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No, unspent Wealth surplus barter goes away at the end of the session. See here.
The way I see it is that the barter you get from the roll doesn't suddenly land in your knee (and then disappear). Rather, it's the amount that we as a group agree that you can just raise, no questions asked, and give away as you see fit. No questions asked, both in-game and out: the amount you get from your surplus is the limit before we have to play out the interaction where you ask your lieutenant to bring up some jingle, and they ask back "okay, who do you suggest I shake down, boss"? It's not necessarily that the surplus barter is physically in the hardholders sole, discretionary custody (like a safe only they have access to), rather it's an abstraction of how the power dynamics and economics of the hardhold work, with the net result: up to X times per session, just say you rustle up 1-barter, and it happens. After that, it's not like your hardhold is depleted and everyone hates you, but if you want to move barter around, play it out.

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?

I think the thing that makes me the most unsure of myself is the "spoken language", often ungrammatical, that shows up not as transcripts of dialogue, but in the general explanatory text. Stuff like "You're taking turns, but it's not like taking turns, right?" or "For most of the characters, the special sex moves apply when they have sex with another player's character, not with oh just anybody, but for a few of them, oh just anybody will do."

Because there's a whole spectrum between "ungrammatical in the exact same way as the original", "ungrammatical but that's how I'd actually say it" and "grammatically correct because it actually sounds better that way".


And of course, playbook names. I haven't found a way to translate the Battlebabe by using words for "battle" and "babe" (that aren't really bad puns), so my top contender right now is Tigrinnan – literally "the Tigress". I really like it, but I'm also very afraid that I'm messing up something subtle really bad.

On the whole it's been very fun and rewarding, though!

In the basic refbook at apocalypse-world.com, go aggro reads as follows:
"When you go aggro on someone, make it clear what you want them to do and what you’ll do to them. Roll+hard [...]"
In the preview pdf of the 2nd ed book, it has the old reading:
"When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard."

Is this a mistake, or has it been updated again after that refbook was posted?


Also, in 2nd ed, the reading moves say to ask 1 anyway on a miss (and prepare for the worst, i.e. MC move). However, the examples of play for both in the book include an example of a player missing the roll, and only getting an MC move in the face immediately, without asking a question. Maybe the player gets to ask a question after the example ends, but that isn't very clear. If the intention is that the MC can do as in the example, and simply forgo the 1 question, then that should be clear.

That's a really cool idea – just make sure everyone around the table is aware that you're playing with this possibility, since it's not implied by the exact wording. Some moves operate on "has to be able to see you", and some on "time and physical intimacy". The brain relay makes "able to see the brain relay" work as if it were "able to see you", but doesn't say anything about physical intimacy.

If I were the MC though, I'd allow it, if the brain relay was something that the brainer intended for other people to get intimate with (such as the cuddly doll).

(The violation glove operates on similar logic, allowing "physical contact" to replace "time and physical intimacy". Just to go munchkin on the house-rule of a brain-relay cuddly doll, you could let your brain relay doll wear the violation glove, and then only need the victim to touch the doll('s gloved hand)!)

I'd suggest to get in touch with Baker himself. He has an email address that I'm sure you can find somewhere; it involves his screenname "lumpley".

I'm actually starting to question what I meant by "the last two times". I have three games that might apply, but one of them was Dream Askew, and one was AW:Fallen Empires.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



As I said, we had a Dream Askew game that was pretty similar, maelstrom-wise. I don't care to recall details, this post is long enough. We also played Fallen Empires, and we had a Mystic (Savvyhead) who talked to spirits. That maelstrom pretty quickly became a spirit phone – "sure, we'll just commune with spirit X!" but it was kept limited to that kind of communication, and more importantly, it was only available to the Mystic. In fact, it was the first time I felt that I really manages to make the Savvyhead cool – since "can I do X with magic" "sure! You just need X, Y and Z" is easier for me to use to encourage doing cool stuff, than the corresponding "can I do X with weird tech". I think I'm just not very good at thinking in terms of weird tech (I might be too grounded). But yeah, non-Mystic characters opening their brains kept it to passively listening to the spirits in their vicinity, sort of.

One point (maybe mentioned above) is that post-apocalyptic people are, as a rule, good at some thing and really shit at others. There are exceptions, but that's the rule. And it's shown through the read a sitch questions. You're in a canyon and catch wind of an ambush? Just roll+sharp and you might get just the answers you needed. You find a corpse with the murderer long gone? It's fully within your rights to tense up and start scanning the scene for hidden enemies, noting your best escape route, pulse racing... But it ain't gonna help you keep your head cold and solve the murder. You need a savvyhead perhaps, with things speak (I think I'd judge a fresh corpse to be "something interesting"), or maybe you could open your brain. But reading a charged situation, as others have said, doesn't cover a cool, collected crime scene investigation.

Your problem with the Gunlugger situation isn't that read a sitch ought to cover those kinds of questions. They're very limited because they speak of a limited mindset and skillset of post-apocalypse people. Your problem is that in addition to reading sitches like other sharp people of their setting, that Gunlugger (your group seems to agree) ought to a good tracker. My solutions: if they had high weird, I would have suggested handling tracking by brain-opening. I could also whip up a custom move, or simply say "yeah, you're a hunter, obviously you have no trouble following blood trails" and then just give them answers, no move. Especially if your answers, as you say, are rife with off-screen and future badness. That's pretty much textbook "everyone looks at you, expectantly", i.e. you get to make moves.