Hi folks,

Where does the concept of offloading storytelling power to the players by asking loaded questions come from? In particular, when it applies to questions after character creation, when it seems to be a very old technique indeed.
(And which is the best generic term for that, “leading”, “loaded”, “provocative”, or something else?)
As in, such as AW's 7th Priciple, “Ask provocative questions and build on the answers”, come from? I have looked through my copy of DitV, and could not find it stated there explicitly. (I thought it might already be in there, but I have as of yet neither read all those rules beginning to end, nor played it, so I had to rely on the pdf search function as a first approximation.)

I have googled inside the Forge archive using search terms like “leading OR loaded OR provocative question”, but the hits I found were about questions asked there being loaded, not about provocative questions as GM technique.

I asked on rpg.stackexchange (http://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/55121/5843) and have not got a proper answer there either.

Can anyone point me to where this concept appears implicitly and explicitly for the first time, and what may have sparked it being a prominent technique these days?

Hi,

I know you have already drawn your conclusions from the playtest, and I'm sorry it took me until now to put the following things in writing. Some of the notes below may be misunderstood from my notes during the session. I may correct any misunderstood notes later.

I organised an AW oneshot a few weeks ago, and ended up not running it, because we started according to the Co-MC suggestions, and then someone else had a better idea to start than I did, so I passed on being the GM.

When creating our place, it was a bit difficult to come up with names for peoples and nearby places. The language-based name lists seemed to imply that peoples and place names should also depend on languages, but there are no guide lines.

I had not printed enough peoples sheets, and also more peoples creation rules sheets would be good, so people can create peoples in parallel. If your next iteration ends up with stuff that is needed multiple times, an estimate of how frequent stuff is needed on the table would be helpful.

Did we miss an indication of how wealthy characters are?

Are the seasons supposed to follow the yearly seasons of spring, summer, harvest and winter, or are they of arbitrary length, a time during which circumstances are comparable or something like that?

What is the mechanical trigger of “sizing someone up”? In particular, do I need to interact with them, or can I do that from a distance?

How does small-scale stuff interact with large-scale stuff? I think this question turned up during a small battle, in which the influence of individual PCs' actions was comparatively large in “enemies incapacitated” or similar.

During a small battle, we managed to outnumber our fighting enemies 3 to 1, because some of them were incapacitated and some out of range (it was a battle between three boats, so some melee fighters on a boat could not come closer to the action), which scewed the odds extremely in our favour. Are we supposed to have such an immense difference in fighting capability?

The gods did not seem to really play a role at character creation, and did only rarely turn up later.

Leap Into Action reads like a nice move, but when successful allows quite a few choices given the fact that not all of them may be applicable. We felt that either there need to be more options to choose from (I may remember later what we considered missing), or less choices.

Is it on purpose that hindering other characters is not in the rules, but helping is?

Roth's child, the driver in my campaign got lost in the Maelstrom one day. She came back with a film camera and memories of Richard Attenborough, broadcaster and naturalist, and is now known through the maelstrom and to herself as Richard “Rothchild” Attenborough, gang documentary film maker. Wanting to change playbook, but finding that there isn't a really appropriate playbook she could now change to, we started making this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17lq7gAWfObd7fs3yDPsV-S0iwFvSHVTdOqAkiExe9VA/edit#

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

(Should I post the text from there here in this thread?)

I just finished building the angel playbook as a odt (OpenOffice/LibreOffice) file. It's A4 and I haven't put Vx's copyright message in yet (sorry) and use Utopia instead of the other bread type, but you can find it anyway on https://github.com/Anaphory/apocalypse. May be useful for people wanting to build their own pbs without fancy stuff like Scribus or Adobe software. It's currently obviously is a copyright infringement, so if I don't get any absolution, I'll vanish it again, but I hope it's acceptable for the cause.

There seems to be no canonical place where Apocalypse World custom moves are collected in a nice format with easy searching, sorting, rating and feedback. (Is there?) I want some of the latter on one of mine, so please tell me everything that's wrong with the following move (I'm very sure the phrasing can be improved; but to what?) I made for the Hardholder in my campaign:

Search and Seizure
When you take go through the stuff in somebody's shelter, roll +sharp. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7–9, choose 1.

• You find something valuable, worth 1-barter.
• You find something interesting, possibly incriminating. Mark +1 Hx.
• You are subtle about it.
• You make sure that everybody getting the scent of it knows it was just the reasonable thing to do, nothing to be upset about.