William Nichols offered to explain this to me, and I thought I’d take the risk of starting the conversation thread here with a larger peanut gallery.
What exactly is so hackable about AW, that it results in all these great hacks?
My main stumbling blocks are in the class system. Each class has a unique list of ‘moves’ that others don’t. They also have a unique advancement scheme.
To hack the game, you don’t just make some changes to a common skill tree and then push some values around in a mostly mathematized self-balancing system (as you might with Cortex or Fate or Unisystem). Rather, you write classes from the ground up and then write entire rule systems unique to each class. And sort of balance it by feel, or by trial and error.
Obviously I’m missing something significant, because the community is full of great AW hacks, and there is a general belief that the system is easy to hack. Because there are so many hacks, I’m willing to concede that I must be wrong and it is in fact very hackable — but I need some help understanding how.
For me at least it comes down to the place the system puts its emphasis.
Let’s say you have a particular fiction type you want to emulate – high school romance, maybe, or Hannibal-esque using a serial killer to catch a serial killer.
Trad games normally emphasise procedural rules. To make your hack you’d have to work out what the tropes of the fiction are, build a procedural resolution system, and then tweak that system so that it emergently creates the fiction tropes you want.
In an AW hack, you don’t need to do any of that. You simply locate the start points of each trope, and write a move to guide people through evoking the trope and grounding it in the fiction.
Essentially, you can skip a step, by writing only the moves needed to keep the fiction in the desired genre and prompt players to think in those terms.
This comes with the caveat that you need step 1: a style of narrative you want to emulate. If that’s not your priority, in my experience other systems are a better fit.
James Iles is, as per usual, completely right.
And here’s my perspective:
First, there is of course a big difference between any sort of hack I’ve ever done (here are some paybooks and MCfacing materials, let’s do it) and, say, Urban Shadows, Night Witches, Dungeon World, or Monsterhearts. Those are really best in breed games, and there’s so much hard work that goes into those. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into any 300 page book, especially one to be profitable.
There’s a lot of different ways to hack AW:
1. The easiest is to remove playbooks. Want to have a game about biker gangs? Cool, remove the Maestro D, the Q, maybe the Hardhholder. Leave in the chopper and battlebabe and gunlugger for sure. Consider wheter you want the skinner.
This first way is almost invisible, and doesn’t feel like a hack. And yet, you can radically alter the gameplay just by choosing what to offer the players. You don’t get the same radical shift by, say, not offering a wizard or a cleric.
2. Custom moves! Because the core dice is straightforward — 2d6 + modifier — this is really simple. Here’s a move: When your thirst overcomes you and you drink the water in Salmon’s lair, roll plus weird. On a 10+, you see into Salmon’s goals. Ask the MC about a question regarding Salmon’s future plans, she’ll answer honestly. On a 7-9, you and Salmon both read each other. You and the MC both ask a question. On a 6-, well, Salmon’s done you a favor and you’re going to honor that, right?
It’s a lot like open your brain, I admit, but we’ve embedded Salmon and a bit of world-building into the move.
3. New playbooks! For your own game, it can be pretty easy to come up with new playbooks. You figure out what moves they need, and you’re half done. It doesn’t need to look like the Baker’s playbooks to be useful at your game table, You need a core conceit, and maybe 6-7 moves. Which, really, are just ways to modify the fiction and don’t even need to touch the dice.
And this is absolutely a hack. Creating, say, The Righteous Lawgiver and introducing it in play alters how the fiction corresponds to the playbooks, how NPCs treat justice and power, and directs towards a different fundamental scarcity.
4. Hack an existing product! This is (mostly) what James is talking about. I’ve got two or three of my own, all unpublished, each building on work of others and each referencing that as much as possible. I’ve got a game about fantasy poverty, one about space pirates, and one to do leverage style games. For each of these, I needed to go beyond the constraints of (3), as I needed entirely new base moves, stats, and economies.
More in a minute.
It’s also really different from hacking Fate or writing a Fiasco playset. To write something like Diaspora, they needed to come up with several minigames, spaceship building rules, etc. And these needed to work independently.
For AW, this could just be playbooks instead of minigames. If Spaceships are a thing, then I can have a playbook that’s really into spaceships. If social combat is a thing, maybe I just need a single move. Rather than being about subsystems and skills, it’s about the moves.
For a fiasco playset, I need what, 72 well connected and evocative words, in a bunch of different categories. This has always seemed harder to me, as I don’t see a scaffolding to get from nothing to a playset. Meanwhile, with AW I can start with a move or two, maybe write a playbook, and if that hasn’t satisfied the itch do a hack.
As someone who wrote one AW hack (City of Judas) and has drafted several more – I believe the “hackable” part of Apocalypse World, is that is so much fun to write a hack!
You write technical stuff, yes, but have a very simple math behind it; breaking the balance is difficult, and at the same time it is enjoyable and rewarding to write in AW-style. In a way, writing moves and playbooks is a bit like playing and discovering the game for the first time: it’s very “visual” if compared for example to writing OSR materials (which is also fun, but in a very different way).
So thanks to Vincent Baker for writing a system that is so enjoyable to hack (and for leaving it open and hackable, and actually encouraging people to write hack)!
That’s very important William Nichols – moves are atomic. Within a move is everything you need to know to resolve that bit of the game. Now, it might have implications and knock-on effects for your other moves, but the fact it can stand on its own makes it incredibly easy to hack. You can just say ‘I want this to happen when someone eats someone else’s brain’, or ‘I want this to happen when you ask your crush on a date’ and that can be that.
The fact that there aren’t really subsystems per se so much as constellations of moves make it a lot easier to just slot something of yours in, or tweak things.
Plus, it’s important to note that it’s really well supported! AW has a really helpful chapter on hacking the game (as have many other PbtAs) and without that I think it would’ve taken a lot longer for us to see this explosion of games.
[ Also, clearly there’s something I’m missing about writing a Fiasco playset. It’s obviously a thing that is doable, as there are hundreds or maybe thousands. I just don’t understand making one. ]
Related to what James Iles said, at least of why I find PBTA easy to hack is because it leans heavily on natural language as a processing mechanism. You don’t need to translate your tropes into mechanics which generate trope-appropriate (app-trope-riate?) gaming… the simple act of describing the trope already gets you most of the way towards a workable move.
For example, in D&D you often engage enemies in melee combat — so you start your move with ‘When you attack an enemy in melee…’ and you’re most of the way towards DW’s Hack and Slash basic move.
Then you apply the same principle to the various classes: What is it that e.g. wizards do that other classes don’t? They cast spells. So ‘when you cast a spell…’ is going to be one of your triggers. In DW this is further refined into the wizard’s Prepare Spells and Cast a Spell moves, but for my money that’s where the real art (and work) of hacking PBTA is found: getting the details of your moves just so.
Listening
Agreed, it’s about the moves and starting and ending with the fiction. The ridiculous length I wrote about could be summarized as that, but I (still) haven’t had my morning coffee.
Up front permission and guidance in hacking goes a long way.
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Great perspectives here, from everyone!
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To flip it a bit, I would suggest it’s a necessity – all those reasons cited for why moves work well also mean they work very poorly if simply ported to a new skin. Hacks are not optional, so they flourish.
A lot of this is permission and culture and not about the structures in the game at all, but a lot of what others have said above is also true.
One of the reasons, (and writing this at the end, it’s an extension of Rob Donoghue’s point, which is an extension on the other amazing answers here) is that Apocalypse World (and PbtA by extension) is incredibly focused, which means it begs for hacking. I’m not saying hacking like “add a custom move”, I’m talking about ground-up reworks, of which we’re seeing so much.
When you play Monsterhearts, you can only play Monsterhearts. You can’t play an investigation game on the moon in Monsterhearts, right? Even without looking at the moves: Hot, Dark, Volatile, Cold…I don’t even know where to begin rolling to investigate. AW has broader stats, but even with the breadth offered by Hot, Sharp, Cool, Weird, Hard, they still say something about the type of actions you can take. A considered, peaceful, loving action doesn’t fit into any of those things. When you show your husband you love him by buying him his favourite flowers after a hard day you can’t roll+ any of the AW Stats. They don’t fit. When you calm someone down by making a connection with the inherent goodness of their human nature…
The mechanics of any game demand that you take certain actions. For MH those actions are escalatory and destructive, and for AW those actions are gritty, angular, and coarse.
Contrast D&D, especially 3.5: By design everything can fit under one of The Big Six Stats. There’s nothing you could think of that doesn’t engage with one of those very broad umbrellas. There were 36 skills on the character sheet. 36! All linked to a single stat. Want to play an investigation game? You’ve got Sense Motive, Gather Information, and Search. Want to play a swashbuckling pirate adventure? You’ve got Balance, Jump, and Tumble. Want to play a down-time heavy game? You’ve got Craft, Profession, Perform. By design, D&D was trying to be everything, and cover everything, PbtA games specifically do not.
If I want to make D&D into a modern game (that isn’t d20 modern, of course), I rename the classes, a couple of skills, a rifle does 1d8 damage instead of a longsword, but inherently it’s the same game. If I want to make Apocalypse World into an Elizabethian Courting Drama then…well take a look at Alder’s Simple World process: the first thing you need to do is figure out what your game is about, then start designing it from the ground up.
And that makes it infinitely hackable, and desirably so, because the only way to really interact with PbtA outside of the narrow band for which that particular game was designed (ie the only way to tell different stories) is to hack it.
“My main stumbling blocks are in the class system. Each class has a unique list of ‘moves’ that others don’t. They also have a unique advancement scheme. “
Not really. It’s almost universally:
-Add to stat/stats
-Empower your Unique Schtick
-New moves
-New moves (other playbooks)
-Gang/Posse/Territory
-Access to advanced moves
I think of AW as what would happen if you stripped the D20/skills out of D&D and just kept the feats but splitting the feats with prerequisites out into their own class books.
uh
Marshall Miller I can totally see that. There’s a rewording thing, but I don’t actually thing it’s significant. “When you fight a goblin, roll Str” vs “roll Str to fight goblins” isn’t all that different aside from more fiction-rooted prose vs rule-rooted prose.
This sounds trite, but I think it’s the structure of moves. Moves are flexible enough to intervene in any aspect of the story, bring in some didactic element the designer cares about, while being very concise.
Consider a duel: there are lots of statements you could make about the violence. What does it take to start it? What are the consequences, physical or social? How do people feel about it? What goes wrong? What’s the fallout a day later? Do you look good while doing it? Moves lets you express your design intent in any part of that.
At the same time, they’re short enough that they don’t feel like a random bunch of special cases (at least, not if they’re thematically related) bolted onto a more generic system; your dozen or so special cases is the entirety of the system.
(I happen to feel that PbtA games do start to creak a bit when they get lots of moves.)
When games are short but effective at presenting a novel take on things, they’re inspiring. I think that has to do with a lot of the hacks that followed.
Jason Mills , I thought you’d like to see this thread.
There is an elegance to the randomness provided by rolling the dice in PbtA games.
First, you don’t roll for trivial things. Ever. Gone is the game trap of “roll dice until you succeed because it’s critical to the plot for you to succeed in order to move on.” If that’s true, you do it; no rolling.
Also gone is the trivial roll where failure means “Okay, nothing happens.” If that’s the result, players shouldn’t have bothered rolling.
Gone is the artificial balance between “difficulties” and players’ maximized or poorly-planned stats. There’s no DC 45 Knowledge: Sewer Monsters that table 1 can’t ever make and table 2 can’t ever fail.
Instead, whenever players reach for the dice, there are three options: Success, partial success with consequences, or negative consequences. That’s nice.
If you want to try something that could be awesome, but has some risk, and it makes sense that it could be possible, you can try it – and there’s the possibility it will work, as well as the possibility it will fail. Either way moves the story forward.
If what you want to try would not make any sense, like pick-pocketing a siege weapon and stealing the pants off everyone in a tavern, it’s just part of the conversation that such actions are idiotic and cannot succeed (unless you’re playing in the type of universe where they could)- there’s no rolling a “natural 20” and doing the impossible while the GM fumes at how you’re ruining the story. There’s also no rolling a natural 20 and being told, “Sorry, you still didn’t make the DC. (I really just didn’t want you to do that but let you roll because I’m weak)”
Boiled down to only rolling dice when outcome is uncertain and matters, it then becomes trivial to re-skin the setting and moves that get triggered to match the types of stories you want to tell. Defining what triggers a move is also focusing on what matters to your story.
One thing I’ve heard from Vincent Baker himself is that making a PBtA hack lets you “do your work in short bursts of genre analysis” (paraphrased). That is to say, you just look at the fiction you want to emulate, and keep an eye out for patterns. Recurring character archetypes are your playbooks, things the characters do regularly (that have significance to the plot) are either basic moves or playbook moves depending on who does them, things the writers do are your GM moves and principles, etc.
Sebastian Baker Important both from the standpoint of focusing in on atomic elements of fiction that can then be modularly combined, but also from the standpoint of allowing the designer to work in available time afforded them by their daily demands.
That’s so true, both from my experience and logically working it through. Thanks for sharing, Seb.