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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.
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At the end of every session, choose a character who knows you better than they used to. If there’s more than one, choose one at your whim. Tell that player to add +1 to their Hx with you on their sheet.If this brings them to Hx+4, they reset to Hx+1 (and therefore mark experience). If no one knows you better, choose a character who doesn’t know you as well as they thought, or choose any character at your whim. Tell that player to take -1 to their Hx with you on their sheet. If this brings them to Hx -3, they reset to Hx=0 (and therefore mark experience).
If you forget to do this at the end of a session, be sure to do it at the beginning of the next. It’s important. Every player has to choose someone, no passing. I talked about Hx and this move pretty extensively in post no. 127. Let’s look instead at the idea behind resetting your Hx with another character, and what that means about how we relate to other people. Here’s what the text says: Resetting Hx from +4 to +1 doesn’t mean that now you know them less than you did, obviously not. It means that you’ve crossed a threshold of knowing them, kind of like how both of your brothers know you better than a coworker does, but you can still say that one of them knows you better than the other. Some groups play that when you reset your Hx with someone, they have to tell you a secret, to reflect the fact that you’ve crossed this kind of threshold with them. It’s a good rule, if you’d like to adopt it yourself. This idea of a relationship progressing at the same time that the number drops has caused quite a bit of consternation over the years. Vincent and Meguey have spoken about it in several places. Meguey talks to +Richard Rogers in his first episode of the +1 Forward podcast (it’s a great podcast and that was a great episode, so check it out). In his “anyway” blog, Vincent talks about it as well: “The Hx rollover in Apocalypse World is absolutely rooted in my observations of people, yes. I've often had the experience where I'm hanging out intensively with someone, and getting to know them better and better, and then suddenly I feel awkward and alienated around them for a little while. I don't know them any less well, but knowing them better makes me less comfortable until I get used to it. ”The Hx+3 honeymoon's over, in other words, but there's always the possibility of another Hx+3 honeymoon in the future. ”It goes along with the fact that I know my brother Drew, say, better than I know Graham Walmsley, but whichever of the two I drive out to GenCon with, I know better at the end of the trip than I did at the beginning. ”I think that people find it clunky in the game because there's an implied second Hx stat, but the game doesn't have any use for it so doesn't ask you to track it. It's the Hx baseline, which starts at 0 and increments with every rollover. Apocalypse World cares about how your Hxs change, relatively, not which of your Hxs are stronger in absolute terms. ”If it makes you feel more comfy, you can track your Hx baselines in your game.” (from “Just 3 Insights?”, comment 8, http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/604) So you can think of the first time your Hx+3 with another character rolls over to Hx+1 as going from 0.3 to 1.1, and so on. I would like to see the examples tackle one of these resetting moments, but none of them do. I can’t say I blame the authors, because doing something cool like telling a secret or something else that signifies that growth is entirely optional. The examples show you what needs to be done an how it works, not optional tricks and tools. These are the examples we get: During the session, Marie and Keeler had a light-but-honest conversation, and Marie said maybe something that wasn’t a big deal, but she’d never said it to anyone before. Marie’s player tells Keeler’s to take +1Hx. Keeler, however, was completely appalled by what Marie said, and withdrew from her abruptly. Marie didn’t even notice but kept right on talking. Keeler’s player tells Marie’s to take -1Hx. During the session, Bran pursued his own interests mostly apart from the other two, but enlisted and had conversations with both of them at different times. He chooses to tell Marie’s player to take the +1Hx, more or less arbitrarily, and figures he’ll choose Keeler next time. I do love the Marie/Keeler exchange. Keeler knows Marie better and is horrified by what she learned. Since Marie paid so little attention to Keeler’s response, she learned nothing about Keeler and proved that she knew Keeler less well than she thought by thinking the story shared wouldn’t be “a big deal” to her. The example is a clever and quick way to get that across. Since the game cares about how your characters interact and connect (or fail to connect), I would love to see Bran have a reason to give the +1 to either Keeler or Marie. But the other examples already establish that, don’t they? The point of Bran’s example is that you sometimes have a session where you don’t have a lot of interaction with the other PCs. When you do, don’t sweat it; give a +1 to whomever and move on. The game won’t fall apart if your character was doing her own thing with NPCs all session, and it’s not worth fretting about. But it’s equally important that you don’t have the option to skip the move. By insisting on every player making the move, the game forces a little debrief and consideration at the end of the session. You need to think about who your character interacted with and how. You need to take measure of where they are in their relationships. That mindfulness, that taking stock, is the real point of the move, I think. Yeah, the changing of your Hx scores will eventually result in a point of XP here and there, but unless you’re an angel having a field day healing and fucking everyone, your change will be pretty slow. The Hx rules in general, and the session end move in particular, are there to keep you thinking about these relationships and how they are changing from session to session. Having those relationships in mind gives you ideas about scenes you want to have and ways you want to play your character when they are paired with the other characters. The trip from Hx+1 to HX+4 (or Hx=0 to Hx-3) is just close enough that that extra tick at the end of the session can push you to further shore up or fracture that relationship in the next session. And of course, the more players come into a session with desires and directions of their own, the more exciting that session will be. Most of the playbooks include a move like this (from the angel):
If you_ need jingle during a session_, tell the MC you’d like to work a gig. Your gigs: • Tend to the health of a dozen families or more. • Serve a wealthy NPC as angel on call. • Serve a warlord NPC as combat medic. • Others, as you negotiate them. When a player tells you that her character would like to work a gig, ask her what she has in mind. She might pick one from the list, or she might suggest a new one. It’s up to you to decide whether to say yes, no, or not yet, like “that’s a good idea, but first you’ll have to…” (153) Working gigs obviously goes hand in hand with the lifestyle move. If there were no financial pressures in Apocalypse World, then characters would not “need jingle during a session.” Things cost in this world, so it only makes sense that the game provide you with a move to secure jingle for your character. Like the lifestyle move, this move is new to the 2nd edition. In 1st edition, there was a character called “The Operator” who was a mover and shaker in the Apocalypse World, making deals and working jobs. But of course everyone in Apocalypse World is fighting to survive, so it makes sense that they all have to be movers and shakers to some degree. So the character was done away with and her gig move was democratically redistributed. Even if you have a game in which your character never works a single gig, its presence on the playbook sheet, like the lifestyle move, makes clear that these are the pressures in the world. And the list of potential gigs indicates what role your character-type plays in the communities they call home. In this example here, the player of the Angel can see that she might be acting as a community doctor, a private doctor for someone of means, and a combat medic for one of the warlords. This is what other medical professionals in Apocalypse World do, and these are some paths for you. Of course you are also invited to create your own. Like the other tools in Apocalypse World, gigs are meant to inspire and support you, not limit you. The gigs move is versatile in play, able to expand or collapse to meet the needs of your game: Once you’ve settled that question and the character works the gig, you have to decide or find out how it goes. Successful? Unsuccessful? Dangerous? Easy? Suppose that Bish the angel is serving a warlord NPC, Jeannette, as a combat medic: • You can just decide. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders all the time come back burned and smoke-poisoned, so you set up beds and lung-pumps and stuff. It’s hard work on those nights but on other nights you’re free.” • You can play it out in full. “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders are going out tonight. How do you set up? What do you do?” • You can call for a move, or a quick snowball of moves, to summarize what happens. Like “Sure. Jeannette’s raiders with the smoke inhalation and the terrible burns. After midnight they start pouring in. Act under Fire to treat them all!” These three examples show that the gigs can enter play as anything from two sentences of narration, to a couple of moves, to a full session or more of play. Do you just need to get some jingle in the hands of a character and don’t want to sidetrack the fiction? Give the summary. Do you want to have some dramatic ramifications in the fiction of what exactly went down during the gig? Make a move or two to set up the fiction. Are you in a lull in this character’s narrative and looking for something to focus on? Make the gig the focus of play for a while. The game doesn’t know what exactly you will need from it at any given time, so it gives you the options and tools to control your own pacing and scope. Another thing that changed from 1st to 2nd edition is how profitable gigs are. The Operator would typically get 1-barter for a job well done. She’d have to commit murder to get 3-barter from a gig. Now, 3-barter is the standard: No matter which way you do it, the baseline for pay is, when they work a gig, they get 3-barter. You’re allowed to pay 2- or 4-barter when you feel like you should, but save them for exceptional outcomes. Far more often than you pay 2-barter, you should say “it went really poorly, and you can see that Jeannette resents it, but take your 3-barter.” And far more often that you pay 4-barter, you should say “it went fantastically well, better than Jeannette would have dreamed. Take your 3-barter, and she’s totally delighted with you.” (153-154) Why the change? As Christopher Wargo pointed out in the comments of my last post, 1-barter can no longer sustain a character for a month. In the 2nd edition, 1-barter is “enough to live on for a few days” (73). I guess even the Apocalypse World can’t escape inflation. Between that and the lifestyle move’s demand that you pay your barter’s worth of living every session, you need to make enough from a gig to sustain for a few sessions so that play doesn’t become simply a neverending series of gigs. 3-barter will let you avoid having to worry about gigs for a couple of sessions so you can build up steam in other parts of your narrative. The rules strongly encourage you not to vary from the 3-barter payment. Allowing the MC to go as low as 2 or as high as 4 suggests that the game will not break with these numbers, but that they will affect the game if used regularly. The reason for making the payment reliable is so that players know what their character will get by taking a gig. How you do and how it all comes out might be up in the air, but you can count on your payment. Without that standard, players could get financially punished for a bad roll, which encourages players to find a more reliable way to secure some jingle. What the game proposes instead of varying the payment is to work the relative success or failure of the job into the cause-and-effect chain of the narrative. Jeanette’s resentment or delight is a much more exciting (and meaningful) variable for the game than the payment. Moreover, if you stick to 3-barter generally, then when an NPC does short change or overpay it has punch. So, yes, gigs are about making money to sustain your characters, but that’s not what they are really about, are they? Like everything else in the rules, they create arenas in which PC-NPC relationships can flourish and bear dramatic fruit. Now for the ending of this section, an ending that I love: If you make it easy and safe for the characters to find and work paying gigs, they’ll be rich. The harder and more dangerous you make it, the more desperate the characters and the more desolate the world. Choose intentionally. Make Apocalypse World the way you want it. I love the simplicity and directness of “choose intentionally” as a standalone sentence. The gig subsystem is a kind of dial, and where you set it affects the rest of your game. The good news is that none of the settings on the dial will break the game, so don’t worry about that. But not breaking the game and giving you the game you want are two different things. I also love the idea that the Apocalypse World you create could be a land of plenty, at least for the PCs, with jobs and jingle always in easy reach. So much of the game is about scarcity, but that doesn’t mean the PCs have to be on the suffering end of that scarcity. What do the PCs make of the world when they are profiting from the system while others in the larger community are not? It’s its own interesting question. What you are exploring is up to you as the MC, and the gig move is one of the tools the game gives you to control that. Most of the playbooks include this move:
At the beginning of the session, spend 1- or 2-barter for your lifestyle. If you can’t or won’t, tell the MC and answer her questions. Imagine that there are three (or more) qualities of life available. The first is the typical quality of life for your Apocalypse World, where the PCs are, how most people around them live. What do they eat, drink, wear? Where do they sleep? If the player pays 1-barter at the beginning of the session, that’s the quality of life her character’s had and can generally expect. The same as most people around her. If she pays 2-barter at the beginning of the session, she has a quality of life that is substantially, notably better. Whatever other people eat, drink, and wear, she’s eating, drinking, and wearing better. She sleeps more comfortably and safer, and has more control over her personal environment. She doesn’t get any other benefit, so make it clear: she shouldn’t spend 2-barter unless this is precisely the benefit she wants (151). The lifestyle move is new to the 2nd edition, and I think it accomplishes a great deal within the game. First, it’s important to note that the move triggers at the beginning of your first session. For the text we have to jump forward to page 154, under the title “Lifestyle and gigs at the start of play”: At the beginning of the first session, have everyone make the lifestyle move, but tell them that in session one they have to pay 1-barter. Tell them that their starting barter is calculated to include this. It’s true. Each playbook starts with at least 2-barter worth of oddments (except for the hardholder, who’s a special case all around), and some playbooks start with 4-, 6-, or 8-barter (the Brainer’s got bank!). Because the move triggers in the first session, it necessitates a conversation about what life is like in your Apocalypse World. When the MC asks how much you are spending on your lifestyle, it prompts a group discussion of what 1-barter gets you in our world, and what 2-barter would look like. It also forces the question, what are you bartering with in your Apocalypse World? What is being traded? What is valuable? Like the playbooks themselves, and the Hx questions you ask each other, answering these questions about lifestyle helps us organically create the world in a loosely-guided conversation, on small, manageable step at a time in fun bursts of creative discussion. Additionally, the lifestyle move raises the specter of not being able to pay that barter cost. It says that your character could be destitute, and that there are undoubtedly others in your world who are already destitute. What are their lives like? Where do are they huddled? Even if you don’t answer those questions, they haunt the edges of your conversation. You have 1-barter now at the beginning of the game after having paid for your living, and if you don’t spend another oddment, you have enough to cover one more session. That’s it. And that’s a kind of world-building too, right? This is a world of limited supplies, where you need to pay your own way, either with oddments or favors, or you face deprivation. If that were the only purpose of the move, it would be enough. But of course there is more. If she pays 0-barter, this should mean that at the beginning of the session she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst, but hold off. It could turn out that way, but she has to answer your questions, right? As MC, your first question is to the other players: “okay, so who’s going to pay 1-barter to keep Keeler alive?” If one of them springs for her, cool; they can work the debt out between them and you don’t need to think about it any more. If none of them can or will, though, you get to choose: • Go straight to, yes, she’s desperately hungry and dying of thirst. Inflict harm as established. Take away her stuff. • Choose a suitable NPC—Rolfball, for instance—and say, “oh, that’s okay, Rolfball’s got you covered. That’s good with you, yeah?” Now the debt is between her and your NPC, and you can bring it into play however you like. Given the NPC’s threat type, impulse, and general nature, how eager are they to be repaid, and on what terms? • Say, “well, okay, who do you think should pay to keep you alive? Rolfball? Fish? Who?” You can either negotiate an appropriate arrangement in summary, or else jump into play: have her read a person, seduce & manipulate, go aggro, or whatever she needs to do to get her way. Apocalypse World is a game whose story and movement are created entirely by the players through the actions of their characters. Remember that whole “DO NOT pre-plan a story line, and I’m not fucking around” thing? Well, the game can’t demand that of you and then not give you the tools with which to build a story. I mean, it could do that, but it would be a shitty game, and Apocalypse World is not a shitty game. The playbooks go a long way in character creation to creating a complex community full of named NPCs and personal pressures for the characters. Those make great starting points, and in some situations, that’s all that’s needed. But if those initial leads fall flat or prove to be less interesting than hoped, the lifestyle move is built-in fuel, there whenever you need a complication to explore. The move puts pressures on characters to have jingle, which could push them toward gigs or other risky ways of sustaining themselves. I love that the first question is to the other players. The game doesn’t necessarily want PCs at each other’s throats (although it’s cool if that happens), but it does love to have them tangled in each other’s shit. Throwing this option to the other players is a way to let them have first say in generating this narrative drama. If they pass, then the MC can look over the landscape and decide what would be most productive right now: starvation, indebtedness to a particular NPC, or a choice made by the player of the broke (or freeloading) character. However it works, this is a moment for the players to decide what dramatic pressures they want on their characters to drive the story forward from this point. It’s an incredibly flexible tool that provides drive and direction in whatever you see fit. You’ll note that 1-barter, whatever it is for your world, is defined by the game as providing a month of expenses, yet the move is supposed to be triggered at the beginning of every session, even if the last session of play took only an hour or two of in-game time. The move doesn’t prompt you to trigger it at the beginning of session only if a month of in-game time has passed. And it doesn’t provide you with reasons why the move would need to be triggered if little to no time has elapsed since last session. That’s left entirely up to you and your table to explain the necessary costs, or to leave it unexplained. But what if you want to just forget it? What if you’ve got plenty of drive in your story already and you don’t want to futz with gigs and financial pressures right now? Then forget it. Lifestyle is a move that is there to catch you when you need it and to be painlessly overlooked when you don’t. The lifestyle move hangs out in the “Barter” section of the playbooks without so much as a bullet point to even draw attention to it. It is designed to slip into the background and be forgotten. If it’s important to you and your vision for your Apocalypse World, then you’ll call for it. If you’ve got so much going on that you forgot about it, the game will gladly let you forget. But when you go searching your sheet for something to do because the game has run out of gas for you, there it will be to get things moving again. The bookend to the lifestyle move is the end of session move. One kicks you off and one meets you at the end of each session. This is what it says in the text about the session end move: If you forget to do this at the end of session, be sure to do it at the beginning of the next. It’s important. No such sentence appears in the lifestyle discussion. The rules don’t insist that you go back and rectify your barter matters if you forgot to do them, because if you forgot to do them, it most likely means that everything is working alright for you already. The lifestyle move is fantastic at every stage of play. Like a loving guardian, it’s there for you at the beginning of your journey and then it gets out of your way, but is always there to catch you when you need it. Marie’s helping Keeler get into the water cult house by talking animatedly with Tum Tum, trying to hold their attention while Keeler sneaks behind them. Marie misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like. I choose to put Keeler in a spot. “Do you glance Keeler’s way? Or do they read your mind? Or what? Anyway, one of them turns, very deliberately, and Keeler, looks right at you. What do you do?”
Keeler’s trying to get out of a firefight with Dremmer and Balls with her skin more or less intact. Bran’s interfering with her by shining a targeting laser on her. He hits with an 8, so Keeler gets the -1. Bran’s going aggro on Marser, threatening his life, his family’s lives, the lives of everyone he’s ever known. Keeler’s helping by sitting nearby, idly loading gun after gun. Keeler hits the roll with an 11, so Bran gets the +2 to his aggro roll. (150-151) In my last post, I talked about the 1st edition version of this move and the 7 – 9 result that the characters expose themselves “to fire, danger, retribution or cost.” To illustrate what it meant by that instruction, the 1st edition examples each included a parenthetical aside of what that might look like. In the first example, we are told “On a 7 – 9, maybe Tum Tum starts pressing her for . . . unsavory commitments, with threats to back them up.” In the second example, “maybe on a 7 – 9, she notices” Bran’s interference. In the third example, “maybe on a 7 – 9, Marser decides the real threat is Keeler and the only way to be safe is to get rid of her.” Removing that part of the 7 – 9 result does zero harm to the move because the fiction naturally takes care of these kinds of details. In the first example, for example, if Marie hits with a 7 – 9, then she successfully distracts Tum Tum, but she obviously does a less thorough job of it, giving Keeler only a +1 to her roll, so the MC is naturally inclined (and trained) to explore the fictional possibilities and ramifications of that fact. Hell, even on a 10+ Tum Tum can be way too interested in Marie, inviting the MC to make a move that puts pressure on Marie. In the example of Bran targeting Keeler, the idea that Keeler notices is an unnecessary detail, and one the players will naturally work out themselves. “Do you figure out how they keep targeting you? Do you realize Bran is fucking with you?” That’s better drama than letting the dice decide that detail. Same goes for the final example. Marser is free to decide that Keeler is a huge threat with or without that 7 – 9 result. That’s part of the PC-NPC-PC triangles that is constantly under the MC’s purview. No roll is needed to give the MC permission to pursue that route. So while the changes to the move might read on the page as being unexciting, the fiction that results will be anything but. The more you can get the PCs helping each other and getting tangled up in each other’s shit, the more cause-and-effect chains can splinter off and touch multiple PC lives, and the changes in the move seem designed to make that happen more often in play. My favorite example is Keeler “loading gun after gun” to help cow Marser. It’s a wonderful image, and you have seen that scene in a number of movies and TV shows, and it is always chilling if done right. My least favorite example here is the first one because the helping move seems to eclipse’s Keeler’s move altogether. Keeler is trying to sneak into the water cult house (presumably by acting under fire) and Marie is trying to help. When Marie fails her help roll, the results of Keeler’s move seem to become beside the point. Was Keeler’s roll a miss? If not, having Marie’s bad roll undo Keeler’s hit seems downright unfair. If Keeler did miss, then having Tum Tum notice her is just part of that miss and seems unrelated to Marie’s roll, in which case, the MC still has two moves to make. Sadly, it’s a muddled example and missed opportunity. On a 10+, they take +2 (help) or -2 (interfere) to their roll. On a 7 – 9, they take +1 (help) or -1 (interfere) to their roll. On a miss, be prepared for the worst.
The help or interfere move underwent some serious revision from the first edition to the second. Here’s what the move used to say: On a hit, they take +1 (help) or -2 (interfere) now. On a 7 – 9, you also expose yourself to fire, danger, retribution or cost. When I first became aware of Apocalypse World, people regularly referred to the help or interfere move as an indicator of how hostile the Apocalypse World of the game was. It was much more rewarding to hinder someone else than it was to help them. Moreover, to help someone was to stick your neck out and risk sharing in the pain, even if you got a (weak) hit. It was a compelling argument and a good bit of insight. But apparently it was not all that important to Vincent and Meguey since the second edition does away with both of those details. The simplest reading of this change is that the Bakers were originally concerned about the math, that if a character could have a +3 from a stat, the +2 from help would mean that the player would have a guaranteed hit. A maximum +1 meant that even with help and everything else going a character’s way, snake eyes would still result in a miss. And once you limit a strong hit to +1, then you can’t go any weaker than that on a weak hit and still consider it a hit, so you need to make the weakness of the hit related to something other than the bonus, which in this case was exposing yourself to danger. Obviously something about the move was not working the way they wanted it to. I don’t know if the low payoff of +1 meant that players were less inclined to help each other, or if players were scared away by the possibility of exposing themselves to danger, or if the dramatic ramifications of a weak hit were interfering with the play they wanted. Maybe it was something else entirely. So far as I know, the Bakers haven’t stated in any interviews, tweets, or blogposts why they made these changes. The move is certainly simpler and more inviting in its current form, even if it initially seems a little less sexy. Losing the 7 – 9 element of “expos[ing] yourself to fire, danger, retribution or cost” is I think no big deal because that fiction will take care of itself. Why is your character only able to be of +1 assistance instead of +2? Work that answer into the fiction. And if you are working into the fiction that your character is there helping, then the MC is going to naturally work that fact into the cause-and-effect chain that follows that moment. I’ll look more fully at this in the next post when we look at the examples. The changes to the move itself are not the only changes in this section. Behold: 2e: If a player doesn’t say how her character’s helping or interfering, always ask. To do it, the character’s got to do it. “I’m helping,” is fine to say, but just like for “I’m going aggro,” you answer it with “cool, what do you do?” 1e: Always ask how! To do it, you’ve got to do it. “I’m helping” is the same kind of unacceptably vague as “I’m going aggro” – you answer them both with “cool, what do you do?” 2e: Both of the players – the acting one, the helping or interfering one – can roll at the same time, but it’s not important. 1e: It’s best if both the players – the acting one, the helping or interfering one – roll at the same time, but don’t be a nit about it.” You can see that these changes are not to the substance of the passages but to their tone. The second edition doesn’t make many tonal changes (or at least not that 6I’ve noticed), so it’s interesting that in rewriting this, the Bakers felt the need/desire to dial this back. I suspect that calling your reader a “nit” and suggesting that the players are acting “unacceptably vague” just came off as unnecessarily harsh. While the book employs rough language and salty tones, it doesn’t tend to attack its audience directly like this. Those are at least my best bets. What are yours? A lot of RPGs give players the ability to have their characters help each other. What’s unique in Apocalypse World is that there is a dedicated stat for the purpose. Here’s the first sentence of the help or interfere move:
When you help or interfere with someone who’s making a roll, roll+Hx. Before we look at the rest of the move, I’d like to spend some time talking about Hx and its role in the game. It’s a pretty neat thing to mechanize how well our characters understand/get/see through/grok one another, but it’s only neat if the game has a reason to do that, only neat if doing so is important to the game. In Apocalypse World, how well our characters get each other is central to the themes of community and of making something together of this mess of a world we’ve inherited. The players first encounter Hx during character creation when they “do the Hx thing” (97). I’ve already talked about how cool “the Hx thing” is as it not only gives the players insight into how that character understands the people around them but that it also creates fiction that pre-dates the opening scene of the game about to be played. In answering Hx questions, players mark out relationships between the characters, define crucial color of the world the characters inhabit, and shape the play and fiction that will form the foundation of the game ahead. If Hx did nothing more, it would be awesome tech. But it does so much more. In Apocalypse World, there are three ways to gain XP: 1) roll a highlighted stat, 2) reset your character’s Hx with someone, and 3) gain it at the behest of a move. Let’s start with the second one. The game rewards you with XP for your character’s growth and improvement every time you do something to increase their Hx enough to roll over to the next level of “getting someone” or decrease enough to roll down a level. The game doesn’t care if you’re improving your relationships or destroying them; it only cares that those relationships and understandings are changing significantly. We’ll look at how Hx changes during play itself in a moment, but the reliable way that Hx changes is from the end of session move that says that every player has to decidedwho knows their character better because of the happenings in that session and grant them a point a Hx. If you can’t find someone who knows them better, choose someone who knows them worse. Changing Hx at the end of the session is not optional - “Every player has to choose someone, no passing” (154). If you want to speed up your character’s progression, you’d best have your character interacting with the other characters in ways that change that relationship for the better or worse. As a player, then, you are encouraged by the rules to play your character in a way that builds or degrades that community in measurable ways. Now let’s look at the first way to gain XP: highlighted stats. It’s no coincidence that highlighted stats are tied to Hx. Who gets to highlight your stats is determined by which player’s character your character understands best. That player then selects one of your stats so as to say, I’d like to see your character do these kinds of things in the upcoming session. Highlighting stats builds community at the table just as Hx stats measures community in the fiction. Our characters have to look out for each other, and the players likewise have to look out for (and be invested in) each other as players. Every time you have your character do the thing that the other player said she wanted to see, you get an XP for your character. The more you aim to please your fellow players in this way, the more you are rewarded. In this way, community at the player level is thematically connected to the community being created at the character level. What about that last way to gain XP? Which moves tell you to gain XP? Yep, the moves that ask you as a player to make your character do what another player wants. Let someone seduce or manipulate your character, take an XP. The savvyhead’s oftener right move and the hocus’s insight move also result in XP as one player’s character influences another player’s character’s behavior. Like highlighted stats, these moves reward community at the player-level of play. And some character’s moves result in a change, not of XP, but of Hx scores, yeah? Do harm to another character, that other character gets plus one to their Hx stat with your character. The more harm done, the more insight gained. Heal another character, you get plus one to your Hx stat with the healed character. The more healing done, the more insight gained. And sex moves! Bring those characters together in moments of intimacy and watch the Hx stats swing in both directions. This is one of the reasons why sex moves are central to the game rather than a tacked on subsystem. Yeah, you can play without them and have a good time, but the game is about how these characters relate to one another and build a community together, and it does that more effectively and more powerfully when the sex moves are present. Every element in the reward system is tied to the fictional development of community between characters and the real community created at the table between players. That Hx is used as the basis for how well you can help or hinder another player is awesome in its own right. The more I get you, the better chance I have of anticipating what you will do or what you would want me to do. But if that’s all Hx did, it would be nothing more than clever, an amusing insight into human interaction at best. What I think is especially smart in this design is that using Hx as a stat in helping or interfering is a way to take advantage of something the game already wants to do. Marie practically keeps house in the world’s psychic maelstrom. She thinks ghosts live in there and maybe she’s right. She goes in there to consult with them, and (unusually) misses the roll. I’m tempted to capture her, but instead for my hard move I decide to announce future badness—not often a hard move, but in this case it counts. We play out her conversation with the ghosts, but they aren’t helpful and she comes out frustrated. “Roark’s there,” I say. “He looks happy, his face has this look of wonder on it. ‘Marie!’ he says. ‘Marie, such a gift you’ve given me!’” “I what?” she says. “‘Roark, are you okay?’” “‘I’m not Roark,’” I say, and not in Roark’s voice. “‘It’s me, Monk!’” (149)
As usual, we begin with the missed roll. There are several things I love here. I love the phrase “keeps house”; it suggests that Marie not only lives in the world’s psychic maelstrom a large portion of the time, but that she keeps things orderly in there, cleaning in the corners, stacking the magazines, and wiping down the counters. I love the uncertainty in the second sentence of “thinks” and “maybe she’s right.” Do ghosts live in the world’s psychic maelstrom, or is that just how her brain interprets what she encounters there? The psychic maelstrom is a place of fuckery and bloody fingerprints, so players can only say how they experience and perceive their encounters in it, and the MC is free – no, practically ordered – to mess with those perceptions. I love the phrase “goes in” to describe Marie’s opening her brain, that for her it is a physical entrance into the in-between space of the world’s psychic maelstrom. And I love that the MC is “tempted to capture her.” This last one is a reminder that all the MC moves are still in play when a character opens her brain. What would being captured in the psychic maelstrom look like? What would it look like to the people standing beside Marie’s body in the world of the game? If you are interested in the hardness of this move, I discuss it further in post number 90. Bran has this scheme to reboot Jeanette’s brain and he’s trying to figure out if it can possibly work. As part of his research, he opens his brain, and hits with a 9. I tell him that the world’s psychic maelstrom is of the opinion not only that it will work, but that it’s a really great idea. “All you see is the world’s psychic maelstrom’s beatific and radiant smile,” I say. “Oh by the way, whose face is the world’s psychic maelstrom wearing?” “Um,” Bran’s player says. “It’s mine” (149). You had me at “reboot Jeanette’s brain.” I want in that game. Of course a weak hit is supposed to result in an impression, and that impression here is that “it’s a really great idea,” which I love because you can practically see the players exchanging quick glances hear the nervous laughter in response to this declaration. Bran just wanted to know if it could be done; that the world’s psychic maelstrom is excited about the effort is enough to give anyone pause. The question here is wonderful too because it builds off a detail of the maelstrom’s radiant smile, which presumably popped into the MCs head during play. What would that look like? It’d need a face to do that, yeah? Whose face? Ask Bran’s player because no matter what the player answer tells us something about Bran and the psychic maelstrom and the relationship between the two, and it does all that while creating concrete and gripping fiction. Keeler, against every instinct in her body and soul, opens her brain once to the world’s psychic maelstrom, because she’s once-in-a-lifetime desperate. She hits with a 10. I tell her that the vultures are circling and they aren’t real, but they all have the faces of Tum Tum. “Wait, what?” she says. “Tum Tum’s behind this shit? God damn it.” “One of the vultures lands in front of you,” I say. “It croaks out, ‘I’ll take a message for you.’ What message do you give it, and who do you want it to take it to?” (149-150) What I love about all of these examples is that they inspire the MC to have fun with the fictional possibilities that the world’s psychic maelstrom opens up. The psychic maelstrom can speak to the characters in dream-like imagery in any tone desired. The examples act as little seeds for the reader to churn into the soil of their imaginations for when they are daydreaming up apocalyptica. Here, the vultures at first simply reveal Tum Tum’s involvement, which seems to give Keeler’s character exactly what she was looking for. But then the MC decides to give Keeler’s player something more for her strong hit and uses what she has already created – the vultures – to give the character a chance to send a message. The rules surrounding the world’s psychic maelstrom are designed to be pretty slim so that it can be whatever your story needs it to be. The designers cannot anticipate and do not wish to restrict what you might do with the psychic maelstrom in your fiction, so the text sets up that it exists, that is related to the apocalypse, and that it is an essential threat for your PCs. But whereas all the other threats are restricted by their kind and their impulses, the psychic maelstrom is left wide open. The text prompts you with a question, not a command: “what kind of threat is the world’s psychic maelstrom?” Think about it. Wonder about it. See where the fiction and the play take you. As long as it is a threat, you’re doing it right. These examples act as permission to follow the fiction where it goes and use the world’s psychic maelstrom however you would like. They show us that there are no limits to what you can do with the infinite playground of the world’s psychic maelstrom as long as you barf forth apocalyptica, respond with fuckery, and get those bloody fingerprints over everything that passes through your hands. As to the good details versus the impressions, look to your threats to provide them. The “you already know all there is to know” clause is there, but I’ve never used it and I hope you never do too.
Open your brain is unique in that it asks the MC to have at her fingertips “something new and interesting” to say about any given situation or topic that the characters might open their brains to. Most moves call on the MC to react to specific fictional prompts, but opening your brain puts the MC on the spot. Thankfully, Apocalypse World might ask a lot from its players but it always provides the tools to do the job right. In this case, your threats preparation assures you always have something to say. Your threat maps, your threat countdowns, your stakes questions, and your general “I wonder” questions give you a whole list of things to draw from to tell the players either what they asked for, something that is interesting to you, or something that they need to know if only they knew to ask. A fleshed out threat map and an inquisitive MC with an evergrowing list of stakes and things to wonder about will rarely find themselves in a position of having nothing to say, or not knowing something new and interesting. If you have failed to do your prep or if the player has asked about a topic entirely off your threat map, you can of course always make things up and work that into your prep before the next session. The game is designed to be flexible enough for that as well. Finally, you are given an out if your prep is incomplete and your brain is sluggish; you can say “you already know all there is to know.” I love both that the option is given and that the hope that you never use it is expressed. It makes me think of something Vincent says in one of his blogs: “In my imagination, a rule is like if you take a nail and scratch a line in dry dirt, and what people actually do is like where the water actually runs. Some water will run down the line you scratched, because you scratched it. Other water will run down the line you scratched but would have run there even if you hadn't. Other water will go wherever it goes. And (and here this picture breaks down, now I'm talking about bizarro-world water) some water will respond perversely to your line, bouncing off of it or testing its limits or sliding around it or flowing in the opposite direction out of plain orneriness” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/430). That water is going to run where it will, and it seems useless to tell the water it cannot run down the “I have nothing to say about this” path since some MC somewhere will inevitably feel the desire to say it. So the Bakers have scratched their line in the dirt to accommodate those fringe cases. The secret to a good set of rules of course is to make the players want to follow them, to make it so that following your rules is more rewarding than not following them. And that’s certainly what is going on here with open your brain. As the MC, it’s fun to have a way to tell the other players about the cool things happening off screen with your threats, and it’s fun to try to make the other players gasp or groan with some cool revelation that they had been ignoring or hiding from. The fact is, it is more fun to draw something from your prep or to make something up than it is to say, “I’ve got nothing. You already know all there is to know.” Were that clause not there, I suspect some players would resent its absence and want to buck against the design “out of plain orneriness,” so including the clause is a psychological move. To then say “I hope you never do too” is equally psychological in that it suggests you’ll be letting someone down if you do. You’ll be letting your player down, you’ll be letting yourself down, you’ll be letting your story down, and you’ll be letting the designers down. It’s a pretty brilliant inclusion. I concluded my last post by observing that the world’s psychic maelstrom occupies an interesting place in the game in that it is simultaneously unnecessary to play with (by which I mean the game functions fully if the maelstrom is never accessed or explored) and vital to the nature and feel of Apocalypse World as created in the text of the rule book. Vincent and Meguey have said in several different interviews that the first thing Vincent wrote when starting on Apocalypse World was the Brainer playbook and the descriptive blurb that introduces the Brainer: “Brainers are the weird psycho psychic mindfucks of Apocalypse World. They have brain control, puppet strings, creepy hearts, dead souls, and eyes like broken things. They stand in your peripheral vision and whisper into your head, staring. They clamp lenses over your eyes and read your secrets” (17). The world’s psychic maelstrom is central to the creative vision of Apocalypse World, so let’s take a moment to look at it up close.
Let’s start by breaking down the phrase itself. You’ll notice that for the most part I’ve been using the full phrase “world’s psychic maelstrom” without abbreviating it; that’s because it’s seldom abbreviated in the book, which tells us that the entirety of the phrase is important. First, it’s a maelstrom. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a maelstrom as “a powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius” and “something resembling a maelstrom in turbulence.” Cool. The maelstrom is chaotic and turbulent, and I love the idea that it is “sucking in objects within a given radius,” the “given radius” being all those who open their brains to it, and “objects” being the thoughts, memories, and mental space of those same people. Remember that the maelstrom is described as always being eager to flood the brains that are opened to it (“waiting for you to open your brain so that it can rush in” (14)), and that the maelstrom is one of your “essential threats” (107). If your version of the maelstrom is not “sucking in objects,” it is at least a danger to the PCs that cannot be ignored without risk. Second, the maelstrom is psychic in nature. Let’s return to Merriam-Webster and see that psychic is defined as “lying outside the sphere of physical science or knowledge : immaterial, moral, or spiritual in origin or force” and “of or related to the psyche,” the psyche being the soul or personality of an individual. The text of Apocalypse World points to this definition when it instructs you to “ask questions about the characters’ . . . psyches, souls” (148). This isn’t just about mental powers and supernatural chaos; it’s about moral and spiritual turbulence. Finally, the psychic maelstrom is “the world’s.” That little possessive says that the moral and spiritual turbulence hovering just on the edge of perception is unique to our world within the game. This isn’t some cosmic level psychic maelstrom; it’s specific to this place and this time. Either the moral and spiritual turbulence brought about the apocalypse, or the maelstrom was born from the even that shattered our world, but either way, it’s ours. As the text says, “It caused the apocalypse, or else the apocalypse caused it, nobody knows” (71). I have been tempted several times to refer to the maelstrom as “otherworldly,” but the very title reminds us that it is not otherworldly, that it is uniquely of this world. (I feel like there is also a pun in the homophones of “world” and “whirled” as it is paired with maelstrom, but perhaps that is going a step too far. And writing that makes me want to puzzle over the very title of the game, which is a strange one. I have not read anything about the how the Bakers settled on the title Apocalypse World and why. Would be interesting to know, no?) All together, then, the world’s psychic maelstrom is the moral and spiritual turbulence that is part and parcel of the physical apocalypse in whose remnants our characters struggle. And of course, this moral and spiritual turbulence is at the thematic center of the game and what we are playing to find out, even if we as players have never thought about it like that. It is, after all, the fifth reason we are given for why we should play this game: “Because there’s something really wrong with the world, and I don’t know what it is. The world wasn’t always like this, blasted and brutal. There wasn’t always a psychic maelstrom howling just out of your perception, waiting for you to open your brain so that it can rush in. Who fucked the world up, and how? Is there a way back? A way forward? If anybody’s going to ever find out, it’s you and your characters” (8). Even if your characters never struggle with those big questions, and even if they don’t often open their brains to the world’s psychic maelstrom, it’s there all the same, and it impacts the nature of the apocalypse and the world the players play in. Just as the sex moves say something about the characters even if the moves are never triggered, the presence of the world’s psychic maelstrom says something specific about this post-apocalyptic world even if open your brain is never triggered. The want and shortages of this world are not just the physical things that keep us alive – shelter, food, protection, raw material – they are the moral and spiritual things as well, like justice, love, support, camaraderie. Like humanity in a game of Sorcerer, the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is unique to each game of Apocalypse World, and the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is intimately bound up with the specific themes of that specific game. Unlike humanity in Sorcerer, the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is created during play rather than from the outset of the game. The rulebook speaks of the maelstrom only in vague terms, and the MC is not prompted to come to the table with a prepared notion. Moreover, no one person can dictate what the nature of that game’s world’s psychic maelstrom is because it is developed through questions as characters open their brain. The players each get their say, and the MC gets to put her bloody fingerprints and fuckery over the whole thing. The maelstrom can even mean and be different things to the different character, so that a unique psychic maelstrom develops from the interactions of all the players so that the unique themes of the game are entirely and unavoidably emergent through play. It’s been over a month since my last post and I’ve been itching to get back to it! Partly I’ve been swamped with work, partly I’ve been distracted by all the prep that went into my son’s graduation from high school this past week, and partly I’ve been putting this off because I’m afraid I won’t do justice to the topic of the world’s psychic maelstrom in the next couple of posts.
Let’s go ahead and get the text for the move out there: When you_ open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom_, roll+weird. On a hit, the MC tells you something new and interesting about the current situation, and might ask you a question or two; answer them. On a 10+, the MC gives you good detail. On a 7–9, the MC gives you an impression. If you already know all there is to know, the MC will tell you that. On a miss, be prepared for the worst (148). The world’s psychic maelstrom has been mentioned several times up to this point in the text, but how the maelstrom affects the game mechanically has been unclear. The first thing to note is that you have to actively “open your brain” to gain access to the world’s psychic maelstrom. We know that it is always “[a]t the limits of perception . . . howling, everpresent” (8), but it cannot penetrate your thoughts without your inviting it in like a vampire. Once it is in, the exchange is a two-way affair; you give a little and you get a little. Technically, the move says the MC “might” ask you a question or two, but come on, it’d be a sad day if the MC didn’t. That two-way street is not without its risks. Let’s remember that the world’s psychic maelstrom is one of the “essential threats” that you start thinking about after the first session; and yet in spite of that, characters are supposed to willingly invite this threat into their heads? How does the game engineer that, especially since the only bait on that hooks is “something new and interesting”? The player will want to choose a topic, naturally. She’ll say “I open my brain about Tum Tum” or something. 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—but not all the time. Sometimes you should tell them about your favorite topic instead, and sometimes you should tell them what they need to know, if only they knew to ask. First, the game tempts you with information. You want to know more about something? All you have to do is open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom and you can have plenty of information at your fingertips! In this way, opening your brain is a third type of perception move, only it doesn’t rely on your sharp the way reading a sitch or a person does, and the conditions to meet the fictional trigger are easily met. This one you can do any time about anything. That’s an offer that is hard to pass up, even with a game like Apocalypse World that doesn’t rely on mysteries for its narrative oomph. The instruction for the MC is to “give her what she wants, much of the time” because you want to encourage players to open their brains as much as possible. Even when you aren’t giving her what she wants, you’re still telling her things that are interesting and new, whether it’s a thing that interest you or a thing that they should know. All in all, this paragraph makes it seem like a pretty good deal really. Remember to respond with fuckery and put your bloody fingerprints on it no matter what. Oh right! There’s the thing that makes this Apocalypse World and not Hey Neat I Have Psychic Powers World. Giving them what they want happily coexists with responding with fuckery and putting your bloody fingerprints over everything that comes out of the world’s psychic maelstrom. The second lure for players to want to trigger the move and access to the world’s psychic maelstrom is how cool the play is that results from the move: At first when you ask questions, they can be simply to establish facts and images, questions like “what’s the psychic maelstrom like for you?” and “how do you learn things from it?” As the game progresses, though, ask questions about the characters’ lives, pasts, psyches, souls. “Who was your first kiss? Tell about it.” “Are you happy?” “What’s the worst hurt you’ve suffered that you can’t remember?” “If you could take one conversation back, undo it, what would it be?” “If you were to kill Bran right this minute, how would you do it?” Make time for the players’ answers, and don’t let the players squirm out of them just because they never thought about it. “I know you don’t know who your first kiss was. Make it up!” For me, this is the real gold at the center of the move, those questions about the characters’ “lives, pasts, psyches, souls.” Open your brain provides a mechanized way to dig in to the quiet and often unseen parts of a character, parts that you might never have even thought of otherwise and that certainly could not become “true” in the fiction without an opportunity to make it officially part of the narrative. In another game, you might have reams of backstory for your character, but until it makes it into that shared fiction at the table, they are nothing more than ideas that guide the way you play. Because playbooks in Apocalypse World are designed to build characters quickly from physical cues and narrative abilities, the “lives, pasts, psyches” and “souls” of the character are left to be discovered in play. Some parts of your character you discover by the choices they make when faced with various challenges and problems; the rest is set up to be discovered by the probing fingers of the world’s psychic maelstrom. And look at those sample questions! They’re so personal and intimate! Are you happy? If you could take one conversation back, undo it, what would it be? Who was your first kiss? These are not casual exchanges you have with strangers you just met; these questions mirror the kinds of conversations you have with close friends or with people you wish to be close with in the small hours of the morning. The questions probe not just for “facts” about the character, but for the messy stuff of feelings, ambitions, and unspoken desires. Who doesn’t love to have those conversations?! And now you can have them with your fictional characters, building up their complex internal lives one small conversation at a time. Obviously, I’m not the only one who loves the fiction born from this move. Once the move is triggered and the power of the questions is witnessed at the table, many players are eager to trigger the move and see it triggered by other. It’s an organic and beautiful way to learn about the characters piece by piece, and because the human brain is always making connections, those little tidbits and stories are ripe for the players to tie into other elements of the fiction that have come before or are yet to come. The next paragraph from the text is all about these types of connections our big ol’ brains like to make, and it gives us the third incentive to trigger the move: the world’s psychic maelstrom offers a whole new depth to the stories you can tell and crises you can explore. Also take full advantage of the characters’ open brains to barf forth apocalyptica. What if there’s somebody in the maelstrom that they know? What if some part of the maelstrom stays inside their brain when they close it again? What if the maelstrom sweeps a certain key memory out of their brain while it’s in there, or gives them a brand new fresh one? Dealing with warlords, brutes, grotesques, and hostile landscapes is challenging enough, but the world’s psychic maelstrom provides a whole new axis for dangers in Apocalypse World. It gives the game a fourth dimension beyond the physical world of want and suffering, and it invites you as players to think of all the ways that the maelstrom can play with the minds, perceptions, memories, and pasts of the characters. And like all the other questions you ask yourself when MCing the game, these are questions that you don’t want to know the answers to beforehand. What happens if some part of the maelstrom stays inside their brains when they close it again? Play it out and see, together. What if the maelstrom swaps out old memories for new? Make it happen and explore the results, together. The game gives you permission, urges you in fact, to dive into the unknown with the apocalyptica you barf forth. The nature of open your brain puts the move in the interesting position of being simultaneously unnecessary for successful play - in the sense that characters can do everything they need to do without ever opening their brain – while being vital to the nature of Apocalypse World and the feel of the game. A game of Apocalypse World that ignores the world’s psychic maelstrom would be a hobbled and deflated one. There’s a beautiful tension that exists in a lot of Vincent’s designs – a tension between the ways our intuition and experiences as roleplayers are supported at one moment and then given a hard jerk at another moment. He analyzes the way people really play at the table and will serve up a design that falls into those patterns we’ve developed while simultaneously demanding that we do something alien and potentially awkward. PC moves immediately resonate with players as an intuitive way to play, but at the same time, players buck against the limitations of specific moves, like go aggro or seize by force. MC moves are praised for structurally representing how many GMs naturally play, but threats (and fronts from first edition) are often jettisoned for feeling unnatural. Some people are made uncomfortable by that tension, and some might even dismiss the parts that grate as poor design. Personally, I love the tension.
We see that tension at work in the way that both read a sitch and read a person limit the questions that a player can ask when making the move. The idea that we get to ask penetrating questions is satisfying and feels rights. That we only get a handful of questions to ask can feel like a jacket that’s slightly too small, restricting our movements and comfort. Having introduced the moves, explained them in full, and provided examples for them, this next section seeks to summarize a distinction between the moves, answer a predictable question, and give a handy trick to the MCs. First, the distinction: When a character reads a charged situation, the player asks all the questions up-front, right then. When a character reads a person, though, the player holds onto the questions and asks them one by one during their interaction. You may have to remind the players a few times before they get in the habit (147) Check. Roger. Covered that. That last sentence acknowledges the tension I’ve referred to. Asking questions as a freeform conversation between characters unfolds is not natural for most roleplayers, so it will take some time to form the new habit. Second, the predictable question – what do I do if they ask a question not on the list?: Strictly speaking, the player should ask questions from the lists, and no other. Some players, you’ll find, won’t do this naturally, they’ll just out and ask whatever’s on their mind. My recommendation is to take it in stride: the rules require you to answer a question from the list, even if the player asks some other question, and there’s no need for you to draw attention to it. For instance, let’s say that Keeler’s about to step out into some hotly contested territory, so she reads the sitch. “Am I about to walk into an ambush?” her player says. I could be a picky stickly and insist that she choose a question verbatim, but fuck that, right? I’ll just pretend she asked “what’s my enemy’s true position” and answer as though she had. “There’s a fantastic spot for an ambush, a chokepoint you’ll have to pass through,” maybe I say. “I’d bet a hundred jingle that Disember’s fuckers are there waiting” (147 - 148) There’s that tension again. The answer here is a practical solution to employ before your players pick up the new habit demanded of them by the game. Yes, they technically need to choose a question from the list, but if the question they ask can be answered by you as though they asked a question from the list, answer that question. What I love about this little section is that it offers a little sympathy to the reader. It says, I know that what I’m asking of you and the other players is hard and unlike what you have done in other games, so here are a few tips to get you through the transition, a workaround while you build some new habits. Whether you think the tension in these moves is productive or a pain in the ass is up to you. I dig it, but I respect that others have struggled with it. What this section makes clear is that Vincent and Meguey are well aware of what they are asking of - and offering to! - their audience. And with that, they give a little advice to the MC: When the player blows the roll to read a sitch or read a person, one of my favorite moves is to turn the questions back on them. “Hey by the way, where are you most vulnerable? Also, what should Roark be on the lookout for? And while I’m at it, what’s his best escape route?” and then use the player’s answers to just fucking bring it home. Yeah, that’s an awesome thing to do. It doesn’t surprise me that they end with this juicy bit of advice, because they basically just told you that there are going to be some growing pains among your play group as you adjust to the rules of the game, and even though they are giving you tools to deal with those pains, a reader could be put off by the indications of hard times ahead. So to soothe over whatever might have been stirred up in you by the first couple of paragraphs, they end with a reward, the upside of the move’s questions. As an MC, the questions are perfect for you, pre-planned fuckery just waiting for a missed roll. Yeah, yeah, possibly rough waters, but look at this! That’s just a smart rhetorical move. Marie is trying to reconcile with Roark after fucking it up with Joe’s Girl, and going into the conversation she reads him, of course. She misses the roll. Roark, out of his own self-interests, is ready to let bygones be, but now no way I’m telling her that. I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to offer an opportunity, very much with a cost. “It’s obvious, he hasn’t even opened his mouth and it’s obvious, he’s not going to listen to you,” I say. “You can have him back, but you’re going to have to in-brain puppet strings him to do it” (146)
This scene is of course a follow-up to the first example of the seduce or manipulate move. When we last left them, Roark had stormed out of Marie’s place stark naked, pissed off that she was using him to get to Joe’s Girl. Poor Marie can’t get a break and misses another roll. I love the MC’s move here because it genuinely probes what is important to Marie. Is it more important to her that she regain Roark’s trust or that she gets him back for another shot at Joe’s Girl again? Marie’s response to this move tells us about her and what’s important to her. You can’t ask for more from a move. It’s unclear how long after the last scene this one picks up, but I’ll admit I was thrown off by the idea that “Roark, out of his own self-interests, is ready to let bygones be.” That statement seems to suggest that the last MC move was not as hard as it first appeared, that the separation of Marie and Roark was not as severe as it seemed. But it’s important that Marie and Roark are in a charged interaction here. Roark may want to let bygones be bygones, but he’s mad and hurt enough not to be able to just come right out and say as much. Marie’s got to get there through this conversation. Had her player succeeded in her roll, Marie would have been able to read Roark’s signs and begin to mend the relationship. Instead, the MC used their move to have Marie misread Roark’s pain as a refusal to listen. The only thing missing here is that Marie’s player should still get her one question, and I don’t know how that question would affect the rest of the move. Does the MC make the hard move before the player get’s the question, effectively cutting out the option “how could I get your character to - ?” Should that question come first and then the MC can make as hard a move as she likes? Is the order up to the MC and the other player? The example doesn’t let us know. Bran’s sitting back watching Foster give orders and receive reports, all business. Bran pays attention to her manner, mood, body language, and hits the roll with a 7. He asks almost idly what Foster’s really feeling. “She’s scared,” I say. “Scared? Of what?” he says. “Of Marie,” I say, as honesty demands. “She is?” he says. “But that would mean …Oh shit.” This example shows that follow up questions to the original answer are within the bounds of the move. Now, the MC could have said, “She’s scared of Marie,” but that lacks a lot of dramatic punch, and it makes sense that Bran would first notice that Foster is scared, and then having noticed that, begin reading Foster’s movements more closely still to determining what she’s afraid of. The way the MC breaks up her response to Bran’s player’s question imitates this natural movement. Oh, and of course, this example shows that you can read a person outside of a conversation, that you can study a person’s interactions with other people, not just with yourself. The question is, if that’s the case, how much of the conversation should be played through? If the character reading the person is merely observing the interaction, is the move still subject to the direction that “in play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through”? Come to think of it, it is not clear from the presentation of the example, why the players agree that Foster’s interactions are charged at all. Presumably, the MC made some mention that something was off about Foster, that there was some underlying tension there. This is of course easily broached in play with, “there’s something odd in Foster’s behavior; want to read her?” or Bran’s player saying, “I’m studying Foster; is there anything there to read?” Keeler’s negotiations with Tum Tum are going really well. Really, really well. Suspiciously well. So she decides to watch them carefully while they’re talking. She hits the roll with a 12. She asks what they’re feeling, and it’s a mix of malice, impatience and hope. She’s like, “malice?” so she asks what they intend. “It becomes increasingly clear, the way they shoot these subtle looks back and forth between them or something, but you’re pretty sure they intend to kill you afterward.” They keep talking and she asks “how could I get them to let me go?” Let her go? No way. She’ll be fighting her way out. This is the only example that shows the move occurring over the course of the conversation. In fact, Keeler’s player doesn’t even notice that the conversation is charged until she suspects that things are going too well. Once she suspects that there is more going on beneath the surface, and the MC concurs, dice are thrown. The first question leads immediately to the second. The answer to the third question reinforces the idea that “’Dude, sorry, no way’ is a legit answer to ‘how could I get your character to - ?’” as well as providing another example of “unhappy revelations, every chance you get.” Finally, we get to the “mistake & correction”: Audrey’s connected with Keeler to ask for her help, and she’s acting reluctant, so she decides to read her. She hits with an 11. “Okay! So how could I get you to help me, what do you intend to do, and I guess what are you really feeling—” “Whoa stop,” I say. “Hold onto those, ask them during the conversation, not all up front. You can ask one now if you want, but then you two keep talking. Ask them as you go.” This is our reminder to “play the interaction through.” Pretty straight forward. What I would have liked to have seen in one of these examples is a full conversation played through rather than summarized. The Keeler-Tum Tum interaction would be a fine candidate for this. I understand that it would take up a lot of room to do so, so I get why it wasn’t done, but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. If you truly want players to play the interaction through, it’s helpful to show them what that looks like in play. Also! Just a quick word to say that 4/23 marks the one year anniversary of the Daily Apocalypse posts. We’re halfway through the text, so I suspect we have another 6-12 months of entries ahead of us. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting and plain following along. When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll+sharp. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7 - 9, hold 1. While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
• Is your character telling the truth? • What’s your character really feeling? • What does your character intend to do? • What does your character wish I’d do? • How could I get your character to - ? On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst. Reading a person is an investment in time. It means studying them carefully through the whole conversation, noticing changes in their tone, the movements of their eyes and hands, their most fleeting expressions. In play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through (145 - 146). I love this move. Anyone who has had a difficult conversation is familiar with the need to read every available cue in order to navigate the conversation safely and productively. Was that joke a stab at you or a lighthearted remark? Should you push against what they are saying or quietly listen without comment? Do they want you to agree with them or challenge them? I love that this move captures that experience so beautifully. But the designers want the move to emulate more than just real-life experiences; they want it to emulate the kind of conversations we see in novels, movies, and TV shows. The secret to that latter goal is this instruction: “roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through.” It is only by playing the interaction through that the move can achieve what it is truly meant to emulate in well-written dramas: subtext! Two characters with emotional stakes in a conversation can talk about the most mundane things on the surface while communicating devastating blows with their subtext and cues, both verbally and non-verbally. That’s what this move strives for, and that’s why the interaction needs to be “genuinely charged,” why the player isn’t supposed to ask all her questions up front, and why the interaction is meant to be played out in full. If the conversation is not genuinely charged, then there’s no room for subtext. In a genuinely charged conversation, the people speaking are not free to speak their feelings and desires plainly, either because of internal or external pressures. If a character can’t speak their feelings and desires plainly, they are forced to talk about other things, but those other things float on the surface of those unspoken feelings and desires, and in floating on the surface they are – consciously or unconsciously – shaped and distorted by them. With this move, you don’t have to be an incredibly clever writer of dialogue in order to get the same impact that skilled dramaturgists achieve. No matter what the two characters talk about on the surface, the player can ask questions like “what’s your character really feeling?” or “what does your character wish I’d do?” and get the answer before returning to the conversation. As an MC, you have the opportunity to create cool details that explain those deeper meanings. Throw in all the gestures and undertones you want and give them meaning – that’s the meat and the joy of this move. If it’s two players’ character interacting, they can totally read each other at the same time. Both roll, both hold, both ask, both answer, no prob. You see the possibilities of this move here, yeah? Quinn Murphy has an excellent essay called “The Talk: Better Conversations in Your Games” (it appears in the Indie+ 2014 Anthology, pg 2), in which he gives advice about creating a conversation between two players that has all the rich subtext that we see in our favorite dramas. This move doesn’t obviate Murphy’s technique, but it allows for so much more, and it does so mechanically rather than through coordinated planning. With read a person, we can conduct a conversation between two PCs that are ostensibly about one topic while we reveal all the turmoil and desires underneath. We no longer have to have our characters’ conversations be on the nose. Cool. I think of this instruction to trigger this move “only . . . when you’re going to play the interaction through” as a sort of Easter egg hidden in plain sight. I say that because it’s easy for players in the heat of the moment to skip the full conversation and jump right to the questions and answers. After all, there is nothing in the move itself that forces the players to “play the interaction through.” The rules certainly demand it, but the game doesn’t enforce that demand. If a player wants to say, “I talk to her, and I’m just trying to figure out what she intends to do about X,” the MC can just give the answer and play can move on without so much as a hiccup. Back in posts nos. 100 and 101, I talked a fair amount about “self-enforcing” RPG design that forces the players to make the fiction clear. The loosey-goosiness of the instruction to “play the interaction through” makes me think of the same “anyway” blogpost I referenced in those earlier posts: “2009-06-15 : Lazy Play vs IIEE with Teeth” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456/). In that post, Vincent says: So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you? Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age. You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing. Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing. Obviously, Vincent and Meguey are clever enough designers to know that this rule to “play the interaction through” is unenforced, which means that they are fine with some players skipping past the interactions details straight to the answering of the questions. I can’t think of a way to make the move self-enforcing without also making it cumbersome and potentially unpleasant. So even though they know that some X-percent of their players won’t play the move that way, it is worth it to them not only to keep the advice in there, but to state that advice as a rule. I don’t know about you, but that says to me exactly how important they think that instruction is. If you don’t play the interaction through, you’re cheating yourself of the experience of the subtext-laden exchange between characters. Your game won’t suffer if you don’t do it, but it will be greatly enhanced if you do. Everyone knows that the MC in Apocalypse World never rolls the dice.
I’ve been thinking that keeping the dice in the hands of the other players was a solution to several problems. First, it speeds up conflict and moments that call for resolution. The player throws the dice, instantly sees the result, and game play continues. There’s no back and forth as the PC acts and the player rolls followed by the NPCs’ reacting and the GM rolling. The entire back and forth of action and reaction are smoothly folded into one roll. Similarly, opposed rolls by two players have to be compared, read, and interpreted before the fiction can be finalized. Second, it keeps the MC honest by making it impossible for her to fudge a roll, to roll behind a screen, or to falsely inflate an enemy’s roll because it feels right to make the moment more dramatic. Third, it lessens the MC’s investment in the results of the roll because it reinforces her role as observer and interpreter only. Fourth, limiting who can roll dice keeps the narrative focused on the PCs. When the GM in a game can throw dice for their NPC, it temporarily raises that NPC to equal status with the PCs. There’s none of that in Apocalypse World. So here’s the confession part. I didn’t think about how the fact that the MC never rolls dice is directly related to the fact that NPCs don’t require any stats or written attributes. If I’m going to roll for this nasty NPC against your awesome PC, I need to know what I’m rolling, which means the NPC needs to have enough pre-decided information for me to have a meaningful dice roll. By folding all the NPCs’ actions and reactions into the PCs’ rolls, the game removes any real-world cues that measure and define the NPCs. The result is that the NPCs exist entirely within the fiction. As the MC, all you need is a name and an idea, and you can whip up an NPC as quickly as the developing story demands it. Why is that solution particularly fitting for Apocalypse World? Remember that whole “DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not fucking around” thing? The MC needs to be completely reactive to the other players and what they decide their characters will pursue. Moreover, the threats in Apocalypse World are almost exclusively human, so the landscape is going to be full of all kinds of NPCs, and no one knows which ones will end up being important. Having the NPCs exist solely as fiction is a way that the game lets the MC be flexible with the story. It’s the way that the game lets the MC names everyone and make everyone human. It’s the way the game lets the MC look at the NPCs through crosshairs. The more laborious NPC creation is, the more the game needs to allow the GM to plan NPCs in advance, and the more precious those creations will be to the GM. Look through your RPG collection and see how the different games balance NPC creation with the rest of the game design. How does the game accommodate the GM to be able to create NPCs quickly and easily, and where does the game demand more attention and resources be spent? I had not thought of the relationship between NPC creation and the way a game is GM’d or the way a game develops narrative and conflict, but for now I can’t stop thinking about it. Apocalypse World is chock full of examples. I’ve already said that they exemplify the conversation that is the act of roleplaying Apocalypse World, that they show negotiation and assent in action, players responding to each other thoughtfully and respectfully, correcting themselves and moving on. I’ve said that they show us the rules and elements of the game in action, character moves, MC moves, procedures - all of that. In addition to those things, the examples establish expectations of what play will look like and permission to take play in all kinds of directions. Let’s dig into that aspect of them.
There’s a lot of violence, yeah? Most of the extended example in the Moves Snowball chapter is a fight between a PC and a group of NPCs. But it isn’t just any fight; it gets particularly brutal. I’m thinking of Marie’s chopping into Plover and Pellet with a chainsaw. Then there’s Keeler going aggro on Plover, trying to smash his head in with a claw hammer, only to finish the job in the sucker someone example. And let’s not forget Bran’s casual attempt to blow Balls’s brains out in sucker someone. There are other examples, of course, and many don’t show these levels of malice or spite, but these characters are cutting loose and wreaking some havoc. The examples you put forward in your game text tell readers what to expect in play. Some readers will be put off by the cruelty or animosity displayed here, and others will grin and hurry to print out playbooks. The first kind of reader is warned that this kind of play can readily result from the game, and the second kind is given permission to take play in these directions. The question before us then is why setup a game with these kinds of permissions and expectations? Why does Apocalypse World in particular not only allow for this kind of play, but construct it through the players’ moves and actively encourage it through these examples? On my way to proposing an answer to that question, permit me to make a quick detour. I’m currently (and slowly) making my way through 7th Sea, which is all about heroes. I won’t go into much detail because, one, it’s not particularly important, and two, I haven’t read enough to make the full claims I’m heading toward (but I’ll post something when I’ve finished the text and gotten my thoughts in order). In the description of the various nations of the setting, there are story seeds that ask, as a hero, will you do X or Y. For example, as a musketeer in the world’s equivalence of revolutionary France, will you back the king or find a way to help those suffering under his indifferent rule. That’s a totally fair question to ask, and it balances the difficult pressures the hero is facing between duty and ideals, but we never really suspect that ideals will be trashed for duties. The question is does the hero find a way to satisfy his sense of honor and help the helpless, or go in entirely with helping the helpless. Again, it’s a fine question, but whatever the answer, we know that the hero will act like . . . well, a hero. It’s in the very premise of the game. We never expect the musketeer to skewer a beggar to get her out of the king’s way, for example Apocalypse World is a morally murkier world than Theah. The world has gone to shit and the players are asked what kind of community will their characters build from the fucked-up societies of this post-apocalyptic landscape. Maybe the characters will be heroes, and maybe they won’t be. When we sit down to play the game, we don’t know if we are telling a tragic or hopeful tale, a grim cautionary tale or a triumphant story of making it all work somehow. We can only find out through the act of play itself. The crucible of Apocalypse World will tell us who these characters are at heart, what they care about, what they are willing to sacrifice, and what they are willing to settle for. In order for that to be a truly open question, the characters need to be capable of doing some truly callous and horrible things. They need to have a limited set of tools that challenge them to establish peace - or at least stability - in whatever hodge-podge way they can. If they are not given the chance to be rotten, then being anything other than rotten is never a real choice. You can’t truly be a hero if you don’t have the freedom of being truly villainous. Apocalypse World has no use for those terms – hero and villain – but some form of that spectrum still exists. So the moves limit how the characters can effectively interact with the world, and they tempt the characters to travel down some morally dark allies to get where they are going, and the examples show the readers again and again that taboos that might exist in other games don’t exist here. You can take revenge or settle a dispute with a claw hammer. You can push someone off a roof because they are fucking up your shit. You can happily manipulate someone to get what you want or need. Hell, not only can you do it, but you’ll probably feel the need to at some point in the game. Once the game establishes those expectations and permissions, then the players are truly free to find out who their characters are and what their story looks like. That’s why, I believe, the examples show the things they do. A bonus question: what keeps the game from being a glorification of violence, a celebration of characters doing shitty things to others? Consequences. The point that the text drives home again and again is that you as MC make everything hum along by making every action taken by the PCs consequential. Players’ characters can do whatever they like in Apocalypse World, but they will pay the price for those actions. What that price is and what those consequences look like – that’s left to the MC to decide. That’s what you are sculpting as you make your MC moves and wield the threats pressuring the PCs. The other players are equal participants in building the world, but you are solely responsible for the moral landscape and ramifications for deeds done. What does the opposite and equal reaction look like in your Apocalypse World? That’s entirely up to you. It seems to me that the most common misapplication of read a stich is to treat it like a general perception check, where the player is rolling, or the MC is prompting the player to roll, to see if they can figure out what’s going on. If there is not immediate or impending danger that is either being responded to or prepared for, read a sitch is not your move. In those situations where the move isn’t triggered, the MC has no reason to be coy – tell the players what is happening and get to the good stuff. Make the situation and the threat plain. If there is no threat, then the players can ask their questions and should get straight answers from the MC without a move being involved.
It’s with knowledge of this common misapplication that I find the first example in this section lacking: “So that’s weird,” Marie’s player says, at some point. “What IS going on with Birdie?” “Roll to read a sitch,” I say. She misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like. A good one here is to turn the move back on her, so that’s what I choose. “I dunno what’s up with her,” I say. “I mean, I do, but she’s opaque to you. Anyway, where would you say you’re most vulnerable to her?” (144) What is happening here? First, this is carried over directly from first edition, in which a miss does not get the PC a question. So, the MC fails to let the PC ask her single question before turning her move back on her. Not ideal in an example. Second, it is unclear what is motivating the player’s attempt to read the situation. If Birdie is a friend, then read a person seems like the more appropriate move here, which would then let the player ask questions like what’s Birdie feeling, what does Birdie intend to do, what does Birdie want me to do? But no, the MC sees the character’s musing about Birdie triggering read a sitch instead. So what does that imply? Birdie must be posing a real threat to Marie in order for the move to trigger. My own feeling is that Birdie is about to betray Marie in some horrible way and Marie’s spidey-senses are tingling, but that is conjecture because of the move. If Marie’s player had succeeded in her roll, she could ask who’s really in control here, or what should I be on the lookout for, or who’s my biggest threat, which means some shit is about to go down in the not-too-distant future. Birdie’s looking for Marie’s weak spot implies the same thing. But none of that is clear and it requires a lot of mental work in order to make sense of it. Instead, it looks like the move is being used just to generally suss out what is going on, which is a disservice to the readers and their desire for clarity. Let’s jump to Keeler and Tum Tum, because that is an awesome example: Keeler doesn’t like the way things are going, so she takes a quick look around. She hits the roll with an 11, so she gets to ask three questions. I answer that Tum Tum isn’t her biggest threat, Tum Tum’s psychically linked cultist-bodyguards are. Her enemy’s true position is closing in slowly around Tum Tum’s temple, where they’re talking. And if things go to shit? I think her best escape route would be to take one or the other of Tum Tum hostage. (Keeler’s player: “Aw fuck.”) (145) What I love most about it is the “sudden unhappy revelation” of Marie’s best escape route: “take one or the other of Tum Tum hostage.” That’s so much better than a get-out-of-jail-free card! The ace up Keeler’s sleeve is messy and unpleasant and fraught with uncertainty. Can she get that close to Tum Tum? Can she seize one of them successfully to take them hostage? What the fuck does she do with them after she escapes with them? What will be the long-term repercussions? So much good stuff here! Before the move was triggered, the only thing in the fiction was that Keeler had a bad feeling about the situation. After the move, we can see the cultist-bodyguards surrounding the temple, we know that they are the biggest threat present, and we know that this could all possibly end in a hostage situation. What more could you want a move to contribute to the fiction?! Now let’s dive into the final example, the “mistake & correction”: Audrey’s got an old plastic box, like an interoffice mail box, with 2 dozen fresh apples in it. She brokered them from somewhere and now she’s delivering them to her friend Partridge, but there’s as usual a stretch of way she has to go through that’s in Dremmer’s territory. She stops at a safe spot and reads the way forward, and hits with a 10. “Cool. What should I be on the lookout for?” “Dremmer sends patrols through here, of course,” I say. “You should be on the lookout for a patrol.” “Makes sense. How far will I have to go exposed?” “A few hundred yards, it looks like,” I say. “Okay,” she says. “Question 3—” “Oh no, no,” I say. “that didn’t use up any of your hold, I was just telling you what you see.” “Oh! Great. How often do the patrols come through?” I shake my head. “You don’t know. Could be whenever.” “But can’t I make that my question, so you have to answer it?” “Nope!” I say. “You can spend your hold to make me answer questions from the list. Other questions don’t use up your hold, but I get to answer them or not, depending on whatever.” “Okay, I get it,” she says. “So I’m on question 2 still? What’s my enemy’s true position?” (145) This example addresses the common issue of players asking questions that aren’t on the list. How does the MC handle it? We have a clear, imminent danger in this situation as Audrey is about to move through a chunk of Dremmer’s territory. Sweet. The first question lets the player learn that Dremmer’s gang patrols this area. That makes the player want to know more about the patrols and Audrey’s potential exposure to those patrols. There are two ways to interpret the MC’s response to these questions; either she’s being a jerk and making the player find the exact question, or she thought Audrey’s questions were legit and not an attempt to use up her holds. I’m going with option two. Audrey’s player wants to know how much exposed land she has to travel through, and the MC thinks the player wants to know this before asking her next question. Audrey the character knows the expanse of exposed area so the MC just answers. When Audrey’s player asks about the patrol frequency, the MC thinks she’s asking if Audrey knows the frequency. She doesn’t, and the MC tells her so. Those questions are, in the end, just questions to know what the character knows, and the MC still has to answer them according to her principles of saying what honesty and her prep demand. This is all part of the conversation surrounding the move. The player only get three questions from that list, but she is of course free to ask any related question she’d like because players always have an invitation to do that in Apocalypse World. Through this exchange, Audrey’s player pieces together that what she’s really trying to figure out is where that patrol actually is, her enemy’s true position. The move naturally creates this kind of back-and-forth in the conversation. As the MC says, “You can spend your hold to make me answer questions from the list. Other questions don’t use up your hold, but I get to answer them or not, depending on whatever.” And that’s really what this example drives home. The list of questions are not the only questions you can ask, but they are the only questions that use up your hold and whose answers are binding (and mechanically supported by the +1forward). When you read a charged situation, roll+sharp. On a hit, you can ask the MC questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC’s answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3. On a 7–9, ask 1:
• Where’s my best escape route / way in / way past? • Which enemy is most vulnerable to me? • Which enemy is the biggest threat? • What should I be on the lookout for? • What’s my enemy’s true position? • Who’s in control here? On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst. You can tell me that this move isn’t brilliant, but then you’d be a liar, so don’t do it. This move and its counterpart, read a person, are the two active perception moves that allow characters to assess their surroundings. Of course the situation has to be “charged.” As with all the other language in Apocalypse World, “charged” is not a special term with special meaning, but is simply natural English. So what a charged situation is is up to the players at your table to determine. That said, you can feel the edges of what the move itself thinks of as a charged situation by the questions it allows you to ask. Looking over those six questions, we can see that they fit naturally into any situation in which you or someone you care about is in or is about to enter a dangerous situation. Every question in the list allows the characters to determine how to identify dangers and their corresponding opportunities, yeah? What blows my mind is how every situation worth assessing is reduced to six simple bits of information. As I noted in post no. 90, the advantage of using natural language is that moves are expanded by the inherent vagueness of the written word. Words like “situation,” “enemy,” “vulnerable,” “threat,” “position,” and “control” all provide enough wiggle room that this move covers dangers that are not only physical, but also emotional, spiritual, and social. The situation at hand could be a charged conversation, for example. Imagine how each of those questions can apply to someone trying to corner your character in a conversation, either an enemy or a lover. If a PC is vulnerable or has the opportunity to do something that will make them vulnerable, the situation can be read. But why create a list of limited questions at all? Why not let the players come up with any question they want? I think there are a number of reasons to limit the questions in this way, but let’s hold off on that question for now. We’ll look at this again and in more detail when we get to “Reading a Sitch or a Person” on pages 147-148, where Vincent and Meguey talk more about it themselves. Instead, let’s look at what reading a situation looks like in the fiction. Reading a situation can mean carefully checking things out, studying and analyzing, thinking something through, or it can mean a quick look over the wall and going by gut. Depends on the character (144) How you wrap this move into the fiction is entirely up to you. This could be a scene full of research, maps spread across a table with notes of intel and rumors. It could be like a scene from the super-combative Sherlock Holmes films in which Robert Downey, Jr. analyzes the scene around him in a split second with methodical and intellectual precision. It could be information gathered so fast it feels like a burst of intuition. “Depends on the character.” How does your character take in the world around her and process that information? What does that look like? You’re the one who has to do it in order to do it, so it’s your call. That’s cool. And what about things from the MC’s perspective? How do you answer these questions? Following your principles, is the short answer. Say what honesty and your prep demands. If your prep gives you nothing, then misdirect, make up something and then present it to the players as though the fiction itself produced that answer. But whatever you say becomes true: “Either way, you do have to commit to the answers when you give them. The +1 is there to make it concrete.” That +1 is a beautifully elegant way to give teeth to what you say, and it ensures that your misdirection is only ever about the fiction, not about lying to the other players. The +1 makes it impossible on a hit for a PC to _mis_perceive the situation. As such, it builds trust between the MC and the players. The +1 also acts as an encouragement to the players to read every charged situation they come across, for who can’t use a +1 in their back pocket? The game wants this move to go off often. Why? I find myself thinking of a passage from Dogs in the Vineyard: “I want them to figure out what’s wrong in the town. In fact, I want to show them what’s wrong in the town! Otherwise, they’ll wander around waiting for me to drop them a clue, I’ll have my dumb poker face on, and we’ll be bored stupid the whole evening” (pg 139). The more the characters assess the situation, and the more confident they can be about the answers they receive to their questions, the more they can act and stir up trouble and roll dice and create opportunities for some hard-ass MC moves. And all that is propelled by a simple +1. Even when you aren’t making hard moves, even when you are just answering questions, you are advised: “Spring sudden unhappy revelations on people every chance you get. That’s the best.” That IS the best, and I love the Bakers for not only recognizing it but for saying it. Yes, those two sentences are also on my list of Favorite Passages in AW! Your first order of business as an MC is to follow your principles in pursuit of your agenda, so if you can drive those principles right to the door of making the PCs’ lives not boring, do it! The openness of the questions give you the quiet invitation to introduce “sudden unhappy revelations” whenever you see the opportunity. It’s your job to look for them and seize them. I really love looking at the examples in Apocalypse World.
Marie draws Roark a bath and joins him in it, with dandelion wine. She wants him to bring Joe’s Girl to her. She misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to separate them. “As soon as Joe’s Girl comes up in conversation, he sees what you’re up to,” I say. “He shoves you out of his way and stomps out of your rooms. He takes his shotgun with him but doesn’t even bother to get dressed. He’s muttering the whole way down the hall, like ‘fuckin Marie, shoulda known, fuckin trusted her, fuckin Joe’s Girl…’” This is my favorite example of the bunch here. I love that Marie and Roark are most likely already a thing. Roark’s not shocked by the bath and the wine and the special treatment. It just looks like a loving setup. Marie is definitely seducing/manipulating Roark, but it’s not heartless, or so it seems to me. She can both want to get naked with him and have him bring Joe’s Girl to her. Two birds and all that! Seduce and manipulate can sound pretty shitty, but it doesn’t always have to look like that in play, so I appreciate this example. And let’s appreciate that hard move. On the one hand, it just looks like he left. She doesn’t get what she wants and also gets no sex. Not so hard on the surface. But, man, his not putting on clothes! Leaving butt-ass naked, with just his shotgun shows how distressed Roark is (and how a part of him his shotgun is!). On top of that, his mumbling about how he should have known better than to trust Marie – it’s all a perfect picture of a man who feels betrayed at the deepest level. Marie and Roark weren’t just separated physically; there’s a deep fucking divide between the two now and you can tell that things are permanently changed hereafter. The second example shows something I said in the last post, that the person being manipulated when this move is made against another PC is the player, not the character: Bran wants Keeler’s backup in an ill-considered raid on Jackabacka’s junkyard. Keeler knows how ill-considered it is, though. “Oh come on, it’ll be fun,” Bran’s player says. He hits the roll with a 7. “So, the carrot or the stick?” Keeler’s player says. “The carrot,” he says. “You’ve got hard highlighted, yeah? The way I figure it, with that, plus one from me, this raid could give you enough experience to get a whole improvement.” “Hm,” Keeler’s player says. “That’s an interesting point.” The conversation here is between Bran’s player and Keeler’s player, not between Bran and Keeler. Presumably the players will go over how Bran convinces Keeler, but that part is less important for the sake of this example. You can see plain as day Bran’s player is trying to align Keeler’s player with their own self-interests so that Keeler’s player can play Keeler’s aid in the raid with enthusiasm. The final example is rather straightforward: Keeler’s gearing up for some ill-considered raid or other. “Hey, MC, do I remember right that one of the outguards has night vision goggles? III, maybe, or Joe’s Girl?” “Sure, III does,” I say. “Cool,” she says. “I drop in on her…” She proceeds to offer III a cut of the spoils in return for the borrow of them, and hits the roll with a 10. “Yeah,” I say, “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.” “On a 10+, they go along with you.” Yep. That’s what happens here. The strength of a 10+, as I’ve pointed out before, is that the result consequentially affects the fiction. The consequence of this roll will only play out after the raid, when III’s goggles are scuffed, lost, or returned in perfect condition, or when Keeler squelches on her deal or lives up to her deal. All that comes later and is really outside the scope of this example, so for now, it looks a little dull: “Sure thing. III will go for that for sure.” Apocalypse World directs us to make straightforward NPCs: “Make your NPCs human by giving them straightforward, sensible self-interests. . . . In your game, make all your NPCs just not that complicated. They do what they want to do, when they want to do it, and if something gets in their way, well, they deal with that now. What they do in life is follow their parts around – their noses, their stomachs, their hearts, their clits & dicks, their guts, their ears, their inner children, their visions” (84).
I talked about NPCs in post no. 43, and there I say that giving NPCs straightforward self-interests allows the MC to always know how a character will respond to whatever a PC does. I still stand by that, but I want to add to it. In post no. 82 I talk about a distinction Vincent made in one of his podcast appearances between instruction and orientation in a rulebook. In short, he suggested that some rules are there to tell you what to do and some are there to prepare you for what the rules are going to make happen anyway. I feel like the direction to create NPCs with “straightforward, sensible self-interests” is definitely an instruction, but that instruction is reinforced by the rest of the game’s design so that making simple, self-interested NPCs feels almost instinctual. Uncomplicated NPCs are required in order for threats to gain simple trajectories that PCs can intercept, and their simplicity is everywhere in the basic moves chapter, which we see in the ways that PCs can interact with the NPCs in a moment-by-moment basis. In the move seduce or manipulate, we are told the following: Seducing someone, here, means using sex to get them to do what you want, not (or not just) trying to get them to fuck you. Asking someone straight to do something isn’t trying to seduce or manipulate them. To seduce or manipulate an NPC, the character needs leverage, a reason: sex, or a threat, or a promise, something that the character can really do that the victim really wants or really doesn’t want. Absent leverage, they’re just talking, and you should have your NPCs agree or accede, decline or refuse, according to their own self-interests. Let’s start with that last paragraph. The default state of NPCs is to go about “according to their own self-interests.” Every PC interaction with an NPC is guided by what that NPC’s uncomplicated wants are. If you are trying to get something from an NPC without triggering a move, you are just talking and the MC will play the NPC in accordance with their simple desires. All the social moves in Apocalypse World get triggered when you try to get an NPC to act in your self-interest, either by convincing them that satisfying your needs will meet their own or by demonstrating that your threat overrides what their self-interests previously were. If as an MC you create NPCs with complicated desires you make it difficult for the PCs to know where to push and difficult for yourself to know if that pushing will be effective. Similarly, if you do not pick a body part and give your NPC enough of a desire to follow it, there is no tug-of-war between characters because there is no clash between self-interests. This is not something you need to understand in the abstract as an MC, and if you’ve made your NPCs as the rules instruct, this will all happen magically and seamlessly. If you didn’t, the moves will push you in that direction simply in order to make the interactions work the way they need to. In this ways, the rules tell you which direction to walk, and then the rest of the game builds pathways and bumpers to unconsciously steer you down that path anyway. That’s pretty bitchin’ game design. And what about conflicts of self-interest between PCs? When one player’s character manipulates another, there’s no need for especial leverage. Instead, the manipulating character simply gets to offer her counterpart the carrot, the stick, or both. The carrot is marking experience, and the stick is erasing a stat highlight. See that? No leverage. You can’t manipulate another PC anyway, so why call for leverage? Whether another PC goes along with you or not is entirely up to them, and never the dice. So we get the ol’ carrot and stick approach. That carrot and that stick do exactly what the leverage is designed to do, with a twist. The move aligns the interests of two people, but it aligns the interests of the players rather than the interest of the characters. Characters don’t care about XP or highlighted stats – they don’t even know what the hell those are. Once the players’ interests are aligned, then the characters can go off and do their “ill-considered” (to borrow a word from the examples) things together. When you try to seduce, manipulate, bluff, fast-talk, or lie to someone, tell them what you want them to do, give them a reason,and roll+hot. For NPCs: on a 10+, they’ll go along with you, unless or until some fact or action betrays the reason you gave them. On a 7–9,they’ll go along with you, but they need some concrete assurance, corroboration, or evidence first. For PCs: on a 10+, both. On a 7–9,choose 1:
• If they go along with you, they mark experience. • If they refuse, erase one of their stat highlights for the remainder of the session. What they do then is up to them. On a miss, for either NPCs or PCs, be prepared for the worst. (142) This is our second move PCs can undertake to try to get someone to do what we want, and it’s a damn effective move. The only two requirements for the move are that we 1) tell them what we want, and 2) give them a reason. There are no limits imposed by the move beyond that. There is no caveat in the rules here that says the thing you want them to do has to be reasonable or something they would typically agree to do. In the explanation of Read a Person, we are told “’Dude, sorry, no way’ is a legit answer to ‘how could I get your character to___?’” (146) but no such guidance is given here. You are invited to be as far or as close reaching as you’d like. Thematically, this means that everyone in Apocalypse World has a price. Further, the currency for that price is not fixed. Sex, drugs, money, power, promises of rewards – all of these (and more) are potentially effective on every one you meet. Well, that’s all good thematically speaking, but how does a move like this exist without being abused left, right, and center? What is to stop you from trying to solve the problem of an invading enemy force with some sexy moves? I haven’t heard any tales of the move being abused horribly, so what keeps it functioning? I think there are two things that make this move reliably work. Actually those two things are really one thing: the equality of all the players at the table. The game doesn’t assign authority to any one person in determining if and when a move is triggered. As we’ve covered before, moves trigger via a natural and often unspoken negotiation. The player and the MC have to agree that the move has been triggered, so if a player wants a ridiculous return on a tiny investment, the MC can raise her eyebrows to get negotiations rolling. So that’s the first thing of this one thing: the built-in negotiation between players for moves to trigger from the fiction. The second thing of this one thing is the way the move is written. You are free to tell your target anything at all you want them to do. Period. But the anchor and limiter to that request or demand is the second part of the move: you have to give them a reason. If you want someone to do big things, you are going to have to give them big things. The reason that you give will naturally be a part of those negotiations between player and MC. You want her to call off her brute squad and leave the townsfolk in peace? And you think that is going to move her? The question, then, becomes not can you try to get them to do what you want, but how much are you willing to pay to get them to do the thing you want. The twin levers of “tell them what you want them to do” and “give them a reason” always work in tandem, and they ensure that no matter what offer or threat is made, the story is bound to profit by it. In this way, it’s a self-scaling move. One of the awesome things about playing Apocalypse World, whether you’re piloting the PCs or driving the world around them as the MC, is that you can play as hard as you’d like, that you are in fact rewarded for pushing hard. The scaling power of seduce or manipulate is one of the ways the game allows for and encourages all that pushing without ever threatening play itself. As an MC, you can throw horrible consequence after horrible consequence at the players because their moves give them the tools to deal with whatever comes their way. You never know what the characters are truly made of until you put them in a pressure-cooker of a situation; then we’ll see what they think is worth fighting for, and we’ll see what they are willing to pay to get what they want. When you Attack someone unsuspecting or helpless, ask the MC if you could miss. If you could, treat it as going aggro, but your victim has no choice to cave and do what you want. If you couldn’t, you simply inflict harm as established (140).
I love the elegance of turning this rule, which could easily have been tucked into the text of Go Aggro, into its own move. Doing so prevents the reader from having to scan each move for all the exceptions and possible applications when using the text as a reference book and makes this common-enough occurrence easy to find. It’s one of the things that makes moves such a beautiful and concise way of presenting rules. The In Battle move works the same way. The rule says that battle moves can only be made when in battle, but the move says when you’re in battle, you can make the battle moves. The rule becomes a move. Generally speaking, people are awful readers, and that is doubly the case with rulebooks. I may love all the ways Apocalypse World treats its readers with respect and invites them to engage with its text, but the book functions perfectly well as a rulebook even if you don’t care about the hows, the whys, the language, and the poetry. Presenting rules as moves where possible allows the quickest and sloppiest reader to grab the rules and go. Smart. It’s your job to judge whether the character could miss, but there’s no need to agonize over it. If it’s not perfectly clear, go ahead and have her roll to go aggro. The thing that strikes me about this brief paragraph is how seldom the phrase (or the meaning behind the phrase) “It’s your job” shows up in the text. Much of the game is set up to make it easy and natural to negotiate assent between players rather than dictate responsibilities to solely one player or another. This moment shows that when there is no value in negotiating assent, and when a simple decision is needed to move the game forward, the game will step in and assign authority. Finally, I want to point to two things in the two examples. Here’s the first: Bran’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, he’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of a borrowed rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” Bran’s player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” “You might miss,” I say, “so it’s going aggro, but if you hit with a 10+ he has no choice but to suck it up.” He hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have Balls barricade himself securely in: “you don’t blow his brains out, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note, on my threat sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again. Those last two sentences are where the gold is at. Having Balls barricade himself could be a lousy move. It has the potential to not be a victory of any sort if all it does is make Balls hide for now and just surface later, which could be seen as undermining the hit that a 9 represents. More importantly, that’s not consequential. What the MC does here is not only send Balls into hiding temporarily, but possibly permanently. If we ever do see him again, we can be certain that he’s going to remember this moment that had such an impact on him. That’s good MCing. The second example is exceedingly clever: Plover is groveling at Keeler’s feet, and Keeler’s standing over him with a crowbar. “No, seriously, I have no need to talk, fuck this guy. I smash him in the head. He’s at my mercy, right? How much harm does a crowbar do?” He sure is, and it does 2-harm messy. Shit. A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover. See what they did there? This example picks up where the Go Aggro example left off. Keeler came after Plover, and Plover fell to groveling, promising to do whatever Keeler says. To do so, answers an unasked question: what happens when your character decides that there’s nothing she wants so much as a blood reckoning? A sucker attack that can’t miss. And I’ll say it again: “A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover” is one of my favorite sentences in the book. The violence carried out by the characters in these examples – and they are casually carried out, more often than not – was pleasantly shocking to me on a first read, and I like that the MC shares the surprise. We can feel the MC as audience, learning about these characters through their decisions and behavior. That’s part of the thrill of playing to find out. There’s also a hint of sadness at the loss of Plover, and the MC feels that even while looking at poor Plover through crosshairs. It’s touching and funny and a rare treat in a rule book. I covered threats a while back (posts #70-88), and at that time, I looked at the threats individually and didn’t really consider why these threats? Why this collection of threats for this particular game? If you had asked me those questions, at the time, I would have said, It’s all part of the post-apocalyptic genre. Of course you have warlords and grotesques and brutes and afflictions! You’d get those in a post-apocalyptic movie, so of course you get them in Apocalypse World too!
Earlier this week, I was rereading this post from Vincent’s Anyway blog from 2005, called “Creating Theme”: http://lumpley.com/creatingtheme.html. I had read it a while back, but being an English Lit guy, I just sort of nodded through it and went on to the next post. This time, it got me to thinking about the themes that an Apocalypse World game creates through play and what Vincent and Meguey put in the game to dictate the thematic content created by the game, or if not dictate, strongly influence. To follow that thought through, I realized that I needed to know what possible endings the game sets up, or to put it another way, what are we playing to find out. As it says on the back of the book, what are these characters going to make of the broken-ass world they inherited? The game’s rules create a “fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangle, untenable arrangements” (97) from the start, and play proceeds from this state of disequilibrium to the point that the characters find a way to stabilize their world in one way or another. What’s fucked up there at the beginning, what’s fractured and full of inequalities is the social world that the character’s inhabit. Yeah, it’s a world of shortages and need, but what that shortage and need shine a light on is how people come together or fall apart when there’s not enough to go around. So what do the characters do? Do they find a way to build up a community? Do they protect their own by cutting others off? Do they run off and form a community of 3 or 4? What inequalities are intolerable to them and which ones suit them just fine? In short, it’s a game about society and government and relationships between individuals and between groups of people. When you play a game of Apocalypse World, you’ll find your world teeming with people. Factions, groups, gangs, families, lovers, etc. That’s by design, yeah? You don’t fight sand monsters or mutated creatures for survival. You aren’t telling a tale about fighting the elements as the last surviving humans looking for some mythical city at which the rest of humanity has gathered itself. Other post-apocalyptic games might go that route, but not Apocalypse World. No, the game wants tons of people around the PCs, and it wants those people exerting pressure on our heroes to see what they’ll do. What society will they build? So the game (and I would say any RPG) is defined by two things: 1) how the PCs interact with the world and 2) what opposition the MC put in the PCs’ way to create pressure on those characters. The first is of course determined in Apocalypse World by the moves. The second is shaped primarily by the threats. The threat lists and their related moves aren’t just handy tools for you as MC to always have something to say (though they are definitely that also); no, they give you specific types of pressure to apply to the characters, and how the designers define those threats directly affects the story created through play. In fact, to MC the game, you are instructed “to create your essential threats” (107). The only essential threats that have nothing to do with people and society are the landscape and vehicles; every other threat is about the people co-inhabiting the world with the PCs: brutes, warlords, grotesques, and afflictions. Warlords force the issue of leadership and government organization. Brutes force the issue of mob mentality, a perverse and dangerous kind of unity. Afflictions are the pressure on an entire populace, forcing the issue of mass struggle and individual expressions of that struggle. Grotesques force the issue of the perversion of humanity living in a world of scarcity and disharmony. Each of these threats actively creates a volatile and fractured social environment, and when the MC plays these threats, we all play to find out what they PCs can make of this social order and disorder. I never appreciated how vital and thematically central threats were to determining what stories are created by play in Apocalypse World. PC moves may determine how the PCs can interact with the threats, but the very issues and crises facing the PCs are born from the threats list. Change the threats, and you change the entire nature of the game. The threat I sidestepped above is that of the world’s psychic maelstrom. I’m saving that for another post somewhere down the road. What are you rolling for when your character goes aggro? What are you rolling to find out? You aren’t rolling to see if you “hit” because whether or not the target of your aggression takes damage is up to them, not you. You’re not rolling to see if they cave, because again, that’s up to the target. As I look at the move, the roll determines how well you limit your target’s response to your violence, how little wiggle room you give them to react to your aggression.
On a miss, anything can happen. We see this in the first example. Not only does Joe’s Girl not go with Marie, she has Marie unarmed, bloody-nosed, and pinned to the ground before Marie knows what’s happening. On a 7 – 9, the target can get out of your way, secure themselves away from you, try to appease you with whatever they think will work, try to prove to you that they are no threat, take the beating, or yield entirely and do what you want. This is Fleece sidestepping Bran’s attack in a “half-laughing, half-terrified” manner. According to the text, “What’s important is the character’s got the target’s attention and has forced them to change course or give ground” (139). At its most basic level, a successful hit means that the target can’t ignore you and must shift their behavior in some way to accommodate your demand on their attention. The logical extreme of that measure is precisely what a 10+ gets you: the target completely changes her course to accommodate you or bears the full brunt of your attack. The best you can get is to give your target two choices: suck it up and do what I want. That’s where Plover finds himself when Keeler is bearing down upon him brandishing a claw hammer in the third example. In Act Under Fire, the stakes of the roll are made clear by defining the fire, either situationally or verbally. In Go Aggro, the stakes are implied to some extent by the range of responses allowed by the move’s pick lists. Because of the structure of the move, the players never have to agree about what the aggressor wants or how the target might respond. What’s at stake is always how unignorable your intended violence is. And that brings us to the “example of a mistake & correction”: Audrey the driver corners Monk. “I scream at him, shove him, call him names. ‘Stay THE FUCK away from Amni, you creepy little turd.’ I’m going aggro on him.” “Cool,” I say. “Do you pull a weapon, or is it just shoving and yelling?” “Oh, yeah, no, it’s just shoving and yelling.” “Well, that’s fine,” I say, “but if he forces your hand, he takes 0-harm. I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s going to do. Do you want to roll for it anyway?” “I do, but no, he better take me seriously. I’m just shoving and yelling, but I’m threatening to cut him off, you follow?” “Oh!” I say. “Oooh. Yeah, roll it” (140). This is a great example because it raises the issue of what happens when your violence is ignorable even if you make the hit. Audrey doesn’t want to bash Monk’s brains in, but she wants to physically attack him and be taken seriously. She’s not going to manipulate Monk with her hotness, and she doesn’t want to reason with Monk through her sharpness. She’s being violent and clearly going aggro, but her 0-harm attack means that on any kind of hit Monk’s choice to force her hand is tantamount to ignoring her, the very thing a hit is supposed to prevent. What to do? The threat to “cut him off” give Audrey something additional_to hold over Monk along with the violence. If Audrey’s player rolls a hit, Monk will be forced “to change course or give ground.” To force Audrey’s hand now is to take the 0-harm _and accept that she’s cutting him off (from the drugs, sex, or whatever good stuff she’s been supplying him with). And I love that the MC is super intrigued by the threat, like she doesn’t know how Monk will respond to that threat any more that Audrey does and is eager to find out. Now everyone is leaning in to see what the dice say in order to find out what Monk will do. The fiction is clear, the stakes are clear, and everyone is engaged. That’s what the rules are there to create. The passage strikes me as play advice disguised as a mistake. Going aggro isn’t “do X or I’ll hurt you.” It’s “I’m trying to hurt you but you can get me to stop if you do X.” First, if your character’s actions fit that equation, it’s going aggro, not seducing or manipulating someone. Second, you are not limited to only bringing violence; you can layer a non-violent threat on top of it. That extra threat has no mechanical teeth (meaning you aren’t bound either to follow through with the threat or to honor an agreement not to) but it does bring additional pressure to bear upon your target and can give you that “Oooh, yeah, roll it” moment. When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose 1:
• Force your hand and suck it up. • Cave and do what you want. On a 7 – 9, they can choose 1 of the above, or 1 of the following: • Get the hell out of your way. • Barricade themselves securely in. • Give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear. • Back off calmly, hands where you can see. On a miss, be prepared for the worst. Going aggro on someone means threatening or attacking them when it’s not, or not yet, a fight. Use it whenever the character’s definitely the aggressor: when the target isn’t expecting the attack, isn’t prepared to fight back, doesn’t want to fight back, or can’t fight back effectively (138-139). First I want to look at going aggro as a tool for exerting your will on another character. Going aggro is one of three moves that can potentially get someone to do something specific. The other two moves are Seduce or Manipulate and Read a Person with the question “How could I get your character to_____?” For good reasons, none of these methods is fool proof; you can’t just make a roll and then have an NPC (or a PC) obey your desires. Doing so would undermine the realness of the NPCS, and the game can’t very well give you the agenda item to make Apocalypse World seem real if the game itself isn’t going to back your play. More importantly, being able to solve any given problem with a single roll to control an NPC is bad game design. But, still, these are characters who are trying to make something of the world, and one way to do that is to try to exert their will upon others. When a character goes aggro on another character to affect their behavior, they commit some form of violence on that character and hope it works. But in Apocalypse World, violence is an imprecise tool at best. Even on a 10+ the other character can say, “fuck you,” and take the damage you’re dealing out. On a 7 – 9 roll, they have the option of doing what you want, but they’d have to be pretty inclined to do it anyway, given all the other options they have. Apocalypse World makes it very hard for violence to be meaningless. You can lash out at anyone for any reason, and go aggro will be there to see you through, but what the move does is make that violence a kind of social exchange. I want something from you, and I’m using violence to get it. That thing might be as simple as for you to come with me or as bloody as for you to die. But after I make my request with violence the response is left entirely to the recipient. It’s important in the move that the target of the violence gets to choose their own response, whether they are PCs or NPCs. The person committing the violence gets no say in what happens after the attack. The recipient can return the violence, in which case a battle starts up; they can yield, in which case you get what you want; they can try to reason with you to keep it from becoming a battle while not giving in to your demands. The aggressive attack is merely an opening salvo in a conversation between the characters. I would argue that this is one of the reasons why there is no simple “throw a punch” move. Violence always exists in a context, and specifically a social context. In Apocalypse World, throwing a punch is always about more than just exchanging damage, not just because that’s uninteresting, but because it’s not true to human experience. Even when we are filled with rage and lash out blindly without understanding our own motivations, there is something we want out of that attack. Note that there is no requirement in the move to state what you want your aggressive attack to accomplish. To seduce or manipulate, you need to “tell them what you want them to do [and] give them a reason” (142), but there is no such instruction for go aggro. You can declare your attack and roll the dice without ever knowing or stating what you want from your victim. The MC or another player might ask what is it that you want the character to do in order to know if she caves or not, but it’s not necessary. Two of the three examples involve situations in which the aggressor doesn’t have a stated desire. Bran threatens to push Fleece off the roof, but what he wants beyond that is unstated. Keeler just wants to beat Plover’s head in, but Plover, liking his head as it is, caves. The MC doesn’t seek to clarify what Keeler wants and simply has Plover beg for mercy. So not only do you not have to declare your reasons, you don’t have to even know your reasons, because as I say above, isn’t that how anger and violence often work? You lash out with the intent to hurt without even understanding the emotional undercurrents that brought you there? As a tool for getting what you want, go aggro is pretty piss poor. But again, that’s how violence works in Apocalypse World. There is no move that lets you use hard to seduce or manipulate, and no way to use hard to read a person. If you are going to engage with the world the hard way, you only have so much control over what comes of it. Of course, if you keep brutalizing the world with your hard, eventually you can advance your go aggro move so that on a 12+ your target doesn’t have the choice to force your hand. You have proven through the last 25+ experience marks that you are willing to pummel your way through any opposition and they can see that now. Shy of that, you’ve got a long bloody road ahead of you. As a final note, another thing go aggro does – and I love it for this – is make torture as useless in Apocalypse World as it is in real life. If someone doesn’t want to tell you something, they won’t. If you’re expert enough, you’ll more likely than not just kill them. If you’re not expert enough, they’ll “give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear.” It’s always going to be more effective to seduce or manipulate someone, where a 10+ guarantees that they’ll go along with you as long as you don’t give them a reason not to. Better yet, asking someone you’ve read how you can get them to do the thing you want will always get you an honest answer from the MC. Now, the answer might be, “you can’t,” but at least then you know not to waste your ammo or hand bones trying to beat an answer out of them. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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