Custom Moves for a Metro-Inspired Game

Hello again!
I'm planning on running an Apocalypse World game that is inspired by Metro 2033. I drew up some custom moves suitable for the game: Tunnel-Crawling and Surface-Prowling.
Opinion and critique is welcome. I won't say anything yet about the design logic, but I will say that the moves are contrasting methods.

Tunnel-Crawling
When you want to travel through the tunnels, choose a destination that is connected to your location by a tunnel. Roll cool.
On a 10+, you get there without trouble.
On a 7-9, choose one.
* It takes much longer than you hoped.
* You run into something you didn't want to meet.
* Treat this as having opened your brain and missed.

Surface-Prowling
When you ascend to the surface, start a countdown. You can use an oxygen canister to set back the countdown by one segment, but they're real heavy and take up space. Remove the countdown when you reach a place with atmospheric sealing.

Before 9:00: Your oxygen is over 50% and you're breathing okay.
9:00-10:00: Your oxygen is below 50% and your head is spinning.
10:00-11:00: Your oxygen is in the teens and your throat is closing up. Carry -1 forward.
11:00-12:00: Your oxygen is in single digits and you're coughing up blood. Take 1-harm.
Past 12:00: You've run out of oxygen.

Scratch out a segment when your PC travels for thirty minutes.
Traveling one map square equals:
* 30 minutes when you're walking.
* 15 minutes driving safely.
* 5 minutes driving insanely. You're acting under fire and the fire is 'you're gonna crash'. Every square you're traveling adds a -1 to your roll.

For Tunnel Crawling, I think it would just be easier to simply say, "traveling through the tunnels is acting under fire." You're still rolling +Cool, but now the world is the MC's oyster, rather than simply having 3 choices. Also, this feels a bit like a "saving throw" sort of move. What might be interesting is to offer some opportunity or bonus or whatever on a 10+.

For Surface Prowling, I'm kinda torn. I think I get what you're going for (sort of a slow burn on the PCs' health), but it's tracking another kind of resource (two, actually, because you have both your countdown clock and however many air canisters you're carrying), and that is always a pain in the game.

You might be better off coming up with a custom move for being out of oxygen and simply treating "you've run out of oxygen" as a consequence for some other missed roll when the characters are in that environment. I had an AW game that took place on a dilapidated space station that had a similar rule for being exposed to vacuum. It most often came into play as a consequence of a miss, or as a hard bargain or an ugly choice. "An 8 while acting under fire during EVA maneuvers? OK, you can grab Swan as he drifts past and keep him from spinning out into the void. But his momentum drags you along the exterior of the hab module where some jutting piece of sharp metal holes your suit from hip to arm-pit." Incremental effects for "50%" or "low oxygen" or whatever isn't necessary. Just determine how much/how quickly damage accrues from having no oxygen and go from there.

Custom moves are always best when they're simple and easily applied.

Finally, you have something at the end there where you're applying a -1 modifier per square traveled - as a general rule, modifiers for difficulty aren't really a thing in AW. The occasional -1 forward or -1 ongoing is fine, but modifiers as a form of tracked currency don't typically add anything to the game but complication.

For reference, this was what I posted to our forums at the beginning of the space-station AW game (which had a very sort of hard sci-fi feel to it in a lot of respects):

Because it seems like hard vaccuum and/or EVA might be an important part of this campaign:

Quote

When you go naked into the void (i.e. encounter hard vaccuum without the benefit of an intact vac-suit or breathing apparatus), you are taking 2-harm (ap) per tick you spend depressurized. Further, anything you attempt is acting under fire. This situation can be helped by:

• breathing gear, which reduces the damage to 1-harm (ap) per tick.
• a damaged vac-suit, which removes the act under fire condition.

So what's a "tick?" I figure it's about the time it takes to complete a particular basic action or move. 30 seconds or so maybe? On that order. What this basically means is that you can spend 30 seconds or so buck naked outside the station and only end up with the kind of damage that heals on its own. Longer exposures (a minute or more) start resulting in the kind of damage that won't fix itself (ruptured blood vessels, internal bleeding, nerve damage, frostbitten lung tissue, etc) or that's permanent (i.e. you're taking debilities).

My reasoning behind vac-suits helping you do stuff is largely because a vac-suit's primary function is to keep you alive long enough to get back to a pressurized environment. Pretty much every suit's most important feature is the protection it affords your hands, which is almost always going to be tight-fitting gloves that provide mechanical pressure on those tissues (to keep them from swelling and becoming useless). Without your hands, it's hard to do stuff (which is why you're acting under fire when you don't have a vac-suit). Even if your vac suit has a hole or a tear and is leaking oxygen, it still typically allows you the use of your hands.

Similarly, breathing apparatus reduces the rate at which you take damage, but eventually off-gassing in your blood stream and radiative heat transfer are going to do you in. Also, at the pressure differential that your lung tissues can take without rupturing, you're operating very close to the hypoxic limit.

Does this make sense?

This rule required no resource tracking at all. The "tick" time unit is both arbitrary and flexible, making it super easy to apply in play.

Or to navigate tunnels, the navigator has to open their brain.

One of the first custom moves for my first AW game read pretty much exactly like your tunnel crawling move. That... worked like the first time or so it was used, but after that it was just a problem. It kept getting in the way of a story, especially if the story required a dip into "the tunnels" but that dip was not really important to the momentum at the time. Long story short, I found I had drastically overcomplicated things.

Acting under fire is a much better choice in this regard, because you can tell them if they're in the tunnel long enough, or deep enough, to trigger/not trigger the move. And even then? It's not needed. Consider this:

For the random "event" that this move introduced, again that could actually cause you problems. If someone is using the tunnels to join back up with the group to finish up some cool thing, and then they get hijnked into some event they didn't want to do, they others might have to sit there and wait through it. Not always a good thing. Consider instead, that you announce that the tunnels are dangerous, and if they decide to use those tunnels... then you now are presented with an opportunity for fuckery if you think an event here would fit nicely with the tempo. You can always give them the opportunity to avoid the same as before too, by announcing the badness and letting them try to get through anyway.

Joe: "I'm heading through the tunnels into the building behind that place. I want to get a good vantage for when the rest of our group heads right up to the door. I'll signal them when I'm there."
Rest of the Group: "We're heading in as soon as we get Joe's signal"
You: "Alright roll to use the tunnels."
---------
At this point, everyone is waiting for him to do this thing. The excitement is about to occur. The tunnel foray provokes a move, which if he uses the tunnels often, he's had to roll all the time. If he hits a 7-9, he either has to deal with a horrible uncertain miss of the maelstrom... on a partial hit? he can make everyone wait a long time for him. "safe but boring?, costly but boring? boring." Or he can run into trouble, which could take a whole lot of game time to resolve and that also means everyone else is waiting for him, since trouble is assumed to not take as much time as the option that it takes a long time. Meaning you're also hamstringing yourself here, because the trouble cannot slow him down cause he didnt choose that option AND he got a partial hit.

This doesn't sound like a good set of choices.

Let's instead consider something like this, rather then a move:

"The tunnels are dangerous, some people talk of weird smells that fuck with what you see and how to think. Others just go in and get lost, sometimes they just lose their way in their thoughts...  starving to death just feet away from an exit. And that's when the tunnels are empty... now, the tunnels are not always empty my friend. No. Sometimes horrors unimaginable dwell there"

A nice bit of thematic text. You give yourself this the following quick bit of advice:
• Always barf forth some apolocalyptica to unnerve them or worse if they go into the tunnels

ex: Joe goes into the tunnels to get up and behind the location. "You grab the rungs leading down and slide in to the darkness, hitting the tunnels floor with a soft splash. You know it's only a short distance, but you have to look back up to remember what direction your facing. You get a shiver run through you. What do you do?" bla bla bla he makes he way deep into the tunnel. "When you're reaching the other end, you hear something and pause. A ripple brushes against your heels and something shifts in the darkness out of the corner of your eye. What do you do?"

You just always fuck with them in the tunnels, it doesn't even need to be real. Joe could shine his flash light all over the tunnels and it'll be empty, the floor rippling with his steps... or something else's. It's just to unnerves them. Then he climbs back up and the rest of the action happens as needed.

If someone is willing to spend a long time in those tunnels getting to a place... They're just asking to be fucked with. Decide, toss the flavor at them and if they seem to be interested, or if nothing else is going on, or if they're being sloppy / in a rush about things... make things different. Maybe they actually see/hear/smell something, maybe it chills them to the bone. Maybe they know if they dont move, they might be in a life or death fight against something they really dont want to fight. They can try to get away with an act under fire. If they hit a 7-9, then maybe it takes awhile, maybe they drop something, maybe they saw something that'll haunt them. Who knows? Creativity is bountiful.

Maybe if they get lost in the gasses in those tunnels, the ones that fuck directly with their brains, maybe they need to open their mind to get through the stuff. Maybe that's the only way. It'll be interesting, no matter what happens. Maybe they'll even try to bottle and use the stuff in an interesting way later, who knows. Play and find out.

Random events, tracking resources, these aren't typically AW's domain. Thematic terror? emotional or psychological shit? Yeah, that'll all good. Human needs, wants, fears, sins, darkness, and all the brighter stuff too. This game is about the people, not really the things. The things are stuff they either have or don't have, the moves are about the people and the effects those things (lack or surplus) have on them.

As a quick final note... Be wary of any moves that would effect a groups travel that might have to either ll be rolled separately or always handled by one person. What if a group goes in, most with a bad stat for the tunnels, but they go in with that one guys that knows them. Can he roll with their aid? What happens if they run into something and get seperated? The roll was a success, so they all get to the location, but now they've got some weirdness, do they have to roll again, for each seperated member now? They already had the group roll... so you gotta be careful not to nullify the success.