Barf Forth Apocalyptica
hacks => blood & guts => Topic started by: Paul T. on January 29, 2011, 10:08:47 AM
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Just a quick question:
Why is it possible to advance basic moves so quickly and easily (two advances for all seven)?
Is it because 12+ results are rare in play?
It seems to me that choosing *which* moves to advance makes really interesting statements about the character and where you want them to go. But in two advances, you've got all of them, no choices to make on that front.
I feel like I would still choose that advance even if I could only apply it to one or two moves (especially seduce/manipulate, right?).
For those of you who've played long and hard enough for this to come up, what's it look like in play?
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When I had a character advance that far, I knew exactly which three I wanted to advance. There was no question: seduce/manipulate (to protect people); open my brain (because I used it A LOT); and Read a Sitch ('cause I had Eye on the Door so I could ask "What's my best escape route?" AND "What's my second-best escape route?"). Getting the other 4 was just a bonus.
Would you rather it be done in three steps? Like, open 2, open 2 more, open the last 3? Or like 3, 2, 2? Sometimes I want to open special moves too.
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Basically, yeah, I'm just curious about this particular design decision.
Why just two advances, why not one to advance all the moves, or three, as you suggest, Johnstone?
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All in one advance is no good for obvious reasons: there's no opportunity to make a choice and thus make obvious what is important to you as a player. Example: I was playing the Battlebabe so I had cool+3, but I didn't open act under fire. I had other priorities and I stated them when I opened three other moves.
Why 2 moves instead of 3 though? No idea. Maybe Vincent has an answer, maybe he just did it that way. I think 3 moves to advance them all, either 3-2-2 or 2-2-3 would be dope.
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The second advance is really not worth it for most characters. A third would almost certainly not be. Unless you're rolling +2 or +3 on a move, you're effectively never going to roll a 12+ anyway. So unless you've consistently opted for stat bonuses over new moves, are using stat substitution to be good at everything, or are a driver--you probably only have 3 moves you need to open anyway.
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As I've said somewhere else, I would seriously consider simply removing the second advance next time I run an AW game. Like Johnstone said, the first advance is an opportunity to make a statement about your character's priorities -- or your priorities for your character. The second advance just seems to make those statements obsolete, as well as removing a possible delineation between highly-developped characters.
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Personally, my preference would be to allow you to advance 1 basic move for each advance you spend, and that you can do it twice, so each character can only open up 2 moves. As it is, players are most likely to advance the moves that they have the biggest bonus in (+2 or +3) and that leads to more of a sense of diversity and difference among the characters.
That said, part of the point of advancing all the moves may be the unexpected results that occur when someone rolls a "natural 12" when doing something relatively insignificant. In my experience, though, those instances can sometimes feel jarring and bizarre instead of really cool. Like, when you're just trying to manipulate someone to give you their keys and all of a sudden they become your Ally, it doesn't really make sense sometimes.
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I think we came to the same conclusion over here:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=1570.0
I was thinking 1 improvement for each advanced move, max: 3. But max: 2 might be good, too.
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Just a quick question:
Why is it possible to advance basic moves so quickly and easily (two advances for all seven)?
Is it because 12+ results are rare in play?
It seems to me that choosing *which* moves to advance makes really interesting statements about the character and where you want them to go. But in two advances, you've got all of them, no choices to make on that front.
I feel like I would still choose that advance even if I could only apply it to one or two moves (especially seduce/manipulate, right?).
For those of you who've played long and hard enough for this to come up, what's it look like in play?
Paul, I have a gone multiple sessions sometimes without rolling particular moves. By advancing multiple moves, it seems to me that it makes those advancements worth taking, on par with the other good stuff, as well as driving the fiction towards interesting places.
It also means that the ability to uncover radical stuff abut the world is relatively open to everyone. If you could only advance a single move, it's likely ALWAYS and ONLY ever be the Brainer who uncovered the true nature of the Maelstrom, and ALWAYS AND ONLY ever the Skinner who got people to become her ally. With the ability to advance multiple moves, you increase the chance that at least one of them will come up without making the player feel like they need to just keep spamming one particular move if they ever hope to get actual utility out of that Advancement.
At least, that's my take on it, anyway. My Chopper isn't called to Act Under Fire all that often in our current game, that's just the way it goes. The fact that I can tack a 12+ result for it onto the Hard moves I really wanted is great, it creates possibilities that encourage me to not ALWAYS be pushing to Go Aggro so that I have a shot at a 12+ result before I die.
I do have to say I remain kind of baffled why people feel it's necessary to take that option away form others who may want it... of curse you're free not to take it yourself if you think it's badnotfun, but is it really so pernicious it needs to be slapped down?
-Jim C.
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[quote author=Jim Crocker link=topic=1061.msg9835#msg9835 date=1307167115
I do have to say I remain kind of baffled why people feel it's necessary to take that option away form others who may want it... of curse you're free not to take it yourself if you think it's badnotfun, but is it really so pernicious it needs to be slapped down?[/quote]
Er, the only 'others' here would be 'people playing in a game the person is running.' It's not like anyone is suggesting it be stricken from the records. Nor is anyone portraying this as some kind of crusade, except you in that last sentence.
That part aside, I think you're totally right about the danger of 'one advance = one open move'; it really ratchets up the already-present pressure on players to only open the moves they have high stats in, instead of maybe the moves whose opened versions are the most appealing to them, or most important to the character.
This is part of why I think it's only the second, 'open the remaining three' advance whose pernicious influence is going to destroy the fun of even the most experienced AW player, and must therefore be removed at all costs.
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You guys are crazy in this thread too, but knock yourselves out here too. (Not Jim, Jim's the sensible one.)
The "it reduces diversification" complaint is especially crazy. These are the basic moves. Everybody's supposed to share them! It was almost a coin toss whether advancing a basic move advances it for everyone, not just for you. I can still see that rule for hacks. It also wouldn't be absurd to just start the game with all the basic moves having their 12+ effects, that'd be fine for some hacks too.
Better than taking away the ability to advance your basic moves, would be adding the ability to advance your character moves. I wish that were practical.
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It's interesting to hear you say that, Vincent. How is rolling 12+ pretty regularly not guaranteed to turn things crazy or silly after a while? It just ends up breaking my suspension of disbelief. Honestly, after I rolled a 12+ a few times, I'd rather retire the character than roll another 12+ result; that's how much I feel like it affects my experience of playing the game, when it happens a bunch.
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Well if anything's breaking your suspension of disbelief, it shouldn't be happening in the first place. The 12+ results aren't silly by nature.
If you want to dig into what happened in your game, which advanced moves did what and when and to whom and stuff, we can, in another thread. My suspicion sight unseen is that somebody overplayed something, and it became a local standard, and now it's become part of your local understanding of how the advanced moves should work.
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Didn't we already have a thread about the 12+ manipulate/seduce result and suspension of disbelief? It's been awhile since I was in a game where characters were at that point, but I still feel like it's over the top.
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Start a thread if you want. Tell what happened in your game, ask what maybe could have happened instead.
I bet somebody overplayed it.
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Yeah, we already had that thread, Daniel. Looking back from nowaday's perspective, we overplayed it, although the speed of advancement didn't match the pace of our game.
Which may (partially) account for my dislike of opening all seven moves with only two advances. It's too fast to really explore the implications of having only those particular three open.
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Yeah, we already had that thread, Daniel.
Anyone got a link to that discussion?
Advanced moves have just come into play in our tenth session and I'd like to see how other people have handled them.
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Sure, it's over here (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=107.0). The thread is mostly about the 12+ manipulate result, which (to add some context to my contribution in that thread) used to be something you could only achieve by using an Unbidden Future advance -- like changing a playbook, for example.
I am still curious why this change was made, to be honest, and I'd love to hear Vincent's thought process on that particular shift. But I don't think I'm going to start a whole new thread about it, since there was already that one.
(Johnstone I will just have to ask you in person what you mean by 'overplayed', since I don't get it.)
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I'm still thinking about "overplayed" and what that could imply. Looking over the advanced moves and viewing them as being roughly comparable in scope, I think I see what that might mean. Advanced Act Under Fire, Seduce/Manipulate, and Open Your Brain seem particularly susceptible to being treated like superpowers.
Vincent, here's a thing I just thought of: are there examples in the book of players rolling 12+ results with advanced moves? Maybe that's part of what's messing people up, not having as much to go on in this case.
A couple more specific questions:
On advanced Seize, you say "Taking doubly definite hold of it would mean, I dunno, marking it as the character's in some profound existential way." And both the abstractness of that and the "I dunno" part make it sound like a mystical, intuitive thing, no so concrete. Is that because it's so context-specific, depending on what you're seizing?
The other place I get confused is on advanced Seduce/Manipulate, where at the end you say "By now the players are bone weary from knowing that every single NPC is, at her heart, only a potential threat to them. Now, this one person, they can breathe." And that's really powerful, evocative language, but it only seems to describe the first time a character gains an Ally. But if they have Hot+3 and the advanced move, it could happen once a session or even multiple times in the same session.
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The examples I gave in the other thread:
Our PCs are infiltrating an enemy compound. I've brought some NPCs along, partly because I want to transfer their loyalty from my boss to me so they can be part of my gang when/if I take that advance.
After one of the heavies gets killed, my PC Hellish puts the other one, Pierre, on point. He balks and I tell him who's boss. I get a 12+, he becomes my ally.
At the end of the line, another PC, Mule is trying to diffuse the tension between him/her/it and another NPC, Fauna. Mule gets a 12+, and Fauna becomes an ally.
So, in these situations, the MC can't just kill these characters off-hand. If the PCs put them in danger, they can die as a consequence, but not otherwise. That's how I interpreted the ally tag, anyway.
However, later on, the two of us (PCs only) have been captured by Parcher. I'm trying to set up my Eye on the Door move through some elaborate fiction, while Mule threatens Parcher with the retribution of my boss Cobra. So, in this case, if he rolls a 12+, Parcher becomes an ally? This dude who wants to poison us becomes an ally because dude threatens him with somebody else's wrath? I don't see it, in this case.
These are what Vincent's comments made me think of. I'd call them overplayed. The NPCs becoming allies in each of these situations doesn't feel right because rolling to manipulate in each case was inappropriate (in my opinion).
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Daniel, the rules haven't changed. You still can get 12+ results only if youve advanced the move, which you can only do as an ungiven future improvement.
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In our local games, we've had profound, game-shaking results from some 12+ hits.
We've also had cool, but totally normal results from some 12+ hits.
Guess which one gets talked about more?
I think you're right about "overplayed," Vincent. But! Even so, I am still crazy, because I really like one advanced move per improvement. :) I also really like the sound of "once advanced, advanced for all," though. That's REALLY interesting.
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Daniel, the rules haven't changed. You still can get 12+ results only if youve advanced the move, which you can only do as an ungiven future improvement.
Well, the access to the effect may not have changed, but its cost has gone down in terms of advances and most importantly the control over the effect's target has obviously changed dramatically.
Are you saying that you don't think there's an important difference between 'you can choose one NPC to become your ally, and nobody else ever becomes your ally' and 'sometimes when you are manipulating an NPC they will become your ally, and so your primary means of control over who might become an ally is the frequency with which you manipulate them'? I mean those seem very different to me -- and they felt very, very different in play. Both in terms of not being able to proactively choose AND in terms of having the choice made for me unexpectedly.
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What are you talking about? The cost has gone down since when? From what to what?
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What are you talking about? The cost has gone down since when? From what to what?
I think he's saying that in the playtest rules a PC had to spend an ungiven future advance to get a single ally, while now they can spend an ungiven future advance to advance Manipulate and get as many allies as they want to roll for.
So, in essence, the "cost", in ungiven future advances, has gone "down".
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Yeah, Daniel's under the impression that the original rule was: "Spend an advance, pick an NPC, they become an ally," and he's been pining after it ever since that first game.
I remember discussing this, way back when, but it's not actually in the playtest rules we used (not that I bothered to read that section when I was running it or anything).
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If that was a playtest rule, it was a short-lived one! I don't remember it.
I'm pretty sure that you guys should just write the custom move you want and go forward with happy hearts!
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I remember discussing this, way back when, but it's not actually in the playtest rules we used (not that I bothered to read that section when I was running it or anything).
Oh weird. I am going to have to review the rules we were playing from to see where I got that impression, in that case. Because I really don't think that's something I would have made up out of thin air -- but then again, you never know!
But yeah, as soon as I can think of another thing for the 12+ manipulate to do, I will be 'reverting' (to the imaginary rules in my head, maybe!) future games.