The Physical Language of Action Movies

I was tagged into a conversation on G+ today about action movies and violence. It was a small circle conversation, so I'll refrain from giving names, but it was an interesting discussion about violence, maleness, and media. Obviously, those are things which are on everyone's minds since Mad Max: Fury Road is (depending on who's talking) the most feminist big budget film produced this century or a false prophet injecting acceptance of violence into feminist discourse.

I can't speak to that. I've not seen Mad Max and I probably won't until it's on DVD or streaming. Having a five year old and a wariness of expensive babysitters tends to curtail your movie options. Plus I just hate watching movies in theaters. I'm old and cranky. So this blog post isn't about this.

Instead, it's about the notion that violence is what action movies are about. I was tagged into the conversation because I wrote and am currently trading edits on ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD, an upcoming tabletop roleplaying game which will hopefully be out this year. My purpose with that game is to deconstruct what makes action movies of the genre's golden era (say 1980-1998, or roughly the VHS era) tick. Sometimes I write an article when I want to examine something, sometimes (rare) a blog post, every so often a game.

So here's my thesis: action movies aren't about violence. They are, of course, violent. Very violent. And that violence is very front and center. But rather than being about violence, what they're actually about is physical expression of emotions.

Think about action movies. Yes, anger turns into killing. But love and lust turn immediately into sex scenes. Friendships become about back pats, high fives, and surviving physical adversity together. Characters in action flicks yell and laugh louder than we do, because a big laugh or a loud yell are fundamentally physical acts.

The ramping up of the physicality in quick fashion is the trick. If the natural expression of feeling is physical in the world of action movies, going at a more traditionally dramatic pace is, by definition, unnatural. So you see action heroes behaving in really weird ways, like high fives turning into impromptu arm wrestling matches:

It strikes me that zeroing in on the violence of action movies misses a lot of interesting things. The scale of the violence seems like low-lying fruit when we talk about this type of movie. And, maybe counter-intuitively, I think the more low budget the action movie, the more honest and open this portrayal of physical emotion is. Deadly Prey isn't trying to subvert anything like maybe Mad Max or Alien are. It merely is, and that is is maybe ugly or funny or weird, but it's stripped down and lean. This is part of the reason why I love low budget and/or bad movies. You've got filmmakers and actors who aren't quite good enough to conceal their ids from the viewer.

There's definitely a discussion to be had about the maleness of action movies, their role as propaganda, whether they inure us to violence, etc. All of that is worthy. But I think that when we zero in on violence as the essential kernel of the genre, we're missing out on more interesting questions about how we express emotion and, maybe more importantly, how we wish we could express emotions in our dream worlds.
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Pure game talk: AMW is undergoing edits right now as we can. It will be published by Flatland Games, fine creators of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. Check the tags for past playtest documents and notes on the game's creation.

It's been an age, hasn't it?

I've left this blog fallow for quite a long time. I think my last post was in June and even it wasn't very long. Status updates, though, are good for the people who found out about Before Iron and ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD through here.

Before Iron: This is still in limbo, despite my having been told that I could talk about it a year and a half ago. It is, I am assured, still a priority. I've received some good news on the Before Iron front from Stewart, but it's not the sort of thing I can share publicly.

It'll be out when it's out. I don't know when that is, but it's probably best to not think of it until I post firm news.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD: Always in caps. Always.

As far as I'm concerned, AMW is feature complete for testing. Not feature complete for release, of course, but for testing, absolutely. You can find the latest playtest docs here:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BxzKPjPAQ2CYcHBVY1hLX0pCMDQ&usp=sharing

The only reason I haven't been playtesting the hell out of this online (we've done some locally and it's gone swimmingly) is because Apocalypse World derived games are really tough to do properly without playbook pdfs to consult. There's something deliciously tactile about the *W experience, so doing it without those pdfs is both incomplete and lacks a certain ease of use.

The pdfs are slowly, ever so slowly, coming together. Work on them has been turned over to my brother and co-author on Before Iron. But he's started a new job at a new school, which slows things down, and I've started school again, been busy with other projects, and my daughter started preschool, which slows things down even further. Rest assured that our mutual breaks in the action are devoted to things like the playbook and script pdfs. I suspect testing will come in hardcore once the holidays roll around and everyone has some time off. I also suspect it might be ready for release by the end of Summer 14, though that is optimistic.

Release is already more or less settled. My brother and our friend (that's +Peter Williams and +John Cocking, respectively) have a company called Flatland Games which publishes a very nifty and well-regarded OSR titled Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. AMW will be released there when it comes out.

Will there be a Kickstarter? That's unsure. Frankly, signing on with Flatland means that it's not strictly necessary; the infrastructure for printing on demand and having an awesome pdf are already there. That doesn't mean it won't happen, however; I like Kickstarter as a way of helping with lump sum payments to talent and getting the word out.

If we do go Kickstarter (and this is probably a topic for another post), it will be handled quite differently from many others. For one, it won't go to KS unless and until it's fully written. Since it's not necessary to have the operating capital a KS could offer to get it out in some form, I see no need to kickstart it and then write it over the next however many months. This is not least because I'm rotten at time management and I want precisely zero risk that it goes over my time allotment.

We also won't have any stretch goals as they've come to be thought of. It'll be very simple: more money means better art. Maybe there's a hardcover version. Maybe it's in color. The initial goal would be very modest, as well. I prefer things simple and streamlined as much as possible.

Geeky & Genki: I'm proud to be doing some entertainment writing over at Geeky & Genki. It's a bunch of cool folks I respect the hell out of doing podcasts and writing on all sorts of things. If anything's suffered because of my busy Fall, it's really G&G; I hope to write some more for them very soon (I already have my In the Heat of the Night cultural criticism magnum opus written in my head for Fall break).

Jacobin: Being a more or less lifelong socialist of one stripe or another, I've been very excited to be able to write for Jacobin (and by extension Salon) on geek culture. Jacobin is a magazine I really and truly respect, young as it is, and to have my name next to people like Eileen Jones, Bhaskar Sunkara, Connor Kilpatrick, Corey Robin, etc truly, sincerely blows my mind and humbles me.

If all goes well with the draft, I'll have a long read on the political economy of the video game industry in the next print issue. It should hilariously torpedo any hopes I may have had of returning to the video game industry (spoiler: I actually have no desire to return), but I hope it proves a thought-provoking read.

Anyway, keep an eye on here and follow me on G+ for updates. My next focus is AMW, AMW, AMW, at least once midterms are done.

Another ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD Playtest Report

+Jonathan Reiter was awesome enough to do a playtest of AMW's current alpha rules. Feedback was good. It was very cool because I'm extremely into seeing what people do with the game when I'm not there. I know how I run the game and I know how to explain it. Those two things can cover a lot of holes. So it's always nice to see what happens when I'm not there.
Anyway, I've excised some of the specific feedback for readability, interest, and because I prefer to keep feedback notes (good and bad) in the design talk vault while it's in development. But the play report is below.

I GM'd a one-shot of +Ian Williams' Action Movie World: First Blood for five willing-ish test subjects. Here's what happened.

THE MEAN GREEN

Cast:

Brandt Sterling as AGENT JONAH STAIN

2Wack as OFFICER FORD ABRAMS

Chip Fistwell as DETECTIVE DRAKE TUNGSTEN

Jason Stacy as OFFICER ISAAC

Malory Pariso as OFFICER TILA MARTINEZ

Premise: Jonah Stain is an Irish INTERPOL cop on the case of a transatlantic human trafficking ring. Officer Ford Abrams is the NYPD wunderkind who is mere inches from finding Shadowsmith Sanderson, the head of the ring. Can Stain drive out the snakes on a St. Paddies' weekend in NYC?

Some key moments:

1. The Musclehead (Tila) is undercover with her partner in Vice, The Gunfighter (Isaac). They are infiltrating a strip club that is the front for the ring. Tila is the working girl to Isaac's pimp, and they are decked out in green sequined bikini and crushed velvet jacket respectively. They decide to bring in their informant, and a gunfight breaks out. Tila uses her boiled ham thighs to drag the informant out while Isaac provides slo-mo covering fire. "Next time," Tila says exasperated, "you get to wear the bikini."

2. Our Op (Jonah) is the lead. The Smartass (Ford), is driving. They are hot on the tail of Isaac and Tila's car, which is currently being flanked by two black Hayabusas, riders armed with TEC-9s. They shoot ahead of the chase via shortcut. While Ford t-bones one of the cycles into flames, Jonah throws his cane at the other rider. The riders falls roughly into a heap of garbage. Jonah stands over, uses the cane to flip open the visor, exposing his love interest, Katya, and her gorgeous flowing auburn locks. Smoldering looks are inevitably exchanged.

3. After Ford is kidnapped by the smugglers, everyone at his precinct falls apart a little bit. At the bodyless funeral, The Thesbian (Drake) tries to deliver a lifting soliloquy over Ford's presumed death. Unfortunately, despite the best effort of his NA sponsor, Jonah, Drake has fallen off the wagon. He harangues about how the department is filled with bastards and lectures the shocked crowd about the inevitability of violent death.

4. Isaac drives a shamrock diesel truck into a vacant party supply warehouse in Queens, burning tons and tons of goons and himself in the process. Pathos for Jonah who comes crashing in to the third floor through a skylight, assaulting goons with his cane. "And now you know why they call me Jonah Stain," he says economically, leaving behind a heap of bloodied bodies. Jonah tangles with Sanderson, and they both go out a window, leading to broken bones and Pulp Fiction limp chase. Meanwhile, Tila convinces Katya to get out of the ring through a released captive daughter, an emotional high for the flick.

5. A tank chase in the middle of the St. Patrick's Day parade, as Sanderson threatens the city with a dirty bomb strapped to Miss Delaware's chest.

It was super fun and people had a ton of fun. I initially thought it was going to be very hard work, because 5 players is a bit much for an AW game. But, it turned out fine.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD Actual Play Report

The first real playtest of ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD went extremely well. It certainly exceeded my expectations. A non-zero portion of that is that I was running it for guys that I have gamed with off and on (more off than on after my move to Raleigh) for well over twenty years, but it’s equally true that a non-zero portion of it is just that rough spots I was concerned with weren’t that big a deal.

This is pretty long (about 3500 words) but I want to make sure the first actual play report touches everything important in a little more detail than maybe I otherwise would. Even then, there are still spots which could use MORE detail, so ask questions about rules and where things are going.

The players were John, Peter, and Scott. It was decided at the outset that Peter would get to be the Lead in whatever movie was chosen as it was his birthday shindig that this was all taking place at. Right now, it’s pretty nebulous how Lead is determined; that’s something to firm up, for sure, but it was easy enough for the first test.

Peter opted to play The Yeller, a Reb Brown, screams all the time, beefy sort of actor. John went with The Pugilist and decided  to go a little slapsticky with his martial artist a la Jackie Chan. Scott went with The Gunfighter, a Chow Yun-Fat gun-fu type.

The actor names were as follows:

Peter: Chet Bradford (Yeller)

John: Jack Sprat (Pugilist)

Scott: Chip Kaiser (Gunfighter)

Once the playbooks and actor names were picked, the group chose their moves. Chet picked “Just Yell”, which allowed him to roll +Muscles instead of +Drama for certain scenes, and “Move, Move, Move”, a move which allows him to egg his companions on when speed is needed. Jack decided on “Go for the gut. He’s soft there”, a straight +1 Agility, and “Sting Like a Bee”, letting him roll +Agility instead of +Muscles in close combat. Finally, Chip decided to go for “Gun Ballet”, granting –area to any ranged weapon he uses, and “This Is My Gun”, giving him a +1 to all Stunt rolls while a ranged weapon is in his hand.

These are the actors. You can think of the actors as brands and these moves as calling cards of each particular actor. Using Chet as an example, we see an actor who delivers heavy emotional scenes by screaming his lines and who tends to rely on screaming at his costars to hurry up. So, quite a bit like Reb Brown, actually.

With the actor playbooks chosen, it was time to pick a genre of movie and see what we could come up with. Right now, I only have the Cop Movie and Barbarian Movie Scripts (movie playbooks) ready. I’ve got plenty in the pipeline, but if I set a bar of “all the Scripts are done” as a minimum for testing, then this thing is never going to get tested because, ho boy, it’s practically limitless.

The guys decided to go with the Cop Movie. I was pretty happy with this, since I’d done a one on one with the Barbarian Movie once before.

The first thing you do is sort out what sorts of relationships the characters have with one another. Starting with the Lead and going to his or her left, you roll on or pick from a chart (or make something up entirely) to see what the relationship is. It’s deliberately reminiscent of Fiasco; one of my favorite bits of Fiasco is the way that it forces you to think about what the relationships between the characters mean.

We determined that Chet’s character and Jack’s character had a cop-informant relationship. We knew that Chet was going to be the Lead in this film, so it was pretty easy to sort out which was which: Chet was the cop, Jack was the informant. Jack was next to roll and he ended up with a relationship of precinct buddies with Chip. Problem: we already established that Jack was going to be playing an informant in this film. Easy solution: Jack was an ex-cop, disgraced but still of use to the force as an informant from his new vantage point from the docks. Finally, Chip rolled to see his relationship with Chet and got a 12. They had both seen something terrible.

We paused here. We had a slowly coming into view picture of what the movie looked like. We knew it was a cop movie (duh), that Chet and Chip were cops who had witnessed something terrible, and that Dusty was an ex-cop (and ex-partner) of Chip’s who had fallen on hard times. Nice. Time to drill down more.

Before we went any further, I wanted names of the film characters the actors were playing. This isn’t the same as the actor’s names; actor’s names won’t change, while film character names will change each movie (yo, this is meta: you are a real person playing an actor playing a character). Chet decided to play Sgt. Lance Anger. Chip, his current partner, played Rob Collier. And Jack played poor Dusty, a man who left his last name and badge behind him.

With names done, we returned to the setting. What was this terrible thing that Lance and Rob had seen? After some discussion, it was decided that they saw a terribly mangled body with its fingers snipped neatly off at the site of a diamond heist. Some sort of message, but what did it mean? Going further, the precinct (it was also decided that it was set in Los Angeles) was in a tizzy about the ghastly crime. Dusty, our informant, was a drunk fisherman with his ear to the ground in the dockyards. He’d been implicated in a prior, years ago jewel heist, so some suspicion was coming his way.

Next up were the Script moves. Each player picks a move from the chosen Script, exactly the same as with their Actor playbooks. Script moves only last for the duration of the current movie, however; they’re tightly tied to the genre being portrayed, while Actor moves tend to be more general, pan-genre action moves (experience expenditures can make Script moves permanent, though). Lance went with “Supercop” (+1 all stunts), Dusty with “Corrupt Is As Corrupt Does” (can spend holds to get access to illicit goods), and Rob with “High Speed Chase” (a demon behind the wheel).

The characters  picked their gear (Lance Anger loved his nightstick, Dusty still had a stash of teargas grenades, and Rob Collier had his assault rifle) and then it was time for the final step: picking a villain. In this stage, the Director (me) gets to pick, though the players have veto power. Each Script comes with a list which you can pick from. The entries all have associated impulses, familiar to anyone who’s made a Front for Apocalypse World. I’d heard Dusty talking about drugs with his Script move, so I floated a drug kingpin; the group wasn’t too keen on that and floated the police chief being the big bad guy. I thought that sounded cool, so I named him (Brent McGillicutty) and off we went.

We opened in the precinct office. Chief McGillicutty had a hot tip that Dusty had some information regarding the diamond heist and mutilation; he asked Lance and Rob to head down there, since Rob had a relationship with Dusty dating back a decade. Lance had to go, too; he was Rob’s partner and the best cop on the force. (Peter really played the yelling aspect of things to the hilt; he would yell borderline incoherently at random times and kept it up for around three hours) The partners grabbed their squad car and headed down to the docks.

There was an obvious break in the action so it was time to jump cut over to Dusty. He had an old fishing boat which he lived on now. His cousin, Nick, was fixing the motor for him and was wrapping the job up as we cut over. Nick and Dusty exchanged some pleasantries, with Nick expressing concern for his well-being, when Lance and Rob pulled up. Nick and Dusty greeted the two cops and Nick excused himself, stating that he had his kids for the weekend.

The scene shifted to a bit of heavy pathos, with Rob assuring Dusty that he was a good cop caught in a bad situation, while Dusty, reticent to help, insisted he wasn’t. Lance decided he wasn’t interested in this and decided to convince Dusty to help by making an emotional connection. This is a +Drama roll and varies from the more direct manipulation roll in approach. The emotional connection move is about delivering a stirring speech of some sort and trying to elicit an emotion or memory.

Lance rolled and ended up with a 12; obviously a rousing success. At this point, we ran into a small rules snag. Lance was going to punch Dusty in the stomach to snap him out of it before delivering a speech about how he was still a cop at heart; Dusty decided that he wasn’t going to go along with that and wanted to resist. Lance’s narration was totally valid only as long as the target didn’t resist. He could’ve narrated it differently, with maybe just a speech and no physical contact. The second physical contact was initiated, Dusty had the option to resist and cause a fight to break out. This isn’t currently adjudicated in the rules and was just a judgment call on my part; I’m inclined to keep it that way, as this particular situation strikes me as somewhat rare.

I gave Lance a chance to change the move. He definitely wanted to, as his in-character intention was to snap Dusty out of it, not start a fight. Rob jumped in here and suggested that he stop the punch from behind before it was thrown; Lance thought that was a really good idea and agreed. So Rob stopped the punch, shouting that this wasn’t the way. Lance huffed and relented.

“You’re still on the force to me, Dusty! You’re still on the right team!”

Dusty relented and agreed to help. I asked Dusty what he knew, putting the decision in player hands. Dusty knew that the Pier One Gang (yes, that Pier One) was rumored to be involved in some heavy stuff. He used his “Corrupt Is As Corrupt Does” move from the Cop Movie Script to do this. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was something. Before the group could pull off, though, a cop car pulled up and out stepped officers Jane Lillard and Bob Thomas with a search warrant for the boat. Stand up cops and acquaintances of all three of the heroes. They presented the search warrant and said that Lance and Rob could certainly contribute.

Things took a weird turn here. For whatever reason, Lance and Rob decided to knock out the two searching cops. Dusty, for his part, wisely stayed out of it. We turned to some combat rolls, with punches thrown and pistol whippings galore. Dusty opted for a stunt move to get the hell out of there, tumbling over the side and into the water. Bob took a tumble down into the ship’s cabin, while Jane landed in the water. Dusty ended up dragging the unconscious Officer Lillard onto the deck; Rob searched her and found a crumpled note with the address for the Pier One scribbled on it. Lance, for his part, went to go question Bob down below. Bob was coming to when, out of the corner of his eye, Lance caught sight of an open briefcase of crisp, unmarked bills sitting on a table.

A series of accusations broke out between Lance, Rob, Dusty, and the still groggy Bob. A couple of read a person moves established that Bob wasn’t behind planting the money there. Only one person made sense: Dusty’s cousin, Nick the mechanic. Lance and Rob tried to talk Bob down from radioing in what, from their perspective, was a massive misunderstanding. That was obviously the persuade move and it was flubbed, badly. No dice: Bob was getting the still comatose Jane and radioing in backup. With no choice, the two beaten up cops were gently left on dock and the boat roared to life, course set for Pier One.

Rob decided to roll High Speed Chase, netting an 8; he opted to take a shortcut, but either he or the vehicle would take some damage. He narrated ducking between tugboats and eking every bit of speed out of the old boat, while I described the fishing gear getting knocked loose during a clip with one of the tugs. Not particularly crunchy, but it made for a cool narrative moment and was actually one of the most visually striking scenes when placed in my mind’s eye.

The heroes (I use the term loosely after the search warrant fiasco, but it’s also not entirely outside the source material) killed the motor as night fell and headed up to the Pier One warehouse. There’s no real stealth move, or acting under fire, so sneaking around unseen defaulted to a +Agility based stunt move. This brought up an interesting flow of play question: do I want AMW to be the sort of game in which a roll is needed by everyone to make what amounts to a group move or do I just defer to the most competent one? It felt more in keeping with the conversational tone to just ask for the one roll; that may be something I revisit, but it felt right last night.

Everyone climbed up to the top of the warehouse unseen, to a glass skylight. Peering down, they saw members of the Pier One gang unloading military grade weaponry from crates which had just arrived. Assault rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, land mines… the whole nine. And who did they see with Teeth (leader of the Pier One gang)? If you guessed Cousin Nick, you were right.

The climax was coming. Dusty decided this would be a good time to go for a Camaraderie move, a sort of abstracted move meant to revel in the friendship that most action movies have as a theme. You actually have a communal Camaraderie score, which goes up and down throughout the course of a movie. Before he did this, though, he decided to go for a killer one-liner move; one of the outcomes of a successful one-liner is a +1 to your Camaraderie score.

Dusty stated that it was “time to get a drop on these guys” as he prepped to toss out hi-fives before diving through the glass to kick some ass. Unfortunately, he missed his one-liner move. In this case, a miss taps into the meta, just a movie portion of AMW. The line elicited laughs mixed with groans at the table. In the movie, Dusty’s buddies were into it. But a miss on a one-liner meant the imaginary audience wasn’t into it; it fell flat. It was lame. It gave Dusty a -1 to his next move which was, of course, a Camaraderie move.

Dusty gave his hi-fives and everyone prepared to go in. He rolled the groups +Camaraderie (which was a 0; that’s where it starts in every film and it hadn’t been bumped up or down) with his -1 from the lame one-liner and missed. The consequences for a failed Camaraderie roll can be pretty dire. In this case, Dusty chose to have the Director make an immediate and very hard move against one of his compatriots (not him; important note).

Teeth glanced up and saw Rob at the edge of the skylight. The gangster whipped a grenade launcher out of his trench coat (the movie was set in 1992 so of course it was a trench coat) and took a blast at Rob. Rob’s body was shattered, near death. He coughed up blood as Lance grabbed him, swearing to return for him, asking him to hang on.

Lance and Dusty, tears in their eyes, jumped through the skylight. Dusty chucked tear gas down into the crowd via a successful stunt roll, opting to give the +1 forward the success granted to Lance. Lance put it to good use, diving right onto Teeth while Dusty handled Nick; Dusty nailed a combat move and opted to hit a whole ton of people in addition to disabling Nick.

The heroes handcuffed their quarry to the boat’s railing before running to the roof to check on Rob. Rob was definitely dying. When a supporting cast member dies, the actor gets two experience, while the surviving PCs gain the option to demand Vengeance; Vengeance is a hold which can be spent to gain a 10+ automatically on a move.

The death scene was great. Rob asked Lance to make sure his family was okay before reaching into his pocket with his last breath; he handed Lance adoption papers for a puppy he was going to get for his wife for their anniversary, along with a photo of said puppy. Then he was gone. Lance and Dusty swore vengeance before returning to the boat.

Once back on the boat, a few more emotional connection and manipulation moves had Teeth admitting that Chief McGillicutty had been behind the operation and that most of the police force was corrupt, while Nick repented and, for family ties, agreed to help out where he could. Sirens were heard.

One of the current holes is what to do with players of dead characters. I opted to try my current first option, which is to assign control of an NPC (starting with the main villain) to such players. Scott (Rob’s player) took over for Chief McGillicutty. I still set the scene as I would for most other NPC centered situations, but I granted Scott a lot of leeway in terms of how McGillicutty acted and spoke.

While McGillicutty and the cops were on their way for a final showdown, we cooked up a quick montage of the heroes and Nick setting a trap. Nick, being a mechanic, wired what was basically a gigantic powder with explosives (action movie logic, don’t ask). Dusty hid in his boat with a rocket launcher. Lance hid out at the door of the warehouse.

I loosely set the scene for Scott so he knew, generally, how to proceed with Chief McGillicutty. I narrated an army of cops pulling up, with him at the lead. He rolled with it, describing the chief getting out of the car with his bullhorn and doing a classic “give yourselves up” line. Lance shouted that he wanted to talk to McGillicutty, one on one, inside the warehouse. McGillicutty shouted back that he agreed, but remained by his car, motioning for the police to surround the warehouse.

Dusty figured this was his chance and he shot his shiny new rocket launcher at the now separated McGillicutty. An intersection of two rules occurred with this. One, the main villain has plot immunity from everyone but the Lead; only the Lead can kill him. Two, Dusty failed the roll. Badly. I sort of cheated here and shouldn’t have (though this did lead to an interesting potential rules change). McGillicutty caught a glimpse of Dusty in the boat and pulled his pistol, shooting poor Dusty between the eyes.

Lance lost it at this point and invoked his Vengeance move. The warehouse blew as Lance jumped out of the blast radius, propelled forward in a mega-tackle of McGillicutty (10+ on his stunt move from Vengeance). Lance bellowed that he was taking the chief in legally. It was time to fist fight. McGillicutty squirmed free after clocking Lance with an elbow to the temple. I gave Scott the option of how to react; McGillicutty ran like hell. Lance took this opportunity to hop in a squad car and run the erstwhile smuggling mastermind down.

The movie closed with credits rolling and wailing guitars. Lance was on the boat, heading out to sea. “I’ve seen enough of the city. It gets to you,” he said. “Time to try my luck out there. On the bay.” The sun was setting and a red sheen on the water paved the way for Lance Anger’s next adventures.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD March Progress

The playtest documents are done. More or less. I've discovered that Google Drive's formatting is awful when it comes to bulleted lists, but that's okay for an alpha document. I'll shape it up for the next pass.

So, what's it look like?

Structurally, not much has changed. The work was in getting the details in there for a playable document of some sort. There are some things which need to be firmed up, but that's why it's an alpha. I definitely need to detail how a movie is expected to play out, but I also want to see what people do with it now. Plus, I need to run it several times on Hangout or something to help guide me on how I communicate that.

One interesting thing cropped up which reminded me a bit of Pendragon and, by extension, Before Iron. Obviously these are two different styles of gaming, but in both AMW and Pendragon you know how things end.

In Pendragon, this is specific: you know that Uther will beget Arthur, that Lancelot will betray him, that Mordred will slay Arthur, and that the dying Arthur will sail off on his little boat to his little imaginary island and everything sucks.

In AMW, this is more general. The good guy wins in an American action flick. He or she (it's almost always a "he", but I'm very into being gender inclusive in this project, even if the movies aren't; the Cynthia Rothrocks of the world deserve no less) is going to kill or capture the bad guy, get the love interest, and ride off into the sunset.

How do you make this interesting? It's not going to be for everyone. I've had players balk at the notion that they weren't going to wield Excalibur (I mean, you can play Pendragon that way, but I don't find it interesting so I didn't run it that way) or rule Britain. Others (most) thrived on it.

Pendragon took the tack that your knights were equal to the greats but different. The big stories were there as backdrop, but the stories of the PCs were running in parallel. So, no, you were never going to get Excalibur, but you might get Farfar the Axe of Jormungandr in Fairy Land or whatever. You might go to the Battle of Badon knowing that, in the larger narrative, Arthur is guaranteed to win. Which is lame, maybe, until you consider that what's not guaranteed is your PC's survival or glory.

In AMW, by contrast, one character is designated as the Lead. This rotates and you can't do it a second time until everyone else has had a crack at it. The Lead essentially has plot immunity. He or she can't die and is guaranteed to eventually kill the bad guy. I say "eventually" because the Lead absolutely can be beaten up, set back, and generally screwed with to make it hard. But the Lead can't lose.

The supporting cast, of course, can and probably should lose. I offer a mechanical carrot of 2 XP if a supporting character dies in the movie (which really isn't terribly punitive, since you just come back for the next movie), but even there, broad leeway is given to those characters in how and when they die. What drama demands comes first, mechanical doodads and notions of balance/fairness come second.

I like Vincent Baker's maxim that a roleplaying game is a conversation. If I didn't, I probably wouldn't have latched onto Apocalypse World as tightly as I have. So AMW is a conversation, too, but it's shaped differently than AW's conversation. What's going on is that we know how the conversation in each movie in AMW begins and how it ends, but we don't know what it looks like. We don't know how the AMW heroes know each other. We don't know where they are. We don't know how the big villain gets his or her comeuppance or even why it's deserved. That's what you determine in-game.

Interestingly, I feel that this overlaps with another AW engine project I've been testing, +Nathan Paoletta's World Wide Wrestling. It is, as you can probably guess, a pro wrestling game. Pro wrestling matches are scripted (what? NO!) and Nathan's been cooking up ways to acknowledge that while giving the players control of how things look. He's doing a good job of it so far, but I imagine it's challenging; at the least, it's challenging for me.

I'm going into this knowing that this is going to be completely uninteresting to some people. I'm totally okay with that! As my father-in-law says, it wouldn't do for everyone to like the same things. I do think that, because of this difference in what the conversations are like, it's important to be up front about the expectations and zero in on conveying how the conversation should ideally look once the blanks begin to get colored in.

That's really the most challenging part of the project. I'm mostly happy with the playbooks and Scripts. I'm generally happy with most of the moves, though I feel like there's a bit too much overlap in some of their outcomes. It's making sure a movie "looks" like a movie that's tricky.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD February Progress

I'm using my child transmitted flu or cold or whatever to knuckle down on some ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD.

By way of progress, I'm feeling good about getting a playtest document out by the end of March *provided* mid-terms and a busy end of that month (Rafael-con, Easter, my stepmother's retirement party which has me cooking paella for twenty) cooperate. I say that more as a precaution than anything else; I'm feeling good, but I also know that 1/3 of the days in March are spoken for, with another 2-4 days on midterms. That's a not insignificant chunk of time.

Actually sitting down and writing is always clarifying for me in a way that notes and spreadsheets aren't. I like gaming books as a sort of quasi-narrative art form, rather than as instruction manuals. Always have.

Because of that, the difficulty I was having in firming up Scripts (the movie playbooks) just kind of melted away once I sat down, stopped thinking too damned much, and just started making them. Which isn't to say that *any* of this is perfect; it's not and that's what playtests are for. In fact, I see things I'm not entirely pleased with right now but I want to see what other people say before I nix them or alter them. There are times when I am (quietly, neurotically) extremely hard on my work. Not that you'd know, since I don't verbalize it too much, but it's there. My subpar bit of writing or awkward rule is another person's favorite bit of the whole thing.

But Scripts are coming together, which were the real final hurdle to making a playable document. These are the playbooks representing the movies which you play. They're recognizable and consist of several parts:

Background and Relationships - This is something which can be completely done without the aid of charts and such, but I wanted to include some in order to make things flow smoothly in case people were stuck for ideas. The start of a movie feels somewhat tough to me in a vacuum. There's no "what's a typical day for you?" situation as there is in Apocalypse World. While the players will drive all of the intervening points between A and Z, there still has to be an A and a Z.

So, a bit like Fiasco, you go around the table and establish a relationship with the person                    to your left. Everyone does it and, yes, in groups of four or more, not everyone will have a relationship with everyone else. This should grant a base on which to build.

Script Moves - These are exactly like playbook moves. Each Script has five moves related to the genre of action movie you're playing. Each player picks one and has it for the duration of the film. The only catch is that each move can only be picked by two players; if two people pick the same move, that one's off-limits for everyone else.

Extra-bonus: you can spend XP on making the script moves permanent, carrying them from movie to movie. This is where your cross-genre, potentially goofy mayhem comes in. I fully expect this is going to break the fictional tenets of the game, as Arnold Schwarzenegger does a ninja movie, learns the disappear into thin air trick, makes it permanent, and then uses it in a cyborg warfare movie. I'm completely okay with this.

Gear - Weapons, gadgets, and such. This is, of course, Script dependent. Everyone picks a gear package and that's what they have for the movie. So with the barbarian flicks, you can be the dude with the sword, the dude with the bow and arrow, the dude with the spear, etc, etc, etc.

Villains - So, action movies always have a big, bad villain at the end. He or she is motivated by whatever and things revolve around that. This is how to set up Point Z.

The players will pick who the villain is. Initially, the plan was to have this be a typecast actor. Think the group picking Danny Trejo and dealing with Danny Trejo moves for the duration of the movie.

The problem is that this did nothing to help gel the fiction. As work has gone on, it's increasingly clear that this game is about (referencing my earlier sentence) what happens between Points A and Z, not what A and Z actually are. Because A is determined on a per-movie basis and Z is always the same (hero kills villain, crowd cheers) in action movies with extremely rare exceptions. Incidentally, that sets up a very interesting, rather unexpected parallel with my playing of Pendragon and my work on Before Iron which I might write about later.

What will happen now is that each Script will present a list of villains and the players will choose one. This will be sort of like a mini-front. A list of possible motivations and techniques will be listed (I'm trying to thread a needle between too loose and too restrictive), along with a special move which pops up when the villain is active.

So, for the barbarian movie Script (the one I'm working on now), the villains might be a cult leader, an evil monarch, a ravenous barbarian tribe, and a master assassin. The cult leader might have possible motivations of "to conquer", "to convert", and "to lay waste" or something similar. Then, we'd have a move which might make it tough to directly attack him or her due to powers of persuasion. Those are all just examples off the top of my head (most of this Script is done except the villain specifics) but you get the general idea.

My hope, with the Scripts, is that a group will get enough starting and end point help that they can worry about the explosions and stunts in between, while simultaneously giving a heaping helping of player choice about how the beginning and ending work. I expect that how I thread this particular needle is going to be one of the things which shifts most in playtesting.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD Design Notes

With Before Iron, I've been left to dole out information on a completed (minus layout/art) project after the fact. It's been difficult to settle on precisely how much information to give out and when, since I've no real idea when it's going to go out. I don't want to say a whole bunch of stuff when release might be another year away, finding that I have nothing to say when I actually need to promote a real, existing, solid book that's in my hands.

With ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD,  I get to do something a little different, which is talk about things I think are worth talking about as they get formed enough to do so. I'm not inclined to design in the open, but I do like to get people excited. Or bummed out! Whichever. I can feed off of that a bit and it can help solidify certain ideas which haven't quite gelled.

So, notes. Before I get to those, work's been going well. I tend to binge write, leaving things fallow for two or three days before going on a mad, all day spree. This is no different. Since I hit my homework in the same fashion, AMW:FB has meshed pretty well with my current schedule, which is good. I feel good about a preliminary playtest document maybe in March, though I don't want to overpromise. Anyway:

Stats

The stats are set at +Muscles, +Agility, +Drama, +Sexiness, +Swagger. The names are subject to change; they're all nouns but I sort of want them to adjectives. And Drama doesn't quite fit the way I want it to, in that the others are things that a person has, while Drama is read differently.

I reached these stats by breaking down what action movie stars do in movies. Stunts and violence, yes, but pathos-filled speeches about personal loss, love scenes ranging from touching to down and dirty, and non sequitur wisecracks left hanging for effect. Plus, not all stunts are performed the same way or for the same reasons; a muscley guy holding a portcullis open in a barbarian movie isn't doing the same thing as a person doing a backflip out of a helicopter.

So Muscles (I'm dropping the plus sign, since it tries to tag people in G+) is for stunts involving strength and close combat. Agility is for stunts involving dexterity and ranged combat. Pretty bog standard stuff but I'm happy with that split.

The other three tie into the meta aspect of the game a bit more. Even though you're never, ever supposed to directly acknowledge it, the conceit is that we're all in the know that this is just actors doing a movie. So it's not just that the actor seduces that guy, it's that the seduction is, ideally, interesting to this imaginary audience. Again, I don't want this to be directly acknowledged, but it affects the way the fiction works as you roll for your outcomes. A better example may be the wisecracks which come with the territory; they make no sense whatsoever in a "real world" situation, but make perfect sense if you imagine that everything you're doing is a scene on a screen, even if the narrative fluctuates due to your actions.

So, Drama is about how good you are at conveying real emotion and making connections with people which go beyond the deliberately superficial relationships in action movies. Sexiness functions an awful lot like Hot and is probably the closest to the AW stats of the five. Swagger is the unflappable sense of cool and humor which folks like Kurt Russell and Han Solo/Indiana Jones era Harrison Ford have.

Playbooks

Playbooks are mostly designed in a first pass sort of way. The mechanics, I'm certain, will change, but I'm pretty content with the action movie actors being represented.

Each has a primary stat and five moves. At least one move is always of the active, roll Stat and make choices type. The playbooks are:

The Musclehead (Muscles): Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno type. Lots of raw power and menace in the moves. Right now bears a (totally accidental) heavy resemblance to the Gunlugger and I'm not entirely happy about that.

The Yeller (Muscles): Reb Brown. Reb's a little obscure and never actually did any "good" movies, but it's my game and, by damn, he's going in. He substitutes yelling for dramatic chops. Or he's a bard, if you prefer. A bard who yells.

The Gunfighter (Agility): Chow Yun-Fat. The John Woo, gun-fu type. I've had to expand the moves to include all ranged weapons, simply because it would be really lame to play a gun wizard in a barbarian movie. Moves center on making ranged combat look completely badass and creating dramatic scenes which revolve around the Gunfighter's weapons.

The Pugilist (Agility): JCVD, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Cynthia Rothrock. This is the actor who got a start in martial arts or boxing and parlayed it into a career. Moves center on hand to hand combat, with one training montage move. Because of course there has to be a training montage.

The Thespian (Drama): Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone. It's really easy to forget just how good the first Rocky movie is. Sly showed some real acting chops, even if his range isn't stellar. This Playbook is that sort of action movie star, one who can drop real moments of drama in things. This may end up being my favorite because, in the course of doing the actual design, I found that I was making Drama for the Thespian function as a real narrative changer. Picture the guy in the movie (any movie) giving a soliloquy about what's going on in the plot or the conflicts driving things. Now, let's pretend that it's a chicken and egg argument, that it's insight of what's already happening but that the observations actually make things happen. A kind of reality bending through dramatic training. That's what the Thespian can bring to the table.

The Wiseass (Swagger): Kurt Russell. This one and the Operator (I need to change that name, since there's an Operator in AW) are my current work and, frankly, the toughest of the seven to get where I want. Unlike the others, the niche is mostly "stuff other playbooks do but BETTER", which is a tougher thing to make interesting than "stuff nobody else does".

The Operator (Sexiness): Sean Connery, Daniel Craig. The sexy Bond type. I feel better about this one than the Wiseass. I settled on some moves to grant some narrative control through romantic interests and making things "sexy".

The Other Stuff

I'll leave things like basic moves, the Camaraderie stat, and Scripts (movie playbooks) for another time. Short version: basic moves are good, though with a surprising amount of overlap with AW's and I'm not happy about that, Camaraderie is sketched out as a communally used stat which goes up and down through group action, and Scripts haven't been cracked yet (plus will probably be the most labor intensive part of the game).

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD

(and yes, it is always, always in caps)

Work is rolling on what I hope ends up being a commercial AW hack. I'm ready to crack the door open a little bit more on it, since it's progressing more quickly than I expected.

Yes, it's about action movies of the 80s/90s variety. I'm aiming to deconstruct the common threads connecting American action movies of the era before building them back up in game form. +Bret Gillan  has been of great help in shoring up some ideas. It was kind of limbo for a few months after we initially dove in, but once I sat down a few days ago and actually wrote at length, it really began to gel.

Now, I know there are plenty of AW hacks out there. I hope some of the ideas pique the interest of people who might be inclined to wander away from "another AW hack". In somewhat brief form, some highlights of what AMW:FB is going to do:

-One of the big things is that there's a bit of a "meta" aspect to AMW:FB. Drawing a bit of inspiration from +Nathan Paoletta's currently in beta pro wrestling AW hack, the action is both real and not real, scripted and unscripted. Players of AMW:FB will be playing in the sort of unscripted fashion you would expect: outcomes are decided at the table, people die, people fall in love, etc. This is just as you would play any other AW engine game; no railroading allowed and player control is front and center. But it's also not real and is scripted, if only in retrospect: the action happens on an imaginary screen in a theater somewhere. Your character might die but your actor won't. It's going to require a dual-track in your head and I need to firm up the language, but that's why it's rough draft.

-Playbooks are going to represent actors in this very meta sense. This is to represent Arnold being Arnold in all of his movies. So if you pick The Musclehead, you are, in a very real sense, picking a brand. The Arnold Brand. Or, if you pick The Pugilist, you're picking the JCVD Brand (before it became passe, of course). That's what you will be throughout your movies. Typecasting is the goal.

This bit is also "genreless". The idea is that there's this larger, super-genre called "action movies" which is an umbrella for the individual types of action movie people know and enjoy. Actor Playbook moves are designed to be plugged into any of those individual genres, rather than tied to assumptions about what type of movie your group is playing.

-What are movies? In addition to the Actor Playbooks, the game will have Movie Playbooks. These contain your setting assumptions. It's expected that the group will play a Movie for four or so sessions before wrapping up and choosing another one. A Movie Playbook (and I may call them Scripts) will have your gear options, charts to help organize a loose plot for the movie, some Fiasco style relationship building help, and special moves. This is where the character/actor distinction really shows up. You can be Barnold Dortsenegger the Musclehead playing Tronan the Beerbarian for the length of the movie. All played by Joe, the real person.

The movie moves. This deserves a bit more explication. Each Movie Playbook will have four or so moves which are tightly tied to the movie genre being played. Each player will pick one. For the duration of that particular movie, he'll get that move, with an option to make it permanent through experience spending later (which leads to some wacky crossgenre potential with enough spending). 

So, going back to The Musclehead, he comes in with two Musclehead moves (we'll say +1 to Muscles and a move which helps him with stunts based on that stat). Everyone decides to pick a Ninja Movie Playbook. Not what big meatheads are known for, but fine. Looking at the list, he decides he really wants a move which lets him disappear in a puff of smoke. For the duration of the ninja movie, he has that move and can use it normally. He can make it permanent at the end, if he wants, and it becomes a sort of calling card, integral to his brand.

The combination of Actor Playbook and Movie Playbook should offer a wide variety of styles of play while both staying under the action movie umbrella and providing a sly wink that it's just a movie.

-Other things will be done to model some of the conventions. Incentives to allow your PC to die horribly (we need high body counts), a rotating lead role capacity which allows a certain level of immunity to death, tying certain GM moves to a player picked lead bad guy role (again, based on actor... pick Danny Trejo OR Tex Cobb analogues), and a stat based on friendship which allows powerful moves on the part of the group. These are more mechanically shored up than I'm communicating here because I've already gone on quite a bit.

Anyway, it's in very obviously rough draft status, but work is going quickly, as I said. I'm glossing over a lot of details above; it's not prototype status but it's not quite ready for public consumption, either. I may be looking for playtesters in a month. Maybe a little less. When the time comes I'll be posting on G+ and maybe here. My hope is that it ends up being something cool that people want to play.