The Maestro D' and Barter

I've run games with a Maestro D' in them before, and the Barter question didn't really come up that much.  I figure a guy running an establishment is going to be able to support himself on the margins anyway. Just like how the Hardholder doesn't have to worry about having a place to live or paying for dinner. 

The Maestro has plenty of other stuff to worry about, like keeping his employees from stealing, keeping NPCs from taking his place over or shooting up the joint, and maintenance.  In the games I've played, the Maestro D' did a lot with favors, giving the Savvyhead a coveted box seat in exchange for help with the spotlights, that sort of thing.  I guess you could make them pay "rent" of a barter a week, but I don't see the need.  THere's lot of opportunities to make them pay for stuff.

Why should a Maestro that does not have fingers in every pie not be heading towards bankruptcy at 1 barter a month? It just sounds like it's difficult to run a gin joint in Apocalypse World.

I just doesn't seem very realistic for a person to keep a business going if she needs to be working elsewhere to remedy the loses the damn thing imposes on her. Also, it is not just a gin joint, my player choose to have "drugs" as the main offering, supplemented by alcohol and sex (all pretty lucrative stuff in all historical scenarios, people will forfeit food for some of these) - and I´m betting all of those choices are pretty frequent in AW games :D

I don't have the pdf handy, does the Maestro d' not have a section describing barter on the back of the playbook?
If that is missing I could understand your confusion

Then you do (understand my confusion)  :D - to be completely honest, there is a barter session, but it only covers the cost of things (the same that is repeated in all playbooks: "1-barter might count for: a night in high luxe and..."). It has no information on what the Maestro does to get money. The "If you’re charging someone wealthy for your services..." block is simply not there. The Operator and Hardholder are also like this, but they have moves to make up for it.

the Maestro has things beyond the basic venue that are worth barter... What's it worth to a pair of gang leaders to have a private meeting on neutral ground? The Maestro can make it happen. Want some private time with one of the dancers? Sure but that's a premium service. Does Balls owe the Holder money? Well he's a regular and the maestro can collect for a cut. Need someone dead? Devil With A Blade and Give Me A Motive are nasty. The Operator has Moonlighting but the Maestro has the skill set to get out there and hustle in play.

Nice! That´s exactly what I was looking for. I´m starting to see the Maestro D as a buyer and seller of information, or a facilitator. Does that make him too much alike the operator?

Would you say "a special meeting in neutral ground", "some private info on someone important" or "the location of someone currently hiding" are worth one barter? That would give an operator a way to get money with it´s other moves (without introducing a new move).

I figure a guy running an establishment is going to be able to support himself on the margins anyway. Just like how the Hardholder doesn't have to worry about having a place to live or paying for dinner. 

I agree with you, at the very least I won´t make this guy buy the 1-barter monthly living expenses (but once again, the Hardholde playbook says that´s the case explicitly, the Maestro D doesn't)

If you want to host a whole bunch of things beyond just playing the guy that owns the local watering hole, like, if you want Profit from those gigs. I would suggest you take moonlighting and theme your gigs as inside your establishment. An easy way to see profits rise and troubles with them. Nothing comes cheap.

I'd certainly not say a night with a girl is worth a month's hard living. That's absurd, unless that girl's the Skinner. However the When you charge someone wealthy for your services section... is just something you have to work out with your mc, knowing whats appropriate. He shouldn't be trying to screw you out of your holding because the barter isn't flashing up to be soaked away every month. That's "paint by numbers" and not "making the world feel real". Logic would dictate that: of course if you've lasted this long to be a PC and then be on scene, /something/ has been keeping you afloat until now. Figure out what that is with him.

It just doesn't seem very realistic for a person to keep a business going if she needs to be working elsewhere to remedy the loses the damn thing imposes on her.

The business isn't imposing any losses. The business itself (by itself) is barter neutral. Yes, you might be able to charge a fair amount for booze or sex or drugs or whatever, but you have to have gotten that stuff from somewhere. Getting all that stuff has a cost (and a hook - who are your suppliers?). Housing all of that stuff has a cost (and a hook - who is your landlord and what do you owe them?). And most importantly, protecting all that stuff has a cost (and a hook - do you have your own muscle on the payroll, or it someone else offering protection in exchange for a cut?). So yes, you provide a service, but that service has costs of its own. In total, if you don't do anything special (or stupid), your profits and those costs offset.

And yeah, if you chose to live in your establishment, I might also knock off the 1-barter a month living expenses. But maybe not, depending on what it provides. A roof over your head is great, but a man can't live on sex, booze, and drugs alone (despite what Keith Richards would have you believe). Sooner or later you gotta eat.

Absent having connections (which is essentially what fingers in every pie represents), if you want to be rolling in barter you've gotta do what everyone else has to do - hustle. But it doesn't have to be outside your establishment. A good business owner is going to leverage his establishment to help him hustle. Want to make more money off the drugs? Invite your source to dinner, then poison the fuck out of him and tell him that the only way he gets the antidote is by telling you where he gets the stuff. Spoiler alert - there's no antidote.

Expand into a new and lucrative side-business (a perfect use for moonlighting). Welch on a deal. Overcharge a desperate customer.

Just remember that no matter what services or goods you're offering, honest businessmen pretty much never get ahead in Apocalypse World.

Dunno, this all doesn't really sound like being a fan of the Maestro. If I picked the playbook that focuses on running a business, I'd probably feel cheated if the MC insisted that the business itself couldn't ever make any money. I mean, by a strict reading, the Maestro can't even afford to eat at her own restaurant, which doesn't really square with Vincent's post in the other thread about being "self-sufficient".

The barter section tells us that your crew's cut of a spectacular event is 1-barter. It's weird that it doesn't give any suggestion what the Maestro's cut is, but that's probably the way to solve the problem: you and your establishment are self-sufficient, and if you want extra barter for whatever, tell us about the spectacular event you're throwing to bring it in.

The only thin I don't understand is why the Maestro d' doesn't have moonlighting as one of it's improvement options.

you and your establishment are self-sufficient, and if you want extra barter for whatever, tell us about the spectacular event you're throwing to bring it in.

Exactly.

The Maestro D' is specifically designed to bypass the Barter system. Like that's the thing that is actually going on, here. On purpose.

If you want to make a 'profit', take Fingers in Every Pie. Or figure out what a real profit looks like, and get it. The Maestro D' does not run a business, she runs an establishment; this is not late-era capitalism, this is the apocalypse. Barter is the least interesting thing in the game, anyways, why would you be upset that it's been replaced by something specific and useful?

Sure, but the "establishment" in question is among other things a means of distributing resources to its staff and patrons, and Barter is how personal control of the distribution of resources is abstracted in AW. Barter per se isn't that interesting a mechanic, but scarcity is certainly an interesting theme, and that means you can't be too vague about what resources a character has to throw around.

(Fingers in Every Pie bypasses the barter system, but it's an optional move, and scarcity is still a theme whether or not you pick it. Does the Maestro just roll over and die if the MC picks "Make Them Buy" as a hard move? Should the MC just never pick that move? If the Maestro is paying in free meals at the club or whatever, how many can she afford to give away, and how is that different from bartering? If Dustwitch the medic always charges everybody else for fixing them up, should we just assume she fixes Maestro out of the goodness of her heart? Much easier to just use the same Barter system the other playbooks use for the same reasons the other playbooks use it.)

Sure, but the "establishment" in question is among other things a means of distributing resources to its staff and patrons, and Barter is how personal control of the distribution of resources is abstracted in AW.

Another way of thinking about it is: do you want to abstract the thing the playbook is about? What is the advantage of abstracting the economic life of the Maestro D's establishment? The Gunlugger doesn't have a 'roll this and some people just die whatever' move. Playbooks that are 'about' economic activity have moves that model the fictional reality of their particular activities; the Operator and Hardholder don't have an 'if you're charging someone wealthy for your services...' section, either.

"You can't be too vague about what resources a character has to throw around" is as much an argument against Barter as in favour of it. Without Barter, the resources a character has to throw around are as specific as possible: things we know they actually have, for fictional reasons. We might not know what they are 'worth', abstractly, but we know what they're worth, concretely, to any other NPC or PC, because we just have to follow our principles and we can figure it out. Instead of 'Barter' we just end up with barter: an exchange between two people.

The playbooks present a spectrum, as mentioned; some playbooks have services they might provide, and their general costs in Barter is listed. Others have specific moves to generate Barter, which replace that list of services, but generate complicated social situations when used. The Maestro D' takes this even further, with no services listed AND no moves that generate abstract wealth. Instead they have only their fictional establishment, and its built-in relationships -- many of which are economic -- as well as an optional move for a Maestro who wants to be able to generate specific, rather than abstract, wealth.

The Maestro D' is an optional playbook, so it's not surprising that it does some things a bit differently. I think it is a pretty interesting experiment, vis-a-vis the way wealth is portrayed in Apocalypse World, and what that specifically says about the sort of micro-culture the Maestro D's establishment depends on. Nothing the Maestro D' has can leave with them, nothing can be separated out from their establishment. They are tied to it and trapped by it, at least starting out. If the circumstances that make that establishment possible are threatened, they stand to lose it all.

Why would the Maestro D' "roll over and die" when hit with make them buy any more than any other character would? What separates the Maestro D' from any other character who may or may not have any barter on them at the time? Why would the MC refrain from using the move in these cases? I would argue that the best time for an MC to use make them buy is when a character (of any playbook) has no barter on hand. Scratching 1-barter off your character sheet is not interesting. Figuring out how to get what you want when you don't have the means to purchase it outright is far more intriguing.

Further, the establishment isn't necessarily "about" distributing resources at all.  If your establishment is about spectacle, with side jaunts into scene (see and be) and games, with an atmosphere that offers noise, blood, violence, and a cage, you don't run a inn or a brothel or an opium den. You run Thunderdome. Sure, maybe you get a cut of the gambling that goes on there (or maybe people pay some kind of admission), and that covers your expenses (buying pit slaves, training them to be gladiators, equipping them for their matches, the occasional medical expense, building or buying props, etc). If you want to turn that into some kind of profit over and above the usual operating expenses, tell the MC how you plan to do that. And he or she will say, "Awesome!" And along the way complications arise, and you will play to find out what those are and how they get resolved.

But trying to decide up-front how much barter a Maestro D's establishment "generates" passively is like trying to decide up front just how many jobs an Operator can work in a week or a month - it completely misses the point of the playbook.

In my experience with the game, Barter is a pretty mediocre tool for representing scarcity in Apocalypse World. 'You are out of gold pieces' is not a compelling move. Yes, you can Make Them Buy, and sometimes that really does make their lives more interesting -- but not usually because they then have to go gather some generic Barter until they can afford the thing.

Usually the result of the move is that they either a) get to show off all that Barter they've gathered (i.e. you're using it to be a fan of the PC, not as a hard move) or b) they have to do something else entirely to get the thing they want. Often the something else is small-b barter: i.e. doing a specific task or getting a specific thing that will allow them to trade with or gain leverage over whoever has the thing they can't afford to buy.

(Cross-posted with Munin.)

We might be talking at cross purposes, since I'm not suggesting the establishment should generate income passively. I'm responding to the idea that the Maestro is somehow outside the Barter system and never gets any Barter from Maestro-ing. Hence the problem with Make Them Buy- if the Maestro doesn't ever have any Barter she can't ever be made to buy, even though lots of resources fictionally flow through her hands. (Yes, it's possible to not be a distributor of resources if your staff are all volunteers who provide their own equipment and do their own maintenance, but that's not exactly the general case, you know?)

The full extent of my view is: the establishment and the Maestro are self-sufficient in the general run of things. If for some reason the Maestro wants extra mechanical Barter in order to interface with the various game mechanics that reference Barter, she should tell the group about the awesome events she is running to generate it, thus enriching the story. If she wants wealth to be a big ongoing aspect of her character, she should take Fingers.

Daniel, you're arguing for not playing with Barter at all, or minimizing your use of it. Which I think is a perfectly sensible way to play and also how my instincts go. But it's going to come out weird if everybody but the Maestro is using the Barter system fully.

The Maestro D can still kill someone for a barter, they just might poison the guy. They might get a barter from someone wealthy for hosting a big event they want in their establishment. They're not outside the barter system at all, they just don't represent something so specific that it needs or desires listed examples. Sure they don't need to worry about surviving from month to month if they've got their establishment, but if some *&% blows open a wall, it might cost something to fix it. Figure out who needs something you can provide, and charge them a barter for the services. Its not like the things listed in the other playbooks are all that extraordinary when you consider their themes.

Consider some themes, play the part, they can make barter just like anyone else, they just have to do it on screen rather then off-screen like an op or hard-holder. Its not a complicated issue.

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On a slight tangent, O'm interested in feedback. How would you handle a character with the fingers in every pie, that wants to have an item show up like magic, but that item is like hi-tech or important to the narrative with implications. Say you've a savvy head who wants to build a certain kind of bike and is working towards it being awesome, can the guy with fingers in every pie just say he wants a bike just like it and have it show up? What if they say they want the specific or unique thing someone else has or just got. What if they;re out there trying to find a thing, and they find out where it is, does this move bypass any narrative challenge presented? Granted that last one was frame in the quest for treasure thought process that I know AW isnt concerned with, but bare with the example. I've my own understanding of these answers, but I'd like to hear feedback on the move we're avoiding discussing here.

Daniel, you're arguing for not playing with Barter at all, or minimizing your use of it. Which I think is a perfectly sensible way to play and also how my instincts go. But it's going to come out weird if everybody but the Maestro is using the Barter system fully.

I was mostly trying to suggest that the game works fine without Barter at all, it just requires more work, and that doing that work when the Maestro D' is involved might be particularly rewarding.

I don't think it's going to come out weird at all if every playbook is using 'the Barter system' as much as they are designed to do so. It's not really much of a system, since the moves that actually use Barter as a value are explicitly optional anyways, so there really isn't much to break down. Certainly my experience playing games with Maestro D' PCs are that this is not a problem at all. Like, at all at all. It may be that other MCs like to make a lot more use of Barter in general in their MCing, in which case I can see how they might be a bit uncertain how to proceed with a Maestro D.

But as Munin and others have pointed out, the Maestro D is not somehow immune to paying for things, just because they have no clear way to generate Barter. They are 'outside the Barter system' only in the sense that the playbook is designed to have other ways to pay for things, or get the Maestro D's needs met. There is no rule in the playbook that says 'this character cannot gain Barter,' there are just no rules in the playbook that explain specific ways for them to do so. My feeling is that this actually interacts particularly well with a world in which the other PCs are heavily Barter-involved, precisely because of the contrast it brings*, and the questions it asks about what the 'Barter' economy actually looks like. It makes it harder for players to pretend that Barter is actually money, which can often be an issue in games where the status quo is trending heavily towards 'working civilization.' It's easy for players to lose track of what's actually going on underneath the abstraction, and the Maestro D being in the game demonstrates that other means of generating wealth/opportunity are both present and often more powerful/useful.


* But also because it presents an obvious avenue for the Maestro D's player when they need Barter: get it from the other PCs.