Barf Forth Apocalyptica
barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: Philomorph on July 29, 2011, 07:45:33 PM
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How often do you guys start a game with no hardhold in play?
How often do you end up going for multiple sessions without one?
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I have this idea in mind for a campaign where the PCs are on the run from something1, and the entire thing would take place as one big chase, and also with scenes in the places they pass through. Think 'The Gunslinger'; desolate, desperate, and pursued. Anyway, I've been wondering the same thing. I mean, sure, they would be passing through holds, they might even stop a while to help out (or get waylaid) in one, but by and large the campaign would not be taking place in a hardhold. Questions that I have been asking myself are things like, How do you play the Hardholder?, Or the Maestro D'?, Does this type of campaign devalue the Operator? How about the Skinner? The Savvyhead with no workshop? Is another character necessary (something like a scout. does the driver fill this role? how does the chase change if you have a driver or a chopper?), If one character has a gang or followers, all of a sudden the dynamic changes. You're no longer some people on the run, you're a village on the run.
It's interesting to think that the hardhold, as peripheral as it may seem to the core seed content (or maybe not to you?) may actually be an intrinsic part of Apocalypse World as written. In this case, how heavily do we need to hack it in order to run the holdless game?
I have some possible answers to these questions, but I'm curious to see some other people weigh in first.
1I'm not sure what it is that will be chasing them yet. I've toyed with two ideas mainly. The first is that whatever the Apocalypse was, it's still happening, and they're trying to escape it's swath of destruction. The second is more about people (or a person) chasing them, which I feel adds a lot of potential for backstory and PC-NPC relationships.
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I'll be mcing my first game tomorrow, and i've purposely left out the hardholder from the stack of characters. The only thing i know so far about the setting is that the characters start in a small northern california town that's mostly deserted and near a forest that's currently on fire.
I am excited to see where they go from there, and i'm sure they'll find holds along the way. But you raise some good points. I suspect one of the players will be drawn to the savvyhead, so we'll see what happens workspace-wise.
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Some AP on this would be hot. I'm excited to hear how it goes.
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Always, and ... forever?
I don't think anyone's ever been a Hardholder in any of my games. There are ruins, underground bunkers, desert tribes and fisherfolk that all could have been hardholds had we'd have had a Hardholder but without they're just fiction and Fronts.
No one seems all that interested in the Hardholder; lots of Maestro d's, Hocuses and Operators but I can't recall a single Hardholder.
Or are you asking about traveling play?
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I'm just trying to get a feel for how people have handled games where no one is playing a hardholder and they didn't start in an NPC controlled hold.
Mine won't have one to start, so I'll get to see what the characters do to find some semblance of safety. That doesn't mean they won't ever find a hold to call home, we'll have to wait and see :)
Thanks for the feedback!
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Well, the game I MCed never really had any of the characters being part of a holding. There were some out there, but they were always external groups that the PCs were pushing against.
At the beginning, the characters were tied together by the Savvyhead. They all lived/worked at the workshop. This place was a neutral zone, that everyone nearby visited now and then.
The game went through to a natural end, maybe 15-20 sessions, with nobody being a hardholder. The savvyhead eventually retired, and our skinner took the place over as she became a maestro'd, so the workshop became a bar and kept the same neutral status.
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based on a game i've played with a hold and one without
the hold is no good
it's just a lot of little house on the prairie homework business that don't really get across the whole 'life here in AW is cheap and terrible' vibe because everything is too safe.
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A couple weeks ago, I ran a 1st session where there is no holding. Instead, the Driver is leading a caravan to the Beach, or Santa Monica, where there is food aplenty, life is safe from harm, and its a paradise.
The caravan stops at each dinky town to put on a show by the Skinner and her backup dancers, who perform songs from the pre-Apocalypse classical group, the Spice Girls.
There is no real leaderahip, the caravan follows the Driver and the Skinner only because they seem to know where they are going, and a Dustbowl is slowly engulfing the land.
And there is a Brainer kid and and and old Hoarder to make everyone else seem normal.
I'm thinking Ron Moore's Carnivale, but everyone else wants Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
I made the mistake of not making their first town seem real enough; I was expecting them to pack up and leave so I didn't invest too much time to the town.
Also, I didn't push the scarcity involved with a holdless caravan; fuel, food, power, parts, and purpose.
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based on a game i've played with a hold and one without
the hold is no good
it's just a lot of little house on the prairie homework business that don't really get across the whole 'life here in AW is cheap and terrible' vibe because everything is too safe.
Being in a hold should be WAY more dangerous than being out of a hold. A hold is where the people are.....
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Being in a hold should be WAY more dangerous than being out of a hold. A hold is where the people are.....
Yeah, it really depends on your MC. I mean technically all NPCs are threats but, realistically, you kind of want to see this community grow and beat off the zombie threat, etc.
Shreyas, I don't see it as "Little Hold on the Prairie." Media analogues would be more like:
Game with a hold, semi-non-threatening NPCs = Road Warrior
Game with a hold, threatening NPCs = Deadwood
Game with no hold, semi-non-threatening NPCs = Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (1977)
Game with no hold, threatening NPCs = The Road
Depends really how you'd classify each of the above as "gritty."
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It's weird that Shreyas said that, because in our current game he's playing the de facto hardholder (A Maestro 'D who runs the traveling rave and who everyone works for), and he's basically got it way easier than any other hardholder I've seen because he doesn't have to do the scarcity roll at the beginning of every session.
So maybe it's not Little House On The Prairie because no one's sick and/or rioting and/or idle and/or whatever. It's easy mode.
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Our first session was last night, and it was interesting how the three players developed their little part of the world. I basically told them where they were (Yreka, a small town in Northern California), and that the nearby forest seemed to be on fire, although it wasn't close enough to see flames, only smoke.
The were playing a Savvyhead, a Driver, and a Quarantine. But as their situation unfolded, they described a town that was a little more well functioning than I'd expected. While there wasn't a proper "hold" in the walled-in moat around it sort of way, there is a nominal boss of the area (Hugo), who has a crew, and who people come to when they need something they can't get for themselves.
Since it's a fairly rural area, most everyone has their own little veggie patch, or raises chickens. There's a sort of farmer's market in the town center where people gather with carts of what they can scrape from the land to trade each other.
Gearshift, the PC driver, mostly runs deliveries for Hugo or anyone else that needs something sent or picked up. The savvyhead fixes stuff for people and travels into town with his mule-drawn cart and a portable tinker's setup to sharpen knives, clean guns, and do other things for jingle. If you've got a bigger job you'll find him in his workshop/house, which is a gutted 747 in the middle of his junkyard, which used to be an airplane graveyard, then an automobile graveyard, and now just a big patch of dirt with a lot of junk on it.
Anyway, so I don't give them a hold, and they sort of make one themselves. That's fine with me, because I have plans for that forest fire. This 1st session was definitely on "easy mode", which seemed appropriate. I promised them there'd be a bit more action next time.
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None can resist the dreaded Status Quo.
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It's weird that Shreyas said that, because in our current game he's playing the de facto hardholder (A Maestro 'D who runs the traveling rave and who everyone works for), and he's basically got it way easier than any other hardholder I've seen because he doesn't have to do the scarcity roll at the beginning of every session.
So maybe it's not Little House On The Prairie because no one's sick and/or rioting and/or idle and/or whatever. It's easy mode.
No. This is bad. The wealth roll isn't to create bad things; it's to limit the bad things to just one or two and that on a missed roll. Pseudo-holders without the wealth roll in my games? It's tooth and nail. Your people, they're hungry and diseased and savage and idle, all of these at all of the times that there are, and what do you do about it?
Hardholders, you may question their methods, but they're good at holding a community together. You, Maestro? You're no holder.
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No. This is bad. The wealth roll isn't to create bad things; it's to limit the bad things to just one or two and that on a missed roll. Pseudo-holders without the wealth roll in my games? It's tooth and nail. Your people, they're hungry and diseased and savage and idle, all of these at all of the times that there are, and what do you do about it?
This seems a bit harsh. The hardholder has all the responsibility because he also has all the wealth and power. That's why the move is called "wealth" and not "actual good government." The maestro's pretty well-off in general, but definitionally, they don't have the resources the hardholder has, because they don't have the power base, and so they don't have the problems maintaining that power base either. In our actual play, scarcity is a very real issue -- I don't think it's easy at all! The worst part about trying to deal with the rave is that there's no actual organization to get things done. (As Smith would say, obviously.)
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Here's my 2c: Obviously there are going to be different ways of things in different worlds we come up with.
But the demolition of the status quo seems intended to prevent the boredom that can so easily come from a bunch of competent, decent people living together.
If everyone is getting along and you mainly just have to worry about scarcity, then people may come together and resolve issues and everything stays hunky dory. But in Apocalypse World, that's not supposed to be the case.
If there isn't someone with the wealth AND power to keep things together (e.g. the hardholder) then no amount of communal good will and cooperation will overcome things like disease laden rats, idleness leading to fights, and external raiders.
My players in this new session seem to think that while "things are pretty tough", they aren't so tough that you can't go along to get along, as it were. But "live and let live" is not part of the new world order, and they will find that out pretty quickly.
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For my part it's the 'person who feels like it's their responsibility and right to keep shit together' that is the identifying characteristic of the hardholder, not their competence to do so.
Certainly Saffron's rave has shit that is always breaking down, half of her security bike gang doesn't actually have wheels, etc., but Saffron doesn't really give a crap about that because her job is not any of these:
- make sure that people have shit to eat*
- make sure people have shit to sleep on*
- make sure people have a place to shit*
It is only precisely to:
- Throw a good party, regularly and without incident
which is hard enough on its own. If that means I gotta poison one of my security guys using the poisoned greywine my maybe-girlfriend's wife gave me, then that's what I'm gonna do, because that dude's expendable, but if I can sell his bike for drugs, then it serves the party.
*: It is also these particular class of 'household needs' that makes hardholding feel like LHOTP to me
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At the beginning, the characters were tied together by the Savvyhead. They all lived/worked at the workshop. This place was a neutral zone, that everyone nearby visited now and then.
The game went through to a natural end, maybe 15-20 sessions, with nobody being a hardholder. The savvyhead eventually retired, and our skinner took the place over as she became a maestro'd, so the workshop became a bar and kept the same neutral status.
How much time would you say in "years" did this scenario take to unfold?
I'm just kind of curious what sort of time frame your story took to go from start to retirement.
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No. This is bad. The wealth roll isn't to create bad things; it's to limit the bad things to just one or two and that on a missed roll. Pseudo-holders without the wealth roll in my games? It's tooth and nail. Your people, they're hungry and diseased and savage and idle, all of these at all of the times that there are, and what do you do about it?
This seems a bit harsh.
I'm sorry it comes off like that, but that was the nice way to say it. Having a non-holder not get community problems like this:
So maybe it's not Little House On The Prairie because no one's sick and/or rioting and/or idle and/or whatever. It's easy mode.
...suggests is just bad. It suggests that wealth exists to create problems or punish bad rolls and I think it fulfills the exact opposite of that function.
I've heard the "moves are not competency" argument. I don't buy it. If I roll high on dice and good things happen and I roll low on dice and bad things happen, this pretty clearly touches on character skill. Is it more in the realm of effecting the "plot" directly at the narrative level. Eh. That's another discussion.
And all Apocalypse World characters are competent by default. There are other holders, but you're the Hardholder. And you're good at it.
I can't address the actual game, since I've not seen it, and I'm not trying to attack it or anything. I don't know anything about Saffron or what kinda problems she has. I can only address the post. But suggesting that people have enough to eat and are immune from sickness because a character who's nominally in charge does not have the wealth move is not sitting happy in my brain.
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The distinction here for me is responsibility. The Hardholder has responsibility to all the people in his hold, and is in turn rewarded for his efforts. This is all reflected in the wealth roll. The Maestro D', on the other hand, has absolutely no responsibility whatsoever to her patrons, and so gets nothing (explicitly, in the moves text) from them. It may be that one of your regulars brings you that thing for Fingers in every pie, but it's not explicit. Your patrons are not a part of your character. Your holding is.
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...suggesting that people have enough to eat and are immune from sickness because a character who's nominally in charge does not have the wealth move is not sitting happy in my brain.
This is sort of my feeling, although again, it depends on the kind of world you're running. If you want "Apocalypse lite" where the scarcity isn't causing everyone to constantly wonder where their next meal is coming from and whether tomorrow will bring plague or raiders, then that's what you've got.
In my post apocalyptic scenarios, you can have your PCs on the move, using what skills they have to fend off hunger and highwaymen. But a settlement's worth of people? If there isn't someone in charge, that's going to devolve very quickly.
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How much time would you say in "years" did this scenario take to unfold?
I'm just kind of curious what sort of time frame your story took to go from start to retirement.
I'm not sure actually. Events happened in bursts of activity of a few days, and a few times we elided time with "okay, so lets say it's about four weeks after the events of last session". The Savvyhead was right at the centre of the action, so he went through a lot of intense action (i.e. lots of rolling moves) in what was probably only a few months in game. The retirement was quite 'early', too. I think it was the second ungiven future advance chosen (after creating a second character), so in a sense it was a case of "I'm more interested in the new character now" as much as "this character's story has nowhere left to go".
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I can't address the actual game, since I've not seen it, and I'm not trying to attack it or anything. I don't know anything about Saffron or what kinda problems she has. I can only address the post. But suggesting that people have enough to eat and are immune from sickness because a character who's nominally in charge does not have the wealth move is not sitting happy in my brain.
1) I'm straight-up not sure what your goal is in this thread if it's not to say that we're not playing the game right!
2) I'm fascinated by you cutting out the bit of my post where I said that we do deal with issues of scarcity.
3) Nobody's suggesting that everybody is fat and happy. The point being made is that making sure people get enough to eat and don't get sick isn't actually anybody's problem. There probably are some people who are starving or diseased, but if they fall behind, they get left behind. We're a travelling rave! There are villages and places where people live, but we're not them.
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I can't address the actual game, since I've not seen it, and I'm not trying to attack it or anything. I don't know anything about Saffron or what kinda problems she has. I can only address the post. But suggesting that people have enough to eat and are immune from sickness because a character who's nominally in charge does not have the wealth move is not sitting happy in my brain.
1) I'm straight-up not sure what your goal is in this thread if it's not to say that we're not playing the game right!
2) I'm fascinated by you cutting out the bit of my post where I said that we do deal with issues of scarcity.
3) Nobody's suggesting that everybody is fat and happy. The point being made is that making sure people get enough to eat and don't get sick isn't actually anybody's problem. There probably are some people who are starving or diseased, but if they fall behind, they get left behind. We're a travelling rave! There are villages and places where people live, but we're not them.
:) Yeah, I don't know anything about your game. I didn't address the rest of your post because it didn't have anything to do with what I was saying. I wasn't sure what to do with it, man.
As far as nobody suggesting that everyone is fat and happy? I don't know if you and Elizabeth are in the same game, but she pretty clearly described it as "Easy Mode". I was just addressing the content of her post, where she said that if someone ran a hold without the move, no one was idle or sick or etc. Even her language of referring to it as the "scarcity roll" rather than the "wealth roll" was somewhat indicative of a particular mindset about the move.
This thread isn't particularly about a single game. It's about running a game without a hold or living in a hold without a holder. My posts address that. Just trying to help! I'm sure your game is awesome. :)
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I don't know if you and Elizabeth are in the same game, but she pretty clearly described it as "Easy Mode". I was just addressing the content of her post, where she said that if someone ran a hold without the move, no one was idle or sick or etc. Even her language of referring to it as the "scarcity roll" rather than the "wealth roll" was somewhat indicative of a particular mindset about the move.
Yeah, P and E and I are all talking about the same game.
She's just trolling me(:
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We had a game where the Hardholder quit. The player had to leave the game for personal reasons, and it dovetailed with the fiction moving the Hardholder out (retire to safety maybe?), so there we were, a Gunlugger, a Maestro'D, and an Operator, left to figure stuff out. A short while later, an Angel showed up as a second character. So it's not exactly a holdless scenario, but we did function without a hardholder for a whole bunch of sessions, until one of the other PCs stepped up.
Oh, and we just had the hardholder in our current game go off and find he'd become a Touchstone. So that's fun.
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I feel like I should be able to give a good answer to how not having a hard holder should be difficult, because I live in Eureka and work in an organization that has problems related to not having a hardholder.
Here's some problematic issues:
- Someone shows up. No one likes them, but no one is the person who has the responsibility to say 'dude, you need to leave'. So that new person is an asshole. And other people are unsure about what to do. Than another person jumps them with a knife. And some people think that's good, others think its bad. And than you have a community problem.
- Someone starts being addicted to drugs. And other people decide that that person is a waste of resources. And other people decide that by deciding that person is a waste of resources, you're being all judgemental, and hey, you're messed up on pain killers from that last mutant attack, so screw you mr.hypocrite.
Also you should add a move, When you you've run out of supplies after leaving Yreka, roll+weird. On a hit, you can find lodgings and food back in Yreka.