The Magic of 7-9: Paul Holds Court 2/3
In post 1/3, Paul Taliesin asked for specifics about my comment on “the magic of 7-9,” which apparently Judd Karlman thinks is now a Paul B cliche (it is). Here are my current thoughts on why I say that.
First off, 7-9 “yes but” results don’t start magical. Not at all. They’re just procedural, a nifty way to produce mixed outcomes. It’s good basic tech, and if your craft doesn’t extend beyond procedural mastery, sweet, you’re still good to go.
But in my games, at some point they become magical. Like, they show up at just the right time for maximum impact. And I can totally disclaim that impact! Look, it’s not me delivering the killing blow. It’s the dice. Such magic. Wow.
I think what’s actually happening, if you want to get really boring and deconstructionist about it, is that I’m setting situations up so that when a 7-9 comes up, I’ve got an amazeballs outcome that goes well beyond the procedure itself.
I think another thing that makes 7-9s magical for me is that I love me a good O. Henry style ironic twist. Why beat down the players with punitive 6 misses that feel like failure when I can let them feel like, oh wow, you almost got everything you want but fuuuuuck you.
Hey, look, the dice. It’s the dice.
It’s magic.
Don’t blame me.
In our haunted carnival AW game, the heartbreaking, perfect 7-9 was the battlebabe making a mad dash, literally acting under fire, to reach his lover Mice. He gets to her! And one of their more likeable NPCs is the one who shoots her dead upon his arrival.
I mean it came as no great surprise. Mice’s hardhold and her gang, the Patriots, have been ambushed and outmaneuvered by Hugo and his brutal alliance of scavenger gangs. She’s on the run: another roll, a miss in fact, put her at the Driver’s main ride, gun out, first demanding a ride and then happily accepting the Driver’s show of friendship.
And that came as no surprise because I’d asked the Battlebabe all kinds of leading, investing questions along the way via Open Your Brain (which will be post 3/3 in the Paul B Holds Court series, coming next).
So what I’m basically saying is, I lay lots of groundwork leading up to the brutal delivery of a 7-9, and just waited until the roll happened. Because they roll a lot of dice in my game. The odds are entirely in my favor that a timely roll will give me my 7-9 and I’ll have already paved the way toward executing it.
I also like 7-9s more than misses because it feels like you got so close to everything you wanted, you know? A miss is a miss. I’ve been working hard at backing off the sting of a miss, because gosh it’s easy for me to treat them like FAILURE. Which they don’t have to be. So my “MC punches you in the gut” moments land on 7-9s, not 6es.
Keeping my powder dry for the 7-9s is what I mean when I say I use them to “close a thread” in the previous post. It’s not a good phrase because obvs nothing is “closed.” What I really meant was what I said above: dreaming up the best, most wrenching twist and filing it away.
Make sense? I feel a little like I’m explaining not just the punchline, but the craft (timing, reincorporation, repeating motifs) involved in delivering it for maximum effect.
Next: The Maelstrom
Share this:
Discover more from The Indie Game Reading Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So in your example, what would have happened if the Battlebabe had missed that roll? They wouldn’t have made it to Mice in time to see her die, or at all? Would something worse happen?
I suppose I’m asking where the success is in that “mixed success” 7-9 roll.
The success was getting to Mice.
On a miss, I’d have probably just complicated the situation further. Put up more roadblocks. More troops on the ground, maybe. I dunno exactly! But I wouldn’t have taken her away from him because of it.
Was he dashing to save her? Because if so I fail to see how getting to her to see her die benefits him in any way (but maybe we’re missing some context).
Really interesting take on the 7-9!
You’re totally missing context, yeah, and this is why I kind of hate talking specifics in this way.
In the heat of the moment, at the table, blood pressure up, I say “okay, there’s Mice! She’s right across the town square. She sees you.”
BB: “I have to get to her!”
Me: “Sweet, act under fire to get to her.”
BB: “Umm…7.”
Me: ::devilface::
I think it is a super important part of Apocalypse World that there is no effort to clarify intent. The game gives no shits about intent, other than the whole “if you do that you trigger X move” or “so you’re good with taking harm as established?” type clarifying statements. Otherwise fiction follows fiction and we leave intent out of it.
This does leave me in a bit of genie-granting-literal-wishes role, which, you know. Not everyone is on board with. But I’ll say I’ve never actually had someone get mad and all “well shit, of course I wanted to get her to safety, you fucked me!” type reaction.
I tend to roll easier on 7-9s, usually setting up for later hard moves, but that’s just personal style.
I do recall at least once killing an NPC biker when the Chopper was just trying to get him under control. He rolled a 7-9 and got what he wanted, but then he told his second-in-command to “take care of this” and that’s just what he did.
Paul Beakley Yeah, in retrospect I kind of regretted discussing this very specific example while missing the context, sorry. Thank you for the additional details : I now realize I never take the player’s intent out of the equation when I’m making MC moves — and it might be worth trying it your way to see what happens.
JC Nau it’s a tricky thing! My instinct is to always, always get a sense of intent. In fact I’ll say I do, as a practical matter, tend to be aware of what their intent actually is. But I don’t talk about it because that creates the expectation that I need to honor that. Which the rules don’t require or even allow, especially on AUF 7-9s.
Which is why I say it’s like being one of those asshole genies who fucks with you because they know exactly what it is you were asking for.
“Sometimes, disclaim decision-making.”
“It wasn’t me, it was the dice.”
hey Paul, in the example, where you said, “literally acting under fire”, was the Battlebabe running through a hail of gunfire during a battle to get to Mice?
If so, then the success part of the mixed success is that he wasn’t shot, right?
AW is a regular normal RPG, so intent is not really relevant to the system. Who cares why you swing your sword at the orc!
OK, aside from your aggressively normative use of “regular normal”, I do fundamentally agree with you, Jason Corley. I hate to quote chapter and verse, but there’s a thread in Vincent’s writing from lumpley.com – anyway: post a comment to the earliest posts on anyway about Apocalypse World, that suggests that he moved from “let’s talk about intent” out the other side into “I actually like if it we talk about what you do and what happens, and you have to negotiate with yourself and the game how to achieve your intent”.
See also my favorite passage in Poison’d:
> This is a word to the wise—I think you’ll find that fighting is a poor way for your pirate to get what he wants out of people. At the end of the fight, you’ll often find that he’s beaten or killed his opponent instead of getting what he hoped for.
?
.
Your write ups on AW have all be fantastic, Paul. I really enjoy reading them.
Short Campaign Pacing: Paul Holds Court 1/3
Paul Taliesin asked me in a thread last week about how I went about wrapping up our latest Apocalypse World mini-campaign in a satisfying way. I meant to post sooner but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. To be honest, I’m not sure I can point at specific techniques!
It’s about running every session like a one-shot. I find AW and most PbtA games are especially good for this vibe: lots of internal conflict, not much structural prep to (even unconsciously) protect from disruption. Guess I’d start by just saying that: run every session like it was a one-shot, satisfying and whole unto itself.
Of course if you know it’s gonna go longer, you have additional tools at your disposal. Here’s what I came up with after noodling on it for a week:
* Apocalypse World RAW is really good for setup (create characters, set up Hx, follow them around their lives). I’ve expanded on that a little, mostly from experience: Hx questions always come with a little more context, and I draw out one of my big full-table relationship maps during character creation. The Hx context is how I fill the r-map out with more NPCs and implied near past events/near future urgencies. And that’s what turns my r-map into a situation map. (Oh god another smap tease, I need to get this written.)
* As NPCs get introduced, I start them as probable allies/friendlies, unless everyone knows there’s beef due to the Hx questions. I find it useful to imply a status quo early on, so when it comes falling down it feels catastrophic, and not just a continuation of life in chaos.
* The Maelstrom is my main tool for setting emotional hooks and really dredging around in the players’ psyches. This is purely a technique thing and I wish I could really lay out a point-by-point plan on how to work this well. Hm. One thing I’d do is look at something unstable on the smap connected to the character, and ask them opinions adjunct to the connection, rather than on-the-nose.
Example: our Battlebabe puts his babe-ness to use hustling crash spaces and food everywhere he goes. He has zero loyalty to anyone but himself. So he starts the game “attached” to the local hardholder, Hugo, as a sexy killbot who never gets off his ass and actually kills. So when things start to slide sideways, he finds it useful to seduce a member of the biker gang, and then almost immediately seduces another hardholder the next session, leaving the biker chick and other NPCs in his wake.
So the trail of broken hearts, that’s kind of a front, right? I don’t explicitly make it so, it’s just a human complication of the battlebabe bull-in-china-shopping his way through people’s lives.
At some point he Opens His Brain, can’t remember why. The Maelstrom wants to know how he’s gonna disentangle himself from Mice, the new hardholder he’s hooked up with. She’s been super nice and protective, so first I ask questions about how nice and protective she is toward him. Stuff like “When was the last time you felt as safe as you do with Mice, now?” It’s a way to hard-frame the player as well as the character, you know?
I think I’m not explaining this very well. What I’m getting at is the Maelstrom stuff is a way past the player’s defenses, which in this case is arms-length authorial play.
So later when he opens his brain again, the line of questioning is more like, “so you’re going to have to leave Mice eventually, right? I mean you never stick around. You think you can get away from her if she’s alive?” All this in service to creating emotional investment in that story aspect.
Why go through all this? Why all the unapologetic mind-fucking and gaslighting? So that, once the hooks are set, any given moment in that story element’s arc can be brought to a high-tension climax.
But this is all storygaming 101 stuff. Awareness of player investment and where those investments lie, turning the metronome a little higher on those things, all that. I’m just saying Open Your Brain is an astonishingly good tool to put toward that.
* Depend on the magic of 7-9s. They’re magic! If you’ve been building things up, your 7-9s are, IMO, where you can create well timed emotional climaxes. Because if it’s too soon, right? You can dial the “yes, buuuut” to just continue spooling out that thread OR you can cut the thread right there. I don’t use misses for that, although I do tend to feed misses right into my fronts’ clocks if we’re on a deadline.
* Oh yeah, build out your fronts after that first walking-around session. Give ’em all clocks. It’s good prep.
I started my game out knowing in advance it’d be a 5-6 session long game. My players knew it as well, and that helped shape their advancement chase. Knowing the game is gonna end fast, I think, put their minds more solidly on their advancement (highlighted stats) as well as more consequential advancement choices.
I’ve never directly heard this but a popular ghost story told at Apocalypse World camp is that Vincent or Meg or someone once said the game gets “good” at six sessions. My best guess is that refers to advancement tempo, which looks to be around once per session, and that the second advancement set is where you get the opportunity to retire in safety. Might be true, dunno, but in our game at least the ghost story came true: being able to make choices from that second set did alter the tone of the game quite a lot.
If I was going to deliberately plan a 3-shot — say, for a con or something, Fri/Sat/Sun slots — I would probably come to the table with a firm setting pitch, maybe three fronts already cooking, maybe even a check or two already on those clocks representing recent history. And I would, as GM, highlight “weird” no matter what anyone else wanted to highlight, and look for natural (seeming) opportunities for the characters to Open Their Brain. Sitting around wondering what to do next? Curious about what a Front is up to? Walking away mad at someone? The triggers for Open are defined by the GM and that’s some powerful black magic.
I might also hand out, say, two advances right out of the gate. That gets them closer to their second set, and I believe you can get them there if you’re super generous and not weird about your stat highlight choices. Let the battlebabe be cool, let the Savvyhead be sharp, etc. You’re really not gonna have the time to let the players settle into their roles such that other players might want to see other facets (the cool Brainer, the sharp Gunlugger).
This is all pretty meander-y, sorry. I really have been thinking about your question all week! And I can’t really point at any specific techniques beyond setting up interesting threads so they can be either extended or brought to a conclusion whenever you want.
Oh, last one. You probably already know it, don’t be insulted that I’m bringing it up: do the denouement thing at the end of your last session. Where did each character end up afterward? It’s a great post facto technique that creates a sense of closure in everyone, regardless of how up in the air things felt when you can to call it.
Next up: The Magic of 7-9
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Maelstrom Thoughts: Paul Holds Court 3/3
Aight, last of my nonsense. First part is here, second part is here.
Okay so this mini-campaign I took a different tack than before. A lot of this comes directly from some killer best-practice advice about Sagas of the Icelanders I got from Mikael Andersson back in the day, regarding that game’s bond economy and some clever interpretation of the moves set. The executive summary from that game (hear me out) is that when someone Tempts Fate and the GM (whose meta-character is “The Fates”) earns a bond on that character from a 7-9 roll, the GM gets to use that bond in exactly the same way as the players: specifically, a move called “look into someone’s heart.” I’m sure you can see the similarity to Open Your Brain.
This campaign, I didn’t have a strong sense of “who” the Maelstrom was, but I knew it’d have a personality and an agenda. I took the players’ lead on that the first time someone opened their brain: what even is the Maelstrom, how does your character interact with it, what does it look like to them? Based on those early answers I formed up the Maelstrom’s personality.
In Sagas, the neat little psych trick is when you look in someone’s heart, you get straight answers but the questions are constrained. Stuff like “how could I get your character to do X?” Then, later, when the GM puts those things into motion, was that the Fates? Was it magic? It’s even better when the Seidkona playbook, who is ostensibly “magical,” gains 3 bonds on you, asks her own questions, and the Fates (the GM) collaborates on the answers. It kind of … seems like magic is happening.
In Apocalypse World I go for the same thing. I’m asking questions for a couple reasons: to get them talking and thinking about stuff, and checking to see where the players’ interests lie. The talking and thinking sets the hook if their interests are aligned with the questions.
When I ask Maelstrom questions, I just ask Paul-to-player. I don’t talk with a weird voice or anything. I feel like I’m asking on behalf of this fictitious monster, though! Like I’ll sit there a moment and imagine what this evil fucker wants. And then I’ll ask about that in the nicest possible way. That might look like ummm:
Dang, not to get back into the Battlebabe story but it’s a fresh and relevant example. What the Maelstrom really wants to know is, how I can I get the Battlebabe to hurt Mice the worst? How can I manipulate him into that moment? Concession prize: how can I hurt the Battlebabe the worst via his relationship with Mice? It is totally a shit-stirring, dysfunctional, mean-girl kind of attitude. How can I inflict misery? Because, when I first asked about what the Maelstrom “is,” the answer I got was “the psychic static of the world’s misery that reached a tipping point.”
Okay, so I hear the Maelstrom tell me this. Then I have to rely on my grasp of human nature to make that work. So I ask questions about BB’s investment in Mice. Nudge him toward investing in the idea of their relationship more. Nudge my play of her into something sincere. This is me doing the Maelstrom’s bidding. You can armchair-psychologist this all you want. ?
Later, I remember testing the waters, to see if the hooks had gotten set. That’s when I asked about whether he thought she’d let him go if she was alive. Followed with, “so I guess that means you have to kill her, yeah?” And just letting that sit with the player a bit.
Then, when my 7-9 came along and I could finally cash in my chips, I know he felt partially responsible. It was my proudest, brightest moment in the game when he sits there, puts down his character sheet, throws his hands in the air and says “I don’t know what to feel!”
Then he had his character run off and nearly die chopping the shooter’s head off with a sword.
I guess I’m not sure how else to describe this other than to hone your headgame skills. If this doesn’t come naturally, maybe it’s not a technique you can internalize and put to good use.
I will say this: I also use the Maelstrom to get a sense of how to deliver meaningful achievement as well. Sometimes 10+ results can be just as magical: everything is on the line, it could all end in catastrophe, there’s genuine tension, and that is when they get everything they wanted and more.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Great post, but I feel like something is missing here. Are you just talking about a 7-9 outcome of an “act under fire”? Because I’m not seeing it as obviously for other moves.
I know you said you didn’t like to speak of particulars, but I think this is the kind of thing where a specific example is almost entirely necessarily. Else everyone just reads what they want to hear into an abstract example and we all go home none the wiser.
Also related: I think what you’re describing can often (maybe even always) done on a miss. Give them what they thought they wanted, and then twist the knife. “You get to her, after all… to find her bleeding in the dust” sounds like a great Hard Move to me. You can always do this kind of thing on a miss.
Or am I missing the point here?
What I’m taking away from your post is: use the fiction, play, and provocative questions to find those meaningful points where the right resolution will really have weight, and then wait for the appropriate die outcome to deliver that move/moment/outcome.
I’m not sure that has anything to do with 7-9, though, right? In some circumstances – and depending on the move – it could be a miss, or sometimes even a hit. (A classic example being a success on a “Reading” move or an “open your brain” which reveals to you something you wanted to know, but, unfortunately, which is also terrible news. If the MC has just invented that on the spot, it could be seen as cheating, or against the spirit of the rules, but often you’ll find that the situation has already been set up – the bad thing has happened off-screen, perhaps – and revealing it even on a success feels entirely right.)
The magic of 7-9 extends to other moves, sure. Not all of them. Nothing cool happens on the harm move.
My experience of play has shown me that 7-9 just feels different. The players cringe on a miss, and I’m messing with that Pavlovian response to them: misses are not failures.
So, sure, procedurally and “legally” I could have totally waited for a miss to kill that NPC. But the texture of the 7-9 moment is just … different. I’m not sure how else to explain it.
There’s lots and lots about the craft that have their own truths aside from what is procedurally accurate. I mean this isn’t controversial is it?
Yeah, that’s my approach to misses too. The 6- is a rug-pull, the 7-9 is a paper cut. A miss is often more severe in the grand scheme of things, but paper cuts, man — now that’s personal.
Great example. I know you didn’t ask for intent but it does feel to me like a classic BW switcheroo of task and intent. I want to protect Mice, I do it by running across the battlefield. Dice come up bad, you fulfill your task but fail to meet your intent. You make it across the the battlefield but Mice doesn’t need your protection, in fact she has a pistol trained on you as you come around the corner and opens fire.
Defy danger can feel unwieldy in the beginning so to hit a point where you know exactly what to do when that 7 comes up does seem pretty magical. Would you say your prep work placed a question of how are these two going to split in your head, and when the 7 came up you knew your answer?
I find it interesting that you value 7-9s over 6s. I like to use 6’s to make moves, introduce new threats or complicate their lives in general. But I have also received confused feedback when it feels like the 7-9’s hurts worse than the 6’s. With act under fire moves you got an alibi because nothing is really written in stone and the players don’t know whats going to happen. but on more explicit moves they see what a 7-9 looks like and can feel toyed with when 6 or lower doesn’t hit as hard. I’m specifically thinking about The Sprawl where the 7-9 result on mix it up is pretty brutal. So when a 6 comes up I jump on the chance to not sucker punch them as much as twist the knife with complication. Still to some players it felt like a lighter consequence than a 7-9 and cause confusion about how the game worked exactly. No real answer or conclusion. Just rambling thoughts about expectations from dice rolls, and how it can be interesting when the 7-9 are the more dramatic result.
Interesting. So part of the “magic” of the 7-9 is that’s a surprise, or more likely to catch the players off-guard? I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Who doesn’t love a surprise? 😀
More to the point: why hit them with the heavy feels when their armor is up?
Hmmm! I’ll have to think on it and try it. (Or maybe I’m doing it, too, and I just haven’t noticed it?)
Thanks for the excellent and thorough reply!
Here’s what you posted elsewhere, by accident, but belongs here:
“I mean that the transaction around 7-9 is a ritual. Just like a miss has a ritual. It’s nothing so formal! It’s more like…
The Miss Ritual
Them: Oh! A miss. Typical. (Internal dialogue: Oh god, I rolled a five. Well shit, guess I failed. Good thing I didn’t roll snake eyes! I’d have been really screwed! Etc etc. (ignoring the procedural inaccuracies of this line of thought, it’s still a ritual involving probably all five of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief).)
Me: Okay, so let me make my move then. Nah it won’t be that bad! Remember, and I’m saying this for myself as much as for you: misses are not per se failures. Oh hey, you see Mice clambering up out of the river bed. She looks pretty beat up but you could get to her. Just have to get across the open field where the firefight is going down. (The move I’m actually making: Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost.)
The 7-9 Ritual
Them: hey a … 9. Shit. Okay. Um?
Me: Gimme a second. (I don’t need a second. I just let it sit there for a bit.) Let me look at that move again…a worse position, hesitate, an ugly choice…hm. (I don’t need to look at the move again.) Ah. Well obviously as you get there, safe and sound, three shots pop-pop-pop from behind you and Mice falls to the ground, dead.
Them: AAAAAAUUUUGHHHH.
I mean this is all just the theatrics of facilitating a game, yeah? These aren’t rooolz. This is just tempo and delivery and messing with players’ heads.
I could write out examples all day long, I guess, but that’s all I’m talking about.”
That’s solid. I still have mixed feelings about the idea of surprise being key here – it would be easy for it to come off as a cheap shot or breaking the social contract – but it’s interesting.
The particular example of Mice getting shot doesn’t sound like a “worse position, hesitation, or an ugly choice”, but I can chalk that up to the challenges of describing things in words over the internet – I’ll assume that the fiction leading up to that moment at your table made it feel like just the right thing. (No point debating that kind of stuff online, after all.)
Thanks for this excellent series of posts! It’s been a fun conversation.
For 7-9 on Act, I tend to focus on the “offer” and “choice” part of the move. You want to get across to Mice? Either you or she are going to draw more fire, which will it be? Or, you can make it across, but you’re going to get shot in the process, do you still want to do it?