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By default, characters have access to the barter moves, but you can limit or ignore them if you think they might not suit your Apocalypse World (160).
Since Apocalypse World is designed to let the players create the details of their own setting, the designers have to choose what aspects of the game they will insist upon and which are up for grabs. Barter is one of those things that the game anticipates you’ll want rules for but doesn’t insist upon them. As we saw in the lifestyle move (pg. 151), the game leaves the matter of the economics of your particular Apocalypse World entirely up to you, so use what you want here, ignore what you don’t, and create your own as needed. Of course, even if you don’t use the moves, they are suggestive about the general or default nature of the Apocalypse World created by the game. When you give 1-barter to someone, but with strings attached, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required. Example: Marie needs Dremmer to let Roark go without a fight. She offers to buy Roark from him for 1-barter. Naturally, he’ll make the deal (160). This move always surprises me with the strength of its conviction! It says a lot about the importance of jingle in Apocalypse World. When you hit with a 10+ while manipulating someone, “they’ll go along with you.” So, essentially, when 1-barter is the leverage applied to manipulate someone, they don’t say no. Jingle is a leverage that, in Apocalypse World, is fail-safe, no need to roll. In fact, when 1-barter is the leverage, your hot doesn’t even enter into it. No matter how hot you are, your jingle is much hotter, always rolling a 10+. By default, this is an aggressively capitalist world, no matter what particular form the currency takes. I love the move as commentary. But. Other than making a statement about the economy (ours and the post-apocalypse’s), I don’t see the immediate point of the move. The particulars of the move are covered by seduce and manipulate, since the reason you give can always be 1-barter. So why make that be an automatic 10+? Why give a way to sidestep drama and complications? If the MC and players want to create such a workaround, that seems easy enough to do without the aid of this move. And why fix the price to 1-barter? Why not say something like, “When you want to buy your way around a problem, ask the MC how much barter it will cost and who you have to pay; if you pay the price, it counts as manipulating them and hitting the roll with a 10+, no leverage or roll required”? As it is written, it seems to suggest anything can be got for 1-barter, which we know is not the case. Hell, the night vision goggles in the next move’s example cost 3-barter. So, in the example given for this move, does the MC have the ability to say, no, Dremmer won’t go for that, or no, Dremmer wants 2-barter ‘cause he can see how badly you want Roark? It’s unclear to me. Is it intended to fight an MC’s impulse to “arbitrarily deny them things they want or would find useful” (quote taken from later on that same page)? The other barter moves are about trying to locate a thing your character wants and the price they are willing to pay to get it. Cool. This barter move, however, is for when you know who has the thing you want and you want a move to get it. What’s weird about that is that almost all the basic moves are designed to allow for a solution to that very problem. This guy’s got something I want; how do I get it from him? I can go aggro or seize it by force. I can try to manipulate or seduce him. I can read him and see if there’s something I can do to get it from him. This particular barter move is not only superfluous, but it runs the risk of short circuiting the narrative developments the other moves are designed to create. (I posed a couple of questions about this move to Vincent and Meguey earlier today on Twitter to see if I’m misunderstanding the move. If they respond, I’ll let you know what they say.)
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135. Inflicting Harm On and Healing Another Player
When you inflict harm on another player’s character, the other character gets +1Hx with you (on their sheet) for every segment of harm you inflict. If this brings them to Hx+4, they reset to Hx+1 as usual, and therefore mark experience. When you heal another player’s character’s harm, you get +1Hx with them (on your sheet) for every segment of harm you heal. If this brings you to Hx+4, you reset to Hx+1 as usual, and therefore mark experience. You can remember these two moves like this: when you hurt someone, they see you more clearly: now they know what you’ll do to them. When you heal someone, you see them more clearly: there’s nobody so uniquely vulnerable and exposed as an injured person in your care (159) There is a sub-theme in Apocalypse World about how we act when others are vulnerable to us. We encounter it first and primarily in the unique special move that every character has, their sex move. In triggering the special move each character must make themselves vulnerable to another who is in turn made vulnerable to them, which is just how intimacy works. For most characters, sex adjusts the Hx between the characters to varying degrees as each character is either willing to open themselves to others or attentive to their lover when the lover opens themselves up to the character. (I discuss special moves in post no. 22, if you’re interested.) These harm and healing moves are directly related to the special moves, not because the game equates sex and violence – good lord, it does anything but that. They’re related because they are all concerned with how your character treats the vulnerabilities of others. If you take advantage of that vulnerability (or force vulnerability when it isn’t offered), you learn nothing about the person you violate, but they learn about you, and they learn in direct proportion to the harm you do them. If however, you use that vulnerability to care for and heal that person, you learn about them, and in direct proportion to the amount of healing you do. In light of these moves, you can see an intimate sexual encounter as an act of healing, even if it doesn’t touch the characters’ harm clocks. If the angel has an Hx=0 with a lover before the special move triggers, then the Angel understands that lover as well as if they healed that person 3 marks on their harm clock. When the gunlugger gets +1 to their Hx with their lover, they are as good as healed that one point in their very soul. It may only be a suggested equivalence, but it’s a beautiful one. By default, the harm & healing moves are in play. You can choose to forego them case by case, when you think that they’ll slow the action (158).
Each of the moves in the peripheral moves chapter is given a “default” status like this one. In this case, the game assumes you will play with these moves, usually, understanding that they can slow down the pacing and will sometimes be dropped in the interest of keeping things moving. I think it’s cool that the Baker’s recognize that there’s a natural tension in the suffer harm move between the development of interesting fiction and the fine tuning of the narratives pacing. We see this in every form of the narrative arts. Writers and filmmakers always have one eye on pacing, and they use descriptive detail to control the speed at which things move for the audience, slowing down with full details at this moment and speeding up by dispensing with details here. Of course RPGs, as narrative games, are subject to those same tensions. Sometimes skipping the harm move will be a purposeful decision by one player, and other times it will be an instinctive forgetfulness that makes the players simply mark their harm clock and jump to the next action. When you want to slow the action down or to have concrete details off which to bounce creatively in the cause-and-effect chain of play, the harm move is there for you. The first harm move is unusual in that a hit is bad for the player and a miss is good. If you find that your players have trouble with this quirk of the move, roll it yourself against them, no grief (158). I had somehow glossed over that second sentence in my earlier readings of the text. The reason that a hit is bad is because you are literally rolling against yourself, for the MC or whoever’s character is dealing the harm. I had not thought of it that way (in spite of it appearing clearly right there!). It’s even more obvious when you consider that the MC gets to make all the choices from the pick lists. So in every way, the move is made by the MC – so why have the player roll it? I suspect that it’s for two main reasons. First, it’s a stronger rule to say the MC never rolls the dice than it is to say the MC almost never rolls the dice, but they do in this one situation. Second, the MC’s position in the game is structured as a curious observer who is constantly pursuing what interests them as the story unfolds. To throw the dice for suffer harm makes the MC, however subtly, care about whether they roll high or low, and the game doesn’t want the MC caring about the roll, only interested in how the results affect the fiction. Picking from the pick list is merely a case of saying, “Ooh! It’d be cool if this happened!,” while rolling the dice puts you in a position of thinking, “Ooh! I hope this happens!” It’s a subtle distinction, but a mildly important one. I say mildly, because the text itself says that it is “no grief” if the MC rolls the move. It’s not ideal, but it certainly won’t break the game. And finally, we get to the move itself: When you suffer harm, roll+harm suffered (after armor, if you’re wearing any). On a 10+, the MC can choose 1: • You’re out of action: unconscious, trapped, incoherent or panicked. • It’s worse than it seemed. Take an additional 1-harm. • Choose 2 from the 7–9 list below. On a 7–9, the MC can choose 1: • You lose your footing. • You lose your grip on whatever you’re holding. • You lose track of someone or something you’re attending to. • You miss noticing something important. On a miss, the MC can nevertheless choose something from the 7–9 list above. If she does, though, it’s instead of some of the harm you’re suffering, so you take -1harm. On a miss, do often choose something from the 7-9 list, even though it gives the player the -1harm. Those effects on the character are usually more interesting than the mere mechanical harm. This is a great move. This is what keeps a battle or a one-sided attack from being a “mere mechanical” exchange of harm. We are all familiar with the I-swing-I-hit-I-do-X-damage-go phenomena that creeps into games whose combat is “mere[ly] mechanical.” But these lists do a lot more than just add color to taking harm. A lot of systems that attempt to get beyond mechanical combat do so by adding in (or rewarding players for adding it in themselves) color, detailing the way a character lunges into battle or screams when struck. That’s all cool, but it doesn’t affect the combat, just lays over it. The suffer harm move, on the other hand, changes the fictional landscape itself by shifting the character’s fictional positioning, which in turn limits or alters the character’s options going forward. At the extreme end, the character can be knocked unconscious, become trapped, or become cognitively impaired. Unconsciousness and being trapped are pretty clear, but what does it mean in play to be incoherent or panicked? Note that there is no mechanical element to becoming incoherent or panicked. How you play that is up to you. Is there any greater sign that the fiction has meaning in the game, that the fiction is the “basis of play, not an appendix to play” (see post no. 100 for that quote)? It’s possible that players will treat that like being stunned, that to take any action at all is to act under fire (pg 218 in the book), or it’s just as likely that the player will describe their character being incoherent or taking a panicked action. The game doesn’t need to mechanize it because it has prepared the players to make the fiction the foundation of play. Of course, since fictional positioning is what the game is all about, the move needs to give you ways to let a character keep their positioning if that’s what you as the MC want. In the case of a 10+, the game gives you the option to keep it purely mechanical by letting you deal an extra point of harm. In the 7-9 range, you can opt to have the character “miss noticing something important” or “lose track of someone or something you’re attending to.” These are great options to let the character keep their immediate position by losing something that will affect their position in the future, near or far. Even on a miss, the MC can either alter the character’s position or go for the merely mechanical damage. The example drives home that these options are important for the MC to pursue what interests them: Keeler’s fighting her way out of a situation that turned bad. At some point she takes a machete blow: 3-harm, minus 2-armor, for a sum of 1-harm. I have her roll the harm move, which, bad luck, she hits with an 11. I have no desire to put her out of the action, so: “it doesn’t seem too bad, but then you realize that blood is dripping steadily out of your jacket sleeve. Take 1 more harm” (159). The important sentence for our purposes here is “I have no desire to put her out of the action.” As we’ve seen, the MC has a lot of options. They could have chosen 2 from the 7-9 list if they thought that would complicate the fiction in a desirable way. While I like that we learn from this example what the MC says to communicate the idea that “it’s worse than it seemed,” it would be cool to have an example of what it would look like if Keeler missed noticing something important or lost track of something she was attending to. Choosing those two options would still allow Keeler to stay in the action, keep her feet and weapons, and still complicate her positioning in the scenes to come. I know I’m just being greedy – there are few texts that give more or better examples – but what can I say; I’m greedy. Together, the options available to the MC in this move make it a powerful tool to shape the fiction by having the suffering of harm affect the positioning of and options available to the characters. These are basic moves that come into play less commonly, or optionally, or that might not come into play at all (158).
That’s our one-sentence introduction to the chapter on peripheral moves. From it, we learn that the moves ahead are “basic,” but we don’t really have a working definition for what “basic” means here. The moves under the “basic moves” banner are moves that “[e]verybody gets” (136). On each playbook, under the “moves” heading, we are told, “You get all the basic moves.” Looking at the peripheral moves, that certainly true for the harm and healing moves, the barter moves, and the highlighted stat move, but it is not true of augury and insight. Basic certainly doesn’t mean simple or easy, as these moves are no less or more complicated than other moves. Basic could just be a category that separates these moves from “battle” and “character moves. Perhaps basic has the meaning of fundamental here, the base of the structure that supports and props up the rest. I think that last definition gets to the heart of it. In that meaning, these peripheral moves are still part of the foundation, but they aren’t load-bearing pillars, and nothing will fall apart if they appear “less commonly, or . . . not come into play at all,” either because they never get triggered by the fiction, because you forget about them, or because you choose not to use them. It doesn’t make any difference to the game or the designers why you omit these rules, because the game is built to be able to function without them. In fact, Vincent discusses this design structure in one of his blogposts on “anyway,” calling it “concentric design.” To describe how he imagines this design, he uses the metaphor of a lightbulb suspended above a table in a room. Here’s most of that post from 2011: 1. The core of the game is barely visible. It's like the filament in the light bulb. It's these things: - Vivid color - A few stats and a simple die roll - On a 10+, the best happens. On a 7-9, it's good but complicated. On a miss, it's never nothing, it's always something worse. - The MC's agenda, principles, and what to always say. That's a complete, playable game. Details of the dice aside, it's most of Over the Edge, for instance. 2. Built around that, the light bulb, is what I'd call fundamental Apocalypse World: - The basic moves - How harm works - How experience works - The MC's moves - The structure of fronts and threats, but not their details. That's also a complete, playable game, even though it's not the entirety of Apocalypse World. (Over the Edge has a light bulb around its filament too, but it's smaller than Apocalypse World's.) 3. The table we're playing at! This is all of Apocalypse World by the book: - The character playbooks, character moves and special moves and all - The details of fronts and threats - Some of the peripheral moves - All the crap, like holdings, angel kits, weapons, vehicles, gangs and all - Character improvement, including the ungiven future. This is the Apocalypse World we all play most of the time. And finally... 4. The room we're playing in. This is all the potential Apocalypse World that we can bring in if we want. Much of it isn't even in the book! - The optional battle moves - All kinds of custom moves - MC love letters - New playbooks - New threat types - New kinds of crap like monsters, hoards, caravans, space stations. - Co-MCing. Most of us who play Apocalypse World bring some of these things in sometimes, but nobody has to, and obviously nobody can play by ALL the possible potential rules. Potential Apocalypse World is bigger than us. Okay! Here's a cool thing about Apocalypse World's design in particular, if I may say it myself: Apocalypse World is designed to collapse gracefully downward. - Forget the peripheral harm moves? That's cool. You're missing out, but the rules for harm have got you covered. - Forget the rules for harm? that's cool. You're missing out, but the basic moves have got you covered. Just describe the splattering blood and let them handle the rest. - Forget the basic moves? That's cool. You're missing out, but just remember that 10+ = hooray, 7-9 = mixed, and 6- = something worse happens. - Don't want to make custom moves and countdowns for your threats all the time? That's cool. You're missing out, but the threat types, impulses, and threat moves have got you covered. - Don't want to even write up your fronts and threats? That's cool. You're missing out, but your MC moves have got you covered. - Forget your MC moves? That's cool. You're missing out, but as long as you remember your agenda and most of your principles and what to always say, you'll be okay. The whole game is built so that if you mess up a rule in play, you mostly just naturally fall back on the level below it, and you're missing out a little but it works fine. (“Concentric Game Design,” http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/594) These peripheral moves that we’ll be looking at fall into the 2nd and 3rd layers as Vincent describes them above. Keep that in mind as we look at each move. One thing I’ll be interested in looking at is how Vincent and Meguey designed the moves to make you want to use them, especially since you have explicit and implicit permission to ignore them. (A further note: If you read the anyway post and read through the comments, you’ll see that Ron Edwards disagrees with this model because he feels that advancement in Apocalypse World is central to play since they are crucial to what the game is saying thematically: “For example, what about the rule in which you get moves from other character types, or the rules concerning removing a character from play? I consider these absolutely fundamental to the ultimate reward system of the game, which concerns what the character becomes (especially in light of the insights about the apocalypse which have undergone some development by this point).” It’s an interesting discussion, and worth reading if that kind of thing floats your boat.) Oh, and a final note: I think the word “basic” as used throughout the text is naturally comfortable to experienced RPG players because there is a long history in the hobby of using the word “basic” to denote a stripped-down, introductory ruleset, usually replaced or added to later with “advanced” rules. I feel like there are echoes of that meaning here, in the sense that the “basic” rules are what the GM in those other games can fall back on in the heat of play without flipping through the rulebook to settle an issue. Most RPGs have this concentric feature with its rules; what’s interesting here is how the game purposefully plays to that design to allow the game to keep functioning under nearly any gameplay experience without breaking down. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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