So I'm thinking about a Star Trek flavored AW hack, and I'm watching some original series episodes to identify various moves.

In the episode "Journey To Babel", at the climax of the story, McCoy is doing heart surgery on the Vulcan ambassador while the Enterprise is under attack. Mechanically, that's two separate move sequences: McCoy is doing healing moves while Kirk is doing ship combat moves; both aspects are dramatic enough to call for moves and die rolls.

However, the jostling and power fluctuations on the ship are interfering with the surgery; the outcome of the doctor's moves are dependent on the success of the captain's moves.

I can think of a few ways to model this in the basic AW framework:

* McCoy rolls Healing, hits 7-9, MC says "the ship is getting shaken around pretty badly, and you're going to lose your patient if the raider ship isn't dealt with right quick; Kirk, what do you do?" This is unusual because the normal 7-9 shtick is to make the acting player make a choice, but here MC's shifting the focus and decision to another player -- not necessarily a bad thing.

* McCoy rolls Healing, misses with a 6, MC says "the ship's getting shaken around too badly, and you're going to lose your patient; Kirk, you can help him here by beating the raider ship." MC doesn't want to reduce the starship fight to a single Help roll; instead she improvises a special move that gives the effect of a Help roll if Kirk beats the raider without the ship taking more than 2 harm or something.

* McCoy rolls Healing, hits 10+, MC says "you'll be able to save him", cuts to Kirk, the space battle plays out, with narrative cuts back to sickbay as the ship gets shaken around. Works fine in vanilla AW rules, but the surgery lacks the suspense that the entire episode has been building towards.

In another context, I've considered using a "reverse countdown clock", requiring multiple successes from the players for different subtasks in order to reach a major goal, and I think that mechanic might be a good way to handle this kind of partially-dependent move series.

Anyone else have ideas on how to handle this?

The holding is called Merciful Bear after the nose art of an ancient bomber aircraft whose wreckage (and one good gun turret) makes up part of the scrap-metal wall surrounding the town. The (NPC) hardholder is a woman called Lin; she takes a share of the crops grown in the holding’s poor soil, maintaining a small standing militia of about 12 soldiers, and keeping a distillery running, producing liquor and fuel.

The PCs:

Joo, the Gunlugger sheriff, genetically engineered human/canine hybrid, ex-mercenary and family man; he and his wife and stepson came to town at a time when Lin’s soldiers were getting greedy and abusive, and he put a couple of them down; now he functions as a check on Lin’s power.

Mostly, the Brainer, who recently stumbled into town weak with fever; she owes a debt of gratitude to the local doctor; she has little memory of her past prior to two years ago.

Truth, the Hocus; he and his nomadic sex-and-drugs cult recently arrived and set up camp in the hills just outside of town.

Hey all - I hope recruiting for players is okay here?

I'm hoping to get an AW game started on roll20.net. I've got one player signed up and am looking for about 3 more.

Weeknights in Pacific time zone, weekly or biweekly, starting in November.

I'm also interested in playing Monsterhearts, MOTW, Dungeon World, or other PBtA games.

The campaign link: https://app.roll20.net/campaigns/details/395659/merciful-bear