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At the end of every session, choose a character who knows you better than they used to. If there’s more than one, choose one at your whim. Tell that player to add +1 to their Hx with you on their sheet.If this brings them to Hx+4, they reset to Hx+1 (and therefore mark experience). If no one knows you better, choose a character who doesn’t know you as well as they thought, or choose any character at your whim. Tell that player to take -1 to their Hx with you on their sheet. If this brings them to Hx -3, they reset to Hx=0 (and therefore mark experience).
If you forget to do this at the end of a session, be sure to do it at the beginning of the next. It’s important. Every player has to choose someone, no passing. I talked about Hx and this move pretty extensively in post no. 127. Let’s look instead at the idea behind resetting your Hx with another character, and what that means about how we relate to other people. Here’s what the text says: Resetting Hx from +4 to +1 doesn’t mean that now you know them less than you did, obviously not. It means that you’ve crossed a threshold of knowing them, kind of like how both of your brothers know you better than a coworker does, but you can still say that one of them knows you better than the other. Some groups play that when you reset your Hx with someone, they have to tell you a secret, to reflect the fact that you’ve crossed this kind of threshold with them. It’s a good rule, if you’d like to adopt it yourself. This idea of a relationship progressing at the same time that the number drops has caused quite a bit of consternation over the years. Vincent and Meguey have spoken about it in several places. Meguey talks to +Richard Rogers in his first episode of the +1 Forward podcast (it’s a great podcast and that was a great episode, so check it out). In his “anyway” blog, Vincent talks about it as well: “The Hx rollover in Apocalypse World is absolutely rooted in my observations of people, yes. I've often had the experience where I'm hanging out intensively with someone, and getting to know them better and better, and then suddenly I feel awkward and alienated around them for a little while. I don't know them any less well, but knowing them better makes me less comfortable until I get used to it. ”The Hx+3 honeymoon's over, in other words, but there's always the possibility of another Hx+3 honeymoon in the future. ”It goes along with the fact that I know my brother Drew, say, better than I know Graham Walmsley, but whichever of the two I drive out to GenCon with, I know better at the end of the trip than I did at the beginning. ”I think that people find it clunky in the game because there's an implied second Hx stat, but the game doesn't have any use for it so doesn't ask you to track it. It's the Hx baseline, which starts at 0 and increments with every rollover. Apocalypse World cares about how your Hxs change, relatively, not which of your Hxs are stronger in absolute terms. ”If it makes you feel more comfy, you can track your Hx baselines in your game.” (from “Just 3 Insights?”, comment 8, http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/604) So you can think of the first time your Hx+3 with another character rolls over to Hx+1 as going from 0.3 to 1.1, and so on. I would like to see the examples tackle one of these resetting moments, but none of them do. I can’t say I blame the authors, because doing something cool like telling a secret or something else that signifies that growth is entirely optional. The examples show you what needs to be done an how it works, not optional tricks and tools. These are the examples we get: During the session, Marie and Keeler had a light-but-honest conversation, and Marie said maybe something that wasn’t a big deal, but she’d never said it to anyone before. Marie’s player tells Keeler’s to take +1Hx. Keeler, however, was completely appalled by what Marie said, and withdrew from her abruptly. Marie didn’t even notice but kept right on talking. Keeler’s player tells Marie’s to take -1Hx. During the session, Bran pursued his own interests mostly apart from the other two, but enlisted and had conversations with both of them at different times. He chooses to tell Marie’s player to take the +1Hx, more or less arbitrarily, and figures he’ll choose Keeler next time. I do love the Marie/Keeler exchange. Keeler knows Marie better and is horrified by what she learned. Since Marie paid so little attention to Keeler’s response, she learned nothing about Keeler and proved that she knew Keeler less well than she thought by thinking the story shared wouldn’t be “a big deal” to her. The example is a clever and quick way to get that across. Since the game cares about how your characters interact and connect (or fail to connect), I would love to see Bran have a reason to give the +1 to either Keeler or Marie. But the other examples already establish that, don’t they? The point of Bran’s example is that you sometimes have a session where you don’t have a lot of interaction with the other PCs. When you do, don’t sweat it; give a +1 to whomever and move on. The game won’t fall apart if your character was doing her own thing with NPCs all session, and it’s not worth fretting about. But it’s equally important that you don’t have the option to skip the move. By insisting on every player making the move, the game forces a little debrief and consideration at the end of the session. You need to think about who your character interacted with and how. You need to take measure of where they are in their relationships. That mindfulness, that taking stock, is the real point of the move, I think. Yeah, the changing of your Hx scores will eventually result in a point of XP here and there, but unless you’re an angel having a field day healing and fucking everyone, your change will be pretty slow. The Hx rules in general, and the session end move in particular, are there to keep you thinking about these relationships and how they are changing from session to session. Having those relationships in mind gives you ideas about scenes you want to have and ways you want to play your character when they are paired with the other characters. The trip from Hx+1 to HX+4 (or Hx=0 to Hx-3) is just close enough that that extra tick at the end of the session can push you to further shore up or fracture that relationship in the next session. And of course, the more players come into a session with desires and directions of their own, the more exciting that session will be.
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Most of the playbooks include a move like this (from the angel):
If you_ need jingle during a session_, tell the MC you’d like to work a gig. Your gigs: • Tend to the health of a dozen families or more. • Serve a wealthy NPC as angel on call. • Serve a warlord NPC as combat medic. • Others, as you negotiate them. When a player tells you that her character would like to work a gig, ask her what she has in mind. She might pick one from the list, or she might suggest a new one. It’s up to you to decide whether to say yes, no, or not yet, like “that’s a good idea, but first you’ll have to…” (153) Working gigs obviously goes hand in hand with the lifestyle move. If there were no financial pressures in Apocalypse World, then characters would not “need jingle during a session.” Things cost in this world, so it only makes sense that the game provide you with a move to secure jingle for your character. Like the lifestyle move, this move is new to the 2nd edition. In 1st edition, there was a character called “The Operator” who was a mover and shaker in the Apocalypse World, making deals and working jobs. But of course everyone in Apocalypse World is fighting to survive, so it makes sense that they all have to be movers and shakers to some degree. So the character was done away with and her gig move was democratically redistributed. Even if you have a game in which your character never works a single gig, its presence on the playbook sheet, like the lifestyle move, makes clear that these are the pressures in the world. And the list of potential gigs indicates what role your character-type plays in the communities they call home. In this example here, the player of the Angel can see that she might be acting as a community doctor, a private doctor for someone of means, and a combat medic for one of the warlords. This is what other medical professionals in Apocalypse World do, and these are some paths for you. Of course you are also invited to create your own. Like the other tools in Apocalypse World, gigs are meant to inspire and support you, not limit you. The gigs move is versatile in play, able to expand or collapse to meet the needs of your game: Once you’ve settled that question and the character works the gig, you have to decide or find out how it goes. Successful? Unsuccessful? Dangerous? Easy? Suppose that Bish the angel is serving a warlord NPC, Jeannette, as a combat medic: • You can just decide. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders all the time come back burned and smoke-poisoned, so you set up beds and lung-pumps and stuff. It’s hard work on those nights but on other nights you’re free.” • You can play it out in full. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders are going out tonight. How do you set up? What do you do?” • You can call for a move, or a quick snowball of moves, to summarize what happens. Like “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders with the smoke inhalation and the terrible burns. After midnight they start pouring in. Act under Fire to treat them all!” These three examples show that the gigs can enter play as anything from two sentences of narration, to a couple of moves, to a full session or more of play. Do you just need to get some jingle in the hands of a character and don’t want to sidetrack the fiction? Give the summary. Do you want to have some dramatic ramifications in the fiction of what exactly went down during the gig? Make a move or two to set up the fiction. Are you in a lull in this character’s narrative and looking for something to focus on? Make the gig the focus of play for a while. The game doesn’t know what exactly you will need from it at any given time, so it gives you the options and tools to control your own pacing and scope. Another thing that changed from 1st to 2nd edition is how profitable gigs are. The Operator would typically get 1-barter for a job well done. She’d have to commit murder to get 3-barter from a gig. Now, 3-barter is the standard: No matter which way you do it, the baseline for pay is, when they work a gig, they get 3-barter. You’re allowed to pay 2- or 4-barter when you feel like you should, but save them for exceptional outcomes. Far more often than you pay 2-barter, you should say “it went really poorly, and you can see that Jeannette resents it, but take your 3-barter.” And far more often that you pay 4-barter, you should say “it went fantastically well, better than Jeannette would have dreamed. Take your 3-barter, and she’s totally delighted with you.” (153-154) Why the change? As Christopher Wargo pointed out in the comments of my last post, 1-barter can no longer sustain a character for a month. In the 2nd edition, 1-barter is “enough to live on for a few days” (73). I guess even the Apocalypse World can’t escape inflation. Between that and the lifestyle move’s demand that you pay your barter’s worth of living every session, you need to make enough from a gig to sustain for a few sessions so that play doesn’t become simply a neverending series of gigs. 3-barter will let you avoid having to worry about gigs for a couple of sessions so you can build up steam in other parts of your narrative. The rules strongly encourage you not to vary from the 3-barter payment. Allowing the MC to go as low as 2 or as high as 4 suggests that the game will not break with these numbers, but that they will affect the game if used regularly. The reason for making the payment reliable is so that players know what their character will get by taking a gig. How you do and how it all comes out might be up in the air, but you can count on your payment. Without that standard, players could get financially punished for a bad roll, which encourages players to find a more reliable way to secure some jingle. What the game proposes instead of varying the payment is to work the relative success or failure of the job into the cause-and-effect chain of the narrative. Jeanette’s resentment or delight is a much more exciting (and meaningful) variable for the game than the payment. Moreover, if you stick to 3-barter generally, then when an NPC does short change or overpay it has punch. So, yes, gigs are about making money to sustain your characters, but that’s not what they are really about, are they? Like everything else in the rules, they create arenas in which PC-NPC relationships can flourish and bear dramatic fruit. Now for the ending of this section, an ending that I love: If you make it easy and safe for the characters to find and work paying gigs, they’ll be rich. The harder and more dangerous you make it, the more desperate the characters and the more desolate the world. Choose intentionally. Make Apocalypse World the way you want it. I love the simplicity and directness of “choose intentionally” as a standalone sentence. The gig subsystem is a kind of dial, and where you set it affects the rest of your game. The good news is that none of the settings on the dial will break the game, so don’t worry about that. But not breaking the game and giving you the game you want are two different things. I also love the idea that the Apocalypse World you create could be a land of plenty, at least for the PCs, with jobs and jingle always in easy reach. So much of the game is about scarcity, but that doesn’t mean the PCs have to be on the suffering end of that scarcity. What do the PCs make of the world when they are profiting from the system while others in the larger community are not? It’s its own interesting question. What you are exploring is up to you as the MC, and the gig move is one of the tools the game gives you to control that. Most of the playbooks include this move:
At the beginning of the session, spend 1- or 2-barter for your lifestyle. If you can’t or won’t, tell the MC and answer her questions. Imagine that there are three (or more) qualities of life available. The first is the typical quality of life for your Apocalypse World, where the PCs are, how most people around them live. What do they eat, drink, wear? Where do they sleep? If the player pays 1-barter at the beginning of the session, that’s the quality of life her character’s had and can generally expect. The same as most people around her. If she pays 2-barter at the beginning of the session, she has a quality of life that is substantially, notably better. Whatever other people eat, drink, and wear, she’s eating, drinking, and wearing better. She sleeps more comfortably and safer, and has more control over her personal environment. She doesn’t get any other benefit, so make it clear: she shouldn’t spend 2-barter unless this is precisely the benefit she wants (151). The lifestyle move is new to the 2nd edition, and I think it accomplishes a great deal within the game. First, it’s important to note that the move triggers at the beginning of your first session. For the text we have to jump forward to page 154, under the title “Lifestyle and gigs at the start of play”: At the beginning of the first session, have everyone make the lifestyle move, but tell them that in session one they have to pay 1-barter. Tell them that their starting barter is calculated to include this. It’s true. Each playbook starts with at least 2-barter worth of oddments (except for the hardholder, who’s a special case all around), and some playbooks start with 4-, 6-, or 8-barter (the Brainer’s got bank!). Because the move triggers in the first session, it necessitates a conversation about what life is like in your Apocalypse World. When the MC asks how much you are spending on your lifestyle, it prompts a group discussion of what 1-barter gets you in our world, and what 2-barter would look like. It also forces the question, what are you bartering with in your Apocalypse World? What is being traded? What is valuable? Like the playbooks themselves, and the Hx questions you ask each other, answering these questions about lifestyle helps us organically create the world in a loosely-guided conversation, on small, manageable step at a time in fun bursts of creative discussion. Additionally, the lifestyle move raises the specter of not being able to pay that barter cost. It says that your character could be destitute, and that there are undoubtedly others in your world who are already destitute. What are their lives like? Where do are they huddled? Even if you don’t answer those questions, they haunt the edges of your conversation. You have 1-barter now at the beginning of the game after having paid for your living, and if you don’t spend another oddment, you have enough to cover one more session. That’s it. And that’s a kind of world-building too, right? This is a world of limited supplies, where you need to pay your own way, either with oddments or favors, or you face deprivation. If that were the only purpose of the move, it would be enough. But of course there is more. If she pays 0-barter, this should mean that at the beginning of the session she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst, but hold off. It could turn out that way, but she has to answer your questions, right? As MC, your first question is to the other players: “okay, so who’s going to pay 1-barter to keep Keeler alive?” If one of them springs for her, cool; they can work the debt out between them and you don’t need to think about it any more. If none of them can or will, though, you get to choose: • Go straight to, yes, she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst. Inflict harm as established. Take away her stuff. • Choose a suitable NPC—Rolfball, for instance—and say, “oh, that’s okay, Rolfball’s got you covered. That’s good with you, yeah?” Now the debt is between her and your NPC, and you can bring it into play however you like. Given the NPC’s threat type, impulse, and general nature, how eager are they to be repaid, and on what terms? • Say, “well, okay, who do you think should pay to keep you alive? Rolfball? Fish? Who?” You can either negotiate an appropriate arrangement in summary, or else jump into play: have her read a person, seduce & manipulate, go aggro, or whatever she needs to do to get her way. Apocalypse World is a game whose story and movement are created entirely by the players through the actions of their characters. Remember that whole “DO NOT pre-plan a story line, and I’m not fucking around” thing? Well, the game can’t demand that of you and then not give you the tools with which to build a story. I mean, it could do that, but it would be a shitty game, and Apocalypse World is not a shitty game. The playbooks go a long way in character creation to creating a complex community full of named NPCs and personal pressures for the characters. Those make great starting points, and in some situations, that’s all that’s needed. But if those initial leads fall flat or prove to be less interesting than hoped, the lifestyle move is built-in fuel, there whenever you need a complication to explore. The move puts pressures on characters to have jingle, which could push them toward gigs or other risky ways of sustaining themselves. I love that the first question is to the other players. The game doesn’t necessarily want PCs at each other’s throats (although it’s cool if that happens), but it does love to have them tangled in each other’s shit. Throwing this option to the other players is a way to let them have first say in generating this narrative drama. If they pass, then the MC can look over the landscape and decide what would be most productive right now: starvation, indebtedness to a particular NPC, or a choice made by the player of the broke (or freeloading) character. However it works, this is a moment for the players to decide what dramatic pressures they want on their characters to drive the story forward from this point. It’s an incredibly flexible tool that provides drive and direction in whatever you see fit. You’ll note that 1-barter, whatever it is for your world, is defined by the game as providing a month of expenses, yet the move is supposed to be triggered at the beginning of every session, even if the last session of play took only an hour or two of in-game time. The move doesn’t prompt you to trigger it at the beginning of session only if a month of in-game time has passed. And it doesn’t provide you with reasons why the move would need to be triggered if little to no time has elapsed since last session. That’s left entirely up to you and your table to explain the necessary costs, or to leave it unexplained. But what if you want to just forget it? What if you’ve got plenty of drive in your story already and you don’t want to futz with gigs and financial pressures right now? Then forget it. Lifestyle is a move that is there to catch you when you need it and to be painlessly overlooked when you don’t. The lifestyle move hangs out in the “Barter” section of the playbooks without so much as a bullet point to even draw attention to it. It is designed to slip into the background and be forgotten. If it’s important to you and your vision for your Apocalypse World, then you’ll call for it. If you’ve got so much going on that you forgot about it, the game will gladly let you forget. But when you go searching your sheet for something to do because the game has run out of gas for you, there it will be to get things moving again. The bookend to the lifestyle move is the end of session move. One kicks you off and one meets you at the end of each session. This is what it says in the text about the session end move: If you forget to do this at the end of session, be sure to do it at the beginning of the next. It’s important. No such sentence appears in the lifestyle discussion. The rules don’t insist that you go back and rectify your barter matters if you forgot to do them, because if you forgot to do them, it most likely means that everything is working alright for you already. The lifestyle move is fantastic at every stage of play. Like a loving guardian, it’s there for you at the beginning of your journey and then it gets out of your way, but is always there to catch you when you need it. Marie’s helping Keeler get into the water cult house by talking animatedly with Tum Tum, trying to hold their attention while Keeler sneaks behind them. Marie misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like. I choose to put Keeler in a spot. “Do you glance Keeler’s way? Or do they read your mind? Or what? Anyway, one of them turns, very deliberately, and Keeler, looks right at you. What do you do?”
Keeler’s trying to get out of a firefight with Dremmer and Balls with her skin more or less intact. Bran’s interfering with her by shining a targeting laser on her. He hits with an 8, so Keeler gets the -1. Bran’s going aggro on Marser, threatening his life, his family’s lives, the lives of everyone he’s ever known. Keeler’s helping by sitting nearby, idly loading gun after gun. Keeler hits the roll with an 11, so Bran gets the +2 to his aggro roll. (150-151) In my last post, I talked about the 1st edition version of this move and the 7 – 9 result that the characters expose themselves “to fire, danger, retribution or cost.” To illustrate what it meant by that instruction, the 1st edition examples each included a parenthetical aside of what that might look like. In the first example, we are told “On a 7 – 9, maybe Tum Tum starts pressing her for . . . unsavory commitments, with threats to back them up.” In the second example, “maybe on a 7 – 9, she notices” Bran’s interference. In the third example, “maybe on a 7 – 9, Marser decides the real threat is Keeler and the only way to be safe is to get rid of her.” Removing that part of the 7 – 9 result does zero harm to the move because the fiction naturally takes care of these kinds of details. In the first example, for example, if Marie hits with a 7 – 9, then she successfully distracts Tum Tum, but she obviously does a less thorough job of it, giving Keeler only a +1 to her roll, so the MC is naturally inclined (and trained) to explore the fictional possibilities and ramifications of that fact. Hell, even on a 10+ Tum Tum can be way too interested in Marie, inviting the MC to make a move that puts pressure on Marie. In the example of Bran targeting Keeler, the idea that Keeler notices is an unnecessary detail, and one the players will naturally work out themselves. “Do you figure out how they keep targeting you? Do you realize Bran is fucking with you?” That’s better drama than letting the dice decide that detail. Same goes for the final example. Marser is free to decide that Keeler is a huge threat with or without that 7 – 9 result. That’s part of the PC-NPC-PC triangles that is constantly under the MC’s purview. No roll is needed to give the MC permission to pursue that route. So while the changes to the move might read on the page as being unexciting, the fiction that results will be anything but. The more you can get the PCs helping each other and getting tangled up in each other’s shit, the more cause-and-effect chains can splinter off and touch multiple PC lives, and the changes in the move seem designed to make that happen more often in play. My favorite example is Keeler “loading gun after gun” to help cow Marser. It’s a wonderful image, and you have seen that scene in a number of movies and TV shows, and it is always chilling if done right. My least favorite example here is the first one because the helping move seems to eclipse’s Keeler’s move altogether. Keeler is trying to sneak into the water cult house (presumably by acting under fire) and Marie is trying to help. When Marie fails her help roll, the results of Keeler’s move seem to become beside the point. Was Keeler’s roll a miss? If not, having Marie’s bad roll undo Keeler’s hit seems downright unfair. If Keeler did miss, then having Tum Tum notice her is just part of that miss and seems unrelated to Marie’s roll, in which case, the MC still has two moves to make. Sadly, it’s a muddled example and missed opportunity. On a 10+, they take +2 (help) or -2 (interfere) to their roll. On a 7 – 9, they take +1 (help) or -1 (interfere) to their roll. On a miss, be prepared for the worst.
The help or interfere move underwent some serious revision from the first edition to the second. Here’s what the move used to say: On a hit, they take +1 (help) or -2 (interfere) now. On a 7 – 9, you also expose yourself to fire, danger, retribution or cost. When I first became aware of Apocalypse World, people regularly referred to the help or interfere move as an indicator of how hostile the Apocalypse World of the game was. It was much more rewarding to hinder someone else than it was to help them. Moreover, to help someone was to stick your neck out and risk sharing in the pain, even if you got a (weak) hit. It was a compelling argument and a good bit of insight. But apparently it was not all that important to Vincent and Meguey since the second edition does away with both of those details. The simplest reading of this change is that the Bakers were originally concerned about the math, that if a character could have a +3 from a stat, the +2 from help would mean that the player would have a guaranteed hit. A maximum +1 meant that even with help and everything else going a character’s way, snake eyes would still result in a miss. And once you limit a strong hit to +1, then you can’t go any weaker than that on a weak hit and still consider it a hit, so you need to make the weakness of the hit related to something other than the bonus, which in this case was exposing yourself to danger. Obviously something about the move was not working the way they wanted it to. I don’t know if the low payoff of +1 meant that players were less inclined to help each other, or if players were scared away by the possibility of exposing themselves to danger, or if the dramatic ramifications of a weak hit were interfering with the play they wanted. Maybe it was something else entirely. So far as I know, the Bakers haven’t stated in any interviews, tweets, or blogposts why they made these changes. The move is certainly simpler and more inviting in its current form, even if it initially seems a little less sexy. Losing the 7 – 9 element of “expos[ing] yourself to fire, danger, retribution or cost” is I think no big deal because that fiction will take care of itself. Why is your character only able to be of +1 assistance instead of +2? Work that answer into the fiction. And if you are working into the fiction that your character is there helping, then the MC is going to naturally work that fact into the cause-and-effect chain that follows that moment. I’ll look more fully at this in the next post when we look at the examples. The changes to the move itself are not the only changes in this section. Behold: 2e: If a player doesn’t say how her character’s helping or interfering, always ask. To do it, the character’s got to do it. “I’m helping,” is fine to say, but just like for “I’m going aggro,” you answer it with “cool, what do you do?” 1e: Always ask how! To do it, you’ve got to do it. “I’m helping” is the same kind of unacceptably vague as “I’m going aggro” – you answer them both with “cool, what do you do?” 2e: Both of the players – the acting one, the helping or interfering one – can roll at the same time, but it’s not important. 1e: It’s best if both the players – the acting one, the helping or interfering one – roll at the same time, but don’t be a nit about it.” You can see that these changes are not to the substance of the passages but to their tone. The second edition doesn’t make many tonal changes (or at least not that 6I’ve noticed), so it’s interesting that in rewriting this, the Bakers felt the need/desire to dial this back. I suspect that calling your reader a “nit” and suggesting that the players are acting “unacceptably vague” just came off as unnecessarily harsh. While the book employs rough language and salty tones, it doesn’t tend to attack its audience directly like this. Those are at least my best bets. What are yours? A lot of RPGs give players the ability to have their characters help each other. What’s unique in Apocalypse World is that there is a dedicated stat for the purpose. Here’s the first sentence of the help or interfere move:
When you help or interfere with someone who’s making a roll, roll+Hx. Before we look at the rest of the move, I’d like to spend some time talking about Hx and its role in the game. It’s a pretty neat thing to mechanize how well our characters understand/get/see through/grok one another, but it’s only neat if the game has a reason to do that, only neat if doing so is important to the game. In Apocalypse World, how well our characters get each other is central to the themes of community and of making something together of this mess of a world we’ve inherited. The players first encounter Hx during character creation when they “do the Hx thing” (97). I’ve already talked about how cool “the Hx thing” is as it not only gives the players insight into how that character understands the people around them but that it also creates fiction that pre-dates the opening scene of the game about to be played. In answering Hx questions, players mark out relationships between the characters, define crucial color of the world the characters inhabit, and shape the play and fiction that will form the foundation of the game ahead. If Hx did nothing more, it would be awesome tech. But it does so much more. In Apocalypse World, there are three ways to gain XP: 1) roll a highlighted stat, 2) reset your character’s Hx with someone, and 3) gain it at the behest of a move. Let’s start with the second one. The game rewards you with XP for your character’s growth and improvement every time you do something to increase their Hx enough to roll over to the next level of “getting someone” or decrease enough to roll down a level. The game doesn’t care if you’re improving your relationships or destroying them; it only cares that those relationships and understandings are changing significantly. We’ll look at how Hx changes during play itself in a moment, but the reliable way that Hx changes is from the end of session move that says that every player has to decidedwho knows their character better because of the happenings in that session and grant them a point a Hx. If you can’t find someone who knows them better, choose someone who knows them worse. Changing Hx at the end of the session is not optional - “Every player has to choose someone, no passing” (154). If you want to speed up your character’s progression, you’d best have your character interacting with the other characters in ways that change that relationship for the better or worse. As a player, then, you are encouraged by the rules to play your character in a way that builds or degrades that community in measurable ways. Now let’s look at the first way to gain XP: highlighted stats. It’s no coincidence that highlighted stats are tied to Hx. Who gets to highlight your stats is determined by which player’s character your character understands best. That player then selects one of your stats so as to say, I’d like to see your character do these kinds of things in the upcoming session. Highlighting stats builds community at the table just as Hx stats measures community in the fiction. Our characters have to look out for each other, and the players likewise have to look out for (and be invested in) each other as players. Every time you have your character do the thing that the other player said she wanted to see, you get an XP for your character. The more you aim to please your fellow players in this way, the more you are rewarded. In this way, community at the player level is thematically connected to the community being created at the character level. What about that last way to gain XP? Which moves tell you to gain XP? Yep, the moves that ask you as a player to make your character do what another player wants. Let someone seduce or manipulate your character, take an XP. The savvyhead’s oftener right move and the hocus’s insight move also result in XP as one player’s character influences another player’s character’s behavior. Like highlighted stats, these moves reward community at the player-level of play. And some character’s moves result in a change, not of XP, but of Hx scores, yeah? Do harm to another character, that other character gets plus one to their Hx stat with your character. The more harm done, the more insight gained. Heal another character, you get plus one to your Hx stat with the healed character. The more healing done, the more insight gained. And sex moves! Bring those characters together in moments of intimacy and watch the Hx stats swing in both directions. This is one of the reasons why sex moves are central to the game rather than a tacked on subsystem. Yeah, you can play without them and have a good time, but the game is about how these characters relate to one another and build a community together, and it does that more effectively and more powerfully when the sex moves are present. Every element in the reward system is tied to the fictional development of community between characters and the real community created at the table between players. That Hx is used as the basis for how well you can help or hinder another player is awesome in its own right. The more I get you, the better chance I have of anticipating what you will do or what you would want me to do. But if that’s all Hx did, it would be nothing more than clever, an amusing insight into human interaction at best. What I think is especially smart in this design is that using Hx as a stat in helping or interfering is a way to take advantage of something the game already wants to do. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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