I second the advice to make sure there's a lot of conflict within the holding. I've run two different traveling AW games. The successful one had a cult with lots of internal problems. The unsuccessful one didn't.

Hey Vincent,

You mention in the "how the stats balance" thread that there's a rationale behind which playbooks get two starting moves, and which get three. I am working on some custom playbooks for a reskin, and I'd love to hear what that rationale is. :-)

If you sell stuff for bullets and then buy other stuff with those same bullets, it's a currency, even if you are going to use some of the bullets to shoot at people later on.

An awesome realworld example of this sort of thing, for people who are interested in this topic:

http://www.albany.edu/~mirer/eco110/pow.html

Yes, she is. And yeah, crosshairs and all that. It just seems weird that a brainer could give an impossible order, and then have lethal psychic blackmail on that person forever.

It's not that I think, necessarily, that it's "overpowered" or that I don't want to give the player the full benefit of his moves. It just seems like it's so much better than the "normal" use of that move that I wonder why anyone would ever bother using it in the (presumable) intended way. Why give someone a reasonable order which would loosen your hold on them, instead of giving them an impossible order and then giving them whatever reasonable orders you want for the rest of both of your lives?

It's interesting to me not because of it's application to vanilla AW. I'm not the type to get excited about a simple change in presentation.

It's interesting to me because of the possibilities for card-based hacks. In vanilla AW, you have a fairly limited but fairly static set of moves. You can choose to add one occasionally, but other than that your moves don't change much. A card-based system could facilitate a lot of different variations on that. For instance:

-The fun thing about CCGs is the number of interesting combinations of cards. You could have a great variety of moves, and part of the fun of character creation could be "building your deck". Cards facilitate a large number of moves, because of the way you can manipulate them individually, as opposed to having to deal with long lists of moves in a book somewhere.

-You could add a random element to it, by drawing a certain number of moves from a deck and choosing between those. This could be intended to model the difficulty in choosing the absolute best thing to do in a stressful situation: oftentimes you only think of the best option after the fact.

-You could make it easy and intuitive to lose moves somehow. If I told my Hocus that he didn't have hypnotize any more, until some necessary thing happened, we'd all find that hard to remember. If I can physically jank his card from him, it becomes much more tactile and significant.

We've mostly been talking about character moves, but it could also be interesting for custom threat moves. "There's another guard or something coming around the corner, let's see who it is. :Flips a card: Oh shit, it's one of the crazy mindfuckers, check out what you have to roll to go against him!"

Hey, that makes a lot of sense. I love exception-based design, and I love Apocalypse World, yet I never put the two together. Good stuff.

I like the optional rule to roll a d6 to see if the NPC is dead quite yet. But yeah, other than that I never roll anything.