So I saw District 13 a bit ago, and seeing this particular chase scene immediatelly made me think "crap, he's a battlebabe, isn't he?"

But, while I finally get the appeal of playing a battlebabe now, it also made me think...

Isn't the fact that the playbook has custom guns and weapons on it a big fat misdirect? Giving them awesome weapons seems to say: hey, look! This one is good at fighting! Pick it if you want a battle! And that is a hell of a lie - battlebabes, with their puny hard, are downright sucky when things come to actually having to shoot your guns or bloody your blade (you can debate this but I probably won't believe you).

The fictional battlebabes (David Belle, that dude in Equillibrium, Hit Girl, River in any of her fight scenes) do something different than fighting, I think... They *dodge* until the enemies around them are dead, and use the environment and the enemy's weapons to inflict their harm.

And you can't do that with the battlebabe as written (or can you?). If that's the case, it's a problem easily solvable via custom playbook moves, probably.

But first, I would of course like to know if I am totally totally wrong about all of this.

Deja vu all over again!

http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=202.0

"Hmm, now where did I put that apple?"
'You are now in pursuit of an apple'
"Ah, there it is!"
'You mark XP.'

Other than that, it seems very fine!

Oh wait no, I do have a little rant, one that isn't specific to your playbook, but I think is important. Sharp - it is already a very useful stat, the stat of stats so to speak, as it grants you a +1 to almost any task.

With Connects the Dots, In and Out, and, say, Driver's Good in a Clinch... You essentially get a reliable +4 to under fire and seize by force, which is insanely powerful, and possibly frustrating to an MC or even the player, eventually.

How about a specialized violence move instead, one that takes into account the fact that Sharp is all about situational awareness?

How about... Know when to fold 'em - when reading a sitch, you can spend your hold to cause harm instead of asking questions.

Or, alternativelly, a specialized "you get that thing!" move, if that was more your angle. No idea what one would look like, though.

The Maestro D' is a character playbook you get for either having helped playtest the game, or pre-ordering it.

Not possible to get now, unless you build a machine to go back in time! Or, I dunno, someone gives it to you.

Huh! I had exactly the same seed of an idea, but the (tentative) direction I took it in was very much different.

Looking good, though!

I like "Show me the money!". I also like "Board members", but... The name is descriptive, not kicky. And there's *something* about 'once per game' that I don't like. If you're going to do that, why not just give me the thing as part of my default gear, yer?

1) Working the PC-NPC-PC triangles hard. When PCs are in an "us vs the world" mode they will be able to beat the crap out of lots of things. But when they get separated, have feuds, and are not working together where the Skinner can sleep with the Gunlugger and get the +1 forward and the hold to spend without the Gunlugger worrying that the Skinner is going to bone her over... well, then it gets harder.

Did this change from the playtest doc? I still don't happen to have the end ruleset (poor as the dirt!), but if I remember right...

PC-NPC-PC triangle =/= Driving wedges between PCs.

The function of Triangles is to bring possibly disparate stories together, I do believe. Say there's a PC Battlebabe who spends her time swinging between buildings with her endless chains, beating up local toughs and freeing their sex-slaves... And a partly insane Savvyhead all cooped up in his little booby-trapped tech-tower, sucking secrets out of the maelstorm. They might know of each other, but their two stories will be completelly unrelated if you play them.

Until you do this:

"So, Battlebabe... that tough you just offed, he's the right hand of the local warlord, Millions."
"So, Savvyhead... You say you don't have any legs anymore, right? Well, Millions still has one of them."

And there you have it! Instant connection between the PCs.

Driving wedges between characters isn't not-good per se, I do believe. It's just not it's primary function.

Re: Rolling as high as you can!

I have actually figured out a way to roll +X in AW.

Skinner +3 Hot.
Savvyhead Oftener Right
No Shit Driver / Car +3 Looks (due to Savvyhead).
Perfect Instincts +2.

As long as the MC's (and, er, Savvyhead's) answer is "drive around everywhere while wiggling your ass through the window", you can roll +9. Or possibly +10 or +11 if you get help and some sort of sex bonus.

At UF, you'd get a conga line of allies going after that car!

Make Home a relevant front! A change in fiction as well as in mechanics! Encircling the names!

Fuck yes, gentlemen.

As far as I know, Home was not made into a front. It probably would have made a lot of sense for it to, because that's exactly what my guy was angling towards all the time! Making a home for people.

Currently, I'm thinking something like... Put those Allies on a list. And write the opposite of a fundamental scarcity above that list. Fear becomes Bravery, Decay becomes Rebuilding, Ignorance becomes Understanding.

As far as the change in fiction... Depends on how you look at it. The threats-to-allies did not... reveal any symphathetic properties. For one of the earlier allies, the MC told me "Well, just because you changed his allegiance some doesn't mean he's a different person now. He's still a violent, savage motherfucker -- only now he's *your* violent savage motherfucker". A change of heart for that dude would have been immenselly gratifying, and would have made some sense at the time, too, I think.

This is an important thing, probably! Without figuring out how the persons involved fundamentally become allies instead of being threats in the fiction... The Allies will just become not-threats. That's... something, but not much.

As for myself... My operator did not have much of a choice in establishing scenes the last couple of sessions! Every other roll was 'under fire from being in dangerous territory' of one kind or another. Might've angled for including them more otherwise, possibly.


Encircling the allies' names is cool and one of the real little answers of how to keep the on your mind as the MC.

But yeah! A question: I'm the MC, I want my players' allies to matter. When do I bring them into play? How do I bring them into play? With threats, it's fairly simple: I escalate accordingly, and when I can, I make a hard move. When do I bring in allies? If it makes trouble for the other characters', I can just use AW's default settings. But what about when there's a character that needs help?

Say, there's a guy who's under fire from circling raiders of some sort. He tries to get out and busts his roll... Do I now as the MC make life hard for him? Or, if he has an appropriate ally (guardian, say!), do I instead go all "They catch you sneaking out! One of them, Wolf you think his name was, lunges towards you, and just as he's about to cut you open, there's suddenly a big hole in his head. You look at where the shot was fired from... It's <ally: guardian>!"

That actually sounds kind of cool, now that I've written it. How do I put it in principle form? "When I make a hard move, I make it with an ally against the threat instead of the actual threat, hmm?" seems a bit... iffy for a reason I can't quite place.

Well... In principle? If you log in and stay logged in and idle until someone posts something, you could. But IRC is best used when all the people are online at the same time, so it'd be a hassle.

A forum is probably your best bet. Some of the run-of-the-mill messaging services should have that kind of function, too, maybe? If you do ever do any live play, you can just stick in in the forum.


A thing that I did with friends with crazy schedules: Log in, see who's on, play the game with the ones available (unless someone is REALLY needed for a scene), stuff log on blog. If you're MCing and the game lasts long, I won't guarantee you won't go a bit crazy, though.

Maybe some play-by-post / realtime combo is viable? AW seems easy enough to mold into new modes of play, at least.