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Saturday, March 3, 2012

Apocalypse World - It Ain't My Bag

I've spent some time trying to slog my way through the Apocalypse World rulebook in dead tree format, hoping beyond hope that I may find it more appealing that the PDF...

That shit ain't happening.

It's not that it's poorly laid out.  The layout is fine.  I just feel the writing sucks ass.

When I complained about Vornheim, it was about the layout and how the horribly small font made it a struggle to extract the goodness that others were finding in it.  For the sake of forcing art on the product, the meatiness of it was pretty much obscured from me.  I just don't have the patience to dig through annoying crap to find my reward.  I tried that with HoL back in the day (but I knew going into HoL it lacked redeeming rewards besides humor)

With Apocalypse World, Baker hides what many call an excellent RPG behind an attempt to be an "Artistically Shocking Author", or at least that's what I'm going to call it.  It's disjointed.  It's confusing.  It's fucking annoying.  This is probably why almost everyone I've seen talk / post / whatever about Apocalypse World and how great an RPG it is, usually follows it up with: "But I never read the rules, I just play in the game.  The GM read the game".  Well, God bless your fucking GM, because he's a stronger man than I am.  He's also probably half way to insanity, but who isn't?

Why all the "fuck" in my language in this post?  Because it's the most used word in Apocalypse World.  Sex may be a close second, but fuck has it by a mile.  I'm a cop and Baker uses "fuck" more than I do.  For him, it's gone from seasoning enhancement to main course.

K, I'm going back to my baby - my Original Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set.  I need some grounding after this experience.

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