So a little AW love letter here. And I’m not even using AW as my primary game right now (that’d be Fate Core).
I was thinking today about the common RPG meme of “don’t tell me the ‘right’ way to play!” Personally, I think that’s a load of crap. An RPG is an instruction book for a game, and isn’t fundamentally any different than baseball, or chess, or Monopoly. In any of those games, you can play your variant, or with your house rules, but there is a defined ‘correct’ way to play, and everybody knows what it is. That’s why two people can play chess with each other that have never met and don’t speak the same language.
RPGs often have rules, but no way of putting them together. A guy I played with (Jacob Poss, I think) told me about playing some Palladium game at some point and how it didn’t occur to him until afterwards that the game never told him exactly how to run it. He just kind of made a bunch of assumptions and ran with it.
Even more so, most RPGs leave the GM role incredibly undefined. There’s a lot of “physics” types rules, and usually some rules for players. But what does the GM do? “Run the game.” That’s usually the directions. Sure, there’s advice, but that’s about it.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that AW and its hacks/derivatives are pretty traditional games in play. And I agree with this. What they bring in this area isn’t some fantastic new gaming methodology or technique. What they do is provide GM instructions.
More so than any game I’m aware of, AW tells the GM how to GM. It tells the GM how to respond to things. It tells the GM when it’s allowable – and actually good! – to be nasty to the players. It gives the GM a toolbox of things to do to keep the game flowing, as well as when to use those. Player fails? Make a GM move. There’s a list of them. Knock yourself out. Those are the options you get, and that’s when you get to use them. Pick one.
Heck, a lot of rules in the game outright forbid bad habits in GMing. Railroading? “Play to find out what happens.” If you’re railroading, you know what happens, and you’re thus breaking the rules. You’re not playing AW any more.
If there’s every been a system to teach you how to GM (at least a particular style!), it’s AW. It drills straight into the heart of what it means to be a GM, and even offloads the tedious bookkeeping to let the GM actually focus on the core competencies of GMing, rather than getting bogged down in minutae better handled by a spreadsheet.
And that’s why AW is awesome, and why everyone, and especially every GM, should play it at least once.
Aw, thanks!
Did I read some of your goals correctly, Vincent Baker? My observations seemed consistent enough that I’m pretty sure of it, but it’s always nice to get confirmation 🙂
Confirmed!
I agree with you. I think this is a fresh approach to a old way of thinking in Role-playing games. And because of this, it’s not an easy thing to do. I’ve been playing AW and Dungeon World for some time now, and every time we are improving and learning a lot. This is a awesome game, and I look foward to play more and more of this, it’s been a real pleasure.
I think AW and the *World games in general as a primer on how to run a game. Follow it up with a couple other games(any burning game, and a Fate game) and you will start to see what it is a GM does and does not in general terms. I wish there were more games on the AW level of explaining how to run a game of it. because I think there is a world of difference in style between some games.
Igor Toscano , are you Italian, by any chance?
No, Brazilian. Why?
Sorry ^^
Because your name sounds a little Italian and I would have loved to invite you in the Italian “indie” gaming community.
We are a lot into AW, DW and other powered by the apocalypse games and we could offera lot of gaming occasions^
oh, yeah, I’ve got italian ancestry, as you can see from my name. thanks for asking.
+Brazilian is still ok.
Michael Llaneza I think that should be a T shirt
If you make one, I’ll buy it 😉
This post is so good that I´ve taken the liberty of translating and sharing it in the AW official spanish publishers forum. People are cheering you in the comments.
Check it Robert! You are no bilingual…sort of
Oh, about checking it, here´s the link:
http://foros.conbarba.es/apocalypse-world/lo-que-aw-ha-aportado-al-rol/
Even though I was one of the guys who was arguing against you, I completely agree with your point here. I had basically stopped playing RPGs for most of my 20’s, and then last December discovered Dungeon World (and then Apocalypse World) by chance, and it’s changed the way I look at everything. I’m BACK now, because of AW.
Though, I do have to add a little jab…you’ve gotta know the rules before you can break them, right?
That’s not a jab, Ed Gibbs. That’s my point.
I want to know how the designers intended to play the game because when they made decisions about what rules to include, they did so in the context of their game. I want to know their intent because they may have some insight into RPGing, or a different way of doing things, that might be awesome, and if I just basically use my old gameflow with a new simulation engine, I’m going to end up with the same game, effectively.
I don’t see that as meaning that anybody has to keep playing the game that way.
Two examples: One is art. In art, you learn lots of realistic figure drawing. Lots. Picasso could draw incredibly realistically. That knowledge of proportion and form and light and shade informed his modern work. His modern art work wouldn’t have been nearly as good had he not learned those lessons.
The other is airplane pilots. Some study was done, where they had very experienced pilots codify what they did and present that as “do this, do that” type manuals to more junior pilots. When the pilots followed those instructions exactly, their performance improved dramatically. However, when the experienced pilots did the same thing, their performance decreased.
In both cases, it helps to know the rules before you break them. And I’m just not comfortable saying that I know the rules of a game system better than the system’s author.
I am frequently disappointed that games don’t have full actual play examples by the designers.
not those half page ‘sequence of play’ examples, they don’t count!
Speaking of; I can find good actual plays of AW, but I want to see someone do a YouTube walk-through of The First Session, The MC Homework based on that, and then the completion of The First Arc
(including additional homework sessions that show updates and restructuring along the way…)
…twelve sessions or so, I think that is where Vincent Baker suggests AW starts?
So far, all the interesting and ‘helpful’ portions of the game have been omitted from every Actual Play I have found… I guess on the grounds of it being considered ‘boring’ or something… which, so would a flight instruction video. :-\
It would be nice if I could compare my techniques and interpretation with others; on a level of advice, tips, tricks, and random grandiosity of extolling, that might be competitive with the available walkthroughs and grandstanding seen for more common Calaboose & Creatures style games.
William Mims so what does count? What games, in your estimation, have good examples?
Well Jacob Poss… right now Mark Rein•Hagen is showing off his newest creation on YouTube… maybe not the best example really though.
(not sure he really understands the system… j/s)
If you pick any Calabooses & Creatures style game for a right-arm leg spin bowler favored Inter-Tube search, you can find advices, tips, tricks, preparation walkthroughs, and celebrity actual plays…
If you were having trouble with nearly any game made before 2k, you can find such help… mostly because they are a lot alike.
But more recent games have gotten some good exposure of this type too…
Fiasco, Microscope, Dragon Age…
…these have all been given walkthroughs of full game actual play by the designer.
A lot of games haven’t even gotten fan serviced exposure yet though… some surprisingly so (imho), since there is an apparent large fan base for them.
So yes, I would like to see AW get the D&D/Pathfinder treatment on YouTube… or someone who can step up and be the Chris Perkins of Apocalypse World… ya’know?