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I have talked a lot about the examples in Apocalypse World throughout these posts because they are unique and thoughtful in what they demonstrate. Every time I plan on not talking about an example, I find something about it that is too cool to pass up.
The examples from Act Under Fire do everything we have come to expect from examples in the book. Namely, they exemplify not only how to MC the game and how the rules work, but how the conversation looks in action. The coolest element here is the decision to show what “a mistake and correction” look like in play. I can’t think of another RPG that does this, but it is an inspired part of the text. If an RPG rule book should communicate not only the rules of the game, but give the players the tools they need to have the conversation in which play exists, then showing that mistakes will be made and easily corrected is a real gift to the players. Here’s the passage: Audrey the driver’s blundered into Dremmer’s territory and gone to earth. She’s lying up against a wall amid the debris with a plastic tarp over her, trying to look like not-a-person-at-all, while a 2-thug patrol of Dremmer’s gang passes by. If they spot her they’ll drag her to Dremmer and she wants that zero at all. She hits the roll with a 9, so I get to offer her a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. “Yeah,” I say. “So you’re holding still and you can’t really keep them in your sight. They, um, they spot you, but you don’t realize it.” I think about this for a second. It doesn’t seem quite right, and Audrey’s player is looking at me like I might be cheating. “Actually wait wait. You hit the roll, you didn’t miss it.” “I was gonna say,” Audrey’s player says. “So no,” I say. “Instead, they haven’t spotted you, but they’re getting closer and closer. They’ll be on top of you in just a minute but if you do something right this second you’ll have the drop on them. What do you do?” I really like that description of things going sour – the feeling that something’s not quite right, the unhappy-not-in-a-good-way look from the player, the realization of the error, and the player’s “I was gonna say.” But once the problem is identified, the fiction’s wound is healed with two words: “no, instead.” And that’s all it takes to correct the mistake, rewrite the fiction, and build the momentum back up. By the time the MC gets to “What do you do?” no one at the table cares about the moment before. So two things are accomplished in this one example. First, it takes an earlier general warning (“remember that a 7 – 9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure”) and lets us see a specific expression of what that looks like in play. The example makes concrete the difference between a worse outcome and a failure, which is infinitely more useful than an abstract warning. Second, it shows us how the conversation surrounding such an error works and how small a deal making such an error is. That’s comforting and instructive to inexperienced and experienced MCs alike. We don’t need to go into the other three examples, but we should note that it’s clever how the Bakers not only worked in examples of a strong hit, a weak hit, and a miss, they did so while simultaneously offering examples of a worse outcome, a hard bargain, and an ugly choice. I don’t think that needs any analysis; it’s just cool, and deftly handled. Examples can be tricky to write because they need to be instructive, but not patronizing; immediately understandable, but not obvious. And on top of all of that, they should be inspiring, portraying exciting moments that let you envision what play looks like and make you want to get your friends together as quickly as possible to have similar experiences. That is, I think, precisely what these example do.
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We’re back to look more at the Act Under Fire move. I am particularly interested in the way that the “fire” is characterized. Here’s the explanatory text that follows the move itself:
You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. I often say things like “okay, roll to act under fire, and the fire is just how badly that’s going to hurt,” “…and the fire is, can you really get that close to her without her noticing?” or “…and the fire is, if you fuck it up, they’ll be ON your ass.” Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first. On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure. First, there is no rule that says you have to define what the fire is; instead, we get a recommendation: “I often say . . . .” The Bakers do not make something a rule unless it is necessary for the game to do what it is designed to do. It never hurts to name the fire, but it is not always necessary. What does naming the fire accomplish? It clarifies for all the players why this move is being triggered. If you can’t name the fire, then the fiction doesn’t have someone “requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care,” and they can probably just do it without triggering the move. The move triggers when there is something unknown about the possible outcome: “how badly that’s going to hurt,” “can you really get that close without her noticing?” and can you do this without fucking up and having them “ON your ass”? By clarifying the fire, the players are identifying the question being asked that the roll will answer. Or, to put it differently, defining what the fire is sets the stakes for the roll. Really, what are stakes other than a shared clarity of the fiction? If the fiction is well-established and the situation is dramatic, then everyone at the table is already asking themselves the questions posed by naming the fire. If everyone is asking separate questions, then the fiction itself is probably muddled. Naming the fire, then, is a quick checking in rather than establishing something new, which is why it’s less of a rule than a suggested practice. It’s important that the fiction be detailed and clear (and hence the stakes be detailed and clear) going into the roll, but it is just as important on the other side of the roll, especially for the 7 – 9 result, for that’s when you need to “look at the circumstances and find something fun.” If you’ve done it right, “it should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice.” If you’re having a hard time finding some fun way to fuck with the situation it’s either because the fiction itself is unclear or because there’s no actual fire under which the PCs are acting. In this way, the move is self-regulating. If you don’t clarify things before the dice hit the table, you are forced to do so afterwards in order to work those dice results back into the fiction. Act Under Fire: roll+cool
When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7-9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. On a miss, be prepared for the worst (136). It’s very easy to see this as Apocalypse World’s “do a thing” move: “Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first” (137). The results of the roll are generally applicable to any situation – on a strong hit, you fully succeed; on a weak hit, you are given a complication; on a miss, prepare for the worst. It is the most stripped-down structure for a move, and as such it served as the inspiration for Dungeon World’s Defy Danger move, which in turn led John Harper to make it the foundation of the only move in his World of Dungeons. Between the Bakers’ “come here first” and the popularity of Defy Danger, it’s tempting to overlook the specificity of Act Under Fire. Defy Danger and the World of Dungeons move both require the players to figure out what stat the acting character is tapping into to solve her problem, because the move applies to all stats, so you are rolling+whatever-is-relevant. Significantly, that’s not the case with Act Under Fire. Everything about Act Under Fire is about the cool stat. In fact, while the authors might define the cool stat on page 11 (“meaning cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, unfazed”), it is really this move that defines what coolness means in the game. In other words, cool as a stat only exists to give this move a mechanical variable. Without this move (and a handful of other moves tapping into the same character trait prominent in the main characters inhabiting Apocalypse World) cool wouldn’t exist as a stat. The written definition of cool orients us to the meaning, but Act Under Fire shows us what that actually looks like in the game world. All of the language in the move itself and the passage that follows the move, is about the characters’ ability to remain calm and focused in the face of “serious pressure.” I’m struck by the oft overlooked phrase “or dig in to endure fire” because sometimes acting under fire means keeping from mis-acting under fire. The endurance referred to here is not a physical, constitutional endurance, but a mental, determined endurance. The detail of what it means to roll a 7-9 is similarly about that mental resolve. Flinching, hesitating, and stalling point to a slight break in resolve, discipline, and endurance, enough of a hiccup to reduce the strong hit to a weak one. “[Y]ou flinch, hesitate, or stall” is the narrative effect of your roll, which leads to a mechanical effect of the MC offering you “a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.” In the paragraph following the move, the authors clarify that “[y]ou can read ‘under fire’ to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance, or care.” (Side note: I have many times talked about the poetry of the prose in this text, and I love the rhythm of that list from discipline to care. Try putting those words in any other order and you can feel the sentence stutter and uncoil.) So what is the significance that this, the most general move in the game, is focused solely on cool? It indicates that determination, that mental discipline, resolve, and endurance, are central to challenges faced in the game by the main characters. The main characters are going to have to endure and overcome a lot of hardships, but the rest of the rules of the game (especially those applying to the MC) will tend to point you to a place that the characters are having to dig deep within their own reserves to withstand danger and unpleasantness. Unlike Defy Danger, you will not use Act Under Fire to figure out if a character can leap a great distance, push a heavy boulder, or slide through a narrow opening. If you do use it to determine such things, you will need to phrase the dilemma in terms of mental resolve rather than physical toughness or dexterous ability. Leaping the distance just because you want to get to the other side isn’t really subject to a roll. Either you can do it or you can’t and the MC will tell you which. But leaping the distance as you are being chased by a gang of brutes intent on spilling blood? Now the leap is a test of your discipline and resolve. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one, revealing to us the dramatic heart of Apocalypse World in action. Of course, there are moves that let you act under fire with other stats. A battle-hardened gunlugger can use her hard to act under fire instead of her cool. A maestro d’ with the You Call this Hot? move can act under fire with hot rather than cool. And a spooky intense savvyhead can use her weird when acting under fire. All of these substitutions change the way those players handle serious pressure; they don’t change the way the game doles out situations full of serious pressure. A battle-hardened gunlugger uses pure physical brutishness to muscle her way through the fire. A maestro d’ being chased by that gang of brutes will leap that distance by calling on her grace and hotness, rather than her internal discipline. In short, those character moves tell us about the characters and the way they confront pressure. The MC is still bringing situations packed with “serious pressure.” In my next post, we’ll look at the nature of the “fire” and the examples the text gives us of the move in play. Before I end though, let’s all applaud the phrases “a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice.” It is probably one of the most popular phrases in the text (I know, there are so many), and deservedly so. There’s the lovely syntactic balance of adjectives and nouns, the neat inversion of a the single- and double-syllable words in the final coupling, the always-pleasant triad of options, the straightforwardness of meaning from good straightforward words – but mostly, there’s the clear communication that something unpleasant is coming. You don’t want any of these things, but like a kid terrified of and thrilled by a monster rollercoaster, you want all of them and the excitement they promise. There are dozens of possible outcomes with those options, and each one will offer an exciting turn for both the narrative and the players’ characters. What’s not to love? Before we start talking about the basic moves, let’s take a moment to puzzle over the picture that introduces the chapter. What an interesting choice!
What is she doing? Her hands are up, fingers spread, as though she were showing that she’s unarmed. It’s almost as if she’s reacting to someone going aggro, “back[ing] off calmly, hands where you can see,” but her arms are not naturally positioned for that, are they? Her arms are close and elbows in as though she were forced into a small space. But then her head is thrown slightly back and her lips parted with an unreadable expression. Is that pleasure? Longing? Unconsciousness? And her hair: it runs down the front of her face in thick strands like clumps of wet hair. The way the black envelops her, she’s reminiscent of Ophelia half submerged in the inky black river. Her state of dress (or undress) is entirely ambiguous. Why choose this image for the chapter on basic moves? Is she on the receiving end of someone going aggro? Is she seducing or manipulating someone? Is she digging in to endure fire? Is she in need of help? I know that I would like to read her as a person and the situation in which she has found herself. Perhaps she has opened her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, receiving weird visions and communications from that unnatural howling at the edge of our perception. That, I think, is my favorite reading, but there’s nothing textual to support that idea. All we know is that the picture depicts someone who is vulnerable, intimate, and strange, and whose strangeness makes her potentially threatening. How perfectly like Apocalypse World. That seems to me the point of the image. It’s a reminder that the moves are about interacting with other characters, sometimes intimately, sometimes strangely, but someone is always vulnerable and exposed. It’s easy to focus on the violence implied by acting under fire, going aggro, and suckering someone, but most of the moves are about understanding and engaging with your fellow human beings, whether you’re reading them, seducing or manipulating them, helping them, or seeing traces of them in the psychic maelstrom. Going aggro is about reaching out to another person, even if it is through the threat of physical violence, and the fire under which you act is as likely to be social and personal as it is to be violent and life-threatening. At its most basic level, the game is about negotiating with other characters, other human beings, PCs and NPCs alike, to try to make of this world what you can. The humanity at issue – and the vulnerability of that humanity – is what I think this picture is all about. I spoke in passing in my last post about the way the MC agenda items and principles align the interests of the MC with those of the other players. As far as aligning the interests between other players goes, the game isn’t overly concerned about it because for the most part it anticipates the characters are working together, even if uncomfortably at times. Obviously, PvP came up often enough after the first edition of Apocalypse World was released that the Bakers had to put some official rules in place for the second edition. But you can tell by the writing, that PvP is not something the game delights in or encourages. PvP is something the rules deal with.
Here are the PvP rules in the second edition: First of all, emphasize that we have rules for this and we’re going to follow them. When it turns to PC vs PC, everybody wants to start shouting all at once and race to be the first to roll their dice, and that’s no good. Then go around the table to find out what everybody’s going to do, but have them hold onto their dice. Don’t let them roll yet. Everybody gets a turn to say what they’re doing, and they can change their mind if they need to, and nothing happens until everyone’s had their say. Include your NPCs. (This is based closely on the “free and clear” phase in Ron Edwards’ game Sorcerer.) Once you know what everyone’s going to do, have them roll dice in the order that makes sense to you, taking turns or rolling simultaneously as you think best, always following the logic of the moves themselves. Sometimes a character’s action won’t count as a move. That’s okay. Don’t have the player roll, just acknowledge what they do and say what comes of it or how it affects everyone else’s actions. Sometimes a character’s action counts as more than one move. That’s okay. Have the player roll them all, in the order that makes sense to you. After everyone’s done what they’re going to do, and you’ve resolved everyone’s actions and overseen everyone’s moves, sum up how the situation has changed. If it’s resolved, move on. If it hasn’t, go around again, having everyone say what they’re going to do and hold onto their dice until you’re ready to have them roll (132-133) The thing that sticks out to me most about this passage is its tone. There is nothing in this passage that wants to sell you on how cool PvP can be in Apocalypse World. The rules are functional and reasonable, and that is precisely how they are presented. In fact, in this passage, the Bakers sound like parents who are fully prepared to turn this car around if we in the backseat don’t stop misbehaving: “we have rules for this and we’re going to follow them.” Yes, Sirs! Each sentence that follows is a direct, no-nonsense statement that tells us exactly what we need to know and no more. The “that’s okay”s in the third and fourth paragraphs don’t communicate the usual calming, “you got this” tone. There’s nothing playful or encouraging, just orderly and instructive. It’s like talking to the IT woman who has had a long day and is ready for you to just follow her instructions and stop fucking up your computer. There is no encouragement about snowballing here, no enticement of the sweet things that can happen if the main characters go at each other’s throats. Instead, we get, “If it’s resolved, move on.” And that pretty well captures the spirit of this passage: PvP is something to resolve and move on. If you own or have access to Urban Shadows, compare this passage to the one there, on pages 207-208. Hell, compare it to just about any other passage in Apocalypse World and you’ll see how dry this is, leeched of humor, poetry, and general excitement. This steak doesn’t sizzle. It’s properly cooked and meets the required nutritional and health requirements as mandated by local ordinances, but that’s about it. ”Right,” Marie’s player says. “That’s okay. I pick up his chainsaw and chop into them both.”
Damn. I’m impressed. ”I think that makes it a battle,” I say. “You’re seizing something by force, yeah? Seizing your room back I guess?” ”Yeah.” ”Roll it.” I have absolutely no interest in saving these NPCs, none. I’m looking at them through crosshairs, and as much as I like them, I do not make them safe. She rolls+hard and hits a 7-9. “How much harm will I inflict?” she says. She has to decide which seize-by-force option to choose, and first wants to know what’s what. ”With a chainsaw? 3-harm. Messy, so you might hit one or both of them. They’re wearing armor, though, 1-armor.” ”And I’ll suffer . . . ?” ”Well, none from Plover, you’ll hit him first and since he dropped the chainsaw he’s unarmed anyway. Pellet still has her handgun, it’s just a 9mm, so 2-harm from her.” ”That’s fine. I’ll choose to inflict terrible harm, and to impress, dismay or frighten my enemy” (130-131). I have talked about the conversation created by Apocalypse World several times already, but I think there is (at least) one more thing to say, and I think this passage demonstrates that thing to some degree. It is very easy to confuse the conversation for the fiction being produced by the words that come out of our mouths at the table. It is easy to think that the conversation that the game constructs is “my dude does this,” “the worlds reacts thus.” But the conversation encapsulates everything said at the table, not just the bits that actively contribute to the fiction. Here, the question about which move might be triggered (“You’re seizing something by force, yeah?”), about how much harm has been established by the situation (“With a chainsaw? 3-harm” and “none from Plover”), and about what options are available to the player by the rules (“I’ll choose to inflict terrible harm, and to impress, dismay or frighten my enemy”) are all parts of the conversation that are structured by the game. Think about how different the conversation surrounding the players’ actions and choices are during play of any other RPG. Universalis will include conversations about pennies, and established facts, and how much it costs to destroy this or create that—that’s part of the conversation of the game. Dread creates conversation about the pulling of blocks, which block you might want to draw out, etc. To play Call of Cthulhu is to talk about your skill sets, sanity points, target numbers, and bouts of insanity. Part of the conversation of Ten Candles is whose Moment is up, how hard it is to read the dice in the dwindling light, and whether you want to burn a trait or not. In Bubblegumshoe you need to talk about whose rank is highest in this skill so you know who gets the clue, and whether that player wants to spend more points to get extra information. Or you might discuss who has to pay what in order to successfully piggyback off someone else’s roll. It’s not just that each game creates different fiction in different ways, but it structures and limits the very way that we discuss the rules surrounding those processes. And all of that is part of the conversation of the game, part of the back and forth between players. Part of exemplifying the conversation is exemplifying this part of the conversation, and that seems to me to be the purpose of including this part of the conversation here. This whole section could have been summarized in a couple of sentences saying that Marie’s player chose her seize-by-force option and harm as established was exchanged, but it wasn’t summarized. So what do we learn from this part of the conversation? We learn that the MC is entirely up front with everything going on in the fiction. There are no surprises for Marie’s player, and the fiction can be frozen in place while all the elements in play are identified and accounted for. We see again the negotiation of moves being triggered as the players come to an agreement that Marie is seizing something by force. We see that while the MC is playing characters whose interests are diametrically opposed to Marie’s interests, the MC’s and Marie’s player’s interests are in perfect alignment. Because the MC is playing to find out, looking through crosshairs, saying what the rules demand, and saying what honesty demands, her interests mesh with those of Marie’s player, who is also playing Marie as though she were a real person trying to survive this encounter and come out on top. Side point #1: Yes, technically the conversation includes the requests for bathroom breaks, the discussion of that project you’re laboring over at work, and who wants what on their pizza. I can’t think of any games whose rules attempt to control that part of the conversation, so I’m not including any discussion about that here, but they are part of the conversation all the same. Side point #2: “Damn. I’m impressed” is for some reason another one of my favorite lines from the text. It makes me smile every damn time. It’s right up there for me with “A moment of silence please for poor fucking Plover.” I think they both capture beautifully and with humor how the MC is in for these moments of surprise and delight as an audience to the fiction unfolding in play. ”I set off my pain-wave projector.”
”Sweet,” I say. “That’s . . .” ”1-harm area loud ap” ”The loud is their screaming,” I say. “They’re like – “ and I hold my hands over my ears. On a whim, looking through crosshairs, I add, “Church Head isn’t. He looks paralyzed, he’s rigid and silent, his eyes are rolling around in their sockets but otherwise he’s not moving” (130). Tags serve several purposes in Apocalypse World. Back on page 12, we read: [T]ags work in 3 different ways. Some of them are straightforwardly mechanical, like 3-harm, fortune+2, surplus and want. Some note the circumstances under which the thing can be useful, like close and reload. Some tell you, the MC, things to say when the character uses the thing, like loud, 1-barter, augury, judgment and savagery. In this example, we see all three types of tags. I’m interested in that third type, the one that gives the MC “things to say.” Here, that’s “loud.” But to say that “loud” is just a thing to say is to understate its role in play. “Loud” here is a fictional cue for the MC, a detail to bring into the fiction that can affect the development of future fiction. Without that detail, it would be easy for the MC to simply note the damage done to the NPCs by the pain-wave projector and move on. The tag brings the specific fictional details of the pain-wave projector to bear on the fiction itself. Here, the MC brings the onrush of the NPCs to a halt so that they can react to their pain. And thinking about that pain and the internal nature of it (they’re grasping their heads) prompts the MC to think about how that pain might really fuck someone up, which leads to Church Head’s “eyes rolling around in their sockets.” This is also the moment that Marie’s player seizes the intiative and goes on the attack. While Plover is dealing with his ringing skull, Marie puts her violation glove on his cheek as pulls his in-brain puppet strings: A subtle thing just happened. I’ve been saying what they do and then asking Marie’s player what Marie does, but here she’s seized initiative from me. It isn’t mechanically significant; we’ll still both just keep making our moves in turn. It’s just worth noticing (130). It might not be mechanically significant, but it is narratively significant. Because the MC allowed the tag to impact the fiction, Marie had her moment to turn the tables and go on the attack. The MC didn’t do it so she could go on the attack, but it had enough weight in the fiction to affect how things developed from there. Earlier in the example, when Isle forced Marie’s hand after her direct-brain whisper, Marie’s player chose to not use the loud tag (it was “loud-optional” – page 127). There again, the use of that tag had a direct impact on the fiction. Because it wasn’t loud, the MC interpreted the psychic attack as doing serious enough damage that it did not even allow Isle to scream out. That interpretation led to Isle’s slumping and her bleeding ear, which would lead to the attack on Marie’s home an hour later. These types of tags are made to affect the fiction, and anything that affects the fiction should be given a full cause-and-effect relationship with the fiction that follows. Right after this passage, Marie picks up the chainsaw and takes it to Plover and Pellet as they fight. In the conversation about that attack, the tag that becomes important is the messy tag: ”How much harm will I inflict?” she says. She has to decide which seize-by-force option to choose and wants to know what’s what. ”With a chainsaw? 3-harm. Messy, so you might hit one or both of them” (131). The messy tag prompts the MC to think about the ways that the chainsaw exists in the fiction, in this case being able or likely to cut into both attackers in one swing, which is what Marie wanted to do in the first place. And that’s exactly what happens, of course. It’s easy to think of tags that gives the MC “things to say” as just flavor, but in a game that uses the fiction as the basis of play - in a game that puts the fiction itself at the heart of the cause-and-effect chain created by the game’s system – anything happening in the fiction is never “just” flavor. Those fictional details directly impact the fiction that develops from it. In my last post, I looked at what I believe is the heart of being powered by the Apocalypse. I named the first two parts – being inspired by Apocalypse World or one of its descendants, and using rules that make the fiction the very foundation of play – and ended by mentioning the third: constructing play so that what the players say is likely to be interesting. That’s where we’re picking up today. And since we’re in the middle of the Moves Snowball chapter anyway, I thought we’d use the next excerpt to make our discussion concrete.
But before we get to the passage, let’s look at an excerpt from one of Vincent’s posts on his “anyway” blog. This one is from his 9/24/2008 entry entitled “That Reminds Me” (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/389): The real cause and effect in a roleplaying game isn’t in the fictional game world, it’s at the table, in what the players and GM say and do. If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don’t need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That’s the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool. [Then in comment 1:] If your rules model a character’s doing cool things, and in so doing they get the players to say cool things, that’s great. I have nothing against modeling the cool things characters do as such. Just, if your rules model a character’s doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that’s not so great. Awesome. Characters doing cool things does not inherently mean the conversation will be interesting. Players saying cool things, does (or at least it does as much as any system or rules set can). How does a designer achieve that? We can see Vincent’s answer to that question in another “anyway” post. This time, we’re looking at “Adequacy, Cause and Effect,” posted on 6/9/2009 (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/455): Here’s a subsystem from a game I just made up (similarities not especially coincidental): When your character attacks, describe the attack and roll d20. If you roll less than your opponent’s ADV (Armor Defense Value), your character hits! The GM describes the hit, and you roll your character’s weapon’s damage die for the damage. We all know what happens with these rules. “Describe the attack” and “describe the hit” notwithstanding: I attack. You miss. I attack. You hit! 7 damage! I attack. You miss. I attack. ad interminable Now, what we want, recall, is for somebody to say something interesting instead. There are two ways to make that happen. I’ve been focusing on this one: Make rules that give the details of the attack and the hit or miss causal power. For example: GM, on a hit, choose one of these, based on the details of the attacker’s attack and the defender’s position: - The defender stumbles and falls. - The defender backs desperately away. - The defender’s guts spill out. - The defender’s foot is half-severed. - The defender’s skull is cracked. - The attacker’s weapon wedges in the defender’s ribs. - The attacker slips and loses her footing. - The attacker has to draw up or she’ll overreach. See how the GM will just naturally ask the player “how are you attacking?” and take the player’s answer into account? I attack. 6 damage. You hit. Wait, what was your attack? Uh, I thrust at his face with my knife. Cool. [checking the list] You cut open his cheek but your momentum’s significant. Do you draw up or overreach? We can see that making players say interesting things and making “self-enforcing” rules (to use Vincent’s phrase quoted in my last post) that make the fiction the basis of play are intimately bound up with each other. The first requirement for a statement to be interesting is for it to be specific. It’s not enough for a game’s rules to order the players to describe things. If the game’s structure allows players to mechanically move forward without detailing the fiction, a large portion of players will do that at some point in play. And while it may be exciting later in the retelling that you battled and bested the Great Vampire Master, the conversation during play itself - I attack, you miss, etc. - is dull as dishwater. Setting up game play so that the conversation is vibrant and interesting is at the philosophical and design heart of Apocalypse World, the binary star of making the fiction the basis of play rather than an appendix to play. Both elements spin in each other’s gravity to power the specific play we get out of the game. You are already thinking of all the things the rules of Apocalypse World do to safeguard an exciting conversation by directing players to say cool things. All those move triggers require you to say something likely to be cool to activate them. All those pick lists and 7-9 results make it more likely than not that cool things will be said in resolving a move. And what about the MC moves? They are designed to give the MC something cool to say every time she speaks. The MC scans the list of moves, picks one that looks interesting, and then misdirects by coming up with fictional details that make it seem like the fiction made the decisions instead of the MC. In fact, I think you are more likely to have interesting things happen in your game if you don’t fool yourself by your own misdirection. As I discussed back in post no. 51, the text on page 89 orients you to consider the move itself as separate from the fiction, that you are choosing a move and working it into the fiction, not creating fiction and then retroactively thinking about what kind of move it would be. Consulting that list is likely to launch your own game in unexpected directions, and as long as you can work it into your fiction, it will always work. So let’s see how the MC moves give the players interesting things to say. Picking up from where we left off in our discussion of the Moves Snowball chapter, here’s our passage: “So, Marie: at home, pacing, armed, locked in, yeah? They arrive suddenly at your door with a solid kick, your whole door rattles. You hear Pellet’s voice: ‘she’s expecting us I guess.’” I’m announcing future badness. “I go to the peep hole,” she says. “There are three of them?” “Yep,” I say. “Pellet on your left, Plover and Church Head are doing something on your right, Plover’s back’s to you - and you hear a coughcough-rrrrar sound and Plover’s at the door with a chainsaw. What do you do?” I’m putting her in a spot. “I read the situation. What’s my best escape route?” She rolls+sharp and – shit - misses. “Oh no,” she says. I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. The brutes’ threat move I like for this is make a coordinated attack with a coherent objective, so here it comes. “You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space.The door’s creaking and snapping at the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this - ” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand, like whacking a croquet ball. “I dive for - ” Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection. “Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4 - harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?” “1 - armor.” “Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3 - harm.” She marks it on her character sheet. “Make the harm move. Roll+3.” She hits the roll with a 9. I get to choose from the move’s 7 – 9 list, and I decide that she loses her footing. “For a minute you can’t tell what’s wrong, and you have this sensation, it seems absurd now but I guess it makes sense, that you hit the ceiling. Maybe you tripped on something and fell, and hit it that way? Then gradually you get your senses back, and that noise you thought was your skull cracking is actually your door splitting and splintering down, and that noise you thought was your blood is their chainsaw. What do you do?” Announcing future badness dramatically sets the scene. Putting someone in a spot escalates that drama by literally bringing the future badness to the PC’s door. The coordinated attack with a coherent objective brings the baddies through the door and into the character’s room. Because the character tried to read the situation, the MC is prompted to give out the interesting details of Marie’s window being barred and 4 floors up, which is of course misdirection as to why Marie has no easy escape. A successful roll for reading the situation would have revealed an escape route to Marie of course. My favorite part is when Marie’s player tries to jump into the conversation while the MC takes a breath. The MC interrupts her and has to explain within the fiction why she doesn’t have time to dive for whatever it is she’s diving for. The real reason is of course that the MC is making her “hard move,” but since the character wants to dive for cover, the MC misdirects by creating fictional reasons why she can’t. “They cooked it off.” Boom. (Literally and figuratively.) Then of course, there’s the harm move that demands the MC think beyond simply marking the character’s harm clock. Like the example list of attack results in the blog post above, the harm move guides the players to thinking about interesting fictional results of suffering harm. Translating “loses her footing” into the fiction creates this cool disorientated experience of Marie losing track of which way’s up, only to find herself on her back with these three toughs rushing her from the door. That’s incredibly exciting shit! And while some excellent players can probably make that kind of excitement happen with any game system while they are at the top of their game, Apocalypse World is designed to make these moment happen regularly with players of all skill levels, no matter what their state of mind. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that a game that is powered by the Apocalypse attempts to make it likely that the players say interesting things. Whether it uses pick lists, or MC moves, or any or none of the tools used by Apocalypse World, it gives the players some “self-enforcing” infrastructure to support a conversation full of interesting statements. This is going to be a long one, so get yourself some refreshments.
One of the conversations surrounding Apocalypse World that I love is the continued attempt to nail down what is at the heart of Apocalypse World. If you are creating your own game and declare that it is “powered by the Apocalypse,” what does that mean? There are plenty of opinions, and I thought I’d use this, my hundredth post on the game, to offer my own definition. In various interviews, Vincent and Meguey have made it clear that there is no "system" behind Apocalypse World that can be imported into other games to make them powered by the Apocalypse. Here's what they say in the first slide of the Metatopia presentation "Powered by the Apocalypse: Using Apocalypse World to Outline and Draft Your Own RPG": Apocalypse World offers a powerful, flexible framework you can use to outline, draft, and potentially finish your own role playing games. . . . It's not a game system, it's an easy approach to game system design. Here I am less interested in how to use the design elements of Apocalypse World to design a game of your own, and more interested in the particular ways that Apocalypse World structures play, because it is there, I believe, that the heart of the game lies. We all know that a game can be powered by the Apocalypse and lack every single mechanic that the game comprises. 2d6+stat; misses, weak hits, and strong hits; moves, MC moves, threats, harm clocks, pick lists -- none of those individual elements is crucial to making something the offspring of Apocalypse World because all of those elements were specific answers to questions Vincent and Meguey asked in order to make Apocalypse World specifically. Instead, we need to look at the approach to RPG play that the game embraces and enforces, the philosophical underpinnings that support all the individual mechanics and rules. Vincent has done us all a favor by charting the progression of his thoughts about game design all over the internet, from threads on the Forge to his own blog "anyway" (at lumpley.com) to here on G+ and now over at dice.camp on Mastadon. The time I have spent on the Forge threads have been very rewarding, but they are difficult to navigate, and there is a lot of stuff you want to wade through to find the gems you’re looking for. So I have decided to focus for the moment on "anyway," where everything is laid out chronologically. Vincent might not have written us a text book yet, but "anyway" gives us something far richer and more valuable if you have/make the time to read through them: a diary of his thoughts and guesses about RPG design. If you read through his posts on RPG theory on "anyway," you will see a lot of posts that he calls "clouds and dice" posts. In these posts he maps out the relationships and movement between the fiction created during play and the physical, real-world items, such as your character sheet, the dice, and all that jazz. The posts have diagrams, in which the fiction stuff is represented by a cloud and the real-world stuff is represented by dice (or sometimes boxes). See, clouds and dice. Anyway, fictional events can have real-world causes or fictional causes and can lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Similarly, real-world events can have fictional causes or real-world causes and lead to fictional effects and real-world effects. Good? In his 4/7/2009 post, "3 Resolution Systems" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427) he looks at the cloud-dice set of cause and effect for three different games (an unspecified traditional game, Dogs in the Vineyard, and In a Wicked Age). He observes that in his diagram of In a Wicked Age play, the real-world elements have fictional and real-world effects, but that the game creates very little movement from fictional causes to real-world effects. He notes in a comment to that thread: There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows [meaning fictional causes with real-world effects], but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have the discipline as a practice of habit, having learned it from other games (comment 4). In short, the game can be played mechanically without necessarily investing in a rich and well-defined fiction because the game doesn't force or reward (mechanically) the concrete development of the fiction. Jump ahead to his 6/8/2009 post, "Restating: Fictional Causes and Realization" (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/454). He begins the post by quoting Frank Tarcikowski from a Forge thread: I'm saying that one should invest in the SIS [shared imagined space], and specifically, in Situation, moment-by-moment. Who's there, what's going on, what does it look like, sound like, feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still sound great in a write-up but to me, they're leaving a bad taste, like reading a book way to fast. To this, Vincent says: And here's me in agreement: if you have a game whose rules don't adequately depend upon fictional causes, it's easy and easier to let the game's fictional details fall away. 'Adequately' can mean both quantity and quality. If you have a game whose rules don't often enough depend upon fictional causes, yes; if you have a game whose rules don't significantly enough depend upon fictional causes, too. A game needs to mechanically depend on the fiction regularly and significantly in order to ensure the fiction stays developed, detailed, and what Vincent in comment 4 calls "concrete." In fact, let's look at a great example he uses in that same comment: Like, we're playing a stakes-setting game from 2006 that was never actually published that I'm just making up. I say, 'okay, what's at stake is, do you lose your temper and burn down the orphanage? I'm rolling my Provocative, you roll your Calm . . . I win! Bye bye orphanage!' And you say, 'actually I'm going to bring in my "cucumbery" trait, which is listed under Calm, for a reroll . . . Dang, you still win. You've provoked me into losing my temper, I burn down the orphanage.' . . . All with no reference to what my character does to provoke yours, or what. Things happen - orphanages burn - but it's just like Frank says. Sounds good in a writeup, leaves a bad taste in play. Actually, let's stay with that post for one more moment. In comment 8, Vincent notes how all of this fits into trends of RPG design: [T]he fashions in indie RPG design right now [remember, this is mid-2009] don't offer good solutions to game designers trying to develop games at this end of the spectrum. For the past year, I've been having conversations with my designer friends that go like this: 'I've noticed that when people play my game, the fiction is pretty, like, low-cal. It's too summary, it's not really realized. Sometimes that's fine and sometimes they've been unhappy with it, but either way I've noticed it. So . . . I want the fiction to be more rich. I think I need to add more fictional effects to my fundamentally real-world causes, real-world effect rules, wouldn't you say, Vincent?' My answer is: 'I wouldn't say that, no. I'd say that people's investment in the fiction will gravitate to the fiction's value, so I'd say you need to make the fiction more valuable. I think you need to add more fictional causes to your fundamental rules, so that they treat the game's fiction as the basis of play, not an appendix to play.' Right?!?! It's easy in this post-Apocalypse World world to overlook what problem in RPG design Vincent and Meguey were addressing with Apocalypse World, but here it is (or one of the problems, I should say). The fiction needs to be the basis of play, not an appendix to play. Write that in your design notebook. And that I think is the philosophical heart of Apocalypse World, and it has nothing to do with 2d6, stats, scaled outcomes, or any other specific mechanic. It has to do with your game forcing the fiction to be the basis of play. The rules of the game demand that the fiction be detailed and concrete for the game to even be played; that means not just making the fiction primary in importance but foundational in its very purpose. Vincent goes on to call games that make it so that play cannot happen without a developed fiction "self-enforcing" (6/15/2009's "Lazy Play vs. IIEE with Teeth” - another great post that I highly recommend). Apocalypse World is of course reinforcing. In fact, you can't activate a move if it doesn't happen in the fiction. If you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it, right? No one can know what happens until the fiction is fleshed out fully. How can the MC pick her move if she doesn't have the fiction clear in her mind? And when that move is expressed, you're not to speak its name, because you need to speak in terms of fiction. If the MC is sloppy in her fiction, then players won't know what their characters can do to activate moves. Everything in the game runs on the fiction. And from this light you can see all the principles preparing you to speak in terms of fiction rather than in terms of game play or mechanics. The fiction is always the cause of real-world effects, such as picking up your 2d6 or marking your harm clock. And if it is ever unclear what the fiction is, the players and MC have an open invitation to ask questions, which allows the fiction to be clarified so that it can continue as the basis of play. And now we come back to where we began: what does it mean to have your game powered by the Apocalypse? There are three parts to my definition: 1) It means first, that your game is inspired either by Apocalypse World itself or by one of the games that can trace its lineage back to Apocalypse World. (I know: duh.) 2) Second, your game has rules and mechanics that make fiction the basis of play in a self-enforcing way, in such a way that play itself cannot happen without the fiction being fully and concretely described. 3) Third, your rules and mechanics need to make it likely that the conversations generated by play is interesting. This post is long enough as it is, so I’m going to pick up this third part of the definition in my next post. We’ll look at another of the “anyway” blog posts and the next section of the Moves Snowball chapter to see what it means to make it so your players say interesting things. Here’s my big plan, by the way. Isle’s listed in the cast for a threat called Isle’s family, which is a brute: family (naturally enough). Its impulse, accordingly, is to close ranks and protect their own. What’s most fun is that I’m acting on that impulse but I’m using Plover, Church Head, and Pellet – members of Keeler’s gang! – as Isle’s family’s weapon. It’s just like when Keeler uses them to go aggro or seize by force, only I’m the one doing it.
If Keeler lets me, that is. Keeler thinks about imposing her will upon her gang to stop them, her player thinks about it too. She twists her mouth around, thinking about it. Finally, instead, “knock yourself out,” she says. Marie’s player: “damn it, Keeler.” I really like this entire interlude with Keeler and her player. Why is it so great? The MC has a “big plan” and is excited to see it unfold. If she wanted to, she could cut straight to Marie pacing inside her home behind her triple-locked door and get right to it, but she doesn’t. She detours to Keeler instead, giving her every chance to scuttle the big plan! That seems like a crazily bold move by the MC. Well, yes and no. It could definitely mean that Plover and his buddies leave Marie alone, but it won’t mean that they’ll forgive or forget. Because you create a world with a meaningful chain of cause and effect, the fallout of Marie’s attempted manipulation of Isle would only be postponed by Keeler’s intervention, not dissipated. In short, the rules of the game make it so that no matter what happens, the players will create interesting and dramatic stories. If Keeler makes her pack alpha move, she’s going to have to roll dice. On a miss or a 7-9, there is immediate tension between Keeler and her gang that temporarily overrides Plover’s concerns with Marie. On a 10+, Plover and the others obey Keeler without confrontation. But even then, a 10+ doesn’t threaten to kill the dramatic momentum, because now Plover might get to wondering why Keeler is protecting Marie, wondering why she’s siding with Marie over her own biking brothers? Plover, Church Head, and Pellet might become a disgruntled group, and far from extinguishing the dramatic possibilities, the 10+ has multiplied them. This scene with Keeler pulls the PC-NPC-PC triangle into the forefront. Keeler has one relationship with her gang, and Marie now clearly has a different relationship. By bringing Keeler into the dustup, the MC uses that triangle to make everything fraught! Keeler has refused to step in, and now Marie’s player knows that she left Marie out to dry – drama! We can easily imagine how tense their future meeting will be, especially when at least two of the three gang members are dead at Marie’s own hand. The actions of one character have a direct impact on the world of the other character because of the PC-NPC-PC triangle. I love that we don’t get any insight into what Keeler’s player is thinking. Is she afraid that a low roll puts her into a confrontation she doesn’t want? Is she thinking about whether Keeler’s character would care one way or another what happens to Marie? That “knock yourself out” line is gloriously non-committal. No matter what happens at Marie’s home, things are going to be awkward afterwards. One last bit of praise for the MC. Plover could have gone to face Marie alone, but the MC latches onto the “close ranks” impulse of the Isle family to have Plover gather together Church Head and Pellet. Three dudes with an axe to grind is a much more daunting enemy than one badass with a shotgun. It’s because there are three gang members that Keeler has to pause. It’s because there are three gang members that Marie’s player is nervous about the impending confrontation. Apocalypse World doesn’t have challenge ratings or anything that forces the MC to consider how big a threat a player can face. The rules are flexible enough that the MC can throw whatever she wants at the players and know that it will work out. Besides, Plover probably just wants to beat the crud out of Marie to teach her a lesson—although he might well want to kill her. There are systems in place to prevent the random killing of a PC, so the MC can push hard at a player with NPCs to see what she will do without having to worry about doing something "unfair." The other line I want to acknowledge is the MC’s “What’s most fun . . .” That is how you should feel when you are MCing Apocalypse World! Using Keeler’s gang as Isle’s family’s weapon should give you joy because you are tugging on those PC-NPC-PC triangles and have no idea what will happen—and you know whatever does happen is going to be awesome and entertaining. Playing to find out means wandering into the unknown with the other players and being psyched to watch the explosions and chaos. ”Cool. Keeler – “ turning to Keeler’s player “ – you’re passing by your armory and you hear some of your gang people in there. It’s Plover, Church Head and Pellet, arming themselves. What do you do?” I’m_ announcing future badness_.
”Hey, what’s up?” Keeler’s player says. ”Marie attacked Isle,” I say, in Plover’s blunt, heavy voice. And in my own: “he stops what he’s doing and looks square at you, he’s still got a shotgun in his hand. Church Head and Pellet, you know they’re going to back him up.” Let’s talk about free play and how it works in Apocalypse World. Free play is not a term that’s used in the text, nor is it to be found in Ron Edwards’ Provisional Glossary, but I think it’s a common enough term to use here. Free play, as I think it is commonly used – at least it’s how I’m going to use it here – is the part of RPG play that is not governed by mechanics or procedural rules. It’s the part of play during which we talk to each other in our characters’ voices and build up fiction together without rolling dice or engaging any mechanics of the game. Way back on page 8, Vincent and Meguey talk about the way the rules of the game “mediate the conversation”: “They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after.” Free play is that time before the mechanics of the game “kick in.” It’s perhaps overbroad to say that free play is unique to roleplaying games (under which umbrella I am including larp and games like Once Upon a Time – any game that has a shared fiction that must be agreed to to some extent for play to happen). At no time during a board game or a card game are you doing things that affect the game but that are not regulated by rules and mechanics. In roleplaying there are these free-flying moments that we all partake in by the grace of our own imaginations and social agreement. Then when we get to a part of the game that has mechanical teeth, we lock into those rules, follow the event through, and then go off soaring again. I think we can all agree that free play is one of the most incredible parts of roleplaying. But free play is also a huge challenge to designing RPGs, in that the designer has to be mindful of where things can go during that free play and how to smoothly transition from free play to mechanics and back to free play. Even when mechanics are not engaged, there might be procedures (or not) that keep the free play focused, keeps players in the proper tone, or themes, or whatnot. How intrusive do you get as a designer? How do you help the players get the most out of free play without hindering them in the process? What I see in Apocalypse World is half an answer to those questions and half an analysis of what actually happens during free play in order to identify the natural procedures playgroups adopt in mediating their own conversations. The Bakers then use that analysis to provide a soft structure for free play (or at least to identify and point out the soft structure we unconsciously use). Now back to the passage quoted above. Let’s start with that “what do you do?” I have talked about “what do you do?” as a reminder to the players that their characters are the heroes of our story, that it is their actions that drive the narrative, as opposed to some preexisting idea or plot presented by the MC. I have also talked about “what do you do?” as a tool for clarifying the fiction so that moves can be made without confusion. Here we see a third use. Here, even as the “what do you do?” accomplishes those first two goals, it also serves to mediate the conversation taking place at the table. Back to page 8: “You and other players go back and forth . . . Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right?” With this “what do you do?” and every time it occurs, it is a way of passing the conversational conch to the other player. The MC has made her move (announcing future badness) and now it is the player’s turn to describe Keeler’s actions. And how do we know when the player is done with her turn? Page 88: “whenever there’s a pause in the conversation and everyone looks to you to say something,” make your move, Ms. MC. These are the basic building blocks of conversation in Apocalypse World. I make an MC move and ask “what do you do?” You describe your character’s actions, either triggering a move or not, and then looking at me expectantly, at which point we can repeat the exchange. In our example here, the MC makes her move, announcing future badness, and the player slides effortlessly into character and free play, engaging Plover with a question, “what’s up?” The MC joins in the free play, and although the text doesn’t specify, it looks like the MC lands on another move, for when she says that Plover has a shotgun in his hand and Church Head and Pellet are going to back him up, the MC sounds like she is telling the possible consequences and asking, or possibly offering an opportunity (to interfere), or maybe just continuing the announcement of future badness. Either way, there’s an unspoken “what do you do?” a clear challenge to Keeler’s player to get involved or step aside. During free play, the natural restrictions on the PC players is to stick to the fiction, say what their characters do and think, ask questions about the fiction, and answer questions asked of them. There are no mechanical or procedural limitations to their end of the conversation stated in the text. The conversation on the MC’s side is much more explicitly structured. Moves, for example. One of the things Apocalypse World does by structuring the MC’s side of the conversation with MC moves is that it forces free play to be productive narratively one way or the other. The MC is doing one of a few things at any given moment: 1) asking questions to create fiction or make the current fiction concrete; 2) answering questions by the players to create fiction or make the current fiction concrete; 3) creating fiction in response to a move that has been triggered, rolled for (or not), and needs resolving back into the fiction; or 4) making a move. You could make a case for a fifth option in engaging as NPCs in a dialogue, but I suspect that even then, the MC is making (or building up to) some kind of move or another. Now this limited range of MC participation in the conversation is never explicitly laid out like that, but it structures the conversation at all times all the same, and it’s one of the reasons game play runs so smoothly and eventfully. The back and forth and inevitable escalation of situations is built right into what is traditionally free play. Mind you, I still believe it is free play because the MC’s actions are governed by procedural rules rather than the hard teeth of mechanics. The Bakers have merely, to my understanding, analyzed what free play consists of and broke it down into its parts in order to shape the conversation in a way that gives the players the best possible chance to create a compelling, engaging, and interesting fiction. ”Plover thinks she’s just leaning her head on his shoulder, but she’s bleeding out her ears and eventually he’ll notice his shirt sticking to his shoulder from her blood. Do you stick around?” I’m telling possible consequences and asking.
”Fuck no.” ”Where do you go?” ”I go home, I guess.” ”So you’re home an hour later?” Se me setting up my future move! I’m thinking offscreen: how long is it going to take Plover to get a crew together? ”Hold on, it was only 1-harm – “ ”I know. She’ll be okay. It’s Plover who’s the biggest threat.” This is what honesty demands. “Are you home an hour later or where?” ”Shit. Yes, home.” ”Having tea?” Always ask questions! ”No tea. Pacing. I have my gun and my pain grenade and the door’s triple-locked. I wish Roark were here.” Let’s jump to the middle of this passage to talk about the moment that the MC says “what honesty demands.” Marie’s player is concerned about whatever the MC is planning here, but we never know what she’s thinking exactly, only that she protests that she did “only 1-harm.” To her concern, the MC responds, “I know. She’ll be okay. It’s Plover who’s the biggest threat.” This, we are told, is what honesty demands. I find this to be so interesting because it is not immediately clear which part of the MC’s response is the honest part. That Isle will be okay? Did Marie’s player think that the MC had killed Isle because of Marie’s brainer move? Possibly. Or did Marie’s player think that Isle herself was coming after Marie because of the attack and the MC is honestly telling her that no, it’s Plover who will be coming for her? Also possible. What I propose is that whatever Marie’s player thought was going on in the MC’s mind, it’s the statement “it’s Plover who’s the biggest threat” that is the honest statement . This is fascinating because a moment ago (see post no. 94), Plover’s being the biggest threat was a little bit of misdirection, a “fact” the MC capriciously made up in answer to a question. How can Plover’s threat level be both misdirection and subject to what honesty demands? How do you resolve the tension that exists in having misdirection and honesty apply to the same statement? This moment I think is at the crux of how fiction is handled by the MC in Apocalypse World. There’re plenty of times when the text (as I have pointed to again and again) urges the MC to follow the “logic” of the fiction, to follow through on the logical chain of cause and effect that the players create in the fiction. The MC preps threats and NPCs and sends them all out on their trajectories to see how they interact with the players’ characters. That method is one of the key ways the MC keeps her thumb off the scales and can play to find out what happens. So there’s that on the one hand. On the other hand is what I was talking about in post no. 94, that the MC is constantly making decisions based on real-world factors and then using misdirection to present those decisions within the fiction as though the details of the fiction are actually responsible for those decisions. How do those two things coexist? Where do they meet? In this chapter, they meet in the statement “Plover is the biggest threat.” When Marie’s player asks that question, the answer doesn’t exist and the MC has to capriciously decide. That’s the misdirection. But once the MC decides and lays out the misdirecting fictional details, that decision becomes a fact within the fiction. So when we get to who is coming after Marie, “Plover is the biggest threat” has moved from misdirection to fact and created something of a trajectory for Plover that the MC is bound to follow through on, even though it was mere fancy moments ago. Now, pursuing Plover’s reaction to Isle being psionically attacked is what honesty demands. Trajectories begin as mere MC-driven whim, but once they are in motion, the MC principles demand that they be seen through on their logical course. The other thing to note in this passage are all the questions being asked by the MC. Does Marie want to stick around? Where does she go? Is she at home an hour later, or somewhere else? Is she drinking tea or doing something else. As the MC asks questions trying to make the fiction concrete for her upcoming move, you can feel Marie’s player trying to squirm into a protective positioning. Fuck no, not here. Home. What a minute, are you being fair? Okay, home. Not tea. I’m alert and waiting. I’ve got my gun. And my grenade. And a door that is triple locked. It’s cool whatever her answers are. The MC just needs to know, not to fuck over Marie, but to have a concrete fictional setting in which to establish Plover’s efforts to settle the score. The asking of provocative questions (and the MC’s questions here certainly provoke Marie’s player) is to establish an agreed-upon fiction. The questions themselves aren’t a move by the MC, but a necessary precursor. If the fiction is not clear, the MC cannot make a move. The player has the right to decide where her character goes, so the MC cannot make a move placing Marie someplace Marie’s player hasn’t agreed to. Questions are the means of bringing the concrete details into focus in a way agreed upon by all concerned players so that the MC can make her move. These questions are a more focused form of “what do you do” that we saw in the last post (no. 96), but they leave the answer no less under the control of Marie’s player. ”Okay. I do direct-brain whisper projection on Isle.”
”Cool, what do you do?” ”Uh - we don’t have to interact, so I’m walking past under their feet where she can see me, and I whisper into her brain without looking up.” She rolls +weird and hits a 10+. ”What’s your whisper?” ”Follow me,” she says ”Yeah,” I say. “She inches her butt forward to drop down behind you, but then tips her head like she’s thinking of something – “ Don’t do it,” Marie’s player says. ”She forces your hand,” I say. “She takes 1-harm, right? Loud-optional, right? So, loud or not?” ”Isle, god damn it. Not loud.” ”Sweet”(127-128). Now that Marie has assessed the situation, she has to decide how she’s going to get to Isle to “visit grief” upon her. She wants to lead Isle away from Plover and Mill in order to be able to deal with her alone. Cool. So she uses her brainer move. But of course the move is triggered by the fiction, so the MC asks, “Cool, what do you do?” Note in Marie’s player’s response, the fiction doesn’t have to be elaborate, merely clear. In this case, the fiction needs to establish where Marie is in the scene and that Isle can see her (as dictated by the move). No one needs to describe the dirt caked on Isle’s boots or the heat radiating off the garage. If the players wanted to embellish the fictional details, the game certainly allows it, but nothing in the game requires it. In fact, when Marie makes her whisper, there is no elaboration of what that looks or sounds like. Perhaps this isn’t her first time making the move so that detail has already been established, but perhaps not; perhaps this is the first time. In that case, we can assume that there is nothing to be seen from the outside. No one watching Marie would have any idea she was whisper projecting. I draw attention to this only because a lot of players love the rich fiction that comes out of playing Apocalypse World or other games powered by the Apocalypse. It is worth noting that while the game grounds play within the fiction, it doesn’t actually make a lot of demands on the richness of that fiction. Enough fiction needs to exist and be concrete enough for moves to trigger and for MCs to be able to make their moves, but how rich you get in your play is entirely up to you and beyond the push of the game’s mechanics. Note also that the game is not particular about the order in which the fictional details are created. Technically you can’t direct-brain whisper to someone without whispering something in particular, some action you are trying to force your target to take. What was whispered wasn’t specified before the roll, but it’s no big deal. If she had, great; since she didn’t, it needs to be clarified now, so the MC asks, “What’s your whisper?” If Marie’s player had rolled a miss, the MC would still need to know the whisper in order to make her move as hard as she liked. So the MC is asking questions here like she did earlier (“You do? It’s charged?”). That first set of questions (see post no. 93) was about negotiating assent surrounding the triggering of Marie’s read the situation move. This set of questions is about clarifying the fiction for play to move forward. See all that damn work that questions are doing during play? (I’m currently a little obsessed with the purpose of questions between players in roleplaying games, so expect more analysis of questions in the next couple of posts.) Finally, let’s take a moment to appreciate that the entire scene of play that follows is born from a strong hit, a 10+. As I’ve observed before, strong hits don’t get much love in the Apocalypse World community, often overlooked by the heart-filled eyes that players have for the 7-9 result. The text tells us that the way to make a strong hit meaningful is to make it “consequential” (pg 86), and that’s what the Bakers demonstrate in this extended example. Isle doesn’t just resist, take the damage, and Marie tries to find some other way to visit grief upon her. No, Marie’s move permanently changes the situation, and the MC has the NPCs actively respond to that changed situation. That’s MCing like a boss. ”Hm, now I want an escape route. Can I read the situation again?”
”Of course not.” Once is what you get, unless the situation substantially changes (127). This is just a quick post to praise the excellent dialogue in this example. As I said in post no. 92, this chapter is an example more of the conversation created by the game than of anything else. As such, it needs to represent a conversation we can imagine ourselves having. Here, the “Once is what you get” could easily have been part of the spoken statement rather than as an aside for us the reader. Instead, all the MC says is “Of course not,” because these are all experienced players and friends. You can already picture how horrible this dialogue could be if it were written only to teach the rules: “Can I read the situation?” “Sure, as long as it’s charged! How is it charged, do you think?” “Well, I came here to pick a fight, right? So wouldn’t my simply being here charge the situation?” “Absolutely!” “I roll both dice, right? And add . . . let me see . . . my sharp stat! Oh no. Looks like I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed! 5+5 would be a strong hit, but my -1 takes it down to a 9. Darn! At least it’s not a miss.” Oy. It could have been more wooden, condescending, and didactic than an after-school special. We have all read samples of play like that in other RPG texts, so it wouldn’t have been shocking if it happened here. But instead, we get dialogue that hews pretty closely to lively table talk. Yes, the rules are certainly being taught in the example (otherwise there would be no need to include whether the situation could be read again at all), but that goal is secondary to demonstrating the conversation itself. “Which of my enemies is the biggest threat?” she says.
”Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard fucker. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.” (See me misdirect! I just chose one capriciously, then pointed to fictional details as though they’d made the decision. We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.) (127) I like this moment in the example, because I wouldn’t have thought of answering the question that way - with shit you just made up - as misdirecting. Isn’t that just what you have to do to answer the question? By calling it as an act of misdirection, the text emphasizes what misdirection is. Any time you as the MC say a thing about the fiction, whether you are aware of it or not, you are making a decision about what you say based on real-world concerns. You might be thinking about dramatic possibilities or how to put pressure on the scene or how to add to the tone or themes you’ve been playing with - whatever. Even if your decision amounts to “wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” you are deciding the thing outside of the fiction. The command to misdirect is to present that made-decision to the players as fiction. So what I think is cool here is that the example takes a moment that most of us would just do instinctively and points out that we are following a principle just by doing it. Being mindful of that is not necessary to MCing the game, but it is an important insight into how the game functions. It’s easy as an MC to think that you are playing only within the fiction, that sometimes you aren’t picking moves so much as the moves are practically picking themselves. The players are giving you fiction and you are responding by giving them fiction. That’s how it can feel, especially if you are excited by the fiction unspooling before you. But as the example shows us, the choice to make Plover the biggest threat is actually a capricious one. The fictional details are pointed to “as though they’d made the decision,” but they didn’t. The MC could have easily said that Isle was the biggest danger and have come up with fictional reasons why, or Mill as well. Truly, the answer could have been anyone and it would have been just as good. What “misdirect” means here is cloaking that capricious decision in fictional details. In fact, it is the fictional details themselves that constitute the misdirection. If the answer had simply been, “Plover,” with no explanation, there would have been no misdirection, just an incomplete answering of the question. It’s the grounding of the decision in fictional details that makes the answer appear to have come from the fiction itself. Why is that important? Because those fictional details are what the player needs in order to make her next move. Those fictional details are used by the player to decide what her character does, how she approaches the scene. If the answer had been, “Plover, but not by much, they all look sickly and unable to put up much of a fight,” that changes everything, right? And that’s the magic of Apocalypse World. The fiction isn’t just something that comes out of play; the fiction is critical to play, the substance of play itself. Details can’t be glossed over in a couple of vague statements because the players need those details to say what they do, need those details to trigger their moves. And the MC needs those details from the players to know what MC move to pick and how to detail the fiction of the move back into the scene. Back and forth, each player requires concrete fiction from the other player in order to do her thing. Without that fictional detail, play grinds to a halt. When that happens questions need to be asked back and forth until that fictional details are properly established and play can move on. Now you don’t need to know any of that for the game to function. The game will force you to misdirect with fictional details whether you like it or not because the players will ask for clarification in order to trigger their moves. But while you can MC without the understanding, I suspect that you can MC more powerfully with it. The details that misdirect in this example all affect the encounter. We know that Plover is a hard fucker and that he is currently without his armor, but has a gun in his boot. We know that Isle is no push over. And we know that there is a kid present, who if not innocent, isn’t violent. And Mill isn’t just any kid, he’s Isle’s little brother. That collection of people makes knowing what to do tough for Marie’s player. She might be okay getting in a fight with Plover, but does she want to do so in front of Mill? Even if Marie’s not sensitive to possibly traumatizing Mill, could Mill run off to get more of Isle’s family? The MC is only answering the player’s question, but she is doing so with details that make the next decision of what to do a hard one. You as the MC are in control of the fiction in these moments of misdirection, not the other way around. Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs).
”I read the situation,” her player says. ”You do? It’s charged?” I say. ”It is now.” ”Ahh,” I say. I understand perfectly: the three NPCs don’t realize it, but Marie’s arrival charges the situation. If it were a movie, the sound track would be picking up, getting sinister. She rolls+sharp and hits with 7-9, so she gets to ask me one question from the move’s list. (126) First, it’s notable that we begin with Marie’s player pursuing Marie’s own agenda. The MC has not thrown an encounter or a crisis at the character but is instead responding to the player’s actions. It’s a subtle choice to have the extended example begin this way, but an important one to understanding the way the game was designed with character agency in mind. Second, the first move we encounter in the example is Read a Sitch. It’s an interesting choice for a first move since it doesn’t have much fiction surrounding it. My instinct would be to start with a move that drives home the importance of “to do it, do it.” Instead, to make the move, Marie’s player just has to declare she’s reading the situation. Well, that’s not really all she has to do, is it? The MC asks for clarification, not of the “cool, what do you do?” sort, but of the “let’s clarify the fiction” sort all the same. The only situations that can be read by the move are charged ones. “Charged” would have been a great word to add to my “natural language” discussion – post no. 90 – since the word is both consistently used and not technical or jargony in its use. What is a “charged” situation? That’s for the players to agree on among themselves, but to me it means filled with potential energy on the verge of becoming kinetic. So the MC asks how the situation is charged. I read, “You do? It’s charged?” not as a challenge, but as a surprised inquiry. The scene the MC painted was not one of conflict, but one of relative peace. The three NPCs are having a quiet moment sitting in harmony and eating peaches. The player can approach this scene in any way she wants, so there is no reason to assume the situation is charged—and it’s not, until the player says it is. Remember, Marie is here “to visit grief upon” Isle. Note that the MC does not say, “No, you can only read charged situations. How is it charged?” In other words, the MC is not making the player justify the triggering of the move, with the player making a case and the MC being the arbiter of whether the move was triggered or not. Instead, this is a subtle negotiation between the players so that they agree about what is happening, and with that agreement, the move can trigger. The MC’s inquiry is met with “It is now,” which is in turn met with “Ahh.” That “Ahh” marks the assent from the MC to the situation being charged. Everyone involved in the scene understands the fiction, “understand[s] perfectly” even. Because the fiction of the situation is clear, Marie’s player rolls without further checking in or discussing what’s happening. I don’t really know if this is the case, but in my head, the Bakers began the example this way because that relationship between players and the way the game structures communication and assent are critical features in the way Apocalypse World functions at the table. Before we can get to “cool, what do you do,” we have to understand that state of the fiction is determined not through MC fiat but through shared assent. As a final observation, let’s take a moment to praise the MC for constructing a scene with the potential for conflict. Presumably, Marie’s player said she was going to find Isle. The MC could have had Isle alone in her quarters or anywhere else, but instead she created a scene in which Marie is accompanied by two other NPCs, one of whom is in Keeler’s gang, as we’ll later find out. Whatever Marie wants to see Isle for, having to deal with 3 people is a much more complicated affair than having to deal with one person. Not only that, but they’re all on the roof! Now Marie has to either shout up to them, or climb up on the roof if she wants to have a direct encounter with Isle. That’s a pretty brilliant construction for a scene. (Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder what move the MC made to create the scene. Since she is surprised that the scene is charged, and given the peach-eating quiet of the whole thing, she almost certainly wasn’t announcing future badness. I suspect she was offering an opportunity (to talk to or confront Isle) with a cost (of having to conduct that exchange in front of Plover and Mill).) Shared publicly•View activity Before we dive into the extended example that makes up this chapter, let’s take a moment to appreciate what it is an example of. It is not an example of fiction created, but an example of the conversation that the game structures.
Yes, fiction is created in the example, and the mechanics are demonstrated, but those things exist only within the conversation as they are presented in this chapter. A lot of RPGs provide examples of the kinds of things characters can do or the ways mechanics function, but they seldom (in my experience) anchor them to the conversation itself. Since the medium of play is conversation, and since the rules of an RPG shape and govern that conversation, it seems only natural that the conversation itself should be the subject of examples in RPG texts. Moreover, part of the design philosophy behind Apocalypse World is that the rules of the game should make it likely that the players (and relatively easy for them to) say interesting things to each other in play. This extended example, then, is about the interesting things you say in the conversation that creates the fiction. A related aside: In one of the recent RPG Design Panelcast episodes (“The Confused State of Rulebooks,” 1/6/18 release date), +Jessica Hammer tells the story of an assignment she gave to her students to design an app that helps novice roleplayers learn to play Pathfinder. To do that, they needed to research what impediments stood between the novice roleplayers and their ability to learn to play the game. The students found that the biggest concern for new players was . . . the conversation: “novice roleplayers had a really hard time understanding how to construct a sentence that was meaningful in the world. They literally did not know how to speak, what they were allowed to say.” (0:19:50). So, yes, an example needs to show what the players can do and how certain mechanics in the game interact with other mechanics, but what it needs to do above all is demonstrate the play itself, that is, the conversation. Demonstrating the conversation is the RPG equivalent of boardgame rulebooks’ pictures of the board and the pieces in demonstrating setup and play. You will find that none of the examples in Apocalypse World exist outside of a conversation. All the MC example moves? Examples from the basic moves chapter? Examples in discussing harm and life becoming untenable? They are all presented as dialogue and conversational excerpts because in the end, RPG play doesn’t exist outside of conversation. No game exemplifies that understanding more thoroughly than Apocalypse World. Any given conflict between characters, one move alone probably won’t resolve it. Very often it’ll take several moves and countermoves, a whole back-and-forth between them. Hitting rolls on a 7-9, especially, usually leaves a whole lot unresolved, primed for followthrough or a counterstrike (126).
That’s the first paragraph of the chapter Moves Snowball, and it seems to me to be carefully worded to conjure of the issue of conflict resolution without ever calling it conflict resolution. The word “conflict” only appears in one other place in the whole text, and that is in reference to the MC having a conflict of interest with the players if the MC plays her part adversarially (top of page 82). Resolve appears not once, but twice here, both times letting you know resolution is not the end result of a single move. Added all together, this paragraph states that moves are not about conflict resolution. Why not just say that? While conflict resolution is a common term or art, it is still a term of art, and the Bakers don’t seem interested in having the game burdened with preconceived ideas of RPG theory, even casual ones. In this paragraph, then, if you are sensitive to the theory, it’s there for you to see. If you’re not, then you just read the paragraph as meaning exactly what it means. Easy enough. For those of us who look at an RPG and think in terms of resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks, we are told here not to think of moves in Apocalypse World in terms of conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is about seeing how the conflict as a whole is settled, if the goal of a character is achieved through the conflict. I want to subdue this woman and get the information out of her. I state my goal, work out the stakes with the other players, roll the dice, and interpret them to decide whether my goal was achieved or missed, and translate that into the fiction. But moves in Apocalypse World aren’t designed to resolve conflict but to generate and perpetuate it, as the rest of this chapter shows us through the example of play. Moves are not designed simply to denote success or failure but to permanently alter the situation from one state to another. The moves cascade very naturally. Holds overlap, outcomes nest and double up and flow seamlessly into the new moves. Just remember the rule - if you do it, you do it; to do it, you have to do it - and see their logic through. That “see their logic through” is the part that permanently alters the situation into a new situation. I have spoken many times in past posts about how internal logic and causality within the fiction are the backbone of play in Apocalypse World (posts 27, 35, and 47 in particular, I think). A 10+ is as permanent a change as a 6-, and when followed through logically, should have as much impact on play as a 7-9, even if it is potentially not as immediate or frenzied. (Remember: “the way to make a character’s success interesting is to make it consequential. When a character accomplishes something, have all of your NPCs respond. Reevaluate all those PC-NPC-PC triangles you’ve been creating. Whose needs change? Whose opinions change? Who was an enemy, but now is afraid; who was an enemy, but now sees better opportunities as an ally? Let the characters’ success make waves outward, let them topple already unstable situations. There are no status quos in Apocalypse World” (86).) Now, a skilled GM can take an RPG with resolution mechanics and make those results alter the fiction in permanent ways that simultaneously push the story forward by pressuring the characters and demanding actions and reactions from them. The brilliance of Apocalypse World is that its moves mechanize the creation of unstable situations out of other unstable situations. Moves are situation-propelling mechanisms rather than resolution mechanisms, which is precisely what the opening paragraphs in this chapter point out, and ultimately what the whole of this chapter demonstrates. There has been a ton of digital ink spilled on what it means to “make as hard and direct a move as you like” (89). Nearly every pbta book published after Apocalypse World spends time defining and explaining “hard moves,” by opposing them to “soft moves” or by placing them on a scale of hardness or by using any other technique to make the distinction clear to their readers. Apocalypse World is unique in leaving the matter without a strict definition. Why do that? Isn’t a rule book supposed to make everything unambiguous and easy to follow?
As I used to tell my students back when I taught literature, when something is unclear in a text and you trust the author to know what they are doing, that lack of clarity is the point. Is Hamlet mad or is he conniving? Find your textual evidence for each interpretation, but if you find that that evidence is inconclusive, then that ambiguity is purposeful and is itself worthy of analysis. In writing their 2nd edition, the Bakers had the choice to nail down the issue of hardness in MC moves, and they chose to leave it as it is. This is the way they want it. There is no glossary to Apocalypse World. There might be cool use of words in the text, but there are no terms of art. Hx is unique to the game, but it mean “history” in the way it is commonly used. The stats are defined for us so we know what they cover, but the words don’t have special meaning. The lists of words that clarify the stats on page 71 are not presented as a restrictive list but as a representative live. They show you a range of meanings to help you understand the flavor of the words; they don’t set the words in concrete. When discussing MC moves, the authors make clear that “[t]hey aren’t technical terms or jargon: ‘announce future badness,’ for instance, means think of something bad that’s probably going to happen in the future, and announce it” (88). Similarly “hard” is natural language without a strict, in-game definition. The advantage of natural language is that it allows the text (and rules of the game) to live and breathe, rather than suffering from interpretive ossification. We see the game delight openly in these broad definitions with a move like “Seize by force.” You can seize something physical like a box of ammunition or something more abstract like advantageous positioning or someone’s undivided attention. Only natural language lets one move accomplish so much. Moreover that broadness allows the players to think of things the game designers might not have anticipated, because so much can be “seized” in the fullest sense of the word. Same thing with “Act under fire”: it allows the “fire” to be anything that pressures or limits the characters when acting. What stories do you have of a creative use of “Seize by force” or “Act under fire”? Those cool stories exist because the designers created the room for your own imaginative applications, and they did that by avoiding jargon and technical terms. “Making as hard and direct a move as you like” leaves the definition of “hard and direct” up to you. They want you to think about what that means. They want you to engage with the possible range of meaning. They want you to surprise yourself with the ways that hardness and directness can express themselves during play. Instead of worrying that there is a right way and a wrong way to make a move as hard as you like, you should explore the possibilities and know that there is no wrong way to do it when MCing Apocalypse World. My textual evidence for this position is that there are three common ways to think about hardness, and all three are presented in the text without one being prioritized over the others. The first way is to make the move irrevocably change the situation. We see this referred to on page 114: “If the players have handed you a golden opportunity (like if they blow a roll, or if they let you set something up and follow through on it), make as hard and direct a move as you like, the more irrevocable the better.” The second way is to think about the hardness of the move in opposition to the typical softness of standard moves. This method often talks about “softer” moves giving PCs a chance to react while “harder” moves create a change before letting the PCs react. We see this approach supported on page 89: “Generally, limit yourself to a move that’ll (a) set you up for a future harder move, and (b) give the players’ characters some opportunity to act and react. A start to the action, not its conclusion.” The idea appears again on page 114: “Otherwise, make your move to set yourself up and to offer them the opportunity to react.” The third way is to think about hardness as emotionally hard or surprising. The best example of this is on page 149: 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!’ Every and all of these ways are good and fine ways to make your move as hard as you like, and each one is supported by the text. What constitutes a hard move is yours as the MC to decide. The openness of the text is one of the things I love about Apocalypse World. The lack of jargon and insistence on natural language and its inherent flexibility is one of the things that makes the language of Apocalypse World feel poetic and oddly alive. A competent rule book needs to communicate who can do what when and how gameplay properly unfolds. A stellar rule book does that while letting you feel that the possibilities of the game reach far into the shadows beyond what the text can illuminate. To me, that’s what AW uses natural language to do, and it does it amazingly well. It’s a text that gives you all the tools and then trusts you to run with the game in ways that would surprise the designers as well as yourself. Okay, I really should be working on video edits, but I had a revelation about my own stupidity and wanted/needed to confess.
I’ve remarked once or twice in past posts that I loved the stylistic decision to have the harm clock and the countdown clocks in Apocalypse World look the same, as though it were a question of aesthetics and thematic continuity. But as I was driving today, something in my head shook loose and I realized that harm clocks and countdown clocks weren’t just similar—they’re the same damn thing. A harm clock is just a countdown clock for the character’s life and functionality. Period. I’m sure this is nothing new to a lot of people, but it’s pretty revelatory to me. A shotgun might as well say “advance the harm clock on the shot individual by three segments” as “3-harm.” In this way, harm is not just 6 hit points but a constant tracking of a character’s viability. I’ve been reading through Vincent’s theory posts on anyway and came across this post from 2006 a month or so ago, which should have told me everything I needed to know, but for some reason it took weeks to sink through my skull: Hit points don’t do what you think they do . . . . That’s why you think they’re broken. Hit points tell you how long a conflict can last. They’re a pacing mechanism. They’re a perfectly good one, right there alongside Trollbabe’s “a conflict lasts 3 exchanges,” Dogs’ “a conflict lasts until somebody runs out of dice,” and Primetime Adventures’ “a conflict lasts one roll.” You need some way to know when the conflict end, that’s all. (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/175 ) So, yeah, the harm clock, like every other countdown clock in Apocalypse World, is a pacing mechanism helping us pace the setbacks and progress of a character’s hold on their life. Sometime after every session, before the next, get out your threat map and look it over. What’s changed? Have any threats come closer? Have any receded further into the distance? Have any notional threats proved real? Have any moved, circling the characters or acting on the world outside their bounds?
Flip through your threats’ listings and update them. Who was killed? Whose stakes questions did play resolve, and what do you wonder about now? How have their countdowns progressed? Create any new threats you’ve introduced. Remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts. Remember that your NPCs are just not that complicated. You’re not holding back for a big reveal. You’re not doling events out like you’re trying to make your Halloween candy last until New Years. All your threats have impulses they should act on and body parts leading them around, so for god sake, have them act! The real power here is that final paragraph. There is a lot implied about your threats up until this paragraph, how to prepare them and how to use them during play. They give you things to say. They have spatial trajectories and temporal trajectories. They are whizzing across your threat map like balls on a pool table waiting for impact with the PCs. But here it is explicitly stated that you need to actively drive those threats and NPCs. Since you are not creating a story through which the PCs can travel, there is no “big reveal” for you to make. The drama comes from the players’ and characters’ decisions, not from some plot twist you’ve been preparing. The analogy with Halloween candy is fantastic—don’t dole them out! The game’s design lets you as an MC push hard with everything you have at the PCs to see what they do. In fact, if you don’t push hard, you will have a flat game with little dramatic tension and action. Your tools are your NPCs in Apocalypse World and you must use them aggressively without concern about what will happen next. Indeed, you have to have a big fat question mark about what will happen next. You need to not know and need to want to know! The example threat maps that close out this chapter beautifully show what you can expect if you MC the game according to its own rules. We begin with a bare outline of what’s in the world and what direction things are heading. We know that the Water Cult is exerting some pressures to join them, that Dremmer’s raiders are to the South, and that the Barge People are to the East. There are apparently refugees from the Barge People heading toward the PCs. By the end of the second session, threats have been fleshed out and numbered. Members of the cult and gang have been defined (presumably through play). An emissary named Rothschild has approached the PCs looking for something in particular. The refugees from the Barge People are knocking on the PCs’ doors and also heading north toward the notional refuge (the “ha!” of which tells us its existence is dubious at best). Dremmer has installed a slaver over the Barge People, explaining the refugees. A hunting pack has appeared “outside,” either from the world’s psychic maelstrom or way elsewhere. By the end of the third session, threats have been fractured and re-detailed. The refugees are spreading, the furnace pits have entered the picture, and the troubles surrounding the PCs are expanding. In every map, we can see what the MC is curious about, what they have sworn to themselves to find out through play rather than by decree. (As a side note, I’m in love with Schroedinger’s Village with is simultaneously to the South and to the West, and only ever notional.) The maps prove to be a single-sheet tool for the MC to see at a glance all the growing pressures on and questions for the PCs. The world and threats develop and grow through play, and every addition gives the MC more “things to say” and more actors to “have them act!” The threat chapter has more graphics and physical examples of play artifacts than any other chapter. Threats are not a suggested means for MCs to get the best play. No, threats are a designed part of the game, a subsystem that exists to guarantee that the game plays the way it was designed to play. The examples show that the authors are well aware that this is a tricky and possibly daunting part of play and they try to make it all as clear and non-threatening (no pun intended) as possible. It is no coincidence that the threat chapter is the chapter that has undergone the most revisions from the first to the second edition. Before I move into the Moves Snowball chapter, I will have a couple of other posts covering some odds and ends, such as revisiting the concept of hard moves, looking at the use of natural language vs. jargon in the text, and the way MC moves are structured and presented in the text. But before I cover any of that, I need to wrestle with a bunch of work projects that have stacked up while I have buried myself in RPG texts and theory. It will probably be a month or more before I can get back to posting regularly, but I will be back! I’m looking at the example threats today (pages 119-121), and specifically at threat number 3, the Water Cult threat (120). All of the example threats are educational and great demonstrations on how to make playable threats, but I am particularly struck by the water cult, primarily because they are not given the Cult type as a bunch of Brutes. The other examples are all Brutes, but the water cult are created as an Affliction, a Delusion of the people with the impulse “to dominate people’s choices and actions.” It’s an interesting choice.
By giving each threat type a name and an impulse, the threat lists work to capture your imagination on several fronts. Perhaps you are attracted by the notion of a Breeding Pit, or Sybarites, or a Pain Addict. Perhaps you are compelled by the idea that a threat “craves contact, intimate and/or anonymous,” or has the impulse “to riot, burn, kill scapegoats,” or the impulse “to leave people bereft.” Whatever it is that gets your motor revving, it’s the impulse of a threat that will determine its actions and its role within the unfolding drama, and the example of the Water Cult acts as a gentle reminder to think about how you see that threat fucking up the world you all have built. As a Cult threat type, the Water Cult would have the impulse “to victimize & incorporate people,” but as a Delusion, they instead seek “do dominate people’s actions and choices.” The line might be a fine one, but by picking Delusion, the MC here sees the Water Cult as primarily wanting to control the populace more than simply grow by incorporating more and more of the population. The joining of the cult is about ceding control to it, not about adding to its numbers—and that distinction tells the MC how to play the cult in the game. Many of the threats have potentially cult figures. The Prophet Warlord, the Mindfuck Grotesque, the Delusion and Sacrifice Afflictions, the Cult Brutes, and more—they can all form the basis of a cult in a game you play, but each option offers not only a different flavor but a different trajectory and set of goals and desires. By making the Water Cult a Delusion, the example subtly drives that point home. It’s worth taking a moment to look at the example countdown clock on the Water Cult threat as well, to see how the MC creates a clock that “list[s] things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control” (118). Before 9:00, the cult swells with the addition of NPCs. The cult becomes particularly relevant to the players when someone from Uncle’s Gang joins the cult, but that can be done without demanding anything from the PCs. The crisis point at 9:00 comes when the cult approaches the PCs and demand that they join. And join or not, the cult will lead a revolt against the hardhold to fill in that 11:00-12:00 slot. The PCs can interfere at any time and throw the clock off, but the MC has put forward a vision of what will happen if the PCs keep out of the cult’s affairs. It’s a great example of how the clock makes no demands on the PCs while simultaneously crossing their paths and potentially involving them if they are interested. In the end, the climax will force an interaction and choice from the PCs—who will they side with? Will they talk the cult out of revolt? What will they be willing to do to prevent a revolt, help the revolt, or fight against the revolt? There are so many juicy and difficult questions that are created because of the countdown clock. There is an entire chapter devoted to making custom moves in Apocalypse World. In interviews, Vincent Baker has said that it became immediately clear to him that people were going to hack the game, so he wanted to give them the proper tools for doing so, even going so far as to create a variety of moves to demonstrate different ways to build them.
But here in the Threats chapter, Vincent and Meguey don’t just give permission to the reader to build new moves, they actively encourage it, even insisting upon it: Whenever you make a disease threat or a disease-like threat, you should create a custom move for it like “when you use an angel kit to treat someone infected . . .” (119). In this section, the text makes it clear that building custom moves for threats is an integral part of being an MC. The primary explanation is that you’ll want to “punch . . . up” some threats: For some threats, you’ll want to punch them up with their own custom moves. You create them. Punch them up is a way of saying breathe life into them. Punch them up is a way of saying give your idea and flavor mechanical weight. Punch them up is a way of saying use the language of the game to make your threats a structured and interactive part of the conversation. The examples show us that a custom move takes a facet of the threat and puts gears and teeth on it: When you go into Dremmer’s territory, roll+sharp. On a 10+, you can spot and avoid ambush. On a 7–9, you spot the ambush in time to prepare or flee. On a miss, you blunder into it. When one of Siso’s Children touches you, roll+weird. On a 10+, your brain protects you and it’s just a touch. On a 7–9, I tell you what to do: if you do it, mark experience; if you don’t, you’re acting under fire from brain-weirdness. On a miss, you come to, some time later, having done whatever Siso’s child wants you to have done. If you drink the water out here, roll+hard. On a 10+, spend a few minutes barfing but you’ll be fine. On a 7–9, take 1-harm (ap) now and 1-harm (ap) again in a little while. On a miss, take 3-harm (ap) now and 3-harm (ap) again in a little while. What’s the thing about Dremmer’s territory? It’s crawling with Dremmer’s gangs ready to ambush invaders. The move turns that idea into a mechanical reality. What’s the thing about Siso’s Children? Damn, they can exert a kind of mind control on those they touch. The move gives you a way as MC to make that idea happen within the rules of the game. What’s the thing about this landscape? The water is dirty and dangerous. The move lets the players interact with that fact rather than just being told, “hey, the water out here is brown and nasty – you have to be pretty desperate and hardy to drink it.” The basic and character moves that form the backbone of the player-facing rule can cover just about every typical situation, but threats are unique to your game and cannot be anticipated by the designers. You as the MC need a way to make your threats more than narrative elements, and the custom moves give you the means to do that. In this way, custom moves are the equivalent to the OSR refrain, “rulings not rules.” The notion behind “rulings not rules” is that a game cannot cover every action players might take. Instead, the game gives you the basic rules and it’s the GM’s job to extrapolate rulings from those rules to cover the uncovered situations. Custom moves accomplish the same goal. There is no move for drinking dangerously contaminated water? Make it up. There’s no rule for spotting an ambush? Make it up. In the context of this section, custom moves are created in between sessions when you are working on your threats, but there is nothing prohibiting an MC from making up a move on the spot when the situation calls for it. How can everyone at the table be sure that a move is fair and just? First, you have the repeatable structure of the 10+, 7-9, 6- division so that a move provides for hits and misses. But more importantly, the strictures of the MC agenda, principles, and always-say demands apply to everything the MC says as her part of the conversation. If your move doesn’t make Apocalypse World seem real, make the PCs’ lives not boring, and allow you to play to find out what happens, you can’t say it. As a final note, the other thing these example custom moves do is serve as inspiration to the reader, to give them a glimpse of all the wild ways you can take the game. I don’t know what a “hollow daughter” is, but damn, I desperately want to bring them into the game! My favorite move in this section is this one: When you try to read Monk you have to roll+weird instead of rolling+sharp. Fucker just does not have normal body language. That fucker not having normal body language is so evocative and intriguing that I want to see how an MC plays Monk in a scene to communicate that. The simple act of changing which stat to roll with has a huge impact on the fiction that unfolds from the move. After reading that move, you can’t help but think about how the different basic moves change merely by switching the stat rolled. That’s the kind of inspiration that leads you to reexamine the rules and the possibilities. That’s hot. Countdown clocks are first raised in the Master of Ceremonies chapter when discussing the principle “Sometimes disclaim decision-making” (86-87). There they are described as a method for having a “considered and concrete plan” for making decisions “instead of just leaving it to your whim” (87). Thirty pages later, the entirety of the threat chapter is about giving the MC the tools for keeping their thumbs off the scales when determining how and when PCs and NPCs collide during play. The threat map is concerned with the spatial trajectories of various threats while the countdown clock is concerned with the temporal trajectories.
A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’ (117). As much as the clock is a mechanical feature, its primary goal is to serve as ”a reminder” that the threats are not yours to manipulate at your whim. In this way, clocks straddle that hard-to-define line between orientational rules and instructional rules that I discuss in post #82. The clocks work mechanically while simultaneously orienting your own behavior and attitude as MC. Even when clocks aren’t given to a threat, the knowledge that they might belong there is itself orienting your attitude. So when do you put a clock on a threat? When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created. I love the phrase “vision of its future.” If you create a threat and you see how it might unfold in the future, that’s when you clock it. Countdown clocks are a way for the MC to put down a bid on future events without scripting or mandating those future events. More on this below, after we look at the mechanical structuring of clocks in Apocalypse World. Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen: • Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps? • Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it? • At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it? At a purely instructional level, this breakdown of what each stage of the clock means is incredibly useful and clear. Preventable, inevitable but with time to brace for impact, and full expression are great divisions, and the questions associated with each stage are great ways to coax out of you the expressions of the threat at each stage of the countdown. If you just look at the clock as six segments, the time of preventable consequences and inevitable actions are equal in each section, but the visual of the clock tells us how these things work as units of time. The preventable approaching of events is slow and ponderous compared to the speed and weight of the thing once its progress is inevitable. Visually, the clock tells us that the last three units take up the space of only a third of the previous three units. The clock graphic orients us to the pacing of the threat. As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments. Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out. For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit: “if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.” Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to. This brings us back to the notion that countdown clocks are proposals for what might happen in the future. The inviolable tenet behind the game is that the story must grow from the actions and desires of the protagonists, and as such, the MC cannot pre-determine any future scenes or happenings—none whatsoever. Twice the authors have told us they are not fucking around here, so we best take them at their words. Countdown clocks are a tool for letting the MC prepare for possible futures without ever declaring by fiat that they will be so. Instead, the MC maps out a temporal trajectory that can be interrupted or diverted at any time if the PCs get involved. Like the rest of the delicate dance the game demands of the MC as a person who is both an eager participant and a detached observer, the countdown clocks ask the MC to be interested in what will happen without being invested in what they hope will happen. How much weight clocks have in determining the future can be seen in the casualness of the phrase “just scribble it out.” The nonchalance of “just” and “scribble” reflects the attitude the MC must have when a countdown clock becomes irrelevant. Nothing about the clock is set in stone or worth worrying about if it becomes irrelevant. This casualness of phrase is driven home by the direct tonal contrast with the phrase “not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT.” Side note: I’ve always liked the defining of a game element as both descriptive and prescriptive. Those things that are prescriptive and descriptive are where the meta-concerns of the game and the fiction of the game overlap. Just as fictional occurrences make the players mark up their playbooks to reflect the change, so the fictional occurrences cause the MC to mark up their threat sheets to reflect the change, and vice versa. So much of the play in Apocalypse World happens at that intersection, I think, which is one of the reasons why the fiction can roll on without getting caught up in metaplay concerns and why nothing that happens at the meta-level will bring the fiction grinding to a halt. I had an odd confluence of media lead me to an unexpected proposal: character sheets are simply a collection of what we need to know in order to play our part in the conversation of a roleplaying game. To use the language that recurs in Apocalypse World, the character sheet gives the player things to say.
In Apocalypse World, the phrase “gives you things to say” only appears in reference to the MC. We are told of the MC moves, “Whenever there’s a pause in the conversation and everyone looks at you to say something, choose one of these things and say it” (2nd edition, 88). The tags on weapons and gear serve several functions, one of which is they “tell you, the MC, things to say when the character uses the thing” (12). Elsewhere we are told “the game’s rules give you things to say” (92), and “your threat map gives you things to say, too” (93). Finally, “remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts” (121). Because the MC in Apocalypse World has to be completely reactive to the actions of the PCs, the game needs to give the MC the necessary tools to uphold their side of the conversation, “things to say” no matter what unexpected thing might happen. Of course, the other players who are driving the narrative in Apocalypse World also need things to say, and those things are found in their playbooks. Since the stats are tied to specific moves, each stat tells us not only something about the personality of the character but what approach they would be more likely to take when solving a problem. The gear and crap tells us how the character can interact with the scene and others. The look and features gives us things to say when we present our character in a scene or react to the other players’ characters. The moves we choose tells us not only what the character can do, but they also tell us something about the character. A Savvyhead with Things Speak and Deep Insights is inherently different from one with Bonefeel and Oftener Right. As I observed in my post on Sex Moves (#22), the sex moves tell us things about how our character handles intimacy, what they observe and what they give away in those intimate moments. And whether you ever trigger a sex move or not, that fact is sitting right there on the sheet. The harm clock tells us at a glance how injured we should play our character and whether they are getting better or worse. Hx gives each of us a quick detail of a past with at least two other players’ characters and a score for the rest of the players, telling us how they generally interact with others. Some of that information may have mechanical purposes, but they all give us things to say to participate in the conversation. At the end of character creation, we are given everything we need to start creating scenes and reacting to each other and the world around us. Now take a game like early D&D. You didn’t need to know anything about your character’s past or personality because your main purpose was to kick ass and take experience and gold. Your part of the conversation is where do you go in the dungeon, how do you try to keep alive, and how do you try to overcome the obstacles before you. Stats, saving throws, armor, thac0, your weapons, and your basic equipment were everything you needed. Alignment is the closest thing to a character trait or a guiding principle of behavior, and that often feels like a useless, half-developed appendage. And what about Primetime Adventures? The players are responsible for a much larger part of the conversation. They set up scenes. They interact with each other dramatically to reveal who the characters are. They need to know who their character is within the world (their role), who their character is in relation to the other protagonists (their relationships), what they are striving for (their issue) and how they express themselves when that issue is at stake (their impulse). They need to know how far into the spotlight they should step, which the screen presence tells them. Then they have notes about their personality and manner or speech to know how they are going to say what they have to say. Their personal set even gives them a default location to set a scene. The character sheet is full of things to say! A well-designed RPG gives the players the tools to have a dynamic, exciting, and meaningful conversation, and to do that, it needs to give the players things to say when it is their turn to speak. A poorly-designed RPG doesn’t give the proper tools to create and sustain the conversation it wants to create. I realize there is nothing remarkable or probably even impressive in this observation, but seeing the character sheet as a resource for your part of the conversation is something of a revelation to me. It remains to be seen if that approach bears fruit or clears up murky waters. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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