The sleeping Gunlugger and the shitty knife.

Could be, but a grenade doesn't explode at once, so he could run away.
Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying Doule is dead no matter what and the rules allow this; I'm wondering if the harm rules are strict and inavoidable also in such extreme (because they are extreme) situations, in which one PC is helpless and the other could kill him on the spot.
If they can be avoided, cool: I've no problem with that.
If they must be applied, cool: I've to figure out how to put together "A grenade explodes in your mouth" with "You're still alive" (for example: can the MC says, "Actually, the grenade doesn't explode, but make a burst: you still take 4-harm, but you're not dead"?).
It's why I'm waiting for Vincent: to solve a doubt.

If I were the MC, when Rouge stabbed at Fifi, I would say, "OK, Rouge, that's going Aggro on Fifi, and it seems to me that what you want him to do is, die with his own knife through his eye. Cool?" And, if Fifi's player saw this as a good death scene for his character, he would cave. I see the going aggro move as ideal when one character has the drop on another, as with here.

Charles

Ok, this is how going aggro normally works ^^ Fifi would choose between death and harm, and oviusly he would choose harm... unless the player want to kill the character for whatever reason.

I specifically said, in my example, that Fifi is totally defensless. Defensless in "this is not even a move, just stab it", and this has been obtained through a couple or four moves by Rouge.

I used the example to clarify the situation, but the core of my question could be: sometimes fictional situation in which a character, even a PC, is just killed, regardless of the harm for the weapon, could arise.
How to use the rules in these situations?

I can see how to go from rules to fiction ("You die for a knife wound, so I think the kinife enter in your eye, puncturing the brain"), but sometimes I found difficult to do vice versa (Rouge secured herself, throught moves like seduce and manipulate, or maybe an arresting Skinner, the possibility to stab Fifi in the eye and puncture the brain. I apply the 2harm damage of the knife even if Fifi should be "realistically" dead?)

In Apocalypse World, there is no move that allows you to say, "I have you helpless now; I can keep  doing harm to you until you die, and there is nothing you can do about it." In stories, furthermore, when Fifi is lying there in a drugged stupor, and Rouge looks at him with murderous intent and then gets ready to stab him in the eye with his own knife, dramatic tension almost always goes up, not down, and an auto-kill  with already established murderous intent means no dramatic tension whatsoever. So, neither by fiction nor by rules is an auto-kill supported.

Now, in the Going Aggro example, on a 10+, the choices are suck it up or cave. All well and good, these. If the result is 7-9, though, we see the payoff of Rouge having maneuvered Fifi into position. The additional options, at least in theory, that are available to Fifi in such a case are:
• get the hell out of Rouge's way
• barricade himself securely in
• give Rouge something he thinks she wanta
• back off calmly, hands where Rouge can see
• tell Rouge what she wants to know (or what she wants to hear)
Fifi's problem is that to do any of these, he has to, you know, do it. How is Fifi gonna do any of these, drugged and unconscious as he is? So, he's back to sucking it up (if he wants to live) or caving (if he wants to die).
Assuming he takes the damage and lives, I would, as the MC, turn to his player and say, "I'm thinking you want to defend yourself here. So, to do anything except take Rouge's next stab, you'll have to act under fire, and the fire is that drugged stupor you're in," and go from there.

As for the realism of knife to brain, assuming it went in as planned, there have been people who have made full recoveries from having chunks of their brains knocked out, so one stab through the eye isn't necessarily the end.

Charles

When you stab a helpless victim in the eye you do six harm.

"OK Rouge, the knife slides into Fifi's eye-socket like butter but you have to push hard to get it into the brain.  Fifi dies, barely even twitching because of the narcotics.  You want to get out of there before Uncle finds out what you've done?"

"Fifi, mark six harm and give me a harm roll.  You want to just die or have anything else up your sleeve?"

One idea that has to go is that player characters have special considerations in the system when it comes to death. A dude's a dude, even if he's an especially interesting dude who's adventures you're comitted to following.

Moves are not the primary means of doing stuff in Apocalypse World. Doing stuff is the primary means of doing stuff. You do not make moves when the other dude is a PC. You make moves when the in-fiction situation demands it, and attacking a defenseless person warrants neither of the two of AW's basic violence moves.

Now, sure, the other dude gets to do his own moves when the situation warrants it (and in the example, it is implied he did do a bunch of them, and failed enough of them to end up in the situation he is in). No player character gets to roll as many times as he wants until he finally succeeds, though.

There is no conflict between making apocalypse world seem real and being a fan of a character here... Being a fan means being interested in what they do, not in being committed to them staying alive.


This is quite possibly an icky social issue at the table (which should be solved by social means), but I'm pretty sure the only thing in the game as written to lessen that is the fact that you really need a *bunch* of roll failures for a PC to get completelly incapacitated. But yeah... You fail enough, you become helpless. You become helpless? Anyone can kill you because by definition you can't do anything about it.

One idea that has to go is that player characters have special considerations in the system when it comes to death.

Errrr... they do. NPCs take 1/3 of the Harm to kill them and cannot choose to take a debility instead of dying, nor can they interfere with their aggressor. PCs do get a special treatment.

Yeah, sure. They also can pick a debility when they roll over 5 harm, and they get their fancy moves that lets them generally avoid death better than a NPC would.

My (improperly communicated) point is that the same kind of fictional situations that cause NPCs to bleed and die cause PCs to bleed and die.

PCs get all their mechanical goodies, but they don't get any special 'status' aside from what's provided in the agenda and principles. And there are no agenda or principle that say "make sure your PCs get to live a long as possible", nor can anything similar be derived from the ones that exist ("Be a fan" I've already covered).

It's my belief that the only reason one could want to give Fifi "one more roll" after she's already in a situation where she completelly lost any fictional basis for agency is because one ascribes a special value to "player characters." And that ain't playin' by the book.

Seriously, it's act under fire with the fire being the fucking knife in his eye and the drugs. The knife does 2-harm ap.

If you wanna make Christopher Week 6-harm move a thing in your game, that's your shit and no one needs approval from us to do that. So that's one way to deal with it. As it's been said before, people have survived worse situations and recovered, likewise people die all the time from trivial things. It's not really a matter of realism.

If this was the end of a long, multi-session, many-move affair, it'd still make the Gunlugger roll act under fire to live, unless they're down with dying.

Auto-kill is boring. Make the Character's lives not boring.

Also, be a fan of the PCs. An anticlimactic auto-kill of one PC by another is only being a fan of the PC doing the killing, and sometimes not even of her.

The only time I'd go forward with the auto-kill is if the one player really had worked hard enough to have killed the other, and the whole table knew it. The making of that judgment should take into account everything, including debilities, that make a PC hard to kill in the first place. 3-5 successful cascading moves to get a victim into position, by themselves, isn't enough for that.

"Gotcha! Auto-kill," is against the rules in Apocalypse World.

Charles

By the way, I'll remind you that even if you give PC 6-harm, he still can take a debility. And live, at least.

What's enough, then? More than 5-7 cascading moves? Something other than a [large number] of cascading moves?


Also, Fifi has already rolled act under fire and lost (because otherwise he'd not be there all helpless and drugged). Can he still act under fire now that he's asleep and drugged and helpless? Can you get an under fire roll whenever you're in danger just by virtue of being a PC?

I'd say no. Because? To do it, do it. You can't do "it" if you can't do anything.

Other stuff about realism and such... I don't know enough about human anatomy to know whether that's true or not. But I don't think that matters - the whole argument is just one example of a more general "PC1 makes PC2 helpless, then proceeds to make sure that PC2 is dead in some way that would definitelly kill a dude" argument. There's definitelly some kind of situation where that comes up. Right?

Right but drugged doesn't mean helpless or necessarily unconscious. Moreover, it still means the Player can say things like "I try and regain consciousness to prevent certain death." Keeping someone unconscious while you cut on them is a highly skilled profession that requires sophisticated equipment and specialized medicine, and even then it doesn't always work. I've personally been tied to stretchers and ignored copious amounts of sedatives administered via IV "to knock him out" only to continue trashing during a psychotic episode. I've seen friends tragically drugged helpless with GHB but they were unconscious but not inactive. So, it's entirely possible that the Gunlugger awakens right as they're about to strike, that their liver finishes breaking down whatever it was they were given or their metabolism means they're in a comparatively light sleep.

What's enough? I can't tell you. That's the call you make at the table as an MC.

Oh, yeah, they almost always get that act under fire move. Like I said, the fire is the knife in the eye.

Don't forget about reading a situation. Can Fifi read the situation even though she's unconscious? Maybe! Sometimes I can, when I'm sleeping in real life, can't you?

Also, the chart in the harm chapter that lists falling damage and getting hit by a truck clearly allows you to establish 6-harm for a knife in the eye, if you want to.

Hell, the existence of s-harm and psi-harm clearly allow you to invent knife-in-the-eye-harm and say that it's instantly fatal, if you decide that's the best thing to do.

The game's rules can deal with murderous PvP, but you as the MC have to really make a million judgment calls, case by case by case. Better to think about all the different ways you can handle it than to try to arrive at one unified way you should handle it. There is no such!

Yeah, but, sometimes you don't get to roll under fire because you just did. Like say (true story), if my character tried to hide from a bunch of angry dudes (act under fire, miss), they catch him and put him in a sack. I immediatially ask for another roll to escape from the goddamned sack one way or another, and instead I get "the fire was the sack. You're stuck there for a while. Lets see what this other PC does in the meantime!"

As in, past rolls have traction. If, in the implied under fire roll that Fifi made in this situation, Fifi missed, then Fifi has to endure that fire. Now, sure, the fire could have been "you're some kind of drugged", but what if it was "okay, miss! Fifi, you're unconscious," that's the way things are now and that's what Fifi has to deal with. Getting him to roll for un-unconsciousness right after seems like enough play wasn't given to him being unconscious.

I'm not saying that MCs should go out of their way to inconvenience PCs so they'd become fair game for other PCs or even NPCs. But, I am saying that, if that somehow happens in a moment-to-moment process, where you judge a roll without being invested in it going either way, a PC somehow made helpless can die at the hands of another PC without it being appropriatelly dramatic or based on player decision or table consensus or whatever.

PC death is a possible result of MC'ing fairly, is all I'm saying.

The MC should not be looking at PCs through cross-hairs; the AW rule book pointedly fails to tell the MC to do this, and indirectly tells the MC not to do this. A player looking at another player's character this way, therefore, is on his own.

DWierd, how many successful, cascading moves directly dedicated to the murder of another PC does it take to kill that PC? I'm saying that non-direct murder shouldn't be any easier than direct murder, from the way I'm reading AW rules. For perspective, you can see how 5 6-harm stabs to the eye won't quite kill a PC, can you?

Also, DWierd, past rolls can have traction without granting the auto-kill, as my previous example showed. Looking at your latest example, I myself wouldn't have declared your character to be in stasis in the sack. If you wanted out, I'd have asked, "How? Muscle your way out? Cut your way out? Try to wrestle the sack's holder?" and gone from there, all the while envisioning what it means to fight your way out of a sack when some angry dudes want you to stay in it. On the other hand, if I wanted one hard move to trap you for awhile, I'd have described something more constraining than merely being stuffed into a man sized sack.

Charles