As an MC I haven’t really been sold on Fronts.
If there are no status quos in Apocalypse World then any threat should constantly be changing type, and threatening different fundamental scarcities.
I can’t wrap my head around making fronts, but I can completely get behind looking at all the key players before a session and deciding what they’re threatening today, how they’re acting, and using the front creation rules as a framework.
This is basically what I do!
My understanding of the admonishment of no status quo isn’t that there’s no coherent world. That is, the fronts and threats are the situation as it currently stands based on play. However when things change, they’re allowed to change and there’s no loyalty to the current situation allowed for the MC.
For the MC honesty to the outcomes of Moves and the fictional integrity of the apocalypse world and actions taken trumps everything. Fronts tell you what the current direction is, not what the situation is. Which is why fronts have dark futures, they’re against what things currently are like.
I am not sold on a 100% lack of status quo… that much chaos in an environment would make it impossible to have any meaningful language with which to make sense of even the simplest bartering attempts… let alone organize a salvage crew, rally some motorheads around the art of vehicle maintenance, or convince some poor souls you’ve their best interest in mind.
If there is a hardhold, compound, or hive full of souls, there is stability economically, socially, culturally… and with it is some sense of continuity. Tumultuous and fraught with danger at every turn, but even a den of thieves has a rational trust in continuity through a governing legitimacy held on the basic needs of communal survival.
I think that “no status quo” just means that the PCs shouldn’t take anything for granted, because everything can (and probably will) change during play.
Luca Bonisoli has the clearest part of it.
I think of it like the difference between a computer RPG where you can murder all the NPCs and other games where there is a status quo with important NPCs that have to be protected in order to keep the plots intact. In Apocalypse World, there are no plots that have to be kept intact. So murder away. Or something.
Robert Burson has an interesting perspective on it…
And if it gets to the point where every NPC and every Location has an asteroid land on it. just because the MC happened to be glancing it’s way… that’d be like “DOOM: Nightmare Mode” and “Minecraft: Hardcore Survival” combined…
Apocolypse Respawns; Game Over —
— World Deleted!!!
Fine for a oneshot, but for me, kills the concept of being the character’s biggest fan, when there is no hart left to break.
If there is not enough status quo to gain some measure of earned progression in attachment to politics, places, and people… then there is no meaning in it when it’s being taken from them by events in the fiction triggered by the MCs special Death Gaze move.
For me it means, don’t pull your punches against your toys in the sandbox, you have an unlimited supply of new toys coming all the time… but, that doesn’t mean you have to constantly snipe at everything in the sandbox, either.
Once is a plot device, twice it’s a trope,
third time for a cliche, after that it’s lost all hope.
Darcy Boyd It sounds like you’re still playing the correct way, as you’re using the Fronts in the best way you know how: reacting to the changing environment.
In my very first game of Apocalypse World, the MC had set up three distinctly different threats and in two sessions I killed all three of them. What William Mims and Robert Burson say is at the heart of the No Status Quo concept. No Status Quo means those NPCs were disposable, the threats they represented mutable, and the front associated with them disappeared (or was rewritten) the moment my character blasted them with a shotgun.
You can still have plenty of room for earned progress and even threats with a slow burn, the trick is to find the characters weaknesses and poke them where it hurts to see what happens next.
I like to think of it in pacing terms. Fronts keep the game moving. I like to write all the threat’s countdowns on the campaign map edges or relationship map – in plain view of the players.
I have this awesome ‘analog clock’ stamp from a primary school supplies shop that is great for stamping down a countdown in red ink and bullet point in the future badness that is to ensue if left unchecked.
The players know the shit that is going down, they are never left ‘easy and relaxed’, the world is in a constant flux and re-inforced by these structural artifacts of play.
Interesting, I find Fronts one of the smartest and greatest things ever to come out of AW.
Darcy Boyd, are you keeping the game pretty open ended? If so, instead of fronts are you just making it up as you go? If so, do you have success with that? If so, then you probably do not need fronts. Fronts act as a variety of possibilities and scenarios for those that do / can not develop story on the fly.
Robert Burson said “I think of it like the difference between a computer RPG where you can murder all the NPCs and other games where there is a status quo with important NPCs that have to be protected in order to keep the plots intact. In Apocalypse World, there are no plots that have to be kept intact. So murder away. Or something.”
This line of thinking works for PCs too. Not that I look to murder PCs, but they sure don’t get any special protection just for plot’s sake.
So think of a computer rpg with plot lines/quest lines. Say, skyrim, or World of Warcraft. The quest lines just sit there like little towers you can climb on up whenever you get around to it. Until you start them the ya re static. That’s sorta like fronts
But the key difference with fronts is…someone is picking up the table a bit and giving it tilt. The towers of plot are sliding around, and some of them are on a collision course with player character or something they care about in the world. Shit is going down, the world IS getting worse unless you stop it (or push it along faster)
In classic tabletop RPGs, NPCs are relatively static entities who are there as part of a story. Little static situations. In PBTA games, there are giants lumbering about in the plot, and they will smash into the settlements, rip up the roots of the world, and drown it in their destructive mirth if left alone. The only certainty is worsening, that is if you do not act. NPCs, settlements, fauna, weather, etc are all keys to these massive themes pointed headlong at something important. It makes for anticipation, grand struggle, a sense of importance, and a feeling the world is alive outside the characters
Michael Langford, Can I just hand you my thirty year old dehydrated compressed loathing for entities and events being considered static state in tabletop games?
You described the reasons OSG had this concept called a timeline or campaign calendar, and why social interactions with NPCs, weather and regional events, environmentally common encounters, current rumor and news, and storehouse stock, were handled through relationship scores, chart comparisons, and modified dice checks.
Of course most people ignored all these tools outright, or worse, abused these concepts; interpreting timelines as static prebuilt railroad sequences of calendar events, and whacked out all their chaotic NPCs as randomly unpredictable in every clocktick… and eventually these ‘broken rules’ were omitted by newer games thinking to save space and cost by not reprinting the rules from the other set of Traditional Strategic Roleplaying books everyone was assumed to have.
But yeah, I agree;
Nothing is static in an animated world… trajectories and vectors shift over time,
The nature of all animus is dynamic, and people change their mind.
The only status quo we can rely on for temporalities of cohesion, is that all organization is self preserving of it’s own animus, and will attend to it’s integral quality… until disintegrated or transmuted.
…also; death and taxes.
Those are past attempts to make a dynamic world related to and larger than the PCs. I play traveller, b/x and older RPGs as well. I am aware of what you’re talking
Fronts feel different in practice. While those calendars and random happenings are very GM managed, the fronts are designed once, then rather fire and forget. Very easy to do by comparison. They have a Fiction oriented design that wasn’t quite around yet with that older version of the same idea.
Using the new version will make it pretty clear the difference I think in play. I use fronts in ALL games now.
Right!
I still agree with you, it just hits a nerve with me, because my mileage DID vary… and it comes around to one of those situations where someone might say, “This system doesn’t work when I interpret it this way.” and I am like “Well, then don’t interpret it that way, read it like this.” and I am looked at like I am dumb for not realizing the system is just broken… and wrong for not using the broken system in a broken way.
Another good explicit example would be;
The way alignment is so often interpreted as an explicit static statistic on the character sheet, rather than a dynamic result of historically implied attunement… and use that unfounded interpretation to grief on the concept being restrictive of choice, rather than choice initiated.
I am firmly of the opinion that every system is broken on first contact with the expectations of the hardheaded.
Most of the things explicitly stated in AW were already part of the expectations of me and my groups, based on the way we understood the old school game’s implied intention. From our perspective it is only a difference between explicit and implicit writing… but, we are aware that not everyone has the same background experiences with these older games.
Lets just say you were lucky enough to own Powers & Perils fantasy RPG, and the Top Secret spy vs. spy RPG… would you consider the 2e D&D Complete Handbook of Guilds an important evolution, or just a contribution of explicit licence to do what was already implicitly possible?
Might depend on whether your group was able to act laterally between box-sets of similar narrative and simulation purpose in divergent themes, or were statically constrained to a prejudiced ideal of one set of fair rules per boardgame… right?
But what really holds you back from using NPC Organization sheets, Location Specific Random Encounter charts, and Regional Weather & Political Events tables, as a set of Fronts in process; Not being explicitly told you can, or not following the implied structure of a living dynamically changing world?
Not sure what you’re going for will. I’m not making any claims here people never had worlds that were living before fronts. I’m just saying they’re really good, and easy for people to understand how to do and how to use them. They’re a predictable way to make living worlds that actively drive character action.
AW is definitely borne of the Forge era of games, but all those games were borne of all the RPGs of years past with the bits cut up, and tons of new mechanics dropped in, then things mixed and matched in compelling ways.
I just told you that some people did have living worlds.. no… did have Fronts before Fronts… and showed you one of many methods by which I have witnessed that achievement. It wasn’t to be contradictory… I was just being explicit in my example.
I apologise for the confusion, Michael Langford, I did have some difficulty expressing my thoughts. My point was mostly to illustrate the explicit vs. implicit… and the interpretational vs. the hardheaded.
I reacted with a bit of reflex toward the earlier statement, that is all… then I tried to explain my position as to the nature of that reaction. Perhaps I failed to be concise enough to achieve clarity.