|
To seize something by force, exchange harm, but first roll+hard. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7–9, choose 2. On a miss, choose 1:
• You inflict terrible harm (+1harm). • You suffer little harm (-1harm). • You take definite and undeniable control of it. • You impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy. Seizing by force is the basic battle move. When someone wants something that someone else has, and both are able and willing to fight for it, use seize by force or one of its variations. You can use seize by force alone for battles of any scale, but for large-scale battles, battles where several PCs each want to play their own tactical role, and prolonged battles with shifting tactical terrain, you can choose to bring the rest of the battle moves into play as well. An impressed, dismayed, or frightened NPC absolutely must change their behavior, but it’s up to you how. For PCs, if they’re impressed, dismayed, or frightened, but they press their attack anyway, have them act under fire to do it (167). This is one of the great moves of Apocalypse World. It is a single move that works for any fight over anything. It does so successfully because Meguey and Vincent looked at meaningful battles in games, literature, and movies and boiled it down to one central issue: one character wants something and another character is actively opposing them. In this light, a fight always has a goal, something the combatants are fighting over and a way to know when the fight is over. Through this move, combat is always meaningful and narratively important. For the move to trigger, the player has to make clear what the character is seizing, which means that the focus of the combat is always clear. The move’s picklist makes the possible outcomes of the fight equally clear. Harm will be exchanged, though the exact amount of harm can be affected by the player if they roll high enough. Note that because even a miss allows the player to choose one, the player always has the option to “take definite and undeniable control” of the thing seized. On the flip side, because even a 10+ lets a player choose only 3 options, the player always has the option to fail at their goal. The roll then doesn’t decide if you succeed or fail. The roll decides how much control you have over the combat, mostly. The worse you roll, the more you have to decide what is most critical for you at accomplish in the battle. Even on a great roll, you don’t have total control, of course. You can’t, for example, pull your punches as it were and deliver less harm. The options to “inflict terrible harm” or “suffer little harm” let the player decide how aggressive or defensive a stance they are taking in the fight. The option to “impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy” gives the player another way to bring the combat to a close (as opposed to beating them to death). Each combination of choices creates a different fictional flavor for the exchange. Inflicting terrible harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent looks different than suffering little harm while impressing, dismaying, or frightening an opponent, which looks different than inflicting terrible harm and suffering little harm while making no attempt to impress, dismay, or frighten your opponent. Vincent has talked elsewhere about how picklist moves in Apocalypse World take the best feature of Otherkind Dice while streamlining the process. (I can’t remember at the moment where I read it – maybe on a Barf Forth Apocalyptica forum – so I can’t cite the comment. If someone has a link, I’d appreciate it.) Seize by force is a great example for how this works. For those of you who either don’t know or need a reminder, Otherkind is an incomplete game of Vincent’s whose dice mechanic has been much praised. Vincent talks about it and summarizes the system in the post titled “The Magic Trick: Otherkind Dice” on his anyway blog. Here’s what he says: In Otherkind, a combat roll is a pool of 5d6, and it decides four things. It decides (1) whether you advance toward your objective, (2) whether you hurt your enemy, (3) whether your enemy hurts you, and (4) whether your enemy hurts any of your friends and allies. Each of these is on a scale, like so: Do you advance toward your objective? 1: You lose ground. 2-3: You hold ground. 4-5: You gain ground. 6: You seize your objective. Do you hurt your enemy? 1-3: No. 4-5: Yes. 6: A lot. Does your enemy hurt you? 1: A lot. 2-3: Yes. 4-5: No, but your enemy puts you off-balance or on the defensive. 6: No. Does your enemy hurt your friends and allies? 1: Yes, badly, all who are exposed to danger. 2-3: Yes, but not badly, or only a few. 4-6: No. To make the combat roll, you pick up 5d6, roll them, throw away the lowest number, and then assign the remaining four numbers one each to the four categories of outcome. For example: you roll 1 1 3 4 6. This means that you throw away the first 1, and then choose how to assign the remaining 1, the 3, the 4, and the 6. Maybe you seize your objective with the 6 and hurt your enemy with the 4, but that means that now you have to choose whether your enemy hurts you badly with the 1 and hurts your friends not-so-badly with the 3, or vice versa. Make sense? (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/759) You can see the one-to-one conversion of the system in seize by force. As fun as Otherkind dice are (and if you’ve played Psi*Run you know exactly how fun they are), seizing by force accomplishes the same goal, with the same excitement, while stepping away from the fiction for only a fraction of the time. The only difference between this example and seize by force is that instead of having to protect your friends and allies you have the option to impress, dismay, or frighten, which is I think innately more interesting. On a miss, the MC can always makes a move that hurts your friends and allies if they want. Oh, and before I go, I just want to say how much I love the part of impressing, dismaying, or frightening your enemy as it applies to a PC. It incentivizes behavior without outright controlling the player’s character. It’s a significant risk to act under fire since a miss will result in a hard move and weak hit will bring with it some difficult decisions. It’s a great way to give the move teeth without taking choices away from players. This is the last Daily Apocalypse of 2018 - happy New Year!
1 Comment
Before we go further into the battle moves, I want to take a step back to look briefly at the concepts of want and surplus, especially as they pertain to the insight and augury moves.
The options that the hocus player chooses during character creation detail the nature of the hocus’s followers, telling us how they behave in times of want and in times of surplus. At the start of the session, the hocus makes the fortune move to find out how things stand now. I love these start of session moves for a number of reasons. First, thematically, the move drives home the vagaries of the Apocalypse World; sometimes you’re hard hit and sometimes you’re flush with goods. Moreover, the nature of the move disconnects that state of want or surplus from the actions of the characters or the fiction that came before this session. One session’s surplus might become next session’s want no matter what victories or defeats the characters experience. This is of course a recurring theme in the game as the characters continually try to gain or maintain control in this crazy world, but unless they have loaded dice that keep giving them a 10+, things are not going to go as they wish. By a little or by a lot, things will go sideways. Second, the all-or-nothing state of want and surplus is in keeping with the rest of the game. There is no “enough” in Apocalypse World. Either there is not enough or there is too much. When there is not enough, you need to scrounge up more; when there is way more than you need, someone will soon be coming to claim it. The ups and downs and the extremes of these start of session moves line right up with the assertion that “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World” (97). Third, the moves create productive situations no matter what the dice say. States of want create obvious and interesting pressures that can be brought in by the MC as desired. An example in the hocus playbook is “Your followers aren’t really yours, more like you’re theirs. Want: judgment” (52). Yeah, in times of want, your followers are going to hold you responsible. Other tags listed in the hocus playbook that come in to play during want are desertion, disease, desperation, and savagery. Any of these tags gives the MC license to create a whole swath of troublesome fiction to give the narrative a jolt. States of surplus can similarly offer trouble, such as “Your followers disdain law, peace, reason and society. Surplus +violence.” Depending on what the player picks, they can get struck by either the left or right hand of fortune. When surplus doesn’t offer a problem, however, the narrative is still propelled forward by the opportunity it offers instead, such as the hocus’s insight or augury. The surplus will probably not last, so if a character is hoping to use her augury, then she needs to put her antenna to work now while she can. In this way, these moments of surplus are both exciting and pressuring in their own way, everything you want in a game of Apocalypse World. Finally, I love the choice of the words “want” and “surplus.” “Want” communicates in a single word the physical lack and the emotional/psychological need. The word “surplus,” on the other hand, with its Latinate root is more clinical, communicating the state of excess but without an emotional satiety. Prosperity, flush, bloat, plenty to spare, satiety, rolling in it—there are plenty of words and phrases that carry an emotional valence, none of which were chosen by the Bakers. “Want” lets you feel the hurt, but “surplus” offers no comfort. That rocks. We are moving into the Battle Moves chapter, and before we get to seize by force, let’s look briefly at the chapter’s introductory paragraphs:
These are moves that you or the players bring into play when the action of the game tips over into battle. A battle can be between any number of combatants, starting with one-on-one. Most of the battle moves presume that there are two sides, but when you have three or more, you should be able to think them through and apply them anyway. You can handle most battles quickly and decisively by using seize by force and its variations. Call on the other battle moves for large battles, or when you want to draw a battle out and play through it in tactical detail. Always remember that during a battle, all of the basic moves are still in play. Remind the players to read a situation, and let them act under fire, help and interfere with one another, and even go aggro if they manage to get the drop on somebody. I like the language in that first sentence: “when the action of the game tips over into battle.” The verb “tips” suggests that the default state of the game is such a charged state of interpersonal relationships that physical violence is just a nudge away from happening. Violence is not the usual occurrence, but it is always an option and a temptation. When play does tip over into physical violence, the game offers a “quick[] and decisive[e]” move to throw the players back onto that tightrope, so that battle can happen in the span of one move and quickly return to the state of building tension. To linger longer in battle is a choice the play group has to purposefully make. This choice is both a matter of pacing and taste, dials that the whole group decides to turn together. The final paragraph points out that even during battle, especially during extended battle, all the basic moves are still in play. What this means in game is that even when physical violence is the focus of the game, it doesn’t supplant the other ways of engaging with and understanding other characters and world, but coexists. As a side note, I really like the tone of the second paragraph and the work it does. That final clause, “you should be able to think them through and apply them anyway” is a simple assurance to the players that the way moves trigger and work is driven by common sense, so don’t worry, you can’t work this all out. Rather than filling pages with expansive explanations of how to make the battle moves apply to multiple combatants on multiple sides, this single sentence assures the reader that it will work and leaves it in their hands. It’s much better than wasting room in the rulebook and simultaneously better than not addressing the issue, which would leave the reader to think that the rules are incomplete. It’s a clever solution, and effective. I want to talk about the idea of failing forward as its used when people talk about Apocalypse World and why I think its misapplied.
Failing forward apparently entered public discourse in 2007 by John C. Maxwell in his book by the same title. Maxwell uses the phrase to outline ways that people can utilize their shortcomings and mistakes as a foundation for moving forward and achieving success rather than letting them function as impediments. When applied to RPGs, the phrase generally refers to mechanics that prevent failed dice rolls (or whatever randomizer the game uses) from stalling the progress of the characters and the narrative. Apocalypse World is designed to allow forward movement of the story no matter what a player rolls with her two d6’s and is thus said to let characters fail forward. I agree that AW propels the story forward no matter what result the dice show, but thinking of it as failing forward inaccurately describes how moves work and what they do to make misses as productive as hits. RPGs with randomized resolution mechanics are generally structured to have some form of freeplay that takes the players to a point of uncertainty that the rules then let the dice resolve. This feature has its roots of course in RPG’s wargaming past. My army wants to fire upon your army, so we consult the rules, take the necessary factors into consideration, arrive at an appropriate probability of success, and throw the dice to see if my soldiers are having a good day. In early versions of D&D, the same type of questions were resolved in the same type of way. Do I hit? Can I find the secret door? Can I detect the trap? Safely disarm the trap? Detect the approaching wandering monster? Make the jump? In these games of strategy and accomplishment, these questions of success or failure are the key dramatic questions. Everything important to the play and experience we are sharing hinges upon that question of whether I succeed or fail. As RPGs have evolved, the centrality of success and failure has held fast. Even in games that want to focus on narrative and story, the assumption is that the dramatic question the dice should answer is that of success and failure remains. For example, Hero Wars, Robin Laws’s take on Glorantha published in 2000, has all kinds of rules and features that work to make gameplay resemble cinematic and adventure narratives, but for all the ingenuity of design, the point that the fiction stops and the dice come out is when a character has attempted to do something and we need to know if they succeed in their action or not. The core mechanic of the game is a d20 roll against a skill, trait, or quality that the character has. Rather than the roll resulting in a simple success or failure, Laws created a range of 8 possible results from from “complete success” to “complete failure,” moving through major, minor, and marginal levels at each end of the spectrum. It’s a neat feature, but even with this expanded set of possibilities, the dice still only tell us if an action is successful or not. The limitation of the success/failure binary is not that it halts forward motion (though it certainly can if not carefully managed) but that it becomes an uninteresting question (or at least a less interesting question) when the heart of the matter isn’t a question of winning, as in the matter of a wargame, or survival, as in the matter of a dungeon crawl, for example. For me, this is made no place more plain than in the examples throughout the Hero Wars text. Here’s a taste: Haral (Carpentry 5W) is commissioned to build a chest. Natural resistance is 14 (in this case representing the suitability of the wood, complexity of the task, etc.) (121) Checking to see who wakes up first is a simple ability test based on Light Sleeper, Nervous, or similar abilities. (126) Testing to see if your hero knows the name of the king of a far-away land is an ability test using Foreign Knowledge or Well Traveled, but probably will suffer a penalty for the distance between the hero’s land and the foreign kingdom (126) All three of these examples create a question where there is no guarantee of dramatic tension. Building a chest? Waking up first on the basis that you’re a light sleeper? Do you know the name of a king? Each of these could possibly serve as an important question in the game, but they are just as likely to be mere moments that dice are rolled and success or failure is achieved without impacting play itself. The problem isn’t that failing to make the chest stops Haral from doing something, it’s that that isn’t a very interesting question. We want to know what happens once the chest is built; does it please the noble woman for whom he built it, and does she grant him a favor? Once the characters are awake, what happens? What does the character do with the name of the king? The questions that follow the answers are where the dramatic tension lies, not in the answering of the questions. But when characters are structured around abilities and rolls are centered around success and failure in putting those abilities into practice, the game naturally creates these points of question and answer that are ho-hum. The focus on success and failure also leads the game’s rules to care about the likelihood of success and failure, creating all kinds of bonuses and penalties to the roll that add to the math of the moment but not the drama or importance. Rollo is in Prax, attempting to ride a bison. Kathy assigns a [minus] 5 penalty on his Ride ability, since he normally rides a horse. (123) Rollo is climbing a tree with plenty of handholds. Kathy gives him a +4 bonus. (123) Riding bisons and climbing trees are cool, but do you really want to roll to see if your character can climb a tree? Is that the best dramatic question your game can answer? Does the addition of bonuses and penalties make the players lean over the table to see the dice result? Rollo is sneaking over the wall into town late one night. The wall is rated at 20 resistance: While it is tall, it has numerous rough handholds. Rollo’s player declares that he is using Rollo’s Climb Walls ability (by now a respectable 15W), Rollo’s player throws a 14, a success, which is bumped up by his mastery to a critical success. Kathy rolls for the wall; a 12 – a success. Comparing Rollo’s critical success to the wall’s success, we see that Rollo wins a minor victory, easily climbing the wall. (128) Rollo tries to sweet-talk his way into the heart (or at least the arms) of a pretty girl. His Fast Talk is 12W; her Chaste is 16W. . . . They both roll and both fail. Rollo’s roll of 15 is lower than her 19, so his line is good enough to interest her, though not totally (121) These scenarios are the natural offshoot of basing a game’s dramatic question on the issue of success and failure. Rollo’s scaling the wall into town takes up a huge chunk of play (and math!), all to find out that he “easily climb[s] the wall.” Let Rollo climb that wall easily anyway, because the exciting shit is what happens after he gets over that wall. If he fails the roll, then the exciting moment isn’t heightened, just pointlessly delayed. Similarly, we care more about the interplay between Rollo and his love interest than the math of his sweet-talking. The roll will help the GM and the player figure out how to play the scene somewhat, but the dice delay the exciting moment, not improve it. These examples and their question of success or failure can, of course, impact the story significantly, but it’s not reliably the case. And these examples are from a game that openly cares more about cinematic storytelling than other more traditional RPGs. Moreover, when a game focuses on “story” rather than a mere sequence of events, like a classic dungeon crawl, the issue of failure becomes stickier, because failure could derail the story. We see this often in investigative RPGs, but the problem is certainly not limited to those kinds of games. Letting the dice decide success and failure (and only success and failure) means that sooner or later the rules will back everyone into a corner. The two major workarounds to this problem are the automatic success and bennies. The first lets the GM declare that the players don’t need to roll at this moment (even if they’ve rolled for similar moments), and the latter lets the player ignore, modify, or replace the die roll to ensure success when failure will seize up the game. Both solutions are designed to undercut the dice rather than support them. Now, back to Apocalypse World. When people use “failing forward” to describe how a 6- result works in AW, or “success with a complication” to describe the 7-9 result, we are seeing the prominence of the success/failure binary in the minds of roleplayers. The dramatic question posed by a move in Apocalypse World is not about success or failure. In all the barter moves, for example, (see posts 136-138), your character is going to get what she seeks. The dice don’t decide success or failure; they decide how much you have to offer, risk, or endure to get what you seek. That’s the dramatic question posed by the move and resolved by the dice, and it is what makes us lean over the table to see what the dice say, knowing that whatever the answer, it’s going to be exciting and rewarding. We saw this in our discussion of going aggro, that the dice do not determine if you hit or not, but how ignorable you are to the target of the move. Reading a sitch will let you ask one question no matter what you roll. The question is how observant are you and how much will you learn. Moves are narrative pivot points, those moments of dramatic action that can send the narrative spinning off in a number of structured directions. The designers decide what these pivotal moments are when they create the triggers for the moves. They decide what directions the narrative can go when they create the results of the move. It’s then up the MC to take that general direction and turn it into specific fiction that carries the story forward. Apocalypse World doesn’t need or want rules for “automatic successes” because the trigger for the move is the trigger for the move: if you do it, you do it. There is no way to side-step a dramatic moment if your character does what the game considers a dramatic thing. Nor does the game want or need bennies because the move is going to take you some place exciting no matter what you roll. In a 2008 post on anyway called “Rules Vs. Vigorous Creative Agreement,” Vincent says: “As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. . . . No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/360) Yeah, that’s what moves in Apocalypse World give you. You have to abide by the roll of the dice and make your moves as players and MCs when the rules tell you to. And to make you abide by the roll, the game has to make it rewarding and fun to abide by them, which is what moves are designed to do. Of course, the solution that moves provide are not for every game. Apocalypse World uses moves to create a chain of charged situations to keep things moving and evolving without requiring the MC to plan out anything on a grand scale; in fact, the game’s rules mandate that the MC not plan out anything because the moves will make those decisions for her. AW wants narrative pivot points built into the moves of the game. In classic D&D, pivot points are built into the dungeon itself, since each room or encounter provides a situation to which the characters react. In such a game, success and failure are the exact thing that the dice need to decide to make that game exciting. In Hero Wars, as becomes clear when you read the published campaign material, the pivot points are supplied by the metaplot of the narrative, and in turn the GM, who has to translate the successes and failures of rolls into narrative thrust and to provide fresh pressure on the characters. So, it’s not failing forward, and it’s not success with a complication, that happens during a move, because moves don’t ask if an action is a success or a failure; it asks what can happen within the narrative when a character takes such an action. Moves, more than any other innovation in RPGs that I can think of, break the primacy of success and failure as the central question addressed by dice when a character takes action. But of course, I have a limited understanding, so if you can think of other mechanics and other games that create interesting questions for the dice to answer, I’d love to hear about them. At the beginning of any session, or at the end if you forgot, anyone can say, “hey, let’s change highlighted stats.” Any player, and you can feel free to say it too as MC. When someone says it, do it. Go around the circle again, following the same procedure you used to highlight them in the first place: the high-Hx player highlights one stat, and you as MC highlight another (163).
Like the session end move, this move is a rule of play rather than something triggered by the fiction. There’s something so clean about presenting rules of play in the same format as the fiction-driven moves that I find exceedingly satisfying. They have triggers, when-then structures, procedures to follow, and they read like any other move. It’s a brilliant way to give weight to a procedure, a way of saying this rule is as important as any other move in this section. This is not a suggestion for play, but a rule to follow, one that’s important to the proper functioning of the game. Of course, this particular rule is categorized with the peripheral moves, which means that you can bring it in or not as you remember it and enjoy it. You can hear that lax presentation in the rule itself with the casualness of the phrases “or at the end if you forgot” and “feel free.” The hard and fast part of the rule is that when someone remembers it and suggests it, “do it” – there is no hemming or hawing in that part of the move. When you’re highlighting stats, highlight one that you genuinely think will be interesting – and you can tell the players this, it goes for them too. If the character never rolls, or can’t roll, a stat, it’s obviously not going to be interesting to highlight it, so don’t. That first sentence is super important to the way highlighting stats is designed to work. Remember, highlighted stats are inspired by fan mail in Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures; they are there as a tool for everyone to be a fan of everyone else’s character, a means of telling another player, I really dig seeing your character act like this. It needs to be genuinely interesting to you to have meaning. I see a lot of people talk about not highlighting bad stats because it’s not fun for the player to have to lean into a bad stat, but that shouldn’t be your motivation, as is made clear by this passage. Don’t highlight a bad stat if it’s one the character never uses because nothing interesting will come of it. This is why, in the final paragraph of this section, the Bakers talk about open discussion and negotiation during stat highlighting: As a group, you can negotiate highlighted stats as explicitly as you like. “Hey, would somebody highlight my cool? I’m sick of having my hot highlighted when I’m not into anybody that way.” “Oh, yeah, sure thing. And I think we’re about to get serious with Dremmer, so MC, would you mind highlighting my hard?” “Nah, but I’ll highlight your cool. I think you’ll get to roll it just as much.” Just because highlighting is a way of signaling what you want to see doesn’t mean that those desires can’t be explicitly stated as well. The designers don’t want you to be coy with each other; they want you talking to each other, and the rules around highlighting stats is designed to get you doing just that. I think it is precisely because this rule is important to communication between players that it gets written up as a move rather than shuffled into the text where an inattentive reader could easily miss it. This is something that should be a part of every game. Of course, if your game is humming right along and everyone is in the zone, then you might forget the move, and there’s no problem with that because the purpose of the move is already being met. But when the game falters, and you’re irritated that your hot is highlighted when you want to be going aggro and seizing shit by force, then the move is there to help you have the conversation you need to have with your fellow players. That is some sharp and considerate design. The last thing I want to focus on here is Vincent’s (at least, I’m assuming the “I” in this passage is Vincent, so Meg, forgive me (and correct me) if I’m wrong) “personal rule” for “highlighting stats so that they can shine”: “unless I have a specific reason to highlight a specific stat, I highlight sharp, weird, or their best stat.” Picking the best stat makes a ton of sense because presumably that is the stat that the player most wants to be using anyway. Highlighting sharp and weird lines up with other comments in the text, such as “It’s fine to give her what she wants, much of the time – after all, you want everybody to be opening their brains, you don’t want to chase them away from it” (148). Hot and hard both give characters a way to proactively engage the world around them, but sharp is how characters understand the state of that world around them and how to purposefully and effectively engage with it. Reading situations and persons create all kinds of textures and details in the fiction against which characters can play. The more players have their characters trigger those moves, the more information the table has to know what is happening and what is at stake. At any time, then, and especially when the situation is uncertain, play is sharpened by characters reading the world around them, so when you aren’t interested in seeing a character do anything in particular, highlighting their sharp is a great way to make sure interesting things are happening and being discussed. Opening your brain works in a similar way, dealing with the matters of the maelstrom rather than the physical world. In a game that is fueled by the desires and actions of the main characters, encouraging the characters to analyze and take in the world (and its psychic maelstrom) around them is central to driving play forward. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
Categories |
RSS Feed