Barf Forth Apocalyptica

barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: Simon JB on April 15, 2016, 05:20:55 AM

Title: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 15, 2016, 05:20:55 AM
It's been a while since I actually played AW, and I think I've figured out why. While the explosive chaos that the game breeds is fun, I started missing something... calmer, for lack of a better word.

I mean a sense of a more living world, a more functioning society, more stable relations. It can still be full of scarcity and conflict, of course, and apocalyptica, but I long for playing in a world that has some basic stability, which can then be ruptured and brought into crisis, if that's where the game takes us. I just want a change from the gasoline stinking, chainsaw whipping, free-for-all that the game always seems to pull towards.

(Yes, I know there are other games, and I've revisited Solar System for a while, but then I started to miss AW's rules even more! :) )

I can't really see anything in the hard rules that means the world has to burn by the third session, or that your old lieutenants must try to cut your heart out with a chainsaw by the second, but somehow that's what always seems to happen.

One thing I just read, that got me thinking, was a comment about the PCs' gangs and stuff as threats. I've always read that as very real threats against the PCs, and that made playing a leader much less fun for me (turning the hardholder's lieutenants against them is like taking away the driver's cars; fun at some point, but not immediately and constantly, is my feeling). But this comment pointed out that the gang might be a threat against the PCs' enemies, which, strangely, was a new way of thinking to me. But of course, just because they are dangerous and have an agenda doesn't mean that agenda needs to be opposed to the PC's!

Soooo, I wonder if anyone has any more tips on how to think, or thoughts on what makes a game of AW more explosive versus more stable (while still being interesting, but that goes without saying)?

Best,
Simon
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: noclue on April 15, 2016, 05:25:53 AM
Why does being a threat have to mean that they are turning against the PC? The worst threat is the loyal lieutenant who gets himself gut shot out in the field and looks to the OC for help, or the friend who comes to the PC for a favor, or the little kid who's hungry.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 15, 2016, 06:14:27 AM
Yeah, that's the question I'm grappling with at the moment! I'm surprised I haven't thought about it like this in the ten years since AW came out.

Then again, it's not that strange that PCs' gangs tend to become more of a problem than a resource pretty quickly. I mean, a player misses a basic move and the MC looks for a hard move to make and there it is, a big, juicy Threat on the home front, right next to the PC. So, the PC looks weak, and the hunting pack pounces on them. Some scarcity in the holding gets worse, and the sybarite gang starts plundering the population they are tasked with protecting. Another PC is an oddball, and the enforcer gang victimizes them. And so on.

It obviously doesn't have to get that way, that fast, but in my personal experience, it has been quite hard not to.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Rubberduck on April 15, 2016, 08:02:13 AM
Hmm.. I'm honestly not quite sure where I fall as an MC. I don't usually consciously play the gangs as threats. They just are what they are.

So the time I had a chopper, most of the gang was behind the boss, but there were these two guys who just weren't satisfied with his way of leading the gang. So when he failed his Pack Alpha, they'd act up. Not physically attack him, but complain soft moves to turn the others against him. He could have killed them, easily, but that just never ended up happening.

For hardholders, the gangs generally seem to be even more on his side. It is just that they are also acting according to their nature (which he basically chose when building his hold). So savage gangs will abuse the civilian population, and a disciplined gang will rigidly enforce the discipline and the law, and those can cause problems, even if they think they are just doing what their hardholder expects of them. And don't get me started on the trouble Hocus followers usually get into (due to the choices the Hocus made when creating them).

But even with the trouble, the leader types usually manage to maintain something approaching status quo. They just need to put the effort in.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 15, 2016, 10:23:15 AM
Rubberduck, that sounds like a nice level of fuckery. Thanks for pitching in!
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Borogove on April 15, 2016, 02:33:01 PM
The first AW game I MC'd, one of my failings was in keeping the players' home base too stable. There were big external threats, and some internal problems, but the internal problems weren't big enough to threaten the status quo (which was a NPC hardholder without much ambition, running a fairly safe little town in the middle of nowhere).

Things happened, and the players had fun, but the home front was just a little too quiet for my taste.

If that's what you want, it's easy to get. If your home-front NPCs are basically satisfied with the status quo, and the walls are strong enough that the first incursions from external threats can't blow them down like the Big Bad Wolf, so the players have a chance to respond, then things will only go to shit in two ways: one, if the players don't respond to the external threat, two, the players become the internal threat. Either way, it's pretty much on them, right?

So just don't give the home front NPCs big ambitions. NPC hardholder would like the PCs to find out who chucked a satchel charge over the wall and blew up the fuel depot last night, and beyond that, leave her alone to run the distillery. One of her lieutenants has a grudge against the PC Hocus, but honestly nobody really likes the guy and no one's gonna weep when a flare gun goes off in his mouth. PC Gunlugger's stepson doesn't like him, but he's a good kid and isn't going to, like, go full Oedipus on him. Little stuff inside the walls. Bigger stuff outside.

Me, on the other hand, I learned I need to turn the home-front fuckery dial way, way up. I had it at like "3" before and I'm hoping to hit about "7" this time.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Paul T. on April 15, 2016, 05:14:12 PM
One good way to feel this out is to ask the players what their characters are scared of and worried about. Their answers will automatically set the "scope" of the trouble which is going on.

"I'm worried about that fucking hyena cult which is coming to kill us all in their armoured trucks!"

is a very different answer from:

"Oh, man, that little girl Newt's gotten herself involved with those kids again. I worry they're going to put bad ideas in her head; I need to watch over her."

I tend to lean to a calmer Apocalypse World, in general. I'd like my games to be more character drama and less Mad Max.

I even have more of a "survival"-based AW hack/version:

http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=5248.0 (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=5248.0)
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 16, 2016, 03:17:37 AM
Borogove, Paul, thanks!
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Ebok on April 16, 2016, 09:55:01 PM
I've seen the tempo of an AW game go a both ways, from a very calm drama to the typical hellfire and bullets. I find the reason that these stories tended to differ was in large part the expectations of the players and the MC about the game world and its parts. If everyone around the table assumes the world it a cutthroat wasteland, then it pretty much is going to be just that. However if those around the table are more interested in intrigue and drama, then the game can very easy fall into that zone. There are some design choices you can make concerning the game to help it preform better in the latter drama;

The biggest point I've found is cultivating the players expectations, and then supporting those expectations with experience rewards. The longer it takes to level up, and restrictions on how fast things can be obtained help to drastically calm the tempo of the game down. If experience is gained through other interactions, those interactions happen more frequently. It's just a matter of course that much of AW is about blasting holes in things, but things that push it in that direction are a relatively light weight number of rules. When you need to make a hard move, don't push it into violence, make violence even MORE deadly and expensive even for the toughest gang or badass out there. Give the violent people things they have to protect, things that cant survive without them. You'll find that when NPCs and Players have more to lose all around, they're less likely to throw their life away.

In one of my most violent games I actually turned the harm clock off completely and used some seriously brutal wound and recovery rules. A person got shot, and had to deal with the bullet wound for almost the rest of the campaign. Gangs members that died didn't get replenished, things that went wrong had few ways to recover. Everyone -- even the opposing forces within the same area had an undeniably greater sense of respect for life and thus the push and pull of power rarely reached up to those levels, and when it did, it was universally a character defining moment. Take this with a grain of salt however, because it is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. Make sure the pace of the world you wanna play in is shared by your players, and just come up amongst each other some ground rules about how to handle the escalation of conflict, experience, levels, or whatever rewards are out there.

AW is a fast paced game, so you get and lose things quickly too. Slowing experience is pretty much saying from the start, this is a longer game then normal, we'll play it more, and the things you'll gain through playing are less about the cool guns or bigger gangs on the sheets, and more about whatever elements of the story you collectively decide to pursue.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Paul T. on April 17, 2016, 01:12:13 AM
Good observations, Ebok.

Advancement and harm are both important "side effects" which must be considered in the scope of events of Apocalypse World. How you handle harm helps set the "negative" end of the spectrum: how cautious are characters being, and is reckless violence generally rewarded, or does it tend to have long-term consequences?

I had my own take on this in my rules for "visceral, descriptive harm":

http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/17665/apocalypse-world-a-more-descriptive-visceral-approach-to-harm (http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/17665/apocalypse-world-a-more-descriptive-visceral-approach-to-harm)

In play, they very much had this feature: making the players take a little more time with everything and consider their moves carefully. Learn more about their opponents before striking, look for peaceful solutions: all things which lend themselves to fleshing out the world and its character.

Advancement is even more important; no matter how down-to-earth and slow-paced a game of AW is, advancement throws the PCs into escalating situations and escalating stakes, overcoming smaller Fronts and dealing with larger-scale problems. If you have an improvement coming every session, that puts an upper limit on the length and scope of your campaign.

I haven't seen any effective hacks/mods for slowing down advancement, but I suppose simply increasing the number of xp necessary for an advance may be all that's needed. I would try it with the rules as written first, however.

(Here's an idea, though: instead of marking xp every time you roll a highlighted move, you just get to mark xp if you rolled that stat in the session. Also places a higher onus on increasing/tracking Hx, which may be conducive to a more "introspective" apocalypse, as well.)
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Borogove on April 17, 2016, 10:28:32 AM
(Here's an idea, though: instead of marking xp every time you roll a highlighted move, you just get to mark xp if you rolled that stat in the session.)

In between that and the rules-as-written, there's the Monsterhearts rule: maximum one XP per highlighted stat per scene, so the Hards can't just Aggro a bunch of mooks one after the other to advance.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Natalie on April 18, 2016, 05:57:49 PM
I like to bring up my long-standing beef with how gonzo the maelstrom often turns out. I solved it the last two times by describing hat usually happens, saying that I don't like it or at least would like to try something more grounded, and checking the groups reactions. They seemed to agree, or at least not having much stake in the whole thing so accepting that we play a more grounded maelstrom. And then we did.

I think the same thing is possible here. Start out the first session, before even picking playbooks, by describing as you did in the OP what it is you are growing tired of. Chances are your group will be able to work with you to keep things grounded; to play their characters as realer people (or rather, as people who are closer to real modern-day sensible people, rather then real 50-years-after-the-apocalypse people in that they respond to anything with violence); to keep their maelstrom conspiracies slow-cooking.

I didn't read the thread very carefully but I saw people were talking about slowing down the rate of XP. If that's something you think help, then I can personally attest for the "if you've shown your [highlighted stat side] this session, mark xp" approach. It works like a charm for us, and a highlight becomes an incentive more to generally "try approaching things with this in mind", rather than "find a scene where you can roll this stat as many times as possible". We mark twice for each highlight fulfilled at the end of session, but you could bring it down to only once if you really wanted a slow-burning game.

As an MC, allow yourself to sometimes respond with... I don't want to say a boring move, but something that brings more of a feeling of slow creeping dread and hopelessness, rather than in-your-face "that's gotta hurt" or panic. Moves snowball, sure, but sometimes the urge to keep moves snowballing means escalating up to violence every time, and suddenly your holding is in flames even though it's just the third session. Eschew the "when in doubt, ninjas attack", don't escalate the situation. Have a failed roll sometimes mean they spend the entire day wasting their efforts on a dead end approach, and they return to the holding late at night after they've run out of food and water. Cut to the next day. That's not really a snowball, but it can be very effective at conveying that sometimes, life just moves on, except you're in a slightly worse position than you were yesterday, you can't keep this up forever, what do you do today? Obviously, only sometimes. You'd pretty quick get into making the characters' lives boring if every failed roll was met with hopelessness and attrition.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 19, 2016, 05:29:45 AM
Very helpful thoughts, everybody, thanks a lot!

Jonatan, those pieces of advice especially are spot on for me, thanks!
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Ebok on April 19, 2016, 07:13:55 AM
When a sitch gets difficult and the dice come out, think about what's at stake here. If it's not life and death, then pick another one. You can think back to less violent movies if you like, or build up the approaching harm like a suspense film. However, depending on your player's preferred styles, maybe the stakes are a relationship. Maybe they dictate something about tomorrow. If a move doesn't have stakes it wont be worth rolling, and if the players don't care, then it's also not worth rolling. The potential success should have some sort of balance with the potential loss. I'd give more examples, but these sorts of situations really do come down the players and the individual story, as subtle things are far more important. I'd suggest ramping up tensions between personalities, and let missed movies decide alliances even if temporary. Then again in my games, when this happens, the players always start to pick different sides to join and then the tensions sort of happen naturally. They dont wanna just blow each other away, but threats abound.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: nweismuller on April 20, 2016, 06:58:40 AM
Jonatan- out of curiousity, what has happened the last two times with your more-grounded maelstrom?  I'd be interested to see what solutions came up for people seeking a more grounded experience.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Natalie on April 21, 2016, 09:37:05 AM
I'm actually starting to question what I meant by "the last two times". I have three games that might apply, but one of them was Dream Askew, and one was AW:Fallen Empires.

Last time I played AW, I did exactly what I describe. It was a group where one of the players had played with me several times before, two were new to AW, and one new to roleplaying in general. I talked a bit about the maelstrom: what it's defined to be, what it can possibly turn out to be, highlighting the high variance both in terms of behaviour (does it only ever allow people to gain information, or does it take over people's actions, manifest physically etc) and possible explanations (can it be explained as a "collective unconscious", a field generated by alien psychic satellites, is it practically magic). I stressed that we need not ever decide on a plausible explanation during the game, and if we do we need not reveal it, but I brought up the point that in different games, the maelstrom varies along that axis of explicability.

I also said that despite what I said about my preferences, I would obviously be a fan of any Brainer or Hocus, and allow them the full results of using the maelstrom to further their agenda; I wouldn't want to cripple them in the interest of grounding the maelstrom.

At least one player was still eyeing the Brainer for a long time, but in the end they chose the Maestro D', Angel, Battlebabe and Savvyhead.

Some of them opened their brains at various times – I don't remember very well now. I did the usual thing of asking what it was like for them, and it sort of coalesced into visions and sounds. I did remind them that different people are allowed to experience the maelstrom differently, that's why I ask every character the first time they do it – but they ended up using pretty similar descriptions. This might have been a consequence of wanting to keep it grounded; I guess it feels more gonzo to claim that it's the same thing but it's perceived completely different for different people.

Now, I did decide after about a session what I wanted the maelstrom to be, and kept it in the background until I had sort of given the players a few chances to provide input that might disrupt it. When they didn't, I started treating it as my prep, in the sense that I say what my prep demands. The idea was one that had been kicking about in my mind for a while, namely on wireless computer-to-brain interfaces. I imagined that in the Golden Age, the technology that today only allows a human with electrodes on their head to controla computer, eventually grew wireless, and then bridged the gap in the other direction, so a computer could induce sensory stimuli in the human brain. When this technology had become ubiquitous (a mind-router in every home), some sort of virus or cyber-attack catalysed the end of the world (details unknown).

The Savvyhead found one of these mind-routers, without knowing what it was, and most of her workspacing ended up centering around that. She took Augury pretty quickly. An old woman showed up, drawn to the signals. She was addicted to the higher level of being she had had as a cyborg, so she felt crippled trapped in her human-baseline senses. Long story short, the town distrusted the mind-machine and rallied in a lynch mob to take it from the Savvyhead and destroy it. This was sort of the "Savvyhead's subplot", while the other three were more involved in the snow scooter raiders threatening the town. After the raiders had been taken care of, we spent the last session wrapping up the mind-machine plot.

The mind-machine had every potential for making the Savvyhead Charles Xavier, and turning the game into X-Men. By discussing our preferences beforehand, we all pulled in the same direction, which was that the maelstrom should be mystical, weird, but on the purely physical plain I guess non-impressive. If the correct reaction to the maelstrom had been "oh my god this changes everything we know about the world, and if I can harness this I will rule the wasteland", well, then the game pretty quickly turns into that. I like the maelstrom, but I don't want the premise of every AW game to be "the world's gone to shit, but there's this maelstrom that has the potential to change everything – who will control it?" That's a cool game, but sometimes I want "the world's gone to shit, you're playing the coolest people around, can you make something that will last?" In the same way that we can have a Chopper with really cool bikes without having the entire game revolve around who gets the bikes, I want the maelstrom to be part of the setting without being the most important resource in the world.

It was an important element to our game and narrative, don't get me wrong. The story of the old woman who wanted her old computer-augmented life back, and the Savvyhead eager to help and curious to understand, was a quite gripping tale, pushing the same buttons for me as e.g. Ghost in the Shell.

I don't know how well my solution generalises. The end result, the exact maelstrom we got, was pretty much the product of my own mind; it was apocalyptica that I dreamed up but waited a few sessions before inflicting on the game.

What actually happens when you do "the talk" beforehand like I did, I think, is that you limit the players' view of their choices. Without it, someone might open their brain, experience it as an alternative dimension, fine. Then next time, they ask "can I bring someone else into that dimension?" The next time, "I open my brain and try to find person X". The next time, "I want to open my brain, and when I'm in the maelstrom, I want to focus my entire being on hurting person X". And so on. And before you know it, superpowers. It can be cool, but what I don't like is that the game sort of naturally gravitates towards it – mostly since it can never move in the other direction; you can never de-power the maelstrom during the game. It's a genie-bottle situation.



As I said, we had a Dream Askew game that was pretty similar, maelstrom-wise. I don't care to recall details, this post is long enough. We also played Fallen Empires, and we had a Mystic (Savvyhead) who talked to spirits. That maelstrom pretty quickly became a spirit phone – "sure, we'll just commune with spirit X!" but it was kept limited to that kind of communication, and more importantly, it was only available to the Mystic. In fact, it was the first time I felt that I really manages to make the Savvyhead cool – since "can I do X with magic" "sure! You just need X, Y and Z" is easier for me to use to encourage doing cool stuff, than the corresponding "can I do X with weird tech". I think I'm just not very good at thinking in terms of weird tech (I might be too grounded). But yeah, non-Mystic characters opening their brains kept it to passively listening to the spirits in their vicinity, sort of.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Paul T. on April 21, 2016, 02:21:11 PM
If you're forming your image of the maelstrom largely by interrogating the players, don't forget that you can ask leading questions, too.

-"I want to reach out to someone through the maelstrom!"

You:

-"Ok. Why is that dangerous?"
-"What weird thing does a person have to do to make themselves available to such 'reaching out'?"
-"Why is it that no one in your holding has tried to reach out to anyone in almost 30 years?"
-"You've heard that it's possible to reach out to people through maelstrom, a long time ago. Who was the weirdo who told you that, and when was the last time anyone saw him?"
Etc.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Munin on April 21, 2016, 02:30:11 PM
The last couple of games I've run have had vastly different takes on the maelstrom. In the most recent the players decided jointly beforehand that it would be consistent (i.e. basically the same to everybody) and further decided that it was "I see dead people." That's right, in this apocalypse, the ghosts of the departed (usually people you knew when they were alive) turn up occasionally, giving you insight and (sometimes) abuse. The Angel keeps flubbing the rolls every time she opens her brain, and as a result it has been established that the shade of her departed mentor (whom she was unable to save) consistently gives her crap for being his worst student. We've interpreted her awful rolls to mean that mostly he just shows up at inopportune times and provides distracting criticism.

This interpretation of the maelstrom provides for some great RP interactions, but in no way is it anything like the maelstrom is taking over or a massive source of power or "changes everything" or whatever. It just is what it is and everyone just sort of copes with the ramifications of not being able to get away from dead people.

In the first campaign I ran, the maelstrom ended up having something to do with space/time. When the first couple of players opened their brains, they both described it as "seeing where I am, only in 'the time before,'" or "a brief flash into the future," or some variant thereof. As the game went on, this aspect became a more central part of the game. And when the Hoarder totally blew a roll and ended up skipping three days forward in time (he kept waiting for his "flash into the future" to end, and that kept not happening), things got really fun. Or when the Battlebabe saw something from "the time before" that was a winter scene, and immediately afterwards noticed that there was melting snow on her boots.

It also produced the perfectly pertinent quip by an NPC in conversation of which I am most proud:

PC: "So tell me about your theories on temporal distortion."
NPC: "I already have."
PC: "...."
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Daniel Wood on April 22, 2016, 02:03:01 AM
What actually happens when you do "the talk" beforehand like I did, I think, is that you limit the players' view of their choices.

This is true to my experience as well. I find it much more effective as the MC -- or even as a player, if my character has strong Maelstrom-feelings -- to simply bring the things I want to the table, and bounce them off the players. Like, you're the MC, the players can talk about doing insane shit in the Maelstrom all they want, but that's not actually remotely under their authority -- the Open Your Brain move is pretty explicit about the results on a hit, and none of them include blowing someone up with your hatred or whatever. It's an informational move that is like 95% colour. The colour part is incredibly great and important, but there are other moves for psychically doing harm, and if someone wants to do truly crazy Maelstrom shit that's what Augury is for, generally speaking.

I do think that there is a useful version of 'the talk', though --  but the trick is to have the talk ABOUT the colour, not really about what the Maelstrom does or is. You need to have the talk in the same kind of language that you use to MC someone Opening Your Brain. For example, I have found it quite effective, for initial AW setting building in general, to use word maps and free association among players -- have players put forward single words or concepts or impressions or images that they imagine being part of the Maelstrom, and maybe do a bit of building on some of them (or save that for the game, if they are vibrant enough on their own.) Things like 'empty' or 'a railroad track extending endlessly into the horizon' or 'like a Dali painting' or 'cold' or 'friendly' or whatever are, in my experience, massively more constructive -- and far less likely to produce this limiting effect -- than trying to pin down 'can the Maelstrom give you information' or 'is the Maelstrom an alternate dimension' or whatever. Getting some player input on the _feel_ of the Maelstrom will inevitably also constrain what the Maelstrom turns out to practically be -- but it won't lock down any of that right off the bat, it will just provide a narrower set of starting points for the players.

Another approach, slightly more likely to end up focused towards the 'what is it/what can it do', would be to borrow a tool from Microscope and make a list of things the Maelstrom definitely WON'T include. So if a player is bored of the Maelstrom always turning out to be another dimension they can just put 'no 'going into' the Maelstrom' or 'not an alternate dimension' or whatever on the list -- or 'no mind control' or 'not technological' or whatever. Obviously this is likely to be more effective for groups that have played the game before, but even a slightly miss-aimed veto is still going to tell you something about the player's preference.

Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Irminsul on April 22, 2016, 02:07:18 PM
the players can talk about doing insane shit in the Maelstrom all they want, but that's not actually remotely under their authority

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I was starting to roll my eyes at some of the circle jerking going on. Apocalypse World is very explicitly specific on the roles of players and MC.
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Paul T. on April 22, 2016, 02:53:40 PM
Those last couple of posts are fantastic! Agreed in full.

(Also, treating the maelstrom more strictly will probably play nicely into the topic: "a calmer apocalypse"...)
Title: Re: A calmer apocalypse?
Post by: Simon JB on April 26, 2016, 06:12:46 PM
Those last couple of posts are fantastic! Agreed in full.

(Also, treating the maelstrom more strictly will probably play nicely into the topic: "a calmer apocalypse"...)

Oh yes, I agree completely! (About both points!)