What do you do with doubled-up wants?

So I've got a hardholder, and I chose the manufactory and bustling marketplace as gigs (among other things). Both of those come with +idle.

So what does that mean? Are tags just flags and don't stack when they're already present? Or does this mean if I roll 7-9 on my Wealth at the beginning and pick "idle" for the session's want, that I get super-idle (idle x2)? Or are the two idle tags discrete, so that I pick one of "hungry, idle, idle, or famine" and the second idle is redundant?

My MC just shrugged and said that it's super-idleness, which seemed sensible at the time. But of course I didn't want to pick super-idle, which gave me pause after the game when I thought about it. Now that I go looking for it in the text, I'm thinking that tags work like on/off switches and the first interpretation up there makes most sense to me.

How have you played this in your games?

One of my games had a doubled up disease, so in cases of disease countdowns, a failed roll would advance the countdown twice as fast, 2 segments rather than one.

I remember Vincent phrased it, back in the dev blog, as adding "seriously fucking" in front of anything that gets double-tagged. So, seriously fucking idle, seriously fucking violent, seriously fucking diseased, serious fucking reprisals, etc. I've found it a good guideline.

I think, on a 7-9, you just get one want, so personally I wouldn't use the escalated level. It's like, maybe they're idle because the marketplace isn't seeing much traffic because of the bad weather lately, maybe they're idle because the manufactory is broke again, but it's not both, yeah?

[…everything…]

Yeah. This! This sounds like the AW Way.

Sweet. I'll point my MC at this if he hasn't already been by.

I am the MC in question!

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking.  You're not likely to take "super fucking idle" unless you're in a really tight spot.

My hardholder ran into *the exact same question* in the Apocalyptic Wave game, and then last night I was running a game where a hocus got "growth" and "desertion" at the same time.

We discussed "super idle" or "seriously fucking idle" as well, and that's a great way to go, but I think it gives you more fictional ammunition to remember that it's two distinct sources of idleness. So, if you come up in all kinds of crazy want and you have both idles activated, that indicates that not only is the marketplace doing poorly, but so is the manufactory. That gives you two distinct threat/trouble areas to develop in different ways, which to me is cooler than simply "everyone is *really* laying around doing nothing" (though that can be part of the more complex picture too, of course :) )

I took that approach with the hocus and had the 'desertion' be a separate event from the growth (a follower left and dragged his wife away because she was sleeping with the hocus, and meanwhile one of the hardholder's gang members joined the cult). It would have been easy to think of them as 'canceling out' but by making them discrete events I got not one but *two* avenues of fuckery to go with, so good times for the MC.

Remember that idle means that they act on their threat impulse, not that they lie around doing nothing!

Yeah. Idle hands…

Oh yeah! D'oh!