Apocalypse World was SO FUCKING GOOD last night.

Julia's character Mary let Roark and Birdie loose.

I can't possibly explain just how good that is to you. But, like, here goes anyway.

Roark cracks me up. He's all coming back from battle wearing this stupid hat, crying after sex because sex with Mary includes her violation gloves and the secret hurts of your childhood, taking bubble baths and leaving his underwear on the floor, burning down one of the barges on the poisonous river and peeing his name on its refugees. He has not one pretense.

Birdie creeps me out, though. She started out as a teenage kid in a jacket too big for her, then she became a bondage-sub servant in a corset putting on airs, then she became a cannibal. Now she's stuck inside of Roark because Mary accidentally stuck her there.

"Wait. What happened to Birdie's body?"
"I think it's just like, in there."
"In ... there?"

Emily's character Kal had a vision of Birdie inside Roark, facing the wrong direction, staring out the back of Roark's head. Kal spent the next 15 minutes moving around the room watching Roark always turn his head to face exactly away from him, so that Birdie could stare at him.

Birdie ate only one guy, "the entertainment," but that's enough to get her listed under cannibal in my little book of moves. If I'm the only one who knows what that really means, still everybody else can do the math.

So last night ... Oh I can't stop talking about Roark. That guy. Here's Mary and Roark talking about assisted suicide.

Me, as Roark: ...So before you kill me, let me out. I have some things I gotta do before I die.
Julia: I'm reading him. (She rolls for it.)
Me, as Roark: And some murders.
Julia: What does he want me to do?
Me: He just wants you to say you're sorry.
Julia: Sorry? For what?
Me: For sticking Birdie in him!
Julia: That was an accident!
Julia, as Mary: Wait, murders? Who do you want to murder?
Me, as Roark: Oh Joe's Girl for a start. Bill, Gnarly, Mother Superior... Hey I might be gone a while.
Julia, as Mary: Oh! Joe's Girl. Yeah, you can go. I thought you were going to say Allison.
Me: as Roark: Allison? Nah, I don't want to kill Alli - wait.
Meg [Allison's player]: GOD DAMN IT JULIA.
Elizabeth [Damson's player]: What about Damson? I thought for sure he'd want to kill Damson.
Me, as Roark: Y'know, you probably won't have to "help me on my way" after all. I don't think they're going to let me get away with this.
Me, as Roark: I mean, that'd be FUCKING AWESOME if I could murder (and maybe eat) everyone on my list and then come back here and die in your arms. But I just don't think they're going to let me do that.

I tell ya, the guy slays me. I haven't laughed this hard at my own jokes in a long time.

So now at the end of the session, he and Birdie are out and about. I don't want to jinx it, but I think, just maybe, just possibly, there's an off chance, it may just be, that Allison's Alley is going to run with blood.

-Vincent

Allison has a few reactions:
1. Oh HELL no!
followed very quickly by:
2.*sigh* Ok, I didn't want to do it this way. Let me get my guns.
followed by, if things go poorly:
3. Mary, Damson, Brain: +1 barter to the first one to take him out. He's beyond helping.

Mary's reaction (smiling sweetly, of course):  First off, no one takes him out until I get one last roll in the sack with him. Second, no one takes him out unless you leave his body intact. I need the skin to make a dress. Third, no one takes him out because I have plans, and if you don't want Allison's Alley to be Allison's Alley with the Cannibal Running Loose Killing Everyone Who Pissed Him Off, then you'll bring him back to me, let me have my way, and let him go peacefully, so I'll get the material for a new dress, one last hurrah, and I'll get to see Joe's Girl beg for her life and dignity. Finally, the person who kills Roark who isn't me will have blood gushing from their ears for days.

Trust me folks, I've got it under control.

Julia

Hey guys,

Umm ... what the fuck are you talking about?

I mean, I'm happy you're enjoying yourselves, but this is a discussion thread, right? What aspects of the game were literally playtested? What rules or procedures showed themselves to work well? Which needed some juicing or tweaking?

Basically, what happened in play itself?

Best, Ron

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to think they were missing something in this thread.

Especially considering that it's in the playtesting forum...

I certainly sounds like you had a lot of fun, but can we get a but more insight about the system, the play situation, or something that shows us what was intended in the events (and how this led to such a great scene).

Now that I've written this, I guess I've basically just echoed what Ron just said.

V

So of course there IS something I want to discuss, but I've had a hell of a time figuring out how to approach it. Finally I figured, hell, I'll just start talking, it'll come up. Thanks for the prodding! You may have to prod me more, yet.

How Urgency works in Poison'd

Poison'd has a GM budget, in the form of a mechanism called "cruel fortunes." It's not a countdown-from-go budget like Shock:'s, it has a variable refresh rate like Primetime Adventures'. It doesn't use numbers, though. The best analogue I can think of is the way your hand size fluctuates over the course of a game of Canasta: sometimes you play cards down and you're left with a hand too small to be flexible, and it's a dry spell for you; sometimes you get to pick up the pile and you have as many cards as you ever hoped for.

How it works is, generally each of the cruel fortunes lists the in-fiction circumstances under which you can bring the cruel fortune into play. For instance, "bring this into play whenever the pirates are making free in port" or "bring this into play when there's an enemy ship." For the most part, you follow the pirates around, slapping down cruel fortunes to match whatever's happening in the game's fiction. You can't play just any cruel fortune, like in Canasta you can't play just any card, you can play only the cruel fortunes that fit.

See the current conversation here and here about before and after.

However, there are a couple of things that make the cruel fortunes a budget, not just a, like, mechanical mirror that the GM gets to hold. One is, when the pirates cruise for a prize, the GM gets to spend points to build a hand of cruel fortunes to bring into play against them, more or less arbitrarily. "You seize the ship but oh bummer! everbody on board has bubonic plague! Now you do too!"

The other is the cruel fortune Urgency. As GM, you can put Urgency into play whenever you want, and when you do you specify another cruel fortune that's coming. It might look like this. "Captain, you're yawning and stretching in the morning and a perky little breeze flutters by. Urgency: The Storm." (Captain's player: "oh fuck.") Then Urgency starts to count down and the pirates scramble around to make ready and then BAM, here's The Storm. (Huh. Come to think of it it's kind of the opposite of freezing the pile with a wild card in Canasta. It's like if there were a way for you to say "okay I'm going to pick up that pile on my next turn! Get while the getting's good!")

In short: you aren't allowed to bring The Storm into play unless there's a storm. However, you ARE allowed to bring Urgency: The Storm into play when there's not one. Together with the literal budget you get when the pirates cruise for a prize, this creates the same effect as the variable budget refresh rate does in Primetime Adventures.

So...

Apocalypse World has a GM budget like Poison'd does, but even more non-concrete and conceptual. I'm really pushing strongly toward reducing the GM's budget to its component parts, which are (of course) permissions and expectations. What, at any given moment, does the GM have the group's permission to do? What, at any given moment, must the GM do to fulfill the group's expectations?

In Apocalypse World, they aren't cruel fortunes that the GM brings into play, each with its own triggering circumstances and its own mechanical concequences. Instead they're moves that the GM makes, directly and exclusively in the fiction, embodied in the actions of NPCs and non-character setting elements.

...More in a sec.

(edited to add links)

Okay, GM moves in Apocalypse World. They're things like "forcibly separate the characters," "exchange harm for harm," "announce off-screen badness," "take away someone's stuff." As GM, when it's my move (a whole nother topic, I'll touch on it in a sec), I choose one of these moves and I make it - again, strictly and exclusively embodied in my NPCs and the game world. For instance: "Foster's people drag you, Mary, off to a cell, holding you firmly by the wrists and not making any skin contact. October, Foster watches them go without much expression, then turns to you. 'Join me for dinner?' she says."

There's no mechanical effect to any of my moves, unlike Poison'd's cruel fortunes. Instead, it's like in Spione: the cards say that I can have this guy suborn this other guy, so that's what I do. "This guy has suborned this other guy" doesn't carry with it any concrete mechanical effect - there's no "...so now I get an extra card" or anything - but instead the guy really did suborn the other guy, and that constrains every single thing that comes after. In my example, it's just that Mary and October really are separated.

Mm. Anyway, it turns out from playtesting (see! Playtesting!) that there are two kinds of moves I can make. Let's call them "maneuvering" and "punching in the face." Any given move, like "announce off-screen badness" or "forcibly separate the characters" or any of them, might be a maneuver, and might be a punch in the face. It depends on, oh, everything else. I hope you can see what I mean by that, I can go into it more maybe if anyone asks.

It further turns out from playtesting that sometimes when it's my move I'm allowed (by unspoken group permission) to punch in the face, and sometimes I'm allowed only to maneuver. Here's where I touch on when it's my move: it's my move, among many other times, when a player totally blows a roll. And when a player totally blows a roll, it is absolutely clear that I'm allowed to punch in the face.

Here's an example from an earlier session. In reality I kind of flubbed it; I'm going to tell you how it could have happened played correctly. I'm summarizing down to the heart of it, this was 10 minutes or so of play:
Emily: Can I convince some of the healthier ones to come with me?
Me: That'd be winning them over. Roll for it.
Emily [rolling]: Dammit..
Me: Yeah, absolutely some of the healthier ones come with you.
Emily: They do?
Me: Yes.
Emily: Huh. Okay.
Me: That night they beat the crap out of you and take away your stuff.
Emily: Oh no, those bastards. Really? That's a real punch in the face. Do I get to roll for it at all?
Me: You already did.

"Take away someone's stuff" was my move, and I knew that in this case it would be a punch in the face move, and when Emily blew her roll, that meant that it was legit for me to make a punch in the face move. So I did.

See also the current conversations here about Ben's GM-fu and here about the narrative wall.

When it's my move, when can I punch in the face, and when am I allowed only to maneuver? Well, one time I'm allowed to punch in the face is when a player blows a roll. One time I'm NOT allowed to punch in the face is when a player makes a specifically cautious move and then passes to me. (Example: "I ask around. Does anybody know who this slaver is?" A move I can legitimately make: announce off-screen badness. A move I can't legitimately make: exchange harm for harm.) What about the rest? This is an outstanding question in the game's design, that I'm trying to resolve by playtesting: when, seriously when, am I allowed to make a punch in the face move, and when am I required to make a maneuver move instead? And then, AND THEN, how on earth do I communicate it to the game's eventual audience?

Now, to bring it back to Mary and Roark, here's what it means that Birdie's listed under "cannibal" in my little book of moves. This isn't secret from the players, but when I try to tell them this stuff they put their fingers in their ears and say la la la, so they don't happen to know it. I'm revealing it here for the first time ever!

NPC listings:
Roark is a brute: hunting pack. The move he gives me is "victimize someone vulnerable."
Birdie is a grotesque: cannibal. The move she gives me is "attack someone from behind."

Together, they're almost always going to be a punch in the face.

By having Mary let Roark and Birdie loose, Julia just gave me serious permission to make all the punch in the face moves my little heart desires, provided they're "victimize someone vulnerable" and "attack someone from behind," embodied in Roark and Birdie. This casts light on my outstanding design question, and gives me some very good information to include in the game's text about it. Hooray playtesting!

It also reveals something that I find very interesting in light of all the other conversations I've linked to:

Julia gave me permission that's binding and clearly legit, but that forcibly overwrites the expectations of all the other players. She didn't need their permission to give me permission, if you see. (Lord. What this means? This means that I've solved the problem that ended our 6-year freeform Ars Magica thing. God DAMN.)

...Okay. Have I managed to get to what I want to discuss, in such a way that it's discussable? I don't know! Questions, and more prodding if you can't see it yet, very welcome.

-Vincent

Hey, Vincent.

So, in short, you mean "for a thing to happen at the table in a satisfying way you need one player to provide an opportunity and another player to take up that opportunity?"

'cause, yeah, I can get behind that, for a particular style of game (theoretical question: under what circumstances can one player unilaterally dictate an event in a satisfying way?) I'll relate that to Principia thusly: the abilities in principia (ex: When I use alchemical reagents ... I can blow things up ... And the GM gets to say what the collateral damage is), is basically saying "okay, the player exploits this opportunity, and then the GM takes up the opportunity that creates at his own discretion."

(this happens, non-mechanically, in many games, including in Principia. I'm using Principia because lately Principia is the game on my mind, and because the mechanics show the contours of this very well. I could run Principia for about a year without playing anything else, I think.)

yrs--
--Ben

The reason we all stick our fingers in our ears and go 'lalalalala' is the same reason I don't want to watch how Penn&Teller do their illusions - I'd rather just be in the magic.

On the flip side, knowing some details about what type an NPC can be is really helpful from a player. Suspecting an NPC of being a devourer-type gives me a better grasp of how to handle that NPC. Maybe.

Hi Vincent,

The Spione influence may be more fundamental than the distinction between Maneuvers and Flashpoint Punch. The core issue you're hitting on with this is the absence of consent when it comes to saying and doing stuff in the fiction. The only consent in the game is social, to sit down together and to do this thing - within the thing, forget it - what I say, when it's my "go," and according to the rules of what I can say, is what happens.

There is a ruthlessness to this form of play which charges the mechanics via a feedback-mechanism. How can I illustrate that ...? OK, I'll try this idea. You cannot possibly skip to the middle of a session, for instance, and pick up from there. The middle is by definition the middle of the activity, as in, the people being active with one another. The mechanics at any point in play are altered (multiplied? I said "charges" earlier) according to how much play has occurred and what has fictionally occurred.

The thing about the lack of consensus per unit contribution - and the interesting corollary, the initial consensus to go with whatever is contributed, as we go along - is that the author-audience dynamic, fundamental to Narrativist play, becomes the only possible dynamic for things to move along at all.

One more thing: with that in place, then various other mechanisms in traditional role-playing which generate investment - first among which is the ownership of characters, who are assumed to protagonists - become unnecessary. For instance, in Spione, only two characters are "owned," and technically they aren't even owned fully - just their ethical decisions, not their movements or full back-story. Nor are they necessarily protagonists.

Remember all the squawking and shitting of little green apples which resulted from your Still more character ownership thread? I think you're seeing, in this game design, your own eventual reply to that mess.

Best, Ron

Ben wrote:
So, in short, you mean "for a thing to happen at the table in a satisfying way you need one player to provide an opportunity and another player to take up that opportunity?"

I could run Principia for about a year without playing anything else, I think.

Well, here, this is what I'm hearing. Let me know if I'm getting it right.

So, in this game, NPCs are associated with a particular type of move. Each move comes in two flavors: maneuver and "punch in the face". However, you can only use this move if the NPC is actually free to act in the fiction. So, in a sense, each NPC becomes a GM resource whose availability is adjudicated via the fiction. Therefore, players can control the availability of this resource to the GM through their actions in the fiction.

Did I get that right? Because, if so, that's really nifty.

(Aside: can you escalate "punch in the face" to "face stabby"? Just curious... ;-] )

Ron, there's something kind of wriggly going on here.

For instance:

Ron wrote:
The core issue you're hitting on with this is the absence of consent when it comes to saying and doing stuff in the fiction. The only consent in the game is social, to sit down together and to do this thing - within the thing, forget it - what I say, when it's my "go," and according to the rules of what I can say, is what happens.

One more thing: with [the author-audience dynamic, fundamental to Narrativist play] in place, then various other mechanisms in traditional role-playing which generate investment - first among which is the ownership of characters, who are assumed to protagonists - become unnecessary. For instance, in Spione, only two characters are "owned," and technically they aren't even owned fully - just their ethical decisions, not their movements or full back-story. Nor are they necessarily protagonists.

Seth:

Right! "So, in a sense, each NPC becomes a GM resource whose availability is adjudicated via the fiction. Therefore, players can control the availability of this resource to the GM through their actions in the fiction." - That's it exactly.

...Including "in a sense." Really the NPCs embody the GM's resource, they aren't it themselves. But the effect is, yes, exactly, that the players can control the availability of the resource through their characters' actions with regard to the NPCs.

The GM has a baseline of resources too, which I haven't described at all.

Oh and the "flavors" of the moves aren't formal, they're just something I've observed in play. I'm pretty convinced now that they're Ben's offering an opportunity and taking an opportunity, which is exciting to me.

-Vincent

Follow-up question:

Do you establish the nature of the NPC's resource when you create him? Like, is that part of his "stats" as an NPC? (I'm using "stats" really, really loosely here.)

Also, is this resource the only mechanical impact of an NPC? Or do they have regular stats/Effectiveness/whatever associated with them?

Hi Vincent and all

This is looking good. I always want to know, as a GM, when I have the permission to punch a PC in the face.

Just for curiosity, does this have anything to do with the Push and Pull discussions that were happening some time ago? I can't even find good links to those discussions, but I was wondering if there are any connections.

Seth: you do establish NPCs' natures when you create them. You can also change their natures freely, as they're embodiments, not things in themself. For instance Birdie used to be just a name, then she became a grotesque: mindfucker, then she became a grotesque: cannibal.

NPCs have no effectiveness other than the moves they let you make. The GM never rolls dice, like in InSpectres, but also never sets a target number (and has full off-screen authority, unlike in InSpectres). The die rolls in the game aren't opposed at all, although occasionally one will trigger a counter-roll, itself unopposed in turn.

Those listings for Roark and Birdie are their whole character sheets. Most NPCs list one more word, like "ignorance" or "despair," but those two happen to not need to.

Christoph: of course it does! But it's not like X-thing in this game = Push and Y-thing in this game = Pull. Instead I'd say something like, in play the game is rich in push-and-pull, denying unilaterality; using the game's rules is like drawing your hand through water, with every push creating, by virtue of the rules, a rush of pull eddying around it. But I'd need to have that conversation with Mo before I committed to it.

(I believe you can find some of Push and Pull in the archives of Sin Aesthetics.)

-Vincent

lumpley wrote:
NPCs have no effectiveness other than the moves they let you make.

Seth--I (Mary's player) knew that Roark was a brute and that his move is to "victimize someone vulnerable". I also knew that Birdie was a cannibal. I didn't know that her move is to "attack someone from behind".

I don't think I stuck my fingers in my ears. I'm still trying to figure out what Mary's brother Pierre is and what his move is.

Apparently we trust Vincent a lot!

-Julia

Seth: Oh the list of moves isn't a thing. Like, there's no reason for a player ever to care what moves are available to me; they're listed so that I remember to do them when I have the chance. So when I have to do over on a technicality, it's not ever a "nuh uh that move's not available to you" technicality. It's a "Vincent, did you forget that October's in the room?" technicality. I'm like - "Oh! I did. Dur. Okay, do overs."

So, see, Julia's curious, and I'm keeping some things secret from her on purpose, for the suspense, but there's no conflict of interest there that would make me untrustworthy.

-Vincent

In our last session, Mary killed Roark when he returned from his killing rampage, covered in blood. He had brought Joe's Girl back with him (that was the NPC that Mary was okay about him killing. Then Mary decided she wanted Roark to bring Joe's Girl back alive so Mary could do terrible Brainer things to her.)

Things did not go according to plan. Mary thought Roark would come back with a reasonably intact Joe's Girl, before he went off and killed other people, she'd draw him a nice bath, they'd have sex one last time, and she'd kill him before he could do any real damage to the population of the holding. That was the plan. No, I didn't tell Vincent this plan. Instead, Roark brought back a half-dead Joe's Girl, and when Mary took off her gloves and told Roark to come to bed, Birdie, the cannibal kid inside him, answered, "I don't really swing that way."

Mary's heart sank. "I have to kill him now." So she enticed Roark/Birdie with a nice bubble bath and dandelion wine. Make that dandelion wine with enough digitalis to kill a big biker dude like Roark. She got the digitalis from Kal in a previous session. Roark had a heart attack and died in the bathroom.

This all happened without a single die roll, or using a single PC move. I didn't roll to see if Roark accepted the poisoned wine, or if he died, or anything. I guess it could have been "go aggro", but Mary goes aggro either with her brain (and adds her weird), or with her gun (and adds her hard).

I like this. I didn't want to roll to see if Roark would die. It was a given that he was going to go. I said, "I hand Roark dandelion wine with digitalis, enough to kill him." Vincent asked how long would it be for the dig' to take effect. Minutes. Vincent described Roarks demise. It was terribly sad. I did roll to plant a scary thought into someone's head when he made a rude comment about Roark in Mary presence. ("Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.")

The creepiness continued, which I'll have to describe in the next post. Where Roark's death was a huge tragedy for Mary, it was small thing in the wider scheme of things. Later.

Also, I hope the other players chime in about what happened on Tuesday. This was an action packed session.
Julia

[quote}I like this. I didn't want to roll to see if Roark would die. It was a given that he was going to go. I said, "I hand Roark dandelion wine with digitalis, enough to kill him." Vincent asked how long would it be for the dig' to take effect. Minutes. Vincent described Roarks demise. It was terribly sad.

And Vincent didn't have to make rolls to have Roark kill the other hold members that he took down while doing Mary's bidding in bringing Joe's Girl back to her, mostly alive.  Clearly this was all fine with us, as we didn't say "Hold it there, Mr. you just killed one of the fertile men in the hold! Allison's going to read a charged situation to try to get wind of it."  We all knew it was coming based on the conversation Roark and Mary had at the end of last session. 

Is that how it would work, Vincent? If we had wanted to head Roark off, we would have started this session off by saying, "I'm talking to Bill when Roark comes in covered with blood?" 

Nope! If I decide to have NPCs kill each other off-screen as one of my moves, there's nothing any of you can do about it. In fact Meg tried to save Bill that way, more or less, and I just said "oh, nobody can find Bill," and that was that.

I didn't have Julia roll for Mary to kill Roark because there was no conflict. I mean, Roark didn't want to die, but for anything to be a conflict, the sides have to be capable of acting effectively for their own interests. Roark didn't have the information he needed in order to do that. He accepted the wine and drank it because he wanted some wine and didn't know it was poisoned, and that was that, too.

-Vincent