Barf Forth Apocalyptica
barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: runester on June 29, 2012, 12:33:54 PM
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Hello;
I'm running a campaign of AW for one of my gaming groups. We're maybe four or five sessions in. Most of the players have figured out how to use their moves in concert to get a lot of XP and therefore a lot of advancements and therefore a lot of +3 stats. The result, is they rarely ever fail at any roll. I can set stakes as hard as I want, since they never fail it never matters.
Is there a way to increase the difficulty level of conflicts? Or, how is this handled in other AW games that run longer then a one-shot?
Any assistance would be most appreciated.
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So, there's the mechanical way, right, which is like...
"Balls is fuck-off weird and you can't get a grip on him; when you read him, it's at -1."
There's the way where you get people to use stats that aren't high for them (say a high hard character wants to shoot someone, but has low or mediocre sharp or weird...), like "Oh, sure, Sharkface was around here but shit you don't know where he is now. Probably hiding!" - then, maybe they gotta read the sitch, or open their brain, or try to manipulate people into spilling. So they've gotta do something they aren't good at. Also, there's stuff like "Balls is fuck-off weird and you can't get a grip on him; when you try to read him, roll+weird instead of +sharp." (I think that one's basically right outta the book).
Another thing is, if they couldn't possibly do something, there's no roll at all since the move isn't triggered. So, like, the psychic mutant dragon thing has skin so hard bullets and knives just bounce off, so how the hell are they gonna seize by force or go aggro? It's not scared of their puny weapons - so maybe they need to get a workspace, put themselves in danger, and craft a new type of weapon.
Keep in mind your job isn't really to worry about the players failing and even at a +3 they will fail at least some times. They will also get 7-9 just as often as anyone else. If you push to hard to make things difficult or get failed rolls, it just isn't very fun. Also, I think with the lists of starting stats and advancements available, I think it's tough to have more than one or two stats at +3, max? Don't have the book handy!
- Alex
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So, there's the mechanical way, right, which is like...
"Balls is fuck-off weird and you can't get a grip on him; when you read him, it's at -1."
OK, this I can use to make some situations or villains a little tougher.
There's the way where you get people to use stats that aren't high for them (say a high hard character wants to shoot someone, but has low or mediocre sharp or weird...)
This one would require that I have a list of everyone's strongest and weakest traits in front of me, so I can position the conflict towards one and not the other.
Another thing is, if they couldn't possibly do something, there's no roll at all since the move isn't triggered. So, like, the psychic mutant dragon thing has skin so hard bullets and knives just bounce off, so how the hell are they gonna seize by force or go aggro? It's not scared of their puny weapons - so maybe they need to get a workspace, put themselves in danger, and craft a new type of weapon.
This one I like a lot ... but I'm going to have to think of a good way to bring this type of situation into the game.
Keep in mind your job isn't really to worry about the players failing and even at a +3 they will fail at least some times. They will also get 7-9 just as often as anyone else. If you push to hard to make things difficult or get failed rolls, it just isn't very fun.
We've had whole sessions in which only a single player failed a single roll. This leads to the session not feeling like it was challenging and leads to the PC's running roughshod over everything because they fear nothing - which isn't very apocalyptical. They wanted it to be gritty and dangerous and deadly - but if it's nearly impossible for any of them to fail and for nearly all conflicts to be based on PC rolls and not the GM rolling dice for NPC's ... then I'm not sure how the feel and challenge level are supposed to be maintained.
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I'm having trouble articulating this, but I'm going to try. I think that coming up with ways to make it mechanically harder is probably hiding an ailment with a band-aid. And I'm trying to see through to what's wrong. I have MCd for players with retirement level characters and didn't have this problem.
Do they act like a party? Divide them. And I mostly mean socially; with PC-NPC-PC triangles.
How many +3 stats do they each have? Are they all good at finding eats, hiding from snipers and protecting their minds from the witches that live in the murk-marsh?
What kinds of goals are they pursuing?
Do they care about people or things? When you threaten them through stuff they care about, it's not too hard to make things feel gritty and risky.
How long are your sessions and how many advances happen per? Was the world apocalyptic at first but now they're pretty much cleaning things up? Is it possible that the campaign should draw to a close and make room for the next one?
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Also: highlight their worst stat
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As a character in that game with +3 Hard able to perform as any stat for any basic test other than Sharp (which the character has at +3) and Hot, well... yeah.
Not only that, but having a Savvyhead's Oftener Right to call on, with the Quarantine's Need to Know, most every test is made at +5.
As a Touchstone, I can just straight-up nominate a character to disarm/disable/kill. So, that gang? It's a weapon belonging to another character. I can disarm it. If need be I can kill the enemy gang leader.
I mean, sure, they have to be in range. That's not really a big deal, especially if I get to burn two holds on that Indomitable test and 1, cover range with a machete in hand and then 2, disarm/disable/kill.
There's little need to read a sitch or person, or manipulate or seduce them if you're going to just steamroll through whatever's in front of you; maybe ask a few NPCs for their advice on the way to maybe pick up another +1 if you think you need it (a roll using +3 Hard, +1 Need to Know means only a roll of 2 fails) and combat becomes trivial. Reading is interesting in that it gives you insight into other entity's motivations, but being able to trivialize them is a little deflating for a MC.
I know that stacking enemies - namely, overwhelming Indomitable with multiple, dangerous foes (perhaps even necessitating a "What's the nearest escape route" Sharp test at +3) is an answer, but when a character is otherwise acting pretty low-key until the shit hits the fan that comes off as a "rocks fall, everybody dies" kind of response.
I feel for the MC. I do. There are a few contrived situations where perhaps "rocks fall" is a congruous approach. But the larger trouble is that challenges don't scale, and that trouble remains.
An approach much like gang-gang warfare would be a good hack, where Level or some other generic measure of awesomeness beyond stats can be used. A Level X character facing a Level Y challenge is a net mod of +(X-Y) to the final roll. It's a simple mechanic, easily understood, and only lacking a measure of X and Y... but given AW's "fuck it" approach to mechanics, I imagine no one would be particularly distraught to apply Level (or Magnificence, or Animus, or whatever one would want to title it) as an advance, have it require all stats at -2 or greater, cost a typical XP advance, AND lower all stats by -1 when taken (as it effectively adds +1 to all stat tests), and go off on your merry way.
I mean, some benchmark Level (or Difficulty, or Challenge, or what-have-you) should be defined for every basic test such that an MC would have a decent guideline to judge test parameters (namely its Difficulty) according to examples (ie., reading a lover's person is Difficulty -2, reading a stranger's person is Difficulty 0, reading a shadowy figure in interacted with within the maelstrom who may or may not actually exist as a complete persona is Difficulty 3).
Right now, "fuck the PCs up their weak stat" is not only inadequate and contrived, it's not addressing the underlying issue of difficulty not scaling. There can be a better solution, and I'd encourage other MCs with difficulty issues to examine the idea of Level/Difficulty.
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One adjustment would be needed for the above Level/Difficulty mechanic: no adjusted test can be made at greater than +4.
This prevents Difficulty from overly influencing tests, since you still want a failure on a roll of 2 regardless of the situation.
Another adjustment for consideration is rather than Level being a character trait, it's a trait solely tied to just one Move (maybe Basic-only, just to limit the design effort required to develop the various Difficulty benchmarks). This slows down the rate of mechanical character improvement relative to Advancements taken, as well as keeps characters a little more focused in what they're so wonderful at.
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It sounds like the characters are going to get their way more often and there'll be fewer hard moves, scarcity will be less of a problem and things will get better, and the story will wrap up...unless everyone dies of course. But it does sound like an endgame pacing thing.
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Grim, considering the game is now six sessions in, and difficulty as a generic concern was eliminated at least one, probably two sessions ago. I was under the impression that the game's lifespan would be longer.
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Well, theyre still rolling 7-9 right? So, they still get hard choices and worse results, etc.
Im not quite groking how you got here. Our last game went about 10 sessions, but we never eliminated difficulty as a concern.
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Christopher Weeks' answer is the right one!
-Vincent
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Well, it sounds like they've made an effort to fill up those sessions with action-packed moves to get all the advances.
The game can run longer, but it depends on how many experience-gathering moves you make each session. I've played sessions where everyone got an advance or two, and others where nobody rolled much at all.
One thing I found useful is to think about things that are interesting to deal with but that succeeding on moves won't make any easier. For example, there was a Skinner in one of my games who was awesome at everything. This brought her to the attention of two nearby warlords. They both wanted her on their side, whereas she wanted to stay independent. That led to a lot of cool plotlines, even when she could disarm any single person-to-person conflict with ease.
(Note that this is just my way of saying what Christopher was getting at, too)
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So since they never fail rolls they must have solved all the world's problems by now, right? Everyone has all the food they need, nobody argues with each other anymore, the NPCs they like are never in any danger, disease and injustice are banished altogether -- I bet they have lots of free time to take up knitting and sing campfire songs! Maybe you should write a custom move for that.
Or, since they're so great at killing people -- maybe everybody's dead? Like all those gangs of raiders who used to protect nearby villages from feral dogs, or the evil hardholder whose people are now basically refugees? Maybe they killed some farmers, or the one guy who knows how to fix a radio, or that girl who had a soft spot for kids and used to share her food with a local family? But probably they just killed all the bad guys so everyone is safe now, and they just sort of do laps of all the places they care about making sure to shoot anybody new who shows up to fill the power vaccuum they made by killing the last guy -- I know that's what I'd do, if I could kill people at +5!
I realize that sarcasm may not be the best teaching tool, but at some point the game stops being about whether you can survive and starts being about what you are surviving for -- at some point the characters get strong enough that you are playing to find out what they are going to do with that strength, not whether or not they are strong in the first place. They stop cleaning up the shitty post-apocalyptic wasteland and they start having to decide what it is they're going to put in its place -- and how.
A +3 stat does not make that decision easy -- it just makes the consequences of the decision further-reaching, more emphatic. It is your job as MC to be the consequences, not the challenge.
It just so happens to be the case that the consequences of success are even more challenging than the consequences of failure.
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Yeah, cool+3 and hard+3 is pretty awesome to have when you're trying to kill a warlord or a grotesque, and not to be fucked with is awesome for beating a bunch of brutes.
But how is your near-superhuman ability to use violence going to help you combat a Custom (impulse: to promote and justify violence)? I guess you will need sharp+3 so you can read people and hot+3 so you can convince them to change their ways.
Oh, you got that too? So, how are words and weapons going to help you deal with a Maze (impulse: to trap, to frustrate passage) or a Disease (impulse: to saturate a population)?
If every challenge eventually boils down to roll+stat to determine the outcome, then yeah, really experienced PCs will pwn the shit out of everything and never face any hard choices. But you can also write a collection of fronts that all work to irrevocably change the world the PCs live in and then you find out which threats they choose to thwart, which ones they actually have the ability to thwart, and which ones come to pass just because the PCs drop the ball because they're too busy.
Here's an amusing custom move you could try:
When you are, like, a super-badass and you try to cure a disease, fuck it, just roll+3. On a 10+, the MC will say you need 1 or more of the following:
* A full disease-oriented laboratory and testing facility.
* Some, y'know, actual expertise. Like a doctorate, maybe?
* You need to destroy the psychic maelstrom.
* You need to quarantine the infected and burn the bodies.
On a 7-9, it's hopeless, you just don't have the skills, but at least you realize this before you catch the disease and die. On a miss… uh, I guess you don't?
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One of the fronts I used was a disease. But, this being post-apocalyptical, there wasn't actually that much sympathy for NPC's. So, rounding up the sick and using them on the front-line of a military action on the nearby hardhold and then quarantining the survivors was how they resolved that. They were willing to work on improving their (the sick) living conditions and trying to get them some medicine, but they weren't going to shed any tears when they had to start stacking and burning the bodies.
Also, without the "we give a shit about the lives of NPC's" then having a PC-NPC-PC triangle becomes problematic. "Hey Cutter, the woman you took on as an assistant medic has been secretly seeing the Touchstone and reporting your secret medical experiments to her." - "Oh, really? I blow her fucking head off and turn to the rest of my assistant's with a warning, 'Keeping your gob shut you gits!'"
Further, in a setting in which there is no law and order or a well organized and effective martial force, then being able to punch people in the face and take their stuff is a pretty effective way to deal with need. Let's be honest, the primary reason why anyone, anywhere, negotiates or manipulates or seduces, is because "taking by force" is too expensive and risky. When you're at HARD+3 with an extra +1 from someone else's move then you're only going to miss getting a '7' on a roll of 2. Some armor, a medium sized gang to back you up, and a couple of badass PC's to help you out - and suddenly you become a lot less likely to negotiate with the farmers in the next valley or the savvy heads sitting on a stockpile of antibiotics.
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In the end, I'm just not good enough at GM'ing to deal with this. Maybe I'm too brain damaged by years of traditional game systems and I'd probably need to sit in and play in an amazing long-term campaign of AW to learn how. In any case, this campaign is over. We pulled the plug last night. Maybe we'll pick it up again in a few months or a year, and someone else can give it a go.
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Nah, you're probably being too hard on yourself. You just didn't play up the scarcity angle enough, I think. If you make sure Cutter knows that woman he took on as a new assistant who's ratting him out was the ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD who can work with diseases, and you give whichever PC rounded up the infected people the disease, then suddenly "I shoot her and intimidate the others" becomes slightly less effective.
Or if the only person in the world who knows how to make decent shoes is kind of an asshole... even then what do the PCs do? Even with cool+3 it would suck to have to act under fire all the time because you've got broken glass in your feet all the time.
But you're right: If you're not very comfortable running a certain style of game, it really does help when you see someone else running it that way -- a lot more effective than learning it out of a book or from forum posts. I hope you get to play that game at some point.
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I don't want to harp on this, because I agree with Johnstone that it sounds like you're being a bit harsh on yourself, but: if your PCs decide that the only way they can deal with your problems is to not care about any of the NPCs, then that probably means you were doing a pretty good job of running the game. It's pretty easy to deal with the apocalypse if you just don't give a shit -- though probably that will get you dead eventually (see: Johnstone's comments on what happens when you let important people die/fuck off.)
If they just started out not caring about any of the NPCs and so it never felt like a decision they had to make, that's a bit more of a problem, and that's where those first few sessions are so important for the MC. Those are the sessions where you figure out who they like, who they depend on for stuff, etc. so that later those are the NPCs you can put in triangles, threaten, demonstrate their particular thing-they-want, etc.
Anyways, I hope you come back to the game with better luck in the future.
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At no point did any of the players or their characters give a shit about NPCs. The characters were always interested in our own particular goals, but NPCs that couldn't get on board were eliminated with prejudice. Pogroms solve more troubles than negotiations.
Not only that, but there seemed to be few goals that the mechanics made too tricky: need to have the Savvyhead build a tank/have the Angel cure the rare disease/anything else? Get your list of O NO ingredients and then... apparently there's almost no trouble that a Seize by Force won't solve. Hard drives the plot, everything else is just there to make things interesting on the way.
I mean, "change someone's ways"? LOL. No. Shoot them in the face, then nick their shit.
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At no point did any of the players or their characters give a shit about NPCs. <<Snipped>>
I mean, "change someone's ways"? LOL. No. Shoot them in the face, then nick their shit.
I can completely relate to this. Unfortunately, this may be an issue where you and the group differ on what you want out of gaming. I was straight up told that gaming was "an escape from the the BS of society" by one player and he had no intention of "playing a game about about feelings" and that he just wanted to be a badass. I no longer try to play certain games with that player, it saves me a lot of frustration. We tend to stick to Rifts or M&M because that works for us.
If you haven't already, the best thing to do is talk to them. Ask them why they went the route they did and then decide if thats the logic you want to drive the games you play. They may not want to explore another type of story and are happy with trying to out badass each other. (Its as valid as anyother game.) If so, and you still want to try and change their opinion. you can point out to them that in history when people pulled that shit their neighbors would eventually organize and kill them. I mean if they go for the nuclear option, so will others.... anyway, just my 2cp.
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So, basically they played it like D&D? That's cool, but it's no surprise AW didn't deliver, and if that's the way they want to play, it never will, because it's not the mechanics that make things difficult, it's the fiction. The mechanics don't tell you how hard it is to cure a disease, you tell the mechanics, and then the PCs have to live up to that.
I think you guys should try Dungeon World.
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So what happens when your bed explodes after you killed someone that someone else loved?
Or take a sniper's shot to the head because you were just shooting folks instead of reading the sitch or making friends?
What happens when, the next time you go to pillage the "farmers in the next valley" and find that they've given up on this locale and moved on and your little tin cup is empty?
When you're not giving the curing of the local disease any effort and everyone dies, what do you have left? Just move on?
Why wouldn't there be any ramifications to the PCs' antisocial behavior? Make Apocalypse World seem real.
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We weren't antisocial: we were effective. With Sharps at +3 (or greater) and Hards at +3 (or greater), it gets pretty trivial to find out who your enemies are and then eliminate them. Apocalypse World's mechanics encourage some seriously easy
mind person reading.
I mean, why pillage farmers when you can make a better world with, say, a windmill powered by hope, and then convince those farmers to join up with you because you basically can't lose gang fights, are being nice, and are devastatingly effective at eliminating threats the moment they're detected? This wasn't about HAHA NO ONE CAN STOP US KICK THAT PUPPY FOR FUN, it was more, "hey with a few dierolls we know more than everything we care to about our opposition and then with a few more we can eliminate them and a few more by the Angel and Savvyhead we can invent all kinds of mechanical and biological solutions to resolve the immediate post-apocalypse-ness in this neck of the woods".
I mean, the disease cure was brutal and effective - eliminate the sick, heal the well. So was eliminating the raiding gangs and using the power vacuum to insert our own gang as armed transport and trade facilitators. So was a lot of other "find evil, shoot it in the face" sort of solutions.
If anything, the "realness" made things trivial; it seemed only contrived crapsack grimdarkness would keep the challenge coming. The AW mechanics support some pretty easy rides to glory: playing it real made the PCs' jobs easier.
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Can the OP provide some details, especially about the disease front? I mean, even if you kill all the sick, wouldn't that depopulation severely weaken the holding's economy? Wouldn't there be uprisings from the healthy with sick relatives/loved ones? Would you be killing some essential workers?
Like if you get all you need from an Angel or Savvyhead then kill them, what happens if you need an Angel or Savvyhead later?
And the post about a medical assistant involved with a Touchstone, was that a romantic relationship, or just "friends"? Did the Touchstone not care that the med assist was executed by the other character?
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If at no point did anyone care about NPCs, how does it follow that the behaviour was not anti-social?
If on the contrary, the PCs were solving problems in productive, sociable ways, that doesn't really seem like a problem -- that's what the game starts to turn into once PCs reach a certain power level.
But also, at least based on the description it sounds like the workspace moves were perhaps being used a little generously -- that or all the PCs were ultra-cooperative, problem-solving geniuses. I mean, you can't actually just invent whatever you want using a Savvyhead's workspace -- it's entirely legitimate for the MC to look at the list of questions, look at what you want to make, and tell you that it will take you years of work and lots of resources you don't even know the name of. You can't be like 'I want to make a modern computer' when nobody even knows what a circuit-writer is.
Either way, it sounds like part of the problem was that the PCs never had any reason to disagree with each other about what to do? Or did each and every player have all their stats at +3 somehow? Creating PC-NPC-PC triangles early on is pretty crucial to keeping the game interesting, even once the PCs have started to overcome some of the most immediate threats. If the PCs never care about any NPCs, or are never dependent on any NPCs in mutually-complicating ways, then those triangles won't work and the game will probably fall flat.
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The PC-NPC-PC triangles are even more crucial than the Fronts, because they're the meat and potatoes of character drama which is, frankly, the point of Apocalypse World.
If Fronts get resolved, they should reveal something more disturbing.
If Threats get resolved, it came at a cost.
If the players never fail a dice roll, then tap your way into other avenues of emotional investment (love, hate, envy, hope) that will yield better fruit than success/failure vs. immanent and obvious threat.
The other thing about Apocalypse World is how mysterious you can make it: even if the players read situations until they're blue in the face, there will always be some unexplored aspects, things they don't quite understand, and layers upon layers upon layers of shit to deal with.
There is no status quo, even when your protagonists are ruthlessly competent.
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Personally, I have noticed that in AW campaigns I've played, there's an unspoken a countdown clock that's closely tied to XP. Around the time people are settling into their second playbook and/or retiring, things have always fallen apart. Having a Quarantine, Touchstone, Insight (or its variants) or just someone who loves to Manipulate other players and offer them XP can speed up that process. Having more than one can shoot XP through the stratosphere. In one (online) game I played in, this was about session 4, with my Quarantine having come in at Session 2 and still caught up with everyone else.
By then your PC's probably have +2-3 in their major stats and have taken stat replacement moves to duck around their 0 and -1 stats and have as many moves as they can get on that playbook. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that means they don't really have to worry about the neighboring raiders and the like. There's a paradigm shift that happens at this point that isn't easy to manage. Now that your PC's can do anything, what is it they want to do? Who's going to come to them for help? How do they play off of each other? What can they be convinced to do today that they'll regret tomorrow? How do the new PC's from "play a second playbook" react to the demigods they're thrown into the mix with? I'm not sure I have an answer but I can at least see the outline of the issue.
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Not caring about NPCs is a symptom. The game works on caring about NPCs. That's what PC-NPC triangles are all about. I can't imagine playing a game of AW where I didn't care about the NPCs. Some of them I hate and want nothing more than to see them lying bleeding in the street. Others I am protective of and risk death to save them. But indifference?
If I found myself not giving a shit about the NPCs, I'd bow out of the game.
I mean, the disease cure was brutal and effective - eliminate the sick, heal the well.
What were their names?
Which one of you killed the children? What were their names?
So was eliminating the raiding gangs and using the power vacuum to insert our own gang as armed transport and trade facilitators.
What were their names?
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HAHA no one cared. I mean, I remember the name of the gang leader, Kettle, and his Grotesque aide de camp which escaped (Gurt), but mourning the dead was something we got over after the first game. As soon as it became clear that awful things were going to happen to the NPCs (hard moves!), there seemed little point to get attached to them: they were disposable. The MC tried, laid out the names, gave stories, fleshed things out, but it got clear, quickly, that they were distractions or obstacles.
You can only stare into the Abyss so long before it stares back. For us, that was about one session in.
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It's not a hard move to destroy something no one cares about.
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That was actually part of the problem: once it became apparent that everything was disposable, then... everything became disposable.
Maintaining the tension of keeping NPC important yet completely expendable is a tough lift. For us, once it was clear that NPCs (and gear, and just about anything) could be eliminated by an endless number of methods, it became difficult to ascribe any weight to them. No one mourns toilet paper. The only schemes that mattered were our own, since NPCs were just there to impart pathos and import rather than able to actually meaningfully affect the story.
That's actually a large part of their expendability: they have no mechanical role in the system other than being there to try to marginally fuck with you - say shit, do shit, whatever - but as they can't effectively roll dice against you, they just push you to the limit and force you to make the roll... at +3 or more. Their large and obvious divorce from the mechanics of action resolution naturally divorces them from heavy PC consideration. In some sense the game plays like a superhero game, in that most folk you encounter provide only noise and background, and only supervillians - Fronts - really can do anything meaningful. Toss in the post-apocalypse despair and it's little wonder to me why I marauded through the game like the Punisher.
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There's a signfigant difference between "don't roll dice" and "can't do anything". Now, admittedly, its very difficult for an NPC to do anything directly to a PC with much degree of success. But make Apocalypse World seem real calls for at least some enemies to be smart. That means they'll hit where the PCs are weak when they're not ready to defend.
Is that windmill guarded 24 hours a day? Are all of the guards 100% trustworthy? What happens if it burns down while the PCs are off killing another gang?
Does the Savvyhead have mines around his workshop? If a few of them go off, there's an obvious hole that has to be plugged. So will he stay home and make mines or track the source of the maelstrom leak into reality?
I hate to reiterate the book but find places the PC's don't have perfect control and push there. Or find places that NPC's can put a dent in that control, dent it, then push.
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they have no mechanical role in the system
There's a thing I'm not sure I understand about "mechanical role."
It sounds like you think that if the game tells me as the MC playing NPC Bubba, when I decide that Bubba wants to beat your PC down to roll this and that and compare it to a table and let the PC react in this way or this other way, that that's a mechanical role. Am I close?
Apocalypse World guides me along a little about when I should decide that Bubba acts on his wanting to beat you down and gives me some rules for what to say. I mean, I don't roll those dice like I described above, but I do say something like "OK Keeler, take 3 harm AP as the rifle's bullet passes in through your neck and down through your shoulder. Roll the harm move."
To your thinking, what is the critical difference between those two scenarios that "divorces [NPCs] from heavy PC consideration?"
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I don't know if you guys are talking from the same point of view, here. Mean Liar seems to be saying that the NPCs aren't real people. Well... obviously. I'm not sure that's an issue with the system in Apocalypse World. NPCs aren't real people and there's no real consequence for not treating them as real people except that your game might kind of suck. It's as true in D&D or Shadowrun or Burning Wheel or Star Wars or whatever as it is in Apocalypse World.
I think certain players approach the game as a problem to decomplexify. In their point of view, the end goal is to have a system you can control. Be the king and have only loyal subjects and plenty of resources for that number of people. See, that's a simple system. Because there are only loyal subjects, there will be no attempts to subvert your rule or muck up your resource situation. How do you get there from a complex field with multiple powers in play and limited resources? The easiest way is to kill everybody who's not a loyal subject (and take their resources). It's not really roleplaying unless you're playing high-functioning sociopaths, but it is a game.
It's not a game that AW plays well, I suspect. To have a satisfying game of "kill all the opposition" you probably want stats for them so that so-and-so can be too powerful to kill by just ringing his doorbell and blowing him all to hell. AW doesn't do that naturally. You could give him a large 4 harm gang with 2 armor and bunkers and have him hide there like a bitch, but what's the point? Even then, the PCs can probably sneak in or subvert his gangers or whatever. You could make a custom move like this:
When you fight Mary Sue, roll +Hard. On 10+, choose 1. On 7-9, choose 2. On a miss, the MC will kill you in a spectacular fashion.
- You lose a limb or your genitals.
- You cry like a little baby.
- You are horribly scarred and no one will love you again.
- You can breathe okay as long as the machines stay on.
But, you know, your players might whine.
AW isn't made to describe the high-functioning sociopath game. The players, like the MC, have to make Apocalypse World seem real. Real people don't execute everyone around them to simplify their lives. Real people get involved in relationships and try to make other people happy, often at expense of their own wishes, and stuff like that. If you buy in, you get a fun game. If not, that's okay, just find something more "gamist" and less "color-first" or whatever that phrase Vincent uses is.
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The problem with that is that in AW there isn't some vague "the opposition," there's Millions and her kid brother Pip. Pip sometimes has trouble breathing, and that's why Millions offers to sleep with the Angel in return for medicine. Of course, Jacka Backa is none too happy about that. He's the jealous type and he also controls the hard hold's supply of go juice. Lucky, you have an armed gang to back you up. I'm sure Balls and Stix don't have any designs on taking over or anything...
Similarly there isn't some vague "the sick" There's Pebble, she's twelve. And she's healthy. It's her father, Dognose who's got the bloody flux and needs to be put down. If only Pebble wasn't holding his shotgun...
And I dont get the statement that the NPCs cant do anything. That's plain incorrect. They don't have to roll because the MC just makes a move. Pip steals your gun (Take away their stuff). You can chase him if you want, but you'll be alone (Tell them the consequences then Ask, Separate them). Ah, looks like you walked into a trap (Capture someone).
Yes. I agree they're playing a different game.
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Thank you noclue, that's the best articulation of what was on my mind that I've seen yet. It also gives me a bit of hidden advice, since I'm looking to start my first AW tabletop: start the setting small so there's room to develop all these overlapping and interlocking relationships.
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The only schemes that mattered were our own, since NPCs were just there to impart pathos and import rather than able to actually meaningfully affect the story.
You are not describing Apocalypse World in general -- you're describing the way you decided to play Apocalypse World. What most people in this thread have been pointing out is that this is a choice you made, within the world of the game. You decided not to care about any NPCs, apparently on account of how fragile they were, and as a result the game was 'easy'.
I believe the term here is Working As Intended.
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No surprises here. Of course your game failed. You made two big mistakes:
1. You put mecahnics first (you probably rolled act under fire to dodge attacks or some shit like that, thus, "NPCs can't do anything"). In normal AW, the fact that an NPC doesn't have to roll to shoot you is scary -- not a free pass. When you puts mechanics first, and judge everything with a PC roll, the game breaks.
2. Players didn't follow their one overriding rule (p. 96): Play your characters like real people (not sociopathic automatons).
So, yep. That's a sure fire mess.
Without those problems, powerful PCs are lots of fun.
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You can mischaracterize our play if that helps, but that's weaksauce strawmanning. "High-functioning sociopaths" was pinpoint accurate, but "roll to dodge" is just massaging yourself.
It's clear that AW isn't a game for us. I went into the game thinking of playing Lord Humongous in a psychically-charged post-apocalypse wasteland. Apparently, the game is more Days of Our Apocalypse rather than Road Warrior or The Road. That's fine, but... not exactly the sort of flavor that we felt came out in the aesthetic style of the rulebook.
To each their own.
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I have enjoyed plenty of murder-centric games, no doubt. I just think you're missing a sweet spot in between a soap opera and killer robots where people are tough but human.
I do think you could play Lord Humungous in AW and have it be interesting. He doesn't kill Wez when Wez challenges his authority... he says that he understands Wez's pain and hints that he, too, has loved. "Be still, my dog of war. I understand your pain. We've all lost someone we love. But we do it my way!"
What if Humungous met a woman (or man or marmot) and loved again? Would his gang of rapey fucking hyenas keep their hands off her? He cares about his dogs of war, too. He doesn't kill Wez when he publicly challenges Humungous' leadership - he chokes him out and later Wez is back in line doing good stuff for the gang. What if his lover didn't like him murdering his way across the waste? It's not like the dogs of war have other useful skills. He can't turn them into a farming commune.
None of that means that Humungous isn't also burning and raping his daily bread out of hardholds in the Outback. There'd be loads of combat in this story, but since AW doesn't have a real tactical combat system the combat wouldn't be the part that's challenging you brain-wise. It would be keeping your lover happy and safe and your dogs of war alive and together and punishing that fucking Driver character for helping hardholder Papagallo keep his petrol from you.
You wouldn't play that game?
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Have you read The Road? Cuz the body count was pretty low. As in almost none and the few killings are necessary and emotionally traumatizing for the protagonists. Not a lot of killing. Much more bonding with his son and trying to raise him up to be a man in a fucked up time.
AW does a great The Road.
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It's pitch-perfect for Road Warrior style games, as the dozens upon dozens of badass psychic wasteland AP posts will attest. It's a shame that your game went so poorly that your impression was skewed that badly. Because, wow.