How do you like to handle experience and beginning-of-session moves?

Last time I played AW, I was a Quarantine with a permanently-highlighted weird. We decided to mark experience for the beginning-of-session roll+weird move.

However, since it wasn't triggered by anything in the fiction, it felt funny to me to be getting an extra experience mark every session for no apparent reason.

Similarly, if you write love letters, and the characters roll highlighted stats in those, do you have them mark experience?

I'm running a game where I gave the hardholder a beginning-of-session love letter based on hard, and then he rolled his Wealth move, as usual. With hard highlighted, that's two experience ticks right there. The players looked at me funny when that happened.

I'd love to hear your arguments for and against!

Dear Vincent,

I've read in several places on the 'net now that you no longer recommend "Hatchet City" as a demo of Apocalypse World.

What do you feel is wrong with the scenario? Where does it go wrong?

What design lessons can we glean from this? Which bits are good, which are bad, and which are ugly?

Thanks!

I was very surprised to learn a while back that Vincent Baker was not familiar with the game Fallout.

I'm not familiar with it either, but my friends used to play it, and I liked the image of the poor optimistic fool climbing out of the Vault to face a world nothing like what he expected. In my first Apocalypse World game, I played the Quarantine, and I had no idea what I was about to encounter. Wouldn't it be cool if Apocalypse World were like that? Wouldn't it be fun if we could ALL play the Quarantine?

So I made this thing. I call it "Apocalypse: Emergence". The blurb describes it as well as I can:

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Apocalypse: Emergence is a simple hack of Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World. It's half a scenario of sorts and half a group playbook you all share.

The player characters are people emerging from a Vault and exploring the post-apocalyptic world for the first time. They have lived their entire lives underground, shut off from the outside world, fretting about what was happening on the Outside. One day, the Vault opens and they taste the wind and see the open sky for the first time. Having absolutely no information about how the world has changed, they're unequipped and unprepared to deal with what they are bound to encounter. What will they discover when the door of their Vault opens? What new world awaits their sheltered eyes and unguarded brains? How will their confrontation with what's out there transform their relationships to each other?

Apocalypse: Emergence is an ideal way for an experienced MC to introduce new players to Apocalypse World. The players do not need to be familiar with the rules or content of Apocalypse World, and can just jump in and learn, one step at a time, alongside their characters.

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It's free.

Please take a look, have a read, try it with your friends, and let me know what you think.

http://ihousenews.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/60537218/Apocalypse_Emergence.pdf

Thank you for reading! And thanks to Vincent, of course, for a great game.

So, a pretty hard dude by the name of Bram is sitting in his camp late at night.

Walking by is someone who looks very much like his friend Dweller... but is actually a look-alike, dressed in Dweller's clothes. He's been sent by some enemy smart-ass, headed to do some mischief elsewhere: it would be pretty significant if Bram were to figure this out and stop him right now.

However, without looking too closely, this look-alike really looks like Dweller. Upon closer inspection, and better lighting, it would be pretty obvious he isn't, but in the dark, if you're not paying too much attention... looks just like the guy, right?

You're the MC, Bram is the PC. Bram doesn't know anything, neither does his player, when this enemy dressed up like Dweller walks by.

How do you handle this situation? What moves do you use? Do you call for a roll (maybe a custom move)? What's the most fun way to play this out?

Just looking at this move:

Why is it that the Gunlugger gets "gang stats" (3-harm, etc), instead of just saying that he acts as a small gang in battle? It seems odd that it wouldn't make any difference what kind of weapon he brings into the battle--after all, he's the Gunlugger, he likes his guns, right?

I played today with a friend of mine (a non-gamer).

At first, he seemed unsure what to do, but as we read through the first we introductory bits, he just started narrating things. He would pause and think (or read) carefully in sections, but then come out with some really interesting narration and all kinds of details.

We were both very surprised by how intense and creepy the experience of playing was.

Some observations (I'll be back with more tomorrow):

* It's odd how the "player" does so little talking compared to the MC. I felt bad that I'd asked him to play this game with me... but it seemed like he was the one doing all the work, in a sense. I don't know yet if this bothered him or not, but it really jumped out at me.

* The "core loop" where I, as the player, had to choose Madness, Sorrow, Revenge, etc... it often felt like I didn't have enough information to go on, or was still in roughly the same situation I had been earlier.

Once a couple of the obvious choices were exhausted, it felt very awkward for me as the player: I had nothing to go on to choose other options. We'll see if this gets better/easier as we go along.

When I was instructed to "ask the MC questions", I often narrated character actions (for my character), and then followed up with "what happens?" or "how does the ghost react?". In one room, my "ask the MC a question" turned into "Can I pry open the crate?" "Ok, so what's inside?"

I'm not sure if that's in the spirit of the game, but it helped push things along until I felt like I had enough information to make a choice.

Still, it was frustrating to keep coming back to that page, because the options were disappearing very quickly, and it began to seem like none of the remaining ones fit (particularly because the situation evolved very little during that time).

* We played for almost an hour, and still weren't very far along (I'd seen two ghosts, both of which ran away or disappeared, moved through four different "spaces", and the MC had two face-down cards), so we had to quit. We've agreed to pick up where we left off tomorrow.

Since we both had to run, we didn't get to talk about it too much, except that it was a very cool and very creepy experience. As the player, I felt appropriately frightened and "in the dark" about what was about to happen.

The MC's main comment was that he found it challenging but fun. (I think the game was especially slow--it didn't FEEL slow, we were engaged, but slow-paced--because he really got into detailing his descriptions and would often pause to read his text or carefully come up with the next bit of description.) He was concerned, though, when we left off: "I get the sense that I'm supposed to build some coherent, detailed thing. But it feels like I'm just making up stuff at random." I told him it didn't feel that way to me, and explained why. We'll see how it goes tomorrow!

(Also: our game is pretty slow-paced--more like an investigation game--and neither of the ghosts have done anything terribly menacing or threatening so far.)

Has anyone written a version of the AW "battle moves" for hand-to-hand combat?

Like for gladiatorial fights, or maybe for a fantasy hack of AW?

How did you do it?