I'll second the "make rules" thing. The deal in the MC section of the AW rulebook about making them just not that complicated works for PCs, too. You can get complicated over time, but you don't have to start there. One of the funnest characters I ever played (a different game, but still) I came to the table with the idea that he would never consider the downsides to any potential action at all and that he'd choose to do whatever he felt he'd look coolest doing, have the most fun doing or feel the most awesome having done when it worked (no "if" because don't consider the failure cases). He was wildly consistent because that rubric is pretty simple. This made him feel more real, not less, to the other players because they couldn't detect this fairly simple rule system explicitly and only experienced the consistency implicitly. Honestly, playing a caricature is a good idea as long as it's not just straight up 100% an existing trope with no changes.

Does there exist a document highlighting the stuff that changed between AW1E and AW2E? Or maybe just the most important differences?

If not, could we crowd-source such a list in this thread?

Ahhh. This makes some sense, then. Thanks for answering, Vincent. <3

Anybody else please feel free to answer about how long you play in real time and how that maps to in-game time. I'm curious.

A .50 cal MG mounted on a vehicle of some kind? RPGs and other shoulder-mounted badness? Heavy cavalry, maybe? Trebuchets and catapults? Mortars? Other artillery?

Take a look at the growing up moves:

Make Others Feel Beautiful can let them carry forward, as can (to a more limited extent) Share Your Pain.  Call People on Their Shit and Intervene Against an Act of Violence can give people penalties or simply make them fail.

Nice point! I really like the implication, here: That these characters are too immature to help/hinder as a basic skill. They have to grow up a little at a time, building that skill set as they go. And, also, doing that growing up moves them closer to retirement because once they do, they're pretty much too mature for the genre.

There's little drama if the characters aren't confused and unable to control their own impulses. Totally with-it protagonists are boring.

I feel like there are a lot of indie games out there these days that really facilitate Story Now play (AW, Shock:, Swords without Masters, etc.). I wondered if anyone could recommend a game that really facilitates Right to Dream in a coherent and low points-of-contact way. Ideally something indie, but not required.

My group's been playing GURPS and we will probably explore Story Now some more, but I kind of wonder what else is being done in a similar space. I guess it would help to know that we seem to like exploring System the least and Setting, Situation or Color the most.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. I felt like the people who'd read this forum would be most likely to know the jargon I'm using and know of indie games that I haven't seen (I don't have wide exposure).

I feel like there's a sort of art to reading the AW rules. If you read all the rules and all the (core, anyway) playbooks, a couple of times, you can get a good sense of when Vx is implying something (when a move asks a player to pick options and one is "you take little harm" it implies that if you don't choose that, you'll take normal harm) and when he's not (Juggling is a good example; it's mentioned twice in a row or whatever and those two mentions are all that it's for).

I think the latter can be confusing coming from, say, GURPS (where I'm from) because you expect there to be a whole big section on each stat or kind of stat and for everything to be equally available to everyone. The way AW works, stuff like Juggling and gigs are only available to someone if their playbook says they are. And since the operator is only playbook with gigs out of the gate, the rules for them are in that playbook. It might be tempting to think, "This is the gigs system," but it's more like, "This is the operator's gig system." IMO, anyway.

Recently, I MCed my 2nd session of AW. The PCs got into a firefight with a guy holed up in an 18-wheeler cab they were trying to, um, acquire from him. We've got a pretty Weird bunch, so at one point, someone decided they'd open their brain and it went kind of interestingly (they got some vague hints about an unrelated Threat for their trouble). That was the first time we'd done it, so we talked a lot about the nature of the Malestrom, etc.

Because it went interestingly, two other (of the 4) PCs decided they, too, wanted to open up... and both rolled misses. Since it's the second session, they haven't bumped directly into most of the Threats (though, at least one in each Front, so far), so I don't have a lot of stuff that would make sense in a, "Well, Jojo and her biker gang roll out of nowhere. They must have heard the gunshots and decided it sounded like their kinda mayhem," sort of way. And with the Maelstrom, there's no harm establish to deal out...

Basically, I'm looking at these moves and trying to figure out what makes sense from a misdirection standpoint. I feel like the ones that make the most sense are, like, "Put someone in a spot", "Take away their stuff", "Activate their stuff's downside" (maybe), "Tell them the possible consequences and ask" (maybe), "Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost", "Turn their move back on them", or some threat move. In the case above, I wanted to make at least a medium-hard move (I'm still calibrating what's hard, so I don't know how strong I can hit, yet, but that's just an experience thing).

What I ended up doing was taking one PC's stuff away (hands go completely numb, drop your gun, freak out for a while) and turned the move back on the other PC by asking a bunch of questions. The latter didn't feel nearly as hard as I'd've liked.

AND, after the session, one of the players brought this up specifically. Basically, saying he wanted opening your brain to really have consequences to disinsentivize people from being like, "I open my brain, I buy a drink, I open my brain, I take a stroll, I open my brain, I gaze at the clouds, I open my brain" and never have bad things happen. While I think that's a sort of ad absurdem example (eventually, we'd all get bored and I'd roll out a super hard move no matter my temperament). But his idea was that, like, if you fail your roll+Weird, it would be entirely reasonable for the MC to just nod and be like, "OK. Well, sucks for you." and not say anything more until later when the PC gets back to the hold and finds out their house burned down. In the fiction, no causal relationship to the Maelstrom, but something bad did happen.

Also, in the case of turning the move back, I have a flavor question: If you turn the move around and ask the player a bunch of questions and something comes out, like, "Oh shit. Yeah, I'm totally terrified of snakes. Worst thing I can imagine would be to be buried in them. Can't stand to even be near one, but a ton would be panic attack city." In order for that to be a hard move, that should totally come up again. Do I need to tell myself that, off screen, Harridan the (little h) hardholder got a text from the Maelstrom with that piece of data and so, at some later date, can use it, or is it enough for me to know it and, later, have Harridan just happen to use snakes as a threat against that particular PC?