I'm not sure I understand. Run me through it. Someone meets this dude, and they're like "Looks like this guy is rich and also an asshole. The solution is obvious. I take out my shotgun and blow him away."

What happens next?

They call Oxy "Hillbilly Heroin" for a reason, apparently.

I love me some Justified, and not just for sexy, sexy Timothy Oliphant.

One of the things that I like about the show is the intersection of the personal with the professional. Everyone is someone's cousin or someone's dealer or someone's childhood rival. Dogs has that too, to some extent, but it'd be neat to have a mechanic for it, other than the GM's say-so.

Maybe a thing where you track some stuff about people's family names? When you generate NPCs, if they're a local you pick their family name from a list?

Custom moves:

Brainer: When you roll a natural 12, you get whatever you'd normally get, plus, ask one:
- What does this person fear most?
- Who here wants to fuck me?
- Why did that person do this thing?

Gunlugger: When you roll a natural 12, you get whatever you'd normally get, plus do 1-harm to any one person nearby.

Hocus: When you roll a natural 12, you get whatever you'd normally get, plus ask the MC one question. The MC will aswer as the MC. Like, the fictional character is asking a question of the real person.

I'm messing around with an investigative hack at the moment too!

At the moment I'm exploring my love of no-roll moves by making it entirely diceless. I dunno if it's going to stay that way though.

I wonder if it might be easier to go by relative size, rather than absolute?

Outnumbering 2-1, +1 harm/+1 armour

Outnumbering 3-1, +2 harm/+2 armour

That makes numbers VERY important when there are only a few people, which I kinda like.

Hi!

I'm not sure I agree with your description of Apocalypse World, Poison'd and In a Wicked Age as "Improv" games. They're not any more "Improv" than, for example, D&D3E.

All three games require you to actively pursue the interests of your character. That differentiates them from say, Fiasco, where you're sometimes going to be working against your character's best interests.

In a Wicked Age's tension mostly comes from conflicts between players' characters, and Poison'd is the same to some extent, while in Apocalypse World that's not always the case (although it can be). All three games aren't like, say, Dogs in the Vineyard, which (at least initially) has the players' characters on a fairly unified team, and works fine even if they never come into conflict.

All of these games have explicit mechanistic resolution, i.e. conflicts are resolved by an explict process that references "real life" things like dice or character sheets. That makes them different from some "freeform" games (whatever that means), like Fiasco again, or Archipelago.

None of these games are explicitly competitive, like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach.

In a Wicked Age requires the non-GM players to use more Author and Director stance, from what I understand, than Poison'd or Apocalypse World. In other words, you're more often called upon to make decisions and invent stuff about things other than your own character.

Is this helping?

Good thinking Joe! That's smart.

I would use the Hocus playbook.