I've had no problem at all MCing for 2 players--once I adjusted to having to make way more moves than I was used to with 5 players.

I find what helps is to make every threat a character with a strong personality.

Every member of the Chopper's gang. The psychic maelstrom should have a specific goal in mind. The forest of bones should have a reason for every move it makes.

That way, when the chopper fails to pack alpha, or someone fails to open their brain, or someone fails to navigate the forest, I know what that threat wants to do to them.

Since pretty much every choice in this game is from a list, my friends and I have been messing around with randomization of Apocalypse World games. So far, we've done it twice. (Using random.org for random number generation)

The first time, I ran it for two players. I laid out all the playbooks and had them each choose up to two playbooks they didn't want to play, then choose randomly from the rest. Then we chose names randomly, looks randomly, stats randomly, starting moves randomly, and starting gear. Randomly. They asked, what's the climate like? So I rolled some fudge dice and got -3. "Fucking cold". Turned out Heron the Skinner's random art of making fur and leather clothes was an awesome choice! Then we played a session; it was pretty cool.

The second time, another player ran it for me and someone else, and we followed the same path, only randomizing even more stuff. We chose a random latitude and longitude (wound up in Suriname) and did fudge dice for random climate again (+3). This time, though, not only did we randomly generate our characters, we chose random Hx options, random highlighting of stats, and every improvement we chose was chosen randomly! (Throwing out the options at each step that were mechanically terrible; e.g. replace a stat with a worse stat)

Wound up with some seriously interesting characters, though it might have just been that we were very drunk. I had a Brainer whose first advancement was, randomly, "take a move from another playbook" and wound up with Reputation. Pretty sweet!

To me, highlighting is a totally out-of-fiction comment along the lines of "Hey, you should do more of this" or "It'd be cool if you paid more attention to this".

But is there some element to it that models something within the fiction?

Ooh, that's an interesting thought. I mean, it is somewhat related to the fiction because it's your Hx that decides which player gets to highlight a stat of yours. Also the Quarantine can, through in-fiction events, wind up with Weird permanently highlighted.

I feel like the interesting question isn't "how can we best model getting roofied?", but rather "What does re-highlighting stats best model?"

Oh man guys thanks for this thread. It made me all like "man, I wanna make some affliction moves" so yeah now the cat people who live in the 2-mile-high Kite Oak totally view humans as a subordinate species and that's an affliction:barrier and dudes in jingly collars and leashes are all flying into rages and taking fruitless self-destructive actions all over the place!

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