World Wide Wrestling

World Wide Wrestling The Pro Wrestling Role-Playing Game. Powered by the Apocalypse. Nathan D. Paoletta/ndpdesign 2012-2013 Thanks: Vincent for Apocalypse World, Joe for Simple World, Ian+Bret+Eppy+John for being my wrestling bros. Powered by the Apocalypse Gimmick Thanks: Bret Gillan for The Jobber, Alex Isabelle for The Wasted, Ian World Wide Wrestling is a hack of Apocalypse Williams for The Hardcore Icon World, by D. Vincent Baker. If you’re already fa- miliar with AW, these sidebars call out impor- Rules Thanks: John Stavropolous for the X-Card tant similarities and differences to help you get oriented. If you’re not, ignore them! Development History 1st rough draft - Playtested once with John Stavropolous, Tim Rodriguez, Anon Adderlane, and Terry Romero at Metatopia 2012. 1st rough draft - Playtested via G+ Hangout with Ian Williams and Bret Gillan. 2nd rough draft - Playtested by Alex Isabelle/Revan Adler, Girolamo Castaldo, and others. Helpful and amazing feedback and suggestions, thanks! This is the first Alpha draft. Please direct comments, questions and feedback to (email) n.d.paoletta@ gmail.com, (twitter) @ndpaoletta, Nathan D. Paoletta on Google+. Use the hashtag #WWWRPG. Contents 1. What Is This Game About? 5. The Talent 2. The Big Picture 6. Moves 3. The First Episode 7. Throwing The X 4. Making the Roster 8. Playing The Game 9. How To Be Creative World Wide Wrestling - Alpha Playtest - Page 1 1. What Is This Game About? The game is about creating a professional wrestling franchise with storylines that are both satisfying and surprising. The game asks you to do a lot of double (triple?) think - you need to think about (a) the wrestling persona (b) the real person behind the persona and (c) the audience reaction to both. One player is Creative. Creative books matches, plays NPCs, and orchestrates the environment around the Talent. Creative is in charge of creating ongoing Storylines, and adapting them as the results of play send them awry. The other players are Talent. Each Talent picks a Gimmick and a Role. Gimmicks are unique - each Talent must pick a different Gimmick (though they can change Gimmicks throughout their careers, if they want). There are 12 Gimmicks currently available: The Veteran, The Clown, The Technician, The High Flyer, The Monster, The Legend, The Opportunist, The Manager/Valet/ Companio, The Jobber, The Golden Boy, The Wasted and The Hardcore Icon. There are two Roles, Babyface (good guy) and Heel (bad guy). Most Talent Playbooks will change Role more often than their Gimmick, transitioning between being Instead of choosing one playbook, your WWW good guys and bad guys on the roster. All Talent is generally looking out to character has two! Your Gimmick and Role get over with the audience and to advance their career. break apart the original Playbook model into two parts that advance and change indepen- Something Weird and Important dently of each other. This game requires a certain kind of suspension of disbelief that wrestling fans are generally really good at, but which may require a little mental gymnastics when applied to a game where you’re supposed to advocate for the characters. For everyone: This game is divided between on-screen and off-screen action. The majority of the game takes place on-screen, which means that your descriptions of action and the dialogue you put into your character(s) mouth(es) is literally on the imaginary Jumbotron and television screens, broad- cast to the live audience of your televised wrestling franchise. When a scene is off-screen, this means that the cameras are not rolling, and you are free to express the “real lives” of your fictional characters, for better or for worse. For Talent: Your character encapsulates both the wrestling character who’s performing for an audience and abiding by the booking decisions made behind the scenes by Creative AND the real person who’s trying to square their performance in the ring with their real-life problems, interests and ambitions. Your character is represented by four stats. Two of them are primarily about on-screen, in-ring performance (+Work and +Power), one represents how your inherent appeal translates to the World Wide Wrestling - Alpha Playtest - Page 2 ring (+Look), and one represents your use of, or the intrusion of, real-life stuff Stats into the constructed wrestling universe (+Real). Your character also has Moves There are only 4 stats in WWW: +Look, +Power, representing categories of actions that your character most often takes. The +Work and +Real. results of Moves are what enable you to achieve your character’s goals both on-screen and off-screen, though often as a cost or with a complication. Re- member to always view your characters actions through the lens of the imaginary audience. Simultaneously, you should always advocate for your characters success in-the-ring (you want to win the match!) and out. For Creative: You have a unique challenge. Like in real-world wrestling, you are responsible for booking the results of every match based on what you think will bring in the most (fictional) audience, attention and money. So, generally, you kick off storylines between wrestlers, and book who wins what and when. However, the Talent players have agency and are advocating for their characters’ success. This means that they will often throw a swerve into your planned storyline, either by taking an action you hadn’t expected, overruling your booking of a match through the result of a Move, or both. Your primary job is to take those swerves and make it look like that’s what was planned all along to the imaginary viewing audience. In addition, you can use off-screen scenes to complicate the Talent character’s lives and put additional pressure on them to perform in certain ways on-screen. The fric- tion between the real and the performance, the backstage and the ring, the man and the mask - that’s where the game really shines. 2. The Big Picture Generally, you start a game of World Wide Wrestling by creating a set of interesting and iconic wrestlers (the Talent played by the players) and the constellation of rivals, heroes, sycophants and love interests that surround them in the promotion (played by Creative). The first session should serve mainly to introduce the Talent, show off what’s cool about them and their place on the card, and kick off the storylines that they’re currently booked to be part of. As the storylines unfold over subsequent episodes, the Talent will grow and change, gaining and los- ing title belts, overcoming or being crushed by their rivals, and enjoying or enduring the fruits of their liaisons. Over time, as we get to know the Talent better, their real lives off-screen will become more important to how they perform in the ring, and perhaps vice-versa. A game typically ends when a combination of the following all come together at the same time: all of the current storylines are wrapped up to the groups satisfaction; wrestlers lose the attention of the audience and are fired as a result; a player feels that they have taken their character as far as they want to go. World Wide Wrestling - Alpha Playtest - Page 3 3. The First Episode To start a game of World Wide Wrestling, you need at least two people, two six-sided dice (or more to make sharing easier), some pencils, these rules, copies of the Gimmicks (one each) and Roles (at least one copy of each Role per player), and some pencils. One of the players is Creative, and the rest are all Talent. Once this is settled, any reference to “players” or “the other players” is referencing just the Talent players. Creative is always referred to as Creative. In the first session of the game, each player picks a Gimmick and Role to start off with. Each Gimmick asks the player to pick stats, some initial Moves, and options for their Finisher from the options pre- sented. Each Gimmick also has a list of questions to ask the other players in order to Heat set initial Heat (representing how interesting the relationship between those wrestlers is to the viewing audience). To do this, simply ask the question and Instead of Hx, WWW uses Heat, which tracks wait for one of the other players to volunteer to answer it, then make the ap- how much audience response the relationship propriate Heat adjustment. Once you’re done asking questions, the next play- between two wrestlers receives. Positive Heat er asks the questions on their sheet, and so on until everyone is done asking means a positive audience response, NOT that questions. You ask as many questions as there are other players (so if there’s it’s necessarily a positive relationship! Gener- 3 players, each player will ask 2 questions), and can pick whichever questions ally, rivals have more Heat than allies, actually. you like from your sheet. Once each player has settled into the Gimmick, Creative should take note of any NPC wrestlers demanded or implied by the players choices, as well as think up a few that they want to make sure have a prominent place in the promotion. Creative should also create the list of initial Storylines to kick off and set out the initial booking for each one (more details about this is in the Creative section). Once Creative has booked the initial storylines, we go to the action. In this first Episode, Talent gets introduced and should show off what makes them so awesome for the imaginary viewing audience to watch.

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