The following is a striking example of the difference between “traditional” GMing and something coming out of the indie stables. The game is Apocalypse World.

The Colonel is the Hardholder, the guy who runs this little bastion of humanity in the mess that the world has become. it’s a big market built out of the remnants of a Walmart called Hatchet City. The market is a running free-for-all, but the single biggest trade is in drugs and alcohol, as people need some sort of escape. That part of the economy is handled by Brimful and his family, who are something of a power unto themselves. Brimful is an older man with a couple sons, who really believes that the best way to avoid trouble is to not seek it. He’s got a gang to back himself up, as well as a couple wives and a bevy of lovers and his kids.

So the scenes sets up something like this: There was a difference opinion among the Colonel’s bodyguards, as Absinthe (the recently appointed head of security, this crazy chick who came out of the wastes convinced that the voices are telling her to kill monsters. For those who know the game, a Battlebabe) was trying to figure out who among her crew was a spy for the encroaching warlord Ambergrease. To do so, she called the entire bodyguard detail away to one location, to deal with them en masse.

But while that was going down the Colonel took off to go talk to Rosette (another PC, the Skinner) with whom he ended up spending the night. So when Absinthe finally decided to go looking for him, he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Rumour got started that he had been murdered in his sleep, that Ambergrease was coming for them all, that there were spies and assassins everywhere, that he had taken off in the middle of the night leaving Hatchet City to fend for itself… you know, the kind of brouhaha that happens when the leader suddenly goes missing. By the time the Colonel is found, the entire hold is in an uproar.

Eventually Absinthe finds the Colonel just as he’s leaving Rosette’s rooms. As things are starting to calm down, Brimful comes storming over to where The Colonel is standing with his bodyguard detail, backed by his own gang, and starts a diatribe about how Hatchet City wouldn’t be in such a state if the Colonel wasn’t inviting chaos with his behaviour, that the Colonel shouldn’t be running around in the middle of the night without his bodyguards, how he’s running a loose ship, and if he can’t keep “his whore” in line (Rosette had slept with one of Brimful’s lovers Tip the day before, which Brimful was not happy about) then he might not be the right man to run the hardhold.

Calling Rosette a whore was probably a bad move as the Colonel proceeded to beat Brimful to death. Literally beat the old man with his knuckles, while Brimful’s entire entourage just stood there in shock and watched (the Colonel’s player rolled Seize by force and hit, choosing to do terrible harm, suffer little harm and Shock and Dismay his enemies).

We ended the game around there, but it was that one act of violence I wanted to highlight. See, in the way that I would usually run a traditional RP I would have invested quite a bit of prep and storyline in Brimful. The likelihood of me allowing him to die in such an abrupt way would be slim to none. I would have manipulated the rules, the dice rolls and the narrative control to make sure that Brimful came out of it alive.

But to GM Apocalypse World one must hold to the three points of the Agenda: Make Apocalypse world seem real, make the characters lives not boring, and play to find out what happens. I do not know ahead of time what is going to happen, and have no real vested interest one way or the other: really, I’m just curious to see what the characters are going to do to handle Brimful. Turns out that the Colonel is going to kill him over an insult.

Did that make his life easier? Hell no. Sure, he made a point about Brimful, But the old man had kids ready to step up and take his place, and a gang that can start making trouble, and a serious amount of clout in the holding itself. So now Brimful’s people have good reason to go running to Ambergrease, or to ally with Dustwich (The Colonel’s former lieutenant who is gunning for his job), or maybe to just take a shot at him themselves. Life just got a little more interesting, and it did it without me forcing the story to turn on my dime: it all follows naturally from what was there before.

To me, this is by far more interesting than whatever I would have come up with myself: interesting not only to the players, but to me, because I simply do not know what will happen until it does.

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I give up, I really do. What is it about Vincent Baker’s work that turns me in to a giggling fanboy? In general, I have little patience for fanboyism. To me the term evokes a sort of blind and arbitrary ardour for something. A kind of nerdish religious fundamentalism that brooks no critical analysis or discussion. But it would be hard to describe my relationship with Baker’s games and game theory as anything else. I have a hard time finding fault with anything that he puts out, or the style in which he does it. Even the one major complaint that I have voiced, that the rules can be obscure and dense, I actually secretly think is a good thing: I honestly love his writing style as being an act of poetic terseness! He uses one word exquisitely to say what would otherwise be said with 10! For fucks sake! Any criticism I might muster is inherently weak, because I honestly just believe that this shit is just too good.

At least I can take refuge in the fact that I’m apparently not alone in this. With the advent of his game Apocalypse World Baker has set up a some forums to provide support and give people access to hack the game for their own design. A game that I have always thought of as having a rules set utterly inseperable from the setting, being adapted to other settings? C’est impossible! But then you look at the discussion, and realise that the heart of the game is not the moves as per se, but the principles and agenda of the Master of Ceremonies. The moves, the mechanical actions possible, are really artifacts of the setting. Which means you can have a hack for the rules for most settings. There’s one in planning for Iceland, which is amazingly hot (Viking viking viking! viking!). How about the apocalypse of D&D, Dark sun? No worries! Or, my favourite two so far (both partially or fully the brain child of Baker of course) one for the game of Knife and Candle (Echo Bazaar) and one of Vincent Baker’s own design called Dragon Killer: a fantasy post apocalypse. “When the dragon lived, there was magic everywhere, and ley flowed like water. But when the King of Death broke the dragon’s heart, everything was ruined.”

Seriously, who doesn’t want to play in that world? Who doesn’t want to know what happens next, what does the dragon’s death mean, how does doom come upon us all? I feel like I should be branded, like some sort of cattle. I’ll be the Hefer with the Vx branded on it’s side. I shall attempt to maintain the poise of a critical decision maker, but in the end it’s all just the lowing of steak-in-waiting.

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Via Apocalypse world, I heard tell of a thing called Echo Bazaar. A sort of online game, played through your browser using a twitter account, of life in subterranean London after it was stolen by giant bats. You start off escaping from prison and try to make your way in this fanciful world.

It’s pretty amazing, so far. easy to play, interesting to get involved in, and there’s no time commitment other than you can when you get a mo’. I invite you to join in, delicious friend. All you need is a twitter account. You can find me under my alter ego, Motipha. I look forward to seeing you,perhaps a bout in the game of Knife and Candle, eh? All is well that never dies, you know.

Here’s a guide that helps explain what’s going on. Here’s a quick guide to the very beginning of the game, to get you started.

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On the way to work this morning I heard this story regarding a book about facebook. The author interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (It seems appropriate to link to his facebook account) and mentioned one point that caught me: Apparently Mr. Zuckerberg believes that all people have one identity. My understanding of his position is that all people should have one face they show the world, one unified approach/social persona/whatever for all the people who interact with them. This is apparently part of his drive for facebook, and an argument for why you should use it to link information not only for friends, but coworkers, business partners, and absolutely everyone and anyone you might come in contact with.

While I have not read the book I must say: codswallop. Claptrap, even. I’d go so far as to say bunkum (For those of you wondering, yes, I did look up synonyms for this post. Do you see the research I do for you guys?). Speaking for myself, I have distinctly different personalities dependent not only on whose company I am in, but the situation and environment. While my underlying self does not change, the external demeanour I show the world changes radically in order to suit my needs. In this way I can maintain relationships with deeply divergent groups of people. While there is a core self that does not change, there are other aspects that do. Not everyone needs to interact with me in the strongly pedantic and literal fashion in which I relate to my co-workers about work. My relationship with my parent’s is conducted in a normal speaking voice and with few if any exclamations. I enjoy spending time with people with whom I would never, ever indulge in ad hominem attacks because with them it’s not a necessary part of banter, but a hurtful attack that does nothing but derail and damage our friendship and conversations.

I’m not even going to touch on the need for space between paramours.

I think as gamers we have an interesting perspective on this subject. On the cast we have mentioned that most people tend to play characters that are alike in some ways; you might call it that player’s signature. But beyond such similarities we play many and varying personas, some as outlets of ourselves, some as explorations of who(m?) we are not, as well as other reasons. We revel in multiple identities in our fantasy worlds, because they provide space for us to truly, completely express ourselves. People are far, far more complicated than a single identity could truly give vent to: at times paradoxical (hypocritical, even), often conflicted, mostly expressing ourselves in a way that best suits our situation at that moment. To suggest that we should try to be all these parts of ourselves at once at the same time invites confusion, incomprehensibility and even madness.

While I appreciate Mr Zuckerberg’s apparent desire for understanding and comprehension between people, I think it is deeply mislead. People not only are but need deeply complex and ridiculously plural in natures: to try to boil that down to a single identity is a waste of time and a disservice to humanity. The alternative approach, to encapsulate all the vagaries and variation of a person in one go, would end up with an unintelligible morass of detail that it would take years of study to comprehend. let people be different to each other, and complicated, and hidden. We understand each other better that way, and it takes less work than people trying to pretend they’re always the same person.

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Learning to discern when an in-fiction event is important enough to warrant using the games mechanics is a pretty important skill. Dependent on the game, the ease with which one identifies meaningful decision points (what I think of as conflicts) varies greatly. In Dog’s in the Vineyard those dice come out whenever you disagree (Or as Baker says it in the text “Say yes or roll dice”). My life With Master and Prime Time Adventures both put limits to the actual scene framing, so that there is only ever one conflict in a scene. But all of those games are created in such a way that the rules only express to further story, such that the mechanics make it impossible to not know what is at stake.

In most RPG games that I’ve played actions taken in the game are simulated by some sort of direct dice roll. Climbing walls, Sticking a shiv in someone, write a paper, decipher a manuscript, all of these are done in the context of rules and mechanics around taking these actions. Roll your stat, roll your skill, add in an appropriate aspect, spend some tokens, all the crunch is about what you do and little is about why you do it.

Yet just because such a mechanism exists in the game, and that action happens to be taking place doesn’t mean that you need to bog down in the crunch. Sometimes the action taking place is secondary or unimportant to something else that is happening within or around that scene. In a recent Sorceror game, I was playing a cardshark who was tasked with going out and conning a guy in an illegal game. Mechanically, I ended up rolling a bunch of dice for playing cards, using my demon (a deck of cards that loves it when people get taken for everything they have) to win, and at some point rolling dice to spot the other guys telltale (i.e. that he was a sorceror).

While the setup for the scene was centered around card play, that was actually less important than me noticing his telltale and realising what that means. But with so much time and effort invested in discerning what was happening with the poker game rather than with the point of the scene, it ended up coming out a little garbled. Sure, I came out of it knowing that the guy was a sorceror, ok, but why was so much time spent on poker?

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why there was a push towards the card game, and the GM and I spoke about it after the session was over. I can see why the dice were engaged the way they were. I created a guy who was a card shark, my Cover (read as profession for those who have not played sorceror) was as a dealer, my demon a possessed deck of cards. It’s kind of like a guy who in D&D game creates a fighter with all the relevant stats and statistics and then is confused as to why he spends so much time fighting.

But only kind of, because I’m not saying I shouldn’t be seen playing poker, but that it’s not always what’s important in that scene. Sure, sometimes the scene is going to hinge on how well I play my hand, but it just as well might have to do with my relationship with the other card players, or with something else that’s happening, or even with the demon itself. The game being played might be nothing but colour: it puts what I’m actually doing in context, makes it believable that I’d be there at that time, it adds description to the situation. Maybe I’m really there to listen in on a conversation happening at the bar. Or something’s going on with my demon and the poker hands just an expression of that. Figuring that out will inform whether or not it’s worth rolling dice, and what dice to roll.

In Apocalypse World, I ran in to similar problems over and over. When I first picked up the game, my instinct was that whenever someone tried to do something, I would have them roll the relevent move. While this worked, it injected a lot of mecanical rolls for things that just weren’t that important: seeing whether or not the Chopper could stay awake after ingesting some drugs (acting under fire) might be important, but isn’t neccessarily so. Brainers can do a bunch of weird based things, but it’s not always a conflict when they do so. It’s when these things are important that the machine of the game should engage.

Here are some things I think are worth looking for. They are not perscriptive, nor absolute; all of these these things don’t have to be true, nor if any of them are true does it neccessarily mean it’s a meaningful conflict:

• Does the action represent something that the character(s) care(s) about? If so, what does it represent?
• Does the action represent something I as a player care about? Sure, it might matter to my character whether I come out on top or on bottom in the card game, but I as a player might not really care one way or another and if I do what I care about might not be immediately obvious from the situation
• Do success and failure represent different paths for them? i.e. does it actually matter what the outcome is? What might those outcomes be?

Keeping the above in mind can lead us to what the scene is really about, whether it is important, and what parts of the rules apply. Otherwise, you can end up with a stream of constantly engaged mechanics. That does not help in creating a meaningful and fun story but rather bogs play down in endlessly simulating mostly unimportant minutiae. And to me that is missing the point.

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My discussions with Lexx about Apocalypse World have me thinking about mechanics, and what they are about. Lexx was talking about how he feels constrained by the mechanics, as if they arbitrarily are saying “you can do this, but you can’t do this.” If you want to get your gang to do something, then you have to roll and hit or your gang is going to turn on you. If you want to read a person, then these are the only questions you are allowed to ask. Try to ask anything else is impossible.

To a degree, I can see why he sees the game this way. This is a problem if it is in fact the mechanics that limit what is or is not possible. I’m not sure that it is, or maybe I’m not sure that it SHOULD be in a cohesively designed game. In the end, it really should be the created and accepted fiction that truly limits your choices.

Here are a few examples, both good and bad.

• Mage:The AscenscionThis game describes a world where magick was the ability to mess with reality itself, to reshape it to your beliefs and suppositions. As such, the rules would let you do anything imagineable with reality, taking in to account how hard or easy it is to do magick dependent on your current situation. The rules say “consult these stats, spend these points, roll these dice versus this difficulty” and off you go. But just because the rules allow any type of magick, it doesn’t actually mean you CAN do any type of magick.

  Consider a Verbena, a mage of the blood-and-sex variety: primal forces at work, the flow of life. Imagine that character trying to do something highly esoteric or uber-christian: summoning an angel, calculating the internal geometry of the soul, etc. I would say such a thing is impossible, in those terms: while the rules exist for someone to do those things, it makes no sense that this person would do it.

  In this case, the limit is not capability, but description: A verbena could very well accomplish the same goal that was being sought by summoning that Angel, or by all that delightful math, but would not do THAT to do it. A different description, and the very same goal could be completed (unless the fiction has established that it can only be done this one way).

• D&DIn Dungeons and Dragons, magic traditionally takes a few different forms, but one thing is clear: This is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. In order to do something magical, the spell needs to exist, you need to know/have access to it, you need to be capable of casting it, and you need to cast it. The mechanics show how one goes about completing those steps, but what is actually limiting those mechanics is the world they are trying to describe: In this world, this is how magic works.
• Vampire: The MasqueradeThis is a game that I consider as a bad example. In Vampire, I am a supernatural being, hell-bent on whatever the fuck I’m hell-bent on doing, powered by blood to do crazy supernatural things. Mechanically, I have a set list of supernatural things I can do, as well as ranks of those abilities. This list is this way because… well, because. Possibly there is some justification in terms of you only can use powers that were those of your sire or some shit like that, but in my experience both reading and playing the game it definitely felt like the list was just set. In this way, the rules were proscriptive, and bogus because of it.
• West End Star Wars.Here I’m going to focus on Force Powers, by far the worst example of mechanics being used to limit. West end gave you a very specific list of force powers which acted as a very severe limiter to what you could do via the force that did not match up with the source material. Or rather, one could argue, it used the source material as a limit to what you could do: you can only use the force to do things that are done in the movies, books, and comics. If you try to do anything else, you can’t. Not because it doesn’t make sense in that world, but because we haven’t seen anyone else do it.

  Now I can hear the screams saying “well, you want to do something else, then write up the power and take it.” But what if I want to do something on the fly, but I haven’t “taken” the associated power or it was never available to me? Having a list of “spells” consider what the Force is portrayed doesn’t feel right at all.

Hopefully these examples make some sort of sense.

To me, what makes the first two examples right is that neither feels like it is arbitrarily making rules as to what is or is not possible. In both, it is the fiction that determines what is possible. For the second two, the mechanics are setting the terms of what is possible, or provide opportunity to act based on nothing relevant to the fiction.

But if fiction defines the limitations of possibility, what is it that mechanics do for you?

In essence, the mechanics inform you as to how you might do things. They give you tools, opportunities. You live in a world where magic is strongly patterned, being based on rote learning and prior knowledge and preparation? Here is a list of known spells in the world, and here is how you cast them. Magick is freeform, taking the shape of your conception of it as well as the environment you are in? Here are rules as to how that translates leveraging your stats, your currently held beliefs and worldview, and the nature of said environment.

Which brings up back to Apocalypse World, and the importance of approach. If your approach is “I want to do something, let’s find a rule that allows me to do so,” that system can seem very limiting. You’re looking to the rules to tell you what you can do, so a set list of answers to questions will appear arbitrary and frustrating. But if your approach is “I’m going to do something that works within the established fiction, now how does that look/what does that involve/what does that look like in the set fiction,” the rules provide ways for you to do it while adding colour and thematic elements. It’s not saying “these are the only things that you can do” but rather that assuming you are in a place where you want to do this, this is how you do it and this is what doing that means and looks like.

In the end, I think this really is key to games: the fiction is king, properly enthroned and held up by the rules, NOT vice versa.Of course this isn’t news: GM’s have been ignoring the rules in favour of the story for years already. After all, what is GM fiat if not story trumping mechanics? Yet that is another beast entirely: it’s rules at war with story, rather than helping us to tell it.

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