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There’s a beautiful tension that exists in a lot of Vincent’s designs – a tension between the ways our intuition and experiences as roleplayers are supported at one moment and then given a hard jerk at another moment. He analyzes the way people really play at the table and will serve up a design that falls into those patterns we’ve developed while simultaneously demanding that we do something alien and potentially awkward. PC moves immediately resonate with players as an intuitive way to play, but at the same time, players buck against the limitations of specific moves, like go aggro or seize by force. MC moves are praised for structurally representing how many GMs naturally play, but threats (and fronts from first edition) are often jettisoned for feeling unnatural. Some people are made uncomfortable by that tension, and some might even dismiss the parts that grate as poor design. Personally, I love the tension.
We see that tension at work in the way that both read a sitch and read a person limit the questions that a player can ask when making the move. The idea that we get to ask penetrating questions is satisfying and feels rights. That we only get a handful of questions to ask can feel like a jacket that’s slightly too small, restricting our movements and comfort. Having introduced the moves, explained them in full, and provided examples for them, this next section seeks to summarize a distinction between the moves, answer a predictable question, and give a handy trick to the MCs. First, the distinction: When a character reads a charged situation, the player asks all the questions up-front, right then. When a character reads a person, though, the player holds onto the questions and asks them one by one during their interaction. You may have to remind the players a few times before they get in the habit (147) Check. Roger. Covered that. That last sentence acknowledges the tension I’ve referred to. Asking questions as a freeform conversation between characters unfolds is not natural for most roleplayers, so it will take some time to form the new habit. Second, the predictable question – what do I do if they ask a question not on the list?: Strictly speaking, the player should ask questions from the lists, and no other. Some players, you’ll find, won’t do this naturally, they’ll just out and ask whatever’s on their mind. My recommendation is to take it in stride: the rules require you to answer a question from the list, even if the player asks some other question, and there’s no need for you to draw attention to it. For instance, let’s say that Keeler’s about to step out into some hotly contested territory, so she reads the sitch. “Am I about to walk into an ambush?” her player says. I could be a picky stickly and insist that she choose a question verbatim, but fuck that, right? I’ll just pretend she asked “what’s my enemy’s true position” and answer as though she had. “There’s a fantastic spot for an ambush, a chokepoint you’ll have to pass through,” maybe I say. “I’d bet a hundred jingle that Disember’s fuckers are there waiting” (147 - 148) There’s that tension again. The answer here is a practical solution to employ before your players pick up the new habit demanded of them by the game. Yes, they technically need to choose a question from the list, but if the question they ask can be answered by you as though they asked a question from the list, answer that question. What I love about this little section is that it offers a little sympathy to the reader. It says, I know that what I’m asking of you and the other players is hard and unlike what you have done in other games, so here are a few tips to get you through the transition, a workaround while you build some new habits. Whether you think the tension in these moves is productive or a pain in the ass is up to you. I dig it, but I respect that others have struggled with it. What this section makes clear is that Vincent and Meguey are well aware of what they are asking of - and offering to! - their audience. And with that, they give a little advice to the MC: When the player blows the roll to read a sitch or read a person, one of my favorite moves is to turn the questions back on them. “Hey by the way, where are you most vulnerable? Also, what should Roark be on the lookout for? And while I’m at it, what’s his best escape route?” and then use the player’s answers to just fucking bring it home. Yeah, that’s an awesome thing to do. It doesn’t surprise me that they end with this juicy bit of advice, because they basically just told you that there are going to be some growing pains among your play group as you adjust to the rules of the game, and even though they are giving you tools to deal with those pains, a reader could be put off by the indications of hard times ahead. So to soothe over whatever might have been stirred up in you by the first couple of paragraphs, they end with a reward, the upside of the move’s questions. As an MC, the questions are perfect for you, pre-planned fuckery just waiting for a missed roll. Yeah, yeah, possibly rough waters, but look at this! That’s just a smart rhetorical move.
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Marie is trying to reconcile with Roark after fucking it up with Joe’s Girl, and going into the conversation she reads him, of course. She misses the roll. Roark, out of his own self-interests, is ready to let bygones be, but now no way I’m telling her that. I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to offer an opportunity, very much with a cost. “It’s obvious, he hasn’t even opened his mouth and it’s obvious, he’s not going to listen to you,” I say. “You can have him back, but you’re going to have to in-brain puppet strings him to do it” (146)
This scene is of course a follow-up to the first example of the seduce or manipulate move. When we last left them, Roark had stormed out of Marie’s place stark naked, pissed off that she was using him to get to Joe’s Girl. Poor Marie can’t get a break and misses another roll. I love the MC’s move here because it genuinely probes what is important to Marie. Is it more important to her that she regain Roark’s trust or that she gets him back for another shot at Joe’s Girl again? Marie’s response to this move tells us about her and what’s important to her. You can’t ask for more from a move. It’s unclear how long after the last scene this one picks up, but I’ll admit I was thrown off by the idea that “Roark, out of his own self-interests, is ready to let bygones be.” That statement seems to suggest that the last MC move was not as hard as it first appeared, that the separation of Marie and Roark was not as severe as it seemed. But it’s important that Marie and Roark are in a charged interaction here. Roark may want to let bygones be bygones, but he’s mad and hurt enough not to be able to just come right out and say as much. Marie’s got to get there through this conversation. Had her player succeeded in her roll, Marie would have been able to read Roark’s signs and begin to mend the relationship. Instead, the MC used their move to have Marie misread Roark’s pain as a refusal to listen. The only thing missing here is that Marie’s player should still get her one question, and I don’t know how that question would affect the rest of the move. Does the MC make the hard move before the player get’s the question, effectively cutting out the option “how could I get your character to - ?” Should that question come first and then the MC can make as hard a move as she likes? Is the order up to the MC and the other player? The example doesn’t let us know. Bran’s sitting back watching Foster give orders and receive reports, all business. Bran pays attention to her manner, mood, body language, and hits the roll with a 7. He asks almost idly what Foster’s really feeling. “She’s scared,” I say. “Scared? Of what?” he says. “Of Marie,” I say, as honesty demands. “She is?” he says. “But that would mean …Oh shit.” This example shows that follow up questions to the original answer are within the bounds of the move. Now, the MC could have said, “She’s scared of Marie,” but that lacks a lot of dramatic punch, and it makes sense that Bran would first notice that Foster is scared, and then having noticed that, begin reading Foster’s movements more closely still to determining what she’s afraid of. The way the MC breaks up her response to Bran’s player’s question imitates this natural movement. Oh, and of course, this example shows that you can read a person outside of a conversation, that you can study a person’s interactions with other people, not just with yourself. The question is, if that’s the case, how much of the conversation should be played through? If the character reading the person is merely observing the interaction, is the move still subject to the direction that “in play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through”? Come to think of it, it is not clear from the presentation of the example, why the players agree that Foster’s interactions are charged at all. Presumably, the MC made some mention that something was off about Foster, that there was some underlying tension there. This is of course easily broached in play with, “there’s something odd in Foster’s behavior; want to read her?” or Bran’s player saying, “I’m studying Foster; is there anything there to read?” Keeler’s negotiations with Tum Tum are going really well. Really, really well. Suspiciously well. So she decides to watch them carefully while they’re talking. She hits the roll with a 12. She asks what they’re feeling, and it’s a mix of malice, impatience and hope. She’s like, “malice?” so she asks what they intend. “It becomes increasingly clear, the way they shoot these subtle looks back and forth between them or something, but you’re pretty sure they intend to kill you afterward.” They keep talking and she asks “how could I get them to let me go?” Let her go? No way. She’ll be fighting her way out. This is the only example that shows the move occurring over the course of the conversation. In fact, Keeler’s player doesn’t even notice that the conversation is charged until she suspects that things are going too well. Once she suspects that there is more going on beneath the surface, and the MC concurs, dice are thrown. The first question leads immediately to the second. The answer to the third question reinforces the idea that “’Dude, sorry, no way’ is a legit answer to ‘how could I get your character to - ?’” as well as providing another example of “unhappy revelations, every chance you get.” Finally, we get to the “mistake & correction”: Audrey’s connected with Keeler to ask for her help, and she’s acting reluctant, so she decides to read her. She hits with an 11. “Okay! So how could I get you to help me, what do you intend to do, and I guess what are you really feeling—” “Whoa stop,” I say. “Hold onto those, ask them during the conversation, not all up front. You can ask one now if you want, but then you two keep talking. Ask them as you go.” This is our reminder to “play the interaction through.” Pretty straight forward. What I would have liked to have seen in one of these examples is a full conversation played through rather than summarized. The Keeler-Tum Tum interaction would be a fine candidate for this. I understand that it would take up a lot of room to do so, so I get why it wasn’t done, but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. If you truly want players to play the interaction through, it’s helpful to show them what that looks like in play. Also! Just a quick word to say that 4/23 marks the one year anniversary of the Daily Apocalypse posts. We’re halfway through the text, so I suspect we have another 6-12 months of entries ahead of us. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting and plain following along. When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll+sharp. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7 - 9, hold 1. While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
• Is your character telling the truth? • What’s your character really feeling? • What does your character intend to do? • What does your character wish I’d do? • How could I get your character to - ? On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst. Reading a person is an investment in time. It means studying them carefully through the whole conversation, noticing changes in their tone, the movements of their eyes and hands, their most fleeting expressions. In play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through (145 - 146). I love this move. Anyone who has had a difficult conversation is familiar with the need to read every available cue in order to navigate the conversation safely and productively. Was that joke a stab at you or a lighthearted remark? Should you push against what they are saying or quietly listen without comment? Do they want you to agree with them or challenge them? I love that this move captures that experience so beautifully. But the designers want the move to emulate more than just real-life experiences; they want it to emulate the kind of conversations we see in novels, movies, and TV shows. The secret to that latter goal is this instruction: “roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through.” It is only by playing the interaction through that the move can achieve what it is truly meant to emulate in well-written dramas: subtext! Two characters with emotional stakes in a conversation can talk about the most mundane things on the surface while communicating devastating blows with their subtext and cues, both verbally and non-verbally. That’s what this move strives for, and that’s why the interaction needs to be “genuinely charged,” why the player isn’t supposed to ask all her questions up front, and why the interaction is meant to be played out in full. If the conversation is not genuinely charged, then there’s no room for subtext. In a genuinely charged conversation, the people speaking are not free to speak their feelings and desires plainly, either because of internal or external pressures. If a character can’t speak their feelings and desires plainly, they are forced to talk about other things, but those other things float on the surface of those unspoken feelings and desires, and in floating on the surface they are – consciously or unconsciously – shaped and distorted by them. With this move, you don’t have to be an incredibly clever writer of dialogue in order to get the same impact that skilled dramaturgists achieve. No matter what the two characters talk about on the surface, the player can ask questions like “what’s your character really feeling?” or “what does your character wish I’d do?” and get the answer before returning to the conversation. As an MC, you have the opportunity to create cool details that explain those deeper meanings. Throw in all the gestures and undertones you want and give them meaning – that’s the meat and the joy of this move. If it’s two players’ character interacting, they can totally read each other at the same time. Both roll, both hold, both ask, both answer, no prob. You see the possibilities of this move here, yeah? Quinn Murphy has an excellent essay called “The Talk: Better Conversations in Your Games” (it appears in the Indie+ 2014 Anthology, pg 2), in which he gives advice about creating a conversation between two players that has all the rich subtext that we see in our favorite dramas. This move doesn’t obviate Murphy’s technique, but it allows for so much more, and it does so mechanically rather than through coordinated planning. With read a person, we can conduct a conversation between two PCs that are ostensibly about one topic while we reveal all the turmoil and desires underneath. We no longer have to have our characters’ conversations be on the nose. Cool. I think of this instruction to trigger this move “only . . . when you’re going to play the interaction through” as a sort of Easter egg hidden in plain sight. I say that because it’s easy for players in the heat of the moment to skip the full conversation and jump right to the questions and answers. After all, there is nothing in the move itself that forces the players to “play the interaction through.” The rules certainly demand it, but the game doesn’t enforce that demand. If a player wants to say, “I talk to her, and I’m just trying to figure out what she intends to do about X,” the MC can just give the answer and play can move on without so much as a hiccup. Back in posts nos. 100 and 101, I talked a fair amount about “self-enforcing” RPG design that forces the players to make the fiction clear. The loosey-goosiness of the instruction to “play the interaction through” makes me think of the same “anyway” blogpost I referenced in those earlier posts: “2009-06-15 : Lazy Play vs IIEE with Teeth” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456/). In that post, Vincent says: So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you? Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age. You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing. Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing. Obviously, Vincent and Meguey are clever enough designers to know that this rule to “play the interaction through” is unenforced, which means that they are fine with some players skipping past the interactions details straight to the answering of the questions. I can’t think of a way to make the move self-enforcing without also making it cumbersome and potentially unpleasant. So even though they know that some X-percent of their players won’t play the move that way, it is worth it to them not only to keep the advice in there, but to state that advice as a rule. I don’t know about you, but that says to me exactly how important they think that instruction is. If you don’t play the interaction through, you’re cheating yourself of the experience of the subtext-laden exchange between characters. Your game won’t suffer if you don’t do it, but it will be greatly enhanced if you do. Everyone knows that the MC in Apocalypse World never rolls the dice.
I’ve been thinking that keeping the dice in the hands of the other players was a solution to several problems. First, it speeds up conflict and moments that call for resolution. The player throws the dice, instantly sees the result, and game play continues. There’s no back and forth as the PC acts and the player rolls followed by the NPCs’ reacting and the GM rolling. The entire back and forth of action and reaction are smoothly folded into one roll. Similarly, opposed rolls by two players have to be compared, read, and interpreted before the fiction can be finalized. Second, it keeps the MC honest by making it impossible for her to fudge a roll, to roll behind a screen, or to falsely inflate an enemy’s roll because it feels right to make the moment more dramatic. Third, it lessens the MC’s investment in the results of the roll because it reinforces her role as observer and interpreter only. Fourth, limiting who can roll dice keeps the narrative focused on the PCs. When the GM in a game can throw dice for their NPC, it temporarily raises that NPC to equal status with the PCs. There’s none of that in Apocalypse World. So here’s the confession part. I didn’t think about how the fact that the MC never rolls dice is directly related to the fact that NPCs don’t require any stats or written attributes. If I’m going to roll for this nasty NPC against your awesome PC, I need to know what I’m rolling, which means the NPC needs to have enough pre-decided information for me to have a meaningful dice roll. By folding all the NPCs’ actions and reactions into the PCs’ rolls, the game removes any real-world cues that measure and define the NPCs. The result is that the NPCs exist entirely within the fiction. As the MC, all you need is a name and an idea, and you can whip up an NPC as quickly as the developing story demands it. Why is that solution particularly fitting for Apocalypse World? Remember that whole “DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not fucking around” thing? The MC needs to be completely reactive to the other players and what they decide their characters will pursue. Moreover, the threats in Apocalypse World are almost exclusively human, so the landscape is going to be full of all kinds of NPCs, and no one knows which ones will end up being important. Having the NPCs exist solely as fiction is a way that the game lets the MC be flexible with the story. It’s the way that the game lets the MC names everyone and make everyone human. It’s the way the game lets the MC look at the NPCs through crosshairs. The more laborious NPC creation is, the more the game needs to allow the GM to plan NPCs in advance, and the more precious those creations will be to the GM. Look through your RPG collection and see how the different games balance NPC creation with the rest of the game design. How does the game accommodate the GM to be able to create NPCs quickly and easily, and where does the game demand more attention and resources be spent? I had not thought of the relationship between NPC creation and the way a game is GM’d or the way a game develops narrative and conflict, but for now I can’t stop thinking about it. Apocalypse World is chock full of examples. I’ve already said that they exemplify the conversation that is the act of roleplaying Apocalypse World, that they show negotiation and assent in action, players responding to each other thoughtfully and respectfully, correcting themselves and moving on. I’ve said that they show us the rules and elements of the game in action, character moves, MC moves, procedures - all of that. In addition to those things, the examples establish expectations of what play will look like and permission to take play in all kinds of directions. Let’s dig into that aspect of them.
There’s a lot of violence, yeah? Most of the extended example in the Moves Snowball chapter is a fight between a PC and a group of NPCs. But it isn’t just any fight; it gets particularly brutal. I’m thinking of Marie’s chopping into Plover and Pellet with a chainsaw. Then there’s Keeler going aggro on Plover, trying to smash his head in with a claw hammer, only to finish the job in the sucker someone example. And let’s not forget Bran’s casual attempt to blow Balls’s brains out in sucker someone. There are other examples, of course, and many don’t show these levels of malice or spite, but these characters are cutting loose and wreaking some havoc. The examples you put forward in your game text tell readers what to expect in play. Some readers will be put off by the cruelty or animosity displayed here, and others will grin and hurry to print out playbooks. The first kind of reader is warned that this kind of play can readily result from the game, and the second kind is given permission to take play in these directions. The question before us then is why setup a game with these kinds of permissions and expectations? Why does Apocalypse World in particular not only allow for this kind of play, but construct it through the players’ moves and actively encourage it through these examples? On my way to proposing an answer to that question, permit me to make a quick detour. I’m currently (and slowly) making my way through 7th Sea, which is all about heroes. I won’t go into much detail because, one, it’s not particularly important, and two, I haven’t read enough to make the full claims I’m heading toward (but I’ll post something when I’ve finished the text and gotten my thoughts in order). In the description of the various nations of the setting, there are story seeds that ask, as a hero, will you do X or Y. For example, as a musketeer in the world’s equivalence of revolutionary France, will you back the king or find a way to help those suffering under his indifferent rule. That’s a totally fair question to ask, and it balances the difficult pressures the hero is facing between duty and ideals, but we never really suspect that ideals will be trashed for duties. The question is does the hero find a way to satisfy his sense of honor and help the helpless, or go in entirely with helping the helpless. Again, it’s a fine question, but whatever the answer, we know that the hero will act like . . . well, a hero. It’s in the very premise of the game. We never expect the musketeer to skewer a beggar to get her out of the king’s way, for example Apocalypse World is a morally murkier world than Theah. The world has gone to shit and the players are asked what kind of community will their characters build from the fucked-up societies of this post-apocalyptic landscape. Maybe the characters will be heroes, and maybe they won’t be. When we sit down to play the game, we don’t know if we are telling a tragic or hopeful tale, a grim cautionary tale or a triumphant story of making it all work somehow. We can only find out through the act of play itself. The crucible of Apocalypse World will tell us who these characters are at heart, what they care about, what they are willing to sacrifice, and what they are willing to settle for. In order for that to be a truly open question, the characters need to be capable of doing some truly callous and horrible things. They need to have a limited set of tools that challenge them to establish peace - or at least stability - in whatever hodge-podge way they can. If they are not given the chance to be rotten, then being anything other than rotten is never a real choice. You can’t truly be a hero if you don’t have the freedom of being truly villainous. Apocalypse World has no use for those terms – hero and villain – but some form of that spectrum still exists. So the moves limit how the characters can effectively interact with the world, and they tempt the characters to travel down some morally dark allies to get where they are going, and the examples show the readers again and again that taboos that might exist in other games don’t exist here. You can take revenge or settle a dispute with a claw hammer. You can push someone off a roof because they are fucking up your shit. You can happily manipulate someone to get what you want or need. Hell, not only can you do it, but you’ll probably feel the need to at some point in the game. Once the game establishes those expectations and permissions, then the players are truly free to find out who their characters are and what their story looks like. That’s why, I believe, the examples show the things they do. A bonus question: what keeps the game from being a glorification of violence, a celebration of characters doing shitty things to others? Consequences. The point that the text drives home again and again is that you as MC make everything hum along by making every action taken by the PCs consequential. Players’ characters can do whatever they like in Apocalypse World, but they will pay the price for those actions. What that price is and what those consequences look like – that’s left to the MC to decide. That’s what you are sculpting as you make your MC moves and wield the threats pressuring the PCs. The other players are equal participants in building the world, but you are solely responsible for the moral landscape and ramifications for deeds done. What does the opposite and equal reaction look like in your Apocalypse World? That’s entirely up to you. It seems to me that the most common misapplication of read a stich is to treat it like a general perception check, where the player is rolling, or the MC is prompting the player to roll, to see if they can figure out what’s going on. If there is not immediate or impending danger that is either being responded to or prepared for, read a sitch is not your move. In those situations where the move isn’t triggered, the MC has no reason to be coy – tell the players what is happening and get to the good stuff. Make the situation and the threat plain. If there is no threat, then the players can ask their questions and should get straight answers from the MC without a move being involved.
It’s with knowledge of this common misapplication that I find the first example in this section lacking: “So that’s weird,” Marie’s player says, at some point. “What IS going on with Birdie?” “Roll to read a sitch,” I say. She misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like. A good one here is to turn the move back on her, so that’s what I choose. “I dunno what’s up with her,” I say. “I mean, I do, but she’s opaque to you. Anyway, where would you say you’re most vulnerable to her?” (144) What is happening here? First, this is carried over directly from first edition, in which a miss does not get the PC a question. So, the MC fails to let the PC ask her single question before turning her move back on her. Not ideal in an example. Second, it is unclear what is motivating the player’s attempt to read the situation. If Birdie is a friend, then read a person seems like the more appropriate move here, which would then let the player ask questions like what’s Birdie feeling, what does Birdie intend to do, what does Birdie want me to do? But no, the MC sees the character’s musing about Birdie triggering read a sitch instead. So what does that imply? Birdie must be posing a real threat to Marie in order for the move to trigger. My own feeling is that Birdie is about to betray Marie in some horrible way and Marie’s spidey-senses are tingling, but that is conjecture because of the move. If Marie’s player had succeeded in her roll, she could ask who’s really in control here, or what should I be on the lookout for, or who’s my biggest threat, which means some shit is about to go down in the not-too-distant future. Birdie’s looking for Marie’s weak spot implies the same thing. But none of that is clear and it requires a lot of mental work in order to make sense of it. Instead, it looks like the move is being used just to generally suss out what is going on, which is a disservice to the readers and their desire for clarity. Let’s jump to Keeler and Tum Tum, because that is an awesome example: Keeler doesn’t like the way things are going, so she takes a quick look around. She hits the roll with an 11, so she gets to ask three questions. I answer that Tum Tum isn’t her biggest threat, Tum Tum’s psychically linked cultist-bodyguards are. Her enemy’s true position is closing in slowly around Tum Tum’s temple, where they’re talking. And if things go to shit? I think her best escape route would be to take one or the other of Tum Tum hostage. (Keeler’s player: “Aw fuck.”) (145) What I love most about it is the “sudden unhappy revelation” of Marie’s best escape route: “take one or the other of Tum Tum hostage.” That’s so much better than a get-out-of-jail-free card! The ace up Keeler’s sleeve is messy and unpleasant and fraught with uncertainty. Can she get that close to Tum Tum? Can she seize one of them successfully to take them hostage? What the fuck does she do with them after she escapes with them? What will be the long-term repercussions? So much good stuff here! Before the move was triggered, the only thing in the fiction was that Keeler had a bad feeling about the situation. After the move, we can see the cultist-bodyguards surrounding the temple, we know that they are the biggest threat present, and we know that this could all possibly end in a hostage situation. What more could you want a move to contribute to the fiction?! Now let’s dive into the final example, the “mistake & correction”: Audrey’s got an old plastic box, like an interoffice mail box, with 2 dozen fresh apples in it. She brokered them from somewhere and now she’s delivering them to her friend Partridge, but there’s as usual a stretch of way she has to go through that’s in Dremmer’s territory. She stops at a safe spot and reads the way forward, and hits with a 10. “Cool. What should I be on the lookout for?” “Dremmer sends patrols through here, of course,” I say. “You should be on the lookout for a patrol.” “Makes sense. How far will I have to go exposed?” “A few hundred yards, it looks like,” I say. “Okay,” she says. “Question 3—” “Oh no, no,” I say. “that didn’t use up any of your hold, I was just telling you what you see.” “Oh! Great. How often do the patrols come through?” I shake my head. “You don’t know. Could be whenever.” “But can’t I make that my question, so you have to answer it?” “Nope!” I say. “You can spend your hold to make me answer questions from the list. Other questions don’t use up your hold, but I get to answer them or not, depending on whatever.” “Okay, I get it,” she says. “So I’m on question 2 still? What’s my enemy’s true position?” (145) This example addresses the common issue of players asking questions that aren’t on the list. How does the MC handle it? We have a clear, imminent danger in this situation as Audrey is about to move through a chunk of Dremmer’s territory. Sweet. The first question lets the player learn that Dremmer’s gang patrols this area. That makes the player want to know more about the patrols and Audrey’s potential exposure to those patrols. There are two ways to interpret the MC’s response to these questions; either she’s being a jerk and making the player find the exact question, or she thought Audrey’s questions were legit and not an attempt to use up her holds. I’m going with option two. Audrey’s player wants to know how much exposed land she has to travel through, and the MC thinks the player wants to know this before asking her next question. Audrey the character knows the expanse of exposed area so the MC just answers. When Audrey’s player asks about the patrol frequency, the MC thinks she’s asking if Audrey knows the frequency. She doesn’t, and the MC tells her so. Those questions are, in the end, just questions to know what the character knows, and the MC still has to answer them according to her principles of saying what honesty and her prep demand. This is all part of the conversation surrounding the move. The player only get three questions from that list, but she is of course free to ask any related question she’d like because players always have an invitation to do that in Apocalypse World. Through this exchange, Audrey’s player pieces together that what she’s really trying to figure out is where that patrol actually is, her enemy’s true position. The move naturally creates this kind of back-and-forth in the conversation. As the MC says, “You can spend your hold to make me answer questions from the list. Other questions don’t use up your hold, but I get to answer them or not, depending on whatever.” And that’s really what this example drives home. The list of questions are not the only questions you can ask, but they are the only questions that use up your hold and whose answers are binding (and mechanically supported by the +1forward). When you read a charged situation, roll+sharp. On a hit, you can ask the MC questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC’s answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3. On a 7–9, ask 1:
• Where’s my best escape route / way in / way past? • Which enemy is most vulnerable to me? • Which enemy is the biggest threat? • What should I be on the lookout for? • What’s my enemy’s true position? • Who’s in control here? On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst. You can tell me that this move isn’t brilliant, but then you’d be a liar, so don’t do it. This move and its counterpart, read a person, are the two active perception moves that allow characters to assess their surroundings. Of course the situation has to be “charged.” As with all the other language in Apocalypse World, “charged” is not a special term with special meaning, but is simply natural English. So what a charged situation is is up to the players at your table to determine. That said, you can feel the edges of what the move itself thinks of as a charged situation by the questions it allows you to ask. Looking over those six questions, we can see that they fit naturally into any situation in which you or someone you care about is in or is about to enter a dangerous situation. Every question in the list allows the characters to determine how to identify dangers and their corresponding opportunities, yeah? What blows my mind is how every situation worth assessing is reduced to six simple bits of information. As I noted in post no. 90, the advantage of using natural language is that moves are expanded by the inherent vagueness of the written word. Words like “situation,” “enemy,” “vulnerable,” “threat,” “position,” and “control” all provide enough wiggle room that this move covers dangers that are not only physical, but also emotional, spiritual, and social. The situation at hand could be a charged conversation, for example. Imagine how each of those questions can apply to someone trying to corner your character in a conversation, either an enemy or a lover. If a PC is vulnerable or has the opportunity to do something that will make them vulnerable, the situation can be read. But why create a list of limited questions at all? Why not let the players come up with any question they want? I think there are a number of reasons to limit the questions in this way, but let’s hold off on that question for now. We’ll look at this again and in more detail when we get to “Reading a Sitch or a Person” on pages 147-148, where Vincent and Meguey talk more about it themselves. Instead, let’s look at what reading a situation looks like in the fiction. Reading a situation can mean carefully checking things out, studying and analyzing, thinking something through, or it can mean a quick look over the wall and going by gut. Depends on the character (144) How you wrap this move into the fiction is entirely up to you. This could be a scene full of research, maps spread across a table with notes of intel and rumors. It could be like a scene from the super-combative Sherlock Holmes films in which Robert Downey, Jr. analyzes the scene around him in a split second with methodical and intellectual precision. It could be information gathered so fast it feels like a burst of intuition. “Depends on the character.” How does your character take in the world around her and process that information? What does that look like? You’re the one who has to do it in order to do it, so it’s your call. That’s cool. And what about things from the MC’s perspective? How do you answer these questions? Following your principles, is the short answer. Say what honesty and your prep demands. If your prep gives you nothing, then misdirect, make up something and then present it to the players as though the fiction itself produced that answer. But whatever you say becomes true: “Either way, you do have to commit to the answers when you give them. The +1 is there to make it concrete.” That +1 is a beautifully elegant way to give teeth to what you say, and it ensures that your misdirection is only ever about the fiction, not about lying to the other players. The +1 makes it impossible on a hit for a PC to _mis_perceive the situation. As such, it builds trust between the MC and the players. The +1 also acts as an encouragement to the players to read every charged situation they come across, for who can’t use a +1 in their back pocket? The game wants this move to go off often. Why? I find myself thinking of a passage from Dogs in the Vineyard: “I want them to figure out what’s wrong in the town. In fact, I want to show them what’s wrong in the town! Otherwise, they’ll wander around waiting for me to drop them a clue, I’ll have my dumb poker face on, and we’ll be bored stupid the whole evening” (pg 139). The more the characters assess the situation, and the more confident they can be about the answers they receive to their questions, the more they can act and stir up trouble and roll dice and create opportunities for some hard-ass MC moves. And all that is propelled by a simple +1. Even when you aren’t making hard moves, even when you are just answering questions, you are advised: “Spring sudden unhappy revelations on people every chance you get. That’s the best.” That IS the best, and I love the Bakers for not only recognizing it but for saying it. Yes, those two sentences are also on my list of Favorite Passages in AW! Your first order of business as an MC is to follow your principles in pursuit of your agenda, so if you can drive those principles right to the door of making the PCs’ lives not boring, do it! The openness of the questions give you the quiet invitation to introduce “sudden unhappy revelations” whenever you see the opportunity. It’s your job to look for them and seize them. I really love looking at the examples in Apocalypse World.
Marie draws Roark a bath and joins him in it, with dandelion wine. She wants him to bring Joe’s Girl to her. She misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to separate them. “As soon as Joe’s Girl comes up in conversation, he sees what you’re up to,” I say. “He shoves you out of his way and stomps out of your rooms. He takes his shotgun with him but doesn’t even bother to get dressed. He’s muttering the whole way down the hall, like ‘fuckin Marie, shoulda known, fuckin trusted her, fuckin Joe’s Girl…’” This is my favorite example of the bunch here. I love that Marie and Roark are most likely already a thing. Roark’s not shocked by the bath and the wine and the special treatment. It just looks like a loving setup. Marie is definitely seducing/manipulating Roark, but it’s not heartless, or so it seems to me. She can both want to get naked with him and have him bring Joe’s Girl to her. Two birds and all that! Seduce and manipulate can sound pretty shitty, but it doesn’t always have to look like that in play, so I appreciate this example. And let’s appreciate that hard move. On the one hand, it just looks like he left. She doesn’t get what she wants and also gets no sex. Not so hard on the surface. But, man, his not putting on clothes! Leaving butt-ass naked, with just his shotgun shows how distressed Roark is (and how a part of him his shotgun is!). On top of that, his mumbling about how he should have known better than to trust Marie – it’s all a perfect picture of a man who feels betrayed at the deepest level. Marie and Roark weren’t just separated physically; there’s a deep fucking divide between the two now and you can tell that things are permanently changed hereafter. The second example shows something I said in the last post, that the person being manipulated when this move is made against another PC is the player, not the character: Bran wants Keeler’s backup in an ill-considered raid on Jackabacka’s junkyard. Keeler knows how ill-considered it is, though. “Oh come on, it’ll be fun,” Bran’s player says. He hits the roll with a 7. “So, the carrot or the stick?” Keeler’s player says. “The carrot,” he says. “You’ve got hard highlighted, yeah? The way I figure it, with that, plus one from me, this raid could give you enough experience to get a whole improvement.” “Hm,” Keeler’s player says. “That’s an interesting point.” The conversation here is between Bran’s player and Keeler’s player, not between Bran and Keeler. Presumably the players will go over how Bran convinces Keeler, but that part is less important for the sake of this example. You can see plain as day Bran’s player is trying to align Keeler’s player with their own self-interests so that Keeler’s player can play Keeler’s aid in the raid with enthusiasm. The final example is rather straightforward: Keeler’s gearing up for some ill-considered raid or other. “Hey, MC, do I remember right that one of the outguards has night vision goggles? III, maybe, or Joe’s Girl?” “Sure, III does,” I say. “Cool,” she says. “I drop in on her…” She proceeds to offer III a cut of the spoils in return for the borrow of them, and hits the roll with a 10. “Yeah,” I say, “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.” “On a 10+, they go along with you.” Yep. That’s what happens here. The strength of a 10+, as I’ve pointed out before, is that the result consequentially affects the fiction. The consequence of this roll will only play out after the raid, when III’s goggles are scuffed, lost, or returned in perfect condition, or when Keeler squelches on her deal or lives up to her deal. All that comes later and is really outside the scope of this example, so for now, it looks a little dull: “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.” Apocalypse World directs us to make straightforward NPCs: “Make your NPCs human by giving them straightforward, sensible self-interests. . . . In your game, make all your NPCs just not that complicated. They do what they want to do, when they want to do it, and if something gets in their way, well, they deal with that now. What they do in life is follow their parts around – their noses, their stomachs, their hearts, their clits & dicks, their guts, their ears, their inner children, their visions” (84).
I talked about NPCs in post no. 43, and there I say that giving NPCs straightforward self-interests allows the MC to always know how a character will respond to whatever a PC does. I still stand by that, but I want to add to it. In post no. 82 I talk about a distinction Vincent made in one of his podcast appearances between instruction and orientation in a rulebook. In short, he suggested that some rules are there to tell you what to do and some are there to prepare you for what the rules are going to make happen anyway. I feel like the direction to create NPCs with “straightforward, sensible self-interests” is definitely an instruction, but that instruction is reinforced by the rest of the game’s design so that making simple, self-interested NPCs feels almost instinctual. Uncomplicated NPCs are required in order for threats to gain simple trajectories that PCs can intercept, and their simplicity is everywhere in the basic moves chapter, which we see in the ways that PCs can interact with the NPCs in a moment-by-moment basis. In the move seduce or manipulate, we are told the following: Seducing someone, here, means using sex to get them to do what you want, not (or not just) trying to get them to fuck you. Asking someone straight to do something isn’t trying to seduce or manipulate them. To seduce or manipulate an NPC, the character needs leverage, a reason: sex, or a threat, or a promise, something that the character can really do that the victim really wants or really doesn’t want. Absent leverage, they’re just talking, and you should have your NPCs agree or accede, decline or refuse, according to their own self-interests. Let’s start with that last paragraph. The default state of NPCs is to go about “according to their own self-interests.” Every PC interaction with an NPC is guided by what that NPC’s uncomplicated wants are. If you are trying to get something from an NPC without triggering a move, you are just talking and the MC will play the NPC in accordance with their simple desires. All the social moves in Apocalypse World get triggered when you try to get an NPC to act in your self-interest, either by convincing them that satisfying your needs will meet their own or by demonstrating that your threat overrides what their self-interests previously were. If as an MC you create NPCs with complicated desires you make it difficult for the PCs to know where to push and difficult for yourself to know if that pushing will be effective. Similarly, if you do not pick a body part and give your NPC enough of a desire to follow it, there is no tug-of-war between characters because there is no clash between self-interests. This is not something you need to understand in the abstract as an MC, and if you’ve made your NPCs as the rules instruct, this will all happen magically and seamlessly. If you didn’t, the moves will push you in that direction simply in order to make the interactions work the way they need to. In this ways, the rules tell you which direction to walk, and then the rest of the game builds pathways and bumpers to unconsciously steer you down that path anyway. That’s pretty bitchin’ game design. And what about conflicts of self-interest between PCs? When one player’s character manipulates another, there’s no need for especial leverage. Instead, the manipulating character simply gets to offer her counterpart the carrot, the stick, or both. The carrot is marking experience, and the stick is erasing a stat highlight. See that? No leverage. You can’t manipulate another PC anyway, so why call for leverage? Whether another PC goes along with you or not is entirely up to them, and never the dice. So we get the ol’ carrot and stick approach. That carrot and that stick do exactly what the leverage is designed to do, with a twist. The move aligns the interests of two people, but it aligns the interests of the players rather than the interest of the characters. Characters don’t care about XP or highlighted stats – they don’t even know what the hell those are. Once the players’ interests are aligned, then the characters can go off and do their “ill-considered” (to borrow a word from the examples) things together. When you try to seduce, manipulate, bluff, fast-talk, or lie to someone, tell them what you want them to do, give them a reason,and roll+hot. For NPCs: on a 10+, they’ll go along with you, unless or until some fact or action betrays the reason you gave them. On a 7–9,they’ll go along with you, but they need some concrete assurance, corroboration, or evidence first. For PCs: on a 10+, both. On a 7–9,choose 1:
• If they go along with you, they mark experience. • If they refuse, erase one of their stat highlights for the remainder of the session. What they do then is up to them. On a miss, for either NPCs or PCs, be prepared for the worst. (142) This is our second move PCs can undertake to try to get someone to do what we want, and it’s a damn effective move. The only two requirements for the move are that we 1) tell them what we want, and 2) give them a reason. There are no limits imposed by the move beyond that. There is no caveat in the rules here that says the thing you want them to do has to be reasonable or something they would typically agree to do. In the explanation of Read a Person, we are told “’Dude, sorry, no way’ is a legit answer to ‘how could I get your character to___?’” (146) but no such guidance is given here. You are invited to be as far or as close reaching as you’d like. Thematically, this means that everyone in Apocalypse World has a price. Further, the currency for that price is not fixed. Sex, drugs, money, power, promises of rewards – all of these (and more) are potentially effective on every one you meet. Well, that’s all good thematically speaking, but how does a move like this exist without being abused left, right, and center? What is to stop you from trying to solve the problem of an invading enemy force with some sexy moves? I haven’t heard any tales of the move being abused horribly, so what keeps it functioning? I think there are two things that make this move reliably work. Actually those two things are really one thing: the equality of all the players at the table. The game doesn’t assign authority to any one person in determining if and when a move is triggered. As we’ve covered before, moves trigger via a natural and often unspoken negotiation. The player and the MC have to agree that the move has been triggered, so if a player wants a ridiculous return on a tiny investment, the MC can raise her eyebrows to get negotiations rolling. So that’s the first thing of this one thing: the built-in negotiation between players for moves to trigger from the fiction. The second thing of this one thing is the way the move is written. You are free to tell your target anything at all you want them to do. Period. But the anchor and limiter to that request or demand is the second part of the move: you have to give them a reason. If you want someone to do big things, you are going to have to give them big things. The reason that you give will naturally be a part of those negotiations between player and MC. You want her to call off her brute squad and leave the townsfolk in peace? And you think that is going to move her? The question, then, becomes not can you try to get them to do what you want, but how much are you willing to pay to get them to do the thing you want. The twin levers of “tell them what you want them to do” and “give them a reason” always work in tandem, and they ensure that no matter what offer or threat is made, the story is bound to profit by it. In this way, it’s a self-scaling move. One of the awesome things about playing Apocalypse World, whether you’re piloting the PCs or driving the world around them as the MC, is that you can play as hard as you’d like, that you are in fact rewarded for pushing hard. The scaling power of seduce or manipulate is one of the ways the game allows for and encourages all that pushing without ever threatening play itself. As an MC, you can throw horrible consequence after horrible consequence at the players because their moves give them the tools to deal with whatever comes their way. You never know what the characters are truly made of until you put them in a pressure-cooker of a situation; then we’ll see what they think is worth fighting for, and we’ll see what they are willing to pay to get what they want. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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