Quote from: Chris on July 10, 2010, 04:57:42 PM

With the Perfect Instincts and Ice Cold moves, they're taking +5 to two of the basic moves and a +2/3 to Seize by force.

Could you possibly show your work here?  I'm not seeing how any of this adds up.

+3 cool for acting under fire or going aggro, and +2 from acting on the answers you get from reading a situation. (So, it's +5, if you can make a sharp roll.)

I've actually considered allowing each player to highlight one relationship: So, for example, Vega's Hx with Jan, involving any two characters other than the one they're playing. So you can't highlight any of your own Hxs, nor can you highlight somebody's Hx with you. Maybe let the MC highlight a few, too.

Rereading some of the old development blog posts, and noticed somebody mentioning a World of Darkness hack, which got me to thinking. Here's a few ideas, I don't know if I'll run with them at all, so feel free to contribute your own, or take these ideas and run with them yourself.

VAMPIRES

When you rise at sunset, roll +blood. On a 10+, you're fine for the night. On a 7-9, you feel the pangs: take -1 ongoing until you feed on blood. On a miss, anything you do until you feed is acting under fire, where the fire is losing control.

When you feed on someone, gain +blood equal to how much harm you deal to them, to a maximum of +3.

Playbooks:

The Predator
The Shadow
The Rose
The Prince
The Elder
The Wretch

CHANGELINGS

When you feed upon a mortal's dreams... (stuff)

When you swear a binding oath... (stuff)

Keep in mind your goal is to make their lives interesting, to YOU. Some ways I might do it if the PCs were set up to be a band of vicious and heartless raiders, personally:

See how far they're willing to go. You can just ask this when they open their mind to the world's psychic maelstrom, or put it into practice. This innocent camp of defenseless people, whose warriors all got wiped out a few years ago fighting off the last batch of raiders? What about this holding full of sick and starving diseased people, that barely have anything worth stealing?

Give them a challenge. A warlord with a fortress of stone and metal and a well-armed gang of vast size, and you don't have enough food to just wander off into the wasteland and find another target. Or maybe a less well-defended holding, but there's another band of raiders going after it, too: can you fight them off without destroying the prize you're fighting over?

Barf forth all the weirdness of Apocalypse World. Raiders have to deal with the fact that weird shit like Brainers and Hocuses, Perversions of Birth like Blind-Blue, Breeding Pits, Mutants, etc. And the World's Psychic Maelstrom, always there, always waiting for you to open up.

And if you've got a Chopper (or a Hocus, or an Operator, or anyone with a gang or crew improvement), man, use those NPCs the way the game tells you to. Name them, make them human, and then use them for PC-NPC-PC triangles before you put them in the crosshairs. And invoke their stuff's downside: If they don't have a savvyhead, where do they go when their bikes need maintenance? If they don't have an angel, what do they do when somebody gets sick? Things they'll need to find the services of an NPC for? It's a little bit complicated to just ride in, grab who you need, tie them up, and procure their services at gun-point.

Thanks! We haven't tried it out in play yet, though.

One thing I did notice, once the idea of "apocalypse farmer" was brought up to me, is that you could actually use existing playbooks pretty well to do it: The Operator with gigs of Honest Work, Deliveries, and maybe Brokering Deals, or the Savvyhead with a workspace of Controlled Growing Environment, Skilled Labor, and Truck or Van (specifically, the tractor). If you could only get the Maestro D' special move in there, too, I think the Operator would be just about perfect. (Once you feed somebody, you pretty much accept being responsible for keeping them happy.)

Johnny Cash: Throw "When the Man Comes Around" in there, too. And, personally, I'd include "God's Gonna Cut You Down", too. Cause, y'know. Crosshairs.

Your mileage may vary, but yeah, there's a world of difference between how my PCs treated "three guys with guns" and "Dog Head, Jackabacka, and Isle, all armed" even if I had never used those names before.

And I do enjoy reusing names, too, so you get situations like "Hey, wait, wasn't he my cousin? And he's with the guys who had stolen my guns? Dang. That makes my plan of shooting them all dead a bit more complicated."