Listen to this episode here.
Thrilled this week to have on one of my favorite movewrights, it’s Aaron King of the RTFM podcast. Aaron brought on Love Letters from Apocalypse World, a kind of custom move the GM can write when it’s been a while since we played and everyone might need a refresher on what was going on to get the ball rolling again. I think custom moves are a wildly overlooked part of Apocalypse World, and today we go deep on why that is and how and when to write your own.
Further Reading
Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker
Aaron King’s Worksheet Manifesto
The SF Ultra podcast
Reading the Apocalypse by Aaron King
Socials
RTFM podcast and Patreon
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar. Thanks Chris!
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Ad Links
Jukebox by Jar of Eyes
Oh Captain My Captain by James D’Amato
Aaron’s Love Letter to Me
Dear Tai, when you return from the psychic maelstrom, something follows you. Choose one from each list.
List 1
It is native to the maelstrom.
It is something from before the apocalypse that took refuge in the maelstrom.
It is a fellow traveler, like you.
List 2
It has phosphorescent antlers.
It shimmers like diesel vinaigrette.
It has six limbs ending in human hands.
List 3
Its coming is heralded by crinkling frost.
Bleeding grain plants rise up in its footsteps.
Statues and images change to reflect its appearance.
Roll +weird. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7-9, choose 2. On a 6-, choose 1 and be prepared for the worst.
You know where it is.
It will talk to you before it acts.
It feels fondly for you.
Choose another trait from the lists above.
Love and kisses, your MC
Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and read from the fucking manual that spawned it. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host this week. Is Aaron King.
If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're already familiar with Aaron. They are the cohost of the RTFM podcast, where each week Aaron and Max Lander sit down and read a fucking manual so you don't have to. I've been on that show. We talked about Errant. It was a good time. And I think Aaron King is quietly one of the most inventive and poetic designers out there right now, especially when it comes to Designing moves from the Apocalypse World or Powered by the Apocalypse tradition of design.
Now w what again is Apocalypse World? It's a post-apocalyptic game about scarcity by Vincent and muggy baker, and one of the most influential RPGs of all time. And what's a move? It's just like, you'd think it'd be in a board game, like a little discreet action or bit of mechanics that you can make happen at the table. But sometimes these moves read like the poems.
Like take Aaron's zine, Reading the Apocalypse, in which they take 28 of their favorite novels and write a custom move for each one that might exist in a game based on that book. There's so strange and beautiful and they just make me want to sit down and play. And I see this, not just to hype up my friend, Aaron, but also to set the scene for the mechanic they brought in today: Love Letters that kind of custom move in Apocalypse World that the GM writes for their table after you've all been away for awhile to kind of remind everyone what was going on and get the ball rolling again.
I think writing custom moves is such a core part of Apocalypse World that's been overlooked by so many tables and games that came in its wake, and it was a privilege to get to talk about the practice with one of my favorite move writers.
We also get into another overlooked topic, large amounts of time passing in the fiction, why that's super fun and how to handle it with grace.
Then we close out by writing our own love letter, live on air for a game that we played together. It's a good time. This one is jam packed. So let's get into it.
Here is aaron King. With love letters.
Aaron: Thank you for that beautiful and kind introduction you just gave me.
Sam: Ha ha ha ha ha! You're welcome, Aaron.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Aaron: of course, I'm happy to be back for a first real episode. I've, we flirted, but now you've answered my love letter. Do you like me? Check yes or no. I'm here.
Sam: I checked Yes.
So, before we get into love letters more specifically let's talk about Apocalypse World.
So, Most people probably know what Apocalypse World's deal is, , who have somehow found their way to this arcane podcast, but, , where did Apocalypse World come from, as far as you understand it?
Aaron: Yeah, Apocalypse World is by Vincent and Meg Baker. It was first published in 2010. That was the first edition. The second one was Kickstarted in 2016. And that's the one we're focusing on today. Both of the Bakers were really active in The Forge, which was kind of a story, games let's upturn our understanding of RPGs forum .
And I remember listening to an interview with the two of them, and even though I think Vincent Baker was only credited on the cover of the first one, like, he's very vocal about, well, I wrote it, like, in conversation with Meg, and so I think he kind of said, like, I wrote the Brainer playbook, which is in here, and that was like, the first discrete piece of this game, and it snowballed from there, it spawned the Powered by the Apocalypse, Design philosophy and mechanical niche there are playbooks, there are moves, you're only ever rolling 2D6 these are some of the common features.
Obviously, there's, there's already haters out there telling me, well, hold
Sam: I was
about to say, we're, Powered by the Apocalypse is, again, if you're listening to this, you probably are familiar with the term, but is a broad enough school of design that we have already sort of just, like, huwumped over two or three potholes in
the road of what you were just saying, and we are gonna just keep going.
Those this episode is not about those potholes. This is as much as I will say about what we've skipped over. I think there are kind of two different understandings of what PBTA is. The first is games that look a lot like Apocalypse World. And that's a small number of player facing moves. A different looking set of MC or GM facing moves, some principles and so forth.
You're rolling 2d6 plus a stat most of the time. Maybe you're rolling something plus something else, but for the most part that's what the thing is. The other school of understanding what PBTA is, as a philosophy of design. And that's a little bit more, I think, how we're going to be understanding it today, even though we're only Also talking about Apocalypse World very specifically as a game.
Like I think this concept of love letters, which I will explain in a moment, is something that could translate to really any system. Like you could write Dungeons Dragons love letters really easily,
and it's something that hasn't really escaped Apocalypse World itself. And in some ways I find that interesting.
It's GM advice thing than like a rule in the game, even though it is very mechanically laid out in the game.
Aaron: Right. It's, I would say if you're not familiar with Apocalypse World or Love Letters something similar might be, well, every game can have downtime.
Blades, Blades in the Dark has mechanized it in a really specific way. You could use that specific way in just about any game but it's, a way of approaching running and playing a game that I think a lot of people might even do naturally and this is a Specific way of doing it.
Sam: so let's stop beating around the bush. What are love letters?
Aaron: Love letters are moves in Apocalypse World that you use to kind of cover the passage of time. They say in 2nd edition specifically that they were written because they hadn't been able to play in a while, and everyone needed a little bit of refresher. And instead of coming back and saying, Do you remember?
Was this what happened? They wrote moves to cover maybe what had happened as this time passed as they weren't playing. Moves for each player. And so that's, I think, why they're called love letters, cause it's a little,
kind of, bespoke move for each of the players.
And it covers things that happened in that time, but also serves to remind you of like, oh, remember this person was kind of on your ass, now they might be on your ass even harder.
Sam: Yeah, I want to situate them a little bit within the very specific context they are laid out in in the book. So they're in the chapter called Advanced Fuckery, which is
Aaron: of my favorite chapter titles from an RPG.
Sam: absolutely, and is also like a chapter that's basically just full of GM advice, I'd say, but also Just a ton of encouragement to go out there and make your own moves, and to like, get your hands dirty, to get your bloody fingerprints on everything, as a game designer, almost, in
your home game of Apocalypse World.
Aaron: I think Apocalypse World is like, deceptively strict, like you are kind of supposed to be following these strict conversational rules, which I enjoy. And then the Advanced Buckery chapter is like, alright, I know we're not always gonna follow all these rules, here's the ways to break them, and bend them, and play with them.
Sam: But I think it's also, like, Here's how you write more of those rules.
, let's open the hood and let me show you how the engine of the game works, and what it looks like if you get in there and try some stuff out.
Aaron: And if you do it wrong, I am gonna slam this hood down on your head, like the fucking Breaking Bad episode or something, so look out.
Sam: I find it really interesting that the first thing in the chapter is like, here's a move that almost everyone who playtested the game asked for at some point.
And the move is like, if things are really hard, you get a minus one. And if they're really, really hard, you get a minus two on your roll. And then it goes on and it's like, Listen, this move works totally fine, you can play with this, but everyone abandoned it,
Aaron: That move sucks.
Sam: Like, you don't need it. And so it is, I think, simultaneously saying, Listen, yeah, you want that move?
Here it is, it works totally fine, try it out for yourself. But I'm telling ya, That's probably not the important thing about this game. And then it moves on to other things where it's like, these kinds of things are kind of important about the game. Like writing a custom move for Grome, I think is his name, is good at tying people to tables.
It's like, here's a whole move about Grome tying people to tables because he's really good at that.
Aaron: And there are also, I think there's like, special moves for like, certain areas. Like, this is the, like, irradiated windswept spire.
the move for, like, dealing with dodging harm is not particularly applicable here, let's write something a little bespoke.
Sam: But every time I read that chapter, My brain kind of explodes a little bit of like, oh right, the game actually is pretty insistent that you go out and write your own moves in this way. Like,
it really really wants you to do that, and that is something that has not been absorbed into PBTA. Gameplay culture more broadly, I would say. Like, very few other texts are really encouraging you to do that. And maybe this says something about my GMing style, but I have done very little writing custom moves when I have run these games because I find it scary and intimidating.
Aaron: Max, my co host on the RTFM podcast, is very vocal and insistent that moves are really hard to write.
And I'm not foisting that on him as a way to say, like, I disagree with it or anything. I'm saying I'm very biased. I am a PBTA stan, you might say. And I love to write moves. I have real passion for it.
That sounds stupid. No, I, I think it's true. Like, massive shout out to your zine, Reading the Apocalypse, which is just a bunch of moves disconnected from any game based on whatever books you were reading at the time. They're so cool. And, I don't know, I have heard you described as the only person who understands PBTA better Meg and Vince.
Who said that? I'm coming out. I'm gonna get their ass.
Sam: But I do think that it, you have a reputation as someone who is very comfortable writing PBTA moves.
Aaron: I love it. I really like to do it, and I think part of that is I can sometimes draw a nice picture, but I hate drawing. It stresses me out.
And mostly, I draw a lot of bad pictures, and to get to the one out of five that looks fine to me, is too stressful. Whereas writing PBTA moves, I'm willing to just, like, throw trash at the wall, write a bunch of bad ones, get to some good ones.
But we were talking about why people maybe don't write a lot of custom moves. I think they are hard. Like, there is a structure to them, the trigger. there's a specificity. It's really hard to have way too many words, and like that move you were mentioning, That is, in the start of this chapter, there are a lot of people that bring RPG hangups to a PBTA game, and try to convert them, and I say this as someone who Bought Dungeon World and was like, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna get in it now.
I'm gonna ride the zeitgeist and bounced off it and thought PBTA is not for me, for years after that. I want to encourage people. I don't think it's hard, but also the hard part is like switching modes. It's like if you, my favorite non RPG podcast, it's called SFUltra, and it's about reading and books and stuff.
And he says, everyone wants to read, A poet's novel, no one wants to read a novelist's poems and I think there's an aspect too, like if you're coming from these 300 page hardcovers and you're trying to write this little concise piece of game mechanic that's a hard shift, whereas if you're used to writing these really tight little game mechanics, like if you're spending a lot of time in the indie RPG scene, it's maybe easier to do.
write these moves and then maybe also you're writing cool things like Cybermedie Metal 2012 by Adam Vass.
Sam: Yeah. When I think about taking the leap from. I am a dungeon master. I am a game master. I am the conduit for the game and the designer. To, I am a designer myself, and like, I am adding to the game that we are playing. I am changing it and modifying it in various ways. I think about the legendary tweet from at Yellowcardigan. My therapist laughs at joke I just said. Me, to myself, this is great, I'm going to get a good grade in therapy. It's something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve. And, I think about it. In the context of becoming a game designer, right? Like, think that there was, for me at least, a long time, mental block around the game is this artifact from God, right?
Like, I'm coming out of the Dungeons & Dragons world where the game was handed down from 50 years of history by Titans, like, Chris Perkins and Gary Gygax and whoever the fuck else is making that
game And like, I better not fuck it up. And then even, but like, I don't know, I just did this whole episode with Em Acosta about rule zero and how even Dungeons Dragons is out here telling you you should get your hands in and fuck around with this
and the best sessions of D& D that I've played are the ones where like We never rolled a single die because I brought some bespoke mechanic, or the DM brought in play scripts for all of us to read because we'd been accosted by a traveling theater troupe that needed actors, or whatever. And, it just, the table gets so much better when you get to design for it. For your people, for your friends, like, the people in the ivory tower of Wizards of the Coast can't do that.
And so even if you do a mediocre job, the fact that it's bespoke is gonna be so much more memorable, at the very least.
Aaron: but then you have the other side of it which is someone complaining on reddit
about I started a new game and someone brought Vegeta super saiyan class from D& D wiki dot wiki dot whatever and Like the homebrew has gone too far
Sam: it is about, like, getting on the same page as your players, right? But I think this is actually something, to bring it back to Apocalypse World, that Apocalypse World does really well, where it says Listen, the basic moves and stuff, like, you don't want to replace those until you kind of really know what you're doing.
Like, there are tenets here that you don't want to fuck with, but like, we the bakers have left very clear gaps for you to fill in with a very manageable amount of custom move, and I It would be, it would be fun for you, maybe, to just try filling those things in. Maybe, you know, maybe you just want to try that out for a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah.
To,
Aaron: moves.
Sam: To actually finish setting up Love Letters, let me get in here and read actually some text from the book.
And then we can look at one of the examples from the book, too. So, the game, this is the other thing about the book. There's two paragraphs here I'm about to read, they have some examples in the middle. And this is the entirety of how Love Letters are presented in the book. Here's a batch of custom setup moves.
They're from a game I ran where we missed several weeks in a row. Our collective memory was running dim and we'd lost collective momentum, so when we finally came back together to play, I passed these out. They refer to people and events we'd already established in play. Examples.
They worked perfectly. They reminded us what we had going on and kicked us into the new session with shit already happening. Custom moves can be large scale, situational, personal, and single use. You can use love letters to kick off a session.
Aaron: Alright, I'm gonna read two, including the one you included in the show notes. I'm gonna read that one first.
Dear Keeler, please roll plus cool. On a 10 plus, choose 1. On a 7 to 9, choose 2. One, the headaches are getting seriously worse. Two, you're missing times, sometimes hours out of a day, more and more.
Three, you've been eating some really weird ass stuff. On a miss, I'll choose two for you. And then, another
Sam: It's important, I think, to end this with, love and kisses,
Aaron: I was gonna, I was gonna get to that after, but yeah, each of these ends with love and kisses, you're MC. And then the third one is Dear Rose, please roll plus hard. On a ten plus choose one, on a seven to nine choose two. One, your mother has people hanging around your place keeping a watch out for Keeler.
Two, H has started doing what L tells him to do. Three, you've been totally relying on gams for fresh veg. On a miss, yeah, pretty much all three. So the first one is all about Keeler's internal life, which is why I'm less into it.
The other one I read is all about the world, the player noticing things about the world, and the world reacting to that player character.
I don't think one, I mean this is from a Bespoke specific campaign, so I think the first one's probably really good for that situation, whatever was going on. But to me, love letters really shine when they say, remember all these things that were happening? Remember the power you had over them? Here is a way to play with increasing and decreasing your power over these things that were in play while also reminding you what was going on.
Sam: yeah. I mean, I think the text that I read out lays that out really clearly, that they are about sort of reclaiming the momentum we had whenever we last played and like kicking things off again, and I find that my biggest problem with Apocalypse World and most other PBTA games that I've played is once I get rolling in the rhythm of things with people they're really easy to keep up and I love playing them but it is really hard to kick off with that momentum and Reading these in preparation for this episode, I was like, oh yeah, I should just be starting campaigns with these fucking things.
They do seem so good at doing exactly what you're talking about, of like, reminding people, here's what's going on around in the world, but then also basically picking some of the clocks, which are a tool the MC has on the back end to sort of track how things are getting worse in the world and what people are up to. And you can just kind of like grind some of those clocks forward, make things a little bit worse for everyone, and then figure out what happens next. And, yeah, they're really, really lovely for that.
Aaron: Yeah, and they're also a tool for showing a player's interest, right? Like, if you tell the player in your love letter this, this person that was on to you is more on to you. You can choose that or not. This person who was, you know, you were relying on is maybe a little sketchy or not.
Blah blah. blah. Like, it lets them pick. Oh, this is actually the story I'm interested in pursuing. that's a great point. That the Rose one, where it's three options about other people and Rose's relationships to them. is not written in a way where it's like, on a 10 your mom has been helping you, on a 7 9, your mom's been being a little weird, on a 6 your mom has been kidnapped, or whatever, or your mom is like, being really mean. because it's three different plots, it does exactly what you were saying, of allowing the player some agency in what the story is gonna be coming up.
And if they roll well, the plot they pick is the only one that's really progressed since the last time they played. If they roll poorly, all three of those plots have moved on, which is like, kind of stressful for me as a player. To say like, oh I missed my chance to like stop all three of these, like if I had been on my game, if we had been meeting regularly, could I have been interacting with all of these and slowing them down?
Sam: But that's what Apocalypse World is all about. Like, that particular feeling of stress is the feeling Apocalypse World is trying to engender in you as a player.
Aaron: hard for some people. I say like, as someone who maybe Would like to keep track of all these plots in a game that I'm playing and also as someone who like runs a lot of games for people with different, like, stress disorders and stuff, like the idea of moving plots behind the curtain can be a little, a little scary and a little stressful, which, if you're all on board, good, but.
Sam: Yeah. I want to appreciate the format of these love letters that is a format you see in a lot of Apocalypse World, where it's sort of like, Here are 3 4 bad things that could happen, or 3 4 good things that could happen.
On a 10 you get to choose, like, 3 out of 4 are good. On a 7 9, you get to choose, like, 2 out of 4 are good. And on a Miss, the MC gets to choose, like, what the hell bad is going on. And that format of choice is so much fun.
Aaron: And I think couching that in the clear GM moves, MC moves of Apocalypse World is really nice. I've certainly played. D& D, where we go off after some thing, and because we chose that, this other thing is happening. But there were no kind of mechanical, dramatic tools to tell us that that was the choice we were making.
And so, the idea of kind of saying like, well, this happened because you rolled a six or less, or you looked to the GM, got to make a move in response, and then use their move for tell future badness to describe to you. This faction making their next step or something. I think that kind of stuff is why people insist on trying to run Apocalypse World strictly by the rules is because it feels good to get fucked over that way.
It feels good to pursue this thing and do poorly and then have the GM say, Oh, Back home, this thing goes wrong that feels much nicer than just, Oh, we went and we killed the dragon, and then the GM says, Your house is on fire. And it's
like, what? What? What's,
Sam: I'm reminded of how the Bakers have, I believe, both been like, sex education teachers in the past, and both have talked about how much of that work and sort of, Always acquiring consent is something they tried to bake into the rules of Apocalypse Worlds, it's very much possible that you will be fucked over, but they are putting the manner of your being fucked over in your hands a lot of the time. The, the like, person who's getting fucked over often gets to choose how they're getting fucked over. And
Aaron: the, basic fuckery.
Sam: yeah, exactly.
Aaron: the advanced fuckery chapter.
Sam: Yeah. And it's also, you know, it's very clear when you read these letters before you roll, like, this is what's gonna happen.
And if you had a problem with it, like, I think you could check in and be like, You could voice it's really easy to imagine, like, the player behind Rose getting to the table and reading these over and being like, Oh, no, like, is this really what's going on? And you can, like, put in the air, Either your anxiousness about that, that the table can have a conversation about, or your excitement about that, that the table gets to have a conversation about that, and writing the move out in advance lets everyone sort of have that meta level conversation implicitly, if nothing else, just by virtue of the existence of the love letter.
Aaron: Yeah, I think that leads to an important distinction between love letters and other moves in Apocalypse World, which is that other moves in Apocalypse World have a trigger, like when you read a charged situation. And so there are many times in the rulebook where someone says like, I want more information on this, I want to read a charged situation.
And the MC says, oh, I didn't think of this situation as charged. Is it charged to you? And the player goes, oh, no, no, no, I just wanted to know X, and then the MC's like, oh, yeah, I'll just answer that then.
No move required. So like, stepping up to that trigger, understanding it, making it explicit, and being able to say, oh, actually, my character I don't think is doing that.
There's no trigger like that in this, which is like an interesting wrinkle to me. It's just, you arrive, I say, roll the dice. I like it. I wouldn't want it all the time. I hate to play a PBTA when someone's like, just roll plus sharp. And it's like, why? What am I triggering? And they're like, just do it.
Sam: but the, the, trigger for these is kind of, it's been a long time since we last played. Yeah, like no one remembers what's going on. Like the, I've seen people say like, oh, move triggers should always be fictional, but that's just not true in basic Apocalypse world, even outside of love letters,
Aaron: the start of a session, roll plus
Sam: Exactly, exactly, and these are, Essentially, you start a session moves that you are just gonna do one time based on whatever was going on in the fiction last time.
Aaron: As a GM, I love there to be at least one at start of session, roll X move amongst any group that I'm running games for. Does what these love letters do, which is, it says like, we're jumping in. This is the ritual. This is starting the game. Someone's going to roll. And, we're gonna get a change to the status quo, and sometimes that prompts like, Oh, at the start of session roll, X on a 6 minus uh, resource is missing.
And then you start talking about like, Oh, where were we last time? What's a good resource to be low on? They are such a helpful little ritual session starter.
Sam: yeah, absolutely.
This episode of basic splutter is sponsored by, oh, captain my captain a quick play RPG following the story of a legendary captain and their crew Designed by James D'Amato and based on the innovative descended from the queen system created by Alex Roberts old captain. My captain can be learned in just 15 minutes and played to its end in under an hour.
it's the perfect game for introducing new players to the hobby and with 50 prompts and four different ending questions. It's endlessly replayable old captain. My captain releases on September 22nd, but you can pre-order it right now at bit dot Lee slash oh captain RPG.
This episode of dice, Exploder is also sponsored by jukebox.
Do you like story games? How about karaoke? How about musicals? If you're yelling? Yes. Right now the Juke box was made for you. a GM less, no prep story game where you sing karaoke, bangers and your songs determine the story. Pre-ordered this dice breaker pick for one of the best games of 2024 now, Like going to go dot jar. dot com Slash jute box pre-order.
I think we would be remiss if we did not touch on the kind of cheeky way in which these letters are written. Like, no, no, I love all of them ending with love and kisses, Your MC like, that really sets the tone for, you know, Yeah, I'm like fucking you over here, but like, also, that's my job, and like, we're here to have fun, I see you and I love you and I'm teasing you but I also love Dear Keeler, please roll plus cool, something about please in there is real, it's like the trigger is, I would like this to happen now, are you on board with that?
Like, please and I think that kind of ties into the thing we were just talking about of. What is the trigger for this move? Like, it's the start of session, but this is, the please is almost like this implicit asking for permission to, like, add this new one time start of session move.
Aaron: And I could see, if I were in a group with these people, I could see someone being like, I'm feeling overwhelmed by all these love letters, can we just do two of them?
And, love and kisses, yeah, let's do two.
Sam: Yeah. And I think it would be nice to have a little bit more explicitness to that I think. The rules text lays out all these example letters that are all basically formatted like the two that we read out. But, you can imagine writing love letters that look completely differently.
Like, you can imagine them the way I was talking about, where you take a single issue and then roll dice to see how it's going. I think that would be less interesting than these. But, you could also imagine doing something like this, but aiming it at the whole group all at once. Like. Alright, someone, like, nominated a leader for the group, and they're gonna roll plus weird, and then you're gonna choose two of the PCs to have weird shit going on, and that would maybe bring in some of that, like, ooh, if someone wants to opt out, they can lobby for that, and probably get it. But there's, there's a lot of ways I think you could write love letters.
Aaron: One thing I love is that a lot of people coming from traditional RPGs, skill based I'm gonna call them, but not in a player skill way, but like, My character sheet is a list of skills.
They say, well moves are just like skills, but they have specific uses.
And one thing I like about love letters is, like, this is not a skill list. This is not your deception skill or anything like that. And so I think it really helps situate moves as A little fuckin trap that you step on in the narrative that makes things more interesting. Sometimes it's more interesting in your favor.
You like get this big power over someone and you have to decide how to use it. Sometimes more interesting in, you know, not in your character's favor. You are dangling from a collapsing bridge or whatever, but none of this has to do with how good your character is at something or what they know. And they all have to do with you.
What are you entangled in, and how can those entanglements keep the game moving in a way that keeps people from just thinking, Well, I've solved it. I'm fine now. We can all relax.
Sam: I love that metaphor of moves as a little bear trap that you step on. That feels so useful as a way to think about how to deploy moves and when to deploy moves.
Aaron: And sometimes you see the bear trap, and
you get to have it and throw it at someone
else.
Sam: Oh yeah, let me go stomp on that shit, that sounds fun.
Aaron: I want this person to catch up to me. I want to see
what happens when I'm at their mercy.
Sam: like, they're bear traps for the little dolls that we are moving through the
story, Right, And maybe you won't feel really precious about your doll, but, I don't know, maybe you get the most fun out of stitching your doll's leg back on, like me.
Aaron: Right, and like, all of the moves that I am excited to engage with are not, oh, I get to deal one harm to you, or you get to deal one harm to the bad guy, or you get to seize what you're seeking, but they are like, here's a new weird fucked up thing that's about to happen. you know, toss this ball, we're all juggling them together, there's another one in the air now, and we're waiting for it to drop.
And I think that is where the juice for designing moves at your table is, is just like, what are they interested in? How can I write a move that is exciting to step on?
And when they do, gives them some great choices of what to toss into the air for like, we're all dealing with this now. You all thought mushrooms are cool.
Now there's a fungal weirdness that is in the air and just an invitation to kick it and see what comes out.
Sam: So, another very big and obvious component of Love Letters that we have touched on but not gone deep on is how much they are a mechanic about time passing in the middle of RPGs. I think they are interesting in that they are both about time passing in the fictional world and RPGs. In the real world, right?
That's the recommended, sort of, origin for them, right? Is you come back after a long time away having not played, and you write some of these to get back into the swing of things. But, I think time passing in RPGs is A really interesting thing that does not happen very often, like most games do not make space for.
Sam: And I'm curious what kind of thoughts you have about it.
Aaron: Yeah, I don't think I thought about this much until I was running a long ish campaign of Sagas of the Icelanders, which is like a second generation PBTA following up quickly on Apocalypse World. And one of the MC moves, one of the GM moves, is the season changes. So if at any time the players look to you, or if they roll poorly, you can just say summer becomes fall.
And this first came up because we were in this kind of chaotic situation and someone rolled really poorly. I don't even know what to make happen here. I looked at my list of GM moves and I thought, maybe the season changes. And it changes from summer to fall. It is now like three months later. And I brought up kind of softly, like, this is kind of what I want to do. None of your characters are dead or anything, but like. I'm really intrigued by your response as if everything that just happened, this chaotic, semi violent situation, is all of a sudden three months in the past. and they were like, yes, let's do it, and we'll talk about it.
But, you know, we started down that path, and immediately someone's like, well, wait, what about this other thing that we were involved in? What about this other thing that my character had going as a side gig? How did that happen? And to a player, I think any player, who has given this position of, you can control one character's actions, someone else controls one character's actions, and then there's someone in charge of like, everybody else.
It's kind of weird to go, there are three months that happened to your character where you did not get any input, even though that's your kind of only tool in the box. I don't think any of this is perfect. But it's, it feels very fruitful to me to say, what if, when something bad happens, you just have to deal with it three months later, like as someone with someone with depression, I'm like, Oh, I know the thing about a bad thing happens to me, and then three months later, I'm in bed thinking about it still.
And maybe not a lot has changed for me. And so the power of the love letter to say, all this time has passed. You must choose the one thing that you had power over. Is it that you're preventing H& L from having a lookout on your friend's house or whatever it was in the love letter? Bridges that gap for me.
And also keeps the game from devolving into, you know, You enter town, and I, the GM, want to fast forward to, you get to the reception, the dance, at the princess's hall, or whatever, but they all want to go, well, what kind of town? What do the streets look like? , oh, I'm out of rations, can I buy some rations quick?
To be able to say, you get to town, and the princess's ball is this and have some mechanics to elide those things I'm less interested in.
Sam: It is certainly a loss of control on the player's side, like you're describing.
I think it is. Really interesting, the manner in which you write love letters bring back some of that control by allowing you to pick one of the problems that you have dealt with, probably. But I also think about, I remember you telling that story, that of the Sagas of the Icelanders moment on RTFM, I believe. And It conjuring up in me famous cut in 2001 A Space Odyssey, right? Like, cutting from a bone from pre Caveman to, like, Space Station is a hell of a cut, a lot of time passed, we're all playing new characters now, right?
And I think that can be such a effective and compelling storytelling device. It's really, really, really cool to see it mechanized and to imagine a playgroup that is cool with it, right?
Like, I don't think you would want to do that without the sort of soft launching it with your players first,
like checking in with everyone.
Aaron: Like, in, in a movie, there's no writer in the writer's room or person in the audience who is in control of one character, and thus loses control. Like, that's the distinction.
and the other thing is that the movie can set the stakes in a way, like, no one's like, oh, Fast and the Furious 7 ended.
And then 8 begins a year later and no one's like, wait, but what did Dom Toretto shop for at Walmart? Like, did he get the, the juice
Sam: Did he get more
Aaron: asked for? Right, exactly. Like thank you for remembering
such a specific part
of the
Sam: corona juice.
Aaron: The Dom Nos, as it is
called. Yeah. And so like, they can set things up before that match gets lit.
To make it pleasing to jump
30 years in the future. Whereas that can be harder with a group of players.
Sam: yeah, but that's what makes love letters such a cool tool, is that they, they allow for the smoothing over of that, right? They
allow for the players to have input on that, to get everyone on the same page. In some ways, like, love letters are really more, like, An airbag when you brace for impact on the
other side of that? Like it's already happened that a bunch of time has
Aaron: We've missed three sessions in a row. It's been two months. What the fuck is going
on? Let's just pick one cool thing to go forward on.
Sam: But, but something that would be really cool to me is a version of this kind of move that is more active is something that you might imagine deploying in the middle of a session because that's cool.
Aaron: Every time a character achieves their goals, issue love letters. It's like an MC move, potentially. .
Sam: So the last thing that I wanted to do was maybe try to like write a love letter on air. We recently like wrapped up a little Apocalypse World campaign and I think we could do a little bit of setup for what was going on at the end of and maybe try to write a love letter for it,
but before we get into that, I also wanted to ask you, someone who loves writing moves, when you are going to write a custom move what are you thinking about? And why are you writing any particular custom move as opposed to any other? Like, that's another thing that feels overwhelming to me when I sit down to be like, Ooh, it'd be fun to write some custom moves for the game, is, where do you start?
Aaron: I generally kind of divide a lot of these moves into two very broad categories to start with, which is like, one, there's an archetype, a genre action, or like a failed D& D ism. That I want to address and make fun.
Someone was like, oh, if, if you are in a game of D& D and you're trying to sneak, it sucks that one of you has stealth plus 20, and then one of you has stealth minus 1.
It means you have to break up, it means you have to like, figure out, wait, do we all roll? Does one of us roll? And so like, one way to address writing a specific move is like, when you sneak through the whatever whatever, Roll on a big success, bring someone with you. You can choose this multiple times, choose three or whatever.
like, just a very basic genre demand, is that someone is like, come this way, I know how to sneak, let me show you. And that could maybe also be handled on like, defy danger, plus a help action. That seems very complicated. Also, people love to be sneaky, like, that's a very Common archetype that people come to a game wanting to tap into.
And then the other one is, like, I'm a freak for hyper specific love letter moves as a move you can just take. And I like that because it's a signal to say, I want to start a story. We're in the middle of this game, I have a move that lets me summon my three fellow broom riding witch freaks. And lets me fly around on a broom, it's not just the flight that it grants me, which is fun and cool on its own, but also implies, like, there's these other people out there.
Why do I know them? How do I know them? And then, maybe the more you use this move, they make more demands of you, and then it, you check off.
Sam: Yeah,
Aaron: Something, as you go through, and then at the end you have to reinvest in your relationship with the broom riding freaks, or something. earlier we were talking about this metaphor of almost like juggling, like what are the players currently juggling and what are they interested in juggling? Like I think of, you know, your job as a GM sometimes is to just like throw a bunch of shit at the players and see what they are interested in picking up and running with. Apocalypse World even says this straight up, like, figuring out what they've picked up and then writing a custom move for that thing, whether it's the monster in the lake, or it is Grome and his way of tying people to tables, or Rose's mom, or whatever. that feels like the place to write custom moves.
Sam: I listen to Mike Birbiglia's podcast, who's a stand up comedian. And the podcast is a lot about process.
And he has this piece of advice that when you are coming up as a stand up and you have like. Five minutes of material, and a minute of it is really good, and like, three minutes of it are okay, and one minute of it is bad. Instead of like, trying to make your bad stuff better, the actual thing you should do is work on the good stuff.
Because that's good, and that probably means there's like, more to be mined there.
Aaron: Oh.
Sam: I think that metaphor is really, really Great as a creative at large. But I also think it's really really applicable to writing moves here of whatever it is that is working well in the game That's what you want to write moves about because that's gonna like Pull people in and make them want to trigger those moves or even just like putting the move on the table is going to Add to the mystique and the fun of those moves.
Like, you and I are playing in a game of Pasion de las Pasiones right now that is Addams Family themed. And in the group chat for this game, you were, you just posted, . I'm just trying to write some playset moves, and the first one is, The thing in the lake, when you bring someone to the edge of the lake to help you feed the fish, roll with the questions, can you lure them onto the dock, and are they distracted?
On a 7 to 9, choose one, you push them into the lake but they leave evidence behind or shout to attract attention before being consumed. Number two, they catch you trying to push them and have time to react. And that, there's, there's more to it too, but even just that much, I was like, Wait, what? I gotta push someone to this fuckin lake.
Like,
the whole session we were playing, I was like, Who can I find to put in this lake? I gotta go put someone in this fuckin lake. And that is First of all, the power of a cool move, right? I think
Aaron: The power's in the
trigger.
Sam: Exactly, you were interested in this lake, and so you wrote a cool move to sort of tempt people down to it. But also It's easy to imagine me having already befriended the monster in the lake and then you write this move and suddenly it's like, oh, that monster's not going away. Like, we wrote a whole move for it. We're like, we're all at the table excited about that monster. And
Aaron: It's the, the write off character from season one that the fans loved. And then it's like, alright, we gotta bring that guy back, what's the story?
Sam: yeah, totally.
Aaron: And I think the other thing I want to bring up with that is, like, trying to mechanize or standardize player behavior. Yeah. So I ran D& D 5e for like six years, and you get to know these people, like for the same group, and they always want to do something, and there's never a rule about making friends, or there's bad rules that's just like roll persuasion or whatever, and so you want to create something for them that's like, hey, I see you freaking out about making friends with all these people, here is a way to say, You can make friends with people, but here are some potential complications, here are some ways you can do it with no attachments, and they are your friend, etc, etc.
Like, what if we made this a minigame?
And that's what a love letter is as well, just like a minigame that you play that follows the same conventions as a normal move, but like, we're breaking time out strangely, and we're giving you specific goals and consequences.
Well, so, can I be, I've dodged self promotion so many
times. In a game I wrote called Patchwork World which I'm sure I would disown at this point if I read it again, there is a move called Resurrectionist, which is inspired by the video game Planescape Torment, but it reads, when you discover that you're cursed with unending resurrection, gain 1d6 hold, spend 1 hold for an NPC to have known you in a past life.
When you do mark stress, stress is a thing in there and then roll, plus the stress you marked, on a success, choose one, they feel honor bound to help you, you recall something embarrassing or damaging about them, they've been saving an important item or piece of information for you. So this is like, then there's a 7 to there's a list of bad stuff to happen, but it's a way to say like, hey, if you're the kind of player that just likes saying, this, this guy we just met, he's my friend.
Oh, this reporter that we're talking to is my ex wife. Like, if you are that kind of player, here's a way to just invest you with that power. And you never have to, like, look at me and be like is that right? You could just say, this is someone that has been holding something for me.
Sam: Yeah, that's another cool way of thinking about custom moves as a way of giving players agency in the way you want to give them agency. That sometimes GMing is really hard and I think some of the best GMing advice is when you're stuck just like ask the table for ideas
because, you know, this whole thing is a collaborative experience, right?
Just because you have an asymmetric job doesn't mean you can't ask for ideas. And in some ways writing a good custom move is being like, you can have the ideas for this thing.
I don't
wanna.
Aaron: I see your weird little freak thing about trying to kiss everyone you meet. Like, here's a way to get kiss points, and choose which ones you spend them on, and here's a way to list the consequences very clearly. Your home is not gonna burn down. If you're bad at kissing, but one of your other kissies might get mad.
That makes sense, right?
Sam: Yeah. so, okay, so I wrote some bullet points in the outline here that I'm just now revisiting, and I think they're pretty good, so I'm gonna read them off So I wrote, like, writing custom moves. Why do it? And one is, I think we've covered extensively, you know your table better than any designer, and can design to your player's particular quirks.
That's fun. And two is you can point at something and say, this thing is special, pay attention to it. And sometimes you're doing that after other people have decided that it's special and they like it. And
Aaron: It's a companion to the X card. turn the volume on this one up, please. We want to have more of
this.
Sam: Sometimes it's just fun. Sometimes you just, like, wanna put your own little flair on things, or you had a cool little idea.
I guess that's
kind of the similar, But the last thing I wrote in here is, I just watched the third season of The Bear, which is a show that I really love. Yeah, because it's good. And the third season,
Aaron: I haven't, I've only seen season one, so feel free to
feel free to spoil it.
Sam: Season 2, I think, is one of the better seasons of television I have ever seen, a character in season 2 who learns to appreciate the grace, and love, and Beauty and self worth that you gain by acts of service, like helping other people and just being there to make other people's lives better. And I think that that's a really wonderful idea. And that is what I try to do as a player in roleplaying games these days, regardless of whether I'm GMing or playing. I'm always either really tired or I'm looking at the other players and I'm saying like what does this person seem to be really excited about right now? What do they want to happen? And how can I make something surprising happen that will like complicate that in a way that they will find delightful?
And I think custom moves are a great way to do that as a GM, right? To say, I see what you love in this story, and I am going to underline it and try to make it even better for you.
Aaron: Yeah.
Sam: Okay, so let's let's try writing a love letter. I think you have the notes for this, I am the player who does not have notes, and does not remember what the hell happened two months ago when we finished this thing. Do you wanna tell me about
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I bragged about having notes and now I can't fucking find them. Um, We had, we had three players. One ended by angering many different people, One ended by making a maybe potentially dangerous alliance with some plants. And you ended By being banished to the Psychic Maelstrom, and then coming back different.
Sam: That's right. Yeah. I was a weird little freak. Who Became a weird little monster freak.
Aaron: And so, I think let's, like, yeah, you were kind of a a mechanic who was interested in the mechanics of Psychic something, and you got banished to the Psychic Maelstrom. And then he came back changed strange, more able to interact with the psychic maelstrom.
So Tai was stuck in this otherworldly realm, busted on through with some changes, a new understanding of the realm and herself, and so my idea was for a love letter, if we ever do quote unquote season two for this, we come back and you know, busting through A barrier to another spirit realm.
I feel like something's got to change. So that's my initial idea of like, oh, this is now a more permeable barrier. Does something come after you? Is there a new connection, a sort of permanent connection that could be made? And so I started with like, there's some other entity involved. And it was going to be a sort of roll plus weird.
Unconnected to the roll, choose, is it an entity native to the astral plane, is it an entity that has, from our world, but has been there for a long time, you know, the same way that character creation has like, choose your look, choose your whatever so we build this creature together and then you roll, and based on the roll, like on a 10 you know where it is, It thinks fondly of you, and it will speak to you before it acts, kind of thing, is my choose three of like, what's the best situation.
That's my bullet point in my notes. And then so the idea of like, choose two, Maybe you don't know where it is, or maybe it will not speak to you before acting. You know, like, what are these helpful subtractions you can make from these lists of traits that have bigger implications that aren't necessarily, oh no, crisis.
It might act in like a really kindly way, but it will be a surprise to you and to everyone else kind of thing.
Sam: And sometimes the wrong kindness at the wrong time can really fuck up your plans.
Aaron: I'm sure that's never happened to you in real life.
Sam: Never.
I mean, especially as a player who loves to get down in the shit and step on all those bear traps. I think this feels like the kind of move where even on a 10 there should be some sort of problem associated with it.
Or like, one of these things should not be achievable.
Aaron: Oh, I think, yeah, I I'm not opposed to that. I agree with you. I also love the idea of, I like the idea of player wins,
like get, granting a player like kind of a full win, but then having that thing just hovering, like if you know what it is, you know where it is, and it will come to you before it acts.
That all feels good. And then if you roll poorly in the future, I have it come to you before it acts. And it's like, Oh, I am going to drink all the blood out of this person you really like. And it's like, Oh, you know what it is and where it is. Then that becomes, do you negotiate it with this now? Do
you go to its base?
Do you tell someone else?
Sam: You go have
one last drink with that person before
Aaron: right.
Sam: gets sucked.
Aaron: Yeah. So you can have all the information and get a win. And still have it be this kind of ominous buzzing above the campaign.
Sam: It's interesting that we spent the beginning of our time talking about love letters being like, they're all written where there are three different things on three different plot lines going on and , you kind of get to choose which ones you're going to focus on. There's this obvious idea that you could write a move where there's one plotline that's featured.
On a 10 things are pretty good with it. On a 7 9, things are okay with it. On a 6 things are bad with it. And I was like, yeah, I think that's kind of like the worst kind of these. I think the more plotlines is better. And then we come back in and the one that we're writing at the end is exactly that kind, but also it sounds fucking great.
I love it.
Aaron: I want a weird creature. Yeah, and I mean the juice also would just be in this pick list of you getting to say like It has phosphorescent antlers, its cloak is shimmering like an oil stain, whatever, whatever, and that would be The love letter service process of me trying to say, what do I know about Sam?
How can I write just like my best little lines of prose to be exciting to pick? I don't want any of them to be duds. Like you were saying with Mike Berbicklia, How do I write nine things in three columns where each one is fun, and you get to pick, and then you tell all the
players. It's this, you know, Cat mouthed whatever whatever.
Sam: and
that's a great way to do Sometimes as a GM you do just want to say I have a cool idea and it's happening now There's a monster in this lake deal with it
And this is a really great way for you to introduce that while giving me, the player, a lot of agency over that thing since it's gonna affect my character a lot.
Aaron: they're your new buddy.
Sam: Yeah I can't wait to meet them. this move already just in its most Draft form already makes me go We gotta go back and play more of that game. I need my weird little phosphorescent antlers guy, like,
Aaron: Yeah, it was a fun game. The one I was like, trying to figure out for Keegan was, Keegan's character had kind of angered multiple factions, and so I wanted to, the, another approach to these moves I have is like, what are the weird levers you can pull on in this game, and so one is like, stats.
You don't have that many stats. They have pretty clear definitions, and since Keegan had three factions that they were in a weird limbo with, I wanted to say like, pick a faction, roll with that in associated stat. And so there was like a kind of gang that they had left on weird terms with, and so if they wanted to shine the spotlight over there, they would be rolling with plus hot or whatever.
And then if You know, there were these spirit wasps, and if you wanted to deal with that, roll plus weird, and then the pick list would be the same, of like, they hate you, they love you, whatever, whatever, but, by choosing which stat you roll, you know the probabilities of that roll, some stats will be better, and that creates tension of like, well, but my best stat is not necessarily the faction I want to come back,
I
get to pick, and I get to define the spotlight goes.
Sam: I would take that situation for Keegan, and I would just write a diceless move. I would just be like, fuck, marry, kill, these three factions.
like, you are 100 percent gonna have an ally, and you are 100 percent gonna have an enemy, but you get to decide
who's who.
Aaron: Maybe there's like, a list of nine traits, and you get to assign them amongst these three factions, and one is
like, fucking hates you, one is fucking loves
you. Ah,
this is good.
Sam: Love letters. They're great.
Do you have any final words or thoughts on them?
Aaron: I think, you know, do the Mike Birbiglia thing and write five bad moves. Like, if you are into PBTA, or even if you are only curious about it imagine an archetype or imagine an action that is not in there, and just try to write a move for it. And then just roll it a few times and see if it's
fun. And this is not me saying like, you're all amateurs and I'm the professional, it's just like, this is what my brain does, and if I can get myself excited about every. possibility in a game design piece of tech, then I'm like, all right, that's ready to go.
Sam: great advice.
Aaron: But there's always a bad draft and there's always one that's like, well, this choice is not fun.
you know, it's the most mid of choices.
Sam: Just get rid of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Come up with a better one.
Aaron: Just be better at game design.
Sam: No, but I don't know, love letters are also really nice in that like, you fuck up one of those options. If you put a mid one on there, but like it prompts a interesting discussion, or even if you put an option on there, you know that the person would never ever pick, but
it it is just sort of like hovering there. That's good design still. it starts conversation.
Aaron: Oh, games are a conversation.
Sam: That's another episode. Aaron King, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploder. It's
great hanging out with you.
Aaron: was a pleasure. That's it. Goodbye,
everyone.
Sam: So. Right after recording. Basically, Aaron sent me the love letter. We'd started writing on air in its full form, and I thought you might like to hear the whole thing. So. here it is.
Dear Thai. When you returned from the psychic maelstrom, something followups, you choose one from each list. List one. It is native to the maelstrom. It is something from before the apocalypse that took refuge in the maelstrom. It is a fellow traveler.
Like you. List two. It has phosphorescent antlers. It shimmers like diesel vinegarette. It has six limbs ending in human hands. List three. It's coming as heralded by crinkling frost. Bleeding grain plants rise up and its footsteps. Statues and images changed to reflect its appearance. Then roll plus weird on a 10 plus choose three on a seven to nine. Choose two on a six or less. Choose one and be prepared for the worst. You know where it is. It will talk to you before it acts. It feels fondly for you. Choose another trait from the lists above. Love and kisses your MC. also before we go, if you liked this episode, you should really check out the app I did with Nychelle Schneider in the archives about a really similar topic that went to some pretty different. places. It's another banger. Okay, thanks again to Aaron for being here, you can find, read the fucking manual wherever you get your podcasts, but especially on Patrion RTFM cast.
As always, you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the dice, explode or discord. This episode was edited by Chris Greenbriar. Thank you, Chris. Our logo is designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray and our ad music is Lily pads by my boy, Travis tests murder. And thanks to you for listening. Love and kisses.
I'll see you next time.