In this fascinating thread over at Story Games, a few Apocalypse World players are wrestling with one player’s actual-play issues and discussing some of the edges of the Apocalypse World GM’s job. (I think.)
In that thread, you’ll find some discussion of whether or not one GM’s approach to play is meant to be “part of GMing” Apocalypse World. One issue that has arisen is whether or not the habitual importation of GMing techniques learned from other games, and not endorsed by the game text, can lead to trouble (and a clash, it seems to me, of expectations with results) for GMs.
This forms an immediate question in my mind: If a technique is not a part of GMing Apocalypse World… what do you call it when a GM running a game of Apocalypse World uses that technique? Is it a custom MC move? Is it a hack of the game? Is the MC not quite running Apocalypse World at that point?
As someone who had a lot of trouble engaging the manuscript for Apocalypse World as a stand-alone text (I kept interpreting it as a meta-commentary and let the hype surrounding it influence my earliest readings), and as someone who has barely played and never GMed the game, I’m not qualified to say what you’d call it when a GM imports non-prescribed techniques into actual play of Apocalypse World. What do you think?
I think there’s an obvious difference, too, between a technique that’s willfully brought into play by an experimenting GM and one that is brought in out of habit or instinct… but maybe I’m even wrong about that.
I have this game, and I desperately want to play, but I am trapped in development hell… here’s to hoping you get more comments.
-Ben.
You’ve phrased the question here in terms of AW, but I don’t thing the specific game matters to your question.
So, we’re talking about what we call the use of other/different/outside rules within what is proported to be a game of a specific system. I think looking at the purpose of the change would be the most helpful way to catagorize.
I’m going use an nWod game I just ran as an example. Zombies on a cruise ship, one night game.
A problem came up whereby the PCs could just run past all the zombies because their speed was 10 compared to the zombies 1. Unless I formed an unbroken ring, the PCs could easily escape everytime. Not what I wanted. So, I added in D&D 4e style opportunity attacks. This made the the PC have to either create more space to run, or risk being bitten.
I call that a “fix” because I used a rule to fill a gap in the system.
I also didn’t wanted to try some other stuff that night. I was using premade characters to save time, but I was worried the PCs wouldn’t become invested in them. I also wanted them to be civilians, and yet not suck. I decided to remove willpower and replace it with traits which could be invoked for bonus die (ala Chronica Feudalis and Lady Blackbird).
I call that a “hack” because I removed an existing game mechanic and replaced it with another. At that point, it reasonable to say I was not longer really playing nWod. Still, decribing the game as “nWod but I with X instead of Y” was best way to communicate it.
Ugh, forgive the typos. Working from the phone here.
What do you call it in other games, Will? Like, if I’m GMing Burning Wheel and create a conflict that nobody cares about. Or if I’m GMing Dogs in the Vineyard and decide I’m going to make it clear what’s morally right and wrong. Of if I’m GMing Vampire like it’s a “superheroes with fangs” game. Or if I’m GMing D&D and decide to just arbitrarily decide when the monsters have taken “enough damage” to be dead. What do you call that?
I try not to answer my own question posts, Jonathan, because I ask them to get exposed to opinions other than my own. I’ll comment a bit, though, to see if we can bear fruit here.
Your examples seem pretty loaded to me, compared to Zach’s, and not completely congruent. That is, I’d describe a fanged-superhero take on Vampire differently than I would a conflict that nobody cares about.
I mean, it varies, right? The intent behind the alteration makes a difference, doesn’t it? As does the outcome of the alteration—productive or counter-productive?
I read a negative spin in all of your examples (though that may be happening on my end). What about positive or productive alterations to a game, like those in Zach’s comment?
It’s worth noting, too, that Apocalypse World is a little different in how it interacts with alterations because of its explicitness and codification of GM style as rules. It’s a high-resolution game, in that way—zooming in and distinguishing between GM techniques in a way that many games don’t.
Apocalypse World also applies terminology in a way that makes it a great model for this question, with its custom moves and hacks built into the text. By applying the same term—”move”—to both player-originating dice-driven acts and to GM-originating diceless acts, and then introducing the idea of custom moves, I thought it would be interesting to plumb the question using Apocalypse World‘s jargon. I think AW is an interesting case because of the way it quantifies specific acts of GMing into rules on the same plane as dice-mechanical rules—the plane of moves.
So, we can take the question out to other games, clearly, but I think AW is a good backdrop because it asks us to think about these alterations to play style in a different way.
Edit: If I’m wrong in here somewhere, please say so. I don’t ask these questions to entrench myself but to get exposed to outside ideas.
So, Jonathan, I think your question is a logical extension of mine, but I’d rather hear your answer than mine.
Hi Will. I wasn’t meaning to be flippant. Some of my frustration was probably carrying over from the SG thread. My point with those semi-rhetorical questions was that I don’t consider Apocalypse World to be that different than other games in demanding specific things of the players and GMs, just that it does so much more explicitly.
For example, a while back I posted AW-style principles for playing Burning Wheel and Sage has distilled similar principles from various editions of D&D. If you take the standard section of GM/player advice in game book as a relatively literal and specific description of what players are supposed to do, then a lot of games start looking, potentially, as explicit as AW. And then it’s possible to say things like, “I don’t think D&D 4E is intended to be played that way.” And people can take that as they will. Maybe they care, maybe they don’t.
If a GM is running Apocalypse World and decides to “hit the characters where they are vulnerable”, that’s not a custom move or a hack, but something like a custom MC principle, which isn’t included as one of the core options of AW for a reason. It’s fine if folks are doing it intentionally as part of a larger hack of the game. The options in the end say that you should make up your own MC principles for hacks of the game. But if it’s being done unintentionally or the players just decide to use different MC principles to play “standard AW” then of course there could potentially be problems.
Well, Gygax would have called that a house rule. Overly broad, maybe, but it works.
While out walking the dog, I though it might be helpful if I stated the unspoken “GM principles” behind my examples. Imagine a world in which the guidelines of various games said this:
* Burning Wheel: make certain that conflicts will be really difficult for the characters.
* Dogs in the Vineyard: decide what’s morally right and wrong and look at the characters — both PCs and NPCs — through the eyes of an angry God.
* Vampire: create super(naturally)-powered villains for the characters to foil; set them up to save the city from a darkness worse than themselves.
* D&D: use your best judgment to decide when a fight feels over and declare the monsters dead or fleeing.
None of those principles are bad principles for roleplaying games. There are plenty of games that I can imagine in which one or more of those principles would be exactly the right thing to do. But that are bad principles to follow when running the specific game listed next to them, at least in terms of recreating the kind of play experience the game was written to facilitate.
The last one is even controversial, right? From interviewing hotshot D&D GMs, Jenskot found that a lot of them more or less followed that principle, not tracking hitpoints and arbitrarily deciding when fights were over. So it’s not always a clear-cut thing.