Player Priorities in Apocalypse World

Are they there?

In an interview on GeekNights, Luke Crane said, "I feel stupid playing a roleplaying game in 2010 if I do not have a place to insert or choose a priority as a player--meaning something that I am interested in as a person that I want my character to do." (i.e., Beliefs in Burning Wheel)

this, coupled with one of my fellow players in the AW game that I'm MCing saying that (paraphrase) "maybe it's worthwhile for us to insert some sort of player priority into the game,"* has got me thinking about player priorities in AW.

My theory is that it's a mix between the character type that you choose and an emergent property of the game. Choosing the Gunlugger is effectively saying, "I as a player want to be the baddest ass." Choosing the Angel is saying, "I want people to need me." etc.

And then you play the game, and the logical consequences of the moves you make and the moves the MC makes are for you to discover what your priorities as a player are, and then to gun for them.

This feels like an unfinished thought, and I think I'm missing something. Pretty much this is the same thing as, say, D&D 4th, right? I choose a Wizard because I want to control the battlefield and dabble in arcana. Then I play and figure out what it is I as a player want out of the game beyond that. Except the structure of 4E doesn't support me nearly as much as AW's structure in this regard (is this true? why is this?)

What do you think?


*btw, to this I said, "I think figuring out what you want is sort of the point of AW. Let's leave things as they are."

Hans, to add to that unfinished thought, it seems important to me to think about some other reasons why you might play a wizard in 4E:
- the party is lacking the controller role
- you read somewhere that this certain wizard build is super-optimized
- you just got a new book about wizards and you want to try out some of its new options

My feeling is that 4E doesn't support player priorities in the sense Luke means because these other things are aligned with what you're interested in as a player interacting with the game's abstractions, which are hard to get interested in as a person. D&D has always been a game of resource management, but shifting the nature of the resources from tangibles like "two of your henchmen died" to intangibles like "you spent two daily powers" makes it harder to explore and express priorities like "I am willing to make any sacrifice to get what I want" through gameplay.

I'm excited about AW because it seems to me to make the process of discovering and pursuing what you care about as a person during play really easy, because the game elements are pointed directly at things you can care about.

Hans, to add to that unfinished thought, it seems important to me to think about some other reasons why you might play a wizard in 4E:
- the party is lacking the controller role
- you read somewhere that this certain wizard build is super-optimized
- you just got a new book about wizards and you want to try out some of its new options

I just wanted to point out that all of these things can happen in AW.

- there is no healing because no one selected the Angel and the MC chose not to have an NPC medic, I choose the Angel to provide some
- I read on the AW forums that playing a battlebabe can get me a 6-harm shotgun, that sounds awesome (super-optimized) so I play one
- I just got the Faceless or Maestro D' playbook from Gen Con, these are clearly new options and I want to try them out on that basis

Except the structure of 4E doesn't support me nearly as much as AW's structure in this regard (is this true? why is this?)

The kind of player-priority flags that Burning Wheel contains (and 4e lacks IMNSHO) are there to make GM plots and player agendas compatible.

MCs are not allowed to have plots, so they don't need flags to tell them where to modify their plots to accommodate player agency.

I think the moves are those things where you say, "Hey this is what I want to do." If you want to boss around a gang and put down mutiny, take a character with Pack Alpha. If you want to take on groups of people and shoot them up, take a character with Not to Be Fucked With. If you want to be the one who gives advice, take Oftener Right.

I think Moves are the next step for trad game skills and abilities like you find in Shadowrun or GURPS, and transmute them into something in line with what Luke is describing.

Quote from: Hans Otterson on August 18, 2010, 03:53:41 AM

Except the structure of 4E doesn't support me nearly as much as AW's structure in this regard (is this true? why is this?)

The kind of player-priority flags that Burning Wheel contains (and 4e lacks IMNSHO) are there to make GM plots and player agendas compatible.

MCs are not allowed to have plots, so they don't need flags to tell them where to modify their plots to accommodate player agency.

What eggdrop said - there's no plot.  There's just a world.  You don't make a character to affect plot.  You make a character to experience the Apocalypse World.

Yeah but neither Luke nor Hans said anything about plots and I think you guys are getting sidetracked by making it about plots. It's about player priorities.

Yeah but neither Luke nor Hans said anything about plots and I think you guys are getting sidetracked by making it about plots. It's about player priorities.

Yeah, but what are mechanised player priorities for? In a game where the GM controls story? In a game where you can directly express your player priority?

BW Beliefs are about having your cake and eating it too: You get to have a GM-directed game, and you get to have a player-directed game as well.

AW is all about letting the players direct. The MC's job and the MC mechanics are all about making flags unnecessary: why use semaphores when you've got a cell phone?

Player priorities in general are overrated. I love BITs, but AW is not that kinda game. Does Isis have a priority, something she wants to get done?

She does? Then she does. She works to toward that goal or not as it actually happens, in fiction.

She doesn't have a priority or anything? Then she doesn't. That's her priority.

No need to write it on your sheet. It's not mechanical.

eggdropsoap, I get you. Thinking about MC principles like "Ask questions" through the lens of it being a tool for player priorities is actually really insightful. I had just been thinking the other night that I need to start considering questions that, were I playing that character, I would want to be asked.

If I'm playing an angel, what would I want the MC to ask? Where do you patch people up? Who do you work for? What have people been coming in for lately? Who's the last person you lost? etc. And there's some player priorities right in front of you.

In fact, asking questions might be the best player priority tool in the AW toolbox.

Asking questions is pretty awesome, and is the thing I think I'll be importing into any game I run. I don't think I couldn't import it, at this point.

The hardest thing about being MC, I think (and not having done it yet, mind), is avoiding trying to own the game like you have to as GM. I think the best antidote for that is to lean hard on "ask questions", and "play to find out what happens". I think "be a fan of the characters" is the explicit principle telling the MC not to own the game, but I think those other two are the direct method.

To be honest, I hadn't actually grasped that insight until I came into this thread and started writing, and then you named it. So: awesome!

Yeah, that's been one of the hardest thing for me to do in the game too. It's gone down like this:

Player: So, who's in charge of our settlement?
Me: Uh, Fleece, this chick with a ton of guns.

How it should have gone:

Player: So, who's in charge of our settlement?
Me: Well, whose orders do you follow?

You're totally right, the impulse is there for players to ask you questions and for you to answer them, and reversing that means upsetting a lot of ingrained habits.

Oh no! Don't go too far the other way either. Fleece, the chick with a ton of guns, she's legit.

Ask questions like crazy, and barf forth apocalyptica of your own too. Be enthusiastic about both.

Oh, totally. My "I should have" is in the context of my campaign where I regret not asking more really cool questions when we were establishing the initial situation. But on the spectrum of:

GM decides setting |----------------------| Players decide setting

Most groups, including mine, will default towards the lefthand side, and I think you need to seize on 'Ask questions' to push it towards the middle to underline player priorities. My Brainer is still kind of grumpy that I barfed forth apocalyptica and shoved her into a cave with no friends.

Oh no! Don't go too far the other way either. Fleece, the chick with a ton of guns, she's legit.

Ask questions like crazy, and barf forth apocalyptica of your own too. Be enthusiastic about both.

AW encourages a tactic called "fishing" too (though it doesn't refer to it by name) that I first saw in the Mountain Witch - you set up a situation for a PC and then let them fill it in.

"So, this brute of a chick, Dremmer, she comes up to you in the bar and she's sobbing her eyes out.  Everybody's freaked.  What's Dremmer so upset about and why'd she come to you about it?"