thoughts on Apocalypse World?

[doctorbadwolf]

This I think is the salient (and on-topic) point. They are tropes of a certain kind of genre that, believability aside, has been played out to death a hundred times before. They were old hat in 2010 when AW was published.

The point raised up-thread (sorry I can't seem to find it again...) is that AW created a toolkit that is incredibly well-suited to telling niche genre stories. The tighter the focus the better, generally speaking. Female Russian World War II fighter pilots? Check. Superheroes who are also teenagers grappling with their identities and the complicated legacies they are carrying on? You betcha. Sexually charged and confused teenage werewolves and vampires? Yuuuuuup.

The best broader genre hack is Monster of the Week, which is itself a fairly a narrow and specific genre of its own.

One last point is that I also find AW incredibly well-written. The subject matter and genre trappings bore me to death, but the prose is evocative and excellent. Adding sex as a risk-and-reward mechanic was pretty gutsy and I think help sells the tone and vibe of the stories VB was looking to enable with AW.

I just don't like it, personally. It does not particular well-suit the types of post-apocaltypic stories I'm most interested in.

I would say that I like PbtA as a toolkit way more than I like AW as a game.

I can dig all of that.

Tangentially, I think Monster of The Week can be used pretty easily to tell most any kind of Modern Urban Fantasy story. Most of the work would be on the MC side of things, like monsters and such, and rethinking how MC moves are used to better suit a different subgenre or tone, but shouldn't be hard.

 

[Marc_C]

What happened to the OP? His user name is strike through.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What happened to the OP? His user name is strike through.

At least temp banned from another thread.

 

[chaochou]

I will also say…a lot of the game’s assumptions are very “people are very bad, deep down, and only comfort and safety makes us think otherwise” which, while total nonsensical garbage as a belief about people, is certainly within genre.

It is total nonsensical garbage. Thankfully, it was written by you on the internet, not by Vincent Baker and it's nowhere to be found within Apocalypse World.

Here's what it actually says: "It's your job to create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, untenable arrangements. A dynamic situation, not a status quo you have to put your shoulder against and shift, like pushing a futon up a ladder. No: an unstable mass, charged with potential energy and ready to split and slide."

None of that says 'people are very bad'. It says, people are trying to survive in a landscape of competing interests. the actual tone of each game and the world each is set in (and those of us who play it know this) is a product as much of the players as of the MC.

It's created as a group, not as a dictatorial vision (unlike in D&D-land). There's none of this 'my world, my rules' crap in here. It's a game of collective creativity, not setting tourism and empty cosplay.

Those of us who know and play the game do wish people wouldn't pollute conversation about it with such ill-informed nonsense.

 

[chaochou]

But in smaller communities, we know that trade has always been more common than raiding, and that neighboring communities have pretty much always helped eachother when they can, and banded together to track down and murder the crap out of outlaw bandit gangs, when possible.

What? How can you possibly make this statement without qualifying it with a time and place in history? It doesn't make sense. And the fact that you're willing to assert it, without even trying to place it in time and history suggests to me that you won't have much of an evidence base.

So what does 'trade has always been more common than raiding' mean? Are you saying that the value of goods traded between France and Austria in 1805 was greater than the value of the conquest of Austria by France in 1805?

Are you saying that Rome traded its way to its empire. That Alexander the Great ended up conquering the known world through trade? That the wealth of either empire was based on something other than conquest?

And which 'neighbouring communities' living in peace and harmony in Dark Ages Europe banded together to track down and 'murder the crap out of' which 'outlaw bandit gangs'? It's so far removed from reality it's hilarious.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah not gonna engage with that level of empty, flailingly angry, melodrama.

 

[niklinna]

Ooh, did somebody just roll a miss on their Win Friends & Influence People move?

Meanwhile, on the very broad topics of community size, resources, and trade (among many others), some of you folks might be interested in this – Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

There's also Tomás Pueyo's new gig. (He's the guy who wrote The Hammer and the Dance back at the beginning of our ongoing pandemic.)

 

[pemerton]

@chaochou, I imagine you might be currently embroiled in the UK fuel crisis?

 

[DrunkonDuty]

The inference I'm drawing from the above is either (a) you haven't read Apocalypse World or (b) you're not putting together the integrated aspects of system (agenda + principles + resolution mechanics) that create the dynamic of aggressive protagonist (players) vs aggressive antagonism/obstacles (GM)?

I'm drawing all my inferences about AW from this thread. Because I haven't read AW I'll stay neutral on the edginess or not of its prose style.

Play to find out what happens

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Ummm... I can only assume this means that one* should put forward plot points based on what has come before in previous scenes/acts/episodes/story arcs. As opposed to simply sticking to some pre-planned series of events. Now basing next events on previous events is great and I'm all for that. But this is the intermediate level of RPGs.

*whoever puts forward the plot ideas, which I gather can be players & GMs

fill their lives with danger (provacative framing that demands action and orbits around player-flagged PC dramatic needs and

Well... this really does sound like basic RPG. Whether its dungeon crawling or seducing your way thru a Vampire LARP. Yeah, in a dungeon crawl the dramatic needs are "moar monsters/loot/XP" rather than the high melodrama of Vampire but who's to say one is better than the other?

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how this is done (ask questions and use the answers + Fronts + soft moves to provoke/portend + hard moves if there is no or insufficient uptake/response to the provocation/foretold danger + snowballing move resolution structure and maths + actual danger/cost/consequence to every move made or not made)

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The GM asking "what do you do?" and then resolving the proposed situation with game mechanics is, again, basic RPG. As is deciding consequences for the failure/success of those actions.

deeply thematic basic moves and playbooks and reward cycles/xp triggers

Sounds to me like specific game mechanics intended to give a particular feel to the game. Seriously - what, apart from "genre feel," is the difference between a player in a DnD game saying "my bard is gonna seduce that barman with the great buns" or "my hard holder is gonna put a soft sex move on that barman with the great buns?"

The game has teeth at every turn. It will bite you if you don't respond. It will bite you when you do respond. As a GM, your job is to bite in a way the players have signaled is interesting and keep biting. As a system, its job is to help the GM bark, then bite, and deftly manage their cognitive workload as they continuously bark and bite and be surprised at what shape play takes as teeth meet flesh. As a player, your job is to signal your interests (continuously), decide where/how to take the bites, how you deal once bitten, bite the hell back, and how/if your character can withstand this both-ways nom-fest.

This is good GMing advice. It can be applied to any game. And I think it's great that AW (and other games) put all this advice front and centre. But it's still there in (almost?) all other RPGs. It may not be said explicitly, turning up the heat may take different forms in different games, but it's there.

I'll say again - I'm glad that AW and other games put this sort of advice front and centre, AND have mechanics to back it up. I'm firmly of the belief that having rules for X in a gamebook leads to more X in the actual play. And when I like the X, as I like all the things mentioned above, then viva la apocalypse.

I don't know if that is written too "edge-lordy" or whatever, but that is pretty much the gist. The system has enormous say on how this whole thing churns.

Okay, look, I said I was gonna stay neutral on the cringiness of the writing of AW. But a "soft sex move?" That's just pushing rope.

 

[pemerton]

The GM asking "what do you do?" and then resolving the proposed situation with game mechanics is, again, basic RPG. As is deciding consequences for the failure/success of those actions.

<snip>

what, apart from "genre feel," is the difference between a player in a DnD game saying "my bard is gonna seduce that barman with the great buns" or "my hard holder is gonna put a soft sex move on that barman with the great buns?"

Have a look at my reply to you upthread and you'll see. To borrow @Manbearcat's phrase, the AW mechanics have teeth.

Whereas in 5e D&D (for instance) there is no system (as best I know) that permits a player to oblige the GM to narrate a certain response from a NPC. Hence, among other things, the GM is never playing to find out - unless the game shifts into combat.