Erik,

I'm down with all that! Vincent's quote from the book (in your last paragraph) is good, too, although it's not 100% fool-proof: for example, if I want you to *give me* something you have, that's probably go aggro, too, even though you might say in that case that I "care what my enemy has".

I'm trying to remember (but can't find) a nice breakdown someone else posted somewhere. It's for what happens when you act violently against someone, like hitting or shooting them. I don't remember it exactly, but here's my interpretation:

* If you catch them completely by surprise (from behind, say), you just do it. The response is the MC move to inflict harm, except you're inflicting your harm on the target. (Here's a good post about it: http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=1946.msg11500#msg11500.)

* If you've got the momentum, you're springing this on your target from a position of advantage or surprise, but they see you coming early enough they'd have a chance to get the fuck out of the way, if they're fast enough, then it's go aggro.

* If they're ready for you, like guns/knives/fists out and they're just as ready to use violence as you are (like a standoff or straight-up battle), then it's seize by force. But, like, you gotta be pretty crazy or desperate to do that, right? Because you're gonna get hurt, maybe killed.

Another good example: they're ready for you, not surprised at all, but not willing or able to use violence against you in return? Sounds like go aggro.

Hopefully Vincent will correct me if I'm wrong anywhere in there, of course.

My friend John ("jenskot") described his favourite way to do AW combat as being like "a shooter videogame": you read the situation to get your bearings, act under fire to get into a position to have the drop on someone, then go aggro to see if you can pull it off, and repeat until you're done!

So if I want to take out a gang holding my cousin hostage, I don’t want to just run out there guns blazing using Seize by Force. Even if I roll amazing, I’m likely going to be hurt bad (I can minimize how hurt but likely still hurt, I am after all shooting at an entire gang with no cover). Instead I want to Go Aggro if I can to take out a gang member or two to start to even the odds (making the Gang smaller which means something mechanically). I can’t just Go Aggro by rolling and if I want to position myself to be able to Go Aggro, I may need to Act Under Fire to get there. But if I describe myself fictionally in a position to roll Read A Situation, I can give myself bonuses to my Act Under Fire roll which can set me up for Going Aggro like finding out which target is most vulnerable to me and even scoping out an exit if I fail and need to run. The game feels like I’m playing Metal Gear Solid, sneaking around and kicking ass!

Thanks, Erik!

I really enjoyed that moment, too: it was a fun way to apply the rules to create an unusual and bizarre situation. Given the way the move works, it still leaves room for many different outcomes in the future: for instance, if I roll failures in the next few attempts to use the move, from the "audience perspective", we could say that it's not something the Quarantine Messiah is capable of doing at all, but was just some kind of weird coincidence. Lots of different ways to interpret what happened there!

Some other stuff, vaguely organized:

1. The list of questions is excellent! If I were writing it, I would love to add something to your list: what was the deal with the protest/resistance movement during the Apocalypse itself (as hinted at during one of our "flashbacks" to the Quarantine's memory)?

I'm also really curious to see how Bloodhound perceives what happened to him. Did he see "the other side" while he was dead? How does he see the Quarantine's intervention into his... soul?

Is he talking to Newton's people (or whoever is taking care of him)? How are the people of Fort Scott reacting? (Heck, maybe Newton and her people want to keep it quiet for some reason, and then they wouldn't be reacting at all, but if it gets out *and* it was being kept quiet, it'll have a very different impact later...)

2. The "wonky" use of moves, in my opinion, could become an issue in the future. I'm just pointing it out: if you like the way you're running the game, then please continue doing so. But, in my opinion, we're applying some of the basic moves a little too freely.

For example, remember the scene where Widow was talking to Newton (session 2), and wanted to touch her? You had her roll to "seize [the moment] by force". I think that's interpreting it way too loosely: the design of the move is such that it should only be used in situations where actual violence is being perpetrated by both sides. Otherwise, it just doesn't make sense: we have to narrate in harm retroactively instead of it coming from the fiction we're creating.

Likewise for some use of the "reading" moves (for instance, when the Savvyhead was trying to examine the equipment in the space station or whatever the Quarantine's space vehicle is). "Reading a person" is designed to take place in conversations; "reading a charged situation" means feeling out a situation where there is a potential threat of violence of something similar between people.

There are a lot of things happening in Apocalypse World that are, simply, not moves. I think we have gamer instincts that say, "It feels like we should be rolling something right now..." But the AW rules are often silent in those situations: I think stretching them to try take the place of, say, perception rolls could lead us astray a bit. (I'm thinking of an instance where we had a character roll to read a charged situation because they were lost in the storm, for example.)

None of these were game-breakers, but I feel they're kinda... wonky! We'll get further if we talk about this in person, though, so feel free to hit me up for that next time.

(Have you read John Harper's post about how "seize by force" is like a peripheral move? I agree with that.)

3. Erik has been assembling this amazing "atlas" or scrapbook of maps, notes, and various photos and drawings of our Apocalypse World, and it's AMAZING. We've got it open at the table, it's all scrawled in pen, and it feels like we have a book right there at the table that's a window into this fictional world, like a traveller's diary or something like that.

That's really cool! I was tempted to pick it up and just read through the whole thing, except I didn't want to be rude.

Similarly, Erik's made this huge map out of the "first session" worksheet (with the scarcities in a circle and all that stuff), and instead of doing the typical "GM" thing and hiding it behind a screen we just have it out on the table. There's a cool effect on play, where we can look at the notes and not only get an insight into the MC's prep, but also reminders of what this world is like, since the characters know more about it than we do: a sort of snapshot. Nice!

Have you seen The Grotesque?

It's a fan-made playbook about someone who is... mutated.

That's an interesting point, Nathan, about the focus on acting under fire and opening your brain.

And I was probably thinking about ice cold when I wrote merciless!

I hope Vincent will chime in with his thoughts, too.

What are the effects on the game overall from a) having stat substitution moves, b) not having stat substitution moves?

We finished the game: it took another full hour.

Total play time: two hours. I think it was because the MC was very careful and thoughtful and, after thinking carefully, would narrate a lot of interesting and cool detail. Also, my lucky draws, perhaps.

I didn't feel like we explored the game all that much, really. I ran around, was threatened by several ghosts, and generally they all left me alone (due to lucky card draws, I guess).

When we got to four cards, we flipped and had three suits. On the fifth card, I got lucky and the fourth suit showed up.

I did finally draw a single bust towards the end of the game.

We had very good time: the game was surprisingly scary, atmospheric, and effective. I'll definitely be playing again! But, dang, two hours.

But I think the MC found it difficult to narrate around the various constraints. There'd be things like, "What do you do?" "I run through the door!" "Oh, wait, now I'm supposed to narrate a ghost attack. Can you not through the door just yet?" "Sure." Stuff like that. That may have had a lot to do with the slow pace of the game.


Some more specific notes:

#5 confused the MC player. "It says 'otherwise', but the checkmark means 'do this every time'. So do I do this or not?"

#44 "you've survived the ghost's attack, and it leaves you for dead." When we were narrating the ghost's attack, however, we didn't narrate a lethal attack, AND we didn't narrate the player character appearing to be dead, so this was a major hiccup: "So you dodge out of the way... [flip page] and the ghost leaves you for dead." "Huh?"

Hi, Vincent!

I'm surprised no one's asked this before:

Why the stat substitution moves?

What is your vision for them, how do you see them impacting the game?

They always jump out at me as something I'm... not too sure how to handle.

For example:

* Sometimes you have a stat substitution move that's about something a bit more specific than the basic move, like unnatural lust transfixion. That makes sense: the character's actually doing something very, very different, or in a different way. I can see how that changes the character--and the fiction--in interesting ways, as well as giving the character more utility in a certain way.

* Sometimes you have a stat substitution move that suggests it means something fictionally, but without teeth. For example, merciless... well, the name suggests that if you take this move, you're making a specific statement about your character's, uh, character. If I take that move, am I saying that my character IS merciless? Would I be playing "wrong" if I took the move and then acted all merciful to people?

* On the other hand, some of those... they seem really just purely mechanical, with little or no fictional referent. For example, I'm a gunlugger and I take battle-hardened. Well, I'm a gunlugger: of course I've been in a battle before. And I don't get anything fictionally out of "roll +hard to act under fire". Acting under fire is also very, very broad, so I can't say that it applies in any specific way.

So what do these moves do to the game that you like? What was your designer's goal for putting them in there?

Looking forward to hearing more about these!

Ah, right! I misread that:

An operator starts with 2-juggling, 3 gigs, and one obligation gig.

And you get more juggling if you get more gigs, according to the moonlighting move.

So, unless you somehow lose a gig, you always have 2 more gigs than you have juggling.

That right now?

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.)