Interesting! That does, obviously, change the statistics completely.   

Eggdropsoap,

Your proposal makes intuitive sense to me, but I'm fairly sure Vincent doesn't play that way. As he describes his own play, you're *not* making a statement about the other players' taste, you're playing your character "naturally," which in this context appears to mean "without specifically trying to roll or not roll your highlighted stats".

Personally, I'm still confused about why that would be, as the extra effort involved in my "8 bubble" system seems to be less than the effort saved by skipping the highlighting procedure from start-of-session. 

 

Tavis,

It sounds to me like you're beginning with a fixed idea of what your character wants, and then looking at highlighted stats as something that interferes with pursuing it. That makes sense if you assume that your character is, well, 100% yours and shaped only by your input.

AW doesn't work that way--other players actually get to help shape your character.  You see it in the Hx rules, which allow other players to declare things about you, and to a lesser extent in the manipulation move (how many RPGs let you mechanically compel the behavior of other PCs?).  I'd suggest looking at highlighted stats, not as a *distraction* from what your character wants, but as a *clue* to what your character wants. 

Weirdly, Id argue that *not* having Leadership is Pack Alpha is quite possibly an advantage.  Missing a roll on either of those explicitly causes a relatively serious betrayal, probably worse than the result of flubbing a rune of the mill manipulate roll. 

Assert your authority is the basic social move because the PCs are formerly-upperclass criminals in a world where the lower classes have been bioengineered for obediance. 

It's very similar to manipulate in that you can roll to dictate someone's behavior, but only if you have something over them.  So the default use of the move would be "assert my authority (over the conscripts), where my authority arises from genetic compulsion" but you could also use it on a captured noble by doing something like "assert my authority, where my authority is a big fucking gun". 

Well, originally, the idea was that the game would primarily focus on teams of specialists doing breaking & entering, kidnapping and hostage retrieval, and investigation.  That very narrow focus was required because the game engines I was used to modeled fine enough levels of detail that separating characters too much was just awkward.  Now I'd like to expand the scope of the game to include battlefield maneuvers and prolonged negotiations as things people might get involved with, and let the players each have some room to explore. 

In the original game engine I was using, I had 5 skills: Martial Arts, Human Resources, Technical, Sorcery, and Spiritualism.  (well actually they had japanese names that were less awkward, but w/ever).  That kind of task-based segregation made sense in the context of team-based operations, because it gave everyone a natural role on the team--having one characters numbers mark him as "technical" nominates him to star when the team needs to bypass security measures, and tack a back seat when a suspect needs to be bluffed. 

My concern about carrying over that numerical division to Apocalypse World's engine is twofold: first, that having to define the nature of the danger before rolling adds an extra operation to the move resolution, and second, that the correspondence is too neat.  Martial Arts was meant to help you get past many technological traps, and sorcery was meant to provide some antipersonnel firepower.  I could work those in through playbook moves, of course but it is a concern.

The alternative is to use more function-agnostic stats like the AW default ones and bring in specializations like technical, kung fu, or medical through the playbooks.  The only problem becomes deciding what stats to base the playbooks off.  It's not obvious to me whether a Sorcerer is more Cool or more Hard, or whether a Diplomat should be Sharper than a Technician. 

New Basic Move: Act under fire

When you do something under fire, roll+whatever stat is associated with the fire.  Wood for interpersonal threat, metal for physical threat, fire for technical threat, earth for threats from the Rings, and water for threats from the pattern.  Then proceed as in the core book. 

If you want to kill someone then your choices typically are:

If they're fighting back, you typically need to seize their life by force. 

If they're not yet fighting, you are allowed to "go aggro, and what I want you to do is fucking die" --at which point they either cave and die, or suck up the harm...and probably die. 

Or, use the fiction to catch them asleep or something and you probably don't roll anything. 

As for the Battlebabe, I think almost every Battlebabe will want to start with Ice Cold.  That means you roll +cool to go aggro, so you can assassinate people by suddenly attacking.  The only problem is that one going aggro may not do enough harm to an armored target, as you don't get a "terrible harm" option like with seize. But with a 3-harm weapon and Merciless, you can one-shot even armored NPCs.