If you want to play a knight, that's cool. If you want to play someone who falsly claims to be a knight, that's cool too.

It is clearly different situations, but I don't see what the problem would be.

For me, it's that being a knight comes with the opportunity cost of not having picked +1 Strong instead, and RPGs in general have a long and frustrating history of offering choices between the evocative and the functional.

Now, I'm not saying this is such a choice: in the context of AWDA, being a knight might turn out to be functional. I'm not sure. I haven't played yet, and Vincent's designs sometimes work out in subtle ways.

But both as a player and as a GM, I'm finding there's a significant aversion I need to overcome to even play around with these mechanisms to try them out, because they recall so many frustrating experiences from other games.

Well, if the character thinks it's his right, but the player hasn't chosen to make it his right in fact, that means that the player knows and agrees that the character is mistaken.

That means that those without a right to impose law, hold the crown &c. will tend to be the ones better placed to actually impose law, hold the crown &c., right? In that, in place of the very deniable right, they will have something undeniable like +1 Strong?

I suspect that what that says about the world might largely be the point: kings don't rule by right, they rule by the choice of others to respect that right?

But in terms of gameplay, it seems to skirt very closely to the having to choose between an evocative game element, and an actively useful one, a choice frustratingly common in RPGs.

I'm reposting this here because I'm interested to hear Vincent's reading.

Thanks, I was just going to ask you over at Story Games if it's OK to copy past parts of your interpretation to get more comments here!

(Cross-posted from Story Games)

Our Apocalypse World game is largely medical-themed, with the PCs living in a semi-ruined Sisters of Mercy Hospital, run by Mother Superior and the Sisters of Mercy, his inner circle of enforcers.

Lafferty the operator has seeking answers as his obligation gig: he's looking for a fabled military bunker/medical supply warehouse/research lab that's supposed to be somewhere in the city. His contact for this particular gig is Hare the NPC scavenger, a guy who likes to put on a hazmat suit and wander into the less inhabited and more disgusting parts of the city looking for valuables and curios.

First off, is this a legit obligation gig? It seems that most of the obligation gigs are more of a burden than an opportunity, where "profit" is merely managing to maintain the status quo, and catastrophe is that the situation crashes down on the operator. This particular example of seeking answers, but also seeking answers in general, seems to be more... profitable, in that there's tangible benefits at the end, beyond just "everything's fine for now". Should finding the bunker only be possible if the player takes the "resolve an obligation gig" advance?

Regardless, there was a riot/mutiny mostly incited by the PCs and Hare got the ultimate punishment: to go down alive into Sheol, the medical waste incinerator, where he gets to try to survive the three-tailed endo-rats, Encephalitis X zombies, and general disease and filth that gets funneled down there, for days or weeks until the incinirator gets filled up and activated. Lafferty hopes there's another way in (and out!) of the inicinerator, and that he'll be able to find it and bail Hare out in time.

What happens to Lafferty's seek answers gig? Does it go unworked by force of circumstance? Would it work to temporarily redefine it from "seek answers about the secret bunker lab" to "seek answers about the way for Hare out of Sheol in order to be able to continue seeking answers about the secret bunker lab"?

There's a third gig situation involving Lafferty. Zed the angel needed to add two people to his infirmary to cure Azure the battlebabe of Encephalitis X, and Lafferty spread the word, dropped some jingle, and got two people, or something pretty close: there's two of them, they know what they're doing, but they also have their own things going on, which they'll have to sideline to give Zed the help he needs. Now, it seems to me that it would better highlight what a smooth operator Lafferty is if keeping everything running required more than just paying people for their work, and were instead treated as a sort of deal-brokering obligation gig: Keeping Newton and Fauna working for Zed (they're happy and useful / they ditch your project for their own things). Unworked: they're there, but they're grumbling and slacking. Does this make sense?

Or should this actually be Zed's new gig, because Newton and Fauna are working for him? Or is it a question of which character takes it upon themselves to keep Newton and Fauna happy and useful?