical, constitutional endurance, but a mental, determined endurance. The detail of what it means to roll a 7-9 is similarly about that mental resolve. Flinching, hesitating, and stalling point to a slight break in resolve, discipline, and endurance, enough of a hiccup to reduce the strong hit to a weak one. “[Y]ou flinch, hesitate, or stall” is the narrative effect of your roll, which leads to a mechanical effect of the MC offering you “a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.” In the paragraph following the move, the authors clarify that “[y]ou can read ‘under fire’ to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance, or care.” (Side note: I have many times talked about the poetry of the prose in this text, and I love the rhythm of that list from discipline to care. Try putting those words in any other order and you can feel the sentence stutter and uncoil.) So what is the significance that this, the most general move in the game, is focused solely on cool? It indicates that determination, that mental discipline, resolve, and endurance, are central to challenges faced in the game by the main characters. The main characters are going to have to endure and overcome a lot of hardships, but the rest of the rules of the game (especially those applying to the MC) will tend to point you to a place that the characters are having to dig deep within their own reserves to withstand danger and unpleasantness. Unlike Defy Danger, you will not use Act Under Fire to figure out if a character can leap a great distance, push a heavy boulder, or slide through a narrow opening. If you do use it to determine such things, you will need to phrase the dilemma in terms of mental resolve rather than physical toughness or dexterous ability. Leaping the distance just because you want to get to the other side isn’t really subject to a roll. Either you can do it or you can’t and the MC will tell you which. But leaping the distance as you are being chased by a gang of brutes intent on spilling blood? Now the leap is a test of your discipline and resolve. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one, revealing to us the dramatic heart of Apocalypse World in action. Of course, there are moves that let you act under fire with other stats. A battle-hardened gunlugger can use her hard to act under fire instead of her cool. A maestro d’ with the You Call this Hot? move can act under fire with hot rather than cool. And a spooky intense savvyhead can use her weird when acting under fire. All of these substitutions change the way those players handle serious pressure; they don’t change the way the game doles out situations full of serious pressure. A battle-hardened gunlugger uses pure physical brutishness to muscle her way through the fire. A maestro d’ being chased by that gang of brutes will leap that distance by calling on her grace and hotness, rather than her internal discipline. In short, those character moves tell us about the characters and the way they confront pressure. The MC is still bringing situations packed with “serious pressure.” In my next post, we’ll look at the nature of the “fire” and the examples the text gives us of the move in play. Before I end though, let’s all applaud the phrases “a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.” It is probably one of the most popular phrases in the text (I know, there are so many), and deservedly so. There’s the lovely syntactic balance of adjectives and nouns, the neat inversion of a the single- and double-syllable words in the final coupling, the always-pleasant triad of options, the straightforwardness of meaning from good straightforward words – but mostly, there’s the clear communication that something unpleasant is coming. You don’t want any of these things, but like a kid terrified of and thrilled by a monster rollercoaster, you want all of them and the excitement they promise. There are dozens of possible outcomes with those options, and each one will offer an exciting turn for both the narrative and the players’ characters. What’s not to love? Before we start talking about the basic moves, let’s take a moment to puzzle over the picture that introduces the chapter. What an interesting choice!
What is she doing? Her hands are up, fingers spread, as though she were showing that she’s unarmed. It’s almost as if she’s reacting to someone going aggro, “back[ing] off calmly, hands where you can see,” but her arms are not naturally positioned for that, are they? Her arms are close and elbows in as though she were forced into a small space. But then her head is thrown slightly back and her lips parted with an unreadable expression. Is that pleasure? Longing? Unconsciousness? And her hair: it runs down the front of her face in thick strands like clumps of wet hair. The way the black envelops her, she’s reminiscent of Ophelia half submerged in the inky black river. Her state of dress (or undress) is entirely ambiguous. Why choose this image for the chapter on basic moves? Is she on the receiving end of someone going aggro? Is she seducing or manipulating someone? Is she digging in to endure fire? Is she in need of help? I know that I would like to read her as a person and the situation in which she has found herself. Perhaps she has opened her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, receiving weird visions and communications from that unnatural howling at the edge of our perception. That, I think, is my favorite reading, but there’s nothing textual to support that idea. All we know is that the picture depicts someone who is vulnerable, intimate, and strange, and whose strangeness makes her potentially threatening. How perfectly like Apocalypse World. That seems to me the point of the image. It’s a reminder that the moves are about interacting with other characters, sometimes intimately, sometimes strangely, but someone is always vulnerable and exposed. It’s easy to focus on the violence implied by acting under fire, going aggro, and suckering someone, but most of the moves are about understanding and engaging with your fellow human beings, whether you’re reading them, seducing or manipulating them, helping them, or seeing traces of them in the psychic maelstrom. Going aggro is about reaching out to another person, even if it is through the threat of physical violence, and the fire under which you act is as likely to be social and personal as it is to be violent and life-threatening. At its most basic level, the game is about negotiating with other characters, other human beings, PCs and NPCs alike, to try to make of this world what you can. The humanity at issue – and the vulnerability of that humanity – is what I think this picture is all about. I spoke in passing in my last post about the way the MC agenda items and principles align the interests of the MC with those of the other players. As far as aligning the interests between other players goes, the game isn’t overly concerned about it because for the most part it anticipates the characters are working together, even if uncomfortably at times. Obviously, PvP came up often enough after the first edition of Apocalypse World was released that the Bakers had to put some official rules in place for the second edition. But you can tell by the writing, that PvP is not something the game delights in or encourages. PvP is something the rules deal with.
Here are the PvP rules in the second edition: First of all, emphasize that we have rules for this and we’re going to follow them. When it turns to PC vs PC, everybody wants to start shouting all at once and race to be the first to roll their dice, and that’s no good. Then go around the table to find out what everybody’s going to do, but have them hold onto their dice. Don’t let them roll yet. Everybody gets a turn to say what they’re doing, and they can change their mind if they need to, and nothing happens until everyone’s had their say. Include your NPCs. (This is based closely on the “free and clear” phase in Ron Edwards’ game Sorcerer.) Once you know what everyone’s going to do, have them roll dice in the order that makes sense to you, taking turns or rolling simultaneously as you think best, always following the logic of the moves themselves. Sometimes a character’s action won’t count as a move. That’s okay. Don’t have the player roll, just acknowledge what they do and say what comes of it or how it affects everyone else’s actions. Sometimes a character’s action counts as more than one move. That’s okay. Have the player roll them all, in the order that makes sense to you. After everyone’s done what they’re going to do, and you’ve resolved everyone’s actions and overseen everyone’s moves, sum up how the situation has changed. If it’s resolved, move on. If it hasn’t, go around again, having everyone say what they’re going to do and hold onto their dice until you’re ready to have them roll (132-133) The thing that sticks out to me most about this passage is its tone. There is nothing in this passage that wants to sell you on how cool PvP can be in Apocalypse World. The rules are functional and reasonable, and that is precisely how they are presented. In fact, in this passage, the Bakers sound like parents who are fully prepared to turn this car around if we in the backseat don’t stop misbehaving: “we have rules for this and we’re going to follow them.” Yes, Sirs! Each sentence that follows is a direct, no-nonsense statement that tells us exactly what we need to know and no more. The “that’s okay”s in the third and fourth paragraphs don’t communicate the usual calming, “you got this” tone. There’s nothing playful or encouraging, just orderly and instructive. It’s like talking to the IT woman who has had a long day and is ready for you to just follow her instructions and stop fucking up your computer. There is no encouragement about snowballing here, no enticement of the sweet things that can happen if the main characters go at each other’s throats. Instead, we get, “If it’s resolved, move on.” And that pretty well captures the spirit of this passage: PvP is something to resolve and move on. If you own or have access to Urban Shadows, compare this passage to the one there, on pages 207-208. Hell, compare it to just about any other passage in Apocalypse World and you’ll see how dry this is, leeched of humor, poetry, and general excitement. This steak doesn’t sizzle. It’s properly cooked and meets the required nutritional and health requirements as mandated by local ordinances, but that’s about it. ”Right,” Marie’s player says. “That’s okay. I pick up his chainsaw and chop into them both.”
Damn. I’m impressed. ”I think that makes it a battle,” I say. “You’re seizing something by force, yeah? Seizing your room back I guess?” ”Yeah.” ”Roll it.” I have absolutely no interest in saving these NPCs, none. I’m looking at them through crosshairs, and as much as I like them, I do not make them safe. She rolls+hard and hits a 7-9. “How much harm will I inflict?” she says. She has to decide which seize-by-force option to choose, and first wants to know what’s what. ”With a chainsaw? 3-harm. Messy, so you might hit one or both of them. They’re wearing armor, though, 1-armor.” ”And I’ll suffer . . . ?” ”Well, none from Plover, you’ll hit him first and since he dropped the chainsaw he’s unarmed anyway. Pellet still has her handgun, it’s just a 9mm, so 2-harm from her.” ”That’s fine. I’ll choose to inflict terrible harm, and to impress, dismay or frighten my enemy” (130-131). I have talked about the conversation created by Apocalypse World several times already, but I think there is (at least) one more thing to say, and I think this passage demonstrates that thing to some degree. It is very easy to confuse the conversation for the fiction being produced by the words that come out of our mouths at the table. It is easy to think that the conversation that the game constructs is “my dude does this,” “the worlds reacts thus.” But the conversation encapsulates everything said at the table, not just the bits that actively contribute to the fiction. Here, the question about which move might be triggered (“You’re seizing something by force, yeah?”), about how much harm has been established by the situation (“With a chainsaw? 3-harm” and “none from Plover”), and about what options are available to the player by the rules (“I’ll choose to inflict terrible harm, and to impress, dismay or frighten my enemy”) are all parts of the conversation that are structured by the game. Think about how different the conversation surrounding the players’ actions and choices are during play of any other RPG. Universalis will include conversations about pennies, and established facts, and how much it costs to destroy this or create that—that’s part of the conversation of the game. Dread creates conversation about the pulling of blocks, which block you might want to draw out, etc. To play Call of Cthulhu is to talk about your skill sets, sanity points, target numbers, and bouts of insanity. Part of the conversation of Ten Candles is whose Moment is up, how hard it is to read the dice in the dwindling light, and whether you want to burn a trait or not. In Bubblegumshoe you need to talk about whose rank is highest in this skill so you know who gets the clue, and whether that player wants to spend more points to get extra information. Or you might discuss who has to pay what in order to successfully piggyback off someone else’s roll. It’s not just that each game creates different fiction in different ways, but it structures and limits the very way that we discuss the rules surrounding those processes. And all of that is part of the conversation of the game, part of the back and forth between players. Part of exemplifying the conversation is exemplifying this part of the conversation, and that seems to me to be the purpose of including this part of the conversation here. This whole section could have been summarized in a couple of sentences saying that Marie’s player chose her seize-by-force option and harm as established was exchanged, but it wasn’t summarized. So what do we learn from this part of the conversation? We learn that the MC is entirely up front with everything going on in the fiction. There are no surprises for Marie’s player, and the fiction can be frozen in place while all the elements in play are identified and accounted for. We see again the negotiation of moves being triggered as the players come to an agreement that Marie is seizing something by force. We see that while the MC is playing characters whose interests are diametrically opposed to Marie’s interests, the MC’s and Marie’s player’s interests are in perfect alignment. Because the MC is playing to find out, looking through crosshairs, saying what the rules demand, and saying what honesty demands, her interests mesh with those of Marie’s player, who is also playing Marie as though she were a real person trying to survive this encounter and come out on top. Side point #1: Yes, technically the conversation includes the requests for bathroom breaks, the discussion of that project you’re laboring over at work, and who wants what on their pizza. I can’t think of any games whose rules attempt to control that part of the conversation, so I’m not including any discussion about that here, but they are part of the conversation all the same. Side point #2: “Damn. I’m impressed” is for some reason another one of my favorite lines from the text. It makes me smile every damn time. It’s right up there for me with “A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover.” I think they both capture beautifully and with humor how the MC is in for these moments of surprise and delight as an audience to the fiction unfolding in play. ”I set off my pain-wave projector.”
”Sweet,” I say. “That’s . . .” ”1-harm area loud ap” ”The loud is their screaming,” I say. “They’re like – “ and I hold my hands over my ears. On a whim, looking through crosshairs, I add, “Church Head isn’t. He looks paralyzed, he’s rigid and silent, his eyes are rolling around in their sockets but otherwise he’s not moving” (130). Tags serve several purposes in Apocalypse World. Back on page 12, we read: [T]ags work in 3 different ways. Some of them are straightforwardly mechanical, like 3-harm, fortune+2, surplus and want. Some note the circumstances under which the thing can be useful, like close and reload. Some tell you, the MC, things to say when the character uses the thing, like loud, 1-barter, augury, judgment and savagery. In this example, we see all three types of tags. I’m interested in that third type, the one that gives the MC “things to say.” Here, that’s “loud.” But to say that “loud” is just a thing to say is to understate its role in play. “Loud” here is a fictional cue for the MC, a detail to bring into the fiction that can affect the development of future fiction. Without that detail, it would be easy for the MC to simply note the damage done to the NPCs by the pain-wave projector and move on. The tag brings the specific fictional details of the pain-wave projector to bear on the fiction itself. Here, the MC brings the onrush of the NPCs to a halt so that they can react to their pain. And thinking about that pain and the internal nature of it (they’re grasping their heads) prompts the MC to think about how that pain might really fuck someone up, which leads to Church Head’s “eyes rolling around in their sockets.” This is also the moment that Marie’s player seizes the intiative and goes on the attack. While Plover is dealing with his ringing skull, Marie puts her violation glove on his cheek as pulls his in-brain puppet strings: A subtle thing just happened. I’ve been saying what they do and then asking Marie’s player what Marie does, but here she’s seized initiative from me. It isn’t mechanically significant; we’ll still both just keep making our moves in turn. It’s just worth noticing (130). It might not be mechanically significant, but it is narratively significant. Because the MC allowed the tag to impact the fiction, Marie had her moment to turn the tables and go on the attack. The MC didn’t do it so she could go on the attack, but it had enough weight in the fiction to affect how things developed from there. Earlier in the example, when Isle forced Marie’s hand after her direct-brain whisper, Marie’s player chose to not use the loud tag (it was “loud-optional” – page 127). There again, the use of that tag had a direct impact on the fiction. Because it wasn’t loud, the MC interpreted the psychic attack as doing serious enough damage that it did not even allow Isle to scream out. That interpretation led to Isle’s slumping and her bleeding ear, which would lead to the attack on Marie’s home an hour later. These types of tags are made to affect the fiction, and anything that affects the fiction should be given a full cause-and-effect relationship with the fiction that follows. Right after this passage, Marie picks up the chainsaw and takes it to Plover and Pellet as they fight. In the conversation about that attack, the tag that becomes important is the messy tag: ”How much harm will I inflict?” she says. She has to decide which seize-by-force option to choose and wants to know what’s what. ”With a chainsaw? 3-harm. Messy, so you might hit one or both of them” (131). The messy tag prompts the MC to think about the ways that the chainsaw exists in the fiction, in this case being able or likely to cut into both attackers in one swing, which is what Marie wanted to do in the first place. And that’s exactly what happens, of course. It’s easy to think of tags that gives the MC “things to say” as just flavor, but in a game that uses the fiction as the basis of play - in a game that puts the fiction itself at the heart of the cause-and-effect chain created by the game’s system – anything happening in the fiction is never “just” flavor. Those fictional details directly impact the fiction that develops from it. In my last post, I looked at what I believe is the heart of being powered by the Apocalypse. I named the first two parts – being inspired by Apocalypse World or one of its descendants, and using rules that make the fiction the very foundation of play – and ended by mentioning the third: constructing play so that what the players say is likely to be interesting. That’s where we’re picking up today. And since we’re in the middle of the Moves Snowball chapter anyway, I thought we’d use the next excerpt to make our discussion concrete.
But before we get to the passage, let’s look at an excerpt from one of Vincent’s posts on his “anyway” blog. This one is from his 9/24/2008 entry entitled “That Reminds Me” (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/389): The real cause and effect in a roleplaying game isn’t in the fictional game world, it’s at the table, in what the players and GM say and do. If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don’t need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That’s the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool. [Then in comment 1:] If your rules model a character’s doing cool things, and in so doing they get the players to say cool things, that’s great. I have nothing against modeling the cool things characters do as such. Just, if your rules model a character’s doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that’s not so great. Awesome. Characters doing cool things does not inherently mean the conversation will be interesting. Players saying cool things, does (or at least it does as much as any system or rules set can). How does a designer achieve that? We can see Vincent’s answer to that question in another “anyway” post. This time, we’re looking at “Adequacy, Cause and Effect,” posted on 6/9/2009 (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/455): Here’s a subsystem from a game I just made up (similarities not especially coincidental): When your character attacks, describe the attack and roll d20. If you roll less than your opponent’s ADV (Armor Defense Value), your character hits! The GM describes the hit, and you roll your character’s weapon’s damage die for the damage. We all know what happens with these rules. “Describe the attack” and “describe the hit” notwithstanding: I attack. You miss. I attack. You hit! 7 damage! I attack. You miss. I attack. ad interminable Now, what we want, recall, is for somebody to say something interesting instead. There are two ways to make that happen. I’ve been focusing on this one: Make rules that give the details of the attack and the hit or miss causal power. For example: GM, on a hit, choose one of these, based on the details of the attacker’s attack and the defender’s position: - The defender stumbles and falls. - The defender backs desperately away. - The defender’s guts spill out. - The defender’s foot is half-severed. - The defender’s skull is cracked. - The attacker’s weapon wedges in the defender’s ribs. - The attacker slips and loses her footing. - The attacker has to draw up or she’ll overreach. See how the GM will just naturally ask the player “how are you attacking?” and take the player’s answer into account? I attack. 6 damage. You hit. Wait, what was your attack? Uh, I thrust at his face with my knife. Cool. [checking the list] You cut open his cheek but your momentum’s significant. Do you draw up or overreach? We can see that making players say interesting things and making “self-enforcing” rules (to use Vincent’s phrase quoted in my last post) that make the fiction the basis of play are intimately bound up with each other. The first requirement for a statement to be interesting is for it to be specific. It’s not enough for a game’s rules to order the players to describe things. If the game’s structure allows players to mechanically move forward without detailing the fiction, a large portion of players will do that at some point in play. And while it may be exciting later in the retelling that you battled and bested the Great Vampire Master, the conversation during play itself - I attack, you miss, etc. - is dull as dishwater. Setting up game play so that the conversation is vibrant and interesting is at the philosophical and design heart of Apocalypse World, the binary star of making the fiction the basis of play rather than an appendix to play. Both elements spin in each other’s gravity to power the specific play we get out of the game. You are already thinking of all the things the rules of Apocalypse World do to safeguard an exciting conversation by directing players to say cool things. All those move triggers require you to say something likely to be cool to activate them. All those pick lists and 7-9 results make it more likely than not that cool things will be said in resolving a move. And what about the MC moves? They are designed to give the MC something cool to say every time she speaks. The MC scans the list of moves, picks one that looks interesting, and then misdirects by coming up with fictional details that make it seem like the fiction made the decisions instead of the MC. In fact, I think you are more likely to have interesting things happen in your game if you don’t fool yourself by your own misdirection. As I discussed back in post no. 51, the text on page 89 orients you to consider the move itself as separate from the fiction, that you are choosing a move and working it into the fiction, not creating fiction and then retroactively thinking about what kind of move it would be. Consulting that list is likely to launch your own game in unexpected directions, and as long as you can work it into your fiction, it will always work. So let’s see how the MC moves give the players interesting things to say. Picking up from where we left off in our discussion of the Moves Snowball chapter, here’s our passage: “So, Marie: at home, pacing, armed, locked in, yeah? They arrive suddenly at your door with a solid kick, your whole door rattles. You hear Pellet’s voice: ‘she’s expecting us I guess.’” I’m announcing future badness. “I go to the peep hole,” she says. “There are three of them?” “Yep,” I say. “Pellet on your left, Plover and Church Head are doing something on your right, Plover’s back’s to you - and you hear a coughcough-rrrrar sound and Plover’s at the door with a chainsaw. What do you do?” I’m putting her in a spot. “I read the situation. What’s my best escape route?” She rolls+sharp and – shit - misses. “Oh no,” she says. I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. The brutes’ threat move I like for this is make a coordinated attack with a coherent objective, so here it comes. “You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space.The door’s creaking and snapping at the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this - ” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand, like whacking a croquet ball. “I dive for - ” Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection. “Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4 - harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?” “1 - armor.” “Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3 - harm.” She marks it on her character sheet. “Make the harm move. Roll+3.” She hits the roll with a 9. I get to choose from the move’s 7 – 9 list, and I decide that she loses her footing. “For a minute you can’t tell what’s wrong, and you have this sensation, it seems absurd now but I guess it makes sense, that you hit the ceiling. Maybe you tripped on something and fell, and hit it that way? Then gradually you get your senses back, and that noise you thought was your skull cracking is actually your door splitting and splintering down, and that noise you thought was your blood is their chainsaw. What do you do?” Announcing future badness dramatically sets the scene. Putting someone in a spot escalates that drama by literally bringing the future badness to the PC’s door. The coordinated attack with a coherent objective brings the baddies through the door and into the character’s room. Because the character tried to read the situation, the MC is prompted to give out the interesting details of Marie’s window being barred and 4 floors up, which is of course misdirection as to why Marie has no easy escape. A successful roll for reading the situation would have revealed an escape route to Marie of course. My favorite part is when Marie’s player tries to jump into the conversation while the MC takes a breath. The MC interrupts her and has to explain within the fiction why she doesn’t have time to dive for whatever it is she’s diving for. The real reason is of course that the MC is making her “hard move,” but since the character wants to dive for cover, the MC misdirects by creating fictional reasons why she can’t. “They cooked it off.” Boom. (Literally and figuratively.) Then of course, there’s the harm move that demands the MC think beyond simply marking the character’s harm clock. Like the example list of attack results in the blog post above, the harm move guides the players to thinking about interesting fictional results of suffering harm. Translating “loses her footing” into the fiction creates this cool disorientated experience of Marie losing track of which way’s up, only to find herself on her back with these three toughs rushing her from the door. That’s incredibly exciting shit! And while some excellent players can probably make that kind of excitement happen with any game system while they are at the top of their game, Apocalypse World is designed to make these moment happen regularly with players of all skill levels, no matter what their state of mind. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that a game that is powered by the Apocalypse attempts to make it likely that the players say interesting things. Whether it uses pick lists, or MC moves, or any or none of the tools used by Apocalypse World, it gives the players some “self-enforcing” infrastructure to support a conversation full of interesting statements. This is going to be a long one, so get yourself some refreshments.
One of the conversations surrounding Apocalypse World that I love is the continued attempt to nail down what is at the heart of Apocalypse World. If you are creating your own game and declare that it is “powered by the Apocalypse,” what does that mean? There are plenty of opinions, and I thought I’d use this, my hundredth post on the game, to offer my own definition. In various interviews, Vincent and Meguey have made it clear that there is no "system" behind Apocalypse World that can be imported into other games to make them powered by the Apocalypse. Here's what they say in the first slide of the Metatopia presentation "Powered by the Apocalypse: Using Apocalypse World to Outline and Draft Your Own RPG": Apocalypse World offers a powerful, flexible framework you can use to outline, draft, and potentially finish your own role playing games. . . . It's not a game system, it's an easy approach to game system design. Here I am less interested in how to use the design elements of Apocalypse World to design a game of your own, and more interested in the particular ways that Apocalypse World structures play, because it is there, I believe, that the heart of the game lies. We all know that a game can be powered by the Apocalypse and lack every single mechanic that the game comprises. 2d6+stat; misses, weak hits, and strong hits; moves, MC moves, threats, harm clocks, pick lists -- none of those individual elements is crucial to making something the offspring of Apocalypse World because all of those elements were specific answers to questions Vincent and Meguey asked in order to make Apocalypse World specifically. Instead, we need to look at the approach to RPG play that the game embraces and enforces, the philosophical underpinnings that support all the individual mechanics and rules. Vincent has done us all a favor by charting the progression of his thoughts about game design all over the internet, from threads on the Forge to his own blog "anyway" (at lumpley.com) to here on G+ and now over at dice.camp on Mastadon. The time I have spent on the Forge threads have been very rewarding, but they are difficult to navigate, and there is a lot of stuff you want to wade through to find the gems you’re looking for. So I have decided to focus for the moment on "anyway," where everything is laid out chronologically. Vincent might not have written us a text book yet, but "anyway" gives us something far richer and more valuable if you have/make the time to read through them: a diary of his thoughts and guesses about RPG design. If you read through his posts on RPG theory on "anyway," you will see a lot of posts that he calls "clouds and dice" posts. In these posts he maps out the relationships and movement between the fiction created during play and the physical, real-world items, such as your character sheet, the dice, and all that jazz. The posts have diagrams, in which the fiction stuff is represented by a cloud and the real-world stuff is represented by dice (or sometimes boxes). See, clouds and dice. Anyway, fictional events can have real-world causes or fictional causes and can lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Similarly, real-world events can have fictional causes or real-world causes and lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Good? In his 4/7/2009 post, "3 Resolution Systems" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427) he looks at the cloud-dice set of cause and effect for three different games (an unspecified traditional game, Dogs in the Vineyard, and In a Wicked Age). He observes that in his diagram of In a Wicked Age play, the real-world elements have fictional and real-world effects, but that the game creates very little movement from fictional causes to real-world effects. He notes in a comment to that thread: There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows [meaning fictional causes with real-world effects], but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have the discipline as a practice of habit, having learned it from other games (comment 4). In short, the game can be played mechanically without necessarily investing in a rich and well-defined fiction because the game doesn't force or reward (mechanically) the concrete development of the fiction. Jump ahead to his 6/8/2009 post, "Restating: Fictional Causes and Realization" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/454). He begins the post by quoting Frank Tarcikowski from a Forge thread: I'm saying that one should invest in the SIS [shared imagined space], and specifically, in Situation, moment-by-moment. Who's there, what's going on, what does it look like, sound like, feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still sound great in a write-up but to me, they're leaving a bad taste, like reading a book way to fast. To this, Vincent says: And here's me in agreement: if you have a game whose rules don't adequately depend upon fictional causes, it's easy and easier to let the game's fictional details fall away. 'Adequately' can mean both quantity and quality. If you have a game whose rules don't often enough depend upon fictional causes, yes; if you have a game whose rules don't significantly enough depend upon fictional causes, too. A game needs to mechanically depend on the fiction regularly and significantly in order to ensure the fiction stays developed, detailed, and what Vincent in comment 4 calls "concrete." In fact, let's look at a great example he uses in that same comment: Like, we're playing a stakes-setting game from 2006 that was never actually published that I'm just making up. I say, 'okay, what's at stake is, do you lose your temper and burn down the orphanage? I'm rolling my Provocative, you roll your Calm . . . I win! Bye bye orphanage!' And you say, 'actually I'm going to bring in my "cucumbery" trait, which is listed under Calm, for a reroll . . . Dang, you still win. You've provoked me into losing my temper, I burn down the orphanage.' . . . All with no reference to what my character does to provoke yours, or what. Things happen - orphanages burn - but it's just like Frank says. Sounds good in a writeup, leaves a bad taste in play. Actually, let's stay with that post for one more moment. In comment 8, Vincent notes how all of this fits into trends of RPG design: [T]he fashions in indie RPG design right now [remember, this is mid-2009] don't offer good solutions to game designers trying to develop games at this end of the spectrum. For the past year, I've been having conversations with my designer friends that go like this: 'I've noticed that when people play my game, the fiction is pretty, like, low-cal. It's too summary, it's not really realized. Sometimes that's fine and sometimes they've been unhappy with it, but either way I've noticed it. So . . . I want the fiction to be more rich. I think I need to add more fictional effects to my fundamentally real-world causes, real-world effect rules, wouldn't you say, Vincent?' My answer is: 'I wouldn't say that, no. I'd say that people's investment in the fiction will gravitate to the fiction's value, so I'd say you need to make the fiction more valuable. I think you need to add more fictional causes to your fundamental rules, so that they treat the game's fiction as the basis of play, not an appendix to play.' Right?!?! It's easy in this post-Apocalypse World world to overlook what problem in RPG design Vincent and Meguey were addressing with Apocalypse World, but here it is (or one of the problems, I should say). The fiction needs to be the basis of play, not an appendix to play. Write that in your design notebook. And that I think is the philosophical heart of Apocalypse World, and it has nothing to do with 2d6, stats, scaled outcomes, or any other specific mechanic. It has to do with your game forcing the fiction to be the basis of play. The rules of the game demand that the fiction be detailed and concrete for the game to even be played; that means not just making the fiction primary in importance but foundational in its very purpose. Vincent goes on to call games that make it so that play cannot happen without a developed fiction "self-enforcing" (6/15/2009's "Lazy Play vs. IIEE with Teeth” - another great post that I highly recommend). Apocalypse World is of course reinforcing. In fact, you can't activate a move if it doesn't happen in the fiction. If you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it, right? No one can know what happens until the fiction is fleshed out fully. How can the MC pick her move if she doesn't have the fiction clear in her mind? And when that move is expressed, you're not to speak its name, because you need to speak in terms of fiction. If the MC is sloppy in her fiction, then players won't know what their characters can do to activate moves. Everything in the game runs on the fiction. And from this light you can see all the principles preparing you to speak in terms of fiction rather than in terms of game play or mechanics. The fiction is always the cause of real-world effects, such as picking up your 2d6 or marking your harm clock. And if it is ever unclear what the fiction is, the players and MC have an open invitation to ask questions, which allows the fiction to be clarified so that it can continue as the basis of play. And now we come back to where we began: what does it mean to have your game powered by the Apocalypse? There are three parts to my definition: 1) It means first, that your game is inspired either by Apocalypse World itself or by one of the games that can trace its lineage back to Apocalypse World. (I know: duh.) 2) Second, your game has rules and mechanics that make fiction the basis of play in a self-enforcing way, in such a way that play itself cannot happen without the fiction being fully and concretely described. 3) Third, your rules and mechanics need to make it likely that the conversations generated by play is interesting. This post is long enough as it is, so I’m going to pick up this third part of the definition in my next post. We’ll look at another of the “anyway” blog posts and the next section of the Moves Snowball chapter to see what it means to make it so your players say interesting things. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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