Nathan--I think the book's advice to start with a fundamental scarcity is good.

In our game, I just looked at who had been introduced into play (Omie, for example), then went down the list and said, "what fundamental scarcity does he represent?" Then I made him the first threat in that scarcity, and saw which other threats fell into line behind him (or tweaked the motives of other threats to do so, always making them cooler & more interesting to me in the process. It's key that I never felt like I was squishing NPCs into a front just to do so, but rather the Front rules helped me flesh them out and make them interesting. I hope that's true for you as well).

I also took free license with shit that had only been barely touched on during play and made stuff up about it, creating a fundamental scarcity then filling out the front, step-by-step, from there.

I haven't read your whole post thoroughly, and I'm sure you want some more detailed advice on your particular situation. I'll try to read it all and give you some.

Say a character goes all out after some dude, guns a blazin'.  "I'm seizing this motherfucker's life by force!" the player says.  He rolls and hits and one of the options he picks is "you take definite hold of it."  Does that mean he can now just kill the bastard, regardless of how much harm he's actually done?

Good question. The answer to this will probably clear up any confusion I have left between Go Aggro/Seize by Force.

Well, shit, let me take a stab: If CJ, my gunlugger friend, is all, "I want to kill that motherfucker. I'm pulling out my sniper and pulling the trigger," I as MC would say, okay, SBF, make your hard roll. He makes it and chooses, among other things, "take definite hold of it." I'd either just say the NPC is dead, which seems by the book but maybe not that interesting, or, better yet, say, "yeah, you cap him, you see a spray of blood from his left shoulder and he's writhing on the ground bleeding. You have time to go over to him, and he's helpless, it's really easy to kill him, what do you do?" If he says, "yeah, I go over to that fucker and stomp on his skull," I say, "great, he's dead." Don"t even need to apply harm, right?

But what if he chose "take definite hold of his life," and hasn't inflicted enough harm to kill him? Like:

What if you've seized Dremmer's body by force, you've tied him up, but haven't inflicted harm, and you have no weapon except your fists (1-harm). Can you kill him by strangling? In this case I'd probably say no. "Taking definite hold of his life," is just that, but you can only end the life if you're able to inflict enough harm, right?

This is creating a question in my mind between the harm-mechanics of a particular weapon and the ability to take a life, as defined by "take definite hold." Can you only kill by "take definite hold" if you're capable of inflicting the requisite harm (which makes sense to me, although usually if you're capable of inflicting enough harm to kill after the choice to "take definite hold," you're capable of doing it during the move by just inflicting harm or "inflict[ing] great harm), or can "take definite hold" apply to a life, even in the absence of enough harm? My interpretation is that the latter doesn't hold. If during the resolution of SBF, I've inflicted 1-harm on a dude (and that's all I can do per my weapons and his armor), and also seized his life by force, then I can freely go up to him and inflict another 1-harm, moving him from "cosmetic damage, pain," to "wounds, likely fatal." But then can the player inflict another harm and then another, definitively killing him, because he's seized the NPCs life? I'm confusing myself. I don't think it's this complicated.

I think the answer is that, always, what you're trying to do has to follow from the fiction. If you have a dude, from SBF, definite hold and all that, then you can't just kill him with your fists. You gotta pull out a gun or a knife or something, but that won't require another roll: you already won the privilege to do as you see fit with him by "taking definite hold".

Thanks guys, great stuff. I think this super-simple answer is especially useful to me:

2) Double check your MC moves list, and your Threats, outside of the game. The players have missed a roll, it's a chance for you to make a move. So spend some time wondering: "How might opening their brains and missing be an opportunity to seperate or capture someone? How might it be an opportunity to announce off screen badness?" and so on.

I just need to spend some off-time thinking about the psychic maelstrom and what it is and how I can use it. I didn't think about it at all before our last two games, which is probably why it's been flat.

This is something I'm having difficulty with in our current game. We just played the second session.

The first session was all following them around, right? I was figuring out their deal, and was focusing on making good MC moves that make their lives interesting (which, seriously, for me, is the hardest fucking part about MCing Apocalypse World). I didn't have enough brainpower to focus on triangles.

Then in the second session I was focusing on my fronts, making sure I had interesting things to say (which is still hard), and now my three PCs, Gunlugger, Hocus, & Angel, are like this united front that mow down everything in their path.

Now, though, it's pretty easy to see what I need to do.

If you've got a chopper, a hocus, an operator, or a hardholder, one of the simplest and easiest things to do is have a member of one PC's gang, crew, or followers pick a fight with another PC, or at least do something that PC wouldn't like (stealing their stuff, etc.) Give them a simple reason. Run with the consequences. Works like magic.

This wouldn't work in my current sitch, I don't think, as the PC in charge of the gang would smack down the NPC for stealing from the other PC. It's obvious to me that I need to have an NPC do something detrimental to a PC that will directly benefit a different PC. That's an easy one, and it just came from reflecting on the current session and thinking "how can I make a PC-NPC-PC triangle here?" I just need to keep thinking that between sessions, and I think it'll be fine.

Partially, I think my problem was taking "every NPC's a threat" and, without realizing it, assuming that meant "every NPC's a threat to the PC's as a group" Fuck no, that ain't true. I threw my NPC's at the group, then had them band together behind their backs as a united front against all of them. That is not the way to create triangles. They're threats, but not to everybody. Maybe they're a threat to one PC and a friend to another, at least until the situation changes. A literal reading of the ally rules fucked me up in this regard, too, as I assumed that if an NPC isn't an "ally", then they're gunning balls to the wall for all the PCs. Not true. If a PC picks an NPC for an ally, that just means they won't be an antagonist for that PC. Right?

Sounds like an advancement for the Savvyhead? Or just a detailed description of something the 'head might make.

Thing I saw John Harper do: ask people a few idle questions during character creation, and just immediately start sketching out the area we'd play in. Pausing sometimes to tease an important detail out of someone and add it.

This is what I did, and it's probably due to John's influence as the first MC I played with. We came up with the starting situation through Hx questions and through a little pitching back and forth (not strictly by the book), and then I used those answers to start sketching on my big piece of newsprint. "Okay, I want a river to be here. Maybe the holding or whatever it's called is right here, next to the river? What's its name?" I added a coupla small things throughout the session, when they came up.

ahh, beautiful. Disturbing.