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Today we are gathered to reflect upon the “Gear and Other Crap” section of “The Basics” chapter in the 2nd Edition of Apocalypse World. Here’s our text:
All of the different character types come with their own assortment of gear and other crap, including holdings, gangs, gigs, followers, crews, workspaces, weapons, and specialized equipment. Most individual items of gear or crap get a little list of descriptive tags, like magnum (3-harm close reload loud) or followers (fortune+2 surplus: 1-barter augury want: judgment savagery). Those tags 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. See the gear and crap chapter for full descriptions, page 224. (page 12) “Gear and Crap”: What a fantastic title for a chapter covering all the odds and ends that are important to completing a character’s details. Not only is it humorous; it is dismissive. Of course holdings, gangs, gigs, followers, workspaces, etc. are all critical to the game, but I think cramming them all under the banner “gear and crap” is a way of saying, don’t be distracted by these gewgaws. These things are important only insofar as they contribute to and further the story being created; they are always secondary to the heart of our story: the characters. These are the characters’ gear and the characters’ crap, possessed by and subservient to. We know before we even turn to the chapter, that this book will not dedicate dozens of pages to detailing all the possible guns and weaponry available to the characters. We know that we won’t find a dozen more pages of vehicles in great detail with pictures and flavor text. The “3 different ways” that the tags work are also interesting here. The first, mechanical, is straightforward. The second category is “circumstances under which the thing can be useful.” “Useful” is the important word here. These are not descriptions to bring the weapons to life; they are restricted descriptions that tell us how the weapons can be used in or to shape the Fiction. The third category is the fascinating one: “things to say.” The gun is “loud”—work that into the details of the Fiction. The gang is “savage”—don’t forget that detail. “Things to say” anchors those tags directly into the Fiction. The second category makes specific demands on the Fiction, and the third category calls out what needs to be added to the Fiction when this gear and crap play a role. It’s worthwhile to directly compare tags to a traditional alternative. For example, in the 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu, a .44 magnum (which for AW is “3-harm, close reload loud”) is described as follows: Skill needed: firearm (handgun); Damage: 1D10+1D4+2; base range: 15 yards; Uses per round 1 (without penalty)/3 (with penalty); Bullets in Gun: 6; Malfunction 100 (meaning, on a roll of 100 the gun malfunctions) Since, as we pointed out in the discussion of “Moves and Dice,” dice are only rolled for moves, AW assigns a non-negotiable harm value for each weapon, compared to the die roll for damage of many other games. The range of 15 yards is converted to “close,” which pulls us away from grids, hexes, and tape measures and leaves things to a much more cinematic Fiction. There is no fiddling with numbers or uses—all that is worked into 3-harm, weather you did that with one bullet or a number of bullets fired in rapid succession. Those details are left to the shared Fiction. The same goes for malfunctioning. That’s an option available to the MC when the player rolls a miss during battle (specifically the MC move “take away their stuff”). And the 6 bullet capacity is covered by the simple "reload."
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We’ve reached “Stats” in the “Basics” chapter of the 2nd Edition of Apocalypse World (pages 11-12).
-Cool, meaning cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, unfazed. Roll+cool to do something under fire. I don’t see any need to quote the entirety of the passage, so we’ll dive in from here. As a reminder, the stats are Cool, Hard, Hot, Sharp, Weird, and Hx. Stats are of course not a mandatory element in an RPG, especially for the more narratively-focused games. Fate’s aspects, Dread’s character questions, etc. A lot can be done with simple descriptors and trait lists. But stats are critical to Apocalypse World because of moves. The key mechanic of the game requires you to have numbers to add and subtract from what you roll in order to propel the Fiction. In fact, as the Bakers point out in the “Advanced Fuckery” section when talking about using the AW engine to create other games, “A game’s characters, stats, crap, and whatnot all exist to serve its moves” (page 281). Everything in that playbook, then, is there to make the moves work and do their thing to create the Fiction. When I first read AW, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the stats merely because they were phrased as adjectives instead of the usual (because of D&D, I suspect) nouns (strength, courage, dexterity, etc.). I think the adjectives are an interesting choice, serving to treat the stats as traits and descriptors. There is a difference in feeling if not strict meaning between saying, “My guy has a high IQ” and “My guy is sharp.” “I have a high constitution” vs. “I am hard.” “Whoa, check out my character’s charisma!” vs. “Damn, this dude is hot!” Yeah, it’s a minor difference, but I think it can affect the play all the same. Why are there 6 stats? Because there are 6 basic moves, one for each stat. Okay, there are actually 7 basic moves, but Read a Person and Read a Situation are two sides to the same coin, both together making up a character’s “perception.” I’ll look at the moves in detail when we get there, but here in this section, each stat is connected to its relevant move. Going back to the notion that every part of a character “exist[s] to serve [the] moves,” every stat’s relevance is determined by its usefulness in serving a move, so you wouldn’t have more stats than you have moves. Nor would you have too few stats, because the balance of play depends on each stat being equally useful. If there were 4 stats and 6 moves, with two stats affecting one move a piece and two stats affecting two moves a piece, that encourages players to favor those two stats in order to make their characters more effective. As a game designed to facilitate narrativist play, Apocalypse World wants to avoid incentivizing stat selection based simply on character effectiveness. The stats you select for your character are ideally the result of what narrative and themes you want to explore through play. If you give your character a high weird stat, you are interested in opening your brain to the psychic maelstrom and seeing how that affects the story and play. The special character moves that let you use x-stat to make x-move may not be especially sexy, but they are crucial to letting your sharp Angel still be able to explore the psychic maelstrom without sacrificing his sharpness, etc. A player is encouraged to pick their stats to match the moves they want to make and not the reverse. Nor are players given any way to min-max their characters via their stats or the moves they use. We’ll save discussing Hx and highlighting stats for later. The one last thing I want to hit are the explanatory lists for each stat. I admire all the lists, but I particularly love weird’s list: Weird, meaning a weirdo, psychic, genius, uncanny, lucky, strange, prophetic, touched. The list allows for (and actively suggests) all kinds of tone and approaches to be employed during play. I can make a dark and twisted Brainer or lucky and lighthearted Savvyhead, or anywhere in between of course. The lists act like little character seeds that invite you to make your character’s hotness about inspiration rather than something physical if that's what you want to play and explore. Shit gets real (or is it that shit gets capital-F-Fictional?) in the 5th section of the Basics chapter of Apocalypse World: “Moves and Dice.” I have already said that this opening section, even though it’s an introductory chapter, never feels like you are wasting time as a reader before you get the meat of the matter. That is nowhere more apparent than in this section, which is the meatiest of meats and the matteriest of things that matter. Because the passage is long, I will work through it in chunks:
The particular things that make these rules kick in are called moves. This is a reference to the final paragraph of “The Conversation”: “These rules mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things.” All of the character playbooks list the same set of basic moves, plus each playbook lists special moves for just that character. Your threats might list special moves too. When a player says that her character does something listed as a move, that’s when she rolls, and that’s the only time she does. The name of the section isn’t “Moves”; it’s “Moves and Dice,” because moves are the only time that dice are thrown, and character players are the only players that throw them. Dice aren’t used during character creation. They aren’t used to make saving throws. They aren’t used to determine if a random thing happens. Dice are relegated to a very narrow function in Apocalypse World: resolving moves. Everything else in the game is determined by strict rules, the meta-game-level conversation between players, or through the Fiction itself. The limited use of dice has two effects, I think. The first is that every die rolls becomes exciting because every die roll will impact the Fiction and the future lives of the characters. The second is that it makes the players angle for moves, because let’s face it, we love to roll dice. Rolling dice is its own joy and we will work to be able to do it, which will then beneficially affect the Fiction, creating a cycle that ensures interesting things are always evolving through The Fiction. The rule for moves is to do it, do it. In order for it to be a move and for that player to roll dice, the character has to do something that counts as that move; and whenever the character does something that counts as a move, it’s the move and the player rolls dice. Who doesn’t love the simplicity of “to do it, do it”? Another write could have gone for the clinical and unambiguous description that says for a move to trigger, you need have your character make the move in the story itself, not just declare that the move is being made. That’s unambiguous and clear, but it is not exciting or catchy. “To do it, do it” has the advantage of being full of action—do it! It’s reminiscent of the Nike command to “Just do it.” Make you character’s actions bold and committed! Leave your mark! None of that is said or referred to, but it all lurks in the shadows of “to do it, do it.” No matter how it’s said, this paragraph lays down the important law of Apocalypse World: The Fiction is the focus of the game. Everything that happens at the table is about creating that Shared Imagined Space, and everything we say and do needs to originate from and circle back to the Fiction. Usually it’s unambiguous: ‘dammit, I guess I crawl out there. I try to keep my head down. I’m doing it under fire?’ ‘Yep.’ But there are two ways they sometimes don’t line up, and it’s your job as MC to deal with them. First is when a player says only that her character makes a move, without having her character actually take any such action. For instance, ‘I go aggro on him.’ Your answer then should be ‘cool, what do you do?’ ‘I seize the radio by force.’ ‘Cool, what do you do?’ ‘I try to fast talk him.’ ‘Cool, what do you do?’ I love these examples and the way the MC doesn’t vary her response. It’s a gentle way to tell the player to put her action into the fiction and trigger that move. (As a side note, I like the way this turns “What do you do?” on its head. In this moment it is not about character agency or issues of protagonism—this is about being grounded in the fiction, which I had not thought about “What do you do” doing. The phrase is simultaneously a demand to contribute directly to the Fiction and a reminder that the character and her choices are the main focus of the story we are creating.) Second is when a player has her character take action that counts as a move, but doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t intend it to be a move. For instance ‘I shove him out of my way.’ Your answer then should be, ‘cool, you’re going aggro?’ ‘I pout. “Wel if you really don’t like me . . . “’ ‘Cool, you’re trying to manipulate him?’ ‘I squeeze way back between the tractor and the wall so they don’t see me.’ ‘Cool, you’re acting under fire?’ You don’t ask to give the player a chance to decline to roll, you ask in order to give the player a chance to revise her character’s action if she really didn’t mean to make the move. ‘Cool, you’re going aggro?’ Legit: ‘oh! No, no, if he’s really blocking the door, whatever, I’ll go the other way.’ Not legit: ‘well no, I’m just shoving him out of my way, I don’t want to roll for it.’ The rules for moves is if you do it, you do it, so make with the dice. Cool. These paragraphs not only clarify the relationship between moves and the Fiction, but they model the spirit of the conversation when AW is at the table. The MC never makes a declaration in any of the examples—they are all clarifying questions. Is this what you are saying? Is that what you want to trigger? Did you mean to do that? All of the players are responsible for making sure the Fiction is clear to everyone playing, otherwise it is no longer a Shared Imagined Space; it's just a fragmented collection of different ideas. The questions put everyone in the same space seeing the same Fiction. I have always loved the “so make with the dice” line, not only because it sounds like a gangster’s line from a Coen Brother’s film but because it draws attention to the fact that all the characters’ troubles are brought upon themselves to an extent. If you don’t do anything, you don’t roll, and if you don’t roll, then the MC's hands are tied to a certain extent. That idea is addressed later in the text (and how to deal with players who try to avoid rolling)--and it seems silly that anyone playing AW would try to avoid complications--but that doesn’t change the design of the game: restrict what the MC can do and make the characters the driving force of the Fiction that unfolds. That restriction is alluded to at the end of the next two paragraphs, after misses, weak hits, and strong hits are explained: All the moves list what should happen on a hit, 7-9 or 10+, so follow them. Many of them list what happens on a miss, so follow those too. The basic moves, though, just tell the player to ‘be prepared for the worst.’ That’s when it’s your turn. That paragraph is all about the limitations placed upon the MC. Do what the moves tell you and only what the rules let you do; eventually it’ll be your turn to say something awesome. The rest of the section explains the terminology of taking bonuses forward or ongoing, sex moves (including the wonderful line, “For most of the characters, the special sex moves apply when they have sex with another player’s characters, not with oh just anybody, but for a few of them, oh just anybody will do”), and directions for where to turn in the text for more information, so I don’t see any need to quote it. This entire section is about how the rules of AW mediate the conversation in ways that shape and propel the Fiction being created through play. For someone coming to the text from traditional games, the section is kind of disarming, greeted with a combination of “of course” and “what?!” The names of moves and other terms that haven’t yet been introduced to the first-time reader are casually thrown about, and if you are used to skill-based characters the whole notion of rolling to crawl from one hiding place to another or to push past a jerk at a club or to squeeze between a tractor and a wall to hide is bizarre because you are used to resolving tasks with the dice as opposed to resolving entire conflicts and interactions. But we’ll talk more about all that further down the road. 5. The passage in Apocalypse World that I’m looking at today is old hat to some and mindblowing to others. It’s the “What is a Roleplaying Game” section of the book, which the Bakers call “The Conversation”:
You probably know this already: roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine. These rules mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right? (page 9) If that doesn’t hit you hard, then you were probably a part of the Forge when all this was being hashed out. Or you didn’t really pay attention to the passage. Or you’re weird. And that’s cool. I remember reading that passage the first time in the 1st edition, and getting such a rush. I had never really thought about what was happening at the gaming table in that way. Roleplaying is not like a conversation; it is a conversation. Conversing is the very act of playing, and everything else—the rulebooks, character sheets, dice, everything—are merely tools to facilitate, guide, and otherwise make that conversation possible. The substance of that conversation is of course what is now popularly called “The Fiction” or the Shared Imagined Space. Once again, this text is the very model of concision. I love the writing in this passage, and in particular I love the tone that is struck. First off, there are those two questions, which I find oddly disarming. No, it’s not like taking turns even though it is like taking turns, isn’t it? I can’t think of a better way to characterize the orderly chaos that takes place during a game session. There is something so reassuring in the tone, like we’re being let in on a secret that we are supposed to already know, or like they are trying to jog our memory of a shared experience that we seem to have forgotten. And then there’s the “All fine.” All that messy stuff that happens, it’s cool. Relax and enjoy it, it seems to say. I read this tonal shift—the shift from casually informative to casually reassuring—as a lead in to the subject of how the rules interact with The Fiction. The next section (“Moves and Dice”) is one of the key passages of the whole text, and “The Conversation” introduces it, textually and topically. Come in close, it seems to say. This may all seem a little overwhelming at first, but you’ve got this, right? Yeah, man, we’ve got this. Continuing our way through the Basics chapter, we are looking today at the “Playbooks” section. Here’s our text:
The game’s playbooks and reference sheets contain all the rules that the other players need to play: rules for creating and introducing their characters, having them take consequential action in play, and changing and developing them as play continues. Print them out before you play and bring the set with you to your first session. (page 9) What I really want to focus on here is the word “playbook,” but let’s take a moment to look at the details of the passage. The first thing of note is the word “other” before players, which importantly denotes that the MC is also a player, as opposed to the common GM/player division we see in a lot of texts (and we already referenced in discussing the title Master of Ceremonies). Because the setting for Apocalypse World gets defined by the individual play group both before and through play, and because all conflict, events, and actions are resolved through moves, there is nothing extraneous that players of PCs need to know or have before them while they play. Thus, “all the rules that the other players need to play” are on two or three printed sheet, which is fantastic. There is no Player’s Handbook or Setting Guides or anything else to burden the character players, letting those players focus on what their characters want/need and on how they are going to go about getting it. This approach is ideal for AW’s goals because the characters’ drives and decisions are what the game is all about. There’s something really cool about “introducing” being a key element of the playbooks. I see that simple addition doing all kinds of work, suggesting that the focus of the game is not each character in isolation but in their relationships with each other. Yes, it alludes to Hx at the end of character creation, but it is totally unnecessary to mention that now, which is why it’s interesting to include it here. The same goes for the rest of the sentence, really. The Bakers could have said, “The game’s playbooks and reference sheets contain all the rule that the other players need to create and play their characters.” Just as “introducing” is slipped in there, so “play” is expanded to “take consequential action in play,” which gets to the heart of AW play. In this game, the characters will take actions that have narrative consequences, both in the short and long term, because those consequences will need to be reacted to and on and on. Those consequences mean that the character and the world impact and change each other, which takes us to the last part of that sentence: “changing and developing [the characters] as play continues.” We will discuss AW’s specific reward and advancement system later, but for now, suffice it to say that the characters are tools to tell story and explore themes that interest the players, so their development is about their place in the story, not about their hit points and thac0; characters here "chang[e] and "develop," not level up. Okay, now to the word “playbook.” So far as I know, this is the first use of “playbook” in RPGs, but then, I don’t know much, so if someone else knows that the term was borrowed from elsewhere, I’d love to know. In the Ludography, we learn that the “character playbooks were inspired by XXXXtreme Street Luge, by Ben Lehman” (page 290). XXXXtreme Street Luge is a very enjoyable read (it’s available on Ben Lehman’s website for $1), and you can see how the character sheet inspired the choose-from-a-list/select-an-option layout of the AW playbooks, but Lehman still calls his character sheet a character sheet. I’m supposing that the term “playbook” was adopted in part because the character sheet were originally folded into thirds like a pamphlet or booklet. Still, “character sheet” would have worked just as well. I love the word “playbook” because it declares that what the players hold in their hand is not merely a character—it is the thing through which the players play and enter the fiction, or Shared Imagined Space, to use the Forge’s terminology. It is the player’s tool by which they sculpt the fiction. That’s awesome, methinks. Finally, it seems like a fitting term because a playbook is, to quote Merriam-Webster, “a stock of usual tactics or methods.” By listing moves and other character options, the playbooks echo that meaning of the word. The playbooks are a list of possible stock tactics and methods for this character-type to carve out their thematic place in the fiction we are all creating together. Today’s text is from “Setting Up To Play” in the Basics chapter:
Get three or more players, including you. Choose one player to be the Master of Ceremonies. Since this is the Master of Ceremonies’ playbook, that’s you. Apocalypse World takes quite a few sessions to play, so choose friends with space in their schedules for a commitment. The game really kicks in around the 6-session mark, and it can go much longer. Once you’ve got your group together, start the game with character creation. Before that, though, you have some prep to do. Read through the first part of this book—the basics, the playbooks, character creation, the MC, and the First session—and skim the rest, to get a handle on your job as the MC. (page 8, 2nd edition; page 11, 1st edition) There are a bazillion choices you have to make when constructing an RPG text. What information do you give? When do you give it? How much detail do you go into, and when? How much handholding do you do, and what can you assume your audience already knows? I note all that because I’m about to praise AW’s presentation, but I don’t mean it as criticism of other texts. The Bakers go with a single overview section that walks the reader through the layout of the whole text. Everything in The Basics is going to be expanded on in the main text. The Basics serves two functions. First, it’s what the potential buyer can read to decide if this is the game for them. Second, it lays out all the special terms that are key to understanding the game. This whole section is successful, I think, because it keeps everything short and simultaneously filled with information so that it never feels like filler, never feels like your understanding of the game is being delayed. A lot of opening sections in RPG texts are easily and gleefully skipped over. Long description of the setting and color of the game? Long description of what a roleplaying game is? Long section on how to use this book? There’s none of that here. In this passage, we have our first use of Master of Ceremonies, and it is presented without explanation. All you know is that you are it, since you are reading the book. Why that term? What does the MC do? The first question is never answered (so far as I can remember--though I'm sure we'll talk about it later) and the second question will be answered much later. The term is casually thrown out and we are trusted to not freak out about it. And, man, do I love that the entire text is called “the Master of Ceremonies’ playbook.” If the players’ playbooks “contain all the rules that the other players need to play” (as quoted in the next section), then the MC’s playbook contains all the rules we need to play as the MC. Of course, an important philosophical position in AW is that the MC is simply another player—a player with their own unique responsibilities, but still a player on equal footing with the other players—and the naming of the rulebook as a playbook demands that very equality. The second paragraph of “Setting Up Play” is all about how long you can expect to play. This is not a game designed for one-shots, nor is it expected to go on indefinitely. Why that is will become clear later; for now, we just need to know what we’re getting ourselves into. The Bakers even tell us where the typical sweet spot is for campaign length. This is great information to specify. The three sentences of the final paragraph basically take the place of the “How to Use this Book” section of other RPG texts. Read these sections and skim these other ones before you play. The little extra that they throw in is the casual announcement that character creation is part of play itself, that the game starts with character creation. Does the text assume that you’ve played other RPGs and read other RPG rulebooks? Does anyone know someone for whom Apocalypse World was their first textual introduction to RPGs? Those are not rhetorical questions. I suspect that it would end up being everything you need to get into the art of play, but that is pure speculation on my part. I think the writing show tremendous respect for the reader and that, on top of its being excellently written, is why it’s such a joy to read. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to look at Chapter One, Verse One of Apocalypse World: The Basics: Apocalypse World. Here’s our text:
Nobody remembers how or why. Maybe nobody ever knew. The oldest living survivors have childhood memories of it: cities burning, society in chaos then collapse, families set to panicked flight, the weird nights when the smoldering sky made midnight into a blood-colored half-day. Now the world is not what it once was. Look around you: evidently, certainly, not what it was. But also close your eyes, open your brain: something is wrong. At the limits of perception, something howling, everpresent, full of hate and terror. From this, the world’s psychic maelstrom, we none of us have shelter. (page 8, 2nd edition; page 6, 1st edition) First, that’s a kick-ass way to introduce the setting for your game. I love the immediacy of the tone and voice, as though some old, hardened apocalyptic survivor is speaking directly to us, telling us first to look around and then to open our brain. There’s a fantastic mix of straightforwardness (“Nobody remembers how or why”; “Now the world is not what it once was”; “something is wrong”), poetic phrasings (“families set to panicked flight”; “blood-colored half-day”; “At the limits of perception, something howling, everpresent, full of hate and terror”), and unexpected sentence construction (“evidently, certainly, not what it was”; “we none of us have shelter”). It’s powerful, full of imagery, and succinct. Is there another RPG text that dispatches with introducing its setting as quickly as AW? These opening 8 sentences of the text make up just about the entirety of AW’s discussion of setting. Admittedly, the title already prepares you for an apocalyptic setting, but no words are wasted here. To play this game, you need to know that we are two or three generations into the apocalypse; that society as we knew it collapsed; and that the damage to the world was as emotional, spiritual, and mental as it was physical. Every other detail about the apocalypse is left wide open, and you are free to create any setting you want. The Bakers waste no time (theirs or yours) throwing out ideas of possible landscapes and maelstroms. This is my favorite opening sections of any RPG text. Inspired by daily Bible reading posts, I plan on analyzing passages from and elements of Vincent & Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World, 2nd Edition text. That's what this collection is all about.
No, I'm not comparing AW to the Bible. No, I don't think AW is the only amazing RPG and game text in publication. I do think the text is top-notch, and given how AW is the starting place for so many games being designed today, I think it is worthwhile to take a close look at how the game works. I'm just a literary geek and a new student to RPG theory, so it's likely I'll say some ridiculous things. That's cool. Jump in and let me know what you think. In spite of the title of this collection, it is unlikely that this will actually be updated daily. We'll survive. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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