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You already have a lot of good material to work with. Everything the players have come up with between them and introduced at the end of character creation, plus everything I’ve given you, plus the stuff you thought about yourself before the game.
Talk about the landscape, the sky, the people, their broken lives. Say what the weather’s like, say what time of day, say what the walls look like, what the rag-waste smells like, how the plastic canvasses snap and hiss, how many people are at the well and which of them have guns (98). Apocalypse World is often celebrated because it doesn’t require a lot of prep. The other side of that coin is that the game actively limits what you can prepare; it demands that you hold your part of the conversation with precious little planned. Because of that demand, the game is careful to never ask you to speak without giving you the tools to know what to say. In this case, everything that comes in the first part of the first session gives you “a lot of good material to work with.” The last item on the list in the first paragraph here is the only prep you were asked to do: develop an aesthetic for the apocalypse of your game, aka “daydream some apocalyptica.” That’s what you came to the table with. It is not surprising then that the first bullet point of this list asks you to make use of that material. You’ve daydreamed it for yourself; now describe it for the other players. Description in the first session accomplishes two main things. The first is that it creates a sensory-rich fiction with which the players’ characters can interact. The medium through which Apocalypse World is played is the fiction, and no moves can be triggered by the characters or made by the MC that is not submerged in that fiction. This is the equivalent of filling the pool before you can swim. Get that fiction started and make it specific so the characters have details to engage with. The second paragraph above proposes a list of descriptive possibilities to jumpstart your game (because, again, the game always has your back when it’s your turn to speak). Second, your description in this first session establishes the tone and feel of the game. The apocalyptic landscape and characters populating it can be as dire, threatening, relaxed, comical, rich, desolate, dirty, or verdant as your imagination dictates. As MC, you have the power to offer up a proposed tone through your description. It’s not your decision alone of course, because you are, as the second bullet point will tell us, building off what the players established during character creation, but as the narrative proper begins, you get the first chance to lay out the details of the world. The foundation you lay in the first session will impact the tone and direction of the rest of the game. So seize that opportunity. As the text says, "Say everything . . . “
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Just because it’s the first session, whatever, you’re still actually playing the game.
MC the game. Bring it. But especially do these: Describe. Barf forth apocalyptica. Springboard off character creation. Ask questions all the time. Leave yourself things to wonder about. Look for where they’re not in control. Push there. Nudge the players to have their characters make moves. Give every character good screen time with other characters. Leap forward with named, human NPCs. Hell, have a fight. Work on your threat map and essential threats. (98) I like the special place that the first session has in Apocalypse World, and that first sentence puts it in perspective. You’re still actually playing the game, so MC it. Just because the text is drawing attention to everything you want to be accomplishing in the first session doesn’t mean you get to ignore the last chapter. All of rules of MCing still stand, so achieve your agenda items, follow your principles, and make your moves. But at the same time, you are trying to “create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements” (97), so there are things you need to do above and beyond those usual rules to fracture and tilt that landscape of inequalities. And that’s where this extra list comes in. These aren’t rules, but they’re not mere take-it-or-leave-it advice either. This is firm-handed guidance, things you need to do to let the game do what it is designed to do. The recurring theme of these bullet points is this: curious exploration. We have talked about the MC assuming the position of interactive audience, an engaged fan with the ability to move the characters and world around to see what happens. Well the first session plays a critical role in equipping the MC with the information they need to play their part successfully. Springboarding off character creations, asking questions, leaving yourself things to wonder about, looking for where the characters are not in control, and pushing on those weak spots are all ways to identify and play with the fractured tilting landscape the game’s systems have put in place. When the authors say “you get a whole session to get to know them” (96) they are placing the MC’s needs front and center. The players may have fun stretching their characters’ muscles, but the first session isn’t really about that. It’s a playground for the MC to poke around and see what they want to see more of. Sure, you have “nudge the players to have their characters make moves,” but that is one item in a list of 11. Even giving “characters good screen time” has the important tag “with other characters,” because the item is less concerned with spotlight equality than it is with you getting to see how the characters react to and mix with one another. It’s easy to overlook the first session as simply “begin playing the game,” but it is much more than that. It is an important design element in the way the game plays. Next, we’ll look in detail at some of the bullet points. We’re going to jump ahead a tiny bit because “Before the 1st Session” talks about things we’ve already discussed and I’m not smart enough to have new things to add. In fact, we’re going to slide a little into “During the 1st Session” as well to get to the meat of the matter:
Then I’d just say it outright to your players: ‘your setup’s easy and now you’ve already done it. Mine’s harder so I’m going to take this whole session to do it. So no high-tension kick off from me, let’s follow the characters around for a day and get to know them. Cool?’ A couple of you groaned, I could hear you from way over here. Oh great, getting to know the characters, that’s a recipe for will anything ever happen? Following the characters around for a day and getting to know them, it could mean establishing a whole unwieldy mass of status quo, right? It could mean that but it doesn’t. Say it with me: there are no status quos in Apocalypse World. What it means instead: it’s your job to create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements. A dynamic opening situation, not a status quo you’re going to have to put your shoulder against and somehow shift, like pushing a futon up a ladder. No: an unstable mass, already charged with potential energy and ready to split and slide, not a mass at rest. Here’s how. First and always, do everything it says to do in the master of ceremonies chapter (page 80). This is crucial. ‘Let’s just follow the characters around for a day’—in Apocalypse World, that’s automatically dangerous. It’s automatically a bad day. (97-98) There are no status quos in Apocalypse World. We first learn this slogan of Apocalypse World when explaining the MC move Look through Crosshairs (pg. 83). Status quo means the existing state of affairs, so to say there is no status quo is to say that the situation never holds still long enough to become a state of affairs. Relationships, desires, power structures—none of it is in a state of rest. So the MC’s job during the first session is to take all of that raw material created during character creation and arrange them at impossible angles to each other to “create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles [and] untenable arrangements.” That is, I think, one of the most important sentences in the book. Once you make that happen in your first session, you can sit back and watch the characters react to the world and world react to them, each trading force and energy as they collide off each other in a festival of narrative physics. (Throughout the rest of the game, the characters will fight to stabilize their world, but the MC principles will help us make sure that that stability doesn’t arrive until the story comes to a conclusion—but that’s a discussion for later) This simple notion that there is no status quo in Apocalypse World is the thing that makes Apocalypse World what it is, narratively, and all of the mechanics of the game are built to enforce the ever-changing nature of the world. No status quo is where the interpersonal drama comes from; it’s where the action comes from; it’s where the clarity of character comes from; it’s where the plot itself comes from. Robert McKee has a fantastic instructional book about screenwriting called Story. In it, he talks about the belief that stories are either plot-driven or character-driven. In a well-written story, there is no such distinction, because the plot can’t exist without these particular characters, and these particular characters cannot exist without these particular events and forces acting upon them. Here’s how he says it: The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self. The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naïve, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combinations of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does. Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices the characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change the one, you change the other. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure to express the character’s changed nature. . . . For this reason the phrase ‘character-driven story’ is redundant. All stories are ‘character-driven.’ Event design and character design mirror each other. Character cannot be expressed in depth except through the design of story (105-107). To me, the thing that makes Apocalypse World amazing is that it is built to create exactly what McKee is talking about. It’s design creates the pressures that impact the characters and allow the characters to respond and impact the world in return. The world and the character are built together from the very beginning, and before the first pair of dice is rolled, plot and character are inseparable. And the rules make that happen. The players have it easy. They have their playbooks to go through and then they’re ready to play. Your job is harder, you have a lot more to set up than they do. They each have one character to create, you have the whole bedamned world.
So let’s be fair. You have the whole world to create, you get the whole first session to create it in. You’re supposed to make their characters’ lives not boring, you get a whole session to get to know them. Apocalypse World is a game of discovery. The world is discovered through character creation and the characters are discovered through play. NPCs are introduced and PC-NPC-PC triangles are formed. Plot and character develop simultaneously as one element shapes the other. And the whole process is begun during this, the first session. The first session is a design element of Apocalypse World. This section doesn’t exist merely to introduce the new player to playing the game in a step-by-step manner (although it definitely does that, too). The first session is a necessary part of the game when playing it as designed. If Apocalypse World is a game of pool, then character creation is the racking of the balls. At the end of character creation and Hx, you have a web of characters and world elements and NPC all existing in tension with each other. And then the rest of the first session is the break, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy. This passage is our introduction to the first session, and as such, it lays out its purpose. You can’t accomplish any of your agenda items if you do not know the world that you need to make seem real and if you do not know the characters whose lives you need to make not boring. I love that this gives the MC directed goals during the first session. The MC is already playing to find out, only in the first session, they play is to find out who the characters are, what they want, what the world is like, and what the world wants from the characters. The one thing that seems off in this opening is that the first paragraph is a little unfair to the players. They don’t just create their one character; they are creating crucial elements of that whole bedamned world every time they select details about their character and answer questions about their Hx. They usher forth NPCs, build hardholds, form cults and gangs—in short, they give the MC the bulk of the raw material needed to put the story in motion. The MC will certainly create more elements as play progresses, but the character players do a lot of the heavy lifting at the start . . . which is of course by design. This is it. We’re at the end of the MC section. Up to this point, we have read all the rules for the MC when conducting her part of the conversation, always focusing on what the MC says. What you say, when you say it, what you need to achieve with you speak—all the rules in the section are about guiding the conversation. But this section isn’t “A Few More Things to Say”; it’s “A Few More Things to Do.” :
These aren’t principles or moves. They’re just good practice and I recommend them. In traditional RPGs, recommended “good practice” is pretty much the entirety of the GM section. In Apocalypse World, you get 8 short paragraphs. But the question is, why are they recommendations instead of rules? Let’s look at them and see. Make maps like anything. Have the players make maps like anything too. And sketches, and diagrams, and any kind of ephemera that seems good. Making maps can certainly be a part of the conversation. Sketches and diagrams can make Apocalypse World seem real. Such ephemera can follow what honesty demands and what your prep demands. In short, making maps can follow your agenda items and your principles, so why is it just a recommendation? Making maps is just another form of conversing, an additional way to ensure that the Shared Imagined Space is clearly defined. Some people will find helpful and others will find unnecessary, but nothing about the rules or the conversation requires the making of maps for the game to work. Maps do not interact with any other rules in the game. PC moves, MC moves, harm, threats, gear, character advancement—no system in the game requires maps, so there is no reason for the designer to insist on the practice. The next three recommendations are similar. They are all ways to enhance the conversation, particular approaches that let you achieve your agenda goals but that are not required to make the game run correctly because they don’t interact with any of the game’s system. Turn questions back on the asker or over to the group at large. ‘Good question, actually. What does the rag-waste outside the holding look like?’ Digress occasionally. Include details sometimes as though you were looking idly at a scene and some detail, something not at all the point, caught your attention. ‘She’s pinned rat furs to her wall. The pins are, like, souvenir push pins, the heads are tiny glass lenses with pictures of national monuments under them. Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial…’ Elide the action sometimes, and zoom in on its details other times. Play out a battle in precise and exacting detail, but in the middle of it say ‘so they keep you both pinned down there until nightfall.’ Sometimes pick one session up in the moments where the last left off, other times let days or weeks pass in between. If I were to write an advice book on MCing Pbta games, I’d title it “The Art of the Conversation.” That’s what these recommendations are, ways to make the conversation as interesting and compelling as possible. Specifically, these are conversational techniques that are desirable but cannot be mechanized. (Well, maybe they could be mechanized, but they aren’t in Apocalypse World.) This goes for moves, too. Making a dash under fire might mean crossing 3 meters of open ground in view of one of Dremmer’s snipers, it might mean crossing 100 meters of broken ground with his gang arrayed thereupon, it might mean crossing the whole damned burn flat with Dog Head and his grinning-dingo cannibals in pursuit. Let the moves expand and contract in time, all through the range from their smallest logical limit to their greatest. This recommendation is about how the moves can be used to cover small details or whole sets of actions in one roll, which is part of the magic of resolution systems that don’t rely on task-specific rolls. Making you aware of how you can use and interpret moves is important to do, and obviously belongs in this section. You don’t need to do this, but you are needlessly limiting the game if you don’t. The last two recommendations are different from the previous ones because following them will not help you meet your agenda goals or follow your principles: Go around the table. Over the course of a session, make sure that everybody gets some good dedicated screen time. ‘While this is going on, Dune, where are you? What are you doing?’ When interesting things are happening simultaneously, cut back and forth between them. Take breaks and take your time. Breaks are important, they let everybody reflect on what’s happened and plan a little about what their characters might do next. Little breaks in play when someone else’s character is on screen, longer play-stopping breaks for tea cigs or pee, breaks between sessions, even taking a whole session off now and then. A player worn out and at a loss now, after a break might have great ideas and enthusiasm. Better to call a break early, even, than to go past anyone’s endurance. Making sure everyone gets time in the spotlight does not make Apocalypse World seem real, make the characters’ lives not boring, or play to find out what happens. It is designed to make the players’ lives not boring. This advice is about directing the conversation. It is not about what you say but who you say it too. Similarly, taking breaks is about knowing when to pause or end the conversation. And that brings me back to where I started this post: the “Do” in the title to this section. Each of these items, even the ones focused on the conversation, are about things you can do as the MC to give everyone a shot at an awesome play experience. What can you do as an MC to make the conversation gripping and everyone at the table involved? What can you do to make the players’ moves reach their full potential? What can you do to make your part of the narrative full of surprises? These 8 things. That’s what you can do. The game’s rules give you things to say. When a player’s character goes aggro on someone and the player rolls 7–9, for instance, the rules give you a list of things to choose from. Choose one of them, and that’s what you say. Say it according to the principles as always. For instance, for they get the hell out of your way: “she dives into the mucky ditch and elbow-crawls away.” Or, for they give you what you want: “she puts the night-vision goggles down in front of you. ‘Fine, I didn’t realize you needed ’em so fucking bad,’ she says. ‘But don’t come over tonight, asshole, swear to god.’”
Your threat map gives you things to say, too. When a player’s character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, for instance, the rules might tell you to reveal something interesting. Something interesting? Look to your threat map: Joe’s Girl has joined the water cult, I’ll bet they didn’t know that. So say that, and of course say it according to the principles. Maybe “deep under the brain-howling, you come to hear … is it chanting? A list of people’s names, chanted over and over by a hundred subliminal voices. ‘Tum Tum … Gnarly … Fleece … Lala … Forner … Joe’s Girl … Shan …’” (Player: “wait, Joe’s Girl? Shit FUCK.”) Up until the discussion of the MC’s moves, the Master of Ceremonies chapter focuses on the ground rules for everything the MC says as her part of the conversation. Whatever the MC says, it has to accomplish at least one of the agenda items and satisfy what the principles, rules, honesty, and prep demand. Discussing the MC moves is the first time the text looks at the actual substance of the MC’s share of the conversation. But of course, the MC doesn’t just make moves or ask provocative questions; and that’s what the rest of this chapter is about. In this section, “Rules and Your Prep,” we look briefly at the MC’s conversational role when the PCs are making their moves. The key phrase in this passage is that elements of the game “give you things to say.” How comforting is that?! There’s a lot of pressure on the MC, and the game goes out of its way to never leave the MC high and dry for what tho say. Either the game will explicitly “give you things to say” or you can make a move, which is just another list of “things to say.” Stick to your agenda and principles and you’re good to go. But it’s not really just things the game gives you to say, is it? The game is designed to give you interesting, compelling, and dramatic things to say. For both the MC moves and the PC moves, your part of the conversation is guided by the rules to create exciting talk at the table. The examples in this passage, like the examples of the MC moves, exemplify the conversation created by the moves as much as they exemplify how the moves work from the MC’s perspective. Threats are referred to several times in this chapter. The “prep” that makes demands on us has plenty to do with threats, one of our MC moves is “make a threat move,” and here we learn that our threat map exists in part to give us “things to say.” I have already talked about how the threat map helps the MC say what honesty demands by working out in her prep along what trajectories different elements in the game world are travelling. What this passage drives home is that the threat map is a vital tool in the conversation to let us know what to say at all. In a recent interview with Jason Pitre, on his excellent podcast RPG Design PanelCast, episode 119, “Powered by the Apocalypse,” Meguey and Vincent Baker share a ton of thought-provoking insights. At one point, they are talking about the construction of PC moves, and Vincent says the following: “So one of those ghost moves allows you to ask the GM, ‘what does the ghost tell me?’ And I wouldn’t choose to use that move unless I was confident the GM would have an answer. Right? The GM has thought about it or can answer by gut or the GM is properly set up. . . . So that doesn’t put the GM in the uncomfortable spot of ‘I don’t know what this ghost tells . . . you!’” (0:48:44 -0:49:17). In light of this, we can see that the Open Your Brain move puts the MC in just such a spot, but the rules of threat maps supply you with the necessary material to answer the questions. It’s easy to think of the threats section as advice, a good way to organize your NPCs and storylines, but as we can see here, the game as written expects that prep work to be done in order to you to hold up your end of the conversation. A week or so ago, +William Nichols posted the following question: “What is necessary and appropriate to hack apocalypse world into a game wherein the characters are friends, and go on adventures together?” +Vincent Baker responded with: “1. Shared xp. 2. Collaboration moves, not seduce & manipulate and help or interfere. 3. GM prep that doesn't create pc-npc-pc triangles.”
That last one, number 3, didn’t sit right with me. PC-NPC-PC triangles are the best! Why would you ever NOT make those?! I let that rattle around in my brain for the past couple of days. What do PC-NPC relationships look like in different stories? That’s not a question I had ever asked myself before. It never occurred to me that they might look different in different stories or that that difference could be important information to translate into RPGs. But of course they do look different and that difference is important. Deadwood, Game of Thrones, The Shield, The Sopranos - these are the type of shows where the PCs and NPCs have triangulated relationships. We see scenes with all kinds of character-pairings that demonstrate to us all the facets of these characters. The different relationships are central to the drama and plot of these stories. But then there are shows like The X-Files and Star Trek. In those, the minor characters (which I am equating with NPCs) act pretty much the same no matter who they are with. Similarly, we don’t often get odd pairings of the major and minor characters in revealing scenes. The nature of those characters are set and displayed in ways other than through interactions with other characters. You can certainly play a Star Trek-like game with PC-NPC-PC triangles, but the flavor and feel will differ noticeably from the source material. That aspect of RPGs is not something I had ever considered. I’ve known of course that NPCs are always a valuable tool for the GM, but that they are differently shaped tools with different narrative purposes in different games – that is something I foolishly overlooked. Because the MC moves “aren’t technical terms or jargon,” there is no need to define them further; they mean exactly what they say. So instead of giving definitions, the Bakers gives examples of each move. What’s cool is that these are examples of the conversation created by these moves as much as they examples of the moves themselves.
For example, when showing what “Inflict harm (as established)” might be in play, the authors could have written: “this move can mean more than just having the players fill in a wedge on their harm clocks. If you send a warning to one player by having a nearby NPC gunned down, that is a kind of inflicting harm as well.” Instead, we get this: ”Oh Jesus, Audrey, they’ve got a sharpshooter above you. You find out about it when Mamo grunts and sits down hard, and doesn’t move again. What do you do?” (91) I think we can all agree that that is a bazillion times better than talking about what a move would look like. In the end, moves only exist in the conversation as things said by the MC, so there is no better way to discuss them. Moreover, the moves are the nexus for everything else that precedes them in this chapter. The moves are the things that the MC says, and as such they follow the agenda, the principles, and what must be always said. The examples demonstrate for us the coming together of all the MC’s requirements. In the example above, we see the principles in action. Apocalyptica is barfed forth in the harshness of the world. The MC addresses the character. The move is misdirected through the fiction. The move’s name is never spoken. Poor Mamo has been looked at through crosshairs. In the above example, we see that the MC says what the principles demand, potentially what her prep has demanded, and certainly what honesty demands. The MC is advised earlier in the chapter to “always be scrupulous, even generous with the truth. The players depend on you to give them real information they can really use about their characters’ surroundings, about what’s happening when and where” (81). Here we see that in action. Mamo doesn’t just hit the ground while the MC toys with Audrey to see if she can figure out what killed Mamo. The information that there is a sniper is given free and clear. That Mamo is dead and not just injured is given free and clear. That the sniper is above her is given free and clear. The drama is provided through the situation, not through the confusion the situation could cause. And in the example above, we see the agenda items have all been met. Apocalypse World is indeed made real; Audrey’s life is anything but boring; and the MC is playing to find out what happens. All of that is communicated through a single example. The aggregate of the examples puts into practice everything that has come before them. Oh, and of course the example above also shows that Mamo’s death is serving as the “set . . . up,” the “start to the action,” as moves are supposed to do. How hard the move is is a bit of mystery. On the one hand, Audrey wasn’t shot, but we don’t know how big and NPC Mamo was or how important Mamo was to Audrey. The MC might have intended this to be an incredibly hard and direct move, or it could have been little more than a warning shot. In a lot of ways, I feel like the examples are the breath of reassuring fresh air that comes at the end of the chapter. As MC, you’ve been ordered around, given lists of things to do and not to do, read over bullet points and warning and commands—and then it is all filtered down into a couple of lines of dialogue that lets you know this is no more complicated than saying these awesome things. The language is colloquial and familiar. It’s a way of saying, don’t sweat it. You’ve got this. At the same time, the examples are a sort of promise. Follow your principles, mind your agenda, and always say what honesty demands, and you will have exciting scenes, moments of intense drama, and great storytelling happening naturally and spontaneously at your table. 51. Today we are looking at the “guidelines for choosing your moves” in the MC section of Apocalypse World.
Here are guidelines for choosing your moves: Always choose a move that can follow logically from what’s going on in the game’s fiction. It doesn’t have to be the only one, or the most likely, but it does have to make at least some kind of sense (89). That the move must fit the fiction seems pretty obvious, but the bar here is set pretty low: “it does have to make at least some kind of sense.” What that low bar makes clear is that the move exists separate from the fiction as a thing unto itself, and moreover, that the move takes priority over the fiction. You need to clothe the move in sensible fiction, yes, but what comes first is the move, not the fiction. You do not, to continue the analogy, pick out an outfit and cram a move inside it. Of course, in actual play there is a mental back and forth between moves and fiction as you find the right one of each, but the text itself prioritizes the move. This makes sense by the rules of the game: while you can make a move that only makes “some kind of sense” in the fiction, you cannot say something that is great fiction but that is not a move (unless you are of course asking or answering a question). 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. However, when a player’s character hands you the perfect opportunity on a golden plate, make as hard and direct a move as you like. It’s not the meaner the better, although mean is often good. Best is: make it irrevocable. When a player’s character makes a move and the player misses the roll, that’s the cleanest and clearest example there is of an opportunity on a plate. When you’ve been setting something up and it comes together without interference, that counts as an opportunity on a plate too. But again, unless a player’s character has handed you the opportunity, limit yourself to a move that sets up future moves, your own and the players’ characters’. These four paragraphs are all about the hardness and directness of your move. (While “soft” moves entered the vocabulary from the first games to use the Apocalypse World engine, AW itself does not use the word, and the Bakers felt no need to include it in the 2nd edition, so we’ll follow suit here.) The definition of a typical move is a great one: “A start to the action, not its conclusion.” It’s a little misleading because even the hardest move typically doesn’t end the action; after all, you still need to ask “what do you do?” no matter how hard and direct a move you make. That said, “a start to the action” refers to the dramatic build-up of a scene; the music is quickening and mounting because trouble’s at hand, but all the horns and cymbals have yet to come crashing down. The standard move should “set . . . up” further drama. Your move sets up two things, really. It sets up something nasty to befall the characters should they fail to act or fail in their action, and it sets up the characters to respond to your move and make moves of their own. It’s that nastiness being set up that comes to bear when a “perfect opportunity on a golden plate” presents itself. Such an opportunity comes in two forms: (1) a missed roll, and (2) the characters’ failure to interfere with what you have been setting up. If you make a move that suspends some nastiness over the character’s head, and she doesn’t address it, bring that nastiness on down. If she tries to address it and misses, bring it on down. But outside of those two possibilities, your moves should keep the characters responding and making moves of their own. The kinesis of that back and forth is the engine that drives the drama of play. That back and forth is then punctuated with (1) your hard and direct moves should they PCs miss, and (2) the consequential results of a PCs’ strong hit. The best thing to do when making your hard and direct move is to make it “irrevocable.” This is in keeping with the way Apocalypse World approaches narrative. Making your moves “irrevocable” follows the same line of thought that says “there are not status quos in Apocalypse World.” Making a move that’s “irrevocable” is part of making successes “consequential” and part of “looking through crosshairs.” The long-term play of Apocalypse World is based on the notion that the world itself changes in response to the characters’ interactions with it. The very rules prevent the game from becoming a serial tale in which everything returns to normal between episodes. To play the game according to its rules is to fill both the world and the characters with scars and reminders of what used to be and the promise of what could be. If a character is defined by her choices and actions, those choices and actions must have real and permanent consequences in order to have any meaning at all. Otherwise those choices are play choices and they put no pressure on the characters and reveal nothing real about them. As a final note, I want to say that I love the final sentence quoted above, particularly the phrase, “unless a player’s character has handed you the opportunity.” Golden opportunities and hard moves are determined entirely by the PCs – they must hand the MC the opportunity for the MC to use it. This requirement is part of the same approach that keeps MCs from rolling dice or determining difficulty levels. The rules of Apocalypse World attempt to limit the destructive powers of the MC’s whim as much as possible and still have a functional game with a GM/player split. The MC can monkey with the fiction and create all kinds of trouble, but they are under strict orders to give the PCs what they worked for and to not make hard moves unless a golden opportunity on a plate has been handed to them by the PCs themselves. This is about as just as an unjust world can get. But maybe that’s not right. How do you interpret “guidelines” as used in this passage? I have interpreted them as rules still, but it’s certainly a weaker word, suggesting things you should do rather than must do. It’s certainly stronger than “good practice” that is used to introduce the “Few More Things to Do” section on page 93, but is it as strong as “rules”? And then there’s that “generally” that kicks off the third paragraph I quoted. There’s a hesitancy to raise these guidelines to the status of rules, isn’t there? The softness of the presentation suggests that sometimes the story demands a hard and direct move even when the PCs haven’t offered up a golden opportunity. It’s an unusual position for a game full of hard rules. We’re moving on to MC moves! There are 14 basic moves you can make as an MC of Apocalypse World:
1. Separate them. 2. Capture someone. 3. Put someone in a spot. 4. Trade harm for harm (as established). 5. Announce off-screen badness. 6. Announce future badness. 7. Inflict harm (as established). 8. Take away their stuff. 9. Make them buy. 10. Activate their stuff’s downside. 11. Tell them the possible consequences and ask. 12. Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost. 13. Turn their move back on them. 14. Make a threat move. After every move: “what do you do?” For today, I just want to talk about the order in which the moves are presented. Why not, for instance, start the list with the most common move: announce future badness? They are not presented alphabetically, and they are not presented in order of importance or anticipated frequency of use. But you know that the authors spent some time stacking them in this order, so we should spend a moment ruminating on why. It seems to me that the list begins with the most visual, dramatic, readily understood, and easily interpreted. Placing these at the top of the list puts the reader in the proper mindset to understand what a move is and how it relates to the fiction unfolding at the table. Just as important, when the MC consults the list at the table, these first three items put her in mind to keep the story dramatic and active. In addition, all three moves directly affect the PCs’ physical bodies—separating, capturing, and putting them in a spot. The two moves involving harm (trading and inflicting it) also directly affect the PCs’ bodies, but they are not lumped together; instead, they are separated from each other. I don’t have a good reading for why they would be separated. It could be that trading harm has more in common with the first three moves and that inflicting harm has more in common with taking away their stuff than either harm move has with each other. Trading harm suggests a mutual struggle between a PC and an NPC. This struggle fits nicely with the first three moves as an easily grasped dramatic device. Inflicting harm on the other hand puts the character on the receiving end only, just as taking away their stuff does. Both of these two moves fall naturally on the harder end of the spectrum and can be quite hard if the MC is so inclined. If the moves aren’t hard, they really fall more into the “announce future badness” territory. Coming between the two harm moves are the “announce badness” moves. These two moves point to the dangers that may separate, capture, harm, or put the PCs in a spot. Why does “off-screen badness” come before “future badness?” I think “off-screen” is favored because it is an easily understood term, whereas “future,” at least in this context, is initially vague. Once you read the explanation of the move, its meaning becomes very clear, but for the purposes of the list, “off-screen” is much more immediately graspable. Moves 8-10 are all concerned with the PCs’ “stuff”: take away their stuff, make them buy, and activate their stuffs’ downside. “Stuff” is another aspect of the PCs that the MC can poke and prod at and these moves provide an avenue for doing so. After covering their persons, the dangers before them, and their stuff, the next three moves target ways to play with what the characters themselves do. Telling them the possible consequences and asking and offering an opportunity with or without a cost are two sides of the same coin. You want to do this thing? Here’s what you stand to gain or lose by doing so; want to go for it? If the previous MC moves put the PCs in situations to see what they do, these moves highlight the situation they are already in to see what kind of choice they make. What kind of choice the characters make is always the name of the game, because it is through choice and the action that follows that the characters will reveal who they are, what’s important to them, and how they engage with the world. This is where the gears of the characters’ moves mesh effortlessly with the gears of the MC’s moves, each one directly powering the other. The final move of course gives the MC access to all the moves specific to her threats. The common theme behind all the moves is that through them, the MC puts the characters in a position to (1) make a choice, and (2) act. Each move on this list forces the character to react, which leads naturally to the MC making a move as a reaction to their reaction. That’s the engine that makes the game move forward. But it’s more than the propelling of plot, as I said earlier; it’s the revelation of who these characters are through the choices they make and the actions they take. It’s not just that you should ask “what do you do” after every move; it’s that you should design all your moves to compel everyone at the table to ask themselves “what will they do?!” We’ve walked through the principles one at a time to see how each one works. Now it’s time to look at them together:
Barf forth apocalyptica. Address yourself to the characters, not the players. Make your move, but misdirect. Make your move, but never speak its name. Look through crosshairs. Name everyone, make everyone human. Ask provocative questions and build on the answers. Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards. Be a fan of the players’ characters. Think offscreen too. Sometimes, disclaim decision-making. Barfing forth apocalyptica is the flavor that seasons everything you say. Addressing yourself to the characters and making your move but misdirecting and never speaking its name ground the conversation in the Fiction in spite of non-fictional motivations. Looking through crosshairs colors your attitude toward the things you control and gives you permission to avoid status quos and to make the players’ characters’ actions consequential and meaningful. Naming everyone and making everyone human makes NPCs that will allow you to satisfy your agenda items. NPCs are the meat of your world and the main way the MC interacts with the Fiction; they are her number-one tool. Asking provocative questions and building on the answers forces the MC to share the creation of the fictional space in the conversation, and it allows the conversation to go deep inside the characters’ heads to reveal their feelings and attitudes. Responding with fuckery and intermittent rewards and being a fan of the players’ characters dictate the way you react to characters’ actions and your attitude toward them. Knowing these two things lets you respond appropriately to anything the players’ characters do. Thinking offscreen forces the scope of your narrative and the consequences of the characters’ actions to be far-reaching. Disclaiming decision-making gives you the tools to play to find out what happens. Each principle places a restraint upon what you can say on your end of the conversation. But they restrain you in order to guide you and make Apocalypse World work. They are (to use an admittedly clumsy analogy) like the track of a luge slide, channeling your energy and propelling you forward to take you where you need to go when playing. Most importantly, they teach you how to MC the game by directing what you can and cannot say. You can think of each principle as answering a crucial question to MCing Apocalypse World. How do I make everything I say bring the post apocalyptic world to life? Barf forth apocalyptica. How do I guide the conversation so that it’s grounded in the fiction whenever possible? Address yourself to the characters, not the players. Make your move, but misdirect. Make your move, but never speak its name. How do I build the tools I need to create the stories this game needs? Name everyone, make everyone human. How am I supposed to respond to what the PCs do? Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards. Be a fan of the players’ characters. Look through crosshairs. How do I make the players’ characters’ actions consequential? Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards. Be a fan of the players’ characters. Look through cross hairs. Think offscreen too. How do I make the focus of the Fiction both broad and deep? Ask provocative questions and build on the answers. Think offscreen too. How do I share the act of creation with the players? Ask provocative questions and build on the answers. How do I balance having ultimate power with playing to find out? Sometimes, disclaim decision-making. Moreover, if you always say what these principles demand (while also being mindful of what honesty, your prep, and the rules demand) you can be certain that everything you add to the conversation will make Apocalypse World seem real, make the players’ characters’ lives not boring, and let you play to find out what happens. And the text communicates all that in fewer than 8 pages. In order to play to find out what happens, you’ll need to pass decision-making off sometimes. Whenever something comes up that you’d prefer not to decide by personal whim and will, don’t. The game gives you four key tools you can use to disclaim responsibility: you can put it in your NPCs’ hands, you can put it in the players’ hands, you can create a countdown, or you can make it a stakes question (86-87).
This is the only principle that is directly concerned with playing to find out what happens. Making everyone human, making your move but misdirecting, responding with fuckery—they all concern themselves with making Apocalypse World real and the characters’ lives not boring. Asking provocative questions demands that you use the answers to inform your understanding of the world, so in a sense it prevents the MC from controlling all the details, forcing them in the direction of playing to find out. But this final principle is the only one that tells us how to play to find out and what playing to find out looks like. According to this principle, it is all about “decision-making.” Specifically it is about letting the Fiction, the characters’ actions, the rules, and your prep work inform your decision-making rather than simply relying on your “personal whim and will.” Putting “it in your NPCs’ hands” is about “saying what your prep demands”: You can (1) put it in your NPCs’ hands. Just ask yourself, in this circumstance, is Birdie really going to kill her? If the answer is yes, she dies. If it’s no, she lives. Yes, this leaves the decision in your hands, but it gives you a way to make it with integrity. Who an NPC is, what she wants, and what her attitudes toward all the PCs are—those are all things that the game wants you to nail down between sessions so that they have their own trajectory and momentum within the Fiction. Then you can turn to your NPC and ask, what would you do in this situation? Following their answer allows you to make the decision “with integrity,” which is just another way of saying what honesty demands. Saying what your prep demands and what honesty demands is the way you play to find out what happens. This is why the game text says several times over some version of “you have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality” (80). Let’s jump to the 3rd tool: You can (3) create a countdown. . . . Just sketch a quick countdown clock. Mark 9:00 with “she gets hurt,” 12:00 with “she dies.” Tick it up every time she goes into danger, and jump to 9:00 if she’s in the line of fire. This leaves it in your hands, but gives you a considered and concrete plan, instead of leaving it to your whim. I love the distinction that’s drawn here between leaving it “in your hands” and leaving it “to your whims.” As the MC, the impact that the PCs have on the world is always in your hand, but the “discipline” needed to be an MC (to borrow a word from the first section of this chapter—page 81) keeps you from deciding on a whim when it’s important. That “when it’s important” is a crucial clause because the text itself suggests that you can decide on a whim when you want. But remember: declaring things on a whim is still subject to what you must always say; you can only declare something on a whim if you are not going against what honesty, your prep, the rules, and the stated principles demand. There is a delicate and difficult line to walk as an MC, and the rules do everything they can to equip you to walk it. On the one hand, you have to be an invested audience of the tale being played out. You have to be a fan of the characters and care about the NPCs and the world you all have pieced together. On the other hand, you have to resist using your awesome MC power to override the internal logic of the Fiction. This is where that discipline comes in. As the text says earlier: “You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside” (80). This principle is all about how you walk that line. Stakes questions are presented as a separate tool, but they are really the starting point for the first three tools in this section. Making a stakes question is about being willing to see what happens rather than making determinations about what happens: Or you can (4) make it a stakes question. . . . “I wonder, will Dou live through all this?” Now you’ve promised yourself not to just answer it yourself, yes or no, she lives or she dies. Whenever it comes up, you must give the answer over to the NPCs, to the players’ characters, to the game’s moves, or to a countdown, no cheating. That question – “I wonder, will Dou live through all this?” – is a question you ask yourself when watching a movie or reading a book, when you are consuming fiction rather than creating it. In the text, to ask that question is to “promise” to play to find out. You can think of each of these tools as really the same tool, just implemented at different times in the Fiction. At the start of the session, if you know Dou is in a precarious position, you can make a stakes question. If in play, you start noticing the danger to Dou, you can whip up a countdown. If in the middle of the action, Dou gets hurt, you can leave her survival up to the players’ actions. And if Dou finds herself in Birdie’s hands in the thick of battle and you have a hard move to make, then you put the answer in your NPCs’ hands. They are all versions of the same thing and they all start with the willingness to let the Fiction dictate the course of events rather than MC fiat. As a side note, I also like how this principle exists in tension with looking through crosshairs. Together they say that you need to be willing to destroy any- and everything you create, and when decision-by-whim is permitted, go for it. But you still need to play to find out in those cases that deciding something by whim contradicts what honesty, the rules, and your prep demand. That’s actually quite a bit of tension for the MC to maintain, and I think that tension is one of the things that makes being an MC of Apocalypse World so exciting and rewarding. When it’s time for you to make a move, imagine what your many various NPCs must have been doing meanwhile. Have any of them done something offscreen that now becomes evident? Are any of them doing things offscreen that, while invisible to the players’ characters, deserve your quite notice? This is part of making Apocalypse World seem real – and if you pay attention to your threats, it’s part of making the characters’ lives not boring too.
This short principle exists hand in hand with “name everyone, make them human.” Both principles are about the prep work you do between sessions, both principles are tied to your threats, and both principles serve to make the world seem to exist beyond the lives of the players’ characters. Apocalypse World demands that the MC understand the internal logic and causality of the world. That’s where the prep comes in. The first session might be close to prep-free, but between sessions, the MC is required to put in a little work to make the game function as it is designed. You need to learn who your NPCs are, what they want from each PC, and what their own plans are. Gathering this information allows you to hit all of your agenda items; Developed and focused NPCs will make Apocalypse World seem real, make the characters’ lives not boring, and allow you to play to find out because all the NPCs have their own pre-reasoned trajectories. Moreover, your prep work allows you to say what your prep demands and what honesty demands. And those same developed and focused NPCs can keep doing what they are doing even when they are offscreen. This principle is part of what makes the game emulate fantastic serial TV dramas. When the world and NPCs are in motion even as the players’ characters are busy elsewhere, the world feels alive and real. When played this way, the PCs’ actions aren’t only consequential; those consequences keep on consequencing far beyond this one time and place. That internal chain of cause and effect keeps going no matter where the PCs have placed their bodies and their attention. Like “play to find out,” “be a fan of the players’ characters” has become a common phrase. It’s a phrase that RPG players have wanted and needed to hear, eagerly embraced because it’s why we all play in the first place: to see awesome characters do awesome things and create awesome tales.
It is no surprise that this principle follows immediately after “respond with fuckery.” After talking about how the MC’s part of the Fiction should respond to player characters’ actions, it is only appropriate to discuss the MC’s general attitude toward PCs. Having just said that part of your job is fucking with the PCs, the text makes it explicit that fucking over the PCs is not your job. The word “fan” here is a perfect word choice. It positions the MC as an audience member of the story unfolding (something the game text does repeatedly). When we are fans of a character in other media, we root for their success and want to see them reveal the quality of their character through trials and tribulations. We want to see them get into trouble so we can enjoy seeing them get out of trouble. We want to see them face hardship and come out the other side better for it in some way. The language of the explanatory text of this principle drives home this notion of the MC as audience. In the second paragraph, we learn: The worst way there is to make a character’s life more interesting is to take away the things that made the character cool to begin with. The gunlugger’s guns, but also the gunlugger’s collection of ancient photographs – what makes the character match our expectations and also what makes the characters rise above them. Don’t take those away (86) The language here is laced with evaluative words. “More interesting,” “cool,” “expectations” – all of these position the MC as audience member, one with an opinion about and an interest in the characters. “More interesting” is in reference to making “the players’ characters’ lives not boring,” of course, but boring for whom? Boring for the characters and their players, certainly, but also boring for us, the MC. As audience members, we want their lives to be interesting to us. Same with “cool.” They are cool to us. And whose expectations are we thinking about? Our expectations. If you do not think they are cool, do not find their lives to be interesting, and do not have expectations for the characters to meet and exceed, you are not putting yourself in the position of audience and fan and you should probably pack it in and play something else. To jump to the end: When you highlight a character’s stats, try to choose one that’ll show off who the character is. Find what you find interesting about their characters, and play there. You have phenomenal power in playing the world. Through your NPCs, you can push and prod and poke the players’ characters. How do you decide where to push and prod and poke? By thinking as a fan who is watching a great narrative play out before her eyes. You “find what you find interesting” and go there, see what happens. This is the basis of stakes questions. This is the heart of MCing Apocalypse World. You know how when watching a TV show you think, I wonder what would happen if this gal had to make a choice between x and y? Now you have the ability to get an answer to that question! Think like an invested audience member, that is what this principle demands. The other part of this text I want to focus on is the third paragraph, from which we get this gem: The other worst way is to deny the character success when the characters fought for it and won it. Always give the characters what they work for! No, the way to make a character’s success interesting is to make it consequential. . . . Let the characters’ success make waves outward, let them topple already unstable situations. There are no status quos in Apocalypse World (86) I have many times heard that a 10+ is often the least exciting throw in the game—you get what you want without complications. Yeah, maybe It’s exciting to roll high, but where’s the thrill of the 7-9 results? The Bakers accurately pinpoint this as a moment that an MC might be mistakenly tempted to subvert the success "for the sake of the story." But AW is designed so that the story will take care of itself if you just focus on making everything have consequences, success as well as failure. So to avoid the potential pitfall of an MC subverting a success to be “interesting,” this bit of the rules tells you how to celebrate their successes and make them interesting at the same time: make them every bit as consequential as failures. All that work you put into creating NPCs with simple desires and straightforward relationships gets to pay off yet again when you think about how this success would impact the NPCs and their wants and opinions. Follow the internal logic of the Fiction and all the trajectories you have in place and see where the successes can impact them. Cause and effect doesn’t stop because characters get what they worked for. As in “fuck around with,” not “fuck over.” This is like when you barf apocalyptica onto someone’s answer, but do it all the time. How about an example?
Marie makes it super clear to Roark that she doesn’t care who he kills, but he’s to bring Joe’s Girl (an NPC) back to her alive. For “questioning” or “examination” or something—Marie wants access to Joe’s Girl’s living brain. So Roark goes out, murders a batch of people, and comes back with Joe’s Girl alive. Here’s where I fuck around, though: he’s beaten the SHIT out of her. Marie has access to her brain (because always give the characters what they work for) but she’s in a coma, her back is broken, her face is smashed in. Joe’s Girl is alive for now, but ruined for good. I gave Marie what she worked for, but not really what she hoped for. See it? Throw curves. Put your bloody fingerprints all over everything you touch. Intermittently, though, right, give one of the players’ characters exactly what she hoped for, and maybe go a little beyond. Do it just enough, and not when they expect it, so that they always hope that this time is one of the times that it’ll work out. A third of the time? Half? Not rare, just not predictable. This principle is all pretty clear, so I don’t have much to say here, but I must point out another one of my favorite sentences in the book: “Put your bloody fingerprints all over everything you touch.” Gah! It’s directly related to barfing forth apocalyptica, but it’s so much more personal. It’s a perfectly evocative phrase that says not only are you breaking things and fucking with them, but that the signs of your fuckery will linger long after you have gone. Fingerprints are unique identifiers as well, which suggests you as the MC fuck with things in your own unique way—put your particular stamp of fuckery on everything that passes through your hand, and as MC, nearly everything passes through your hands. That’s a gem of a sentence right there. The other thing I’d like to point out is how carefully and thoughtfully these principles are worded. Every word in them has their place, as becomes apparent when you read the explanation that follows them. Here, the first paragraph defines what “Respond with fuckery” means. The second paragraph exemplifies the definition and makes clear what a “reward” is: “always give the characters what they work for.” And the final paragraph explains “intermittent.” Each word has a specific weight and meaning so that when you are looking at your principles during play, the whole meaning is there for you to grasp. Look back at the ones we’ve covered already and you’ll see that there is nothing casual in their seemingly casual appearance. Ask provocative questions and build on the answer. Name everyone, make everyone human. The explanations spend time with each word in the title, filling each word with meaning so that the principle says everything it wants to say, not a word more and not a word less. This is a carefully constructed text that teaches the reader that each word is laden with meaning and purposefully chosen. If you enjoy that kind of reading, you’ll love the text. If you don’t, you won’t. Everybody loves this part of Apocalypse World. In a game that wants the conversation to be as anchored in the Fiction as possible, questions are a phenomenal way to make that Fiction rich and layered.
Start simple: “What’s your living space like?” “Who’s known each other longest?” But as play proceeds, ask for immediate and intimate details of the characters’ experiences. In his playtest, Mikael made himself a list of question prompts: “Feeling, Sound, Detail: thing, thoughts, Pose, Smell, Need, Irritant,Texture, In sight, Relations, Taste, Detail: place.” They led him to ask questions like “Why can you only fit two people in the cabin of the Tank?” “How do the people of the Tent City make you feel?” “How do her lips feel under your palm?” Very good stuff (84-85) The key word in the principle is of course “provocative.” Asking questions is all good and fine, but the rich stuff comes out because of questions that provoke—provoke thought, introspection, examination, and details details details. Some questions look for narrative details that impact the story at plot level, such as the limited seating in a tank or the physical layout of a living space. But the really rich material is when we get a glimpse inside the heads of the characters, such as how the people in Tent City make you feel and how her lips feel on your palm. Those are the moments that we love because it makes the Fiction rich and real. “Immediate and intimate details,” that’s the secret. Talk about making Apocalypse World seem real! In these moments, characters are more than their actions show. In fact, we can have a productive tension between their feelings and their actions. A standard saying in story-focused RPGs is that if it doesn’t happen on screen, it doesn’t happen. But while these moments of insight don’t really happen on screen, they are every bit as real as actions because of the way that they enter the Fiction. The moments allow RPGs to go beyond the limitations of movies and TV and become more like novels. After you have played this way, not doing so feels incomplete. Once you have the player’s answer, build on it. I mean three things by that: (1) barf apocalyptica upon it, by adding details and imagery of your own; (2) refer to it later in play, bringing it back into currency; and (3) use it to inform your own developing apocalyptic aesthetic, incorporating it—and more importantly, its implications—into your own vision (85). The second half of the principle is to “build on the answers,” and this paragraph gives us three specific ways to do that. While all the players are contributing to building the Apocalypse World of the game, it is the MC’s job to bring the world to life. The MC has the prep work of daydreaming apocalyptica. The MC has final say over whether extra vehicles or prosthetics are appropriate to the world of the game. The MC, in short, is responsible for the overall vision and cohesion of the world—how can she “make Apocalypse World seem real” if she doesn’t have final say in the physics and details of the world? So barfing apocalyptica upon an answer serves three purposes; (1) it allows the MC to both let the answer stand on its own and fit into the world created; (2) it demands that the MC have Apocalypse World ever encroaching upon the characters, corrupting even their senses and thoughts; and (3) it makes the questions and answers a more complete conversation, bringing the MC back into the construction of the Fiction. Referring to the answers later demands that the MC make the answer have significance. Again, there are a couple of reasons for this. First, as a player, you want your invited contributions to matter. If whenever you answered a question you believed that the answer didn’t matter, you would have no motivation to invest anything into your answer. Your contributions would be meaningless. Second, if those “intimate and immediate details” were cool but pointless, they would have no weight in the overall story we are creating. If a novel gave you insight into a character but never did anything with it, it would be unsatisfying, and it would give you the sense that the author was trying to pad her word count. Bringing these details back into currency is just part of good storytelling, and Apocalypse World wants to make moments of good storytelling baked into the very act of playing the game. Even though the MC has final say in the aesthetics of the Apocalypse World in any given game, the MC is not allowed to have the only say. Incorporating the answers and their implications into your own vision demands that the MC allow the answers to alter the very DNA of the world in some way. Remember, this is a game that insists that you not bring a plot or storyline to the table. The MC has to react to the players, to both their characters and their answers to provocative questions. It’s especially important to ask, the first time each character opens her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, what that’s like for her. Maybe it’s the same for everybody, maybe it’s different. And after the first time, always, always add details of your own (85) The world’s psychic maelstrom is a big question mark in every game of Apocalypse World. What is it? How does it work? Did it cause the apocalypse or was it born from the apocalypse? During character creation, the MC is given a couple of sentences to say about it to the player, but that’s it. It’s not something that is discussed in detail, and it is certainly not something that should be worked out before play begins. At no point are the players prompted to decide anything about the psychic maelstrom before someone triggers the move. Instead, those details are developed through the individual contributions prompted by provocative questions. The second player to trigger the move can agree entirely with what the first player said, tweak it in some major or minor way, or do something entirely different. The more the move is triggered, the more details we get, and the nature of the maelstrom slowly gets defined as the mystery is answered for us as it is for our characters. This method creates necessarily more interesting and compelling maelstroms than we would have cooked up as a group. More importantly, our play thus far will inform the maelstrom, which will in turn inform our play, which means that thematically, the maelstrom will fit more reliably into our world than if we invented it before play. That is the beauty and power of creating narrative through questions. We are at the 6th principle, and this one is all about NPCs, every character the MC controls. The three paragraphs of this principle cover everything you need to know about bringing NPCs to life in an RPG. They are, I think, one of the best sections in any book about NPCs. They boil down the essence what makes NPCs compelling in play and how to make a character you just created seem multi-dimensional.
So what’s it doing in a section about MC principles? NPCs are the A-number-one tools available to MCs to accomplish all the agenda items. Want to make Apocalypse World seem real? Populate it with characters who seam real. Want to make the players’ characters’ lives not boring? Give them driven NPCs who want something different from each character to poke and prod at their lives. What to play to find out what happens? Bring those triangulated relationships together and watch it all boil and roil. 9 times out of 10 when an MC goes to make a move in the Fiction, she is going to use an NPC to make it happen. When characters are getting separated, it’s more often than not a set of NPCs you use to separate them. When you are responding with fuckery and intermittent rewards, you are probably wielding a problematic NPC to fuck with the players. So how do we make that happen? There are three paragraphs in this section and each one discusses a different aspect of NPCs in Apocalypse World. The first paragraph is about making the NPCs “seem real”: The first step toward making your NPCs seem real is to name them. There’s a list of good NPC names on the 1st session worksheet, and feel free to scavenge unused names from the character playbooks too. Every NPC who gets even a single line or a single significant on-screen action, give a name (84). Naming NPCs is about two things. The first, as stated here, is to make them “seem real” (which shouldn’t surprise us since three of the principles so far are about making the fiction seem real). Giving an NPC a name turns her from being some woman to that woman. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. What isn’t stated here is that when you have a game whose Fiction can go anywhere the players point their characters, you never know which NPCs will become important and return in future scenes. If you name “every NPC who gets even a single line or . . . action” then the game is prepared to go wherever the tale leads. The second paragraph is all about portraying the NPCs to give them life within the fiction: Make your NPCs human by giving them straightforward, sensible self-interests. Take Roark, one of my favorite NPCs. Roark comes back from burning down the neighboring hold, unleashing chaos upon us all, and he’s beaming because he’s really just not that complicated. He wanted to burn it down, so he did, and now he wants a bubble bath because he’s all sooty, and that’s his entire deal. In your game, make all your NPCs just not that complicated. They do what they want to do, when they want to do it, and if something gets in their way, well, they deal with that now. What they do in life is follow their parts around—their noses, their stomachs, their hearts, their clits & dicks, their guts, their ears, their inner children, their visions. This is brilliant stuff. Like naming them, giving the NPCs “straightforward, sensible self-interests” also serves two purposes. The first is, once again, to make them seem “human,” real. This helps the conversation stay grounded in the Fiction and it gives the player characters focused NPCs to bounce off of. The second is equally critical to the way Apocalypse World is run. By making the NPC straightforward and “just not that complicated,” you are giving them an internal logic by which you can know how they will react to whatever the player characters dish out. If you know which body part controls them, then you can say what honesty demands. If you know what their self-interest is, then you can disclaim decision-making. If you know what they want to do, then you can say what you prep demands. If you haven’t figured them out, then you can’t follow the internal logic of the world, which the game demands in the name of fairness for the players. You can’t make Roark do what you want for the sake of the plot if you know damn well that Roark would never do that. Focus on the internal logic, and the “plot” will take care of itself. Then, you can make PC–NPC–PC triangles—and make your NPCs even more human—just by making sure that their uncomplicated self-interests involve the players’ characters individually, not as a group. Show different sides of their personalities to the players’ different characters. Roark loves Marie, who has ambitions, but he serves Uncle, who wants people in their places. Roark goes to Uncle to boast, to Bish to feel superior, to Marie for bubble baths. Foster wants to overthrow Uncle and take his holding, but would prefer everyone else—Bish, Marie, Damson, Dune—to stay on under her rule. These are the kinds of triangles that give the players’ characters something to talk about. This secret is what the best scriptwriters know. You can’t show a character being “complicated” or “complex” in a single action. It is the aggregate of that character’s actions that communicate their complexity. And the best way to reveal that complexity is through interaction with different characters. The key, as the text says, is to make sure “that their uncomplicated self-interests involve the players’ characters individually, not as a group.” If an NPC has a unique relationship with each character - and desires something particular from each character - those relationships and desires will exist at cross purposes. This setup not only makes the NPCs seem “even more human,” it also creates a rich and textured Fiction for the characters to chew on and work with. This is a surefire way to “make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.” The first principle is the overarching principle. The 2nd through 4th principles are about surrounding the players with fiction. The 5th principle is the first to tell us how to shape the Fiction:
Look through crosshairs. Whenever your attention lands on someone or something that you own—an NPC or a feature of the landscape, material or social—consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground. An individual NPC, a faction of NPCs, some arrangement between NPCs, even an entire rival holding and its NPC warlord: crosshairs. It’s one of the game’s slogans: “there are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” You can let the players think that some arrangement or institution is reliable, if they’re that foolish, but for you yourself: everything you own is, first, always and overwhelmingly, a target (83-84). Let’s take a moment to praise great writing. “Look through crosshairs” is another one of the book's great phrases. We have to be more than merely willing to destroy anything we own as MCs, we have to actively see them as targets, like cold-blooded snipers. I love the concision and the strong visual image it conjurs. The other standout sentence is the rhythmic overkill of “consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground.” Not only is that a fantastic list of destruction, it’s poetic in structure, rhythm, and even rhyme: each phrase in the list grows longer than its predecessor, the middle pairing plays off the opposing “down” and “up,” and it all slide into the delicious “burying it in the poisoned ground.” That conclusion is even more satisfying because of the unexpected rhyme of ground with down. Did I mention that I love that sentence? What is this principle all about? Why is it important to be willing—nay, determined—to burn to cinders everything in our purview? When a GM falls in love with her NPCs, her evil organizations, her plans for the future—that’s when the player characters are in danger of no longer being able to decide their own future. All this talk of destruction is about letting go of those things you love in order to let the story breathe and change, because change is really what is at issue here. “There are no status quos in Apocalypse World.” This is the first time we hear that slogan, but it really is the central idea behind looking through crosshairs. Apocalypse World is a game whose central propelling idea is that in this world actions have consequences, which beget actions that have their own consequences. Think of a chain of dominoes, a series of causes and effects. But if your love for one of those dominoes keeps it from falling, then we will never get the important chain reaction that is at the heart of the story we are creating. So when the players do a thing, let it have consequences. No, make it have consequences, because everything destroyed by their actions will propel the story irreversibly forward. This principle alone will allow the stories created through your game to mirror some of the great TV dramas that you know and love. What would Game of Thrones be like if George R. R. Martin was not willing to look at every one of his beloved characters through crosshairs? Pick an epic drama you love, and you will probably find a trail of broken and bled-out bodies, the fallout from irrevocable decisions the heroes have made. Be like that. Knock down those dominoes and play to find out what happens from there. Before we move on to the 5th MC principle I need to take a moment to amend yesterday’s post and tie it together with a post I made last week, No. 37. (I’ve started numbering the posts to make them easier to find and reference if necessary.)
Yesterday, I looked at why the PC’s moves and the MC’s principles forced the players to make their moves in the Fiction and cloak their moves in the Fiction, respectively. I proposed some theories that I stand behind, but I realized that I overlooked the main reason, a reason so obvious I am embarrassed to have missed it. Why does Apocalypse World force the conversation to always be about the Fiction? Because the designers of Apocalypse World want the conversation created by the game to be about the Fiction. Yeah, I know: duh. When the players make their moves, they have to do so in terms of the Fiction. The moves are written and structured so that all the conversation about the moves is about the Fiction. The MC’s principles demand that the MC present her non-Fiction-focused decisions as Fiction to the players, which means that the conversation continues to be about the Fiction. I would not be surprised to learn that one of the design goals for Apocalypse World was to create an RPG in which 97% of the conversation was about the Fiction. The moves all use the same die roll so what to roll does not need to be discussed. The stats are written in such a way that they are easily found and added to the roll without discussion. The results are standardized so there is no discussion about how to interpret the die roll. The character creation is ordered in such a way that conversations about negotiating assent and establishing the way the individual play group will navigate their conversation takes place before the group dives into the Fiction, so that once it does, it can keep the conversation there. This is not about immersion in the sense that you think and feel like your character, because the mechanics are popping up all the time to make players think authorially and directorally. But it is a kind of immersion in the sense that the conversation itself is immersed in the Fiction. And as I said before, that dedication to making the conversation as much about the Fiction as possible is the very thing that makes the game (and the system that has come from it) so popular. We’re looking at the next two principles together because they are closely related:
Make your move, but misdirect. Make your move, but never speak its name. The reason for these moves is plainly stated in the text: Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead (82-83). The players never have real-world reasons to make their moves; they are always responding to and working within the Fiction. The MC, however, is only allowed to make her moves because of real-world reasons, but for the sake of the players, she must present those moves as part of the Fiction. “Misdirecting” is a way of “pretending” that the reason for the move comes from the Fiction instead of the real-world reasons. Here’s the first example: Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun”—this was the PC’s move—“but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you. This is easy if you always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible. I find this phrasing very interesting. It could have easily said something like, “Choose a move that is closely related to what is happening in the fiction,” or, “let the fiction determine your move.” But no, pick whatever move you want, and then “make like” it’s the fiction that chose the move. Your job as MC is easier “if you always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible,” but that is not a requirement. I find the phrasing interesting because the text wants you to have no illusions as MC that what you are doing exists outside of the Fiction. It is important that you understand the process that is happening, that you are playing the game and not the other way around. I think this is the game designers telling the MC what honesty demands. These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect (83). And that’s the thrust of these principles. When these two principles are acted upon, the Fiction is seamlessly maintained for the players even as you are operating outside of it. Where your move comes from, what your move is called, what your move does—it’s all kept out of the conversation. The question that I keep coming back to as I look at the principles is this: why? Yes, immersion, but as I said last time, I don’t believe that immersion for the players is an end in itself for the game. It might be a lovely benefit that players really enjoy, but it is not the ultimate goal. I have been saying that since the players have to operate within the Fiction to trigger their moves, the MC’s principles are designed to surround the players with Fiction in order to make the players’ ability to operate within the Fiction that much easier and natural. I stand by that. But there’s still a why hidden in there, isn’t there? Why make the game work that way? What is gained by letting the players focus solely on the Fiction? The answer is, I think, in the way that story is created in Apocalypse World. Every RPG creates a “story” at some point, even if it’s only in the retelling of what happened during game play. Some games rely on the GM bringing a “plot” to the table and having the players move their characters through it. Some games rely on rules to structure game play so that there is a beginning, middle, and end. Some games impose a kind of act structure to make sure there are a setup, a rising action, a crisis, and a resolution. All of these things are notably missing—even forbidden!—from Apocalypse World. Instead, Apocalypse World takes a different path to create story. The players’ moves and the MC’s moves, when made in a fictional world bound by the principles in this chapter—all these things work together to create a narrative chain of events, a set of actions and reactions, causes and effects that will necessarily create a unique and incredible story. Neither the players nor the MC are encouraged to think of themes or overarching plots. If there is a willingness to have both the characters and world change due to this series of actions and reactions, then that story will naturally emerge without artificiality. All of the moves and principles of the MC, and all the moves available to the players, are designed to create the rhythms of that story, with highs and lows, successes and failures, and world-altering, character-changing drama. Because the rules themselves are designed to create this kind of story through play, the only thing the players need to think about (and should think about) when they play is their character as she exists within the Fiction. The first four of these principles—barfing forth apocalypse, addressing the characters, making your move but misdirecting, and making your move without speaking its name—are all designed to let the players focus on what they need to for the game to play correctly: their characters as they exist within the Fiction. With this foundation set, the rest of the principles will dictate rules for how the world will respond to and be shaped by (and put pressure upon and shape in return) the characters. This approach to creating narrative takes some time of course. This is why Apocalypse World is not typically a one-shot game, why the text says to expect things to really start flying around session 6. There is a cumulative power to letting this chemical interaction between characters and world brew and broil and react. After six sessions there are enough elements and enough history that everything is charged and crashing into each other. Let things bubble over, trust in the rules and principles, let the characters push, let the world push back, and play to find out what happens. That’s the goal and that is why these rules are established to let the players concentrate entirely on the Fiction of the moment. Okay, this post is already ridiculously long, so let’s wrap up these two principles: Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players, not to hide your intentions from them. Certainly never to hide your NPCs’ actions, or developments in the characters’ world, from the players’ characters! No; always say what honesty demands. When it comes to what’s happening to and around the players’ characters, always be as honest as you can be. Always say what honesty demands. You as the MC cannot fiddle with things behind the players’ backs. Your illusion is not one of dishonesty but for the sole purpose of letting the players focus on the Fiction. That honesty is an indispensible element of the MC’s rules because the world needs to react honestly to the character’s actions if the game is to create the kind of stories it is designed to create. Our look at the MC’s principles continues with the 2nd of the 11 principles:
Address yourself to the characters, not the players. “Marie, where are you this morning?” not “Julia, where’s Marie this morning?” “A woman comes up to you, her name’s Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.” It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt, not exposition straight from you to the player. The typical reading of this principle is that it is designed to achieve immersion. If I want you thinking and seeing things from your character’s perspective, then addressing you as the character is a good way to gently push you to do that. I think that’s a fair reading. But I don’t think it’s a complete reading. Immersion is not an end in itself for Apocalypse World. Immersion has the specific purpose of keeping the Fiction front and center at all times. It’s not that the players need to keep their head in their characters but that they need to keep their heads in the Fiction. As I’ve already said, the game insists that the players make all their moves in the Fiction and the MC’s principles are designed to make that easy, natural, and instinctive. The second example in the passage above is the key to this principle. “’A woman comes up to you, her name is Pelt, and she’s anxious to get back to her family. It’s obvious she is.’ It’s obvious she is makes this something the character knows and sees in Pelt.” The advantage of addressing the character here is that a piece of information moves from being exposition to being a part of the Fiction itself. Marie, like all the characters in Apocalypse World, is observant of everyone she meets. She reads body language, watches for telling glances and hidden desires, extrapolates from what she knows about people—all of this gives her insight into the non-verbal communication of her world. Pelt’s anxiousness moves from being a free-floating fact into a set of tangible tells in the Fiction, and while Julia is simply receiving those facts, Marie is interpreting signs and arriving at conclusions. We see this in books and TV and movies all the time. Smart characters knowing what other smart characters are up to and then filling us the audience in on their wisdom. By addressing the character instead of the players, the details of the conversation become a part of the Fiction itself. As a side note, the unspoken hero of this example is “saying what honesty demands.” Here, the MC is being “scrupulous, even generous with the truth” by telling the player not only that Pelt is anxious but why she is anxious. Had the MC been anything less than generous, Marie wouldn’t know what Pelt wants and might not find out if Julia doesn’t ask the right questions or make the right inferences. The scene could wander with the MC giving clues in her description of Pelt and Julie potentially missing those clues. That kind of scene is both clumsy and un-fun. Instead, you can address the character directly , tell her what she deduces with honesty and move on to the meat of the matter. All of these principles lean on each other to make MCing AW what it is, as the examples in this section continually remind us. I went back and forth between trying to cover all the principles in one mad post and tackling them each individually. For now, I’ll take them on one by one, primarily because this collection is about Apocalypse World as a text as much as it is about it as a game.
So let’s make with the text: Barf forth apocalyptica. Cultivate an imagination full of harsh landscapes, garish bloody images, and grotesque juxtapositions. In Apocalypse World, when the rain falls it’s full of fine black grit like toner, and all the plants’ leaves turn gray from absorbing it. Out among the wrecked cars, wild dogs fight for territory, with each other and with the rats, and one of the breeds is developing a protective inner eyelid of blank bone. If you get too close to them you can hear the click-click when they blink. Generally, I think the order of the principles is significant, and of course specifically, this principle is A-number-one. Everything you say as MC while playing Apocalypse World should have a little barfed up apocalyptica on it, right? Making a move but misdirecting? Smear some apocalyptica on it. Making an NPC human? Don’t forget to coat her with apocalyptica. Responding with fuckery? You bet your ass that is some apocalyptic fuckery you are putting down. What I love about this particular passage is the way it gets down to the cause-and-effect details of the apocalyptica being barfed forth. The plants’ leaves are grey because they have been absorbing the toner-like grit that poisons the rain. The rats’ eyelids make click-click noises because they are developing a protective inner eyelid because of the poisoned environment. It’s an unspoken lesson in daydreaming to create an internally logical world, one with cause and effect, because that internal logic is the root of playing the Fiction when you are the MC of AW. We will see this reliance on a world with its own internally consistent logic as a recurring motif in these principles, and it is subtly alluded to from the first principle, the principal principle, if you will. I know that it doesn’t need saying, but I am going to say it anyway because I never promised you original, insightful, or stellar commentary: “barf forth apocalyptica” is an inspired phrase in every way. The crassness of “barf” juxtaposed with the properness of “forth” and the academic obscurity and pretentiousness of “apocalyptica” is like Apocalypse World in a nutshell; it’s like having Shit head and Venus in the same crew together. It is itself a “grotesque juxtaposition.” Barf suggests an uncontrollable and sloppy spewing of details that might have been a conscious decision at one time but the autonomic system has kicked in and has spun out of control. Barf captures the messiness and unsanitary conditions of the post-apocalyptic world in which our poor heroes are struggling. When the players hand you a bit of fiction and you barf up apocalyptica on it and hand it back to them, they should say, “Ewwwww.” In a book full of brilliant and memorable phrases, this one is among the most brilliant and most memorable. In a game in which the fiction is king, it is only proper that the first principle is the thematic guide for what your fiction should look like. Give your players those details to visualize and grab onto and they will have their characters sliding through your muck and swinging from your jungle gym of apocalyptic imagery in no time. You won’t need to ask, “Cool, what do you do?” because they will be to busy wrestling with the fictitious circumstances you have piled upon them. We’re heading into the MC’s principles, but I want to talk for a moment about the primacy of the Fiction in Apocalypse World. As an MC, you have to check with your principles before saying anything, because everything you contribute to the conversation needs to follow what your principles demand. And as we’ll see, the principles are all about guiding the MC to cloak their moves and their decisions in the Fiction.
Every RPG has its play in the collective Fiction. Fiction is not only the result of play in an RPG, but it is also the medium of play. So an RPG does not need to center the Fiction in order to create Fiction—it’s gonna happen no matter what. A number of RPGs that inspired Apocalypse World have tried to incentivize players to engage with the Fiction when playing the game. Statements like “I swing” or “I make a perception check” are about metagame procedures more than the Fiction, and designers have looked for ways to make the players move beyond the perfunctory. Sorcerer, for example, allows the GM to award bonus dice to players who are clever in their use of the Fiction when describing combat or actions. Similarly, it permits GMs to punish dull play with penalty dice. Over the Edge does the same thing, as do a number of other games. In almost all cases, it’s the GM who is granted the power to decide if a player has engaged with the Fiction enough to be awarded or so little as to deserve punishment. In Apocalypse World not engaging with the Fiction is not an option. If you don’t ground your move in the Fiction, the move doesn’t happen. Carrots and sticks are removed from the equation as is the GM as arbiter. Apocalypse World goes to great lengths to force the players to constantly be thinking in terms of the Fiction. And the MC’s principles are overwhelmingly about constantly feeding the Fiction and presenting everything they do as Fiction in order to keep the players playing in the Fiction. Why is that important? Why do Ron Edwards and Jonathan Tweet want to incentivize that kind of play? Why do Vincent and Meguey Baker force that kind of play? Every RPG structures the conversation it creates in a certain way, demanding that you talk about certain things during play. What kind of conversation do you want to have when you play? What do I need to roll to hit? What’s her armor class? Which chart should I roll on? Ooh, a 14! Does that get me there? That’s one kind of conversation you can have. Or you can keep the discussion grounded in the fiction and talk about what cool and daring things the characters are doing. Every move is designed to make the conversation you have engaging and reliably entertaining. Every option you pick and answer you elicit make for rich conversation. So with Apocalypse World, players can’t make moves except through the Fiction. MC’s can’t make moves except by cloaking them in the Fiction. With these two halves of the equation, you get a self-reinforcing cycle of Fiction informing Fiction. And that cycle—and the conversation it creates—is what I think people are really responding to in embracing the system. That is a fun conversation to have. We continue our exploration of the Master of Ceremonies chapter. Today we are looking at what an MC must “Always Say” (pages 81-82):
• What the principles demand (as follow). • What the rules demand. • What your prep demands. • What honesty demands. Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters. Always be scrupulous, even generous, with the truth. The players depend on you to give them real information they can really use, about their characters’ surroundings, about what’s happening when and where. Same with the game’s rules: play with integrity and an open hand. The players are entitled to the full benefits of their moves, their rolls, their characters’ strengths and resources. Don’t chisel them, don’t weasel, don’t play gotcha. If you’re playing the game as the players’ adversary, your decision-making responsibilities and your rules-oversight constitute a conflict of interests. Play the game with the players, not against them. The MC’s agenda says that everything you say as an MC should accomplish one of those three goals. Now that you know the goals of your speech, you need to know what to say to achieve those goals. That’s what this section is for. And just so you know that the text still isn’t fucking around, these aren’t things you need to say some of the time or even usually. They need to be behind everything you say--always. Being an MC for Apocalypse World turns out to be a very demanding job. The principles, the rules, your prep, and honesty itself are all making demands on what you say, and you are beholden to them all. The first paragraph above tells you why without saying it directly. The roles of the player and the the GM are indeed “divvie[d] . . . up in a strict and pretty traditional way.” (I love that the text doesn’t actually say roles—it says “conversation” of course because that is all roleplaying is. Your role as MC is really just your part of the conversation, meaning what you are allowed to contribute to the Shared Imagined Space. That’s why this section focuses on what you “say” rather than “do” or what powers you have.) The players can say things about their characters’ actions and speech; their character’s thoughts and feelings; and, when asked, about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Everything else in that conversation is given to the MC. That’s why the MC needs to have all these rules governing their speech. Your power is too great to be left unchecked. Apocalypse World wrestles valiantly with the problematic role that GMs play in RPGs. Given the nature of RPGs, the rules need to allow for the unexpected at every turn, and games have traditionally turned to the GM to be the arbiter for all those moments. A number of games published this century have broken the GM’s powers and responsibilities into bits and pieces and distributed them among the players, or built them into the mechanics of the game (these are the GM-less/GM-ful games). But any game that adopts the traditional divisions of players and GMs needs to decide what limitations, if any, it is going to put on the GM. Apocalypse World’s solution is to methodically break down everything a GM does during the game and label those pieces. Then it tethers those pieces to a tri-partite agenda and a number of principles to make the MC aware of each individual piece and where possible corruption comes in. The genius of naming all these parts and dissecting what it is that the MC is doing is that to do so is to be able to exert control over the process. Other RPG’s GM’s sections resort to advice because what else could they do? GMing was so big and messy and everyone was going to do it their way anyway, so why bother to dictate? Uh-uh. Not so for the Bakers. They laid it all bare, and in doing so they can first and foremost make us aware of what it is we are doing and second of all dictate how we do it. Goddamn that’s smart. And it was a move with a lot of chutzpah. The GM and game designer have always had an alliance. The game designer essentially partners with the GM to make the game happen at the table. Without the GM (again, for games with player/GM divisions) the game is nothing more than a book. The GM takes that book and facilitates a conversation with the players to make the game happen. In fact, game texts are often buddy-buddy with the GM-reader, right? I’ve read many a text with jokes about power gamers or players who try to pull a fast one with the rules and plenty of winking aren’t-players-cute language. But Apocalypse World bosses the MC around. Don’t you fucking do that. Seriously, cut it out. And don’t do that either. You know this other thing you do, you can do it, but do it like this. No wonder a number of readers chucked their copy across the room and denounced the game! In one of his Ropecon talks in 2013, Vincent describes using a forceful tone in the book because he’s kicking a door down in a sense. You can’t introduce a major paradigm shift in something as fundamental as GMing without being forceful; hence all the “never do this” and “always do that.” Just look at that second paragraph in this section: “Always be scrupulous, even generous, with the truth.” “Don’t chisel them, don’t weasel, don’t play gotcha.” Bossy bossy bossy. Some people read that tone as befitting an apocalyptic world, but I think it is much more about function than it is about flavor. As a final note, I just want to say how much I love the call for honesty, giving the players real information they can really use, and playing with an open hand. That simple act alone says to the players that the MC is playing with you, not against you. As much as we all love a mystery and a surprise twist, there is nothing better than the drama of knowing the stakes and the risks and watching the protagonists figure out a way through it or around it by their guts and their wits. Playing with that honesty forces the drama to come from characters’ decisions and choices rather than from anything else, and that is what Apocalypse World is all about. Today we are looking at the MC’s Agenda as written on pages 80-81 of Apocalypse World 2e:
• Make Apocalypse World seem real. • Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring. • Play to find out what happens. Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other. It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not fucking around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out. Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside. The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline. When you find something you genuinely care about—a question about what will happen that you genuinely want to find out_—letting the game’s fiction decide it is uniquely satisfying. I want to start with that last paragraph first, specifically this sentence: “The reward for MCing, for this kind of GMing, comes with the discipline.” Here we learn that Master of Ceremonies was chosen to denote a specific way of GMing. We are used to GMs being given different titles, often as a way of bringing the game’s themes into its vocabulary (like _Call of Cthulhu’s Keeper of Arcane Secrets). There is nothing apocalyptic about a Master of Ceremonies, and the designation is not meant to be anchored to this specific game. It has to do with capturing this specific way of GMing. A master of ceremonies, according to Oxford Dictionary, is “a person who introduces speakers, players, or entertainers.” The master of ceremonies creates a space for the performers so that we are all prepared for the awesome things they are about to do. It’s a perfect style for this kind of GMing because, as we’ll see, most of the rules binding the MC are about creating and maintaining a fictional space within which the players can play their characters, drive the story, trigger their moves, and be awesome. Just look at those agenda items, every part of them is about the PCs. Making Apocalypse World seem real is not for the sake of realism or cinematic flavor. It is for the sake of creating a fiction with “internal logic and causality” so that the characters can have a living, breathing story to exist within. Making the players’ characters’ lives not boring is about providing dramatic moments for the characters to bounce off, interact with, make decisions about, and ultimately not be boring themselves. Playing to find out what happens is about letting the characters control not only their own destinies but the very scope and focus of the story that’s told. It is all about the PCs, and if you as the MC are about the say something that doesn’t do any of that, hold your tongue. (I think the focus on “saying” is important, but we’ll look at that in the next section, in which we are told what to “Always Say.”) The MC chapter methodically breaks down (and confines) the role of the MC. While the text eventually covers what the MC can do both within the fiction and without the fiction, it starts with the why governing those actions. You can only make a move or follow a principle if they meet your stated agenda. You cannot “take away their stuff” as punishment. You cannot “separate them” in an effort to control them and force the story to go where you want to go. You cannot “capture them” because Michael didn’t bring any drinks for game night for the 4th time in a row, or because Suzanne is refusing to follow a plot thread that you think would make for great drama, or because Darla keeps successfully forcing the fiction to roll with her +3 stat and messing with the rhythm of successes and failures you want to see in “your” game. As MC of Apocalypse World you need to govern your emotions and check your power in order to make the game do what it’s built to do. But you’re only human, right? Everyone else in the game gets to have their bleed and play it too, why not you? Because, as the text reminds you several times, your power is too great to give in to those desires. That’s why the word “discipline” is key in this section. Here, “discipline” is applied principally to the “Play to find out what happens” element, because let’s face it. How your group works socially is nothing the game can control (or wants to). What the game can insist upon is that you play a reactionary role as the MC, responding to the characters rather than forcing them to go where you want. You will of course give them things to respond to, but how they respond and what comes of that response is up to them and the game, putting you back in a reactionary role. And that’s the real challenge for the MC as it’s presented here. You have to “genuinely care” about what happens but not control it in any way. What this really emphasizes is the MC’s role as audience to the drama unfolding. In a lot of systems, the GM is set up as the storyteller and the players are actors and audience, learning about the plot as they take their non-plot-altering actions. In Apocalypse World, there is no plot except for what unfolds through play, and if played by the rules, everyone, MC and player alike, are audience members, each invested in what will happen but no one with their hands on the reins. The language is strong because the idea is crucial to the game functioning. If any of these three agenda items are ignored, or if other items are added to them, the mechanics and rules cannot do what they were designed to do. They’re not fucking around and neither should you. Just look at where the game promotes innovation and where it doesn’t. There are plenty of rules in “Advanced Fuckery” for creating your own PC moves and threat moves, but there is nothing there that lets you rebuild the Agenda or mess with the MC’s principles. Those are not up for discussion. As they said before, “the whole rest of the game is built upon this.” |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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