Om Playbookfokus
Det här är en del av en serie där jag går igenom playbooks till Apocalypse World. Känns det som det går hemma så kommer jag skriva om allihopa. Jag skriver på engelska för att även kunna posta på AW:s officiella forum. Jag försöker skriva tillgängligt även för den som aldrig ens läst Apocalypse World förut med texten, samtidigt som det finns djupare analyser här och var, t. ex under rubriken "Moves and crap analysis."
Här finns alla playbooks, om du vill läsa dem parallelt med mina fokustrådar: http://apocalypse-world.com/ApocalypseWorld-playbooks.pdf
Jag går igenom dem i den ordning jag känner för det.
The Hardholder
There is no government, no society, in Apocalypse World. When hardholders ruled whole continents, when they waged war on the other side of the world instead of with the hold across the burn-flat, when their armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they had fucking boats to hold their fucking airplanes on, that was the golden age of legend. Now, anyone with a concrete compound and a gang of gunluggers can claim the title. What other authority is there?
The Hardholder is a warlord ruling a local settlement of people. His biggest strength is his gang, a small army (as far as the post-apocalypse goes, it is an army) of armed people doing his bidding. His primary stat is Hard, and he gets two moves: Wealth, which brings him the profit of his hardhold on a good day, and the trouble and wants of his hardhold on a bad day, and Leadership, which is for leading his gang into battle. The Hardholder is one of the leader-type playbooks, who have people working for them. Leaders are good for generating interesting trouble and relationships, and makes a good center for the story in that other characters can work for them, or at least have to relate to their significant presence.
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My take on it:
The Hardholder is all about owning it. The postapocalypse is an infected, frozen or burnt out wasteland, everything is scarcity, but what there is, you own it. And if you don't own it... Well, do you want it? Take it. You have the stats and manpower to back it up. Sharp (intelligence) or Hot (charisma) isn't the hardholders primary stats, but Hard, and I love the Hardholder for it. This isn't the world where brilliant or suave men and women rise to power, but the world where determined ones do. That is not to say that hardholders are stupid, uncouth or brutish. They do not even have to be ruthless, but they have to be determined. They are the ones to make ugly choices concerning peoples survival without flinching, and then sticking to these choices. That's why they're hard.
I played Barnum the Hardholder, a burly guy maintaining a small hold of people and their workshop in the cold and wild pine forests. At night, he and his gang huddled up together to sleep to conserve warmth. He was kind of a family man. But his hold needed him to be an authoritative father, or it would surely perish to the worlds evil.
Or you can go all out the other way and play a cruel dictator, relish in your own power. I mean, who the fuck is going to stop you? In Apocalypse World, you are King. And there is certainly the lure of it! This is your chance to be autocratic, to come down hard on slights of your authority, to harshly punish transgressions of your law, to bully lesser holds into giving you what you want, and it's all justified because we live in a fucked up world. Don't we all feel the attraction to autocracy?
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(you can skip the first 45 seconds of walking)
As a leader, you can certainly further the mood and madness of the post-apocalypse. In one game, the Hardholder was a straight up warlord/dictator a la Idi Amin, as seen in the film Last King of Scotland. A friend of mine played in a game where the hold had a jeopardy wheel to determine punishment for crimes. Death, mutilation or a party! The fucking thing kept stopping on ”party”, almost drove the hold to ruin...
Oh yeah, and don't think the hardholder is invincible, he certainly isn't. No other playbook has this much trouble and headache to deal with. The water is running out, food is running out, the hocus is turning people to his death-cult, his own gang is turning against him... You will need that +2hard stat. Fact of the matter is, almost all of the hardholders improvements are stat improvements.
Why the Hardholder is the best playbook to play:
You get to define the world! You decide what the hold looks like, how it works, what the people living in it are like. And the other characters will probably be living in your hold, (they absolutely should, if you ask me) and you can put them in positions of power, like the Battlebabe is your sheriff, or the Operator is your go-to-guy. Also, your underlings will be a constant source of lovely drama, when there is stuff missing from the armory or when your trusted lieutenant joins the cult of your rival the hocus. And of course, when it comes down to it, you get to play the king, the guy or gal or inbetween who can do whatever they feel like.
What it brings to the world of the apocalypse:
The Hardholder brings scale to Apocalypse World. The map of your world will probably grow to encompass neighbouring holds and dangers, to put your hold in a relation to the surroundings.
It should also bring some sort of social awareness. People around you are not just NPCs anymore, they're a part of your hold. And for your hold to function and survive, people need to get along, be healthy and fed.
Fundamental scarcities of the playbook:
For the playbook to work, the MC needs to push for the problems and threats of the hold. Play the people in the hold like real people, not like mindless underlings. Bring morality and complex issues to the hardholder, use loyalty, disloyalty and other relationships to make the people working for the Hardholder become real people and not just resources. Being a Hardholder should be a double-edged sword: You have the most power, but also the most responsibility. Make sure you have the guts to confront the horrors and tragedies of leading a post-apocalyptic society!
Moves and crap analysis:
The Hardholder is all about Fictional effectiveness as Vincent calls it. Play a hardholder and you won't get the most Mechanically effective and minmaxed character, but you'll get tons of possibility to influence the world, from the very start where you get to detail your hold – A place where all the other characters probably will live out their daily life – and also through your actions. Every other character, if they do not work for the Hardholder, has to somehow relate to their presence in the world, they can't escape it.
The Hardholder has only two moves after all, Wealth (which is trouble as much as it is a blessing) and Leadership. Interesting thing about Wealth is that you do not get to save up the barter you earn between sessions, it resets everytime you make the roll. Kind of makes sense, as you are the bank – Don't buy stuff, make people do it for you instead. If you want to play rich, play The Operator.
As for other playbook moves, there are a lot of routes a Hardholder could take. He could go with NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH or Bloodcrazed from the gunlugger to become an even bigger force of power. He could take Fingers in every pie or Just give me a motive from Maestro D' to go more for a scheming route, or maybe as Barnum did, get Touched by Death or Infirmary from the Angel if he tries his best to take care of his subjects.
The Zen of Apocalypse World
What is interesting about the Leadership move is that it is not a roll to see how well your gang perform today, or exactly how loyal they are today, Instead it gives you hold to spend when your gang encounters a point that really puts their morale to the test. The rest of the time, the MC is encouraged to play them true to their nature: Baiscally loyal, but not perfectly disciplined, looking out for their own interests, maybe savage... Basically, you freeform the gang until the player says ”Hey, I spend my hold to deal with this thing that's come up”. And the whole game runs like this, basically. You never make rolls because your character wants to do something, you make rolls because your character encounters resistance.
I was taking a nap a few days back, idly thinking about how I wanted to make this write-up, when this suddenly struck me. I have just started practicing zazen, zen meditation. Zazen is a very simple thing, you just sit and pay attention to your breath. It is simple, but not easy, because of course thoughts, tensions, emotions, and pain all come up and you have to deal with it. Well, Apocalypse World is kind of the same thing. You do what ever you want, (simple) and when resistance comes up, you deal with it (complex). It's even like the treatment intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy, where the objective for the therapist and patient basically can be simplified into ”let's have an emotionally present and open relationship right now” (simple) and the technique comes into play when the patient's defenses (resistance to experiencing emotion) comes up. It's very clear to me, I don't know if that makes sense to you guys, but there it is anyway.
Det här är en del av en serie där jag går igenom playbooks till Apocalypse World. Känns det som det går hemma så kommer jag skriva om allihopa. Jag skriver på engelska för att även kunna posta på AW:s officiella forum. Jag försöker skriva tillgängligt även för den som aldrig ens läst Apocalypse World förut med texten, samtidigt som det finns djupare analyser här och var, t. ex under rubriken "Moves and crap analysis."
Här finns alla playbooks, om du vill läsa dem parallelt med mina fokustrådar: http://apocalypse-world.com/ApocalypseWorld-playbooks.pdf
Jag går igenom dem i den ordning jag känner för det.
The Hardholder
There is no government, no society, in Apocalypse World. When hardholders ruled whole continents, when they waged war on the other side of the world instead of with the hold across the burn-flat, when their armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they had fucking boats to hold their fucking airplanes on, that was the golden age of legend. Now, anyone with a concrete compound and a gang of gunluggers can claim the title. What other authority is there?
The Hardholder is a warlord ruling a local settlement of people. His biggest strength is his gang, a small army (as far as the post-apocalypse goes, it is an army) of armed people doing his bidding. His primary stat is Hard, and he gets two moves: Wealth, which brings him the profit of his hardhold on a good day, and the trouble and wants of his hardhold on a bad day, and Leadership, which is for leading his gang into battle. The Hardholder is one of the leader-type playbooks, who have people working for them. Leaders are good for generating interesting trouble and relationships, and makes a good center for the story in that other characters can work for them, or at least have to relate to their significant presence.
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My take on it:
The Hardholder is all about owning it. The postapocalypse is an infected, frozen or burnt out wasteland, everything is scarcity, but what there is, you own it. And if you don't own it... Well, do you want it? Take it. You have the stats and manpower to back it up. Sharp (intelligence) or Hot (charisma) isn't the hardholders primary stats, but Hard, and I love the Hardholder for it. This isn't the world where brilliant or suave men and women rise to power, but the world where determined ones do. That is not to say that hardholders are stupid, uncouth or brutish. They do not even have to be ruthless, but they have to be determined. They are the ones to make ugly choices concerning peoples survival without flinching, and then sticking to these choices. That's why they're hard.
I played Barnum the Hardholder, a burly guy maintaining a small hold of people and their workshop in the cold and wild pine forests. At night, he and his gang huddled up together to sleep to conserve warmth. He was kind of a family man. But his hold needed him to be an authoritative father, or it would surely perish to the worlds evil.
Or you can go all out the other way and play a cruel dictator, relish in your own power. I mean, who the fuck is going to stop you? In Apocalypse World, you are King. And there is certainly the lure of it! This is your chance to be autocratic, to come down hard on slights of your authority, to harshly punish transgressions of your law, to bully lesser holds into giving you what you want, and it's all justified because we live in a fucked up world. Don't we all feel the attraction to autocracy?
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(you can skip the first 45 seconds of walking)
As a leader, you can certainly further the mood and madness of the post-apocalypse. In one game, the Hardholder was a straight up warlord/dictator a la Idi Amin, as seen in the film Last King of Scotland. A friend of mine played in a game where the hold had a jeopardy wheel to determine punishment for crimes. Death, mutilation or a party! The fucking thing kept stopping on ”party”, almost drove the hold to ruin...
Oh yeah, and don't think the hardholder is invincible, he certainly isn't. No other playbook has this much trouble and headache to deal with. The water is running out, food is running out, the hocus is turning people to his death-cult, his own gang is turning against him... You will need that +2hard stat. Fact of the matter is, almost all of the hardholders improvements are stat improvements.
Why the Hardholder is the best playbook to play:
You get to define the world! You decide what the hold looks like, how it works, what the people living in it are like. And the other characters will probably be living in your hold, (they absolutely should, if you ask me) and you can put them in positions of power, like the Battlebabe is your sheriff, or the Operator is your go-to-guy. Also, your underlings will be a constant source of lovely drama, when there is stuff missing from the armory or when your trusted lieutenant joins the cult of your rival the hocus. And of course, when it comes down to it, you get to play the king, the guy or gal or inbetween who can do whatever they feel like.
What it brings to the world of the apocalypse:
The Hardholder brings scale to Apocalypse World. The map of your world will probably grow to encompass neighbouring holds and dangers, to put your hold in a relation to the surroundings.
It should also bring some sort of social awareness. People around you are not just NPCs anymore, they're a part of your hold. And for your hold to function and survive, people need to get along, be healthy and fed.
Fundamental scarcities of the playbook:
For the playbook to work, the MC needs to push for the problems and threats of the hold. Play the people in the hold like real people, not like mindless underlings. Bring morality and complex issues to the hardholder, use loyalty, disloyalty and other relationships to make the people working for the Hardholder become real people and not just resources. Being a Hardholder should be a double-edged sword: You have the most power, but also the most responsibility. Make sure you have the guts to confront the horrors and tragedies of leading a post-apocalyptic society!
Moves and crap analysis:
The Hardholder is all about Fictional effectiveness as Vincent calls it. Play a hardholder and you won't get the most Mechanically effective and minmaxed character, but you'll get tons of possibility to influence the world, from the very start where you get to detail your hold – A place where all the other characters probably will live out their daily life – and also through your actions. Every other character, if they do not work for the Hardholder, has to somehow relate to their presence in the world, they can't escape it.
The Hardholder has only two moves after all, Wealth (which is trouble as much as it is a blessing) and Leadership. Interesting thing about Wealth is that you do not get to save up the barter you earn between sessions, it resets everytime you make the roll. Kind of makes sense, as you are the bank – Don't buy stuff, make people do it for you instead. If you want to play rich, play The Operator.
As for other playbook moves, there are a lot of routes a Hardholder could take. He could go with NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH or Bloodcrazed from the gunlugger to become an even bigger force of power. He could take Fingers in every pie or Just give me a motive from Maestro D' to go more for a scheming route, or maybe as Barnum did, get Touched by Death or Infirmary from the Angel if he tries his best to take care of his subjects.
The Zen of Apocalypse World
What is interesting about the Leadership move is that it is not a roll to see how well your gang perform today, or exactly how loyal they are today, Instead it gives you hold to spend when your gang encounters a point that really puts their morale to the test. The rest of the time, the MC is encouraged to play them true to their nature: Baiscally loyal, but not perfectly disciplined, looking out for their own interests, maybe savage... Basically, you freeform the gang until the player says ”Hey, I spend my hold to deal with this thing that's come up”. And the whole game runs like this, basically. You never make rolls because your character wants to do something, you make rolls because your character encounters resistance.
I was taking a nap a few days back, idly thinking about how I wanted to make this write-up, when this suddenly struck me. I have just started practicing zazen, zen meditation. Zazen is a very simple thing, you just sit and pay attention to your breath. It is simple, but not easy, because of course thoughts, tensions, emotions, and pain all come up and you have to deal with it. Well, Apocalypse World is kind of the same thing. You do what ever you want, (simple) and when resistance comes up, you deal with it (complex). It's even like the treatment intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy, where the objective for the therapist and patient basically can be simplified into ”let's have an emotionally present and open relationship right now” (simple) and the technique comes into play when the patient's defenses (resistance to experiencing emotion) comes up. It's very clear to me, I don't know if that makes sense to you guys, but there it is anyway.
Jag måste stjäla den här iden....
). 
