Questions from a rookie

Hi!

This is my first post in this forum and it's a bunch of questions... No cool and interesting thoughts/ideas, sorry. I'll try to contribute with such things in the future though, promise!

I have no prior experience with AW since I haven't played/MC:ed the game before (just read the book). My questions will therefore be pretty basic; some will probably be pure misunderstandings from my part and others will be more of a "how do you do" than "how's it meant to be done?". Enough of my mumblings, here goes:

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1. Who creates the world?
I love how the "cog wheels" of AW work. Everything from the PC's moves to the MC's principles inspire and helps everyone too create a unique world together, but there's one thing that's been bugging me; who should create the basic idea of the world? I'm speaking about ideas like "the world is a big desert and the sun is boiling" or "earth is a piece of ice, it's cold as fuck and we live in igloos".  The book mentions that the MC should allow himself to daydream about apocalyptic imagery, but the basic idea should be something that the group invents together, right? How do you and your group do this?

2. Apocalyptic Roadtrip?
Well, I've read both the book and a healthy dose of Actual Play-threads by now, and it seems like the game depends on the PCs living in a rather small area (hardhold, city, camp etc.) to flow like it's meant to. The book gives an example of a travelling PC group, but I don't see how that would work since much is based around reoccurring NPCs and such. Hey, let's presume that the PC group consists of a driver, a chopper and a savvyhead who wants to do a roadtrip post-apoc style... what would you tell them?

3. Hold?
Hold. It's mentioned over and over again but I never seem to get the hang of it. You can get hold through moves and spend them to learn shit but you lose them if you lose the opportunity, am I right? Every playbook got this little Hold section too, what should the players write there?

4. 1st session worksheet
This is a really cool part of the game, but it feels like I'm not quite getting it all. The worksheet is used to show in which way the NPCs can be a threat to the players. Does that mean that every NPC the PCs meet is a threat and should be noted as such on the threat map? If not, who and what is it that should get a spot on the map?

5. Fronts
Okay, fronts are hard. I'm not sure why, maybe because I'm so used to the old "play a written adventure"-style of roleplaying. First of all, one front consists of several threats, linked by a single threatening situation. That's what it says in the book, but what I don't understand is how all these threats get connected in the first place? It seems like the 1st session threat map is meant to grow into the first front, but how do you link all these NPCs and places together? Should you only have one front in play every time (and then create a new when all of its stakes has been answered)?

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Well, those are the questions that's been stuck in my head the last few days (I'm sure that more will pop up in due time). I know that it's probably a bit diffuse, and I'll be happy to clarify what I meant if there's something you don't understand.

Thanks!
/Widundret

1) This is flexible, but I think the MC has a huge amount of power on this one.  The playbooks tell the players some things they get to simply establish.  The rest is the MC's.  But(!), the MC will ask the players provocative questions and the players will answer.  World will get built like that so the MC will be inviting player contribution along lines that are both OK and interesting to the MC.

In the most recent game that I started, I managed the whole basic apocalypse process poorly.  The players kind of pushed back and I didn't just lay down the law because it didn't seem appropriately collaborative.  But really, it was a mistake.  Next game I start, I'll just say something like "who want's to play Apocalypse World where frost demons crashed the moon into the earth and there are volcanoes everywhere and ... " and see where it goes.  If the players who are into the initial setting come up with some great tweaks, super.

2) The first game I played in, we were a convoy travelling North America, dodging 200-mile wide swarms of locusts.  We carried cargo and escorted people.  We had a chopper, a driver of an off-road bus, a savvyhead with a workspace in the back of his semi,  and a gunlugger.  The NPCs were mostly people in the convoy who were either paying for protection or providing services, but also people in the cities and towns where we would stop.  It worked just fine.

3) Moves can give a player hold and they can use them to do stuff -- it's a mechanic, not specific application.  You can note as much or as little as you need to in your hold box.  Some hold might last session to session.  You won't normally need to track hold from e.g. reading a person by writing things down.

4) Every NPC is a threat in the early game.  Even the ones they create -- gang members, etc.  As I'm writing NPCs on my worksheet, I just throw them down without taking too much time to figure out where they belong radially.  Sometimes it's obvious, but usually it isn't.  You can move them around later as you want to.  Everyone you name should go there and remember things like threatening terrain features.

5) I'm no expert on this.  I think threats are linked just by the fundamental scarcity they share.  They don't have to be actually connected.  Yeah?  The first-session worksheet will get morphed into more than a single front (and the home front).  After the first session, a few interesting characters and situations will stand out to you.  Consider first putting those on fronts if there is at least one other threat representing the same fundamental scarcity.  Then fill in the blanks.

1) I pretty much let the players run with the creation of the world. I'll add details as they are describing it, but they lead, I follow.

For example, my Gunlugger gained a gang. I asked her where the gang came from and she told me that they had abandoned a town to join her (they were her family). When I asked why they abandoned a perfectly good town, she told me that that area on the map was getting swallowed by a Dustbowl.

So now my Hardholder has to worry about the incroaching Dustbowl!

2) The chopper's gang is a great series of NPCs to create triangles with!

Also, when they arrive at each town, ask if they know anyone there, especially if those people will be helpful to them. Players are always angling to make things "easier" on themselves and will create an array of helpful NPCs. But NPCs who are helpful to one player aren't necessarily helpful to another!

3) My group has a hard time with holds. They tend to spend them all in one shot because they are afraid that they'll forget later on.

4) Every NPC is a threat, but if I don't quite know what sort of threat, I'd let it simmer for a while and ask questions about the NPC(s).

5) I have trouble with Fronts myself. I tend to lump them together conceptually first by Fundamental Scarcity and then by location. Sometimes Threats kind of hang out on the side until I find out that they should belong in an already established Front.

About Fronts, what I understand is that they are:

(1) handy categories of bad stuff to throw at the players. You fill the Front with Threats that kind of relate to it.

(2) not correlated with the first session sheet. That sheet is just to get your threats (NPCs & landscapes) down on paper and to start pumping your creative juices for later, when you take those NPCs & landscapes and call them something else: Threats, which are roughly subdivided into Fronts.

(3) intended solely to give you interesting stuff to say and bad stuff to throw the way of the PCs.

You seen Sons of Anarchy? That show is *easy* to make Fronts out of. You might want to do that for practice with SoA or some other AW-conversant media that you're familiar with.

Fronts are there so you don't freeze up. You just look down at your sheet, and you say "Oh, okay, I guess I'll have Uncle go and rape Balls because his impulse is to victimize anyone who stands out." Then you say "So, Bish, Balls comes limping into your infirmary covered with blood and scratches."

Everyone else has covered 1-4, but I wanted to say something about the 1st Session worksheet and Fronts.

I had trouble with the 1st Session worksheet too, because it doesn't really fit how I was thinking about things and doesn't really give me the tools I felt like I needed when running the first session, aside from the list of names.  Mostly, I filled it out after the 1st Session was over, to help me think about Fronts.  Things were just too fast and exciting for me to stop and write everything down and think about where it fit amidst the fundamental scarcities, etc.  Next time I start a campaign, I'm going to make a new 1st Session sheet that gives me more useful tools and info at my fingertips.  So use it when it's helpful, but don't feel like you're breaking the game if you don't really use it all that much.  Just follow the players around, make your MC moves when necessary, and barf forth apocalyptica.  Those are the key things to do, first session.

I was also talking to a friend recently and it turns out we both make Fronts backwards from what Vincent suggests in the game.  Whereas Vincent says to make your Fronts first and then use them to generate a bunch of subsidiary threats, we both find it makes more sense to make a whole bunch of threats, based on the NPCs and what seems to be out there in the game, and then group them into Fronts based on theme or origin or geographic location or what have you.  So it can really work both ways and, honestly, I find the latter way more natural but maybe you'll like Vincent's way better. 

In my current game, the Fronts are very geographical right now.  The threats on the PCs home space station are all a Front, even though the threats are pretty different.  The stretch of scavenger space where they go for supplies is a Front containing a number of threats.  There's Fronts back on earth and on the moon if they ever go there.  However, as the game progresses, I expect that this is all going to mix up pretty fast.  Some of the junklords might come live on or take over the station.  The PCs will bring threats from the station with them when they head to earth or the moon.  The PCs will form gangs that are made up of threats from locations outside the station.  The PCs may eventually leave the station to go live somewhere else, full of its own threats. 

So, my recommendation is, at the beginning, just group threats into Fronts the way that is the easiest for you to keep track of.  That may not necessarily be geographical.  If you're game is set in a zombie plague, maybe all the zombies are part of the same Front and so is the infection that causes people to turn into zombies.  But just go with what makes sense, because it's mostly just a shorthand and organizational thing to make the MC's life easier.  And the players are sure to mix it up and move things around later in the game anyway, so you don't need to worry about making it too complex in the beginning.

Hope that helps.

Whereas Vincent says to make your Fronts first and then use them to generate a bunch of subsidiary threats...

Wow, that's really interesting.  I do it more or less like you describe it and I didn't think I was doing anything backwards so I went back reading rules.  I'm still not sure it's backwards.  In the Creating Fronts list in the Fronts chapter, he writes:

To create a front, grab a fronts sheet and:
• Choose a fundamental scarcity.
• Create 3 or 4 threats.
...

which sort of sounds like you're right -- you're just supposed to just create a front by picking a scarcity and then create related threats.  But at the end of the previous chapter, talking about what to do before the second session, he writes:

Take these solid threats and build them up into fronts.

which describes how I do it.

I suspect that the brevity of the how-to bullet-list gives the impression that we're doing it backwards, but that we're doing it the way everyone does.  Unless you already know that I'm wrong from previous threads or whatever.  I'm pretty interested to hear from Vincent on this.

What's to hear from me?

To make a batch of fronts, you take all the NPCs and stuff you already know about, group them together as appropriate, write them up as threats, and flesh them out with new threats as needed. If you want to make a front up unheralded, like if you're prepping to bring in something brand new, you just imagine some NPCs and stuff that haven't appeared in play yet instead, then same thing: write them up as threats and flesh them out with more threats as needed.

Nobody's doing anything backwards. It wouldn't matter if you were!

Also remember that fronts are just there to give you interesting things to say as the MC. Don't sweat it too much; if they seem difficult now just do what you can and start playing. Everything will fall into place after the first few times you get stumped only to have something obviously awesome jump out from your front sheets.

That's my experience, at least.

Thanks everyone for some really useful answers! I think this made me get it, finally :-)

I'll need to have a 1st session soon and dive right into Front creation after that. It sounds like it's something that gets easier with practice. One question though (there's always something!):

It's a question about the Home Front and whether all established NPCs should be included in a Front, or if you can leave some of 'em just as they are. Let's take, umm... Shopaholic the Shopkeeper as an example! Assume that the PC:s needed to buy some crap during the 1st session and met this cranky old shopkeeper called Shopaholic. Ofcourse, the MC noted him down on the threat map and gave him some simple motivations. Afterwards, when the MC is preparing some cool Fronts, he remembers Shopaholic but doesn't feel that he fits in any of the Fronts. Is this why the Home Front exists, to be able to include everyone in a Front, or could you leave some of the NPCs "naked" if you wanted to? I mean, what's actually the reason of the Home Front?


Daniel Davis: Haven't heard about SoA before, but I'll give it a try. Thanks for the tip!

Oh, the home front is just a name for all the threats that don't have a front, plus all the custom moves that don't, plus any countdown clocks that don't, plus whatever else doesn't, if there is anything else. "This NPC isn't in a front" and "this NPC is in the home front" mean the same thing - it's a threat, it's real, but it's not part of a front.

Oh, the home front is just a name for all the threats that don't have a front, plus all the custom moves that don't, plus any countdown clocks that don't, plus whatever else doesn't, if there is anything else. "This NPC isn't in a front" and "this NPC is in the home front" mean the same thing - it's a threat, it's real, but it's not part of a front.

OK, that's cool. I'll try to write down (or make one of my players write down) our first session and share it with you all in an AP, so you can see how it went.

Thanks again!