Chris & Michael,

"As a player, I don't know if my character thinks they are going to talk or not," is the literal opposite of the type of immersion I'm going for here.  I want to be thinking as my character.

Yeah, I feel you. That might put you in a weird place with the Read moves. Because you can decide that your character thinks the window is the best way out, but the MC can tell you that the back door is. Since that info is sort of based on the character's numbers and the MC's answer can change per PC, I've always seen it as the MC telling you what your character thinks the best option is. After all, it now might BE the best option, because of the +1, regardless of your previous idea of what your character thought.

Quote from: davidberg on February 16, 2011, 06:04:41 PM

1) That's some good news!  It seems as though my group has misinterpreted the lists of success options.  Our expectations have somehow become that a successful roll entitles you to achieve something obviously useful.  "Conserver your strength and wait" would fail on that front and leave the roller feeling short-changed.

You should always say what honesty demands and your agenda is to make Apocalypse World seem real. If "Conserve your strength and wait" is the most honest answer at that place and time, say it.

Yeah. It can be a weird thing, where the MC is telling you something your character thinks, if only a passing thought, and then stamps it with a mechanical bonus, to give it even more weight. The answer for ME is pretty much there in Baker's Immersion rant, the first one. That immersion is a fun part of the game, but it's not the only fun part. Sometimes, I'm locked in; sometimes I fiddling with mechanics, clearly at the table.

What's clear to me is that if a player tries to con an NPC, grabs for their dice, and then I say, "No, there's no way that what you said would successfully manipulate them," the player will be pissed.  All of a sudden Dave is playing judge over their contributions instead of helping them be awesome.

Yeah, this is always a huge one with me. The usual answer of "follow your principles" doesn't jive with me because it's still "Make AW seem real to Chris". A player might think that it's perfectly real for Balls to 180 like that for a little scratch, based on how he's been portrayed. For me and mine, at that point, I usually just give it to the player. If they're that passionate about it, then it'll probably lead somewhere cool. Maybe Balls follows him around or expects a little more out of that relationship later.

You twist and whisper the wrong name
I don't care nor do my ears
Twist yourself around me
I need company, I need human heat
I need human heat

Let's pretend I'm attractive and then
You won't mind, you can twist for a while
It's the night, I can be who you like
And I'll quietly leave before it gets light

So twist and whisper the wrong name
I don't care nor do my ears
Twist yourself around me
I need company, I need human heat
I need human heat

I need human heat
I need human heat
I need human heat
I need

The Twist - Frightened Rabbit

I had an interesting dinner where the discussion of a one-shot I had run last week came up. And the subject of how post-apocalypse fiction is way too bleak and all that was put across the table.

We started to discuss the bleakness and a friend mentioned that all the ways in which we were saying the genre was bleak were masculine. They were power based. She told me to read this and I just did. I'd read Ursula Le Guin, but not read this commencement speech.

Interesting parts:

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

Well, we're already foreigners.

In the framework of some of the discussions about how AW is too bleak or whatever, I find the whole thing interesting.

AW makes me push into Right to Dream play, at least as far as I've ever been able to understand RtD.

I look at the tone of the book and the media influences and as the MC, I want a very, very specific outcome, in terms of tone and color, before we even sit down. And the guy who sits down, looks at the Hardholder playbook, picks Barnum as his name and then plays a crazy clown ruins it for me.

It puts cool ideas into my head about the sort of literary pretension that should be part of the game and makes me wish, sometimes fervently, that my players would make better, more literary decisions for their player characters. It makes me want to make them all go outside for awhile whilst I play the game by myself and make everything go the right way and use words like "whilst" during character dialogue. Not character talk, but dialogue. And then I can tell them about how well it all went later on.

:)

....to off-set all the crazy dogma from both pornography and bleed from our childish sex imagination. 

Yeah, and there's the sheer homoerotic sexual tension that groups of males tend to feel. In my experience playing football and in the military, it gets bled off as homoerotic jokes, which might offset the tone of the game.

I mean, just asking a male friend of mine to share a coffee with me while we talked about a project last week lead to him feeling the need to make jokes about it being a date because he was uncomfortable with it just being two guys.

Humor bleeds tension, but isn't always the best for the tone of the game. Push until the tension is just before that point.

Which one got him? Don't know.

Oh I'm geeky enough to frame by frame it and Hickok beat Bullock on the draw by a mile, but still, you don't know who hit.

Hmmm. I kinda like it the way it is. I don't think the sex moves really advocate having sex or not having sex. I'm not sure it's about it being mechanically interesting, which I think is something that makes more sense for Monsterhearts.

I think it does this:

...they communicate a bunch of things about who these characters are...

...and they communicate it both to the battlebabe's PC, the other PX, and all the NPCs.

I like this:

...when you're a battlebabe, you decide what sex means...

...but I already think it's true, more so than giving the gunlugger the option to give me some scratch because I slept with him.

I think your version makes the battlebabe a wildcard, in that s/he can use sex as either a weapon or a gift, but I think that deadens the original effect, which is that sex matters to h/e/i/r/m as much as s/he says it does, including not at all.

If this is the move, does it include the battlebabe's current one?