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Just because it’s the first session doesn’t mean you can’t.
Here’s a fun thing to do: ‘Keeler, this person named III corners you that night. She’s fucking pissed off, she comes straight at you, fists first. What did you do to her?’ Maybe Keeler’s player will answer with something. ‘Dude, sure, I’ve been sleeping with her guy.’ Great! Away you go. Or maybe she’ll say ‘what? Nothing. I don’t know.’ That’s cool too, must be a case of mistaken identity. Maybe Dog Head stole a can of pineapple from III but she thinks that Keeler did it. Say, ‘great! You don’t know why. Here she comes, though. What do you do?’ Just keep all your NPCs’ motivations simple and you can have them do whatever you want, fights included (101-102). As I’ve been reading it, a lot of this chapter, even as it accomplishes separate instructional goals, is about demonstrating how to use moves to set up scenes. This only makes sense because in order to do everything required of you in the first session (finding where they are not in control and pushing there, putting them in scenes together in different combinations, finding out what interests you about these characters) you need to establish scene after scene to see how things play out. While there are no explicit instructions given, the suggestion created over the course of the chapter is that you needn’t worry about some grand narrative in this first session, or worry about flowing logically from one scene to another. Make jump cuts, put the characters in spots, follow up on whatever leads interest you from character creation. Having a smattering of disconnected scenes is perfectly fine for this first session. As the text says early in the chapter, “You have the whole world to create, you get the whole first session to create it in. You’re supposed to make their characters’ lives not boring, you get a whole session to get to know them” (96). This particular passage is a great example for MCing the first session because it shows you that any answer a player gives to a question is going to work out well. Earlier we got the example of Marie and Bran put in a spot by the MC outside of the hardhold near some of Dremmer’s gang. The MC asks, “What are you two doing out here, anyway?” This is a similar setup with an in media res scene and a question for the character to justify the scene. Whatever the answer, you can roll with it. The player might use the opportunity to create backstory, or she might balk. What’s the answer to balking? “Great!” Man, I love that. The reason that any answer is okay is that the NPCs’ motivation has been kept simple. III wants to beat the shit out of Keeler. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. The why, when it’s discovered, is going to be just as simple. I slept with her guy and you think I stole from you both come down to the simple motivation, I want revenge because you hurt me. The more you complicate III’s emotions and desires, the more difficult it is to let the players create answers for open questions and the more you force meaning and backstory into the play. Everything in this example is still open. III might be an incredibly generous and sweet woman when no one has slept with her guy or no one has stolen her pineapple. We don’t learn details about III, which gives the player a blank canvas to throw paint at if she wants. And the more the players throw the paint, the more you know what conflicts they’re interested in having and the stories they’re interested in telling. The more room you give the players to create, the more likely you are to spot those darting fish beneath the surface that will interest and delight you. And that all starts with simple motivations for NPCs and MC moves that open up questions for the players.
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“Scrimp comes into the room. He’s been out scouting and he has something urgent to tell you, Keeler, but he gets distracted. He looks at all three of you and he’s got this look. Jesus, you know he’s speculating which of you might let him show you his dick” (101).
I believe that that is announcing future badness. Bring them onscreen in pairs and triples, in obvious groupings and unlikely ones too. Play with their natural hierarchies and bring them into circumstances where they might have something to say to each other. Here are a few ways you can do it:
Build on what the players said when they introduced their characters. “So Keeler, Marie, you two have this raiding thing out on the wilderness road, where Marie stands lookout and Keeler attacks travelers in the night? Let’s see that. It’s before dawn…” Invent bad news for one character to give to another. “Marie, you’re walking past the armory (Keeler, you’re in charge of the armory, of course) and you notice the lock’s been smashed off. What do you do?” Make a pairing or tripling that you like, then ask the players to justify it. “Marie, Bran, you two are trapped outside of the holding, you’re hunkered down inside an old gutted RV. Outside, six of Dremmer’s gang are setting up camp, looks like they’re settling in. They don’t know you’re there, they just blundered in on top of you. What are you two doing out here, anyway?” It’s common knowledge of course that you need to make sure every character gets good screen time in any given session. The important phrase in this title is “with other characters.” Remember our “Why to Play” section back on page 14? The number one reason is that these characters are fucking hot. The number two reason is that “hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together.” This bullet point is about putting them together. Apocalypse World is a game about community and relationships, and the only way to get at those themes is to play out those relationships and that community. There are a lot of hierarchies built into the character playbooks. If there is a hardholder in the group, odds are most other character are under her leadership. Characters have not only relationships with each other but responsibilities to each other. “Play with their natural hierarchies” is about seeing how that status relationship plays out when it’s more than just a note in a playbook. The situation you put the characters in, according to the text, is important not because the situation itself is important but because the situation makes it so the characters “might have something to say to each other.” Situations in Apocalypse World are about revealing and propelling character, not about creating plot. As those characters are revealed and propelled, a plot will naturally emerge and take care of itself. This of course ties into our other bullet points. Playing with their natural hierarchies is another way to see where the characters are and are not in control, giving you things to push at and wonder about. It is all part of the grand experiment being conducted by the MC through play, looking for interesting chemical interaction within the group as well as from outside the group. Bringing them together gets them to trigger those Read a Person and Read a Sitch moves as the interactions and situations become charged. And of course we are springboarding off character creation, as evidenced in the first example with Keeler and Marie performing one of their raids. The paragraph here that gave me the biggest thrill when I first read it is the last one. I was like, What?! You can just put characters in a scene like that and then ask them to explain what they’re doing there?! This takes us back to how there is no independent scene-framing mechanism in Apocalypse World. Here the MC has put Marie and Bran in a spot to kick off the scene. The players playing Marie and Bran are going to come up with a much better answer to the MC’s question than the MC could have come up with, and just think of all the great information this scene will bring forth. We’ll learn about Marie and Bran, both individually and as friends/lovers/rivals/whatever. We’ll learn something about what they do in the group that would get them here in the first place. We’ll learn something about their relationships with any of these six gang members. PC-NPC-PC relationships might be revealed. Grudges might develop. No matter what happens, this set up will give the MC material to pursue and wonder about. What more can you hope for from a first session scenario? And all that from one MC move. Wow. As a final note, one thing putting characters together in interesting combinations makes room for are PC-PC-PC triangles. Just as NPCs have different relationships with different PCs, PCs have different relationship with different PCs. These two might be lovers, and these two might be sisterly with each other, while these two might have a mentor/mentee relationship. Such triangles reveal complexity of character for PCs and NPCs alike, so mix them up and see what develops. Start with the characters with beginning-of-session moves: the hardholder, the hocus, the savvyhead, if you’ve got them. That’s now, the first beginning of the first session. Have them make those moves and follow what happens.
Then throughout the session, remind everyone to look at their character sheets to see what moves they might make. Especially, listen in on the characters’ conversations. As soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody. “So that was kind of a sharp thing to say. Anybody want to read anybody?” Situations too: “hey, this situation seems kind of charged to me. Want to read it?” I almost skipped this section. Nudging the players to have their characters make moves only makes sense. It’s the first session, possibly even the first time they are playing the game, so use the first session of get everyone used to how it works. Get those moves triggering and dice rolling and everyone will quickly learn how the fiction and the moves go together. Of course you do that. But then I started thinking about the suggestion that “as soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody.” What an especially great thing to have the players do! I have already spoken about how the character creation process is about learning to negotiate our conversation and our assent to the fiction being created (see posts 27-30). Here in the first session, we players are learning about the conversational possibilities that Apocalypse World presents, and one of the coolest things the game does is allow us to ask personal and insightful questions of our co-players’ characters through Read a Person and Read a Stich. Having everyone read everyone else means that characters will be asking each other what their really feeling are, what they intend to do, what they wish the questioning character would do, and what one character can do to influence the behavior of another character. With everyone talking to everyone, that would make for a meaty and revealing conversation, not only showing the players how insightful their characters are but showing them how they can engage with and think about the other characters in the scenes, PCs and NPCs alike. The conversation reveals desires, goals, inclinations, preferences—all the inside things that make a character exciting to us and that are sometimes difficult to reveal to others. Yeah, go and do that in your first session. This bullet point does not contribute to the tilting landscape constructed in the first session. Instead, it helps create an exciting and exploratory conversation that will help the characters maneuver through that tilting landscape and identify charged situations and interactions. . . . but do . . . Look for where they’re not in control.
If yours are like mine, they’ll want to be in control of everything, all tidy and secure. Of course they can’t be. What’s on their perimeter, on their borders, their horizon? What reaches into their little slice of world, what passes through it? What does it depend upon? Who do they need, and who else needs what they have? “I wonder what they’ll do when their neighbors get hungry.” “I wonder what they’ll do when the weather goes wrong.” “I wonder what they’d do to protect their well.” “I wonder what will happen when Dog Head stops taking orders from Keeler.” “I wonder what would happen if Bran couldn’t get power to his weirdshop.” And . . . Push there. The MC move for pushing is announce future badness. “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning.” “Keeler, Dog Head does what you say, but, it’s like, he keeps looking at you for a minute after you give him the order. What do you do?” “Bran, while you’re working, just for a few seconds all your lights dim and the constant low hum of your workspace? You hear it just start to slow. Everything kicks back in after just a second or two and you can keep working. What do you do?” (99-100) There is no drama or mystery in those places that the characters have control. Those are their spaces to control as they please. But through the playbooks and Hx, everything the players construct at the beginning of the first session, a world beyond the characters’ control comes into being. The game makes it so that we always open on “a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements” (97). That is necessarily a world in which the characters have very little control. It’s a world of vulnerabilities, interdependence, and resource scarcity. That gives the MC a near endless supply of places to “push.” The list of MC wonderings is a beautiful thing. It’s like watching Act I in a movie or the first episode of a TV series and noting all the plot potential of the story about to unfold. There are all these places that things can go wrong, paths that the story could follow. But unlike those other art forms where the story is crafted long before we actually experience it, here everything is still wide open, and each possibility is as likely as any other to make it into the story. So we are encouraged to write it all down in this first session and even to start pushing right away on that which is most interesting to us. And it’s an intuitive process turning your wondering into a push; what would they do to protect their well? To find out all you have to do is threaten their well. Done. That’s the heart of playing to find out what happens, yeah? By structuring the MC’s engagement with the emergent story as wondering observation, the game demands that the MC play to find out what happens. You have questions, the answers to which can only be discovered through play. The MC may surprise the players by threatening the well, but then the players get to surprise the MC by their reaction. “The MC move for pushing is announce future badness.” This is one of those statements that seems super obvious once it is said. Of course you push on characters by announcing future badness. The question this statement (and paragraph) raises for me is how scenes are framed in Apocalypse World. There are no explicit scene framing rules laid out in the text. And since the MC’s powers are governed by the text, it seems odd that scene framing power is not a designated authority given to the MC. This passage seems to suggest that “announce future badness” is a scene setting tool as well as a move to pull out in the middle of a scene. To say, “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning,” is to set the scene via announcing future badness. Presumably, when the time for a scene change comes the players will look to the MC to say something, which lets the MC make a move. That move can simultaneously set a new scene. In fact, I suppose any move can be incorporated into a scene setup, though “announce future badness” seems like it would be the most common move to use in this way. You could also slide into a scene with a question (say, “okay, where do you go looking for Dog Head?”) and then introducing some future badness in response to the answer. Either way, it seems interesting (I really want to say “important,” but I’m not sure that’s right) that scene framing is approached in this way. . . . Ask questions, but also . . . Leave yourself things to wonder about.
You’ll know it when it happens. A player will say something and you’ll be like, hey wait, there are fish swimming down there. So you’ll ask, and the player will answer, but you’ll be like …I don’t think that’s the fish I’m after. I think the fish I’m after is still down there, deeper than I thought, and bigger than I thought too. Sometimes it’ll happen with one of your own NPCs. You’ll be talking along, and you’ll suddenly be like, hold on, this guy Scrimp is kind of a weasely fuck, but he isn’t afraid of Marie at all. How can that be? You don’t need an explanation right now! Don’t look too deep, this is just session 1. Nod to yourself and back away, fixing the spot in your memory. (Which means to note it down on your threat map under “I wonder.”) This is one of my favorite passages in the First Session section, and I think one of its beating hearts. The fish metaphor is incredibly evocative. The darting of fish beneath the reflective surface of the water always presents itself as a possible trick of light and mind. Did I just see that, or did I imagine it? So the MC stirs the water and studies it. It positions the MC as both observer and active participant, a fisher looking for fat and feisty drama darting beneath the characters, setting, and situations playing out. And better yet, the players themselves are unaware of the fish beneath the surface because they are involved in playing their characters; they don’t have the luxury to sit back and observe as the MC does. This is, I suspect, one of the reasons that Apocalypse World has a traditional MC. Someone is wanted to watch for fish as the active observer. Then, as the players pursue their own dramatic goals, the MC can sculpt scenes in pursuit of answering the questions they have asked themselves as audience members. The difference in goals as player and MC makes for the emergence of a richer narrative with the ability to surprise and delight everyone at the table. A powerful metaphor can cover a lot of ground and spark a lot of thought in just a few sentences, and that’s exactly what the Bakers accomplish here. It is equally powerful to note that these same fish can be observed by looking at your own instincts when playing NPCs. The one sentence about Scrimp tells us so much about how the MC of AW is supposed to play their NPCs. We know that you are supposed to pick a body part and let it lead the NPC. We know that you are supposed to create triangular relationships. But here we learn that you can let your own NPCs surprise you. Instead of playing your NPCs as a one- or two-note characters, don’t be afraid to let them wander afield. That’s not an error. When it happens, don’t force the NPC back in line; ask yourself why you did that? What’s behind the NPC’s rogue behavior? This happens to authors all the time. Again and again in interviews you’ll hear authors say that their character just didn’t want to do what the author wanted them to do. Eventually the author has to let the character go and explore what they’re all about. In a game in which plot is emergent, we are all authors, and we have to let the characters do what they want to do when they voice an opinion. This brief paragraph says let that happen, trust it, and make a note of it to explore why it happened. How does that not sound like awesome fun? Of course it does, and it’s why it’s so cool MCing Apocalypse World. The advice to “back away” is important too. The first session is, as defined here, a reconnaissance mission. Play, collect information, start noting questions and seeing what about these particular characters in this particular world under these particular circumstances is exciting and interesting. (The phrase “back away” is yet another evocative one. It calls up the image of one who has stumbled upon something dangerous or fragile or glorious; they don’t want to disturb the scene, but neither do they want to stop watching, so they back mindfully away.) And they give you a specific section on the first session worksheet to simply “wonder”! You are not writing down stats and figures and information about the characters—you are writing down all the things that are interesting and promise to be dramatically fruitful. You are observer and mad scientist (-slash-fisher? I’m lousing up the metaphor)! You get to throw characters together and see what each combination reveals. Get a whiff of a chemical reaction and separate them, noting your observations and questions. Make plans to push those experiments later, for as the text says, “Don’t explain everything . . .” There are so many fun aspects to MCing AW, but this short passage gets at the heart of what is both special and exciting about MCing the game. . . . but you can’t know everything, so… Ask questions all the time.
Ask about the landscape, the sky, the people and their broken lives too, don’t just tell, share. Turn a player’s question over to the group: ‘I don’t know, where DO you get your food?’ But especially, anything you want to know, ask. Anything you think might be interesting later, ask. Anything a player says that sticks out, anything that seems like the tip of an iceberg, or like fish moving under water, ask. Start to cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic in your players too (99). The first sentence of his paragraph is a callback to the second paragraph under “Describe. Barf forth apocalyptica” on the page before. There we are urged to “talk about the landscape, the sky, the people, and their broken lives.” Using the same words in the same order is a fantastic way to connect the “asking” and the “telling” to the same act of MCing. As the MC you will make declarations and decisions about certain things and you will ask the other players and defer to them about certain things—but there is no difference between those things. It’s not that one realm is the MC’s and the other is the player’s. Which brings us to the key word of the sentence: “share.” The MC might moderate the conversation at times by asking and talking, but the whole conversation is one of sharing. The MC has already been dreaming up apocalyptica as part of their prep, so they kick things off by telling, but once that tone and feel has been offered up, it is time to “start to cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic in your players too.” By asking and adding on and probing and distributing the creation of the shared imagined space, we all cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic together that puts us all on the same fictional page. So part of asking questions is about that cultivated aesthetic. The other part of asking questions has to do with the MC’s role as audience. What do you “want to know”? What “might be interesting later”? What “sticks out” or “seems like the tip of an iceberg, or like fish moving under water”? You are sussing out what is happening in this first set of scenes you construct and seeing what interests you, what you feel like prodding in the future, what bits of meat on these bones will be most tasty. Those questions and observations you make in that first session will determine where you push and poke in the upcoming sessions, and they are critical to you playing your role as MC in Apocalypse World. So as the text says, “ask questions” . . . . . . and remember to . . .Springboard off character creation.
The players’ characters are made of interesting details you can build on. Look at the hardholder’s gigs, for instance: each of those gigs has people responsible for it, crews that answer to the hardholder and have names and relationships and all kinds of loose ends. Name everyone! Make everyone human! Look at the chopper’s gang, the maestro d’s regulars, the hocus’ followers. Look at what the players created when they were doing Hx with each other. Look at where they come from and what must be around them (98-99). This bullet point narrows in on some of the specific “good material” you have “to work with” mentioned in the first bullet point. The majority of this passage is concerned with where NPCs for the first session come from to start naming and creating PC-NPC-PC triangles. As we’ve noted before, the playbooks don’t just define the characters but also provide suggestive details of the world in which the characters exist. This passage tells the players to look not only at what is on the playbook but at what is implied by the playbook. The hardholder’s gigs is a great way to make the point. The gigs all have mechanical effects in the form of surpluses and wants. Extra barter afford the hardholder extra funds to make things happen; wants on the other hand all dictate narrative events or background activity that affect or color the lives of the characters. The gigs are all performed by inhabitants of the hardhold, and these jobs become places to anchor NPCs and tie them into the community that the playgroup is constructing. The basic gigs mentioned in the playbook are “hunting, crude farming, and scavenging” but depending on the options chosen you also have raiders, collectors of protection tributes, workers in the manufactory, merchants in the bustling market, operators of the armory, gang members, mechanics in the garage, and weaponsmiths. Damn, that’s a rich world with a ton of places to originate specific and named NPCs. NPCs are a critical part of Apocalypse World, and to run it right, the game requires you to come up with relevant and potent NPCs. And the game is designed to give you the tools to do the things it requires you to do. That’s why every playbook suggests background activities and participants that are ripe for the MC’s choosing when looking to tie an NPC into the fiction. Of course, NPCs are not the only springboards for the MC to strike during the first session. Backstory fiction and relationships are sketched out during Hx as are some of the physical features of the world surrounding them. All this fictional material is ready to act as the skeleton structure to be fleshed out through your fiction. So as the text says, “Look closely . . . “ As a side note, I love the way this whole section is structured so that each of the first six points are connected with transitional sentences to show how they are all interrelated, all part of the same process: “Say everything, and remember to . . .,” “Look closely, but you can’t know everything , so . . .,” “Ask questions, but also . . .” The entire first session is about making connections and bringing strands of ideas together to begin to weave a complete fictional world. It seems perfectly fitting, then, that the language of this section should do that exact same thing. These first six points might have different titles, but the structure here makes it clear that they are all inseparable when MCing that first session. You already have a lot of good material to work with. Everything the players have come up with between them and introduced at the end of character creation, plus everything I’ve given you, plus the stuff you thought about yourself before the game.
Talk about the landscape, the sky, the people, their broken lives. Say what the weather’s like, say what time of day, say what the walls look like, what the rag-waste smells like, how the plastic canvasses snap and hiss, how many people are at the well and which of them have guns (98). Apocalypse World is often celebrated because it doesn’t require a lot of prep. The other side of that coin is that the game actively limits what you can prepare; it demands that you hold your part of the conversation with precious little planned. Because of that demand, the game is careful to never ask you to speak without giving you the tools to know what to say. In this case, everything that comes in the first part of the first session gives you “a lot of good material to work with.” The last item on the list in the first paragraph here is the only prep you were asked to do: develop an aesthetic for the apocalypse of your game, aka “daydream some apocalyptica.” That’s what you came to the table with. It is not surprising then that the first bullet point of this list asks you to make use of that material. You’ve daydreamed it for yourself; now describe it for the other players. Description in the first session accomplishes two main things. The first is that it creates a sensory-rich fiction with which the players’ characters can interact. The medium through which Apocalypse World is played is the fiction, and no moves can be triggered by the characters or made by the MC that is not submerged in that fiction. This is the equivalent of filling the pool before you can swim. Get that fiction started and make it specific so the characters have details to engage with. The second paragraph above proposes a list of descriptive possibilities to jumpstart your game (because, again, the game always has your back when it’s your turn to speak). Second, your description in this first session establishes the tone and feel of the game. The apocalyptic landscape and characters populating it can be as dire, threatening, relaxed, comical, rich, desolate, dirty, or verdant as your imagination dictates. As MC, you have the power to offer up a proposed tone through your description. It’s not your decision alone of course, because you are, as the second bullet point will tell us, building off what the players established during character creation, but as the narrative proper begins, you get the first chance to lay out the details of the world. The foundation you lay in the first session will impact the tone and direction of the rest of the game. So seize that opportunity. As the text says, "Say everything . . . “ Just because it’s the first session, whatever, you’re still actually playing the game.
MC the game. Bring it. But especially do these: Describe. Barf forth apocalyptica. Springboard off character creation. Ask questions all the time. Leave yourself things to wonder about. Look for where they’re not in control. Push there. Nudge the players to have their characters make moves. Give every character good screen time with other characters. Leap forward with named, human NPCs. Hell, have a fight. Work on your threat map and essential threats. (98) I like the special place that the first session has in Apocalypse World, and that first sentence puts it in perspective. You’re still actually playing the game, so MC it. Just because the text is drawing attention to everything you want to be accomplishing in the first session doesn’t mean you get to ignore the last chapter. All of rules of MCing still stand, so achieve your agenda items, follow your principles, and make your moves. But at the same time, you are trying to “create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements” (97), so there are things you need to do above and beyond those usual rules to fracture and tilt that landscape of inequalities. And that’s where this extra list comes in. These aren’t rules, but they’re not mere take-it-or-leave-it advice either. This is firm-handed guidance, things you need to do to let the game do what it is designed to do. The recurring theme of these bullet points is this: curious exploration. We have talked about the MC assuming the position of interactive audience, an engaged fan with the ability to move the characters and world around to see what happens. Well the first session plays a critical role in equipping the MC with the information they need to play their part successfully. Springboarding off character creations, asking questions, leaving yourself things to wonder about, looking for where the characters are not in control, and pushing on those weak spots are all ways to identify and play with the fractured tilting landscape the game’s systems have put in place. When the authors say “you get a whole session to get to know them” (96) they are placing the MC’s needs front and center. The players may have fun stretching their characters’ muscles, but the first session isn’t really about that. It’s a playground for the MC to poke around and see what they want to see more of. Sure, you have “nudge the players to have their characters make moves,” but that is one item in a list of 11. Even giving “characters good screen time” has the important tag “with other characters,” because the item is less concerned with spotlight equality than it is with you getting to see how the characters react to and mix with one another. It’s easy to overlook the first session as simply “begin playing the game,” but it is much more than that. It is an important design element in the way the game plays. Next, we’ll look in detail at some of the bullet points. We’re going to jump ahead a tiny bit because “Before the 1st Session” talks about things we’ve already discussed and I’m not smart enough to have new things to add. In fact, we’re going to slide a little into “During the 1st Session” as well to get to the meat of the matter:
Then I’d just say it outright to your players: ‘your setup’s easy and now you’ve already done it. Mine’s harder so I’m going to take this whole session to do it. So no high-tension kick off from me, let’s follow the characters around for a day and get to know them. Cool?’ A couple of you groaned, I could hear you from way over here. Oh great, getting to know the characters, that’s a recipe for will anything ever happen? Following the characters around for a day and getting to know them, it could mean establishing a whole unwieldy mass of status quo, right? It could mean that but it doesn’t. Say it with me: there are no status quos in Apocalypse World. What it means instead: it’s your job to create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements. A dynamic opening situation, not a status quo you’re going to have to put your shoulder against and somehow shift, like pushing a futon up a ladder. No: an unstable mass, already charged with potential energy and ready to split and slide, not a mass at rest. Here’s how. First and always, do everything it says to do in the master of ceremonies chapter (page 80). This is crucial. ‘Let’s just follow the characters around for a day’—in Apocalypse World, that’s automatically dangerous. It’s automatically a bad day. (97-98) There are no status quos in Apocalypse World. We first learn this slogan of Apocalypse World when explaining the MC move Look through Crosshairs (pg. 83). Status quo means the existing state of affairs, so to say there is no status quo is to say that the situation never holds still long enough to become a state of affairs. Relationships, desires, power structures—none of it is in a state of rest. So the MC’s job during the first session is to take all of that raw material created during character creation and arrange them at impossible angles to each other to “create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles [and] untenable arrangements.” That is, I think, one of the most important sentences in the book. Once you make that happen in your first session, you can sit back and watch the characters react to the world and world react to them, each trading force and energy as they collide off each other in a festival of narrative physics. (Throughout the rest of the game, the characters will fight to stabilize their world, but the MC principles will help us make sure that that stability doesn’t arrive until the story comes to a conclusion—but that’s a discussion for later) This simple notion that there is no status quo in Apocalypse World is the thing that makes Apocalypse World what it is, narratively, and all of the mechanics of the game are built to enforce the ever-changing nature of the world. No status quo is where the interpersonal drama comes from; it’s where the action comes from; it’s where the clarity of character comes from; it’s where the plot itself comes from. Robert McKee has a fantastic instructional book about screenwriting called Story. In it, he talks about the belief that stories are either plot-driven or character-driven. In a well-written story, there is no such distinction, because the plot can’t exist without these particular characters, and these particular characters cannot exist without these particular events and forces acting upon them. Here’s how he says it: The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self. The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naïve, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combinations of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does. Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices the characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change the one, you change the other. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure to express the character’s changed nature. . . . For this reason the phrase ‘character-driven story’ is redundant. All stories are ‘character-driven.’ Event design and character design mirror each other. Character cannot be expressed in depth except through the design of story (105-107). To me, the thing that makes Apocalypse World amazing is that it is built to create exactly what McKee is talking about. It’s design creates the pressures that impact the characters and allow the characters to respond and impact the world in return. The world and the character are built together from the very beginning, and before the first pair of dice is rolled, plot and character are inseparable. And the rules make that happen. The players have it easy. They have their playbooks to go through and then they’re ready to play. Your job is harder, you have a lot more to set up than they do. They each have one character to create, you have the whole bedamned world.
So let’s be fair. You have the whole world to create, you get the whole first session to create it in. You’re supposed to make their characters’ lives not boring, you get a whole session to get to know them. Apocalypse World is a game of discovery. The world is discovered through character creation and the characters are discovered through play. NPCs are introduced and PC-NPC-PC triangles are formed. Plot and character develop simultaneously as one element shapes the other. And the whole process is begun during this, the first session. The first session is a design element of Apocalypse World. This section doesn’t exist merely to introduce the new player to playing the game in a step-by-step manner (although it definitely does that, too). The first session is a necessary part of the game when playing it as designed. If Apocalypse World is a game of pool, then character creation is the racking of the balls. At the end of character creation and Hx, you have a web of characters and world elements and NPC all existing in tension with each other. And then the rest of the first session is the break, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy. This passage is our introduction to the first session, and as such, it lays out its purpose. You can’t accomplish any of your agenda items if you do not know the world that you need to make seem real and if you do not know the characters whose lives you need to make not boring. I love that this gives the MC directed goals during the first session. The MC is already playing to find out, only in the first session, they play is to find out who the characters are, what they want, what the world is like, and what the world wants from the characters. The one thing that seems off in this opening is that the first paragraph is a little unfair to the players. They don’t just create their one character; they are creating crucial elements of that whole bedamned world every time they select details about their character and answer questions about their Hx. They usher forth NPCs, build hardholds, form cults and gangs—in short, they give the MC the bulk of the raw material needed to put the story in motion. The MC will certainly create more elements as play progresses, but the character players do a lot of the heavy lifting at the start . . . which is of course by design. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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