Hi Vincent, I've been playing Apocalypse World pretty regularly for about 3 years, and I have been in a discussion about your new class the Waterbearer on reddit, and wanted to get your opinion on a few questions:

What exactly is keeping the Hardholder from waltzing in and taking the source? I mean, it's just water, right? I'm really not seeing how any Waterbearers are going to be protecting their things.

Also, this seems like the kind of class that might be tempted to never leave their hidey hole. This is the problem I ran into with angels who made a drug lab. After all, with all the violence going around the angel literally never had to leave his med bay as people just kept bringing dying people to his doorstep. And then when he would run out of equipment, others would just go out and get it for him. Like, I can very easily see this person just being rewarded for hiding in their sacred water hole.

Another thing is that this resource doesn't seem like it needs the player character to be fully usable. Take for instance the Maestro D's establishment. NOBODY can run it like the Maestro D. Nobody can manage a hold beyond 50 people EXCEPT for the hardholder, and nobody can command a cult's respect like a Hocus. But if the Hardholder takes the water source, there isn't anything saying that ANYTHING bad happens. I mean sure we could say that the gods are angry or something if that's what the player picked, but would that really stop anyone? It just sounds like having this person around does nobody any favors (the laws) and that they don't do anything that can't be replaced.

My concerns are that this is a character who the other players should play ball with, but don't have to. All of the power of this character is located in people respecting her command of the resource, but if people don't then that power vanishes. Add to it that this person also has no inbuilt way to protect said resource and you might have a real problem.  Especially with the way that people I know play Apocalypse World.

To be clear, I actually really like the concept, and probably will get around to playing as the Waterbearer at some point myself.  I was just was wondering how you would suggest handling these problems.  Foreign entanglements are always an option, but that forces more NPCs in than I might want, and of course they would need to be powerful enough to challenge a Hardholder's control of an area.  I was also wondering how I might get a Waterbearer to leave their area, and that is a lot trickier.  I guess that game would need to be a lot stricter on daily routines.