Apocalypse World: Find Out What Happens

The most fun I’ve ever had MCing an Apocalypse World game was when I took my hands off the wheel, turned to the player who just made an awesome roll, and asked, “Woah! What happens now?” Apocalypse World has changed the way I GM any tabletop roleplaying game. It has changed my entire style.

I’ve run some very sandbox games using other systems. The best example is a Legend of the Five Rings game wherein my troupe played an Emerald Magistrate (an official with broad imperial law-enforcement powers, think a combination of a federal judge and a Federal Marshal) and his deputies. I used a style I call “sandbox with prompts,” where rather than give the players individual cases or missions, I threw them into the middle of an ongoing story and let them decide how to use their characters’ broad prerogative. This sandbox approach allowed the players to exercise a great deal of agency. They would take in whatever information they got in-world about a situation and decide themselves whether there was a case worth pursuing and how to pursue it.

In this case, the sandbox worked partly because of its extensive limitations. First, the world of Legend of the Five Rings is a fantasy samurai setting with very well-defined social rules, including a highly stratified society. Because of this, I didn’t need to plan for the players to act outside of those rules. Even if they did, the consequences of doing so are already outlined in the game’s setting. Second, the PCs had a clear job: investigate and prosecute crimes within their jurisdiction. Because of this, I already had a pretty good idea of how they would approach a given situation. Third, the setting of the campaign was limited to the city the PCs had been assigned to (Ryoko Owari Toshi, aka the City of Lies, if you’re familiar with the setting). These three factors let me very clearly define the sandbox the PCs were playing in and predict to a certain extent what they would do. They had a lot of agency in deciding how, but one way or another they would investigate and prosecute imperial crimes.

When I first read through Apocalypse World, I was impressed and fascinated with the way the MC (AW’s GM) is instructed to run the game. A core thread that runs through all of it is the axiom, “play to find out what happens.” The MC is not to create elaborate plots for the PCs to engage in; they are to bring Apocalypse World to life, set their players loose in it, and see what happens. For a GM used to writing big sweeping story arcs for my players to get involved in, this was a big change. This is not to say that the MC doesn’t prep for a session or know what’s going on in the world beyond the PCs. Rather, the MC’s prep is more along the lines of situations and events that act as prompts for the PCs to take the reins of the game and act out their story.

Apocalypse World provides the MC with important tools to enable them to play to find out what happens. First, the MC has agendas and principles. “Play to find out what happens” is one of these agendas, along with “make Apocalypse World seem real” and “make the players’ lives not boring.” The MC is instructed that everything they do should be in pursuit of these agendas, and is specifically admonished not to pre-plan a storyline. The principles instruct the MC in how to pursue these agendas with specific directions such as “ask provocative questions and build on the answers” and “sometimes, disclaim decision-making.” Among the 11 principles in the Apocalypse World 2nd edition rulebook, these two are key to playing to find out what happens. These are the tools the MC is given to allow the players to take a hand in creating the world and directing the action, making a game of Apocalypse World much more of an act of collaborative creation than, say, a game of D&D.

Another important tool is the game’s rules structure. The mechanics of Apocalypse World are governed by the system of moves. A player engages the mechanics by having their character make a move. The moves are defined by narrative actions. For instance, if a character threatens someone with violence in order to get them to do a specific thing, they are using the Go Aggro move, and if a player wants their character to Go Aggro, they must describe how their character threatens someone with violence. Each move also describes the narrative consequences of a success, partial success, or failure. Because the moves are defined narratively, they allow a great deal of interpretation in the results of a roll. Not only is the MC free to be creative with the narrative results of a move, but if the MC doesn’t have an immediate answer to the question “what happens now?” - or to any question about the in-game fiction - they are encouraged to turn the question back to the players.

In creating threats - all of the people and things in the world that aren’t the PCs - the MC is encouraged to write stakes questions about a few of them. These are questions the MC has about how a given character or other threat’s fate will play out in the game. The point of a stakes question is that the MC doesn’t decide the answer, but rather lets the events of the game determine what happens. This is the essence of play to find out what happens. In the AW game I mentioned at the beginning of the article, played using the Fallen Empires supplement to AW 2nd edition, there was a small idol statue that played into the plot. I didn’t write a formal stakes question about the idol, but I intentionally had left its use and provenance a mystery. The Mystic PC had the idol in their possession during a tense moment in the game, and the player declared his character was using the move Grasp Outward - opening their brain to the world’s Psychic Maelstrom - to activate the idol. The player rolled plus Weird and got a 14, well beyond the threshold for a full success. I had not decided what the idol would do, so I turned to the player with a huge grin on my face, because now I got to ask him: “What happens now?” Want to have more fun as a GM? Take your hands off the wheel every once in a while.