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When you Attack someone unsuspecting or helpless, ask the MC if you could miss. If you could, treat it as going aggro, but your victim has no choice to cave and do what you want. If you couldn’t, you simply inflict harm as established (140).
I love the elegance of turning this rule, which could easily have been tucked into the text of Go Aggro, into its own move. Doing so prevents the reader from having to scan each move for all the exceptions and possible applications when using the text as a reference book and makes this common-enough occurrence easy to find. It’s one of the things that makes moves such a beautiful and concise way of presenting rules. The In Battle move works the same way. The rule says that battle moves can only be made when in battle, but the move says when you’re in battle, you can make the battle moves. The rule becomes a move. Generally speaking, people are awful readers, and that is doubly the case with rulebooks. I may love all the ways Apocalypse World treats its readers with respect and invites them to engage with its text, but the book functions perfectly well as a rulebook even if you don’t care about the hows, the whys, the language, and the poetry. Presenting rules as moves where possible allows the quickest and sloppiest reader to grab the rules and go. Smart. It’s your job to judge whether the character could miss, but there’s no need to agonize over it. If it’s not perfectly clear, go ahead and have her roll to go aggro. The thing that strikes me about this brief paragraph is how seldom the phrase (or the meaning behind the phrase) “It’s your job” shows up in the text. Much of the game is set up to make it easy and natural to negotiate assent between players rather than dictate responsibilities to solely one player or another. This moment shows that when there is no value in negotiating assent, and when a simple decision is needed to move the game forward, the game will step in and assign authority. Finally, I want to point to two things in the two examples. Here’s the first: Bran’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, he’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of a borrowed rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” Bran’s player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” “You might miss,” I say, “so it’s going aggro, but if you hit with a 10+ he has no choice but to suck it up.” He hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have Balls barricade himself securely in: “you don’t blow his brains out, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note, on my threat sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again. Those last two sentences are where the gold is at. Having Balls barricade himself could be a lousy move. It has the potential to not be a victory of any sort if all it does is make Balls hide for now and just surface later, which could be seen as undermining the hit that a 9 represents. More importantly, that’s not consequential. What the MC does here is not only send Balls into hiding temporarily, but possibly permanently. If we ever do see him again, we can be certain that he’s going to remember this moment that had such an impact on him. That’s good MCing. The second example is exceedingly clever: Plover is groveling at Keeler’s feet, and Keeler’s standing over him with a crowbar. “No, seriously, I have no need to talk, fuck this guy. I smash him in the head. He’s at my mercy, right? How much harm does a crowbar do?” He sure is, and it does 2-harm messy. Shit. A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover. See what they did there? This example picks up where the Go Aggro example left off. Keeler came after Plover, and Plover fell to groveling, promising to do whatever Keeler says. To do so, answers an unasked question: what happens when your character decides that there’s nothing she wants so much as a blood reckoning? A sucker attack that can’t miss. And I’ll say it again: “A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover” is one of my favorite sentences in the book. The violence carried out by the characters in these examples – and they are casually carried out, more often than not – was pleasantly shocking to me on a first read, and I like that the MC shares the surprise. We can feel the MC as audience, learning about these characters through their decisions and behavior. That’s part of the thrill of playing to find out. There’s also a hint of sadness at the loss of Plover, and the MC feels that even while looking at poor Plover through crosshairs. It’s touching and funny and a rare treat in a rule book.
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I covered threats a while back (posts #70-88), and at that time, I looked at the threats individually and didn’t really consider why these threats? Why this collection of threats for this particular game? If you had asked me those questions, at the time, I would have said, It’s all part of the post-apocalyptic genre. Of course you have warlords and grotesques and brutes and afflictions! You’d get those in a post-apocalyptic movie, so of course you get them in Apocalypse World too!
Earlier this week, I was rereading this post from Vincent’s Anyway blog from 2005, called “Creating Theme”: http://lumpley.com/creatingtheme.html. I had read it a while back, but being an English Lit guy, I just sort of nodded through it and went on to the next post. This time, it got me to thinking about the themes that an Apocalypse World game creates through play and what Vincent and Meguey put in the game to dictate the thematic content created by the game, or if not dictate, strongly influence. To follow that thought through, I realized that I needed to know what possible endings the game sets up, or to put it another way, what are we playing to find out. As it says on the back of the book, what are these characters going to make of the broken-ass world they inherited? The game’s rules create a “fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangle, untenable arrangements” (97) from the start, and play proceeds from this state of disequilibrium to the point that the characters find a way to stabilize their world in one way or another. What’s fucked up there at the beginning, what’s fractured and full of inequalities is the social world that the character’s inhabit. Yeah, it’s a world of shortages and need, but what that shortage and need shine a light on is how people come together or fall apart when there’s not enough to go around. So what do the characters do? Do they find a way to build up a community? Do they protect their own by cutting others off? Do they run off and form a community of 3 or 4? What inequalities are intolerable to them and which ones suit them just fine? In short, it’s a game about society and government and relationships between individuals and between groups of people. When you play a game of Apocalypse World, you’ll find your world teeming with people. Factions, groups, gangs, families, lovers, etc. That’s by design, yeah? You don’t fight sand monsters or mutated creatures for survival. You aren’t telling a tale about fighting the elements as the last surviving humans looking for some mythical city at which the rest of humanity has gathered itself. Other post-apocalyptic games might go that route, but not Apocalypse World. No, the game wants tons of people around the PCs, and it wants those people exerting pressure on our heroes to see what they’ll do. What society will they build? So the game (and I would say any RPG) is defined by two things: 1) how the PCs interact with the world and 2) what opposition the MC put in the PCs’ way to create pressure on those characters. The first is of course determined in Apocalypse World by the moves. The second is shaped primarily by the threats. The threat lists and their related moves aren’t just handy tools for you as MC to always have something to say (though they are definitely that also); no, they give you specific types of pressure to apply to the characters, and how the designers define those threats directly affects the story created through play. In fact, to MC the game, you are instructed “to create your essential threats” (107). The only essential threats that have nothing to do with people and society are the landscape and vehicles; every other threat is about the people co-inhabiting the world with the PCs: brutes, warlords, grotesques, and afflictions. Warlords force the issue of leadership and government organization. Brutes force the issue of mob mentality, a perverse and dangerous kind of unity. Afflictions are the pressure on an entire populace, forcing the issue of mass struggle and individual expressions of that struggle. Grotesques force the issue of the perversion of humanity living in a world of scarcity and disharmony. Each of these threats actively creates a volatile and fractured social environment, and when the MC plays these threats, we all play to find out what they PCs can make of this social order and disorder. I never appreciated how vital and thematically central threats were to determining what stories are created by play in Apocalypse World. PC moves may determine how the PCs can interact with the threats, but the very issues and crises facing the PCs are born from the threats list. Change the threats, and you change the entire nature of the game. The threat I sidestepped above is that of the world’s psychic maelstrom. I’m saving that for another post somewhere down the road. What are you rolling for when your character goes aggro? What are you rolling to find out? You aren’t rolling to see if you “hit” because whether or not the target of your aggression takes damage is up to them, not you. You’re not rolling to see if they cave, because again, that’s up to the target. As I look at the move, the roll determines how well you limit your target’s response to your violence, how little wiggle room you give them to react to your aggression.
On a miss, anything can happen. We see this in the first example. Not only does Joe’s Girl not go with Marie, she has Marie unarmed, bloody-nosed, and pinned to the ground before Marie knows what’s happening. On a 7 – 9, the target can get out of your way, secure themselves away from you, try to appease you with whatever they think will work, try to prove to you that they are no threat, take the beating, or yield entirely and do what you want. This is Fleece sidestepping Bran’s attack in a “half-laughing, half-terrified” manner. According to the text, “What’s important is the character’s got the target’s attention and has forced them to change course or give ground” (139). At its most basic level, a successful hit means that the target can’t ignore you and must shift their behavior in some way to accommodate your demand on their attention. The logical extreme of that measure is precisely what a 10+ gets you: the target completely changes her course to accommodate you or bears the full brunt of your attack. The best you can get is to give your target two choices: suck it up and do what I want. That’s where Plover finds himself when Keeler is bearing down upon him brandishing a claw hammer in the third example. In Act Under Fire, the stakes of the roll are made clear by defining the fire, either situationally or verbally. In Go Aggro, the stakes are implied to some extent by the range of responses allowed by the move’s pick lists. Because of the structure of the move, the players never have to agree about what the aggressor wants or how the target might respond. What’s at stake is always how unignorable your intended violence is. And that brings us to the “example of a mistake & correction”: Audrey the driver corners Monk. “I scream at him, shove him, call him names. ‘Stay THE FUCK away from Amni, you creepy little turd.’ I’m going aggro on him.” “Cool,” I say. “Do you pull a weapon, or is it just shoving and yelling?” “Oh, yeah, no, it’s just shoving and yelling.” “Well, that’s fine,” I say, “but if he forces your hand, he takes 0-harm. I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s going to do. Do you want to roll for it anyway?” “I do, but no, he better take me seriously. I’m just shoving and yelling, but I’m threatening to cut him off, you follow?” “Oh!” I say. “Oooh. Yeah, roll it” (140). This is a great example because it raises the issue of what happens when your violence is ignorable even if you make the hit. Audrey doesn’t want to bash Monk’s brains in, but she wants to physically attack him and be taken seriously. She’s not going to manipulate Monk with her hotness, and she doesn’t want to reason with Monk through her sharpness. She’s being violent and clearly going aggro, but her 0-harm attack means that on any kind of hit Monk’s choice to force her hand is tantamount to ignoring her, the very thing a hit is supposed to prevent. What to do? The threat to “cut him off” give Audrey something additional_to hold over Monk along with the violence. If Audrey’s player rolls a hit, Monk will be forced “to change course or give ground.” To force Audrey’s hand now is to take the 0-harm _and accept that she’s cutting him off (from the drugs, sex, or whatever good stuff she’s been supplying him with). And I love that the MC is super intrigued by the threat, like she doesn’t know how Monk will respond to that threat any more that Audrey does and is eager to find out. Now everyone is leaning in to see what the dice say in order to find out what Monk will do. The fiction is clear, the stakes are clear, and everyone is engaged. That’s what the rules are there to create. The passage strikes me as play advice disguised as a mistake. Going aggro isn’t “do X or I’ll hurt you.” It’s “I’m trying to hurt you but you can get me to stop if you do X.” First, if your character’s actions fit that equation, it’s going aggro, not seducing or manipulating someone. Second, you are not limited to only bringing violence; you can layer a non-violent threat on top of it. That extra threat has no mechanical teeth (meaning you aren’t bound either to follow through with the threat or to honor an agreement not to) but it does bring additional pressure to bear upon your target and can give you that “Oooh, yeah, roll it” moment. When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose 1:
• Force your hand and suck it up. • Cave and do what you want. On a 7 – 9, they can choose 1 of the above, or 1 of the following: • Get the hell out of your way. • Barricade themselves securely in. • Give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear. • Back off calmly, hands where you can see. On a miss, be prepared for the worst. Going aggro on someone means threatening or attacking them when it’s not, or not yet, a fight. Use it whenever the character’s definitely the aggressor: when the target isn’t expecting the attack, isn’t prepared to fight back, doesn’t want to fight back, or can’t fight back effectively (138-139). First I want to look at going aggro as a tool for exerting your will on another character. Going aggro is one of three moves that can potentially get someone to do something specific. The other two moves are Seduce or Manipulate and Read a Person with the question “How could I get your character to_____?” For good reasons, none of these methods is fool proof; you can’t just make a roll and then have an NPC (or a PC) obey your desires. Doing so would undermine the realness of the NPCS, and the game can’t very well give you the agenda item to make Apocalypse World seem real if the game itself isn’t going to back your play. More importantly, being able to solve any given problem with a single roll to control an NPC is bad game design. But, still, these are characters who are trying to make something of the world, and one way to do that is to try to exert their will upon others. When a character goes aggro on another character to affect their behavior, they commit some form of violence on that character and hope it works. But in Apocalypse World, violence is an imprecise tool at best. Even on a 10+ the other character can say, “fuck you,” and take the damage you’re dealing out. On a 7 – 9 roll, they have the option of doing what you want, but they’d have to be pretty inclined to do it anyway, given all the other options they have. Apocalypse World makes it very hard for violence to be meaningless. You can lash out at anyone for any reason, and go aggro will be there to see you through, but what the move does is make that violence a kind of social exchange. I want something from you, and I’m using violence to get it. That thing might be as simple as for you to come with me or as bloody as for you to die. But after I make my request with violence the response is left entirely to the recipient. It’s important in the move that the target of the violence gets to choose their own response, whether they are PCs or NPCs. The person committing the violence gets no say in what happens after the attack. The recipient can return the violence, in which case a battle starts up; they can yield, in which case you get what you want; they can try to reason with you to keep it from becoming a battle while not giving in to your demands. The aggressive attack is merely an opening salvo in a conversation between the characters. I would argue that this is one of the reasons why there is no simple “throw a punch” move. Violence always exists in a context, and specifically a social context. In Apocalypse World, throwing a punch is always about more than just exchanging damage, not just because that’s uninteresting, but because it’s not true to human experience. Even when we are filled with rage and lash out blindly without understanding our own motivations, there is something we want out of that attack. Note that there is no requirement in the move to state what you want your aggressive attack to accomplish. To seduce or manipulate, you need to “tell them what you want them to do [and] give them a reason” (142), but there is no such instruction for go aggro. You can declare your attack and roll the dice without ever knowing or stating what you want from your victim. The MC or another player might ask what is it that you want the character to do in order to know if she caves or not, but it’s not necessary. Two of the three examples involve situations in which the aggressor doesn’t have a stated desire. Bran threatens to push Fleece off the roof, but what he wants beyond that is unstated. Keeler just wants to beat Plover’s head in, but Plover, liking his head as it is, caves. The MC doesn’t seek to clarify what Keeler wants and simply has Plover beg for mercy. So not only do you not have to declare your reasons, you don’t have to even know your reasons, because as I say above, isn’t that how anger and violence often work? You lash out with the intent to hurt without even understanding the emotional undercurrents that brought you there? As a tool for getting what you want, go aggro is pretty piss poor. But again, that’s how violence works in Apocalypse World. There is no move that lets you use hard to seduce or manipulate, and no way to use hard to read a person. If you are going to engage with the world the hard way, you only have so much control over what comes of it. Of course, if you keep brutalizing the world with your hard, eventually you can advance your go aggro move so that on a 12+ your target doesn’t have the choice to force your hand. You have proven through the last 25+ experience marks that you are willing to pummel your way through any opposition and they can see that now. Shy of that, you’ve got a long bloody road ahead of you. As a final note, another thing go aggro does – and I love it for this – is make torture as useless in Apocalypse World as it is in real life. If someone doesn’t want to tell you something, they won’t. If you’re expert enough, you’ll more likely than not just kill them. If you’re not expert enough, they’ll “give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear.” It’s always going to be more effective to seduce or manipulate someone, where a 10+ guarantees that they’ll go along with you as long as you don’t give them a reason not to. Better yet, asking someone you’ve read how you can get them to do the thing you want will always get you an honest answer from the MC. Now, the answer might be, “you can’t,” but at least then you know not to waste your ammo or hand bones trying to beat an answer out of them. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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