House rule on special moves - add your suggestions

So everybody probably know there's been some controversy in reviews regarding the special moves.
I think it's ok (not every game is meant for every player), but in need of a little tweak, so here's my proposal in doing it and why, with possible technical caveats.

Anything that counts as intimacy when at potential personal risk is a special move. It could be psychological, physical, emotional, mental, vocal. That includes sex, but also telling your worst secret to someone you think you may trust, risking to lose face in front of someone you care about in order to really reach them, see someone in their worst moment and it's ok, being trapped in a cramped place together with someone, deciding to push one's own boundaries in front of another person (first dumb example that came to mind: having to take a dump in the same room), and so on. You can probably think of more situations which would pass.

And there's the caveat. More possibilities potentially means higher frequency of marking experience. It would need more playtesting than i'd have time for to get the formula exactly right. Marking 2Hx where you would mark 3Hx might compensate, but does also even out the varied incentives to do special moves (and i think it's great that different playbooks have different incentives), but it could work. Having the upper limit of Hx before marking experience moving up a notch is a more invasive edit?

Or it might just work fine without any compensation. It may be that the players have a wider repertoir of actions that would pass as a special move, but it's very uncertain if it really means a hightened rate. It could just aswell mean a simple variation in how they achieve it, in which case it's just good.

This house rule is intended to do just that: differentiate/bring some variation to the special move. It also serves the purpose of bringing down sex seen as something super special -- it's a cultural attitude which varies on a lot, anthropologically aswell as discoursively, and i'm willing to disagree on it, not because sex is sex, but because it feels repetive and out of unintuitive to me that that alone would be a shortcut to (mechanical) relationship building between the characters.

So, what do you all think? I'm opting for this solution on my first try and i think my friends will agree on the proposal, and they may have additions or suggestions, but i just wanted to share my thoughts and maybe get a suggestion or comment or two. Is the formula good enough? Otherwise, how would you define it?

I also think it may be great for people who may have agreed to simply editing out special moves (and thus missed a game mechanic that might not be at the core, but still is important enough) to concider this alternative, because if you're not comfortable with sexual themes in ttrpgs, there's other conditions to check that feel special enough that may suit your playstyle better.

EDIT: Then there's the driver, obsessed with not being owned by anyone or something. I think it still works out ok, even though the idea comes from another cultural attitude (whether sex is linked to involvement and/or owning or not). But that could work just as well as any form of intimacy/fear of intimacy/fear of the concequence of intimacy. "We're not there yet, just so you know."

Off the top of my head, it sounds like kind of a disaster, but it also sounds like the goal is to salve some specific cultural disconnect for your playgroup, so maybe it will work fine.

There is already a fair bit of interpretive leeway in terms of what counts as 'sex' -- dramatically increasing that leeway to 'intimacy when at potential personal risk' seems like a lot of risk for not a ton of reward, but the amount of risk (of player disagreement, primarily) and the amount of reward (encouraging other intimate behaviours) are super dependent on your playgroup.

As for the reasons for the change, I feel like the special moves are extremely in-genre, and based on some specific ideas about how sex operates in apocalyptic fiction, rather than just a case of using sex as an arbitrary shortcut for mechanical interaction. If this aspect of the genre is not appealing or seems weird/unintuitive from your cultural standpoint, that seems fine, but I am not sure that maintaining the moves but massively broadening their scope is necessarily a good solution.

In short, you run the risk of doing the same thing to all human intimacy that you are worried the rules are doing to sex. The special moves are special -- they don't come up that often, and it is usually very obvious when they have been triggered -- and so they don't tend to intrude into other moments of character interaction. Obviously, this sort of intrusion is already present in the form of all the moves -- players are always keeping one eye out for something in-fiction that might be a trigger for a move. But the more vague the trigger, the more intrusive this tracking becomes. When I plead with my lover Rolfball to take care of my younger sister while I am out scavenging in the wastes, I do not have to consider whether or not that counts as sex, but I certainly need to think about whether it counts as intimacy and personal risk.

Pretty much what i needed to hear, Daniel!

I still think i need to make some alteration (cultural disconnect is real. We've viewed a bunch of apoc/post apoc movies as a preparation and the group becomes distanced as soon as the trope to use sexual themes  to narrate a catystic event occurs. Battlebabe, if someone will choose to play that part, will remedy/negotiate some of this, i think), but the definition i proposed needs to be tightened up.

I don't want it to be too broad and i don't want it to be too unclear. "Intimacy" and "potential personal risk" might mean a certain thing in the consensus we have and will build up, but i didn't realize in my first sketch just how much it connotes. Like, that personal risk may mean anything you care or worry about, past, present and future,  rather than your atomized singular direct momentary best interest regardless of your next of kin etc. And that intimacy might mean.. well, almost anything, without further definitions.

Will work on seeing if i can make a tighter definition.

On sex, i think my group has a pretty strong concensus: Anything involving lust and concent. Though, while one-sided/rape wouldn't count, mechanically it makes a lot of sense to include because it will most certainly result in some kind of interpersonal history, just like physical harm does.

right now while writing i'm thinking of (possibly) voluntary intimate boundary crossing being a part of the formula, but what would that include/exclude? Also, what would define a boundary? One thing that would deal with is repetive 'special' moves with the same person. You need to do something new. Just having sex with someone for the fiftyeleventh time in the same way doesn't add much history to it, right? It's just a reiteration of the established, a ritual, and an upholding of status quo.

I clearly need to allow some time thinking about this. Meanwhile, any comment is extremely helpful and appreciated.

I mean, there are much simpler ways to handle concerns about repetition; you could just say 'it only counts if it's a new thing', or as some groups do 'it only counts if it comes up in-scene, not as some ongoing background event.' Neither of these require changing the trigger from 'sex' to something more amorphous.

Also I am pretty sure it has explicitly been stated that rape does not trigger special moves.

I bring these up mostly to suggest that the distance between the current rules and what you want may not really be very far. Especially if you consider the current rules as your group would likely make use of them. In my experience, repetition/mechanical abuse/etc. just doesn't really come up, or if it does the group quickly reaches consensus on whether or not a particular deployment of the moves seems appropriate. The same goes for concerns about treating sex as too special, or the artificiality of the mechanical results of the moves.

I think if a group wants to see Special Moves as having more to do with intimacy, that's going to come out when they actually talk about what sex between characters looks like. They're going to focus on the intimacy, or the interactions around it, etc. I understand the appeal of having some of these neat mechanical bits available to use even in non-sexual situations, though. Personally I think it's more interesting to make these sort of changes on a Playbook-level; for example in Monsterhearts, most playbooks have sex moves triggered by sex, but some of them are triggered by more general intimacy, or by specific actions that are playbook-appropriate. This is of course a lot more work than just changing the global trigger for special moves.

I've had some more conservative players in the past that were not entire comfortable with he inclusion of the sex triggers at all. So we did test a few possibilities out, both in alternative triggers and replacing the move entirely. Having done this, I can tell you that our attempt to use intimacy was defined as an interaction where the "heart of one character is revealed/opened and accepted by another". It was a functional trigger, albeit it caused unwelcome discussions and gaminess around the interactions the mattered to the story most. Who gets the authority to say, I opened my heart, and who determines if it was actually accepted?

The following issue was actually far more important: The moves themselves are designed to trigger off some personal quality the playbooks represent, and therefore stopped making sense with this new interpretation of the triggers. ex: The Battlebabe went from "someone that can fuck without strings"  to "someone that doesn't give a shit about what other people really feel". That is a huge distinction, and it makes major changes to the playbooks. The Driver goes from someone "afraid to get tied down" to someone "afraid to interact deeply at all". I mean in certain games maybe these moves can be twisted for some sweet psychological mahem/exploration, but it wasn't a good thing for the players in this case. Secondly, Intimacy are part of other move's triggers and these overlap with the sex moves majorly in both the Skinner and the Brainer. Widening the net, in this case, actually ruined those moves entirely. They either always had access to them, needed restricted access that didn't really improve the playbook's theme, or got muddled up with the standard move equivalent. were forced to replace them, which needed more balancing and it was decided in the end that it lost something important. In the end, we actually tried replacing all the moves and their triggers, but they did seriously alter the game, and we didn't all like the results.

My honest opinion on this is: if the special move is a problem, remove the special move entirely from the game.

If you find that the playbooks need something else, add it naturally. Pick something your group is mature enough to handle, something that is comfortable being part of every character's lives, and then something that can reflect the individual spirit of a playbook. Write that trigger, then ask yourself, what would this arch type do/get/need/feel in response? I replaced the special move for a ...more... children friendly game using the AW base, we swapped killing to beating up, weapons with various sticks/stones/words, healing with love/niceness/gentliness and had the special move doubled, one when two characters share with one another, and one that triggered more broadly when everyone ate together. "having a meal" was an important distinction here, and it prompted character's to talk, share, and be rewarded for doing so. The sharing with one another needed some work but it felt more akin to the personal choice to sacrifice for someone else, that was easy enough to script to our new playbooks.

Good points, both. I've reconcidered. It might also be that it will be handled allright when they are in control of developing the scenario, as opposed to smirking at movie conventions (something i'm guilty of myself).

If i alter something, it will be locally, to some if any of the playsheets. If specials doesn't work with the group, i'll remove them. Simple as that.

However, if one or more players feel uncomfortable with how the specials work for the character they choose (or for some other reason wants something else), i could very well let them pick to be hell bent for x, where x is some scenario/act that is specific and clear, yet requires at least two people to resolve, instead. For example, "if you are unwell and at another players' grace/in another players' care", special is triggered.

This could happen passively, but the player can also take action (refuse to eat/drug her/himself up to a critical point/get poisoned/put her/himself in a risky situation/and so on) to desperately seek the special attention s/he craves, creating drama and tragedy along the way. How about an angel that secretly or openly wants to switch roles, stirring stuff up? Personally, i like that.

Maybe writing an optional for each character, then?

It would upheave the symmetry, but symmetry isn't really needed for specials to trigger anyway, i could see a mix of symmetry and asymetry working. Complete asymmetry would mean less alinged needs, of course, for better or worse. Could be interesting just as well as boring.

 It could also be of help to ask 1st sesh questions about that specific character and maybe its relations to the others.