Character Evolutions

The taking a new playbook improvement has always appealed to me. Nothing in Apocalypse World is static so why should the characters be? The one thing that never changes is that everything changes- for better or most often not.

So I'm just curious to what other players have seen. What character changes where obvious from creation? Did they work out? Did some of these changes only become a good idea because of play? Did some transitions work perfectly or did you end up rolling snake eyes?

I guess I'll start it off. I had a skinner who ended up falling in love with an NPCs wife. They ran away together but she required a high standard of living. It worked perfectly with the Operators obligation gigs and that went smoothly. It was very problem/solution mechanics wise.

In the game I'm in now I was playing a quarantine. He's lost, confused, failed some open your brains and ended up "enhanced" by another players savvy head. He's resigned himself to needing these implants but he's got a lot of frustration. Then it dawned on me he'd make a great faceless. It makes sense that to cope with all the insane stuff happening to him he'd become a little twisted. It's more story based than the skinner turned operator.

So, yeah. There's some of my favorite character evolutions. I'd like to hear about your's.

We had a Battlebabe who went with the Operator and the Hardholder warlord in an attempt to conquer another city, and faced of against the NPC mindfucker Brine deep inside the stronghold after sneaking in. Learning new things about herself and losing some kind of mental duel, iirc the MC told her player that something about her has to change due to this; that Brine had left a big messy footprint inside her brain. So the Battlebabe realised that she had taken enough lives and should start fixing them instead, and thus left the war to become a roving Angel. Completely story-driven; I think the player went into that confrontation with no expectations - she knew the risks and would've accepted character death but she also had an unused advancement so she knew those options were up as possible results too.

The only take-a-new-playbook advance I've seen is a Maestro'D becoming an Operator.  As a Maetsro'D he was running around trying to keep all the plates spinning.  When he lost his place of business, and found his attempts to start a new one or regain the old one stymied, it made sense for him to become a plate-spinning "free agent".  It felt very organic.

Our Battlebabe became a Skinner as part of her attempts to win her old (NPC) lover back. She still feels very much like the same character, to be honest--just now she goes around calling out people's names to the psychic maelstrom when she gets in trouble, or just feels like it.

Last session, our Chopper lost control of his gang and became a Gunlugger. That felt very natural. The player said he'd been planning it for awhile.

Our Brainer is talking about becoming an Operator, which seems like a less obvious/natural choice. I'm excited about it.

Our Hocus is thinking, possibly, about becoming a Hardholder.

Our Angel just set up an infirmary inside a ghost tree. Who knows what's going to happen there.