On Con Games and the Apocalypse (World)

 This past weekend I did a very silly thing that has become part of a pattern for me: running games for the first time at a convention for strangers.

On the three occasions I have attended a con thus far in my life, I have always run games, and of those games there is always at least one that I have not played previously. I consider myself a pretty good GM and thus see cons as an opportunity for me to try out some new stuff in a one-shot environment. This time around I was bringing Apocalypse World and The Warren to the table, games that I had been very excited by upon reading them for the first time within the past few years but had yet to actually play. Surely, I figured, being familiar with PBTA games in general would allow me to make one-shots for them without too much trouble.

I was wrong.

Okay that's overdramatic; the games were fine and the players said they had a good time, but I definitely struggled a bit more than I expected to with Apocalypse World in particular. There would be times when I'd grasp in vain for an appropriate move to resolve what a player had just described or struggle to figure out how moves might cascade into each other appropriately and thereby keep the action churning along. Nothing went off the rails, but sometimes it felt like the wheels were spinning without catching much traction.

At the time I was confused: I had familiarized myself with the moves, created some pre-gen characters so that we could get started playing right away (and so that I would be familiar with the moves present at the table), and created a setting with conflicts ready to boil over the moment action started. So what went wrong?

Well as I've been thinking about it since then, I've realized two important things:

1. I wasn't always making the best use of AW's arenas of conflict in my games.
2. I'm not 100% convinced that AW makes for the best convention games.

Let's break these ideas down.

Working with Arenas of Conflict

In the linked article above, Vincent Baker lays out the 8 arenas of conflict he sees in Apocalypse World: honest negotiation, commitments & obligations, negotiation in bad faith, implicit threat of violence, explicit threat of violence, outbreak of violence, nonviolent physical striving, and weirdness. These are all places where characters (PCs and NPCs alike) can come into conflict with each other over their differing goals and motives. Additionally, all of these arenas have Basic Moves associated with them, allowing for players to take a variety of approaches when trying to accomplish things and gently encouraging players with certain stats to focus primarily on particular arenas (someone with a high Hard stat is going to be most mechanically effective when in the "Explicit threat of violence" and "Outbreak of violence" arenas, for example).

Now it's worth saying that these are descriptive and not prescriptive; the arenas are not laid out in the rules nor are the associations between them and the Basic Moves. But it all makes general sense: you can't really say that you're negotiating with someone if you're trying to seize something from them by force. The mob might be able to say that, but the reality is still that they're taking something, not asking for it.

But even with that said, even with no one telling you that these are the arenas of conflict available to you or that certain moves are associated with said arenas, something is missing from the game if you don't make full use of these arenas, something both narrative and mechanical. Narratively, you're not getting a full scope of what the world you're playing in can offer, while mechanically you're missing out on some of the cool stuff that your characters can do.

In one of my games, for example, a military strike force came to claim ownership of a derelict oil platform where a community of people live. By the end of the game there had been threats of violence, outbreaks of violence, and even some negotiation, leading to a lot of going aggro and reading a person/situation, but not so much seducing/manipulating someone or opening your brain to the world's psychic maelstrom. The game just felt a little incomplete to me, the person running it and most clued into all the moving parts.

Apocalypse World Con Games? Prep Wisely

The real central lack of my two games, I now realize, was the absence of Commitments & Obligations. My players were very happy to slot themselves into my world and make up some history with each other, but without more explicit ties from my world to them it was a little too easy for them to all team up and work together.

In most games this would be a great thing! No one likes the player in the D&D party who's an edgy lone wolf and doesn't want to work with anyone else, but for Apocalypse World you really want some conflicting loyalties among the players. They don't need to actually come into direct conflict, but it really helps if they have to renege on some other agreements in the world in order to work well with the other players. That way, the decision to work with the other PCs cascades into new NPCs showing up and getting involved in the action, and the decision to work against the PCs creates more action between the people at the table.

AW is a game that expects and encourages conflict between player characters because it creates interesting, dynamic stories, and I'm honestly not sure if people in a convention setting are necessarily always ready for that. (Not the interesting dynamic stories part, the PC conflict part.) Trad play cultures (especially D&D) are full of horror stories of player conflict gone wrong, tearing apart tables and ending friendships, and people looking to try out some fun games at a convention might just be averse to getting anywhere near that kind of play.

I can say for sure that at my tables players were always trying to get along and work together, which is great! But it's not really what Apocalypse World is bringing to the table. Had I known better, I would have prompted the players to explore that kind of conflict and to make sure that we were all on the same page for what to expect. And if they weren't interested in that (which is completely fair), I would have needed some strong backup NPCs to barge into situations and start fucking everything up.