Barf Forth Apocalyptica
barf forth apocalyptica => Apocalypse World => Topic started by: Paul T. on January 15, 2017, 12:16:40 PM
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I have a question for anyone who has now had a chance to play both 1st and 2nd Edition AW.
A notable difference - at least to me - is the change in the "miss" clause for some important moves, like Seize by Force. In the 1st edition, it was a basic move, so a miss could be any kind of MC move, including sometimes very punishing ones. The 2nd edition miss clause is an exchange of harm, and, often, something that looks like "success" for the character (e.g. choosing to "take definite hold of it"). Given many PCs who have big guns and lots of armor, an exchange of harm can range from an inconvenience to something safely ignored to a full destruction of the enemy.
How has this affected your play? What are interesting "side effects" on your group, or how the game develops? Has it led to different player behaviour? Different MC behaviour? More assertive low-Hard characters? Anything else?
Feel free to discuss other moves, as well - Seize by Force is just, perhaps, the most obvious example of such a change.
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Oh. lol. I just have the miss be a miss either way. It just lets them get 1 hold of say out of it while I turn their world upside down.
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Is that how it's supposed to work in 2nd edition, or just the way you handle it at your table?
For example, would it be legit for you to negate the exchange of harm, and have something else happen?
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I havent seen an example of how this could work unless this was true. If you say you take something by force, and you're always going to take it, it's just a matter of how much harm it costs... then meh. BORING. Boooo. Autosuccess. imho no style. Doing dangerous things come at a risk of it actually going wrong, not just the harm cost that you take regardless. If there was no risk why roll? (taking harm is not a risk. It's a cost)
Until I see a really compelling example of the opposite, something that drastically changes how I've used this move for years... This is how it goes at my table. I also suspect, this is how it goes period.
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I tend to look at it the same way, Ebok. But that seems to be how the new moves are written! Hence, my curiosity about how people are playing these.
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I agree. I'm very curious how others are reading this.
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We play it RAW, and I think it works nicely. The soft characters are not as afraid of violence, and the hard (and well armed and armored) more often fearlessly wade into battle.
IME it just changes the view on violence a bit: violence is now an easier solution to many problems, which has not made things boring, just created its own set of problems and consequences.
Also, I've noticed, that smart npc's are less eager to go full out, so Go Aggro (and Read a Sitch and Act under Fire) are rolled a little more often.
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Honestly, I don't think it's come up in regards to the Battle Moves. I don't think any of my players have ever failed one (Hard scores for the PCs range from the Battlebabe with a +1 to the Maestro'D and Faceless, each with +3...and the only one that's changed after the first two sessions was the Maestro'D going from +2 to +3). So...not something that's come up.Which means I'm not 100% sure how I'd handle it.
I do think that special playbook moves (like 'Everybody eats, even that guy') shouldn't have additional consequences of failure added on. Most of those work well as is.
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But, shouldn't the concept of failure still be there? Do you still make a hard move as well?
It seems like if you have a big gun and armor/impossible reflexes, then it doesn't matter what you roll with the dice. You either get a resounding success, a large success or a success. It's the 6- triggering a hard move that adds an element of danger to fights for very competent combat characters.
The PCs were already much tougher than the NPCs, keeping some level of challenge is a good thing, imo.
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Like I said, it hasn't come up. My PCs have yet to fail at a Battle Move. *shrug*
Which has worked out okay, really. Even successful battle moves are not exactly cost free.
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Alright, it hasn't happened for you, yet. But, even with a +3 hard, there's an 8 percent chance of a 6-. For those with a +1, that jumps up to almost 28% chance of a 6-. We aren't talking about something that isn't supposed to be part of the game. Heck, the entire engine is built around 10+, 7-9, 6-.
A possible scenario. Keeler the Gunlugger is given the job of driving the Hombres Gang away from the only well in 50 miles. (Keeler has 0 advancements, he's a new character. But, she has picked NTBFW, Insano like Drano, Bloodcrazed and has a MG and heavy (2) armor. She doesn't just look tough, she is tough). Keeler has already killed the leader of the Hombres and several of his bodyguards, but not before they got a call out for the rest of the gang to come back and kill this crazy woman.
25 tough bikers roll up to the well (small gang, 2-harm, 2-armor, because they recently found a cache of kevlar body armor). Keeler is just finishing patching up a cut on her arm and doesn't hear the gang until they are almost on her. The gang sees its dead leader and open fire at the same time as Keeler unslings her still-warm MG and strafes the area. Keeler rolls Seize By Force, because she wants to maintain control of the well and the Hombres are only getting paid if they hold onto that water. Keeler rolls snake eyes and even with her +3 Hard, still just gets a 5. Bad luck for Keeler. Or is it?
Keeler doesn't want to lose this well. This is her first job and reputation matters. She chooses to maintain definite hold of the well. Keeler does 4 harm to the bikers minus 2 because they are exceptionally armored. They do 2 harm to her, but she also has 2 armor. Keeler's roll of a 5 ends with many injuries, some serious and a couple of fatalities for the Hombres. They have no leader, so they break and try to get out of there as quickly as possible. Possibly to plot revenge, but if this is how well they managed on Keeler's unlikely roll of a 6-, things aren't looking good for them. Keeler takes 0 harm and has to roll the harm move. Granted, this can still go poorly for Keeler, but it's relatively unlikely. (When she gets her first advancement, she can take the juggernaut move to mitigate this).
On a roll of 6-, Keeler wins. She kills some, hurts more, drives off the gang. She's likely unhurt. Shouldn't the failure on the SBF mean more than this, even for a tank-like Gunlugger?
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I personally treat it the same way I treat a miss on read a sitch: ask (pick) one anyway, but be prepared for the worst. So yeah, you've definitely taken possession of the well, but I'm gonna still make a hard move against you. In this case maybe, sure, Keeler has driven off the Hombres; but in the process she has had to run so much ammunition through her MG in short order that she's basically melted the barrel to slag. This is me, taking away her stuff.
My justification for this understanding comes from the first description of the basic moves on p. 11, which says: "The basic moves, though, just tell the players to 'be prepared for the worst.' That’s when it’s your turn." This implies to me that the hard move is absolutely still an option here, as SBF (as part of "Do Battle") is one of the basic moves. The section on the MC moves also says pretty explicitly that "When a player’s character makes a move and the player misses the roll, that’s the cleanest and clearest example there is of an opportunity on a plate," which is your cue to make as hard and direct a move as you like. I think the only move that explicitly goes against this interpretation is the Skinner's artful and gracious.
Otherwise, a miss is more or less open season, in my understanding of the rules, explicit mention or no.
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Alright, it hasn't happened for you, yet. But, even with a +3 hard, there's an 8 percent chance of a 6-. For those with a +1, that jumps up to almost 28% chance of a 6-. We aren't talking about something that isn't supposed to be part of the game. Heck, the entire engine is built around 10+, 7-9, 6-.
Sure, though with help from allies and strategic use of Read a Sitch (both used extensively in my game) those percentages go way down. But my point wasn't that it wasn't an issue to be considered, it was that I had no idea what I'd do if it happened and could thus be of little help, despite being interested in the discussion.
That's really all I was saying.
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Munin, I will be doing things pretty much as you have laid out. I 'd rather the spiffy new 2nd edition had clearly said that SBF 6- could still include a hard move. Other moves do express that a hard move should be expected on a 6-, so ambiguity or purposely missing text opens the door for disagreement on how SBF is meant to work. Probably not a big problem, but you never know how people will react when things happen to their character and they think the rules say otherwise.
On an unrelated note, I wish the playbooks contained a line in the box for the advanced moves saying when they become available. New players always try to select one of the advanced moves, because there's nothing saying otherwise, and it seems like such an easy problem to prevent.
DeadmanwalkingXI, I apologize if I came across poorly. I agree with your point about players being able to reduce the odds even further of getting a 6-. In my mind, this only emphasizes the idea that a 6- should remain a potentially bad thing. Not always bad. Not a way to punish the character or player. But, when it happens, it's my chance to figure out a way to make the character's life interesting. I guess we'll all have a better idea as we get a chance to see the moves in action.
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DeadmanwalkingXI, I apologize if I came across poorly.
No worries, it's cool. I was just clarifying my own point.
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I'm surprised not to see some clarity on this point. The 2nd Edition doesn't make this clear, one way or another?
By Vincent's earlier replies on this topic, I would gather that the MC does NOT make a move (other than what she might normally do in that situation). However, as some people have pointed out, that's remarkably "soft" on the players, especially anyone with decent armor.
If, on the other hand, you do play an MC move (as in the 1st edition examples of "seize by force"), then what is gained by choosing 1 from the list? Does it add meaningful to play?
Thanks!
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Yeah. It allows them some control over the failure, which can mean EVERYTHING to the direction of the scene.
Ye olde, I slash my way through to save the NPC! Seize the NPC by force (from the gang). Miss, well shit. Pick one. It didn't hurt as bad as it could've, you took more of them down with you then you expected, and last but not least: all hell did cut loose, but I got to the NPC, the gang either doesn't have her anymore--they have me, or conversely shit went bad and we're both facing something Hard coming our way, but I'm in control of the NPC instead.
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That sounds a lot like a 7-9 on other moves!
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Maybe, until the full Hard move kicks you in the face. I might reverse the move and give the NPCs any option that doesn't counter the single pick they chose. Alternatively, there's a big difference between 7-9 you take some hard, and miss, you maybe get to do part of it but btw GRENADE!
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Paul, you still can make the suffer harm move if they suffer 0-harm, or even less. And even if they roll a miss on suffer harm, the MC can nevertheless choose a 7-9 result. I don't think you can just ignore harm with impunity.
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That's a good point.
Are you saying that you don't make a hard move on a miss, then?
And would you not have the PC make the harm move on a 7-9?
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I'm just getting up to speed on 2ed, but it doesn't look like you make a typical hard move on a Miss. The move says on a Miss, the player takes one forward, and
"All the moves list what should happen on a hit, 7–9 or 10+, so follow them.
Many of them list what happens on a miss, so follow those too (Page 11)."
On a 7-9, I would be less likely to make them roll the Harm Move if they suffered 0-harm. On a Miss, I would think the Harm Move was called for. Also, if the Harm Move misses, I'd be likely to choose a 7-9 option regardless if they rolled 6- on the SBF.
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Thanks, James.
Interesting, but still a bit confusing.
Will you come and clarify once you're "up to speed"?
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I remember noticing how the tactical and support moves, along with Seize By Force, didn't have a "prepare for the worst" clause or state if anything else happened on a 6 or less other then only getting 1 choice. So I checked the forums and found this from Vincent:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7552.msg34019#msg34019
Paul: Only the basic moves leave misses unspecified. This was true in the 1st Ed and remains true in the 2nd. "The MC makes a hard move on a miss" only applies to the basic moves, and always has.
New to the basic moves in 2nd Edition: when you read a person or read a situation, you still get to ask 1 question on a miss, before I make my hard move. This is because I always played it this way anyway.
In the battle moves, yes, when you're defending something you hold, on a miss you can choose to hold it decisively. When you lay down fire, on a miss you can choose to pin Dremmer in his shed. Yes, this is better for you than "on a miss, choose 0," and if keeping Dremmer in his shed was the entirety of your objective, then yeah, you've done it even on a miss. I think you've understood correctly how it's supposed to play out.
The general pattern is: moves that are more dramatic on a hit, more heroic, are more risky. There are several moves that are freebies, including laying down fire (but not the seize & hold moves, because of the exchange of harm, just as you've realized). This is because laying down fire puts you as a player into a supporting position, not a heroic one, and I want to reward that, not punish it, even on a miss.
Oh and Hobbesque, no, the battle moves won't advance.
-Vincent
So the MC doesn't make a move on a miss with those moves. As for the example by Serenity...well, the Gunlugger is supposed to be frighteningly powerful in fights. But if the gang wants to retaliate then using more dangerous weapons would make sense. Common weapons are shotguns and rifles which do 3-Harm, and grenades which do 4-Harm in an area. And the occasional enemy with some of the bigger guns or just AP ammo could provide a challenge.
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You're quite correct (and that was me Vincent was responding to).
However, the quote is a year old, when the rules were still in flux. I'm curious if this change has carried through to 2nd Edition. From responses so far, it seems like people are playing it in different ways. What does the book say about this? Anybody?
Second, I was curious about the effects on play. On paper, it sounds a bit... undramatic. I'd imagine a Gunlugger with good armour can roll Seize by Force with basically no fear, unless they're seriously outclassed. I'd love to hear (or continue hearing) how this is panning out in people's games.
It's a strong contrast to the original intention of the move (and, in particular, earlier examples of misses on the move from Vincent, both in print and online).
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You're quite correct (and that was me Vincent was responding to).
However, the quote is a year old, when the rules were still in flux. I'm curious if this change has carried through to 2nd Edition. From responses so far, it seems like people are playing it in different ways. What does the book say about this? Anybody?
The book doesn't have a section like that, but does specify what happens on failures...which does not include a 'prepare for the worst' on Seize By Force and other Battle Moves. That absence is pretty telling from a pure RAW perspective, though adding them back in seems an eminently reasonable way to handle things if that seems too easy.
Second, I was curious about the effects on play. On paper, it sounds a bit... undramatic. I'd imagine a Gunlugger with good armour can roll Seize by Force with basically no fear, unless they're seriously outclassed. I'd love to hear (or continue hearing) how this is panning out in people's games.
I dunno, even on successes I've found that you need significantly more than Armor 2 to be truly safe. AP ammo, gangs, and custom moves for particularly dangerous NPCs can make it more dangerous, too.
Besides, the Gunlugger is supposed to be the baddest ass, having them be almost unassailable when armored and ready for battle (which is when Seize By Force is used) is appropriate. They can still be murdered in their bed, ambushed, or otherwise get seriously messed up when not expecting a fight or not getting a straight one.
It's a strong contrast to the original intention of the move (and, in particular, earlier examples of misses on the move from Vincent, both in print and online).
Yeah, but a lot of things have indeed changed that much (the Ice Cold Battlebabe move, for example).
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Will you come and clarify once you're "up to speed"?
So, an example is in order. I just steal one from the book and mess with it:
Marie the brainer is stranded in the rag-waste and gets set upon by one of
its not-quite-human habitants. She has no choice but to fight her way free.
She misses the roll with a 4. She still gets to choose 1, and chooses to win
free and get away.
In the exchange of harm, she inflicts 3-harm for her scalpel (3-harm intimate
hi-tech) minus 1 for her assailant’s hide armor, for a total of 2-harm. She
suffers 2-harm for her assailant’s crude cutting blade (2-harm hand messy)
minus 2 because she’s wearing that armor she got off that dead guy in the
jeep, for a total of 0-harm."
Now, if she had rolled a 7, I would say something like "You cut him and flee. As you go past, he swings wildly with that serrated sawblade he's holding. You feel its rusted teeth through the dead guy's jacket. You'd probably be dead without it." And that would be that. But, she rolled a miss, so I make her roll the Harm Move. Is it really too soft on the player with armor? It depends on her Harm roll, but there's a good chance things just got complicated.
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Hey, good catch team. I missed that completely. Seize by Force is NOT one of the basic moves in 2e, and there is no stipulation for a GM to make a move on a miss, as there definitely is on the basic moves. Huh.
Now, if she had rolled a 7, I would say something like "You cut him and flee. As you go past, he swings wildly with that serrated sawblade he's holding. You feel its rusted teeth through the dead guy's jacket. You'd probably be dead without it." And that would be that. But, she rolled a miss, so I make her roll the Harm Move. Is it really too soft on the player with armor? It depends on her Harm roll, but there's a good chance things just got complicated.
You're generous. I'd have no qualms about making them roll the harm move, even on a 10+. Depending on fictional circumstances, of course.
ps that's not a criticism in any way
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You're generous. I'd have no qualms about making them roll the harm move, even on a 10+. Depending on fictional circumstances, of course.
ps that's not a criticism in any way
I get it. I don't have qualms, per se. I share Paul's desire for a miss on SBF to look different from a Hit, even if the PC has massive armor. I would be tempted to just make a hard move like some have suggested, but I'd rather GMs just do what the book says if possible. Honestly, I might just end up recommending that. I mean, I've drunk the Vincent Baker cool aide, but I don't always agree with his design choices. But, one way to differentiate the two in RAW is through the harm move, I think.
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That harm move is no where near hard enough, and you're suggesting something that isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. Harm rolls do not talk about the fact they only happen on a miss. This example is a monkey patch because this piece of information was left out.
With the health system the way it is, that example basically saying any player character that is willing to suffer some harm and survive, can always "get away", period, and probably take people down with them. At any point where fighting occurs, any PC (no matter how wimpy) would essentially be unable to fail in achieving any one objective. The only difference between choose one and choose three is how badly it hurt, and that's by a factor of one. Which is far more dependent on what you're/they're doing harm with then the roll. That's not a real argument for any type of narrative event. More directly opposing your example... the fact that the harm move is a ROLL is basically providing them an additional saving throw against a hard they've already invoked.
You want to storm that castle? Okay you win, how much did it hurt, lets roll to find out.
EDIT
I suppose it's worth noting here that I actually prefer the choose one option on a miss, just not in lue of the miss. Before if something went wrong during a seize by force, really the MC had absolute freedom to act. They could trap them, break them apart, do whatever, even if it was the one thing the characters were devoted to preventing. To me, it seems fair that a player can announce what they care about most. Choose one, cause the other three are going to hurt, makes them need to make a call. In the violence, did I care about hurting them more then protecting myself? More then the strategic object? In that light, the MC can see how the player wants to react to the failure around them, which one did they focus on, and all the rest are now vulnerabilities / weaknesses to be exploited for the hard move.
I have enjoyed seeing this in action and I find taking this to the next extreme, (no real miss at all) does the potential a lot of injustice. We are all looking for Other things to go wrong, other ways to make the choice to fight and fail meaningful, and that's a shame because it was already meaningful before the version change.
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Ebok, it's a fair criticism. One question, are we sure SBF isn't a Basic Move? It's listed in the Basic Move Section and we're told to "consider it as the basic battle move." Maybe it's just a move.
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I interpret it as a basic move. Anyone can do it; ergo, basic move.
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Ebok,
That's exactly my concern. However, I haven't played with the rule, so my concern is hypothetical; this is why I started a thread to see what other people were doing.
You make a strong case (perhaps) for treating it like "Read a Sitch" - in other words, "choose 1, but also be prepared for the worst". That could be a good interpretation of the move. I say "perhaps", because some MC moves could invalidate those choices, or make them irrelevant - for example, "separate them" or something like that. Those would be unusual situations, though, depending on very particular circumstances.
As for Seize By Force being a "basic move", it's quite clearly not. It's a "battle move". In any case, in the 2nd Edition all the moves have a miss clause. The basic moves say "prepare for the worst". The Battle Moves do not; each specifies outcomes.
(I'm also confused by the comment about "Ice Cold"; it hasn't changed meaningfully, as far as I can see. It did in an early draft, but was then changed back for the final version, as far as I can see.)
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Ebok,
That's exactly my concern. However, I haven't played with the rule, so my concern is hypothetical; this is why I started a thread to see what other people were doing.
You make a strong case (perhaps) for treating it like "Read a Sitch" - in other words, "choose 1, but also be prepared for the worst". That could be a good interpretation of the move. I say "perhaps", because some MC moves could invalidate those choices, or make them irrelevant - for example, "separate them" or something like that. Those would be unusual situations, though, depending on very particular circumstances.
As for Seize By Force being a "basic move", it's quite clearly not. It's a "battle move". In any case, in the 2nd Edition all the moves have a miss clause. The basic moves say "prepare for the worst". The Battle Moves do not; each specifies outcomes. Whether it's a "basic move" or not, the miss clause is spelled out, and it doesn't seem to include anything other than the exchange of harm and option choices.
(I'm also confused by the comment about "Ice Cold"; it hasn't changed meaningfully, has it? It did in an early draft, but was then changed back for the final version, as far as I can see.)
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Paul T, I think that the choose one option should be respected by the MC, and they should make sure Not to invalidate whatever option selected. Though to be fair the only two options that COULD be invalidated would be Frighten them or Seize Control. I think the latter can easily be used as an out of the frying pan and into the fire situation that still respects their achievement. The former, well, that is so situational it's hard to say. ( if they suffer less harm and you inflict more hard, they still suffered less then they wouldve otherwise. )
I consider ALL battle moves to be basic moves, and seize by force is the most basic of them. You cannot play without it, so... ergo, basic move. Screw anyone that wants to make my game less interesting. :P
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Edition wars begin.
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My goodness!
So, what is our conclusion here?
Is the text not clear on this point? (I only have the 1st Ed.)
Or was that earlier example a direct quote from the text (which strongly suggests that no hard move is made as part of a failed Seize move, as Vincent explained earlier during the design of 2nd Ed.)?
Does no one have enough experience playing with the new version of the move to post some observations?
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My goodness!
So, what is our conclusion here?
Is the text not clear on this point? (I only have the 1st Ed.)
The text is very clear that there is no hard move on a miss on battle moves. Or indeed any moves where it isn't specified.
The question is whether that's an intentional choice or what, and whether it makes for a better or worse game that way.
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The question is whether that's an intentional choice or what, and whether it makes for a better or worse game that way.
Okay, come on, people. Vincent didn't accidentally move Seize by Force into a different category and then accidentally add explicit text to every move clearly delineating the consequences on a miss. It's a new edition: he changed the rules. If for some reason this is freaking you out, then you can pretend this was actually what he intended all along, and we were all playing it wrong before, and only now has he finally improved the rules text so that we understand what Was Intended All Along.
But yeah. Ebok is not offering a different interpretation, he is describing a hack. It's a hack with a great deal of historical precedent called 'I like this part of the old edition better.'
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For the record I tend to agree that it's pretty definitively the rules as written, but people have disputed that based on Vincent's words on the subject at an earlier stage, and I was explicitly just noting what the discussion was about rather than trying to continue it.
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The text is very clear that there is no hard move on a miss on battle moves. Or indeed any moves where it isn't specified.
Actually, the text is pretty clear that there's an opportunity to go "as hard and direct as you like" on any missed move.
"When a player’s character makes a move and the player misses the roll, that’s the cleanest and clearest example there is of an opportunity on a plate."
Not "...makes a basic move and the player misses the roll..." Any move will do.
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I disagree, Munin. There are cases where it's clear, that the MC does not get to make a hard move even on a miss, Artful and gracious for example.
In the light of such moves, I think it's clear that the paragraph you are quoting is only applicable to basic moves and others, where the players should expect the worst.
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See, I think that artful and gracious is the exception, as it explicitly tells you that nothing bad happens on a miss. None of the other moves do that.
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I read it the same way Munin does. In fact I had never even considered that the alternative was worth consideration until this thread, which has provided only one argument: "That's how how we think it was intended by the author". This to me seems like a fundamental problem. If you're going to back up a reason to play with this "hack" to the known system, provide me with reasons where it excels in performance over it's predecessor. Seriously, where are all the in game examples of where this provides a better gaming experience, what opportunities does it provide (that it's predecessor failed to provide) for the narrative or the collaborative gaming group? Is the only argument that VB (maybe) wanted to try it out?
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That's from the section on when to make a move, though. An advice section rather than rules in the absolute strictest sense (not that the distinction is hugely important in AW, but still), and more importantly, is word for word from the 1E book, meaning it could easily have been overlooked. And every single other piece of rules text in the 2E book makes it pretty clear that that's not necessarily correct on anything other than the basic moves.
The combination of it being legacy text and every other bit of text disagreeing with it leads me to think it's not correct at all for 2E.
And, just to present a counterpoint to people who'd never considered others might feel this way, I never read that sentence quite that way and never considered that other people might. So I never considered that anyone looking at the 2E book could conclude that 2E works the same way as 1E in this regard. I obviously knew 1E worked that way, but it struck me as an obvious and fundamental edition change.
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Which you have played through in practice and have some rational for blindly supporting?
Most changes in 2nd have very clear and observable benefits, they present clear opportunities and clarify the flow of the narrative. They strip away things that were clunky and attempted new things in their place. I'm all for improving a system using what has been learned from the past years of playing. This-- however, provides no obvious benefit to me, and I have yet to see even a theoretical reason why it would improve anything.
I dont rightly give a damn if this was his intention or not. I care about whether it provides real benefit to a game. Does it? Anyone? Saying, Vincent wrote it so... is not a defense of the position. That would require him telling us why he did it or if we're all just flying off the handle.
Let us suppose for a moment... that combat in AW was actually dangerous for PCs. Like really absolutely unforgiving and most NPCs were just as badass as the player. In that world, where an equal exchange of harm always left the pc in a horrible position but also did not end the NPC... the battle moves as described make sense. Because a miss costs a shit load and every point more means everything. However, that's not the reality. The PCs are comfortably able to preform super human feats of martial prowess, pretty reliably too if they're even sort of motivated. In this world, missing allowing an even exchange of harm AND a pick one as the only effect, is basically pre-determined conflict.
It's hard for me to justify that as an improvement. And I strongly urge anyone to provide some real support here, I would like to be "shown the light" as it were.
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I mean, the question was about what the rules said, and moreover people's experience with using the new rules.
I think in practice it's a relatively fine distinction, because regardless of whether you are making a super ultra hard move, you are still probably making some kind of move -- because it is after all your turn in the conversation at that point.
An argument in favour could be something like: the purpose of the battle moves is for situations where you are narrowing the scope to focus on more moment-to-moment tactical interactions, and therefore it is less appropriate to pile on hard moves on every miss, because there is going to be a much higher density of rolls to fictional scope than usual. By moving Seize by Force into the non-Basic moves, the game is also removing it from the list of wider-scope moves, and so interpreting it as though it were still a basic move, just like in the previous edition, is not appropriate. The move may have the same name, but it has a narrower function, and you should make sure you are reading and applying the rule in its new context, instead of glossing over the consequences of the change.
This of course dovetails fairly well with what I said above about it still being your turn to say something, and a natural approach to the scope of the fiction at that point is already probably going to produce less sweeping consequences for the miss.
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I'm not actually arguing that not having hard moves on missed battle moves is better. In fact, I've never argued that. I'm just pretty thoroughly convinced that's the way the rules actually read.
Whether they work better that way is an entirely different question. It's certainly a relevant question, but it's not the one I was addressing, and indeed one I can't address given that, as I noted in my first post on this thread, I've never actually had a player roll a miss on a battle move.
I do think that having hard moves in addition to the listed effects on playbook-specific moves is a bad idea and makes many of them punitive to use to the point that people will be reluctant to use them, which is bad. Those moves have their own explicit downsides anyway and adding more is not at all needed.
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In the case of a move like in-brain puppet strings, the miss option already is a hard move - inflict harm as established. Easy.
And though this rarely happens, I disagree with Daniel Wood's interpretation of the scale of sieze by force and the battle moves in general. Indeed, the section on SBF itself (p. 167) says:
Seizing by force is the basic battle move. When someone wants something that someone else has, and both are able and willing to fight for it, use seize by force or one of its variations.
You can use seize by force alone for battles of any scale, but for large-scale battles, battles where several PCs each want to play their own tactical role, and prolonged battles with shifting tactical terrain, you can choose to
bring the rest of the battle moves into play as well.
So right there in the description it brings up the idea that the move can be used on its own without relying on the other peripheral or battle moves, and further that you could do this for battles of any scale. In this regard I feel like saying, "well, the hard moves will come from other moves that happen during the battle" is a cop-out, as there may in fact be no other moves happening.
AW is a game about consequences, and given that one of the themes that runs right through the core of the game is that violence comes with its own (often unintended consequences), having the most basic building block of the battle moves be virtually consequence-free on a miss (barring the unlikely event of a disastrous follow-up harm move) just seems to be jarringly at odds with how the rest of the game works.
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Weird. I mean, I was extrapolating based on it being moved from Basic Moves to Battle Moves; I don't have the 2nd edition text. It sounds like the shift is not to having Seize by Force be a less basic move, but instead to simply clarify that any time Seize by Force is used, it counts as a battle -- which used to be a call the MC and players would make, circumstantially.
Certainly the way I run 1st edition, someone can Seize something by Force without triggering 'at the beginning of a battle' moves -- not always, of course, but fairly often. So my assumption of Seize by Force moving out of the basic move set was that it was being de-emphasized as a go-to move. But based on that quote, it sounds like maybe that is the wrong assumption.
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To be fair, I've never argued that every class move should have an additional auto hard on a miss. Many cover this already pretty clearly. Those that dont mention what goes wrong, and dont stipulate that nothing goes wrong, however, trigger hard as normal.
I'm pretty sure this entire thread is about assumptions, because the one thing the text isn't clear on is how to use this move IF it was any different then before. Just the fact this is 4 pages is proof enough that something wasn't clear enough. I'd hope that a change of that magnitude would at least merit an example of that case.
Try as I might to picture a game where Daniel's points were true, and seize by force missing did not trigger any other effects; I can't see it working. Again, I'll reiterate a previous statement, the game plays very smoothly with a select one on miss and prepare for the worst. I liked the change there, it's cool because it gives them some agency in the fallout, even if the fallout kicks their teeth in--at least now their action's momentum (and cost) still carries weight into the worst's outcome. If this isn't the case, it seems... game breaking to say the least. At minimum, the way I MC would be totally ruined and I would need to learn again from new baseline... once that was understood. ( I had players miss hard rolls all the time, it's one of the most interesting parts of conflict--for both me and them )
We might just have to see what lumpley himself says about what his intentions were.
EDIT
requoting:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7552.msg34019#msg34019
Paul: Only the basic moves leave misses unspecified. This was true in the 1st Ed and remains true in the 2nd. "The MC makes a hard move on a miss" only applies to the basic moves, and always has.
New to the basic moves in 2nd Edition: when you read a person or read a situation, you still get to ask 1 question on a miss, before I make my hard move. This is because I always played it this way anyway.
In the battle moves, yes, when you're defending something you hold, on a miss you can choose to hold it decisively. When you lay down fire, on a miss you can choose to pin Dremmer in his shed. Yes, this is better for you than "on a miss, choose 0," and if keeping Dremmer in his shed was the entirety of your objective, then yeah, you've done it even on a miss. I think you've understood correctly how it's supposed to play out.
The general pattern is: moves that are more dramatic on a hit, more heroic, are more risky. There are several moves that are freebies, including laying down fire (but not the seize & hold moves, because of the exchange of harm, just as you've realized). This is because laying down fire puts you as a player into a supporting position, not a heroic one, and I want to reward that, not punish it, even on a miss.
Oh and Hobbesque, no, the battle moves won't advance.
-Vincent
Though reading that quote of his again has made me think the "choose and and prepare for the worst" was the intention all along. If the sole objective is to keep a guy in a shed, and you choose keep definite hold of it, that choice doesn't get revoked in the miss. Meaning you definitely do it. Of course if it was seize by force, it means you were actively exchanging harm with someone else while you do it. So that exchange of harm happened, and HARD MOVE. So long as the hard move doesn't contradict the choice, it's exactly that.
Following the stated general pattern. Seizing that castle by force is definitely a very heroic and risky move. It seems crazy that this was lumped together with the other support freebees on purpose.
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Lets take an example:
Molly has been captured by a brutal gang. She's been dragged around and subjected to all types of brutishness, but she finally has her hands free. She's in the middle of the camp, and getting away is going to be really fucking hard. But there's a cutting knife over by the fire and if she can get to that, maybe she can keep a stray hand from dragging her back into the dirt. That's when a large bunch of them get distracted by something.
She's got a choice. She can screw getting close to the fire to get the knife, and just try to sneak away. (act under fire). Or she can dash up and grab the knife, and race away full tilt. If she can get to the edge of the camp, she knows she can outrun them. (size her freedom by force).
Outcomes: ACT_UNDER_FIRE
10+ She gone's
7-9 She got half way out but someone saw her, so she took off but might have a few of them in pursuit.
Miss She crawled around the corner and while looking over her shoulder behind her, bumps her face straight into the gang's chief. Shit.
SEIZE BY FORCE
10+ She's got the knife and bolted, some of them tried to stop her but--exchange of harm. She chooses, seize, less harm, intimidate. Slashing at some of them and maybe slashing a few tires as well, she does her harm to the gang, no one dead but a bunch not really wanting to chase that feral thing down. She takes some harm when one of the clocked her, but that's in the past. She's free.
7-9 She's got the knife and bolted, same as before, but this time she's nursing some fucking nasty cuts since she had to suck up more harm to get out.
Miss NO HARD MOVE
She's got the knife and bolted, she's got some nasty cuts and they weren't intimidated, so maybe some of the are chasing after her. She'll definitely outrun them though because seize definite control.
Miss HARD MOVE
She's got the knife, right? I mean, I hope? Well I'm going to turn the move back on her. As normal I'll select two from seize by force to use against her. That's easy. Suffer less harm and scare the shit out of her. Well, she goes up to get that knife and some of them see her before she grabs it. One of them shoots in her fucking direction and now she's off fighting through them without. She does no harm to them in her escape, and the hands grab at her and beat her down, but she still choose, seize definite, so in the end she fights her way through it all gets free and out runs them all. But she's got these nasty cuts and they're still bleeding, she's utterly terrified of them, and she's still unarmed.
TAKEAWAY
Seems to me like Cool's moves work out great. They're solid and easy to narrate. The hard moves however, that's where we're looking. In either case, if she's willing to suffer the harm, she WILL get away. That's understood.
But the how of it? If the first case it true the only difference between missing and 7-9 is the emotional state of the gang. ???? Eh???? Also why ever sneak off if you're a player character and have access to a medic somewhere? 2 harm is cheap for that sort of guarantee.
In the second case, even going with a really vanilla example (EVEN with no cool: Oh, look who they just dragged into camp to cause that distraction!) the scene's got a lot more color. There was a consequence, and a lasting one, with an emotional tax on the character now that's going to be more fun to explore.
Seems to me like the obvious choice is the obvious one.
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Ebok, no one is disputing your right to play the game the way you want to - if you like hard moves on misses, more power to you. It obviously doesn't break anything.
However it does seem clear from the text that in 2nd the only hard part of missing a sbf is suffering harm and only getting to choose 1 option, see the example about Marie on page 168-169.
And regarding Munins argument, that the book tells us to make hard moves on all misses, well that simply doesn't seem to be the case.
First of, the book directs the MC to make as hard and direct a move as she likes on a miss. And while I agree that artful and gracious is an exception in that it states explicitly that nothing bad happens, it really isn't an exception with regards to ignoring the clause telling the MC to make as hard and direct a move as she likes on a miss, because many moves don't allow the MC that option on a miss. We already looked at in-brain puppet strings which specifies the outcome on a miss. It has been argued - and I agree - that 1 harm (ap) is indeed pretty hard, but it is not as hard and direct as the MC likes. As has already been shown, some character moves do require the MC to make as hard and direct move as she likes, but they are pretty explicit about it.
So the conclusion seems to be that in 2nd ed every move explicitly tells us what happens on the different outcomes, and because of that we have to assume that unless the move tells the MC to make a hard move, she shouldn't.
Whether or not this is the best way to play is a whole other question. As I've already said, my group has not had any problems with the new rules - violence is now a more attractive option and we like that.
Of course that doesn't mean that Marie can just seize her way out of all problems! Moves still snowball, and if she chose to escape, she didn't choose to terrify, impress or dismay, and so it might be reasonable (depending on context) to assume that the raider's friends chase her calling for Marie to escape a hunter.
On the other hand Ebok does have persuasive arguments, and I'll have to try out his hack some day.
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Apocalypse World doesn't have hard MC moves, so you'll never find the rules for them in the text. Arguing from the text about when and how to make hard moves will never work out!
Here's how to understand "hard moves" in Apocalypse World:
- Whenever it's your turn to talk, make a move.
- Set up your moves dramatically. Build a dramatic rhythm, don't just always make the meanest move you can think of.
- Sometimes, though, make the meanest move you can think of.
- When someone misses on a basic move, that's one good time to consider making the meanest move you can think of.
- But follow your dramatic rhythm.
- And remember, whenever it's your turn to talk, make a move, and you always get to choose which move.
The peripheral moves, battle moves, and character moves all include "on a miss" effects. As MC, you should follow these, of course. But in your thinking about them, place them in the conversation, not in the fiction.
I'm playing a badass gunlugger, you're the MC.
I'm like, "fuck it, Dremmer's gang's dug in down by the generator? The hell they are. They're, what, small? With mediocre arms and armor? Yeah, fuck them, they can't even touch me. I'll seize the generator by force."
I roll a miss. I'm crowing. "Ha ha fuckers. That's um 2 harm vs my 2 armor, and I inflict 3 harm +1 for bloodcrazed vs their 1 armor, so I'm taking 0 harm and they're taking 3? Ha ha. I choose one: I take definite hold of it."
I turn to look at you. It's your turn to talk.
The rules require you to admit that yeah, I've suffered no harm, inflicted 3, and seized definite control of the generator. They absolutely don't specify what move you should make, or how mean it should be, now that it's your turn to talk. That's always up to you and the dramatic rhythm you're building.
-Vincent
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On the one hand I get what you're saying, but at the same time I think that's quite possibly the most lazy-ass answer I've ever heard you give.
The issue is one of gauging the appropriate level of "meanness" to one's moves when speaking as the MC. Sure, I could inflict harm as established at any point in the conversation. But I think we all sort of agree that doing so without a set-up or a golden opportunity is kind of a dick-move. So the question of when it's appropriate to narrate both the changing situation as well as the consequences is a valid one. This is especially true when trying to teach people how to actually run the game in a way that doesn't suck (and I say that mostly because AW is such a paradigm shift from traditional RPGs that lots of would-be MCs vastly miss The Point [tm]).
Yes, the tenor and meanness of a move is always up to whatever drama-sauce the MC is cooking, that is and has always been the case. But giving people a little bit of advice on how (or when) to season that drama-sauce (i.e. "prepare for the worst" or whatever) isn't bad either. The fact that this discussion is happening at all means there's ambiguity, and while "fuck it, do what you want" is certainly advice, I'm not sure it's always the most helpful advice.
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What's ambiguous?
-Vincent
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So the take away here is not that the MC doesn't also make a move as hard and direct as the MC likes when someone misses a seize by force roll, just that the MC doesnt have to.
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Vincent,
I think the reason this is difficult for some people is because the "on a miss, make a hard move" concept is a really easy one to teach and follow. Without that, playing can get pretty ambiguous, especially when there's more than one player in the example. It places MCing back into "magical GM skills" territory (or, at least, more so - of COURSE it was there all along).
You're saying that the outcomes of a move are all that's guaranteed to you, and this makes sense. In other words, if you roll to make any given move, it tells you that you pulled off certain things. The rest of the conversation goes along, using those as settled facts. "Ok, the move establishes that this-and-that happened. Now, what else happened?" Cool.
However, the general trend of AW moves is that there's quite a dramatic swing from success to failure, which we use to create our image of the action going down. If I act under fire and succeed, that's one thing. If I miss, there's a very strong (and, I think, useful) expectation that I do not, and that things will not go well for me. (Although we know that "success with complications" is a possibility, it's not the default option in most people's minds.)
With "seize by force" this seems to be... different. What's at stake in most "Seize by Force" situations is: do you seize it? This means that, in most situations, you get what you wanted no matter what you rolled. The difference between a 10+ and a miss is just 2 points of harm? (As Ebok points out, most PCs can happily ignore 2 points of harm most of the time. As a group of people trying to enact a dramatic narrative, that doesn't seem too inspiring. What does this tell us?)
This seems like quite a contrast to your description of missed moves in the examples in 1st Ed (and even going way back to Poison'd).
Another way to look at it is that the Seize move now looks like this:
When you Seize by Force, there's an exchange of harm, and you get what you want.
Roll+hard. On a miss you just get what you want (choose nothing). On a 7-9, choose 1. On a 10+, choose 2:
* You suffer little harm
* You inflict terrible harm
* You frighten or dismay your opponents
If you wish, you can also choose to let the thing you wanted go, in which case choose an additional option, instead.
It seems like a lot of hassle (a roll, choices, etc) for what is becoming a damage roll. Is the only difference between a miss and a hit the +1 or -1 harm?
Or is the MC also supposed to take the rolled result into account when choosing a move to make? That's not clear. Should I make the same move after a 10+ as I would after a miss?
It seems to put a heavier burden on the MC's shoulders. It also seems to create a roll which doesn't impact the outcome in the fiction. (e.g. We know before we roll that if the Gunlugger in the example has set his mind on Dremmer's generator, he'll get it, no matter what the roll.)
Finally, I've always found the concept of "make a hard move on a miss" really helpful when multiple PCs are involved. For instance, taking your example, if the Gunlugger takes control of the generator, but Toyota is also there (another PC), what happens next? In the case of a hit, I'd normally figure out the outcome of the roll, as necessary (e.g. Gunlugger takes control of the generator - there's usually some narration taking place here, IME), and then it would be Toyota's turn, not mine. On a miss, though, I would throw an additional stick into the spokes, with some unwelcome development, before turning to Toyota's player. At least the way I've played it, it's quite a clear distinction between "MC makes a move" and "MC doesn't make a move" - in this case, it's a question of whether it's the MC's turn to talk or Toyota's player's.
Does that make any sense?
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Paul, your reading of the move is correct, but your reading of the implications is incorrect. Everywhere you say "seem," you're pure speculating. Neither the game's technical underpinnings nor anybody's play experiences back you up.
It's true that the move doesn't work the way it used to. It puts the worst potential consequences of a miss off into the snowball, instead of cutting them straight in via "be prepared for the worst." There have always been a number of moves that work this way, and now seizing by force has joined them.
The reason for the change is that the move has a new role to fill, a new place at the head of the new battle moves. The snowball has also changed.
But if your main concern is throwing a stick in the spokes on a miss, you're still allowed to, case by case, by the overarching rules for making your moves. Yes, even if Toyota is there too!
-Vincent
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Vincent,
I can understand how the rules, as written, may very well "work" fine (I don't know, personally, because I haven't played with the 2nd Ed. rules yet).
Do you have any advice for people like myself, who are confused a little bit by this change? (Clearly, I'm not alone.)
I think the issues are the lack of uncertainty (a PC using Seize by Force knows they're guaranteed certain outcomes, if they want them - in particular, for an armored character, Seize by Force looks it would often be a "just how badly do you beat them?" sort of roll in practice), and the lack of guidance for the MC (when to take a miss as an opportunity for a move, hard or otherwise), in comparison to the 1st Edition.
For instance, is merely being involved in combat a case of "handing the MC an opportunity on a silver platter"? Is it legit for me as MC to have a PC simply get shot after a 10+ on a Seize by Force roll? Or only on a miss? Or neither?
Perhaps I've missed other issues - if so, point them out, please (Vincent or other readers).
Thanks for the reply!
I'd also love to hear why this change came about, from a design standpoint. Is it fixing any play problems, for example?
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Note 1: I've provided a TL;DR summary at the end.
Note 2: Please be gentle. This is my first post on this forum.
My take on all this is that there are some fundamental principles that apply to how one should interpret, and use, Seize By Force. These principles imply an approach to adjudicating these matters as MC, but the implications may not be obvious to everyone, so I'll lay them out here.
The salient principles, as I see them, are:
- Be a fan of the PCs. They're cool.
- The names of moves describe what happens. If you "seize by force", you "seize by force" -- you don't "try to seize by force". If you "do something under fire", you "do something under fire" -- you don't "achieve the thing you want to achieve".
- The work your character has to do, and the complications of the conditions, inform how you go about giving your PCs a path to success.
- Players, like MCs, should make decisions to serve the story. In the particular case of players, "serve the story" is mostly focused on serving dramatic character development, where for MCs it's about serving dramatic plot development, because RPGs in general are (ideally) character-driven from the players' points of view and plot-driven from a GM's point of view.
- The chances of failure in combat in Apocalypse World's die roll rules are higher than is typical for other games, because of the fact fewer rolls result in bigger consequences with less opportunity to amortize the pain of failed rolls over time, softened by successful rolls. When one roll often concludes combat, "you're screwed" as the consequence of every move in the game with an average (or more than average) chance of a "miss" can be catastrophic -- not just now, but a shockingly large percentage of the time, to the extent that it can even be catastrophic for players' enjoyment of the game.
The result, then, is this:
If you what the PC is trying to do is straightforward and direct, and the PC is acting from a position of strength, just use Seize By Force. Do not assume a "prepare for the worst" consequence of a "miss". There may be a direct cost involved if the player doesn't really nail the roll, depending on the stats; low armor versus well-armed opponents with a miss on the roll for Seize By Force means a choice between taking harm and achieving the stated goal. When the stats say no harm, and the PC (mostly) only really cares about success at the stated goal, though, this is a moment for the PCs to shine, to be cool, to accumulate accolades from players and MCs alike, who should all be fans of the PC (see point 1 above).
I think it's time for concrete examples. Let's say you're trying to protect someone:
If you're taking direct, straightforward action from a position of strength, of course you use the Defend Someone Else From Attack variant of the Seize By Force move, and you're effectively guaranteed to succeed at that narrow goal.
If what the PC is trying to do is attempted from a position of weakness, indirect, or otherwise complicated, another move might be more appropriate.
- If you're in a chaotic battle situation where you don't have a commanding, central presence, with a gang running rampant around you, and you aren't even close to the person you're defending, you might be forced to provide indirect protection in the form of tactical and support moves like the Stand Overwatch move, where it becomes very difficult to effectively intercede on your ally's behalf apart from giving warnings.
- If the approach the PC takes to defending someone requires some (relatively) complicated series of actions that detract from the overall potential for success, is for the MC to just tell you "No, you don't get to Seize By Force (yet). First you have to get there. How are you going to do this? If you're trying to get to the guy to physically protect him while raining autofire on the enemy, you're first going to have to Act Under Fire to cover the intervening ground." Perhaps the MC has a countdown/clock for the consequences of you failing to get there "yet" every time you fail. Maybe it takes one 10+ result ("you do it") with one tick of the countdown clock to get to a point where you can then use Seize By Force to determine exactly how you save the day in a grand, heroic manner; maybe it takes two 7-9 results ("you flinch, hesitate, or stall") with one tick of the countdown clock (and its attendant consequences) for the each of those two Act Under Fire rolls; maybe every time you miss on Act Under Fire you get nowhere and another tick of the countdown clock brings further consequences.
Once you maneuver to a point where Seize By Force is the only reasonable move, in either of those examples of acting from a position of weakness, the purpose of the move is more to determine how you achieve your goals, and with how much of a dominating presence, rather than whether you do so -- unless you think your character might actually opt for taking no (or less) damage during the exchange of harm rather than effectively defending someone on a "miss", if that's possible given the relevant stats (or unless there's some other trade-off to be made, such as wanting to kill more enemies as a higher priority than wanting to actually defend someone).
Remember, too, that the conclusion of that move is not necessarily the end of the matter. Now your character has defended the person from attack. What happens next? Maybe the PC has closed the distance and provided effective defense, but the PC and the defended person are now trapped, and under siege. On a "miss" result for Seize By Force, you might choose to definitively seize control, but that means you give up on inflicting terrible harm; when fighting against a small gang, that means you've probably killed fewer gang members, seriously injured fewer, and lightly injured fewer, which reduces the likelihood the enemy doesn't count as a small gang any longer (thus changing relative armor and harm values). You've also given up on impressing, dismaying, or frightening your enemy, thus reducing the likelihood they'll turn tail and run in the face of overwhelming force. The negotiation between MC and players to define the ongoing flow of dramatic action should change based on the results of that roll, as the degree of success informs the discussion.
In summary:
Seize By Force is the straightforward "PCs do awesome things" move that applies when action is direct, and undertaken from a position of relative strength. If some other behavior is required to get to the point where Seize By Force is appropriate, the chance of success or failure is the accumulation of several rolls, with Seize By Force just being your "finisher" move at the end. Once again speaking of the example case of defending someone else, if something less certain is more appropriate because of a need for indirect action (e.g. tactical support moves) or not being able to assert a good offense as the best defense so that you only get to try to save someone at the last minute from a sniper's headshot with a tackle (e.g. Act Under Fire), do that instead of Seize By Force.
As a result, there's nothing at all wrong with Seize By Force not having a failure contingency built into it. It's not for circumstances where that kind of "failure" applies. It's just a move that must be applied appropriately within a wider context.
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Is it legit for me as MC to have a PC simply get shot after a 10+ on a Seize by Force roll? Or only on a miss? Or neither?
I think this question deserves its own, very direct, response. This is my take:
The Seize By Force move explicitly prescribes an exchange of harm, so yes, if people are shooting, the "fiction" can include getting shot in the explanation for harm inflicted on the PC in that exchange.
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Paul, my advice would be to get unstuck on your one hypothetical, the badass gunlugger who outclasses their enemy, and do the math on 5 other hypotheticals:
- The chopper leading their gang into action.
- The hardholder sending part of their gang into action, while the hardholder and the bulk of the gang stay back to defend the holding.
- The maestro d' defending their establishment from a gang.
- The hocus who's used frenzy to create a gang and is trying to seize the holding's marketplace from the hardholder, also a PC.
- The driver and battlebabe trying to punch through an enemy blockade. Be sure to use the rules for when vehicles take harm.
Do the math on each of these several times, with different assortments of weapons and armor and different sizes of gangs.
You'll find some combinations where choosing 1 instead of choosing 2 doesn't constitute a loss or a hard choice, as in the case of my badass gunlugger seizing the generator from Dremmer's little gang, and some combinations where it really, really does. Comparing them should clear your confusion right up.
Oh, and Apotheon is right. I know you were just choosing an example of a "hard move," but you happened to choose one where yes, not only may you, but you must. It's right in the text of the move.
-Vincent
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Considering that the MC can use the fiction to make a dangerous or complicating move at any point, regardless of whether or not a particular seize by force roll hits or misses, means that you in fact can make a move that frustrates the scene any time they miss a seize by force roll. So doing so as a pattern of play is something that is perfectly within the scope of the rules. That basically eliminates the need for clarification. What it actually does is not remove something bad happening on a miss, it just removes the safe guard of something bad not happening after a hit.
My fear is that this breakdown of expectations between the player and MC might make for some bumpy waters in groups that have established certain patterns of play from the last iteration. If an MC feels like making a move that the fiction wants to make might feel like punishing a PC after a success, that's a problem. If the Player likewise read the rules and feels the MC is making something bad happen after they missed a roll as a double punishment, that's also a problem. Both of these can be rectified in conversation, or can be codified between the players of a given game though, so it's not a big deal in the long term, but this is a weaker / less defined position then before.
I do believe that this move is no longer very effective for creating tension, but that's a personal bias considering the context of play I've experienced in the past. I've always found the harm rules already to be overly forgiving and narratively destructive (PCs as demi-gods)--which is why my group all agreed to replace the entire thing in play with Paul's T Blood and Guts. We were fond of the element of danger and chaotic implications of making those moves.
Basically, when it comes down to it. The biggest change here is: If a combat oriented character can obliterate an enemy, that's now their right do so. If they want something, it's their right to have it. If a non combat character wants something, and they don't mind the harm, it's theirs. Harm may be spent to achieve goals. The more important question is about how they do it.
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Vincent,
I'll look at the math, as you say. Perhaps I'll see something there which hasn't come up when we played. I suppose, for instance, that 1 point of harm when you're sending your gang out to do something can turn into a question of "how many men are you willing to lose for this?"
You're not willing to explain your reasoning behind this, though?
Also, how does that address my question about the flow of the conversation, and helping MCs play the game (as well as helping players develop correct expectations)?
As for the example of "getting shot", I suppose I should have expected such an obvious response. But it doesn't address my question at all - I was using "getting shot" as an example of a "hard move", separate from the action being described. I was hoping people would understand the thinking behind my question instead of playing "gotcha" with my particular example.
My original thought was that the fight wasn't taking place in circumstances where you might get shot at all (or, at least, not currently/normally).
For instance, let's say I'm trying to escape from my captors. I use a sharp stone to slit my bonds, and I run out into the courtyard. I bump into a guard; he's got a pistol in a holster, and he's standing in front of the door (the exit). He hardly has time to react, except to bring his arms up to hold me back. I charge at him, head down and fists swinging. We decide this is me Seizing by Force - I want to get to the door, to "fight my way free".
When is it legit for you, as MC, to say that I'm not quick enough, and that the guard manages to draw his weapon and shoot me?
It's possible that this was not at all what you intended, Vincent, but by "popular interpretation", at least (judging by my experiences playing the game as well as online dialogue), in 1st Edition you'd likely get shot on a miss. On a hit, you might get shot anyway, but the default assumption seems to be that you'd have a chance to react, first. (For instance, maybe you get past the guard and are rushing out of the place when he draws and fires - and here you'd get a chance to try to avoid that, if circumstances allowed that.) There's the idea of soft moves setting up hard moves, and a missed roll being an opportunity to "play" a hard move without setting it up beforehand.
I'm not sure how this works now, with this kind of formulation. Do I MC differently, depending on the roll? Or do I apply moves and Principles the same way, whether on a 10+ or a miss?
NOTE: Cross-posted with Ebok, above. I think we're in agreement. It seems like the intent here is to make "Seizing by Force" not an uncertain, risky action, but something you weigh against the cost (in harm/damage/casualties) instead. Is that the design goal here?
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Paul, I said it already: I changed seizing by force in order to put it into position at the head of the new battle moves. This requires it to put more of its consequences off into the snowball than it did in 1st Ed, to make the opening for the other moves to lead and follow it.
Ebok, "moves snowball" has always included the possibility of disruptive, frustrating, arguably unfair moves on a hit. That's not a change from 1st Ed.
Both of you, you know how you've been doing it before now?
Doing it that way has always been allowed by the rules, and still is. It's never been required by the rules, and still isn't. If you want to keep doing it that way, awesome! Now you know that you didn't have to do it that way, but you certainly still can!
-Vincent
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You're not willing to explain your reasoning behind this, though?
I think he's trying to explain it, but he speaks so consistently within the jargon of the game book that when there are differences of understanding it becomes difficult to pick out exactly what he means, sometimes.
As for the example of "getting shot", I suppose I should have expected such an obvious response. But it doesn't address my question at all - I was using "getting shot" as an example of a "hard move", separate from the action being described. I was hoping people would understand the thinking behind my question instead of playing "gotcha" with my particular example.
I'm not sure whether that's aimed at me or at Vincent. If me, I should point out that I did not mean it as a "gotcha", but as a genuine explanation of how it's meant to be played. In just a moment, I'm going to explain what might happen if you don't get shot, using your own example, as I understand (and use) the rules.
For instance, let's say I'm trying to escape from my captors. I use a sharp stone to slit my bonds, and I run out into the courtyard. I bump into a guard; he's got a pistol in a holster, and he's standing in front of the door (the exit). He hardly has time to react, except to bring his arms up to hold me back. I charge at him, head down and fists swinging. We decide this is me Seizing by Force - I want to get to the door, to "fight my way free".
When is it legit for you, as MC, to say that I'm not quick enough, and that the guard manages to draw his weapon and shoot me?
Let's make three sub-examples out of your example here. In both of them, you're unarmored (because of course they removed your armor when they captured you) and you're a gunlugger with the Not To Be Fucked With move, and you're using the "fight your way free" variant of the Seize By Force move.
- You roll 7-9: You suffer little harm. You take definite and undeniable control of it (or, in this case, you definitely and undeniably fight your way free). You charge the guard and get to him before he has time to draw his gun, a .38 revolver (harm 2), so you manage to shove him aside so he lands on his back, incidentally taking an elbow to the ribs on your way out, suffering one harm that gets absorbed by the fact you count as a small gang versus a single individual (+1 armor). Rather than stick around and pick up his gun or beat him to death, you rush out the door and escape around the corner of the building before he can gather himself enough to exit the building and shoot you in the back, and before reinforcements arrive.
- You roll a miss: You suffer little harm, and that's the only outcome option you can have. You charge the guard and get to him before he has time to draw his gun, a .38 revolver (harm 2), so you manage to shove him aside so staggers away from the door, incidentally taking an elbow to the ribs on your way out, suffering one harm that gets absorbed by the fact you count as a small gang versus a single individual (+1 armor). Because you do not take definite and undeniable control of it (or, in this case, definitely and undeniably fight your way free), he doesn't take as long to get himself together and gets to take a shot at you before you get around the building. You now need to Act Under Fire to get away. Maybe a 7-9 "flinch, hesitate, or stall" means you take a shot in the back, but still get away for the moment; maybe a miss means more of the gang shows up. Alternatively, maybe a 7-9 means you get around the corner, but he saw which way you went; then, maybe a miss (prepare for the worst) means he shoots you in the back. The MC should play these consequences as things fit the "fiction".
- You roll a miss: You take definite and undeniable control of it (or, in this case, you definitely and undeniably fight your way free). The guard gets his .38 clear of the holster just as you slam into him, and reflexively pulls the trigger, shooting you in the leg, then he falls on his back and his gun flies across the room. Two harm, minus one for Not To Be Fucked With, applies. You still manage to rush through the door and around the corner before he can see where you go or reinforcements arrive.
On a hit, you might get shot anyway, but the default assumption seems to be that you'd have a chance to react, first. (For instance, maybe you get past the guard and are rushing out of the place when he draws and fires - and here you'd get a chance to try to avoid that, if circumstances allowed that.)
The way it works now, I'd say, is that your roll determines how many advantages you get to choose, and whether you get to the guard before he can get his hand on his gun is one of those potential advantages. Another is how far you manage to get when you fight your way free before the MC throws another move at you. Another is whether you kill the guy when his head hits the concrete floor so he can't call for help. Another is whether you impress, dismay, or frighten him so he just doesn't come after you at all once you're past him. The consequences are the player's to choose; the MC just describes them, really.
NOTE: Cross-posted with Ebok, above. I think we're in agreement. It seems like the intent here is to make "Seizing by Force" not an uncertain, risky action, but something you weigh against the cost (in harm/damage/casualties) instead. Is that the design goal here?
Keep in mind that every time harm is done you have to roll your harm move. What happens to your escape if you lose your footing when you get elbowed in the ribs, even if the harm total is zero? What if you miss something important, and the MC thinks up some consequence that will surprise you as a result (like another guard outside, an alarm of some kind that you trip on the way out, a lookout or sniper on a neighboring building, or someone following you discreetly to find out where your friends are hiding with the loot you stole from the gang who captured you for the sake of interrogating you for that information)? Every time there's an exchange of harm, right there in the description of the move you choose to use, consider that something might go awry when you roll your harm move as well.
I forgot to mention something kinda important in my last long post, and I had something in mind to mention in this long post that I've forgotten as well. I don't recall either at the moment, so maybe I'll remember to share both at some later time.
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Preface: I fully understand how and why things read the way they do now. I'm on board and can work with this.
lumply: Yeah, I thought I said that in my last post. Soon as I realized my position was not about whether I had been "hacking" or not, it was much easier to co-exist with what others have argued for. Both ways to read it were justified even though seize by force is not the same tool I hoped it was.
I have enjoyed the expectation that the snowball comes soonish on a hit, but immediately on a miss.
That has worked out well for me, and I may I choose to keep doing it that way.
Where I diverged was allowing NPC's to suffer less harm on a Player's miss. This ability to boost the gang size of the NPCs above what was anticipated allowed for a level of danger that isn't there without. The other battle moves / different pacing will compensate, sure, if we use them.
apotheon, I get what you're trying to say; but I think perhaps your example is not a very powerful one. Seizing something by force, demands that the repercussions and fiction fall in line with the narrative scope claimed by the word "something". If a Gunlugger has no weapons and no armor, and that guy is in the room. His hands can still end up counting as a 3 harm weapon, and even in armor the guy is as good as dead. He's not even a threat. Why seize "your escape from the room" by force in this instance? That's dumb. At the very least don't leave your shit behind.
Any exchange of harm with that NPC means he is dead. Any weapons / armor held by that NPC are now basically the Gunlugger's. If he is the only thing that stands between the Gunlugger and escape, then the Gunlugger simply kills him, full-stop, no roll. Dude's a goner. This is Sucker someone, or maybe Go Aggro if we said he had his gun out already and probably only seize by force if he's waiting gun up and isn't surprised. Now... If the exchange doesnt always / probably kill the NPC things change dramatically. If we suggest that the Gunlugger either has +1 harm or counts as a gang and the dude has 1-armor, then maybe the player has to consider instead: To seize that gun by force. A miss in this case is a great example of it being better to inflict more then seize definite hold. That way you don't get shot again, and he's not still in your way, and and also the guns yours (though maybe not in your hands yet). If the guy's in 2-armor instead, it also spikes the threat ...(assuming a 2-harm unarmed gunlugger), but rewards going for his weapon and afterwards his armor. ( btw this is a good example to consider the effects that a simple +1 can have on the narrative, what's allowed by seizing depends on how quickly you can overwhelm the fight, and if you cant... that changes everything)
The real question was never: "Does the Gunlugger escape the room"? It's: "How many other people in the vicinity are involved in this action?"
So back to the Gunlugger seizing his escape from the location. The guy in front of him? Dead. If there's a guy just outside the door? He's dead too. Two more in the hallway? Also dead, there's no increase in threat here numerically. Add another five in, and alright, now we're talking. Basically until the group classify as a gang they're the same as it being just one guy. (unless you do like me and say that multiple people are a size-0 gang, then they soak harm differently, they're still mostly dead but not all dead). They're not seperate rolls, the scope here is escape, we'll include anything between him and the exit.
Instead, let's look at this differently. The gunlugger Suckers the first guy, but he's still in the middle of say... the medium sized gang. He can grab the dudes gun and maybe take the time to get armored. Probably does, cause the Gunlugger with 1+1 armor and a now 3+1 harm gun can probably waste the entire compound with a medium sized gang inside. Let's seize the entire place by force shall we? (My shit is here somewhere...). There is no question here either, He does it. The only question here is, what happens next and what position is he in health-wise. (he's maybe fine, +3 hard seize by force means on average he counts as a medium sized gang and can take on 20 without any major upsets, though that's starting to push some riskier addition, and probably wont handle a second round well if they're got a good leader) This math changes if the Gunlugger is already mostly dead.
You example might hold true if the dude was just a scrawny unarmed Savvyhead though. In such a case, a seize by force roll to escape, means: Always seize the escape, because any other option means you're not out yet and you'll have to roll again to get that far, thusly taking more harm and making any choice to suffer less meaningless (at least in this circumstance). Also remember, a harm roll wont contradict the choose-1 seize absolutely no matter how bad it might've been, so any harm roll will have to be put into perspective. Even if the extra harm kills you, you died after you seized your escape, not instead of it.
Miss: You get out but suffer two harm.
Partial: You get out but suffer one harm. Or suffer 2 harm but you also killed that bastard. Or 2 harm and [*below]
Hit: You get out and suffer one harm, and you took the guy hostage with you so no one else fired a shot that would risk his death. impress /dismay etc)
There's still something wrong though. The scope of the above assumes he was the only thing between you and escape, thus the only one involved in the harm exchange (or part of a small number of peeps who collectively didn't bump the harm level). That's not quite right if we've said there is a medium sized gang here.
This is a better way to scope that situation: You're escaping the entire compound by force you say? Okay. There are twenty guys in that place armed with mostly light weapons and some light armor. So if we're going to skip to you getting out (we essentially do if he can tell us how he does it) You'll be looking at well 4 harm to escape, because size by force means an exchange and their guns are loud. So ... you'll possibly risking up to 5 harm with the harm rolls and any complications after. "Oh." He says, and thinks about that again. "Maybe I'll do this differently."
tdlr: Seize by Force is saying: how hard /well did you fight to get the thing you just claimed?
Seize by Force is not a matter of, did the dashing hero escape? It's a matter of, do I have the harm / armor to tackle this challenge and win? Interestingly enough, now seize by force basically describes any PC fighting as hard as a gang a size step up from them. +1 harm +1 armor? Yay I can fight like a small gang! Gunlugger? I can fight 20 no 30 people and be on equal footing size wise! (and the gunlugger can probably fight way more with a better gun, at least 1 alternate source of armor, and some any harm focus ).
postscript: I have provided a half dozen little examples that show this move works even without guaranteed a hard roll after... I didn't expect that. It was just a matter of changing the Did you? to a oh, how'd that work out? Good practice. I am still utterly underwhelmed by this game's particular approach to manpower. I like risk, but I also like having deep and meaningful encounters (even the violent sort) that don't always end up with me fishing around for more population to get killed, or giving up on all mass violence just cause a certain PC is scary.
Unfortunately, most battle characters are "never" without their best armor and best gear in practice. After seeing the impact of each +1, some players might find combat boring, especially if their isn't enough fodder around to let them sweat in a fight. This definitely limits tension. An interesting side effect of this is, that the higher harm/armor any one PC can bring to bear, the more populated the area will become to compensate. Thusly, having an alpha wolf attracts people who think he'll kill danger, until so many have come that he's back under strain again.
The biggest fault of the current seize by force is that it assumes any character no matter how weak, can quite reliably fight his way out of a situation without an overwhelming scope. This makes me as an MC want to put more pressure on the HOW they do it and only accept that if that's something they could reasonably do (based on the fiction). Maybe that's okay? Maybe's it easier to make a Act under fire then Seize by force if you're captured, dunno. I'll have to play to find out.
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I think this question deserves its own, very direct, response. This is my take:
The Seize By Force move explicitly prescribes an exchange of harm, so yes, if people are shooting, the "fiction" can include getting shot in the explanation for harm inflicted on the PC in that exchange.
Yes, you can get shot whether you roll a 10+ or a Miss. You can take hold of the thing whether you roll +10 or a Miss too. And the MC can shoot you after the move whether you roll a +10 or a Miss.
@apotheon, I think Paul is struggling with the fact that if he's got, say 2 armor and "not to be fucked with," he might not care very much if they shoot or not.
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Yeah, I think the fixation on the case of the 2 armour Gunlugger is kind of skewing the perspective, here -- especially since they're not missing the roll anyways, because they're the frickin' Gunlugger? I thought apotheon's appeal to the Be a Fan principle was spot on, for that example in particular.
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It is fair to point to that example. Out of every single one of these games I've ever had the pleasure to run or play in, there was always a Gunlugger. That may be odd, but really? No it's not. 2-armor isn't so hard to get, a Hardholder gets the same numbers pretty easily (although healing is easier then getting more loyal troops perhaps). If a player wants 2-armor they can probably get it. Pretty much anyone that wants bloody conflict can see the advantage of taking not to be fucked with as a move from another playbook. You can replicate these numbers with almost any playbook.
These aren't rare occurrences, but perhaps the focus on them is pointing to a different concern in the game, rather then then seize by force itself. Considering both me and Paul T have hacked away the feeling of invincibility regularly now, either one of us might to continue to do so even if that means altering this combat move in play. It's not "wrong" to believe that having the chance to miss, and that miss utterly ruining you (bullet to the face?), makes rolling a hit feel all the more elevating and worthwhile, even for a Tanky Gunlugger.
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I have to say rolling snake eyes and then getting the thing I wanted while the bullet creases my helmet feels weird to me.
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Vincent,
As always, thank you for the answers. This topic boggles me a little, because I generally feel like I have a very good handle on the way AW operates, but here it seems like I'm missing some basic information to even engage in the discussion. I'm not sure why that's the case.
Paul, I said it already: I changed seizing by force in order to put it into position at the head of the new battle moves. This requires it to put more of its consequences off into the snowball than it did in 1st Ed, to make the opening for the other moves to lead and follow it.
Ebok, "moves snowball" has always included the possibility of disruptive, frustrating, arguably unfair moves on a hit. That's not a change from 1st Ed.
Both of you, you know how you've been doing it before now?
Doing it that way has always been allowed by the rules, and still is. It's never been required by the rules, and still isn't. If you want to keep doing it that way, awesome! Now you know that you didn't have to do it that way, but you certainly still can!
-Vincent
Here's what I don't understand (and I believe I asked this from the start):
How does this change affect the game? Does play "feel" different? Does it change the characters' actions or possible actions and consequences?
Ebok is getting at some of those potential changes, but it doesn't seem like s/he (Ebok) is talking from a place of experience. I'd love to hear from someone who has played with both sets of rules and is aware of the differences (including Vincent, of course).
Your first sentence suggests that this is a meaningful difference. What does it mean to "put off consequences into the snowball" when designing (or re-designing) a move? What does this look like, how does it affect play? This is a really interesting aspect of AW's game design I haven't heard described before, and I'm not entirely sure I understand it.
"This requires it to put more of its consequences off into the snowball than it did in 1st Ed, to make the opening for the other moves to lead and follow it."
I'm not sure how changing the way its miss clause operates changes how other moves might lead into a Seize by Force. What about following?
I'm looking at the Battle Moves, and the only one I can see engaging immediately after a Seize by Force (and directly because of its outcome) is Single Combat. I'm not entirely sure how that would happen, but I can probably imagine a few rare cases where that would happen, if I get creative.
So, presumably defining the miss clause and giving the MC a chance to forgo making a move improves the flow of battle somehow. Is that the idea?
In what way is it significant to make "basic moves" open-ended on a miss, but not other types of moves? I've always assumed that moves received "standard" or "spelled out" miss clauses either because a) they were narrow enough in context (unlike basic moves) that they didn't need that flexibility (e.g. "Shoulder another vehicle"), b) to help MCs who might struggle with coming up with a new "miss" result each time, c) (related to b) when a move doesn't have a really clear or obvious "miss" based on context (e.g. 'in-brain puppet strings', 'dangerous & sexy;), or d) to make a move less "punishing", to fulfill genre expectations (e.g. 'artful & gracious').
Playbooks moves, for instance, seem to follow these guidelines (or something similar). Many/most do not "spell out" what happens on a miss except in such cases.
In the 2nd Edition, all non-basic moves (but not playbook moves) seem to be spelling out their miss results. Since "Seize by force" is no longer a basic move (a decision I like - as a headline "battle move" it connects the various parts of the system nicely), it has also received this treatment. Does this mean that we're supposed to be using or applying it differently in play than we did before?
The opening of your post suggests that, yes, we should be. But how? I have no idea. I also don't know how this will improve play.
At the end of your post, however, you say that, no, we can keep doing it exactly as we have been. I know how to do that, of course. But I have no idea how that might be - conversely - harming or holding back my play.
This is what I'm trying to get at.
More generally:
While I appreciate the advice to "do it however you want!", it really doesn't help me (or other readers/players) figure out what to do with our previous expectations for misses serving as a "silver platter" for hard moves. What's the new guideline? Or is it left entirely to our "MC instincts"?
That's the first issue: how does this affect the conversation of play?
Currently, I feel like I'm being told to throw away a very useful tool, with no clear sense of what replaces that tool in play.
The second issue is one of risk/predictability, as Ebok and noclue suggest. Is something gained by allowing this kind of predictability in play? If so, what?
I can understand the value in a game which gives "guarantees" to its players when they make certain moves. That can be used to hammer certainly moral decisions or make statements about the nature of the "game world" ("your insights into the subject matter"). But this doesn't seem to be the case with most other moves in AW - is there something particular about Seize by Force which indicates this being an important change?
From what I understand about the "genre" of Apocalypse World, if anything, I'd expect "go aggro" to carry a more predictable "payoff" move than Seize by Force, if anything, not the other way around. What makes them different, instead, as this new version indicates?
What is the design thought behind this change, in other words?
Was it a recurring problem, for instance, that PCs engaging in Seize by Force felt it was too risky and punishing, and a decision was made to "soft-pedal" the misses? (If that was the case, I never saw it in my games, but perhaps I'm the outlier here, and that's why it feels funny to me.) In every example I can remember you (Vincent) wrote up of a miss on a Seize by Force (e.g. in the book itself, and also in forum examples), the outcome was far more punishing than "choose 1" suggests to me. (For instance, in an online example, you suggested having the MC choose 3 options against the PC, which, clearly, is a far more desperate outcome for the player.)
I would love to hear that playing AW often led to situations which were undesirable or suboptimal because of the way the move worked, and this improves that. If so, what are they, and how? I would love to hear that this is a conscious decision to change some dynamic of play, so I can (at the very least) make my own conscious decision to use it or go back to the 1st edition playstyle.
Saying that you can do either, as you like, isn't really helpful to anyone who's wondering about this (which is several people, at least, as this thread demonstrates)... until we have a sense of why we might choose one over the other, and what the advantages or disadvantages of doing so might be.
I suspect the response might answer other questions people have had about the other battle moves, many of which share this sort of "generous" miss clause. (Or tend to engage a calculation of harm as a balancing mechanism instead of fictional priorities, like "Single Combat". That's a tendency I've seen in many of your design notes and other game drafts, Vincent, so I suspect there's some underlying thought to it! I'd love to hear more about that.)
Thanks, again, for engaging in this conversation. I think it's pretty important for playing running and playing AW, and I also think it's very interesting for any designer or hacker of AW.
If you have the desire or energy to start a thread about this in "Roleplaying theory, hardcore" or "blood & guts", I'm sure lots of people would find it fascinating, too!
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(It also occurs to me that a design goal here might be as simple as making battle *more deterministic in general*, to move the focus away from "how does the battle go" and bring it back to "which fight do you choose"? Some of the Battle Moves suggest a shift in this direction. That's a possible, and very sensible, explanation. [Based on a suggestion from another poster.])
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Paul, before I try to answer your questions, I need you to just confirm for me:
In both editions, the basic moves don't specify miss effects, but ALL the non-basic moves - all the peripheral moves, battle moves, and character moves - do.
In both editions, the rule for making your moves as MC is: When it's your turn to talk, choose a move and make it. Choose one that could apparently follow from fictional causes, and don't say which move you're choosing.
In both editions, the guideline is: generally, use your moves to set up future action, but when the players give you an opportunity, including when they miss a move, make your moves as hard and direct as you want. This in no way contradicts any part of the rule for making your moves above.
So between the 1st Edition and the 2nd Edition there are some technical changes to some moves, including the whole new set of battle moves and this particular change to seizing by force, but there's absolutely no such thing as "the 1st Edition playstyle," in contrast with the 2nd Edition.
With me?
-Vincent
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In both editions, the guideline is: generally, use your moves to set up future action, but when the players give you an opportunity, including when they miss a move, make your moves as hard and direct as you want. This in no way contradicts any part of the rule for making your moves above.
This pretty much clinches for me the idea that the real substantive difference between a miss on SBF under 1st ed vs 2nd ed is that the PC gets to pick one. I'm still going to treat this as a "golden opportunity." Why? Because the rules don't tell me not to, and the results of the moves that I (as MC) make in response to those golden opportunities are what give impetus (gravity?) to the snowball.
Stripped to its bare bones, the ability to always pick at least one means that if you put your mind to inflicting violence, a PC can always get what he or she wants in the moment, but boy-howdy it might cost them in the long run.
I'm cool with that.
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Vincent,
Yes! Absolutely. Makes total sense.
Of course, 2nd Edition has so many "peripheral moves" that it seems to be a much more "visible" issue.
If it helps to understand where I'm coming from, I'm pretty sure that I never (or almost never) saw any peripheral moves used in all my experience of playing AW. (And playbook moves rarely have misses specified, except for moves which really need them for clarity.) That experience may be colouring my attitude here.
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Please go back and check again. Every single playbook move that calls for a roll, says what happens on a miss. Without a single exception.
Right?
-Vincent
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Oh, man, we used to use the 1st Edition peripheral battle and barter moves all the damn time. I actually miss the old clock-based battle structure a little bit. But given that our current campaign is decidedly "Mad Max" in flavor, we've been using a shitload of the new peripheral moves too. I'm a big fan of the vehicle and subterfuge moves, for instance. And while in 1st Edition you could easily handle most of that stuff well under the auspices of "doing something under fire," I think the new peripheral moves are interesting in that they both give the players some inspiration or ideas of what's possible (and what can go wrong), while also giving MCs a framework for how to narrate stuff.
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Vincent,
Well, I'll be! You're absolutely right, of course.
I guess I've been playing too many other AW-based games (e.g. Monsterhearts), which tend to be written the way I described.
So, then, what makes basic moves special, and why did you make the decision to make Seize by Force function in this rather different way?
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Good!
The basic moves have to work across contexts. You can act under fire, for instance, in battle, in the bedroom, trying to fix a car, trying to sneak away without causing any problems for anybody, trying to wait for a signal before you move. They can specify what happens on a hit, because those are the effects you're hoping to introduce into play, but they can't specify the miss because they can't presume the context. Imagine if acting under fire said "on a miss, you take harm as established," for instance. Now it only works when there's harm established, not when you're in the bedroom and not when you're waiting for a signal and getting impatient to move.
The non-basic moves, all of them, contrariwise, have to specify or create the context in which they work. One of the ways they do this is by specifying misses. Another is by specifying who can make them (in the case of the character moves) and/or where you have to be to make them (in the case of the peripheral moves) and/or what has to be going on for you to make them (in the case of the battle moves). They have to do this because otherwise they would be basic moves: whoevs would be able to do them whenevs.
In the 1st Edition, the battle moves were specifically flagged as "optional," meaning that they were presumed out of play unless you specifically chose to bring them in. Seizing by force was the basic move alternative to the whole set of battle moves. In the 2nd Edition, though, the battle moves are only the normal amount optional: presumed in play whenever you want to use one. This is why "do battle" appears on the 2nd Ed playbooks under hard. Doing battle, not seizing by force, is now the basic move.
With me so far?
-Vincent
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Vincent,
Absolutely! With you 100%.
(Although saying that "doing battle" is a basic move seems a little bit like a cop-out. But that's no biggie!)
It's also interesting that the Augury move doesn't *really* have a miss clause. (That's one of the details which convinced me peripheral moves didn't have specific miss clauses, in fact! I was wrong, of course.)
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Uh oh, Paul. You're not exactly filling me with confidence here!
I'm going to ask you to show me that you've followed what I'm saying. Please limit yourself to a sentence or two: what does augury's miss effect specify about the context in which augury works?
-Vincent
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If you're saying that the miss effect is a way to specify the context for the move itself - the presence of the psychic "antenna", and its vulnerability to the possible blowback of a failed Augury move - while also constraining *what a miss for that move can look like* by association, then I'm totally with you.
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Cool.
In 2nd Ed, seizing by force has a specific context. It's prescriptive and descriptive: you can only seize by force in battle; if you seize by force, that's great, now you're in battle. Since it has a specific context, the move no longer needs to work across contexts, so it's no longer a basic move and now it gets a miss effect. Its miss effect plays its part in creating what "in battle" means, along with all the other battle moves, the rules for exchanging harm, and a bunch of other stuff.
So now. You can always resolve a battle with a single seize by force move, treating seizing by force as the basic move it was in 1st Ed. The move is written now with the presumption that you won't always do that, but in fact you can do it whenever you want, including always. That's no problem by the rules and I think we've been over that.
Instead, can you imagine situations where, as the player or as the MC, resolving the battle with the single move feels kind of abrupt, or else feels kind of overreaching, or else doesn't give you the precise outcome you hope for, so you WANT to:
- Turn the tables before seizing by force?
- Hunt prey after seizing by force?
- Escape a hunter after seizing by force?
- Outdistance another vehicle before seizing by force?
- Board another vehicle before seizing by force?
- Etc?
-Vincent
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Vincent,
First of all, thank you for taking the time to engage in this conversation. It's starting to get really interesting, and I'm really glad it's happening. For me, at least, this has been very fruitful.
I'm with your last post here, 100%. Makes total sense to me. Here was me earlier (a page ago):
"I'm not sure how changing the way its miss clause operates changes how other moves might lead into a Seize by Force. What about following?"
So, yes, I'm nodding along.
Edited to add, some idle musing: One of the things that occurs to me is that the nature of open-ended misses, in AW, is part of how the general stakes of play are set and manipulated. For instance, more "difficult" or threatening challenges are often represented not by a penalty to a roll, but by the scope of potential "miss" results.
As a group playing AW, we can use that consideration to pick appropriate "scales" for the moves. In particular, this is really important for "open your brain", which, otherwise, would be very difficult to "scale" - if the move were assigned a predictable miss result like "suffer 1-harm", a group could easily get into arguments about what is possible to accomplish with that move and what is not, since, both strategically and dramatically, we need to maintain balance with the scope of that miss result.
A move with a specified miss clause, therefore, implies things about the move's scope.
I always found the open-ended miss useful with "Seize by Force", since it can be rather abstract in nature. Sometimes the move can be "zoomed in" or "zoomed out" to focus on or to expand the action happening. A player has incentives to act on a smaller scale, however, since they don't always want to risk larger-scale fallout from a missed roll. I'm not sure what they dynamic will be like now, however, with a 'set' miss attached to the move.
Anyway, you (Vincent) seem to be headed somewhere, so please carry on. I'm musing to myself here; not trying to derail your train of thought.
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So, yes, exactly: seizing by force now has a more concrete, less abstract range of possible outcomes, explicitly on the miss, implicitly on the hits. But the broad range of possible outcomes still exists, in battle, not in the single move. Each of the battle moves has narrower possible outcomes individually, but when you consider how they might organically combine, you don't lose any of the possible scaling, any of the possible zooming.
You trade away the range of outcomes in the single move, and in return you get, not the identical range of outcomes, but as broad a range, embedded in a broader range and diversity of possible battles. Plus better pacing.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. I wouldn't claim that it works perfectly and universally, because who knows. But from all I've heard, and from my own play, it works very well overall. The new battle moves get a million times more enthusiastic play than the old ones ever did, which means that seizing by force is doing its new job of leading people enthusiastically into them.
That's where I was going!
-Vincent
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Very interesting, Vincent!
How do you see things pan out differently in your games because of this? Can you give an example? (I'm not looking for high detail; just a sense of what you observed in players which made you think the change might improve the game, and how you saw it happen or pan out - if you did.)
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Like, one time the angel used his infirmary rig as bait for the raiders, but they weren't drawn all the way into the ambush, so the chopper chose to break cover and expose his gang in open terrain to attack the raiders. Despite the angel calling out warnings and the quarantine laying down substantial fire from the top of the angel's rig, the raiders smashed into the chopper's gang, scattering them and inflicting no little carnage. The chopper had gone into the fight already wounded and his life was made untenable, but his bikemate - I forget why, but all the chopper's gang doubled up on their bikes - got him back to the angel's rig. The angel got his rig out of there in time, and the survivors of the chopper's gang filtered back into the hardhold over the next day. The angel brought the chopper back with a prosthetic jaw.
It was a big complicated battle in which everyone got to participate fully, not just by rolling+hx to help. It had big complicated consequences. The battle moves suggested avenues of action and then followed through on the ones people chose. They kept the non-combat character, the angel, fully engaged; in fact it was his show. Compared to the old battle moves, they were concrete and effortless. Compared to just having the chopper roll to seize by force with help from the angel and the quarantine, it was satisfying, cinematic, and dramatically paced.
-Vincent
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Do you happen to recall the difference in size for the Chopper's gang and the raiders? I'm having a hard time figuring these numbers adding up to that sort of dynamism. In my experience, its rare that a single source of NPCs threatens the full player group together without having a significant advantage. In this case, it sounds like bait got the gang into play, and the charge got the chopper downed because... he lead from the front rather then use his hard to send his gang instead with the exact same numbers...
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Vincent,
Thanks! Great example.
I have little doubt that the new formulation of battle moves is helping with that kind of situation - there are a variety of ways to set up and interact with a battle situation, which is really nice. (I won't comment on Ebok's questions, although I wonder the same, because my games have seen almost no gang-on-gang battles.)
What I'm missing, though, is how the miss clause of the Seize by Force move played a role in all of that. Did the lack of open-endedness, or its more forgiving nature, or something else, somehow help that situation play out as you describe?
I can certainly see how the variety of moves help to lead *into* the battle nicely, but I'm less sure about how the less open-ended miss result changes the dynamic of play. That's what I was hoping to get out of this thread in the first place!
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Ebok, I don't recall, but I'm not shy about either (a) big and well-armed enemy gangs or (b) having a PC's gang demand actual leadership from the PC. You shouldn't be either.
Paul, as it happens, I'm pretty sure that it was a missed seize by force roll that took out the chopper. He chose to have his gang suffer little harm, because even though he was going to be at 12:00 either way, he was only willing to take a few casualties in his gang, not many casualties. I don't agree with you on "more forgiving," and neither would you if you'd done the math on those other hypotheticals like I asked you to.
So that's the role it played: it did its thing like it was supposed to, supporting and being supported by all the other battle moves and putting the chopper in a position to abandon his attack to save lives in his gang, or not. It flowed with the battle, it didn't tie my hands, and the chopper didn't feel like it let him off easy AT ALL.
-Vincent
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Hmmm! I see. My games have very rarely featured gang-on-gang warfare (and particularly against well-armed and organized enemies), so that's not something I've particularly seen.
Your earlier answer, though, made it sound like this change was a big part of making battle flow; a necessary improvement. Now, from this example, it just sounds like it's... not harming anything. ("See? It's not too easy.")
If I read between the lines (correct me if I'm wrong!), it sounds like you're saying that the variety of battle moves and options have led you to want to simplify the use of Seize by Force (by not requiring the MC to think up a move on a miss), because there are other moves and options which can take place afterwards. Is that about right?
Is it also part of your intent to create more situations where the group will want to roll "Seize" a second time?
From your statement that the move still creates difficult choices (and not forgiving ones), I read that you're balancing the value of "take definite hold" (or, sometimes, "dismay") against the potential harm. Is that right? It seems to me that in the examples we've seen so far, it's all been a question of "do I let my men die for this goal, or not?" Is that the dynamic we're going for, here, and one that wouldn't exist with an MC hard move?
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Sorry, Paul! Yes, you're wrong. It's not about simplifying seizing by force at all. It's about putting more of the move's consequences off into the snowball, like I've been saying, to create the opening for the other battle moves to lead and follow it. Explicitly follow on the miss, implicitly lead and follow on a hit.
I don't want to oversell it as a big part. It's just one piece of it. But it does play its own small, definite part in making battles flow.
-Vincent
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I'm still pretty new to AW, but I think my personal "aha" moment with seize by force was when I started seeing the fourth option — "You impress, dismay, or frighten your enemy" — come into play more.
That's the one that lets you turn to the gang boss and go, "Now let's talk about the terms of your surrender," or scare off the raiders so much that they don't come sniffing around later when you're trying to sleep off your wounds, et cetera. Sometimes, it's pretty clutch for making that "definite and undeniable control" you just seized actually last longer than this scene.
Even in the world of "gunlugger math" (numbers just work different when you've got 2-armor and Rasputin), that's a huge reason to care about landing that 7+.
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Vincent,
Ok, cool. So, then, that is the part I'm trying - and failing - to grasp.
What does that look like, in play? Can you give an example?
What does it mean to "put more of the move's consequences off into the snowball"?
Alex,
You're absolutely right that "dismay" is an important tool (assuming the MC understands its intent, of course)! I wouldn't downplay that by any means.
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Has this conversation gone dead? That would be a shame, since it was really interesting.
I asked how the new miss result helps to move the action along or create space for moves to lead or follow. Are there any examples of this? How it feels or looks different in 1st Ed vs. 2nd Ed?
(Anyone can answer, not just Vincent!)
To understand this a little better, how would this kind of rewrite affect play, do you think?
* On a miss, choose one option you don't want your adversary to pick. They get the remaining three against you.
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I've already discussed that particular example at length in this thread. You can read back if you wanna know how I see it effecting play.
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(Very true, Ebok! You wrote about various outcomes and possibilities, at great length. I assumed you were writing about hypotheticals, not real play experience. In either case, how would you summarize your position/opinion/experience now?)
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First off, I dont think such an explicit miss statement is warranted, a general one works far better. There will be times you dont want to simply up some numbers, it ties your hands when you could do thing that are much cooler. As this thread has demonstrated, you've essentially free reign for hitting up harder then usual moves after a miss already.
About half of the time in my games I've been willing to reverse the move on a hard roll, (though that means something different with the harm hacks in play). Those were the cases I described at the start. It works fine, so long as they know it's possibility ahead of time. I would never reverse 3 though, that's too much (also no variety), 2 works better and is more then enough to get the effect across. I am most likely to do this in situations where the player has a significant advantage, in order to dent any feeling of invulnerability. I'd never use it in a case where the player was disadvantaged already, at that point it's better to use tactical movements to divide, trip up, or raise the stakes instead of simply "deal more harm". There's not much else to it. It works.
I for one don't like the battle moves, any of them really. And discarded them completely even in the last few 2nd edition games I had run. We could do everything we ever wanted with a free wheeling seize or help, and I often allowed help to do more then just +1 or +2, (they could spend the bonus as hold be more strategic) So really I already had all the battle moves already mapped into play. Dunno, I'll have to play it again with Lumpleys suggestions and reconsider things.
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I'm sorry if this feels like harping on an old topic, but my personal aha moment from reading this thread is this:
If a player rolls for a move, hits the roll, we resolve the hit, and then the player just looks at me asking what happens next... I make a move.
Even if it's immediately after the roll. Even if it was a hit.
After all, the principle is that when the players look at you, expecting you to say something, you choose a move and make it.
A misconception I've had for a long time (unaddressed and unarticulated) is that this can't happen. On a hit, the "hit effect" happens. On a miss, the "miss effect" happens. And on some moves, the "miss effect" includes getting an MC move in the face.
This ignores the time period immediately after a hit. What's the MC doing then? In my case, now that I look back on it, the answer has been "relying on mystical MC skills (i.e. not the game's rules) until the situation has changed a little and I start looking at my moves list again".
This model is (if I read this thread correctly) wrong. Some moves have a miss effect; if so, that happens, then if you turn to the MC they will make a move. Some moves only have "prepare for the worst" – which as a player sort of automatically improves looking at the MC saying "okay, so how fucked am I?" And that's what triggers the MC move.
Now, I'm not saying that the right thing to do is to throw the hardest moves you can think of at the players every time they hit a move. You still want to follow the dramatic rhythm you've got going. And more importantly, when I hit a roll as a player, I'm not likely to look at the MC and ask "so what happens?" Instead, I might go "okay that's great, so now that I'm in the car I wanna..."
I don't think I'm alone in this misconception. And by changing Seize by force from one that doesn't have a miss effect ("the miss effect is a hard move") to one that does ("so what, now we can't do a hard move on a failed Seize?") brought it to the forefront.
Does this seem reasonable?
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Jonatan,
Yep.
-Vincent
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Absolutely. We covered that a few pages back.
I was still hoping to dig a little deeper into the implications of designing miss clauses with different levels of "openness"; as far as I know (I could be wrong), this isn't something that's been discussed (at least not publicly) at all, and would be highly relevant to PbtA hackers.
There have long been certain assumptions made about move design among hackers, and it's interesting to see Vincent deviating from that somewhat.
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So Paul, where are you now on the idea of putting more of a move's consequences off into the snowball? You weren't grasping it before, but do you have a better handle on it after a couple days' reflection?
-Vincent
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I'm on board with the concept, yes. It makes a lot of sense now.
However, I'm not 100% sure I understand how this *particular* design decision does that. Hence my question about a hypothetical variation where the opponent gets choices against the PC, or any other similar variations.
Did you go through any other iterations when dealing with this move, or was it a straight jump from an open-ended miss to the current 2nd Ed version?
Thanks for sharing! It's been very interesting.
Edit: I see that in the Preview documents for 2nd Ed, you had this rule in place when there were three "versions" of Seize by Force (seize, defend, and assault). These were somewhat interestingly different, in that their design required two choices for a "full success" on any given move - choosing 1 meant that you got what you wanted, but not quite (you seize the thing, but not undamaged; you thwart the attackers, but they can regroup and attack again; you make it into the position, but you don't control it yet). All suggest the possibility of a pyrrhic victory or further fighting.
In what way is the final version an improvement on those moves? Or was it just a sacrifice made to streamline the rules?
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As I recall, the preview versions muddied the move up. The variations overlapped in some fictional circumstances and left gaps in others, I wasn't satisfied with how they carved them up. The current version is cleaner, no sacrifice.
Do you see how the current version also suggests the possibility of a pyrrhic victory or further fighting?
-Vincent
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Muddled and overlapping makes total sense to me. I could see that happening, definitely. Very interesting!
I can see how the current version of the rules can suggest further fighting (although perhaps only in relatively "balanced" fights; a dominant PC seems to be in a strong position to finish fights even on a missed roll). The Pyrrhic victory... I see that less. The only "Pyrrhic" possibility I'm seeing in the design of the move is calculating the tradeoffs involved in the exchange of harm. With groups in battle, that can turn into deaths and combatants lost - that's an example of a Pyrrhic victory.
What I'm even less certain about is how this design does that better than previous versions.
And isn't a Pyrrhic victory more of a 7-9 kind of outcome?
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It would help you understand the move better, I think, if you did the math on those other hypotheticals I recommended.
And isn't a Pyrrhic victory more of a 7-9 kind of outcome?
Lord no!
You're making that idea up out of your own head, with no reference to the game as it really works.
-Vincent
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Ok, now you've lost me again! (Sorry, Vincent!)
Doing the math may be helpful, indeed, but isn't that precisely what I referenced in my post (that the "weight" of the move comes from the harm calculation)? Nothing wrong with that; I just thought I already addressed that in my post. (So, for instance, in a situation where the harm calculus favours the PC dramatically, there isn't really another or different angle.)
As for the Pyrrhic victory, I don't really know what you mean. Isn't, for instance, a "worse outcome or a hard bargain" a perfect example of a Pyrrhic victory?
(Although it seems that, in the case of this move - as well as Single Combat - it's the harm calculus which effectively settles the question, moreso than the roll.)
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A pyrrhic victory is one in which the cost was so high that the victory itself is pointless. In other words, only a victory by technicality (e.g. You captured the generator...but your gang died in the process, so you don't need the electricity anymore). Which would only be fair in the case of a miss: A 7-9 is fundamentally a victory, while a pyrrhic victory is fundamentally failure.
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Bingo.
Furthermore, there's no such thing in Apocalypse World as "a 7-9 kind of outcome," to which any given move ought to hold. The moves should and do vary wildly in what they give and what they cost, on each roll. Acting under fire, for instance, doesn't set a standard for other moves, it's just its own self, with its own context and its own needs.
Paul! I have a sixth new hypothetical for you to do the math on:
- The PC savvyhead has grabbed the PC brainer's pain wave projecter (disarmed) without asking, and now they're fighting over it, heavy-ass wrench vs scalpel.
-Vincent
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Ok, that's fair. I think the design of many moves, and particularly the MC moves, as well as the examples in the book, generally tend to "Pyrrhic victories" falling more often under the domain of 7-9 results, but they can occur, in some cases, on 10+ outcomes or misses, as well. It depends, as you say, on the move and on the fictional situation. (For a simple example, if you were really hoping not to hurt Toyota, and you end up having to "go aggro" to get what you want, then rolling a 10+ might be the worst thing for you - Toyota could choose to 'suck it up' and end up hurt or dead.)
Now, I'll work through this example; it sounds interesting.
Let's say the Savvyhead and Brainer both have Hard=0. I'm guessing a wrench is 2-harm, whereas a Brainer's scalpels are 3-harm (but intimate). Clearly, the Savvyhead wants to take pain wave projector, and is willing to take harm to do so. Same for the Brainer.
Now, I don't know who's the aggressor here, but I'll go with the character who's at a disadvantage first (assuming a wrench is 2-harm).
1. The Savvyhead is Seizing by Force. On a 10+, he might grab the projector and come out ahead in terms of harm (3 points to the Brainer, 2 to him), whereas on a 7-9, he gets the thing but they both take 2- or 3-harm. (Perhaps if the Brainer is cowardly, he might see greater benefit in "dismaying" him, too.) All clear victories, but painful.
On a miss, though, by the old rules things would go against him. Perhaps the MC would offer an opportunity for the Brainer to set off the projector, for instance.
By the new rules, he must choose 1. If he chooses to "take definite hold", he does so, and deals 2-harm to the Brainer, while taking 3-harm. Seems like a reasonable deal - after all, he was prepared to engage in the move in the first place, so he was expecting to get hurt. The very best possible outcome was him taking 2-harm, so taking 3-harm instead doesn't seem (to me) to make a huge difference unless he was, say, at 9:00 harm already.
I don't really see him choosing not to take the thing - after all, if he hands it over, the Brainer could likely kill him with it! Better suck up an additional point of harm.
2. What if it was the Brainer making the move?
The math is similar, except with better harm odds for the Brainer. He's facing 1- or 2-harm (not likely a huge difference, I'd think), and dealing 3- or 4-harm. That's getting into "could kill someone" territory, so that could be interesting if the Savvyhead is already wounded. Killing him would be likely a better deal than grabbing the projector.
On a miss, the Brainer deals 3-harm, suffers 2-harm, and grabs the projector.
Either way, the active party seems almost certain to end up with the device.
Am I doing it right?
Is the idea to make the active party more or less successful by default? To give more agency to being the aggressor in battle situations?
I don't particularly see how the new version is more likely to lead to further fighting or a Pyrrhic outcome. Is it just that we're *always* going to have an exchange of harm, which means that they now have a tough choice facing them if they want to fight further (both being heavily hurt)?
I see simplicity in execution, in that the MC doesn't have to wrack her brains for a miss result, and more predictability. I believe that's what I've been saying all along. However, it could get pretty interesting once death is on the line (if, say, they now go at it a second time). There also seems to be a tremendous advantage given to the active party, whereas under the old rules you risked a painful miss. (As in the first example, getting hit by the pain projector before you get a blow in with your wrench.)
Looking forward to your thoughts (anyone)!
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Both roll the move simultaneously.
-Vincent
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Both roll the move simultaneously.
That's new.
I also feel like it lends itself to an ambiguous result - what if they both succeed and both decide to take definite hold of the pain-wave projector? Who actually gets it? Or is your point that neither one gets it and they are therefore still "in battle" and you'd roll again?
I guess I should 'fess up that I'm not a huge fan of "roll again" kinds of moves. The single combat battle move leaves me cold for this exact reason. I get what it's trying to model - two foes locked in combat until one of them blinks - I just think the way it goes about it feels a little odd and clunky, especially in comparison to how the rest of AW works in terms of fiction-changing resolution of moves.
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If both take definite hold, they cancel out, same as if one chooses to inflict +1 harm and the other chooses to suffer -1 harm. It's the same as if neither had chosen to take definite hold (except that both of them spent 1 of their choices to do it).
They might still be in battle, sure, sometimes, but the rule is NOT "it's inconclusive so roll again."
So do your best not to bring single combat into your understanding of it! Despite the superficial similarities, they don't work the same way at all.
-Vincent
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Ah! Interesting.
Well, if you're rolling both at the same time, it definitely makes sense to have a defined miss result, or it just gets awkward. I hadn't thought of that.
Is this new design of the move intended to mimic some of your other "battle" moves in other games, then? Like how in Freebooting... you bid for winning the match? (Except that here you're not allowed to bid more than one, effectively.)
I haven't had this come up in my games, so now I'm in purely conjectural territory. My intuitive response is the same as Munin's, above.
What makes this fun/exciting at the table? Are we missing something?
For instance, is the Single Combat move terribly different from having each roll for damage against the other?
What drove this design concept, in other words?
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This has been around for years guys, since early AW1. Rolling PvP seize by force only occurs fictionally if both are willing to go to battle for it (both aiming to harm the other over the thing). Basically if both are, then the other is defending something by force. And players should roll together over something like this, choose their options, and let the MC narrate if shit isn't clear. Again, standard practice, I was taught this within my first few days on the forum some 2+ years back.
Actually this is the best argument yet for NOT having miss conditions. They sort of gummed up the works here when the players really should be taking the narrative reigns. The miss condition in AW1 was clunky and ignored on multiple occasions within my group when it arouse during PvP. It really was awkward to have to come up with a move during times when there was plenty enough happening as it were.
Apparently my games had a lot more PvP then most from the sounds of things.
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Paul, next do the one where the driver's punching through a (npc) gang blockade. Be sure to use the rules for when vehicles suffer harm. Think through at least a few variations, like different vehicles, different gangs, different choices on the driver's part. Forget about the battlebabe.
In each variation, think up (a) the MC's possible next moves, and (b) the driver's next moves in answer.
-Vincent
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I would... but I have no idea how to. It sounds pretty daunting!
(Ebok: To be clear, I agree with you on that 100%. A defined miss is far superior for PvP situations where both parties roll.)
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Oh, let's do it together then.
Somebody give me a 1-line gang writeup and tags?
Somebody else give me the same for a driver and a car?
-Vincent
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Great. I'll start with the gang.
3-harm gang medium well-disciplined 1-armor - want: savagery
Is that what you were looking for? I figure this is about 40 rough customers, with varied and extensive weapons, and they're disciplined but barely holding on to that discipline.
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Oh, let's do it together then.
Somebody give me a 1-line gang writeup and tags?
Somebody else give me the same for a driver and a car?
-Vincent
Great. I'll start with the gang.
3-harm gang medium well-disciplined 1-armor - want: savagery
Is that what you were looking for? I figure this is about 40 rough customers, with varied and extensive weapons, and they're disciplined but barely holding on to that discipline.
Gremlin, the Driver: Cool+2 Hard-1 Hot+1 Sharp+1 Weird=0
.38 revolver (2-harm close reload loud)
Moves: Daredevil and Eye on the door
Vehicle: Pickup (massive=2, speed=0, handling+1, 1-armor)
Rugged, Off-road, Powerful, Picky
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(Thanks, Ebok!)
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Groovy.
So the gang's blockading Gremlin's way through a broken, rocky, blown-dust and gully landscape called the Knives. She's already read the situation and she knows her best way through: there's a spot overlooking the road where there's a guy with a machine gun, set up to catch coming vehicles in a crossfire, but she's going to take her pickup off-road and punch right through his little machine gun nest. She also knows that she should be on the lookout for the gang's 4-wheeling outriders, on both sides of the blockade, but she hasn't seen any of them yet.
Here are the harm calculations:
The gang's inflicting 3-harm, +2harm for their size, for a total of 5-harm. They've got 2-armor, +2armor for their size, for a total of 4-armor.
Gremlin's using her vehicle as a weapon. A direct hit inflicts 3-harm, +2harm for its massive, for a total of 5-harm. A glancing hit inflicts 2-harm.
Her pickup has 1-armor, +1armor for Daredevil, for a total of 2-armor. She herself has no armor, but gets the 1-armor for Daredevil.
In sum, in an unmodified exchange of harm:
The gang hits her pickup for 3-harm (serious damage, impaired function, can be field-patched). Blow-through hits her for 1-harm.
Her pickup hits the gang for 1-harm (a few injuries, no fatalities), basically messing up just this one guy's machine gun nest.
She's assaulting a secure position, p168, and we'll take "force your way into your enemy's position" to mean "force your way through your enemy's position." She gets +1 to her roll for reading the situation and acting on the answer, which she needs, because even with it she's rolling+0.
Please double check my math! Does it look okay? Everybody with me?
-Vincent
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You gave them 1-armor more then Paul T's one-liner, but otherwise you're good on the numbers.
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Agreed!
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Heh, I like where this example is going!
As an aside to Ebok, when PvP has come up in my games (and it's not uncommon), we've always had one player make the move and the other player interfere (or in one unique case, help!). So if one PC is like, "Yeah, I go to town on Vance with my machete," I'll say, "Great, roll +Hard. Vance, I assume you're going to interfere? What are you doing?" Vance: "For fucking sure; I'm going to put as many rounds into him as I can before that blade hits me." Harm is going to be exchanged, effects are going to be decided based on the results of the rolls. And once that move is resolved, I'll typically give Vance's player the opportunity to make the next move.
If the game is a conversation, having two people making the same move at the same time feels kind of like having two people talking over each other. I can see how it can work in play, but I'm just not a fan of the tone it sets. :shrug:
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Munin: That always seems extremely unfair, as whoever gets to roll the move and spend the hold has a massive advantage in terms of raw numbers.
Trasher has Hard+3, Hugh has Hx+2 with Trasher. Trasher goes seizing on Hugh trying to take his shit, Hugh doesn't want him to and resists.
AW1 using your example
Hugh has a 83.33% to hit and give Trasher a -2.
Trasher therefore has a probable 72.22% to hit anyway. That's a decrease from 91.67%.
This means Trasher can be pretty well expected to not only be successful in taking the shit, but also choose more hold to punish Hugh for resisting. He's got a 27.78% chance to choose two more punishments instead.
This roll doesn't account for Hugh's abilities at all (only his weapon and armor), and pretty much guarantee's he who rolls wins in PvP. This is definitely not an equitable exchange, and I'm actually very surprised your players let you get away with that. This way to handling the problem is even more problematic in AW2.
AW2 using your example
Hugh has a 83.33% to give -1 and a 41.67% to give -2.
Trasher probably still has a 72.22% but instead of being able to assume -2, now there is a large chance of only -1.
This means that interfering is actually less imposing then it was in AW1 by a small margin, and now with the roller able to pick one on a miss, the PvP is guaranteed to give Trasher what he really wants (at no other cost). A one sided seize wasn't at all fair before, it's definitely not fair now.
That's a problem. What works Best, since both players do have agency in that conflict, is that the instigator says what he wants to do and the other says how he plans to stop it. This isnt people talking over each other, this is people establishing the scene through conversation. If Hugh wanted to run away, then we're not at seize by force yet. We're cat and mousing. If He instead decides to stand and fight Trasher off, okay, both can roll a seize by force and both interfere with the other (there might be a better battle move now not sure, either way:)
AW using opposed rolls
Hugh has a +2 hard, +2Hx with Trasher.
Trasher +3 Hard, -1Hx with Hugh.
Now if they roll all the rolls (hardly takes a second to do, really!) They each get to first limit the other's successful hard depending on how well they know each other.
For Hugh it's: 83.33% of at least -1, 41.67% of -2.
For Trasher it's: 41.67% of at least -1, 8.33% of -2.
This now has a range of possibilities. I'm not doing the math for each, or collectively right now. (I will if you think you want that). But essentially it's +3 vs +2 hard rolls with this extra modifier. Much more likely to come out that Trasher doesnt absolutely get Hugh's shit, but they both are probably black and blue, and Hugh significantly less then previous examples. But it is equally clear that Trasher is going to have a much harder time predicting Hugh, and that the advantage of Hard is more likely to be equal or with Hugh advantaged instead. This makes Hx far more important then a mere bump of -few% to win.
This establishes the character's effective rolls. Now they each roll seize to find out how many holds they spend, and they prioritize what they want. It's clear they counter each other in options which is fine. Since this is mostly to see who has what advantages and then exchange harm and decide who has possession if either of them do. Which sets you up to make a move and describe how those rolls play out as an arbiter. The group should decide how the spend the hold: out loud first one then the other, taking turns hold by hold, the winner declares first, or if both declare secretly, etc.
EDIT::
As DeadmanwalkingXI says, this is a Single exchange of harm.
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Like Ebok suggests, I've always had one person roll seize by force while the other rolls to interfere, then have them swap roles (with the person who just rolled to interfere rolling seize by force and vice versa), but I then apply both rolls results to a single exchange of Harm. I think that's probably the fairest way to do it, since otherwise, again as noted, whoever rolls seize by force has a huge advantage that's not necessarily reflective of the fiction...one-sided brutality is better done with Go Aggro. Yeah, that's a lot of rolls, but it's pretty quick to figure out since two of the four just apply penalties to the other two.
This sometimes results in both people saying they 'took definite hold' and canceling each other out on that front, but IME they usually pick 'suffer little harm' as their first option, and then more often 'inflict great harm' than 'take definite hold'. That might just be my players in particular, though.
This has worked out perfectly well in play, with nobody feeling screwed by it or anything.
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...and what do you do on a miss (for those interfering rolls)?
In any case, let's stay on topic. I'm looking forward to Vincent continuing this example.
I think it's pretty clear that there has been a change in how to apply "Seize by Force" in a PvP situation. The 1st Ed was relatively clear that (or, at least, the way people played it) you continued the flow of the conversation, and players took turns making moves. (Hence the existence of the "interfere" move in the first place; there would be no need for such a move when both people are rolling, after all.)
At some point, it seems to me that Vincent started looking at "both sides roll" solutions, and advised people do it this way. Vincent, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I see a definite trend in your recent designs of the last few years to feature this kind of "both sides roll, choose options" approach.
As I said earlier, "both sides roll" works much better with a defined "miss clause", so that's a strong argument for doing it this way. You don't need to throw in MC moves to muck it up - that becomes redundant, as well.
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You don't have to do anything for those misses Paul, except perhaps describe how the advantages occurred in the fiction if your players dont do that for you. I made a small edit to show that Hx is a meaningful contributor to the conflict. And AW1 I thought made this pretty clear from the get go, either that for Lumply did on the forums. This isnt New, you can find references for this play style going backs years. There is actually no change from first to second here. (except now it's more clear you dont have to have MC moves following one or both missing Seize by forces)
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Ebok,
Ah, so you just ignore the missed rolls altogether? Got it.
As for changes... don't forget that Apocalypse World is about 7 years old now. :) So, we might both be right in this case, without contradicting each other. I certainly don't know how Vincent was playing this at home, but in the circles I'm familiar with (and, for example, Story Games), players taking turns to roll, as Munin says, was most common back then.
For reference, my earlier comments were about the post "One Move's Iterations" (you can't see it unless you're one of Vincent's patrons, unfortunately), where Vincent shows the development of "fighting moves" from Poison'd all the way to some more recent games he's been working on. The other example was from a discussion on RPG.net from 2012, where Vincent uses the "reversed move on a miss" option I mentioned earlier (https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?649053-Combat-example-for-Apocalypse-engine-games-(Monster-of-the-Week-Apocalypse-World)/page6 (https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?649053-Combat-example-for-Apocalypse-engine-games-(Monster-of-the-Week-Apocalypse-World)/page6).
Vincent wrote:
"At Berg's word, AT rushes the guy trying to get behind the van, and Berg and Clarion rush the guy in cover on the right. They're straight up seizing by force.
[...] Berg rolls+hard and gets ... a 5. A miss! It's a miss even if Clarion gets to help.
I get to make as hard and direct a move as I like. I could just exchange harm for harm as established, that'd be easy, but instead I'm going to turn Berg's move back on him. "Excellent!" I say. "The gang guy inflicts terrible harm, suffers little harm, and keeps definite hold of his position." Holy crap, that's bad news."
As you point out in your post, above, this approach is (almost certainly) better suited to a playstyle where players take turns making moves, as opposed to both rolling at once.
I think that, if we're looking at PvP situations, the choice is clear. In my experience, most Seize by Force rolls have been PC vs. NPC, however, which is why I'm curious what changes to my games adopting the 2nd Ed "Seize" move might bring.
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That is a PC vs NPC example where the principals tell you to be a fan of the player and put the NPCs in the crosshairs. Munin and I were discussing PC vs PC where you principals require you to be a fan of them both. Those are very, very different situations, and you need to treat the players equitably even if the character's clearly have advantages. As an aside: the above example wouldn't automatically be a miss anymore, since the second player could get a +2 in the help roll.
As Deadmanwalking pointed out, you can take turns doing it the way I wrote out as well. I just find simultaneous rolls keeps the tensions high, which is great.
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...and what do you do on a miss (for those interfering rolls)?
Personally, I complicate things.
'So, while Vasquez and Saffron are having their little gunfight, you all hear the sound of a bunch of bikes pulling up outside. Looks like Dremmer's goons have arrived.'
Or someone comes in to help the person you just failed to interfere with. Or their gun runs out of ammo during this exchange (very relevant if there's a next one). Or they lose some barter as something valuable they have on them breaks. In short, any move I feel like making that becomes a collateral event to the fight rather than taking center stage.
Ebok's totally right that you don't need to do anything, but you certainly can without the system breaking down or anything.
Vincent wrote:
"At Berg's word, AT rushes the guy trying to get behind the van, and Berg and Clarion rush the guy in cover on the right. They're straight up seizing by force.
[...] Berg rolls+hard and gets ... a 5. A miss! It's a miss even if Clarion gets to help.
I get to make as hard and direct a move as I like. I could just exchange harm for harm as established, that'd be easy, but instead I'm going to turn Berg's move back on him. "Excellent!" I say. "The gang guy inflicts terrible harm, suffers little harm, and keeps definite hold of his position." Holy crap, that's bad news."
A reversed move on a miss is much more appropriate for a move vs. NPCs (which that example is) or in a situation where a PC was targeted by a one sided move like Go Aggro, than one with PCs in a situation like seize by force, since that tends to remove a lot of player agency and works weirdly an inappropriately mechanically (it makes the Skinner better at getting that result than the Chopper, for example...since Hx matters and Hard doesn't).
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Yep! Sounds like we all agree. Great.
Deadmanwalking, I love the tip on inserting complications on missed "interfere" rolls. That sounds like a great technique!
(As an aside, I did some trawling of older discussions, and it looks like the basic idea of "both sides rolling" started being part of the mainstream discussion around 2012, although there are a few mentions earlier. Here's an example of Vincent's thinking on this point, from his blog at "anyway", on June 18, 2012 [http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/672#17422 (http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/672#17422)]:
"Protagonist vs protagonist conflict isn't a big part of Apocalypse World's genre. Take Firefly: the protagonists disagree, argue, sometimes come to blows or threaten to drop each other out of airlocks, but they never actually try to hurt each other and they always resolve their differences when there's a real enemy to deal with.
"Consequently, Apocalypse World doesn't handle it particularly well when the PCs actually try to hurt each other. It's not built for that. It can handle it, but it doesn't make it easy on the MC, the MC really has to keep a tight reign and insist upon using the rules very precisely. It's exhausting!
"Anyhow, sooner or later, some enterprising hacker is going to make a set of moves that handle PC vs PC conflict beautifully. It's a limitation in Apocalypse World's particular set of moves, not a limitation inherent to the form."
I think we've seen Vincent address this nicely since then, in various shapes and forms. These changes are interesting! Hence this thread.)
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I too believe in complicating things on missed interference rolls, but I'm careful to keep those complications germane to the fictional positioning. A lot depends on how someone is helping or interfering.
You know, in reading Ebok's and especially DeadmanwalkingXI's posts, I suspect that while our order-of-operations might look a little different, the functional effect ends up coming out very similar. I'd never let one player get to make a move without the other one getting to make a response. But the order of operations usually doesn't matter because it's extremely difficult to off a PC in on go (especially in AW1, where debilities were a thing), and AW doesn't have "damage modifiers" to your roll. So you can take a shotgun blast to the face and still turn around, say, "OK, now it's my turn, Cochise," and roll+Hard. So the method of getting there is slightly different, but like I said, I'll bet at the table the result ends up looking pretty much the same. Very cool.
This has been a fascinating discussion, BTW.
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A bit of housekeeping: the first time on this forum that I told somebody to have both players roll and apply both of their choices to a single exchange of harm was here (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=17.msg79;topicseen#msg79), in June of 2010, before I'd even published. It didn't become the formal rule until 2nd Ed, but it was always the approach that I recommended.
Okay! Here's the corrected sum uppage for Gremlin vs the gang's blockade. In an unmodified exchange of harm:
- The gang hits her pickup for 3-harm (serious damage, more than one impaired function, can be field-patched). Blow-through hits her for 1-harm.
- Her pickup hits the gang for 2-harm (some serious injuries, a couple of fatalities), which we'll take to be her driving her truck right the hell over this guy with the machine gun, and probably he has a friend in there too.
Now I'm going to lay out her choices. She gets to choose 1, 2, or 3 of these, depending on her roll.
- If she chooses to inflict terrible harm, she'll be swerving to drive along the line of the blockade, hitting as many people as she can. She'll inflict 3-harm: widespread injuries, several serious, a few fatalities.
- If she chooses to suffer little harm, she'll be swerving to avoid the worst enemy fire. Her pickup will suffer 2-harm (one impaired function, can be field patched). Blow-through will hit her for 0-harm.
- If she chooses to force her way through her enemy's position, she'll be on the other side of their blockade. If she doesn't, she'll be hung up on it somewhere.
- If she chooses to impress, frighten or dismay them, she probably won't frighten or dismay them, so let's go with impress. They'll admire her fearlessness, recklessness, and unflinching assault, and as MC our job is to change their behavior accordingly.
Before she rolls, she's surely looking at these options and beginning to weigh them out. What do you all think she's thinking? If you were her, how would you be prioritizing them? What roll are you hoping for?
And the MC needs to be thinking about the possible state of her pickup and the possible reactions of the gang, too. The pickup might wind up taking 2-harm or 3-harm; if you were the MC, what would you be thinking about the difference there? How out-for-blood do you think the gang should be? Where do you think the gang's 4-wheeler outriders should be, that you told Gremlin to be on the lookout for, back when she read the situation?
-Vincent
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Oh, and I forgot the most important question for our current purposes!
Which option or combination of options do you think will resolve the situation, and which do you think will leave the situation unresolved?
-Vincent
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This is Paul T's show, but I figured I'd toss out my immediate feelings on the matter:
The priority depends a lot on the fiction (who are these guys, why does she need through?), so taking this example in isolation is already one level of abstraction out. There are many different approaches to this, here are two:
Either way the first choice is Seize Definite Hold: She wants to get through first and foremost. Not choosing this means she's still actively engaged with the gang and can expect another round of violence at the very least... worst case senario. Choosing this puts most the gang behind her, except for the 4-wheelers whose behavior differs substantially depending on:
1.)
Inflict More Harm (7+) ~> Suffer Less Harm (10+)
Inflicting more harm might scatter the gang if they don't have good leadership preventing them from aggressively chasing her down, but will also invoke the worst of the gang's revenge later. Suffer less will mean less time lost repairing the vehicle after getting through, since she's likely to be pursued by some hateful fuckers. The 4-wheelers in this case are probably on the edges of her vision, tracking her, so the gang knows where to find her when they recover. If she's stuck due to damage, she might have them coming up on her later but while she's still isolated (not great). Either way, she might have to follow these rolls with another to lose them.
We could swap the 10+ option for Impress, which would certainly buy her more time and delay the aggression, but at the cost of the vehicle's functionality.
2.)
Impress (7+) ~> Suffer Less Harm (10+)
Her showing moxy might have those gang members going "god damn!" and that marvel is going to eat away at their aggression. I mean, watching some of your pals get run over isn't great, but how many times in one's life are you going to see someone break the lines like That!. So assuming these people aren't going to be overly interested in hunting her down and killing off such a skill, next best thing is to have less to do with repairs. This is probably the best combo for keeping the battle ended here. As for the 4-wheelers, they might also follow her movements, but in this case it's more like to just have the info if they need to sell it off later. Of course, if she's going far, then screw that, maybe they watch her go.
Miss
Of course on a miss, she's got an unimpressed gang still coming after her, not damaged enough to scatter, and her vehicle cant take much more of this. So she'll be racing away from them but probably immediately engaged with the four wheelers and under whatever fire can be leveled on her from the enemy lines. It's entirely possible they'll successfully run her down in her broke ass vehicle which cannot take another hit of any kind.
Damage
As an MC, for the 2-harm, I'd be looking at the vehicle tags when deciding damage. Rugged, Off-road, Powerful, Picky Id start by saying she's probably got a tire blown out, slowing down the vehicle, but not stopping the rugged beast. Probably do some cosmetic damage as well, bullet holes, busted glass, a missing mirror, etc.
For the 3-harm, I think I'd ask my players to tell me what else is wrong with it, making sure they impair the vehicle. If they resist, I'll have some smoke coming out of the engine, maybe it sucked one of the gang members up into the grill and the meat's causing the beast to be more Picky then normal, in need of a serious clean, and risking full on fire if it doesn't get addressed. ( not to mention others seeing the blood and body parts smashed into the front of a bullet laden truck as a first impression )
That's my 2-cents.
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Cool. If it were 1st Ed, what MC moves would you be considering for a miss?
-Vincent
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I'd possibly have the picky truck acting up first, possibly causing the engine to die in the middle of gunning it so when it would've been smashing through, instead contact with something tips the truck, throwing the driver into the mess of things. They (the gang) probably wouldnt immediately know what was happening due to the chaos, therefore the player doesnt has any other immediate threat, but clearly the character is in a jam. They might have stuff in the truck they need, they might need to escape, they might need to steal a 4-wheeler, dunno. Any harm that he wouldve suffered from the exchange of harm I'd re-categorize as scrapes from the crash.
Mind you without context of the terrain, the gang, the other snowballs, it's hard to say definitely what a miss would've been. In that case the truck itself would still crush or hit the members of the gang to deal the harm.
::Edit:: This being a driver though, I would probably resist the urge to seperate her from the truck, in which case I'd consider letting gang members board it instead, possibly forcing the truck off course and into (undesirably) perilous terrain. Now she's barreling down say some pretty rough terrain, with fuckers gripping tight to things held to the bed of the truck. Looks like they're going to start unloading lead soon as they can risk letting go. Course the truck is still damaged, and all that it still described, though I might reattribute some of the cosmetic damage to the new terrain threat.
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In 1st Ed, I'd be considering putting someone in a spot, or capturing someone, or flipping her move depending on the fictional situation. Is someone riding shotgun? If so, for sure that person was thrown from the vehicle during all of the maneuvering. A miss is not success, so Gremlin's definitely not through the blockade; so in this context "capturing someone" might be less a case of "they haul you out of the vehicle and clap you in irons," but more like, "Oh, shit! One of them has an RPG! You swerve like a mad-woman and cut hard-right to keep him from getting off a shot, but that takes you straight into a little box canyon just short of the barricade. You're still driving, but there's almost no room to maneuver in here." Flipping the move feels the least interesting to me in this context. I might also consider taking away their stuff; "Yeah, fuck, this barricade is more strongly manned than you thought. You're not getting through. You pull a nice pirouette and motor away, but the barrels of water in the back of the pickup break loose and tumble out in the process. Dremmer's going to be pissed when he finds out you lost the water." Then, whether or not the gang pursues Gremlin might depend on how much they start fighting with each other over possession of the water barrels.
EDIT: like Ebok, I would resist separating the Driver from her vehicle, which is why "capturing someone" looks the way it does with the box canyon. This snowballs immediately into more violent trouble, for sure.
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Definitely the presence of other things in and on the truck would provide a litany of other ways to hit back for the missed roll.In my response I pretty much assumed an empty truck with just the driver in it. This would also be a good time to introduce the threat of the 4-wheelers as a visible and on scene menace.
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Vincent, just a minor technical question: the 1-harm blow through (instead of the possible 2-harm) is because of Gremlins armor from Daredevil, yes?
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Yep!
-Vincent
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So lumpley, what is so much better about the 2e results rather then 1e results? I mean, the biggest difference is shit got really intense for the runner on a miss, since they didn't get to leverage their advantages and were denied egress. Whereas in 2e, they gained egress regardless of the roll, so the roll had no impact on whether or not this occurred, only the stakes after the success. This is in stark contrast to say, they tried to breach the lines by acting under fire, where the 7-9 results would be closer to the 2e seize by force miss, and the miss is abject failure.
I guess the bigger concern I still have is it was actually impossible to deny the player what they wanted in 2e. They could not fail in pushing through, not really. How would you handle a situation where a character should be fictionally unlikely to succeed, yet has that guarantee through the move? There doesn't appear to be anything besides certain death that could stop an objective from being hit, is that on purpose? And if so why?
Also, you've said we're still able to follow up with MC moves just like before, however, "turn their move back on them" isn't a move you can use if the succeed. In fact, without the permission to make a move as hard as we like in response, I'm not sure that turning the move back on them is even fair play by the rules of 2e. What are you thoughts?
I'm curious what we gain that we didnt have before.
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Ebok, the purpose of the change is to create more space in play for the other battle moves. That's what we gain.
With this example I'm trying to show how it does that, because that's Paul's question, but I think you've already got it: in 1st Ed, if she misses the roll, you can end the battle there, and often should. In 2nd Ed, her miss signals that the battle's still on. She's achieved her most immediate goal (or chosen to abandon it), but she's paid for it in harm, the landscape of the battle has changed, and the matter is still under contest. It's the second or third move that ends the battle.
As far as her guaranteed success goes, notice that the cost she's paid in harm raises the stakes and means that for the second or third move, she can lose the battle even if she doesn't roll a miss on the move. In our example, she simply can't afford any more harm to her pickup, so she's going to have to choose her engagement with the 4-wheelers very carefully.
Hitting the first move with a 10+ means that you go into the second move with momentum and initiative. Missing the first move means that you go into the second move with lost ground to somehow make up.
-Vincent
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That was a very simple, clear, and succinct statement of the intent behind the change. Thanks for clarifying your thought process!
What I think is interesting is that there's almost an implicit hard move on the part of the MC in the 2nd Ed example, and that's that even if you pick to 'take definite hold' and make it through the blockade, you're still considered to be "in battle" and at significant risk (i.e. snowballing into further battle moves) - which is functionally identical to putting someone in a spot.
In some sense, the main substantive difference between editions in this example is on which side of the blockade the further (snowballing) action is taking place. But in terms of player agency and being a fan of the characters, I like the fact that resorting to mutual, dedicated, single-minded violence gives you the opportunity to mortgage your future to get what you want right now.
That said, the NTBFW Gunlugger kitted out in heavy armor and toting an MG is a thing (and not even all that rare a thing), and its ability to take particular advantage of this change should not be hand-waved away.
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Write out the numbers on that dude! It's a good example for him too. How's he looking, going into the second battle move, compared to Gremlin?
-Vincent
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Sure. Let's keep things simple and stick with the same gang: 3-harm, medium, well-disciplined, 1-armor - want: savagery - about 40 rough customers, with varied and extensive weapons, and they're disciplined but barely holding on to that discipline.
Clutch, the Gunlugger: Cool+1 Hard+2 Hot-2 Sharp+2 Weird-1
Gear: machinegun (3-harm close/far area messy), heavy armor (2-armor)
Moves: NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH, Bloodcrazed
We'll keep the truck the same, too; what Gunlugger doesn't love a good off-road pick-up?
Vehicle: Pickup (massive=2, speed=0, handling+1, 1-armor) Rugged, Off-road, Powerful, Picky
So the gang's blockading Clutch's way through a broken, rocky, blown-dust and gully landscape called the Knives. He's already read the situation and he knows his best way through: there's a spot overlooking the road where there's a guy with a machine gun, set up to catch coming vehicles in a crossfire, but Clutch is going to use his vehicle as a weapon and drive right through this little machinegun nest. Clutch also knows that he should be on the lookout for the gang's 4-wheeling outriders, on both sides of the blockade, but he hasn't seen any of them yet.
Here are the harm calculations:
The gang's inflicting 3-harm, +1harm for their size, for a total of 4-harm. They've got 1-armor, +1armor for their size differential, and hell, let's give them +1armor for defending a prepared position for a total of 3-armor.
Clutch is using his vehicle as a weapon. A direct hit inflicts 3-harm, +2harm for its massive, +1 for the fact that Clutch is Bloodcrazed for a total of 6-harm. A glancing hit inflicts 3-harm.
His pickup has 1-armor.
In sum, in an unmodified exchange of harm:
The gang hits Clutch's pickup for 3-harm (serious damage, impaired function, can be field-patched). Blow-through hits Clutch for 2-harm, but his armor reduces that to 0.
Clutch's pickup hits the gang for 3-harm (widespread injuries, many serious, several fatalities), probably royally fucking up that one guy's machine gun nest and running over a few other random assholes in the process of blowing through the barrier.
So here are Clutch's options; he gets to choose 1, 2, or 3 of these, depending on his roll (which, being Hard+2 and taking +1 forward from reading the sitch is highly likely to succeed):- If he chooses to inflict terrible harm, he'll be swerving to drive along the line of the blockade, hitting as many people as he can. He'll inflict 4-harm: widespread serious injuries, many fatalities.
- If he chooses to suffer little harm, he'll be swerving to avoid the worst enemy fire. His pickup will suffer 2-harm (one impaired function, can be field patched). Blow-through will hit him for 1-harm, which his armor will reduce to 0-harm.
- If he chooses to force his way through his enemy's position, he'll be on the other side of their blockade. If he doesn't, he'll be hung up on it somewhere.
- If he chooses to impress, frighten or dismay them, I'ma go with frighten them; the screams of dudes with crushed legs and broken spines can be heard over the roar of Clutch's engine as he does donuts over the gang's prepared positions - as MC our job is to change their behavior accordingly, which might just mean bugging the fuck out.
Even in the unlikely event of a miss, Clutch still gets to pick one. I think much of his choice will depend on how attached he is to his truck, but he certainly has the option of blowing through the blockade and taking his chances with the 4-wheelers who (since they are not impressed, dismayed, or frightened) are probably out for blood. Although if the gang's leader is weak or absent, he might be better off choosing to inflict terrible harm and cause them to break. If "the gang" breaks, does that include their pack of 4-wheelers? I'd say probably so (as it's not a separate entity), which effectively cedes the field to him and ends the conflict. This would essentially be a win on a miss, which is I think what people were originally most concerned about. All that it has cost Clutch is some harm to his vehicle.
And honestly, if Clutch were attached to his truck, he's better off leaving it somewhere (relatively) safe and hoofing it to attack the blockade on foot. Sure, he'll have one less point of armor and do one less point of Harm with his base attack (he loses the +2 massive but gains the area tag, which I'd say probably offsets the bonus to the gang's +1armor for size difference, at least initially). In this case, Clutch is exchanging 2-harm for 2-harm before making any choices.
For the miss case, let's say he plays it conservatively and chooses to suffer little harm - now he's exchanging harm at a 2-for-1 rate. This initially doesn't look so bad going into a follow-up battle move, but the key here is going to be what the MC does to snowball into that move. At the very least, I'd likely describe the gangers fanning out, trying to get Clutch into some kind of crossfire, maybe with a couple of the 4-wheelers making a flanking maneuver (i.e. make it clear to Clutch that he won't get the benefit of his weapon's area tag anymore). And/or maybe say that he sees a couple of 4-wheelers peeling off and heading to where he parked his truck - shit, they must have spotted it even under the camouflage netting! This presents him with the choice of whether he wants to do dedicated violence to the guys in the immediate vicinity, or concentrate on the guys going for his truck (I'd let him lay down fire to suppress the 4-wheelers making a break for his truck, forcing them to duck for cover or break off for a tick).
Is this more or less what you had in mind when designing the 2nd Ed moves?
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It's pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I designed NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH, so, yes.
I think it's important to say that he was just as unlikely to roll a miss by the 1st Ed rules. The badass gunlugger is the character LEAST affected by the change in the move.
-Vincent
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With this example I'm trying to show how it does that, because that's Paul's question, but I think you've already got it: in 1st Ed, if she misses the roll, you can end the battle there, and often should. In 2nd Ed, her miss signals that the battle's still on. She's achieved her most immediate goal (or chosen to abandon it), but she's paid for it in harm, the landscape of the battle has changed, and the matter is still under contest. It's the second or third move that ends the battle.
I get it. I do.
The biggest reason this has been hard for me to swallow is that I don't run my battles like you expected me to. I've never ended a battle because a player rolled a miss on seize by force. Not once. It has ended when a player rolls a miss on the harm roll and is immediately knocked unconscious, or they've taken too much damage to continue and they give up/run/retreat... Instead, I almost always end the battle when the player both Hits the roll and had done enough to keep the enemy from coming back at them. This is why I'm struggling, you end on a miss, I end on a hit.
There are examples, specifically where dealing violence isn't the main objective and the action keeps going: If Kat seizes definite hold of some treasure and did like 1 or 0 harm for example, the entire gang might now chasing her, but the battle is over, nows it's escape time: i.e. fuck this shit / eye on the door / act under fire / cat and mouse. these only become battle again if the "escape" fails, so these would still not be multiple follow up battle moves.
If you read over my examples again, you'll find it was the AW1 results that spiked the action, not the Aw2 results. AW2 was significantly more calm, mostly or entirely resolved. Both work the same when it comes to how to handle the hits, they differ in the misses. Most of those HIT result pretty much was the immediate ended of things, because the gang had either shattered morale (having a non present leader) or were impressed and probably not looking to hunt her down.
Had she had combat driver (with +1 hold), there would be few results at all that would have continued the contest. It would be resolved completely every time. The only followup on a hit that could be a roll was if she manages to buy time by hiding her location from the gang's potential reprisals.
In the AW1 examples the miss did not resolve the conflict. It kicked up the tension and put her under fire, the scene had changed, the objectives might need to change along with them, but it was distinctly Not over. Only in Munin's example where she was forced to turn and flee with the water spilling out the back was it maybe not battle anymore, and even then the 4-wheelers could be hunting her down, and that snowball could also involve the blockade radioing in who just tried to break through. For me, its very clear on an Aw1 Miss that there will be follow up moves, always, because the PC is still in peril.
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As far as Munin's gunlugger example goes, the first thing I noticed was that the Gunlugger put the driver's ability to drive to shame. And his ability to reliably crush the enemy on a miss still did less damage to his truck then the driver could expect. You say the point of the new hard is to extend combat into more moves, for me that means this:
The Real Concern
Combat is only really dangerous through attrition, and Player's endurance through that attrition is primarily determined by the starting harm/armor value of the character, rather then the rolls to find out what happened.
Why?
It also occurs to me that Munin gave the gang's blockade an additional +1armor in the Gunlugger's example. Had we done that to the Driver it wouldve ended her ability to break through that gang. Sure she could choose to get through, but dealing 1-harm and her truck taking 2 or 3-harm would've been a death knell for any follow up battle rolls. She cannot beat them, at least not without hitting twice and still losing her truck.
This is opposed to: if we remove that extra armor from the Gunlugger's example, he breaks them on a miss easily (4-harm base), or 5-harm they're all probably dead and even the best leader doesnt matter. That's a miss. There is no follow up. This scene is over.
What this says to me is that I have to buff the enemies for the Gunlugger to feel it, and that same "challenge" makes it impossible or nearly so for other characters to handle the same situation. We're not talking about a risk, or a little bit either. We aren't talking about rolling to see what happens.
We're talking about the fact that now Gunlugger has a drastic and unmitigated advantage in everything hard compared with the same Gunlugger in AW1. To reiterate: this is AW2Gunlugger vs AW1Gunlugger. The reason is simple, since combat's danger in Aw2 has been reduced to attrition, far more of the battle moves results are dependent on the static harm/armor stats of a given character. If a gunlugger can get +3 harm and +2 armor over the other characters (not all that hard). That's exactly saying what one guy can lazily do on a miss, the others cannot hope to do even on a 10+.
I'm actually less convinced then ever that this change is a good thing.
edit--spelling
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It's pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I designed NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH, so, yes.
I think it's important to say that he was just as unlikely to roll a miss by the 1st Ed rules. The badass gunlugger is the character LEAST affected by the change in the move.
-Vincent
I disagree. Nearly every playbook can get a +3 Hard. Sure in either edition a hit is the same hit, but when we say the Gunlugger CANNOT fail, vs the Gunlugger almost never fails, that's a big change. That disarms both the fictions teeth, and the gunlugger's victories.
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Ebok, I can explain to you how the move works - which you already get - and I can try to explain why I made the changes I made. I can even tell you that I'm not bothered by what you're bothered by. After that, though, it's up to you whether you think it's a good change or a bad one, and whether you adopt it or keep playing by the 1st Ed rules. Please feel free!
-Vincent
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(I'm sorry I disappeared for a few days - I was traveling and unexpectedly lost internet service. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see this discussion continuing and will step back and read along. These examples have been *super* interesting, and quite revealing in a variety of ways.
It seems to me, also, that the new rules are, perhaps, intended to "do" Mad Max: Fury Road, which brings along with it all kinds of genre expectations. For example, the idea of a powerful character going into action sequences against large groups of relatively faceless enemies, including in vehicular chases. In our games, it was always much more personal, and instead of a single Gunlugger breaking that a 40-person strong blockade with machine guns, we tended to see PCs maneuvering into a position of advantage - say, 2-3 PCs ambushing a pair of enemies in a location favorable to them. We also judged guns, ammunition, and armour to be relatively valuable and rare - our apocalypses weren't usually full of arms factories - which put the well-armed and -armoured PCs at an incredible advantage in most situations. It's a more down-and-dirty apocalypse, much less of an action movie apocalypse.
The new rules seem really well-suited to the former style of play, I think. It's harder to imagine them working in the latter mode.
For instance, when looking at the first example, the most interesting choices tend to come from the weighing of the damage to the vehicle, and how it will pan out during the likely followup chase sequence against those 4-wheelers. What if those weren't around, though? Then the outcomes seem less interesting - no matter what the roll, the Driver seems to punch through, and it's mostly a question of how damaged the truck is.
Vincent, your illustration of how the MC move puts a lot on the MC's shoulders *and*, furthermore, makes a forced resolution to the action possible makes a lot of sense to me, though. The "choose 1" design is cleaner, leaner, and better-suited to opposed rolls.
Aside from that, my worries are the same as Ebok's, who has articulated them pretty well. In all these examples, our PCs are facing incredible odds - one person against a gang of 40 bad hombres (ahem) with machine guns and scouts on 4-wheelers? Yikes! How does this logic hold up when the action is scaled down? (And it's valid to say that the game is supposed to do Mad Max and that's that, of course.)
Vincent, what's your take on "interfering" on an opposed "Seize" roll? Both make the rolls as they wish, it being a valid option for any PC? If so, what happens on a miss? Or does it require some specific fictional positioning, or some other kind of tradeoff?
In any case, lots to mull over here! Great examples. I'll ponder for a bit - please continue the conversation! The designer me finds this to be a truly fascinating discussion, as does the AW fan. Thank you for that! - and for your patience, Vincent.
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I think it's important to say that he was just as unlikely to roll a miss by the 1st Ed rules. The badass gunlugger is the character LEAST affected by the change in the move.
I disagree, and here's why: the odds of success/failure are exactly the same in both systems, but the AW2 version still gives the Gunlugger a not insubstantial chance to effectively succeed on a failed roll. And because the move lacks the "expect the worst" clause, mechanically speaking you don't have the "hard move" option on the unlikely miss to do something like flip his move. Like, yeah, the Gunlugger comes charging up thinking to go all guns-a-blazin', but unexpectedly stumbles into a wicked ambush and is under heavy fire before he knows what's up - which lets the NPCs pick to suffer little harm, inflict terrible harm, and take definite hold of some aspect of the situation (e.g. secure the high ground, or the most likely escape route, or whatever).
The bad-ass Gunlugger, being the most resilient to damage/attrition benefits from this change more than the other playbooks.
You know, in going back and reading through the AW2 section on the battle moves, one thing has jumped out at me - Vincent makes the assumption that by engaging in the battle moves, you are "in battle," and further that a miss means you're still "in battle" (i.e. snowball into more battle moves). But nowhere is that idea actually explicitly communicated in the book. In fact, in the example on p. 168-169, Marie misses and yet chooses to fight her way free - the MC says "You’re bleeding, but you get away. You can hear him gasping somewhere behind you, but you don’t know whether he’s chasing you or letting you go." If it were "You can hear him gasping behind you as he gives chase," then sure, I can definitely see the snowball.
I can definitely see the difference between the AW1 and AW2 versions of this move. And functionally, for most characters it won't make too much of a difference (though it will give them the option of an interesting trade-off, which has potential). The edge cases seem a little troubling, though Vincent doesn't seem particularly bothered by them (maybe my Gunlugger players are a special breed of vicious dickhead, who knows).
I think ultimately our group will hash this one over and see if the table comes to a consensus.
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Vincent, what's your take on "interfering" on an opposed "Seize" roll? Both make the rolls as they wish, it being a valid option for any PC? If so, what happens on a miss? Or does it require some specific fictional positioning, or some other kind of tradeoff?
Paul, I'm obviously not Vincent, but one easy hard move if the players fail to interfere is to turn the move back on them: they give the other PC a +1/+2 to their roll.
A harsher (depending on circumstances) hard move could be to take away their stuff: Wolf, you failed your interfere, and Snow manages to knock your knife out of your hand. You do 1-harm instead of 2-harm in the exchange of harm.
We usually don't do mutual interference when two PC's fight because of the extra roll (my players don't like to roll a lot of dice for some reason), but I never disallow it
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I appreciate you weighing in Lumpley, it has definitely helped me to crystalize what is going on and why.
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The thing about a Gunlgger who abuses the fact that they're unbeatable is they'll get murdered in their sleep. Not necessarily literally, but metaphorically. NTBFW is great, but only applies in battle, which makes murdering a Gunlugger an excellent option. One sniper shot from a Battlebabe with AP ammo and they're suddenly in very deep trouble. Pissing off anyone with 'Just give me a motive' will also result in serious unpleasantness for the Gunlugger. Even NPCs can easily screw a Gunlugger over by stabbing them before battle is joined and while they aren't wearing armor. Having consequences like this is part of 'making AW seem real', IMO.
And the 'unbeatable' facet of the Gunlugger is a bit overstated in this discussion as compared to other playbooks, even in a straight fight. I mean, a Hardholder with a Large 3-harm gang vs. a Gunlugger with NTBFW, Bloodcrazed, and a 3-harm, AP ammo, weapon is a net 2 Harm to the Hardholder's gang while the Gunlugger takes a net of 3 (both before Seize By Force comes into play). A Battlebabe can easily be doing 5 Harm-ap (via an AP shotgun and Merciless), which makes the exchange with the Gunlugger 4 Harm to the Gunlugger and the same to the Battlebabe before Seize By Force. The SBF advantage goes to the Gunlugger, obviously, but they can't get it down below 3 Harm per exchange, and that means they're as dead as the Battlebabe by the time it's over (2 exchanges in). Heck, any Driver can get something with Massive 3 and slam into them for a minimum of 4 Harm after everything (6 harm ap for hitting someone with a semi is nice).
Now, I'm aware that this is more about how a Gunlugger deals with NPCs, but even there a Large Gang is a very real threat, and even Medium gangs are very capable of messing you up. Or NPCs with custom moves to emphasize them as personally scary in one way or another. I know I've given NPCs stuff that gave the Faceless in my game some trouble, and he grabbed NTBFW as his first 'move from another playbook'. And Bloodcrazed as his second. Adding custom moves to NPCs is always interesting, too, and adding some stuff freaks PCs out in a fun way.
Are Gunluggers tough? Absolutely. They are, in fact, 'the baddest ass', but they aren't actually any harder to kill than anybody with 2 armor and a small gang backing them, and are actually easier to kill than those with larger gangs. It's clearly intended that a small gang vastly better equipped than another (via, say, 4 harm weapons and 2 armor) will annihilate the other gang if they're the same size. The Gunlugger counts as one size category larger, but that's not anywhere close to enough to make them invincible.
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You completely missed the point.
This was never about how a Gunlugger rates in PvP. This was never about the ability for a player to get the drop on the Gunlugger. Really its got nothing to do with a Gunlugger at all, they're just the clearest example. This was about what happens to a narrative when the raw harm/armor exceeds the fictional strength of their enemies to a point where the character appears and functions more like a God then a human. Being able to fight through 40+ gangs of people and slaughter all of them for the cost of a few scratches... that used to be settled by going "the character is a fucking badass". However, if those swarms of people firing 3,000 rounds of ammo and a gunlugger walks off with a couple scratches, victorious standing on snake eyes, suddenly all the "awesome" drains down the to the level of oh, I'm a level 20 dude fighting 2,000 4hp goblins. yay...
As soon as the threat of real danger, real harm is gone, the harm hardly matters.
Do note that the above comment is exaggeratory. I think.
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My point was three things, actually. None of which are quite the one you're saying (though #2 is close, I guess). And was not directed solely at you, but at the conversation in general. Here are the three things I was getting at, summarized:
#1. In response to Munin's point referencing Gunluggers taking advantage of being badass to be 'vicious dickheads' I noted the consequences of that.
#2. The Gunlugger isn't better off than other playbooks to an unbalanced degree. This is the part you're saying was unnecessary, but really, it seems a relevant point to make.
3. Things can still very definitely hurt Gunluggers (who are some of the hardest PCs to hurt, I won't deny), including NPCs and gangs. A large gang with 3 Harm can just flat-out mess a Gunlugger up. Custom NPC moves can mess them up even more. Anyone with AP ammo can wreck them. They can punch above their weight class, but not hard enough to be invincible by any means.
As I mentioned, one of the PCs in my last game was a Faceless with Juggernaut, Rasputin, Beastly, NTBFW, and Bloodcrazed. Plus a willingness to murder the shit out of anyone who pissed him off, and his Mask was part of his armor so he never took that shit off (well, to sleep or have sex he did, but no other time). He walked around with an effective 4 Armor basically all the time. I still scared him and messed him up fairly regularly (not every session or anything, mind you, but not only once or twice either). It's not that hard to do, as long as you're willing to make NPCs badass and interesting and give them corresponding custom moves.
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Yeah, let's not get distracted with this whole Gunlugger tangent all of a sudden. Ultimately, there are lots of AW characters who end up with powerful weapons, armour, and moves - and that's what we're talking about here, but, even then, only in reference to a miss on a "Seize" move.
Vincent,
I'd love to hear from you on the mutual Seize roll and interfere (do you do it this way? what happens on a miss, there?).
Also, I find it interesting that, in 2nd Ed, "Seize by Force" is now a move that only applies "in battle". Is there any kind of definition of what "in battle" entails? For instance, we had the example earlier of a Brainer and a Savvyhead brawling over a pain projector... that doesn't sound like a battle, by most definitions of the word.
Thanks, again! This is opening up my thinking on a lot of aspects of move design, and, particularly, how move design then relates to the overall shape the game takes. That's something which is very hard to manipulate in games, generally, but AW gives us a really neat way to fiddle with those things in isolation, which I haven't seen since old-school D&D, perhaps. A lot of room for creative design!
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DeamanwalkingXI, the problem with doing what you suggest (increasing the gang size or abilities of the NPCs) is that in order to provide a challenge to the bad-ass Gunlugger, you are using opposition that is straight-up lethal to everyone else. And yes, providing a real threat to the Gunlugger should happen outside of combat - that's a no-brainer and MC 101 "find where they're not in control and push there." At least, it is for experienced MCs. Newbies? Maybe not so much. The point is that for everyone else, violence is a dangerous, risky business with lots of unintended consequences, many of which are mechanical in nature. Unless every group of NPCs you want to throw at the Gunlugger is 1) enormous, or 2) specialized (custom moves, AP ammo, whatever), then for that Playbook (and others like it) that risk is minimized and the unintended consequences are almost purely fictional.
That's not even necessarily bad, but it's something of which people need to explicitly be made aware, especially people new to the system.
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Depends on how you make them dangerous. Personally, IME, AP ammo is uniquely dangerous to Giunluggers and other combat specialists. It's a little more dangerous to less combat-focused people, but only a little. And the consequences of using violence remain very real, I mean, collateral damage leaps immediately to mind as a likely one that isn't stopped at all by anything a Gunlugger does.
But yeah, generally a dedicated specialist in combat is pretty hard to take out. And people should indeed be aware of that. I'm just not sure that's a new development. A Gunlugger with NTBFW has always been extraordinarily difficult to kill, that may be a bit more true now, but I'm pretty sure the game acknowledges it as super difficult just about everywhere.
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Right, but absent the direction to make a hard and direct move on a miss, how do you apply that collateral damage? Or are you just saying, "Yeah, sure, you mess those guys up, but you spray so many bullets that [thing you care about] of which you've taken definite hold is somehow fucked up" in response to the Gunlugger, regardless of success or failure? That's putting your bloody fingerprints all over something for sure, but is it being a fan of the character? Are you telling me that if I'm willing to burn my hold to keep someone safe and eat whatever damage comes my way that that someone might still be harmed in the process? That seems kind of raw.
And of course you can apply that collateral damage to other stuff that's not part of the immediate stakes of the conflict (i.e. I'm keeping Person X safe but inadvertently kill Person Y in the process), but that's something that's incredibly situationally-dependent. In most of the examples given, it's not like these conflicts are taking place around a bunch of innocent bystanders. For sure you can add innocent bystanders to increase dramatic tension, but see above under: maybe warn new MCs that this is an issue.
And in terms of responding to these situations, before under AW1 it was easy: miss on SBF? You have failed to do what you set out to do, and can expect a hard, direct move from the MC in response.
Now, miss on SBF under AW2? You might still succeed. But the cost will be higher. Unless you're heavily armored up, in which case it won't. And there's nothing that says the MC can't make a hard move. So maybe he or she will. Or not. But you're still in battle. Probably. Or whatever.
That's what I mean by ambiguity.
For an experienced MC, the change probably won't make a whole lot of difference at the actual table. But I have a hard time seeing how the new way provides any additional clarity for people new to the system.
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Right, but absent the direction to make a hard and direct move on a miss, how do you apply that collateral damage? Or are you just saying, "Yeah, sure, you mess those guys up, but you spray so many bullets that [thing you care about] of which you've taken definite hold is somehow fucked up" in response to the Gunlugger, regardless of success or failure? That's putting your bloody fingerprints all over something for sure, but is it being a fan of the character? Are you telling me that if I'm willing to burn my hold to keep someone safe and eat whatever damage comes my way that that someone might still be harmed in the process? That seems kind of raw.
Uh...you use a messy, area, or autofire weapon (and most really nasty weapons are one of the three), and you can expect some collateral damage even on a hit. Not on something you 'take definite hold' of, no, but other stuff remains fair game. You certainly don't need a miss to say that some stuff got messed up in the scuffle, and even if you do, you can probably get the players to make another move or two in response to the battle (reading the sitch to see if it's really over, for example) and note the collateral damage then. That's when the characters notice it, after all.
And of course you can apply that collateral damage to other stuff that's not part of the immediate stakes of the conflict (i.e. I'm keeping Person X safe but inadvertently kill Person Y in the process), but that's something that's incredibly situationally-dependent. In most of the examples given, it's not like these conflicts are taking place around a bunch of innocent bystanders. For sure you can add innocent bystanders to increase dramatic tension, but see above under: maybe warn new MCs that this is an issue.
Well, if you're out in the middle of nowhere with no potential for collateral damage, the consequences have to be at one remove, but these are people you're killing. Their family and friends aren't gonna be happy about that. Nor is their boss. But yeah, it's a lot safer to go all out in the middle of the burn flats than in town. I think that's a good thing, and properly reflects the fictional difference between those two situations.
And in terms of responding to these situations, before under AW1 it was easy: miss on SBF? You have failed to do what you set out to do, and can expect a hard, direct move from the MC in response.
Now, miss on SBF under AW2? You might still succeed. But the cost will be higher. Unless you're heavily armored up, in which case it won't. And there's nothing that says the MC can't make a hard move. So maybe he or she will. Or not. But you're still in battle. Probably. Or whatever.
That's what I mean by ambiguity.
For an experienced MC, the change probably won't make a whole lot of difference at the actual table. But I have a hard time seeing how the new way provides any additional clarity for people new to the system.
See, I'm not sure I agree. I mean, I'm not exactly new, I owned AW 1E, but the first game I ran of it was right after 2E came out (I'd run MotW before that, but that's not quite the same). I actually found the way it works in 2E made combat flow better. I mean, the necessity of an MC move on a miss really does just bring things to a halt, while the 2E method leaves things open for battle moves to flow into each other better. Any one is less risky, but assuming you don't kill everyone immediately, I think the total is generally more dangerous simply because there are more battle moves chained together.
The Harm move is also a bit more front and center, and really, does a lot of what you want and happens even if you take 0 harm. Heck, even a Gunlugger who always takes 0 Harm has a 1/6 chance of being knocked unconscious every time he's hit if the MC feels like it (10+ on the Harm roll...) Really, almost all the logical consequences of a failed Seize By Force are covered by one of the 7+ results on a Harm roll.
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DeadmanwalkingXI, You need to stop talking about the snowball that happens later. We all know very well how to run games on this system; everyone involved in this has had a very long history with the game.
In your responses you keep referencing specific tags as a defense of an entire statement, without regard for the fact those tags are the exception to some of these examples, not the rule. For example, collateral damage. This mattering depends on a few things: a.) there is something the Player cares about on scene getting destroyed; b.) the Player is using a weapon that has that type of collateral damage, and c.) the damage to the area isn't also to the benefit of the Player. If these conditions are not met, collateral damage isn't really a threat to the player at all. Sure there are fictional repercussions, but that's not what we're talking about when we say with high enough base numbers, battle becomes predetermined.
The suggestions you've had up to this point about how to handle a player who is a badass work. We know them already. Most of us have talked about them in great detail on this forum. That's never been the point. The point has only been that rolling to find out means that we don't know what will happen before those dice get rolled. Even with a +4 to the roll, it can still go badly. That has been a huge part of the fun. The elephant in the room is that this is no longer the case with most if any battle move under certain circumstances.
Needing to give your enemies bonus to counter a player's moves is the same thing as letting a player level up to get a +5 more damage, and in response to that gives a bunch of enemies +5 or +10 more hp. It's basic game logic, level-up, fight stronger things. Whatever. Fine. Maybe some of us picked up AW because we hated that? And suggestions that say now to make battle dangerous, we should level-up the enemies, that just might not be okay with us.
I for one have made my AW games lethal as fuck. To the point where I've trashed the harm clock, removed gang set sizes, focused on injuries, making sure no one can "take a shotgun to the face" and be okay with that. For me, changing the battle moves back to how they were is absolutely going to happen, and honestly, I was pretty straight up about that through this entire thread. The more important question was to learn why did this change to the rules appear to go in the other direction. What was improved by doing so, etc?
This is a summation of what I've learned:
• MC's can (and should) make anything go wrong, at any time, regardless of a players roll.
There is no safety in the apocalypse world. Hitting your roll does not mean you should expect good things to happen, just that you can claim authority through your hold that these things definitely did happen. MC's should take to heart that the fiction should always come first both when determining if a character can roll, and for determining what should happen after they rolled, regardless of that roll. Missing a seize by force simply means you have even less control over what's happening then you couldve.
• A Character's Harm and Armor are the most important numbers for determining conflict.
Not their hard. A character with no armor is dead is vulnerable, a character with no harm is harmless. If they're willing to be more violent, it can have a slight advantage to the results of a battle, but it is the single least important number. (+1 hard could be a ~10% better chance to get 1 more hold, +1 armor is 1 hold, thus x9 more important).
• Contested rolls provide a hold on a miss.
As mentioned before, hold is how much say you have over the numbers up to a maximum of +1 or -1. Two player characters rolling against each other have a better gradient of options. Although this puts more emphasis on the starting harm/armor stat then before.
• Battle has a different flow
I reject both DeadmanwalkingXI and Lumpley claim that this makes subsequent rolls either more likely or smoother. As I've long learned how to have smooth conflict with the former rules and in all of these many comparisons, not once has it been shown how the AW2's way offers something the former could not. However, it is a different kind of flow, so it is entirely likely that many others might find it more comfortable for their particular style, even if I do not.
• There is no need for an explicit miss
Since we can always make the worse possible thing occur, there are less guidelines on when we should. In contrast, if the scene doesn't have an obvious "hard" move to make that makes sense, we are no longer asked to think up one and make it. Thus it's not the miss that matters, but the seize by force. So we no longer watch the dice, instead, leave our full attention on the fiction to decide what comes next.
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I mean, the necessity of an MC move on a miss really does just bring things to a halt...
Hmmm, this is interesting. I have very rarely lacked for immediate things to say for a hard move. Following the fiction usually makes this easy. Sometimes the hardest part is picking from all the good (mean) options. And if you do lack for something to say, right after a player misses is a great time to cut away to someone else and leave a cliffhanger. That gives you time to decide.
The Harm move is also a bit more front and center...
The Harm move is pretty much exactly where it's always been. I guess I don't see that it's changed at all. We've always made it on 0-harm, even in AW1.
Also, you need to be a little careful about knocking characters out - if I've succeeded in my attempts to take definite hold of something, knocking me out is in many cases denying my success - because presumably I am at the mercy of the people I just "beat." And if I'm not (say they've fled because I've dismayed or frightened them), then what point does knocking me out serve? If I just come to a bit later, what was the point? And if I'm in some kind of trouble when I come to, I no longer have definite hold over the thing, do I?
Now that isn't necessarily bad or incorrect, but if it doesn't have an ironclad fictional tie, it feels like you're bagging on the PC because you can, and runs the risk of setting a confrontational tone at the table.
I'll give you a good example and a bad example. Here we go: in the previous situation with Gremlin forcing her way through the gang's blockade in The Knives, she missed SBF but chose to force her way through as her one pick, and is now clear of the blockade. She also took a point of harm. Let's say she makes the harm move and tanks it with an 11. Bad example: when her vehicle takes a bad hit, she bounces her head off the steering wheel and loses consciousness. Since she's alone, the car is uncontrolled; mercifully, the MC says it doesn't crash, but just comes to a (relatively) gentle stop up against a big rock formation. The gang (whom it must be remembered are not frightened and still hanging together) is free to act against her, to do whatever is fictionally appropriate for them to do; perhaps it follows that when Gremlin comes to, she's tightly bound and being roasted on a spit.
Good example: when her vehicle takes a bad hit, she bounces her head off the steering wheel and loses consciousness. But this time, Gremlin isn't alone - another PC is riding shotgun. Now there's a fantastic "SHITSHITSHITSHIT!!!" moment as her passenger is frantically trying to climb all over her unconscious form in order to keep the car moving, all while avoiding the pursuing 4-wheelers (snowballing perfectly into the second character needing to act under fire).
One is taking the ball and passing it to a teammate, the other is taking the ball and going home.
As an aside, the bad example is actually functionally equivalent to making a hard move on her miss - only you've taken away her stuff, captured her, and put her in a spot all at the same time. See how that feels kind of unfair? It would feel even more unfair if she hadn't missed the original SBF roll.
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Seize by Force alternative:
vs PC, opposed rolls.
vs NPCs, same but:
7-9 MC chooses 1 to use against you first.
Miss: MC chooses 2 or 3 to use against you first.
Might be neat.
--edit--
reasoning: If the PC move is opposed and that works. It stands to reason that the NPC roll being opposed would also work, but since they don't roll themselves, they are considered the inverse of the PC but slightly worse.
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Ebok,
I'm with you on your comments regarding the high importance of harm and armor numbers (I also find it tremendously bizarre that, in a fight, a point of armor is arguably as important as +3 Hard, given this new version of Seize by Force). I've always wondered why Vincent chooses to emphasize weapons and armor so much in many of his designs - in AW, at least, to me, it doesn't seem to fit the genre. However, that's a matter of personal taste, and we can easily differ there. (Ebok, I believe you said that you use my AW "Descriptive Harm" hack in your games, is that true? If so, we may have similar tastes there. That definitely clarifies the function of injury in the rules, and also minimizes the importance of weapons and armor in comparison to your stats and rolls.)
I see other advantages to the new version of Seize by Force, however. The greater ease of use in opposed rolls is a BIG deal. The choices presented to the player on a miss are also very interesting. I can see where Vincent's going with that. In some situations, it's clear to me that it's going to do what Vincent is describing, and there is a tremendous advantage to the clarity and directness of the new move.
You wrote:
"Dunno. I still believe that: choose 1 on a miss, and prepare for the worst, is by far the best solution."
This is what I'm seeing, too. Is there a downside to this approach?
I'm really interested to see what Vincent has to say; this discussion is getting sidetracked, but I'd like to get back to the earlier examples and our observations.
I'm still very curious to hear about some of the details, as well:
* How do we best handle interfering in opposed rolls?
* Is the harm move, as suggested, intended to take the place of a hard move on a miss? And, if so, do we consider it "kosher" to pick options which take away a successful roll's results? Can we ace a Seize by Force, only to lose all the results because of the harm move roll, for instance?
(This is a potential problem with Seize by Force in any case - under standard rules, under my hack, under the old and new versions of Seize by Force. What happens if you die or pass out after a success? In some situations, that feels very natural and fitting. In others it can require some finagling.)
The harm move used to be optional (at the MC's purview), I think, in part to avoid this kind of outcome. (As someone suggested earlier, if that's the case, it can be used to punctuate the difference between a successful and a failed roll in AW 2nd Ed.) Has that changed in 2nd Edition?
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Nothing has changed about the harm move in AW2.
When I play in a text based game I use the Harm Clock (faster because there is less discussion), and your hak Blood and Guts because well, my players absolutely loved having a say in how they got hurt. They normally took it and went into descriptive detail with it, adding a lot of information both for how a character handles pain, how the player views their badassery (or lack of it), and what weaknesses that opens up. The biggest weakness of that hack was that it did not make healing anywhere near as engaging, and emphasized that healing in AW doesn't (in certain circumstances) make a lot of sense.
The downside to this:
"Dunno. I still believe that: choose 1 on a miss, and prepare for the worst, is by far the best solution."
which I deleted afterwards... is that it isn't clean and honestly might not be correct. (thus the deletion) Sometimes making a hard roll is great, sometimes it isn't. It's presence there means we're less likely to make a "hard" move after the character Hits. And sometimes it may be very fictionally appropriate to force a character off the road and into that dangerous terrain if they didn't seize that road by force specifically. Not having the miss condition stated, and instead having the general rule: "the MC can make moves as hard and as direct as he likes whenever you're in battle", is more flexible fictionally.
The only REAL loss to me is the ability to flip seize by force. That means, the only reason I want an explicit miss is to be allowed to do so. Considering PvP is opposed seize by force and that works... and after considering this in greater detail over the last few days... I believe the post example I made above is possible my favorite way to do it. Here it is again:
Seize by Force alternative:
vs PC, opposed rolls.
vs NPCs, same but:
7-9 MC chooses 1 to use against you first.
Miss: MC chooses 2 or 3 to use against you first.
this feels like a more natural approach to NPCs given the use of the move in AW2. It means sure you MIGHT get that thing you wanted, if the NPCs haven't claimed it. You can however prevent either of you from claiming it. That handles the cost/miss ratio pretty well and stays in line with the move's design. This way you don't have to hak all of the battle moves, you can keep the freedom to make moves according to the fiction first, and we reinstate the feeling that seize by force doesnt always go your way.
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You've rather lost me, when it comes to most of that last post. But maybe we'd better take that elsewhere (and particularly your version of the Seize move, which, if you're serious about it, you should discuss it in another thread, both for clarity and in case other people are interested in it). I don't want to clutter things here too much. My focus is still on hearing about people's experiences with the rules change to Seize by Force.
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Did this thread die? That would be a shame; it was very interesting, and educational. A few of us are still hashing out various other things as a result in other threads.
I was still hoping to hear about interfering and misses and the harm move. (Vincent, any chance you're still interested in this? The rest of us don't seem to be able to reach consensus on those things, so it would be fun to hear how you do it.)
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Tell me which passages in the text you're having trouble with and maybe I can help.
If you're looking for guidelines or a consensus that isn't in the text, I don't endorse any.
-Vincent
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Ok! I'll look over the text and get back to this. Thanks for engaging in this mad discussion with us!
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Is that how it's supposed to work in 2nd edition, or just the way you handle it at your table?
Old convo, sorry.
But I'm with ebok, I still make a move on a miss if I think it works with the fiction. Not necessarily a hard move, but something bad happens somehow, or perhaps I just announce future badness.
For example, would it be legit for you to negate the exchange of harm, and have something else happen?
NO! You exchange harm THEN you roll. Seize By Force is pretty explicit on that point.