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Messages - lambdatau

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Apocalypse World / Re: Allies and crosshairs, or, the complex case of Ba
« on: November 29, 2011, 03:13:30 PM »
Thanks, everyone.

Johnstone, one point where I'm still uncertain: Ba is Shade's ally, so obviously he doesn't make problems for Shade. But what about the other PCs? Is he free to stick a gun in their faces if the fancy takes him? If, of course, that doesn't make problems for Shade...

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Apocalypse World / Allies and crosshairs, or, the complex case of Ba
« on: November 25, 2011, 07:01:30 PM »
The Player Characters in my game are making allies with the advanced seduce/manipulate move! I'm so proud of them. But I have a bit of a difficulty really getting how to handle the allies as MC.

I'm not supposed to look at allies through crosshairs and intuitively, I get that. But in practice, I have some difficulties with it. Is nothing bad supposed to happen to them now?

To make it less abstract and useless: In my game, Shade (PC) just made an ally of Ba (NPC). Now, Ba is Pierres lieutenant, and Pierre is kind of a sick monster. So is it legitimate for me to have Pierre threaten to kill Ba to get Shade to obey him? It's definitely what Pierre would do, but on the other hand it is me using Ba to make the world a worse place for Shade, and that doesn't feel like something I wan't to use allies for. Allies should make the world a better place for the PCs.

And well, Ba's a soldiering type. Since I don't look through crosshairs at him, is he going to come back alive no matter what? Or only if that doesn't make Apocalypse World seem contrived? What if he gets in a fight with another PC - say, Line? Do I try to keep Ba alive, since he's an ally, or do I look at him through crosshairs since he's up against a PC?

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Apocalypse World / Skinner with a cult
« on: September 12, 2011, 09:14:43 AM »
So the Skinner took control of the cult since nobody else wanted it (the player took followers and fortunes). Good thing too, they'd have started lynching people soon. The thing is, the player would like a move for her handling of her cult, and frenzy isn't quite it.

First, the way Shade is dealing with her cult is obviously far more by being hot than weird. She's pretty much controlling the cult with her charisma and social grace, by lying and telling stories and manipulating people's beliefs and distracting them with prettyness when nothing else works. Second - mechanically - the options to choose from in Frenzy don't fit with how Shade handles and wants to handle the cult.

I'm a bit torn. The options I'm considering:

1) Make up a hot-based move that's more or less the love-child of Frenzy and Artful and Gracious. Shade's player really wants her singing to play into the handling of her cult and a nice lotus-eater-hot-based move could be fun.

2) Decide that the fun comes from not having the tools to do what you want, but instead having to do what you can with the given tools. Shade has excellent tools for manipulating individual people (Hypnotic and Artful) in the way she wants, so she'll just have to keep the cult in check by constantly keeping key members on her side. Or she could take frenzy, but with her low weird - heh, heh, heh...

What's happened when other skinners took followers and fortunes?

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Apocalypse World / Re: How many sessions to a campaign
« on: June 01, 2011, 07:55:43 AM »
Thanks a bunch, both of you.

Gregpopor, that thing about MC moves is really an eye-opener. I'd probably have missed that on my own.


Irungames - that was probably the language barrier hitting me over the head. The word "campaign" obviously has a lot more meaning to you than it does to me, and now I've learned stuff. I saw "campaign" as meaning more or less "the sessions we will be playing" - that is, I assumed that a group playing AW would rech a point where the story seemed done at which point they would stop playing.

I'm playing with a group of people who have a lot of thing to do with their spare time and who are curious to try playing AW and will want to play the game to its conclusion but probably won't be playing it forever. We'll be looking for the point when it feels done and then we'll most likely be moving on to other games (or other activities).

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Apocalypse World / How many sessions to a campaign
« on: May 31, 2011, 07:21:56 AM »
My apologies if this has been asked before:

I'm starting up my first Apocalypse World campaign (Eeeee! Excited!) and I was wondering how many sessions I should expect it to last. I'm not a very experienced GM, especially not with this kind of game mastering and I don't really know how to pace an AW campaign and when/how to end it.

My assumption is that play will reach a point where the story is over - or is that something I need to work to make happen?

Also - any good advice for a newbie MC?

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