I've never watched AP video (besides "I Hit It With My Axe" which is too edited to be much use), but I love AP audio. It's easily the best way to get a handle on an unfamiliar rule system or style of play. I keep meaning to listen to yours, Glendower, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

I got mine as well! It'll be really nice to have a hard-copy at the game table.

The cover made me laugh.

I would listen! I love actual play podcasts.

Disclaimer: Orion and I know each other in real life, and he's going to be playing in my upcoming AW game.

Just popping in to point out that "add a new move when the fiction demands it" is already in the rules.

Page 177: "when the character’s fictional circumstances or capabilities change naturally, within the character’s fictional world, the player can and should change her character sheet to match."

That's different from "when it's dramatically appropriate", of course, but that's because AW is concerned with the fiction, not the story arc.

Well, there are two things that make random tables awesome: a finite number of concrete possibilities, and more than two possible results. It's true that those things fit together differently in an AW move than they would in a random table, but they're still present.

Obviously there are a ton of differences, but I think they're tapping into some of the same magic.

However, what I feel like you're getting at is like a closed-design setting. All the Fronts and Custom Move are all already done for me and match up with the setting details like a GURPS supplement. I could hack it if I wanted to but in theory there shouldn't a reason too.

Yeah, I think that's the idea. It's important to keep a fruitful void there, you don't need a move for everything. And I would also almost certainly still encourage MCs to invent new moves and the like if needed. But it shouldn't be necessary for the MC to creatively extend the world and the mechanics, the way a good AW MC has to.

Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not advocating this as a method for every hack ever. I just think it might fill a niche for certain gamers that isn't very well filled yet.

Your two concerns are really, really important. Those are the sorts of things that prompted me making the thread in the first place.

First, about the basis of the moves. I think this is completely crucial. There wouldn't be any moves that went "When you drive a car" or "When you reload a gun". However, I think you can make fiction-modeling moves that nonetheless still fit Vx's criteria. From the book itself, this move is a great example of what I mean:

If Grome gets his hands on you, he ties you to a table and
you know he’s really fucking good at that. If you try to escape,
roll+hard. On a hit, you can escape, but at a cost. On a 10+,
choose 1; on a 7–9, choose 2:

• it takes you over an hour and leaves you exhausted. Take
s-harm (ap).
• you suffer for it; your arms and legs are torn bloody before
you’re done. Take 1-harm (ap).
• ultimately you need to bribe Ipe, Grome’s sister, to help you. It
costs you 1-barter.

It's all about a conflict of interests between named characters, but it's still totally flavorful and very specific. I'm imagining a game built on a whole slew of moves that look like that.

The two mook moves I made up on the spot in my first post are interesting corner cases. They're sorta about a conflict of interest between the mook and the PCs, but not really. More importantly they're about the conflict between the PCs and the mook's boss. Whether that's good enough or not is an interesting question, and one I'm not sure I have an answer to.

The second concern, about the designer not having knowledge of the group, is also important. This means that there needs to be enough variety for there to be things to latch onto for different groups, and room for the MC to put their own spin on things. I think I was speaking a little carelessly when I talked about the book creating fronts. It should give you all of the material you need to create a front (custom moves, factions and tensions, maybe some characters), but deciding what parts of that will come together to create the fronts the PCs face should probably still be up to the MC.

I don't think this is particularly radical. I mean, Dogs in the Vineyard gives you a really specific set of situations and responsibilities, and still manages to be appealing to a wide variety of people.

I want to focus on this for a second:

What could be missing is my group and our wants. I take on the 'burden' of design during prep by making Fronts. I am uniquely qualified for this, more so that any absent designer.

I agree that this is awesome. Having what is essentially a custom-built game made for your group is really cool, and a big part of why AW is awesome and I want to play it a lot. But having that work at full capacity requires you to have a motivated and competent designer in your group (and probably for that person to happen to be the MC), which is just straight-up untrue for some groups.

I have some friends who are good GMs, in the sense that they create memorable NPCs and have good instincts for driving the story to interesting places. That doesn't mean they would have any interest in studying the move structure and Vx's principles so that they could make up great custom moves on the fly. I imagine they would much rather just look up those moves in a book, so they can get on with the meat of the story. That's a big part of the motivation, here.

I mean, yeah. That's how Apocalypse World is set up, and it's brilliant. I plan on playing it a lot and enjoying it. That's also how the hacks we've seen so far are set up, and they seem excellent too, I'll probably play some of them. That's not in question.

On the other hand, there are some people who just honestly prefer a little (or a lot) more to be pre-defined, for any number of reasons, some of which I mentioned in my first post. I know that some of my friends definitely feel that way, and in certain moods I do as well. Unless you're claiming that this could never be as enjoyable/satisfying/whatever as the AW method, then the only question is whether AW (or at least the basic structure of the moves) is a good tool to create a game for those people to play.