thoughts on Apocalypse World?

[pemerton]

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.

I don't agree with this.

Here are three examples of play/resolution from the rulebook (pp 198, 142, 152-154):

Marie draws Roark a bath and joins him in it, with dandelion wine. She wants him to bring Joe’s Girl to her. She misses the roll [a seduce/manipulate throw], so I get to make as hard a move as I like, and I choose to separate them. “As soon as Joe’s Girl comes up in conversation, he sees what you’re up to,” I say. “He shoves you out of his way and stomps out of your rooms. He takes his shotgun with him but doesn’t even bother to get dressed. He’s muttering the whole way down the hall, like ‘f****n Marie, shoulda known, f***n trusted her, f**n Joe’s Girl…’”​

​

Maybe I just choose to announce off-screen badness: “Marie, when you see Isle that morning her face is a mess. Somebody cut her cheek open with a heated knife. She won’t say who.”​

​

Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs). . . .​

“Okay. I do direct-brain whisper projection [a telepathic version of the Go Aggro move] on Isle.”​

“Cool, what do you do?”​

“Uh — we don’t have to interact, so I’m walking past under their feet where she can see me, and I whisper into her brain without looking up.” She rolls+weird and hits a 10+.​

“What’s your whisper?”​

“Follow me,” she says.​

“Yeah,” I say. “She inches her butt forward to drop down behind you, but then tips her head like she’s thinking of something—”​

“Don’t do it,” Marie’s player says.​

“She forces your hand,” I say. “She takes 1-harm, right? Loud optional, right? So, loud or not?”​

“Isle, god damn it. Not loud.”​

“Sweet. Plover thinks she’s just leaning her head on his shoulder, but she’s bleeding out her ears and eventually he’ll notice his shirt sticking to his shoulder from her blood. Do you stick around?” I’m telling possible consequences and asking.​

​

To me, this isn't a picture of people who, deep down, are very bad. It's a picture of people who, deep down, crave intimacy but struggle to find it because of the world they find themselves in.

This is why the PCs have their special (sex) moves - at least that's what it looks like to me. Probably nothing brings that home harder than the Driver's special:

If you and another character have sex, roll+cool. On a 10+, it’s cool, no big deal. On a 7–9, give them +1 to their Hx with you on their sheet, but give yourself -1 to your Hx with them on yours. On a miss, you gotta go: take -1 ongoing, until you prove that it’s not like they own you or nothing.​

I mean, to me it seems like that could come straight from a Hank Williams or Leadbelly song!

EDIT to add a further thought:

A key vehicle in AW for the GM to express their thoughts is the world's psychic maelstrom. How this is handled, and what sorts of images and information it provides, can drive home the nature of the world (natural and social) and ways in which it might be fundamentally hostile or fundamentally a home for the protagonists.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It’s a fun read, but not remotely insightful about human nature or the human experience. Completely misses what is going on when groups of boys implode, when kids bully eachother, etc, but it is very quotable!

Sure it does. I mean.....can people rise above adversity or not? That's a pretty foundational question about the human experience. I don't think there's only one answer, so I don't view Golding's novel as some kind of definitive answer to the question....but it is an answer, and it's a pretty compelling one.

And I think that's part of the point of Apocalypse World. The environment is terrible.....how do people deal with that? Can they rise above or do they give in to their baser instincts? That's the question of the game. You seem to think that the game has answered that question before play begins; I'd say it's up to each group to answer that question through play.

 

[pemerton]

I think that's part of the point of Apocalypse World. The environment is terrible.....how do people deal with that? Can they rise above or do they give in to their baser instincts? That's the question of the game. You seem to think that the game has answered that question before play begins; I'd say it's up to each group to answer that question through play.

You asked in another thread about whether and how a RPG might generate a "Han Solo" moment. I think AW is one answer to your question - here's how a RPG could make that possible!

 

[chaochou]

If I was writing a set of RPG rules it wouldn't read like AW. It would read more like my posts - ie an academic essay tone but with too many dashes and italics used to introduce a vaguely spoken-word feeling.

I've no doubt that your rules would read differently from Apocalypse World...! The word I would use for them is authentic. They are both clear and purposeful, but also joyous, vibrant and thematically on point.

I find people describing them as 'try-hard' or 'pretentious' are the ones sounding like pretentious try-hards.

 

[pemerton]

I've no doubt that your rules would read differently from Apocalypse World...! The word I would use for them is authentic. They are both clear and purposeful, but also joyous, vibrant and thematically on point.

I find people describing them as 'try-hard' or 'pretentious' are the ones sounding like pretentious try-hards.

Upthread I explained that I think AW is brilliant but not completely novel. Part of its brilliance is that it brings to the surface ideas and approaches that have been implicit in (some) RPGing for a long time, and explains and celebrates them, and pushes them beyond previous limits and understandings.

It's as if Baker realised he needed new words to describe what he was doing, and what he was inviting us to do. And he melded that into his presentation of his imagined world and all these protagonists in it for whom this real affection, and sometimes pity, shines through - he doesn't read like an author who hates his characters!

Consider this example, of Uncle the Hardholder leading his gang who are under attack from Dremmer (it's on pp 169-70):

Uncle rolls+hard for leadership and hits with a 10+. “Great. We hold firm against a hard advance. It’s a hard advance, right?” . . .

With him as its strong, present leader, the gang will hold together just fine through this exchange, and through another one like it. The danger to this gang is that they’ll be massacred, not that they’ll break.

“Well, you hold firm,” I say. “Mifflin and Putrid go down— Putrid’s guts are all over you — and Pallor and a couple of others are badly hurt. You take a bullet yourself for 2-harm. Your gang badly wants to bug out, not endure another strike. As far as you can tell, you’ve done no damage at all to the attackers, you’ve just broken their momentum. They go to ground all over the place, you’re coming under fire from 3 directions. What do you do?”​

That shows us how the game works. And it shows us how the game puts humans, and their humanity, front-and-centre. Like I said upthread, the only RPGs I can think of that are anything like this are Burning Wheel and Over the Edge.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I do not think the game's assumptions say that at all. I think they point towards that when you live in an environment where violence is the norm rather than the exception that breaking that cycle is much harder than surrendering to inertia.

The assumptions about play, sure. The implied setting assumptions that underpin the game rely upon the assumption that in a failing world with limited resources and no centralized authority, people will largely resort to violence and resource hoarding, etc. Which like I said, is grimdark, but very true to genre.

I also think that particular take shows a distinct lack of empathy towards people who commit acts of violence.

And here ya go judging folks on a personal level because they don’t like a game as much as you do. Again.

Yeah, The story of the Tongan Castaways, six boys between 13 and 16 who got stranded on a remote island in 1965 shows the exact opposite of Lord of the Flies. The boys formed a strong bond and despite deprivations and injuries kept themselves fit and healthy for 15 months.

It could show the huge cultural difference between Tongan and British youth, but a more charitable reading is that humans are a lot nicer and less selfish than Golding and western culture generally expects

Exactly. A D&D example of the same thinking is the writeup of Goliath, but that could be a whole thread by itself.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I don't agree with this at all. The only other RPG I know of that competes with it for clarity of vision, as expressed by the author, is Burning Wheel. And OK, maybe Over the Edge.

I agree with you here in the sense that AW very clearly lays out how to play AW, which, as you mentioned in a later post in this thread, is often pretty rare. So I should be more specific--the flourishes in the writing are, to me, just terrible and cringe inducing and even corny. If the goal is to get across the brutal, abrasive tone of the setting, the writing is doing too much telling and not enough showing. I get why that's happening, since it can't rely on setting details the way other games might. Pulling off that sort of tone carries a very high degree of difficulty, and, for me, in that respect, AW falls on its face. I hate reading it. Just hate to do it.

I don't think that AW is as novel as some other posters in this thread. Of course it's brilliant, and hugely influential and important. But it doesn't come from nowhere. The earliest game I know that supports, at least in a loose sense, being run PbtA-style is Classic Traveller. (Except in combat, which is a bit more wargame-y.)

At the heart of AW (and so in my mind of PbtA) is if you do it, you do it - ie certain actions mandate checks, and if those fail then the GM makes a move in response as hard as they like, that (i) follows from the fiction, and (ii) drives things forward.

Here I don't agree at all. I think PbtA is a seismic shift. The GM not rolling, the complete pivot away from simulating the world that the PCs inhabit and instead making everything a reflection of their actions, and the way it makes success with consequence/cost the default roll result...that stuff is remarkably hard for trad players to wrap their heads around, requiring a major cognitive reboot for many folks. And it speeds and recenters play in huge ways, codifying a low- or no-prep approach that other games just kinda mention as an option, but then punish in practice.

However, I've read and loved your posts on this forum and you're a damn TTRPG scholar--including when it comes to PbtA--so I suspect you have some great arguments to support your position. Not trolling here at all when I ask if you can elaborate a little. For example, I've played Classic Traveler a bunch and I don't get the connection you're making. Do you mean that old-school Traveler didn't have a ton of skills, so a lot of actions were purely within the fiction?

But also, I think the fact that combat in AW doesn't shift into that traditional wargame mode is exactly why it's so novel. It's not a separate set of subsystems (or, as in a lot of games, the core system, with all non-combat as subsystems), which ditches that sense that the stuff before and after combat is sort of suspense/filler/etc., because it's initiative and damage and all those fiddly rules and numbers that settle the narrative questions. Flattening combat and non-combat is where PbtA is still at its greatest and most divisive, I think, and setting aside diceless stuff like Amber, I don't recall anyone doing that before AW in a useful or influential way.

 

[Gradine]

The assumptions about play, sure. The implied setting assumptions that underpin the game rely upon the assumption that in a failing world with limited resources and no centralized authority, people will largely resort to violence and resource hoarding, etc. Which like I said, is grimdark, but very true to genre.

Yeah, this is kind of the biggest problem with a lot of post-apocalyptic settings. The world doesn't get to the point that it does unless humans are fundamentally bastards. Which isn't true. When the chips are down, humanity is by-and-large a social creature. We are not likely to see very many cartoon villains when the dust clears, and they aren't likely going to be as successful as the genre tends to think they're going to be.

 

[Blue]

Yeah, this is kind of the biggest problem with a lot of post-apocalyptic settings. The world doesn't get to the point that it does unless humans are fundamentally bastards. Which isn't true. When the chips are down, humanity is by-and-large a social creature. We are not likely to see very many cartoon villains when the dust clears, and they aren't likely going to be as successful as the genre tends to think they're going to be.

Post-Apocalyptic doesn't require humanity to be bastards. It requires humanity to define "us vs. them", which we are very good at doing, and dehumanizing the other, which we also are. Add in the definitely among those who are most willing to grab at power are those that shouldn't have it, and a trend in a lot to follow a strong leader who is bringing together and empowering you and people like you and just the concept of authoritarianism. People will be kind and supportive and social animals - within their tribes - and none of that towards the outsiders who threaten their already scarce supplies and way of life.

 

[Malmuria]

And I think if people don't like the prose, that's really on them. Vincent Baker is clearly extremely deliberate as a game designer, and I doubt that he wasn't equally deliberate in choosing how to write the rulebook. Sometimes the onus is on the audience to grapple with the work, if they want to engage with what it has to offer.

Fair point! Maybe I'll give it another read.