Apocalypse World is both a roleplaying game and a really intense primer on D. Vincent Baker’s approach to GMing a campaign. In fact, the primer is so intense that it’s been baked right into the ruleset at a really primal level.

First, it says this about what a roleplaying game is all about:

Roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize. All fine.

This is one of the better and most evocative explanations of how you play an RPG.

And then Baker tells you that the rules of Apocalypse World are going to “mediate the conversation”:

The particular things that make these rules kick in are called moves. The rule for moves is to do it, do it. In order for it to be a move and for the player to roll dice, the character has to do something that counts as that move; and whenever the character does something that counts as a move, it’s the move and the player rolls the dice.

Usually its unambiguous, but there are two ways that sometimes they don’t line up, and it’s your job as MC to deal with them.

First is when a player says only that her character makes a move, without having her character actually take any such action. For instance: “I go aggro on him.” Your answer should be “cool, what do you do?” “I seize the radio by force.” “Cool, what do you do?” “I try to seduce him.” “Cool, what do you do?”

Second is when a player has her character take action that counts as a move, but doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t intend it to be a move. For instance: “I shove him out of my way.” Your answer then should be “cool, you’re going aggro?” “I pout. ‘Well if you really don’t like me…'” “Cool, you’re trying to manipulate him?” “I squeeze way back between the tractor and the wall so they don’t see me.” “Cool, you’re acting under fire?” The rule for moves is if you do it, you do it, so make with the dice.”

This really got under my skin (in a good way) because it forced me to look at RPG mechanics from a fresh perspective. What Baker is describing is not radically different from the way I’ve always played RPGs: We have a conversation about the characters and the world they’re living in, and when it’s appropriate we interpret the actions of the characters mechanically and use the mechanics of the game to resolve the outcome of those actions.

But what Baker puts front and center is this: You play a game by making moves. And here are the moves that you can make in this game. Bam.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES

It’s a subtle shift in perspective. But where Apocalypse World really gets up in your face about it is when Baker gets to the rules for the Game Master (which Apocalypse World refers to as the Master of Ceremonies): He gives the MC a specific list of moves. And then he tells the MC that this is all he’s allowed to do.

Wait… what?

Yup. He gives you this list of moves:

• Separate them
• Capture someone
• Put someone in a spot
• Trade harm for harm (as established)
• Announce off-screen badness
• Announce future badness
• Inflict harm (as established)
• Take away their stuff
• Make them buy
• Activate their stuff’s downside
• Tell them the possible consequences and ask
• Offer an opportunity, with or without cost
• Turn their move back on them
• Make a threat move (from one of your fronts)
• After every move: “What do you do?”

And then he says, “Whenever there’s a pause in the conversation and everyone looks to you to say something, choose one of these things and say it. They aren’t technical terms or jargon: “announce future badness”, for instance, means think of something bad that’s probably going to happen in the future and announce it. “Make them buy” means the thing they want? They’re looking to you to tell them they can have it? If they want it, they have to buy it. And so on.”

If you’ve got a lot of experience GMing, this may prove tough for you. (Since it’s likely to be a departure from your normal methods of GMing.) It was tough for me. But I really, strongly encourage you to give it a try. Not because you need to completely change the way you normally GM (although you might end up doing that), but because this is what will make Apocalypse World sing for you.

In general, Baker is pushing two things here: First, make whatever the PCs are doing interesting. Second, use aggressive pacing.

In other words, don’t rush the players or cut them off. But if they’re trying to do something and need feedback from the game world to make it happen, then it’s the MC’s responsibility to make that feedback interesting. (They’re trying to sneak into a building? Put them on the spot. They’re trying to find directions to the Blue Lagoon? Make ’em buy.) And, similarly, if the players have run out of things they want to do (i.e., things they find interesting), then the MC’s job is to aggressively introduce something interesting (either by bringing something interesting onscreen or by fast-forwarding to the next interesting bit).

By limiting the MC’s input to this specific list of moves, Baker is not only making them explicitly another player at the table (with a specific role to play just like all the other players have their specific roles to play); he’s also forcing the MC to make PC actions interesting and to aggressively pace the session.

Baker also introduces a list of Principles which the MC is to follow, and which end up coloring how the MC uses their moves. Most of these Principles are rock solid GMing advice, but there are a couple key ones that factor heavily in understanding how Apocalypse World is supposed to be played:

• Make your move, but never speak its name.
• Make your move, but misdirect.
• Look through crosshairs.

“Make your move, but never speak its name” is fundamentally similar to the guidelines Baker gives for player moves: You don’t take your moves in Apocalypse World by saying the name of the move; you describe what happens in the game world.

“Make your move, but misdirect” builds on this principle. The effect of the move doesn’t occur because you chose the move; the effect is caused by something in the game world. (For example, the MC may choose the move “separate them”. But as far as the players are concerned, their characters have been separated because the plane they were flying in has just been chopped in two and they’re stuck in opposite halves.)

“Look through the crosshairs” basically makes it clear that you need to keep the stakes high and the pace intense. As Baker describes it: “Whenever your attention lands on someone or something that you own — an NPC or a feature of the landscape, material or social — consider first killing it, overthrowing it, burning it down, blowing it up, or burying it in the poisoned ground. An individual NPC, a faction of NPCs, some arrangement between NPCs, even an entire rival holding and its NPC warlord: crosshairs. It’s one of the game’s slogans: There are no status quos in Apocalypse World.”

DIGGING DEEPER

What really makes Apocalypse World tick, though, is that everything I’ve written here is a vast simplification. Or, rather, it’s merely the core of the game.

For example, every player will be playing a specific character type. And each character type has their own list of custom moves (expanding what they can do while also focusing their gameplay).

Similarly, the MC creates fronts (representing various forms of active and passive opposition in the game world). And each of these fronts, just like the character types, have their own custom moves which also expand the MC’s list of available moves at any given time (while also focusing gameplay).

There are rules for your crap, rules for crafting, rules for psychic brain-fuckery, rules for ruling settlements, rules for running gangs… Rules for all kinds of stuff. And it’s all evocative and provoking and awesome.

Baker says this towards the beginning:

The game takes quite a few sessions to play, so choose friends with space in their schedules for a commitment. I don’t figure it’s much of a game until 6 sessions, and it can go much longer.

And that’s pretty much true. It’s a fun little game for a one-shot; but it seems to be shaping up for a very slick campaign. (Although I’m less sure about “friends with space in their schedules for a commitment”. I think it might be interesting to let the game loose at an open table: Most of the characters are drifters anyway, so it shouldn’t be too hard to aggressively frame a given session so that it focuses on just the characters present.)

In case I’m being unclear: I’m saying you should check this one out. It’s one of the best bundles of GMing advice I’ve read in a long time, and it packs that advice right into a really intense (and really fun) game system.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Tagline: Ghost Dancers details the Indian societies and tribal beliefs of the Weird West. An above-average supplement, it is highly recommended for any GM running a Deadlands game and will prove useful to anyone playing an Indian character.

If I recall correctly, Ghost Dancers was the first time I received a review copy of a book. (At the time, RPGNet maintained a Wish List function for people who had posted reviews on the site. They probably still do. Here’s a document somewhat contemporary to this review describing their review policy.) Getting that review copy was terribly exciting for me at the time. I kept meaning to go back and write a review of the core Deadlands game, but for one reason and another it never happened. The half-finished file still lurks on my hard drive as a poor derelict.

Ghost Dancers is the sourcebook for the Indians of the Weird West. It does it’s job well – giving a highly effective overview of Indian political, cultural, and religious life. Those of you familiar with the Deadlands game will know that many of the crucial events which lead to the development of the Weird West (instead of our historical Wild West) are the result of various Indian factions – as a result this book is a crucial key to understanding some of the background to the world itself. Since it also details the Hunting Grounds in great detail, this book is a must for any Deadlands GM.

I also suggest, but not quite so highly, this book for any player with an Indian character who feels that the main rulebook isn’t giving him enough flavor or options for his character. If you are generally unfamiliar with Indian belief and culture, this book will also give you a good one-point stopping place for learning more. (Of course you should beware of taking things in this book as absolute historical fact – the designer himself is careful to point out that not only is the book simplifying many things about Indian culture, the Weird West is not an historical place by any stretch of the imagination.)

The book follows the traditional (and extremely advantageous) breakdown of all Deadlands material: a section for the players (Posse Territory), material that the GM should know and reveal only to select players (No Man’s Land), and material for the GM’s eyes only (Marshal’s Handbook). In Ghost Dancers, however, this has been changed to The War Party, Sacred Grounds, and The Chief’s Words – because “those white guys at Pinnacle Entertainment mistitled the sections in the previous books.” (Any product with the ability to look at itself humorously earns high points with me.) This lay-out is very nice – too often source material is only useful for the GM or reveals world secrets to the players because it lumps all the information about organizations and locations together. Nor have I seen this lay-out lead to useless regurgitation of the same information in each section. Pinnacle always seems to be careful in giving the GM just the extra information, without restating what has been said 50 pages earlier.

STYLE AND LAYOUT

My one persistent problem with Deadlands products is that the graphical presentation of the books fails to do anything for me. It is clearly meant to be evocative, but it just sits like a lump of clay for me. The cover art of Ghost Dancers, like all Deadlands products I’ve seen is a high-quality, excellent piece of work. The interior art, on the other hand, varies wildly from just slightly above average to pathetically horrid. The special font they use for headings is supposed to be mood-setting I suppose, but I’m pretty much indifferent. They have, however, solved one of my big problems with the main Deadlands rulebook – the type font is a nicely readable size, as opposed to the unnecessarily huge size used earlier.

One last minor complaint. Deadlands products use a nice referencing system to take you from one section of the book to another (for example, if you’re reading a section on the Sioux Nations in the War Party section you might get a page reference indicating that more material on this subject can be found in the Chief’s Words section). For this referencing system they use three miniature pictures – a gun and hatchet for the War Party, a holy symbol for the Sacred Ground, and a chief’s head and headdress for the Chief’s Words. These three pictures are then repeated on the title pages of each of the three sections. The problem comes because they apparently created these images at the thumbnail size for the referencing system and then just blew them up for a full-page presentation on the title pages. Anyone who has done this will know that you end up with a fuzzy image at the larger scale – and that’s precisely what you get in Deadlands products. Suggestion: Compose the pictures at the larger scale and then shrink them down to the smaller scale.

None of these are serious problems in my opinion, they just don’t click with me properly. A quick flip-through of the book should be enough for you to judge whether or not you agree with me.

Indeed, these problems are inconsequential. The lay-out of the product is excellent. Material is laid out in an intuitive and consistent fashion and a detailed table of contents will make it easy to find what you’re looking for. You won’t find any weird placement of information – such as sticking a section on weapon damage in the equipment section rather than the combat section with the rest of the weapon damage information – that seems to be trendy with certain companies.

So, to sum up: Externally this product is visually fantastic. Internally, it is visually boring. The lay-out is useful, productive, and easy-to-use however – and that’s the most important thing. It is only my aesthetic sense which is offended.

THE WAR PARTY

The first section of the book serves both as a reference for players and as a general introduction to the book. The first chapter (“Welcome to the Lodge”), serves as that general introduction.

Chapter Two (“Indian Country”) gives a broad overview of Indian history, as well as comprehensive look at the major tribes and organization of Indian society. Chapter Three (“Making an Indian”) provides details on modifying the basic character creation rules found in the main rulebook for Indian characters – including your role in Indian society, the selection of your Guardian Spirit, and new aptitudes, edges, hindrances, knacks, and gear. The section of the book also contains new archetypes for use by the GM and players both.

Chapter Four (“Guardian Spirits”) details the workings of Guardian Spirits, while Chapter Five (“Strange Medicine”) expands and improves upon the medicine rules found in the main rulebook, providing more options and details.

SACRED GROUND

Chapter Six (“Objects Sacred and Profane”) detail the rules for creating and using ‘medicine objects’ (magical items). This is an exceptionally useful resource for the GM, as is the next chapter (Chapter Seven – “The Hunting Grounds”) which details the extradimensional realm of the Hunting Grounds.

If there is one reason above all others to buy this book it is the material found in Chapter Seven. With amazing grace the designers allow the Hunting Grounds to be not only something of significance and importance to Indians, but to all religious groups. In the Weird West the magical forces which have been interpreted through the faith and religion of humanity are all too real – and it was the release of those forces from what the Indians call the Hunting Grounds (and Christians would call Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell) during the Reckoning that created the alternate history which Deadlands details.

In my mind, therefore, understanding and being able to use the Hunting Grounds in a Deadlands campaign is extremely important – and this book is the key to allowing that. As a result, every Marshal/Chief/GM should own a copy of Ghost Dancers.

THE CHIEF’S WORDS

Chapter Eight (“The Chief’s Guide”) provides everything about the Indians of the Weird West that the players just aren’t supposed to know. I won’t go into details here, because there are probably several players reading this review, but some of the stuff you uncover here is truly exciting and made me want to go out and start writing adventures.

Chapter Nine (“Secret Societies”) details the Ghost Dance (from which the book gets its name) and the Raven Cult. The Ghost Dance is a ritual revealed to the Paiute tribe – it preaches of peace and tolerance, and foretells of a time when the white man will be driven from his lands and the red man shall return to power. A time which shall be prophesied in the birth of a pure white buffalo calf.

The Raven Cult — as anyone whose familiar with the Deadlands game knows – is responsible for the Reckoning. They, too, foretell a future where the white man has been driven from the lands of the Indians – but they see the way to this future as one paved in blood and violence.

The GM will learn everything he needs to know about these two secret societies. Once again this is important information and mandates buying this sourcebook. The information on the Raven Cult is important because of the role in the origins of the Weird West setting. The Ghost Dance is important because they are clearly going to become important in the future of the Weird West.

SUMMARY

This book is an excellent and required resource for the GM of a Deadlands game, but only of mild interest to a player (even if the player happens to have an Indian character). I suggest that only one copy is really necessary for any gaming group, but that one copy is necessary for any long-term campaigns set in the Weird West.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: Paul Beakley
Company/Publisher: Pinnacle Entertainment Group
Cost: $20.00
Page count: 128
ISBN: 1-889546-20-8
Originally Posted: 1998/06/19

Tom Bissell has an interesting piece on Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim over here. He’s trying to figure out why everything is wonderful about Skyrim… except the NPC dialogue.

He talks about a lot of things: That the game becomes cinematically boring (due to a fixed camera angle and a lack of action) during the dialogue. That the actual dialogue is terrible, forced, and false. That the voice acting, hampered by the poor writing and lack of context, is bland and weak. That there’s a lack of creatively-directed animation, which means every NPC is just a plastic, flapping mouth animation.

Based on my previous experience with Bethesda games, I’m guessing that this is all 100% true.

But I think most of this is just a symptom of a problem that Bissell struggles to put his finger on. A quick excerpt:

It surely says something that even my most fervent Skyrim-loving friends cop to skipping through the expository narrative sequences. They laugh when they admit this, and it’s a nervous, uncomfortable laugh — a laugh that suggests they’re wondering why they do this. I’ll tell them: Because the stuff they’re skipping is so bad that it makes the rest of the game seem like a waste of time, which it’s not. When many of a game’s biggest fans are unable to endure large parts of that game, it may be time to reexamine the vitality of certain aspects of the experience. Just for starters, not every merchant in Skyrim needs a dialogue tree concerning his or her personal history. Not every Jarl needs to offer you the chance to learn about his town’s ostensibly fascinating history. Why make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments? After all, the world and environments are already there in Skyrim; they’re quite literally everywhere you look, gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore. And they’re beautiful. Like most who play Skyrim, I’m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I’m listening to and watching Skyrim’s interminable characters, I’m skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is.

I think what Bissell is trying to identify, under all of this, is a pretty simple principle: The lack of interactivity in video game dialogue.

Everything else about the Elder Scroll games positively bristles with interactivity: You can go anywhere. You can do practically anything.

But as soon as you start talking to an NPC, the game locks down and your interaction with the game world goes away. Oh, sure, you’ve got dialogue options to choose from. But at least 95% of these boil down to you simply selecting the next topic the NPC is going to lecture you about. It never feels like the NPCs are actually talking to you; it always feels like they’re just talking at you.

The old Ultima games used to have a dialogue system in which you could type in keywords to provoke responses from NPCs. Within the limitations of the technology at the time, this was extremely interactive. But then the entire industry (including the later Ultima games) took a step backwards and simply generated the applicable list of keywords so that you could select between them.

And the industry really hasn’t done anything to update dialogue interaction since then.

I’m not saying that we need to go back to keyword input. (That’s marginally more interactive, but not by much. You’re still just topic-selecting.)

The marginal exception to this is Bioware, who have consistently pushed for deeper and more meaningful choices within their dialogue systems. The industry needs to look at their games and then push even farther. The industry needs to make dialogue interactions just as fun; just as interesting; and just as exciting as the rest of the game. And they can do that by abandoning the concepts of “topic selection” and “exposition pumping”, and instead focus on how actual conversations operate.

Speaking of the virtues of strategic gaming, the Humble Bundle program is offering up a suite of Introversion games including Uplink, which is one of the most immersive computer games ever made (and which achieves that immersion by anachronistically eliminating save games and enforcing real-time strategy-based play).

For those unfamiliar with the Humble Bundle program, they put together packages of indie games which you can then buy by naming your own price. Not only can you name your own price, but a chunk of the money you pay is donated to charity. (And you get to specify exactly how much goes to charity and how much goes to the game designers.)

For those unfamiliar with Uplink, you assume the role of a computer hacker accepting jobs from anonymous clients to break into data systems around the globe. And when I say “assume the role”, I really mean it: The game takes the form of a client interface. The actual hacking is takes the form of fictional “awesome hacking”, but everything about the experience makes it feel like something you’re really doing and not just playing.

In addition to the extraordinary Uplink, the bundle also includes Defcon, Darwinia, Multiwinia, Crayon Physics, and Aquaria. (The last two games are bonuses and were not designed by Introversion.) Really, you can’t go wrong here. (Particularly since you can name your own price.)

Check it out.

I am going to quote something at length from the CRPG Addict because I think it’s important:

The problem [in The Bard’s Tale] is, it costs a lot to resurrect a dead character, especially a high-level dead character. Resurrecting six dead characters cost way more than I had at this point. I had to create a dummy character just to exit the Guild. I was able to resurrect one character immediately, but to get the other five, I had to build up my savings. It took a good three hours before they were all happy and healthy again.

It sounds horrible, especially to modern gamers, but I actually really, really like this aspect of The Bard’s Tale. Death isn’t a game-killer the way it is in Wizardry, but boy does it have consequences. Since you can only save in the Guild of Adventurers, every dungeon foray is a risk, creating a palpable tension as you wander your way through the passages. And every once in a while, you stumble into an encounter like this one (there were actually two more on this same level, with a dragon and a high-powered wizard) that makes your stomach drop and an expletive escape your lips.

Modern games make it far too easy. In something like Baldur’s Gate, you would save every five or ten minutes. If you stumble on to a soul sucker, you might treat the first battle against him like a test run. If your characters die–or, heck, even just lose more hit points than you want to spare–no problem. Just reload and run the encounter again with the experience at your back…

Because of the frequent save points, modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging. In The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and other games of the era I’m playing, there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty. You must constantly strategize. How much gold do I need to get from this encounter to make the “trap zap” spell worthwhile? What should I set as my bottom hit point threshold before I return to the surface? Do I want to expend 15 spell points on this group of wights, or take the risk that they’ll turn me into a crippling old man with one touch? I’ve only got 15 squares left to map on this level, but my characters only have 1/2 their hit points. Should I press on or go back?

Exhilarating. Fortunately, I have a lot of games like this left to play.

In computer games, this is a trend which extends beyond CRPGs. In FPS games, for example, Halo ushered in the era of rechargeable shields/stamina and ending an era in which players shepherded health packs and treated entire missions as strategic challenges (instead of a string of tactical encounters).

If this sounds familiar, it should. Tabletop RPGs have been embracing the same trends, starting with a My Precious Encounter(TM) design ethos for published adventures and then hard-coding that design ethos into the game system.

Allow me to emphasize this one last time with two key pull quotes:

Modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging.

In [older games] there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty.

Obviously this is a design ethos which has been most strongly championed by WotC in the 4th Edition of D&D (and then pushed even farther in D&D Gamma World). But it can be seen cropping up in a lot of places.

The argument can, of course, be made that this tactical focus is “more fun”: You’ll never end up trapped in the lower levels of the dungeon (nor will you figure out a clever way to escape). You’ll never find yourself desperately low on health (nor feel the exhilaration of overcoming the cyber-demon between you and the next health pack). You’ll never need to make a tough choice about whether to use your spells now or later (nor experience the satisfaction of blowing away an opponent with your well-earned stockpile of powerful enchantments).

But, ultimately, I think there’s a reason why we refer to “strategy and tactics” as a matched pair: They go together hand-in-hand. They complement each other. They improve each other. Strategic decisions shape (and re-shape) the immediacy of tactical play, naturally resulting in varied and disparate tactical challenges that must be overcome.

Of course, there will still be a great deal of variance in My Precious Encounters(TM) scenario design. (That is, after all, the “precious” part of carefully crafting your “perfect” encounters.) But in my experience, the result still feels curiously bland. Maybe in this encounter you’re fighting a couple of big brutes and in the next encounter you’re surrounded by grunts. But the encounters still all seem to follow the same basic trajectory.

This is probably unsurprising, of course: By removing the strategic portion of the game, you’ve gutted a huge chunk of meaningful choice and consequence. In other words, you’ve crippled the gameplay.