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Messages - As If

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106
Apocalypse World / Re: Genealogies of Apocalypse World Inhabitants
« on: April 07, 2014, 06:59:58 PM »
Good call and great examples, Munin.  I'm adding that to my campaign notes now. 
Everybody: add the energy question to the list!  (For some groups the answer will be "nothing")

Also noted: Not every question will be equally applicable to every campaign.  It's a brainstorming tool.  Use the questions that make sense for your world.

Obviously, the reason I do this is because I feel it's practical and good, but the length of the genealogy and the exact questions used will differ from campaign to campaign.  Modify it to suit your situation.  It serves two purposes: (a) retaining historical continuity, and (2) adding a layer of verisimilitude to characters and communities so you can really get to know them.

107
Apocalypse World / Re: Genealogies of Apocalypse World Inhabitants
« on: April 07, 2014, 06:24:50 PM »
Certainly, YMMV, depends on your campaign and style of play, etc, which is why I didn't include the three questions in the OP.  Just another optional aide for MCs who want to use it.

108
Apocalypse World / Re: Genealogies of Apocalypse World Inhabitants
« on: April 07, 2014, 05:36:18 PM »
My OP said "the various character classes", not necessarily just PC Playbooks.  So we are on the same page.

In point of fact, the rules, playbooks and expansions (not to mention groups in realtime) contradict the "only one" concept themselves, and while I agree with Munin's assertion of its subtle significance, it's not a big deal in realtime because language is like that.  But it's also a totally separate topic.  The point being made by the genealogy is simply that at point X in time, all this technology and all these concepts have come to exist - regardless of how many there are or how you count them.

I have another set of questions that I use when planning for Session 2, which is related to the generations listed above and my need to fill in backstory for the world.  Basically, for every community/group or NPC that made it through the 50 years, I ask the following three questions (the answers to which may change for each generation):

How did you get your food?
How did you get your water?
What drove you / Kept you together?


For example:
                                    VAULTERS        TRIBALS            CULTISTS        THE DUDE        SCROUNGERS
What Did You Do for Food            stored            subt.farm             cannib             cryo              scrounged
What Did You Do for Water           stored            subt.water            stored             cryo              scrounged
What Drove You / Kept You Together  fear              tribe bond            religion           patriotism        desperation

This allows me to more easily fill in details when the PCs get to know NPCs from that community.  The NPCs can talk about what their parents did to get by, tell a story about their grandpa in the great clone war or whatever, without causing logical errors or discontinuities.  Similarly, players whose PCs come from that community will have an easier time brainstorming their own histories.

109
Apocalypse World / Genealogies of Apocalypse World Inhabitants
« on: April 07, 2014, 01:58:55 AM »
For purposes of session 2 prep and PC backstories, I found it useful to create a generic Genealogy of Apocalypse World Inhabitants for my current campaign.  This assists players and the MC in imagining details about the parents and grandparents of current campaign characters.  YMMV of course because all campaigns are different, but this should give you a good start:

Your Grandparents (you probably never met them, but it's possible)
People who were of childbearing age when the Great Dying began - they lived through it directly; they saw their entire civilization, nearly everyone they'd ever known, wiped off the face of the Earth.  They invented and mass-produced the medical gear used by Angels today; their desperate experiments and perverted ideas of technological progress led to developments like the Violation Glove and airborne biological weapons, in addition to Off-Grid Communities, Cryo Chambers and Survival Vaults.  They experienced the cannibal militias, the toxic rain, the great famine, the freak weather, the constant struggle to obtain clean water, and the initial eddies of the world's psychic maelstrom... and some of them survived.

Your Parents
Their children, who came of childbearing age when the Great Dying had begun to level off.  They remembered much of the above from their childhoods, but by the time they reached adulthood the population had been reduced by 90 percent, and Survival of the Fittest was the rule.  These people lived in very different world from their parents.  For one thing, they lacked any direct experience of the previous civilization, so they had no personal memories of Life Before the Fall, or a world without a psychic maelstrom in it.  Their new ideas of "civilization" were nascent, random, and frequently brutal.  Some of these people began to develop new techniques, new social systems, new ways of living, scrounging, bartering, cobbling together little experiments that were sometimes workable, setting up the first "hardholds", adapting to the harsh realities of life... and some of them survived.

Your Generation
Their children, most of whom are of childbearing age now.  That's you.  You remember much of the above from your childhood, and things haven't changed that much.  If anything the major concepts of the game world have now become crystalized: The psychic maelstrom exists, hardholds exist, and the various character classes (and all their accoutrements) exist.  Welcome to Apocalypse World.

110
At long last, here is an ongoing AP of the WTWD-AE-AW campaign.

And here is a sheet I made for the vault itself.  Useful for those consensus questions.
PDF
DOCX

111
Apocalypse World / Re: Custom Move: Drop Focus (a drug)
« on: March 30, 2014, 01:03:39 PM »
What it made me think of, more than Inception, was Memento.  Imagine this...  You walk into a room and someone you don't recognize tosses you a gun and says "About time you got here.  They're expecting us.  What did you find out?"

112
Apocalypse World / Re: Custom Move: Drop Focus (a drug)
« on: March 29, 2014, 08:31:27 PM »
Once you're addicted, it may be difficult to tell when a memory is first-edition, second-edition, etc, or even a memory at all - maybe a dream, and you cannot tell whether you remember your own past the way it actually happened.  On a failed roll, the MC gives your character to another player to act out the memory scene.  You are helpless to watch as you say and do things you feel are "wrong" but nope - turns out YOU'RE the one who remembered it wrong.  Whatever the other player "re"-enacts?  That's how it REALLY happened.

113
Playbook template updated.

114
That's really interesting.  It could provide for those observational "Ah, she's like me..." moments.  One concern I might have, however, is the possibility of the effect being triggered when I saw an event take place but she really wasn't like me, like maybe it was an accident, or she actually did it for unknown reasons or egotistical reasons, etc.

Which made me think maybe it could be validated before it counted?  Either within the fiction or outside of it...

In the fiction: After the observation is made, if the observing character tells the observed character what she noticed and they agree they are similar in that regard, both characters gain +1 synergy with each other.  If the observed character does not agree, -1 synergy with each other.

Outside of the fiction: As soon as the observation has been made, if the players of both characters agree the characters are similar in that regard, the observer gains +1 synergy with the observed.  This +1 may be reciprocated by communicating it in character as above.

Does that taste yummy or pukey?

115
AW:Dark Age / Re: For Plausiblefabulist: Jewish Genealogy?
« on: March 25, 2014, 06:11:05 PM »
If you want to be literal about the word "blood" (as in bloodline), then something like "Blood of (analog for) Abraham" would be fitting.  If you want to emphasize the Qabalistic aspect, "Blood of Sophia" (as in Gnosis) might be closer to the right general area.

116
Noah sounds like a cool kid. :-)  I wrote my first RPG at the age of 14, but there's no way my first system could have handled crafty concepts like "Children of the Cybernetic Overmind".  He is off to a great start here.

My advice for Noah would be to review all his awesome character types with an eye toward game balance.  Vincent has written about stat balance here on the forum.  Also consider the moves themselves.  It can be a little tricky, but try to make sure that in any combination of two playbooks side by side, neither one totally overpowers the other in terms of narrative effectiveness or opportunities for good "screen time".

117
brainstorming & development / Re: Different Dice Mechanics
« on: March 21, 2014, 04:38:01 PM »
AnyDice can help you visualize your dice prob curves.  Type in "output 2d6+3" (for example) and click "calculate".  It will draw the curve and calc the probs for you.

118
For anyone who wants one, I've created an A:E playbook...
PDF: http://asifproductions.com/sites/default/files/vault_dweller.pdf
DOCX: http://asifproductions.com/sites/default/files/vault_dweller.docx

The DOCX version is better, it has narrower margins.  But to display it properly you first must install the fonts:
Vtks good luck for you
Crust Clean

119
Love the new move "Secure shelter" - and it pleases my OCD to see 2 skills listed next to each stat again. :-)
Version 0.4 of the playbook is up.

120
Version 0.3 of the playbook is up (clear cache if you already loaded the old one):
http://asifproductions.com/sites/default/files/PANEM_TEMPLATE.pdf

I understand the logic of removing Fix an Object, but now I feel like Crafty needs another Move.  OCD is a harsh mistress.

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