Barf Forth Apocalyptica

barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: k2i3n4g5 on August 27, 2016, 12:24:01 AM

Title: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: k2i3n4g5 on August 27, 2016, 12:24:01 AM
So my question is fairly simple, is there a limit set on how many +1 forward and +1 ongoing you can get? I don't remember reading it or not but I assume if you already have a +1 Forward and a +1 Ongoing then you can not stake anymore bonuses right?
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Ebok on August 27, 2016, 12:37:50 AM
I've always played it:

Two, +1 Forwards, is +1 Forward. Perhaps, and depending on the circumstances, a subsequent +1 Forward, but often not. +1 Ongoing does not stack with +1 Forward, it hardly needs to. It'll be there time and again on whatever path that is. Two +1 Forwards/Ongoing will counter a -1 Forward, and still provide the +1 Forward imho.

Aid Another Stacks with this, but not with another instance of aid another.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on August 27, 2016, 01:11:27 AM
I don't have a page reference for this at the moment, but my recollection is that bonuses from different sources stack, but you can only get one bonus at a time from any one source. E.g. if the Gunlugger has sex and then is Aided, he gets +2. But if he has sex twice in a row, he only gets +1. If you can find a way to make a whole bunch of +1 forwards apply, then you deserve the full bonus. (And since forwards and ongoings rarely come from the same source, they also stack with each other.)

EDIT: From what I could find on a cursory skim, the rules just say, "+1... forward just means you add 1... to your very next roll." That's it, no complicated rules about when that does or doesn't apply needed. In almost all cases, if you're getting multiple overlapping effects, then you're putting in effort to get that and probably giving up something else or putting yourself in increased danger in exchange anyway.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Daniel Wood on August 27, 2016, 07:24:52 AM

I don't see why they wouldn't stack, honestly. If this actually happening often enough that it feels problematic, you are probably not using the core playbooks?

I mean, most things that give you +1 forward require you to roll. This provides a fairly straightforward check on how many +1 forwards you are likely to have going at the same time. And very few circumstances give +1 ongoing, so again that seems like a pretty marginal concern. If a PC somehow had more than one +1 ongoing, I would expect them to very quickly resolve whatever the situation was that was giving them the bonus in the first place, because they're going to be kicking ass pretty hard for as long as it lasts.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Ebok on August 27, 2016, 09:21:13 PM
Different play styles. The reason I dont have them stack in my game is that distracts a couple of my players. They are drawn into playing for the numbers rather then story, and a simple solution was just to flatten out the numbers, and let the story take charge. Everyone has a better time because of it. It's not like the people with really high rolls fail all that often at what they're good at anyway.

We collectively decided that no roll should get enough bonuses to make failure impossible.

With different people, things will work differently.


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Also it is extremely easy to get bonuses from different sources. Get the +1 ongoing by asking someone with the give me directions move, if you know they're on board anyway, no risk there. Use the battle babes +2 forward from a read a sitch, whose forwards applies to the objectives there. And get the original guy who was calling the shots to help out (or anyone else really), and you're looking at a +4 more to any roll. At +5 (so any stat at least at +1) you're immune to misses. You cannot fail.

You had to make one extra move to get it, which you will have made anyway. So you've taken no additional risks, you can do this (almost) for every single thing, and if you've got a +3 stat to begin with, you have to roll snake-eyes just to get a partial. Gamey as fuck, easy as pie.

We concluded that this was not desirable behavior.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on August 27, 2016, 10:51:16 PM
Well alright, you can hack it however you want, but if someone asks a rules question, it's probably safe to assume they want to know the way it works in the actual rules.

Also, yeah, it's technically possible to stack bonuses really high, but that's a pretty specific scenario you've described. It requires being the Battlebabe, taking action premeditated enough that you can go to the Savvyhead for advice ahead of time, and then they have to succeed on Read a Sitch, and the MC has to give answers compatible with the Savvyhead's plan (which should almost never happen), and someone has to successfully help you. If they get all that to line up right, I'm happy to give them a roll they can't fail. Especially since they still run the risk of getting additional complications on a partial success, and then they've burned through their huge bonus and are just back to their regular stats for the followup. If that's happening often, the GM isn't pushing hard enough. 

EDIT: If we're talking hacks, wouldn't it be simpler to just say that snake-eyes is always a failure and boxcars is always a total success, regardless of modifiers? That's how I'd do it if I didn't want to ever allow a failureless roll.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Ebok on August 28, 2016, 01:44:41 PM
It doesn't explicitly state it either way, and being a rules question, there's no harm in hearing how multiple people successfully handle it.

As for your suggestion, we considered auto-fail auto-success, but it was meh. The other way added more risk of failure more often (risk = excitement ) with less incentive to try to game the thing, which was the whole point.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Ell975 on August 28, 2016, 06:31:59 PM
Well alright, you can hack it however you want, but if someone asks a rules question, it's probably safe to assume they want to know the way it works in the actual rules.

I think that's an unhelpful way of looking at it. A game's rules are only worth following if it will lead to a better game than if you hadn't followed them, and the only way to determine that is to discuss and analyse the rules and possible alternatives. Game writers make mistakes too, though admittedly most Apocalypse World rules seem to have some pretty clever design behind them.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Simon JB on September 04, 2016, 03:07:21 PM
I have this question right in front of me right now, so, happy for the thread!

I'm a hocus, with insight in this session. My followers say, we should raid this village, but they might have guards, so we should send scouts forward to check the sitch, and poison their water before moving in to slaughter the ones not poisoned.

My read on this is that I'll have the insight bonus on typically three moves: read a sitch first, and then going aggro with poison, and then seize by force to kill and raid the village. It's not a long shot to assume I'll be in a sitch where I'll have +1 from both insight and the read move.

How do you think it should be handled, stacked or not stacked?

Personally, I'm leaning towards stacked, up to max +3 to any dice roll, because there is nothing in the game's logic that says I shouldn't get is, as far as I can see. But what do you think?
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on September 04, 2016, 04:43:48 PM
I still say stacked as high as they can go. No part of the game says they can't be, and if you put in the work and get the successes necessary, you deserve the rewards. The text of the game is clear: if you get +1 forward, you get +1 to your next roll. Also, your MC will ideally give you conflicting advice from Insight and Read A Sitch--things shouldn't be exactly as they seemed to your followers beforehand.

(Though I'm not sure I'd agree with the moves you expect to roll. Unless you're one of the scouts, I don't think you get to roll Read A Sitch through them, and I'm not sure I'd call for Go Aggro as the move when poisoning a water supply.)
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Simon JB on September 04, 2016, 04:46:19 PM
I still say stacked as high as they can go. No part of the game says they can't be, and if you put in the work and get the successes necessary, you deserve the rewards. The text of the game is clear: if you get +1 forward, you get +1 to your next roll. Also, your MC will ideally give you conflicting advice from Insight and Read A Sitch--things shouldn't be exactly as they seemed to your followers beforehand.

Thanks!

Quote
(Though I'm not sure I'd agree with the moves you expect to roll. Unless you're one of the scouts, I don't think you get to roll Read A Sitch through them, and I'm not sure I'd call for Go Aggro as the move when poisoning a water supply.)

No? Cool. How would you do it? (I'm the player in this case, so it'll be my MC's call anyway, but I'm curious!)

To me it looks quite clear, and in line with sending your gang to burn down the next holding, rolling seize by force without being personally present.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on September 04, 2016, 05:35:57 PM
My instinct is that if you're just telling your people to go do something, then they (probably) go try to do it, and succeed or fail at the MC's discretion, same as any other NPC thing. I think using your gang as a weapon for violence moves is the exception here, not the rule. (Per the 2e final preview, "When you have a gang, you can sucker someone, go aggro on them, or make a battle move, using your gang as a weapon." Nothing about any other move.) If you send some scouts, they'll come back and give you a report on what they saw (at which point you can ask your followers for updated advice), but I don't think the rules support you Reading A Sitch through them.

Go Aggro by poisoning, either directly or through a gang, feels a little off to me. I think I'd be inclined to make the part where you get to the water supply the interesting part, if you were doing it yourself, which would probably entail Doing Something Under Fire. Then once you get there, you just dump the poison in and the effects of that play out predictably and fictionally. If you're sending a gang off to do it for you, then that just happens off-screen. But I think an argument can definitely made that you'd be Suckering Someone (with a chance to miss) by doing this, so this one is more of a personal interpretation thing than a rules thing.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Simon JB on September 04, 2016, 05:41:44 PM
Hm, that's interesting. To me, a character reading a situation by having people go and check is a given, but I'll think about it some more (and happily hear more opinions on it!). Thanks!
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on September 04, 2016, 05:58:37 PM
To me, Read A Sitch would be for when you want to go check it out for yourself. Otherwise you're always acting on second-hand intel, and you have to trust that your scouts noticed all the important things, and that what they thought was important was the same stuff you'd find important, and that their report was 100% accurate. Unless there's some Weirdness that lets you literally see through their eyes or something, I'd definitely say they just go, come back (probably), and give you a report.

I'm pretty confident the rules support my interpretation, but they may also support yours--this may just be a playstyle and interpretation thing, rather than a strict rules issue.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Ebok on September 04, 2016, 06:25:43 PM
I concur with JustusGS regarding the moves and the followers (if not the stacking).
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Daniel Wood on September 05, 2016, 06:47:56 AM
Otherwise you're always acting on second-hand intel, and you have to trust that your scouts noticed all the important things, and that what they thought was important was the same stuff you'd find important, and that their report was 100% accurate.

Well that's why you roll, right?

The fictional resources you are bringing to bear on a Read a Situation are relevant to the sort of answers you get -- but a gang is a pretty obvious resource that a PC might make use of when describing HOW they read a situation, much in the same way they might describe their character keeping their ear to the ground at the local watering hole, or drawing on their knowledge of the local political scene. Whether these resources are sufficient to Read the Sitch or not is up to the MC, the scope of the current action, and the situation in question. But 'I am literally in a specific physical place' is only at issue for a particular subset of situations -- this isn't Read a Person, where the Person has to be right there in front of you.


Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Simon JB on September 05, 2016, 07:39:06 AM
My first few years with AW, I used to read the moves as requiring direct action on the player character's part. Sure, I read that you can go aggro or seize by force using your gang as a weapon, but I took it as a requirement that the character was physically present anyway, where the gang-as-weapon mainly affected harm inflicted and other consequences of the move.

When I realized that you could read a situation by, as Daniel Wood puts it, keeping your ear to the ground or drawing on your knowledge of the political landscape, that made the play immediately more fun. The PCs' moves are what drives play, after all, and running everything that is out of the PCs' immediate sight by MC fiat is, to me, a wasted opportunity.

If being physically present is required generally when you make your moves, what's the difference between a hardholder and a gunlugger and how they play, apart from one inflicting damage by gang and one by machine gun? I mean, apart from obvious stuff like the fictional circumstances around them and such. Since the playbooks aren't just about stat numbers and fictional resources, but primarily how they interact with the world around them, of course a hardholder, a gunlugger and a savvyhead would actually read situations in different ways, sometimes by keeping their ears to the ground, sometimes by taking a quick look out of cover in a firefight.

Take the glorious Maestro D' in Deadwood, Al Swearengen, for example. He constantly reads situations, and does all kinds of moves, by sending people out to do his bidding then watching their return with the results from his balcony, with a cup of coffee in his hand. That's cool!
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: JustusGS on September 05, 2016, 02:04:45 PM
I just wrote and deleted a pretty long post where I started out disagreeing, then talked myself around in a circle to a point where I pretty much agree with you. Of course you can Read A Sitch by aggregating various scouting reports with your own tactical understanding, and so of course you can say "I send out some Scouts, then use their reports to figure out what's really going on" and trigger RAS.

I think the important thing is that this does require direct, but not necessarily physical action by the PC. Sending out scouts and listening to their reports is not enough to trigger the move--the important thing is combining it with your own knowledge, intuition, and experience.

EDIT: So, to bring it back to the original example that spawned this discussion, sending people out, having them check out the situation, and then running in and poisoning the water when they see an opportunity would not trigger RAS, since the PC doesn't enter into it at any point. Sending people out, having them check it out, then report back to you would trigger RAS as you used the new info to reformulate your plans.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: Simon JB on September 05, 2016, 04:25:42 PM
That's cool! I also agree completely about the character using her knowledge, intuition and experience to actually grasp the situation. It is her making the move, after all! Only with scouts taking the function of her own eyes and ears in different situations.
Title: Re: Question's about +1 Forward and +1 Ongoing
Post by: onrigato on September 12, 2016, 08:07:59 PM
Vincent's intention was that all the modifiers are cumulative (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=643.msg5656#msg5656).