Apocalypse World is a Bakers' Game

Not only in the sense that it was written by Vincent and Meguey Baker.

People who cook understand that cooking recipes are negotiable. To some extent, this is because the recipe's author does not know about your insane love for tamarind. So, when you dollop an extra spoonful of that irresistible paste into your prawn laksa, it turns out deliciously, of course.

People who bake understand that baking recipes ought to be followed as divine commandments. Even if you personally think egg yolks are the best thing ever, you shouldn't let any show up in your meringue. If you did, it may even cease to be a meringue in any recognisable form.

Baking requires a more rigorous understanding of how things can be combined together, and how these processes of combination might be disrupted. Intuition is a fine basis for cooking, but to bake, one must become a scholar.

Some games are cooking games, and some games are baking games. Many GMs mistake baking games for cooking games, adding or substituting game elements to suit their tastes but ruining the careful design in the process. To avoid falling into this trap, we need to learn to distinguish the two categories.

Sometimes, designers will helpfully signpost when their game is a baking game¹, or when certain elements of an otherwise cooking game take on some baking character² (like how there's hints of baking when you're making a pie, even though you're mostly cooking? OK, I'll admit this analogy is getting a bit tortured). Even absent any signposting, a careful reader can infer some qualities of the rules from how closely those rules are followed in modules written by the same author. Kelsey Dionne doesn't follow the Shadowdark dungeon stocking procedures in her own modules, so we needn't worry if we don't carefully distribute treasure in the right way: Shadowdark is clearly a cooking game³.

Baking games which share large fractions of their mechanics can still feel very different at the table. Two of the Bakers' games, Under Hollow Hills and Apocalypse World are baking games, and they play extremely differently despite having similar structure on paper. Conversely, when other games take mechanics from these games, they often fail to capture the magic of the original. Baking games have directed emergence: a story that is driven by player actions and interests, but still highlights thematic elements that were pre-determined by the designer or game master.

Cooking games tend to be very robust. Just as you can cook reasonably good food by throwing whatever you find in your cupboard into a pan, you can run a reasonably good cooking game by taking whatever books, movies, or TV shows have grabbed your attention and throwing them into your next game session. Cooking games are much more dependent on the GM to set any desired tone, and as such, are much more liable to shift into comedy, even if this is not a direction that was desired at the outset of the game.

When you experiment with changing a game's setting, or making a hack, or mashing up a game's rules with your favourite fiction, know whether your game is a cooking game or a baking game. If it all goes terribly, reflect on whether you got the answer to this question wrong. Think critically and carefully about whether your system's outputs are predictable from its inputs. Consider interactions and downstream effects. If the outcome was very different to your expectations, take your handcrafted Japanese cooking knife and chop up the unexamined. There is little point in experimenting if you don't understand the nature or bounds of the thing you're working on.