Stat Substitution Glitch

Motipha,

You make an interesting point, and one I definitely intend to take to heart.  It's definitely a big part of the answer.  But consider: all RPGs can be said to take place somewhere on a continuum between reader's theater and improv theater.  

At one extreme, you go in already knowing who lives, who dies, and who has sex with whom.  The only thing the players provide is their rendition of the script, the depth of emotion or witty ad-libbed line that makes the character yours.  This can still demand a lot of a player--we swoon over Jacoby's Claudius or Tennant's Hamlet, right?  but many people do want more control of their fate.  

In traditional tabletop gaming, I'd say this is most closely represented by D&D, where the adventure is written out ahead of time and it's generally assumed that the bad guys die, the PCs live, and the balance is restored to the force.  Or for another example, I'm currently running a game of aWoD which is basically the players living through a story I wrote.  I came up with the plot, wrote all the PCs (with some feedback from the players) and gave them their interconnected backstory.  

At the other extreme is improvisational theatre, where any participant can introduce new characters and elements at whim and there's no pre-arranged goal or endpoint.    This area is explored by some games like Munchausen (reportedly, I haven't read it).  The downside, quite simply, is that coming up with interesting new material takes effort and the more you allow things to deviate from a track, the more effort you spend inventing things on the spot, and the more things you came up with ahead of time get wasted.  

Now it's pretty clear to me that AW trends toward the improve side of things, and that's fine.  But it's also clear to me that AW is not intended to be some kind of ideologically pure expression of improv.  After all, you fill out a worksheet full of threats ahead of time, right?  And you spend time between-session working up a cast.  If the characters somehow managed to kill off your entire cast of named characters during a session, you'd have to stop and make new ones, which would slow play and get exhausting.  Same for if they solved all the threats you had planned; you'd need to send them home early or think really fast.  

So I think the guideline of looking through crosshairs is a good one, but it's gotta be tempered by human fallibility.  At the rate at which PCs kill named characters, solve threats, or acquire improvements goes to infinity, the game *will* become impossible for a human MC to run.  The question becomes, "what is the highest rate of turnover a typical MC can accommodate", and "do stat-substituters push games over the edge."  That's an empirical question for which I don't have the data, but I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who does.  

I think that "prepared ahead of time or not" and "blank page problem or not" are two orthogonal axes. In A Wicked Age is not prepared ahead of time at all, but I've never had a problem as GM with coming up with something to say. The characters (with their best interests) that I get from the oracles give me plenty of fodder.

Orion,

Glad that you found my post of help.  There's something about your concern I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around, as in I'm not quite seeing what the problem is, but I'll have a go.

First off, it still sounds like you are most concerned about the MC as the source of fresh material and going's on.  This doesn't really sound like Apocalypse world to me, at least not the MC as the major or even primary contributor.  The 1st session is not only about defining the world, but discovering what about the world is interesting/engaging for the players.  They lead the game, not the MC.  The MC just takes what happens in that session, and then says "ah, these non-PC things happened because of this" and makes that be something that's the players have shown is interesting.  So while there is prep work done, it's much more about solidifying things that are alluded to during that first part of play.

After that, I don't really see a lot of ongoing prep.  The MC spends most of his time turning the existing screws, not adding new ones.  If you'll note the examples I gave, they were all accumulation upon existing fiction or changes to relationships with them,  not the invention of completely new things.  So yes, there is a certain burden of providing new information, but experience with these sorts of games shows that there is almost always a completely natural and exciting path the game takes from where it is before, especially if the players are fully protagonized and pursuing story that interests.  Change, after all, doesn't necessarily mean destruction.

Your concern about the PC's wiping out the entire cast of named NPC's also doesn't ring true to me.  While theoretically possible, I would guess that this rarely if ever would happen in a game like this, it certainly wasn't happening with my group.  The idea of PC-NPC-PC triangles, for instance, means that while one PC might want to kill off a character he's more than likely fucking with the another player's character by doing so, which will have it's own repercussions.  Also, terming NPC's "threats" does not mean that they are inherently people to dispose of.  Pariah's daughters are a threat to his life in that one of them spends her time trying to help him in his goals (and fucking up pretty badly) and the other has started being able to hear peoples thoughts and insists on telling everybody about it.  Is Pariah likely to just put a bullet in both of them and call it a day?  not likely, but they definitely are threats to him getting what he wants/needs.

So I don't think coming up with new material is as much of a concern as it might appear.  You'll have a number of things to keep the PC's occupied, and like has been pointed out before, the likelihood of the PC's clearing the decks in a single session are slim to nonexistent, especially if the MC is working those triangles so that they aren't always exactly on board with each other.

You also seem to allude that improvement makes the turnover of story elements faster.  I don't buy that.  Limerick seduces Kipper, getting her to sleep with him (fun in itself) but more importantly giving him a set of ears on the inside.  Great: he succeeded because he's gotten good at seducing people.  But now he's got to prove he's not just using her, and she wants out, so he's got to figure out how to string her along until he finds out what he needs, and then maybe, MAYBE he'll pull her out...  As has been said before, failure is interesting in this game, but success really should be JUST AS interesting.  Being able to do what you set out to do more often doesn't mean your life is any easier.

Or if the player takes new moves: It means they have more ways to try to get what they want, but it doesn't a) guarantee success or b) mean that success is without consequences. 

But I don't think there is any logical argument that can prove this point to you.  As I said before, what you've pointed out is logically possible, but I would argue in fact highly highly unlikely if not downright not going to happen.  Maybe someone does in fact min-max to the point where they are relying on only a couple stats, and those stats are being rolled at a ridiculous rate.  Ok: what that buys them are a few more points, and some new abilities, and maybe new outcomes that lead the story in new ways, but they don't give them a pass on dealing with the "reality" of the game.  You take an action, you succeed, and that means things happen, not all of them good for you.

finally: the rate at which players "PCs kill named characters, solve threats, or acquire improvements" does NOT go to infinity: it has a very real limit to how fast that will increase, even just looking at the rules and not playing.  Even if you manage to collapse all rolls to just rolling one stat (impossible), unless you find a way to constantly increase the number of rolls you make (again, will hit a hard limit in play) AND decrease the number of rolls between taking improvements (not possible with the base ruleset, though that can be hacked) there is an upper limit to how fast a player can advance.  As they advance, the list of options they have is limited: The lists in the individual playbooks are limited, saying "mark this once" then the ungiven future choices are also limited.  Eventually, that character will run out of ways to improve.

As for your call for empirical data, well, all that can be pointed to are actual play sessions.  I don't think anyone has collated a statistical analysis for the relative speeds of advancement or a measure of the fun had.  As has been said, experience playing is the only real way to get a feel for what works and what doesn't.  But again: the game has been pretty thoroughly playtested, and of those that have played no-one has seen this as an actual concern, rather than a possible one.  Perhaps your experience will be different?

No one has reported a problem with the advancement rules in play. None of us have seen problems.

It's an entirely hypothetical issue that did not arise in hundreds of sessions during playtest across dozens (hundreds?) of players.

There is no problem. All you have to do is play the game to see that. This discussion is so abstract and removed from play it's pointless.

No one has reported a problem with the advancement rules in play. None of us have seen problems.

It's an entirely hypothetical issue that did not arise in hundreds of sessions during playtest across dozens (hundreds?) of players.

There is no problem. All you have to do is play the game to see that. This discussion is so abstract and removed from play it's pointless.

Yep. It's lonely complaining, which is worse than lonely fun.

John, you're the fourth person, AT LEAST to step in to tell me "nothing to see here, move along."

First of all, I don't care how many playtest games you ran unless you can tell me that this game has been *destructively* tested.  

Second, while I really have no reason to doubt your word, I also don't see why not one person can spare the time to tell me

"In our game we averaged N improvement per session, with the fastest characters achieving N+M.  Characters with stat substitution moves advanced faster/slower/the same as character who took their playbooks' more unique abilities.
 
The introduction of new holdings and gangs had a positive effect/negative effect/didn't happen.  When the game ended, approximately X improvements had been handed out and the characters' power level caused the game to end/had nothing to do with the game ending."  

If you've playtested the game hundreds of times, there should be piles of this kind of thing lying around unless you didn't bother to actually collect data.  

It seems more and more like you like writing people's names, and then not actually discussing what they said. I thought I laid out pretty clearly, as have others, why we feel based on our play experiences that your concern is not one. You keep ignoring it so you can keep hammering this "problem." And you want data? There were playtests but this is not a scientific study. I don't know of a single game designer who collects playtest information in the way you are describing. I am pretty sure Luke Crane, who is one of the most insanely thorough designers as far as playtesting goes that I know, does not amass spreadsheets of data like this.

You are being more than a bit boorish by coming in, demanding that we prove you wrong, and when we try to engage you dismissing or ignoring every single thing we say. We have engaged your points, you ignore all of ours. You have reached the point of being insulting.

Take a break, everybody!

-Vincent

So in our game of Apocalypse World, we played approximately thirteen sessions before the game ended, and my character was the closest thing we had to something like you describe -- I had only one stat-substitution move, but it resulted in my not needing +weird at all and consequently, +weird was highlighted in only one of the sessions. The majority of my advancements were spent on stat increases, straightforwardly boosting my rate of success, and I also got a free +1 weird over the course of play because I had the Angel move where your +weird increases if somebody dies in your care. (This move was perfect, fictionally, even though it was a terrible choice min-max-wise because I only rolled +weird for some custom moves.) I had a stat at +3 very early and another at +2 not long after, and all my stats were +1 or higher for the majority of the game. I also switched from Angel to Battlebabe, gaining 'extra' moves as a result.

My character did not advance faster than the other PCs -- though the main point of comparison was the Brainer, who also ended up with a stat-substitution move. We had a Chopper join the game at the halfway point (so six sessions in) -- the Chopper had Hard highlighted for two sessions, and by the end of the game had actually caught up with my character in terms of advancements. I would guess that the other PCs averaged a little under one advance per session, though this often came in spurts based on the intersection of the highlighted stat and the opportunities presented by the fiction.

The rate of advancement in our game never seemed to be a problem. Our early sessions were slowly paced, in terms of fictional consequences (and time passing; our entire game happened over the course of two weeks of game-time) -- once the Chopper character showed up, the pace of things rapidly accelerated.

The Chopper's mid-campaign entry might be particularly interesting in terms of 'unbalanced' characters (advancement-wise). It is my opinion, which I am pretty sure my playgroup would echo, that the Chopper PC was equally or even MORE effective at getting things done than the other two PCs, from the very first session in which he appeared. Why? Because he had +2 hard and fairly quickly bought +3 hard, and the secondary stats just don't matter that much when it comes to getting shit done. As mentioned, the Chopper advanced far more rapidly than the other two PCs once introduced, but I would say that only his first few advancements had a serious impact on his basic character competence.

I bring this up because of the concern about the game somehow ending 'early' due to excessive character competence/growth/whatever. I really don't see it. The issue with certain moves (seeing through the Maelstrom in particular) seems more relevant to our game, but only because the Maelstrom turned out to be the primary focus of our fiction.

However, in our game, our Brainer took the relevant advance at approximately the three-quarter mark of the game -- like session 9 or 10 or so -- and successfully saw through the Maelstrom in either the same or the next session. It did not have any impact that I can see on the speed with which we pursued the final resolution of the game. It had a huge impact on how that resolution happened, but by the point the move came in to play we were already well on our way to doing what we eventually did to end the game.

--

One thing that I haven't seen explicitly addressed (though maybe I missed it) is the fact that tying advancement to actual moves is a built-in pacing control. You can only gain advancements by doing things in the fiction -- and doing things in the fiction is already changing things. In fact, the impact of a move -- hit OR miss -- seems to vastly eclipse the impact of advancement, in terms of shifting the fiction in the way Orion seems to be concerned about.

Our game seems like as interesting an example as any, since I am sure if you plotted our 'number of rolls per session' on a graph it would look a lot like a slowly-sloping-upward line with a spike at the midway point (when the Chopper joined) and a plateau soon afterwards. I would guess we were rolling dice almost twice as much in the last four sessions as in the first four -- and less of those rolls were Reading the Situation or a Person.

To me this was the absolutely, self-evidently most overwhelming factor in the pacing of our game. My character's advancement played a part for sure, but really it was not comparable to the shift in how many moves and what sort of moves the fiction was demanding of us. Making moves push the fiction forward, and the fiction is when the game ends. The fact that my success rate increased by like 20 or 30 percent over the course of the game -- and the possibility that, with further min-maxing, I could have added very slightly to that curve (at some point you run out of relevant +stat advances, and for me that point was fairly early) -- was important, but far less important than the fact that early on I spent a lot of time having talky, social scenes and later on I spent a lot of time making hard physical and social moves to resolve the situation the way my character wanted. This was a natural outcome of both the fiction and my advances, but my feeling is that the fiction -- and the way the other PCs, even apart from the MC, had begun to push the fiction -- played a larger part.


ETA: Cross-posted with Vincent. Taking a break now!

Okay, Orion!

First off, if you're concerned about one character advancing further and faster than another, you should notice that it's an option to retire your character and create a new one -- which is practically guaranteed to introduce a serious imbalance between the characters. If imbalance is a problem, it's a problem there far worse than it is with stat-substitution moves.

Now, no, the game's not designed with any particular advances-per-session in mind at all. It cares about advances per character, not advances per session -- it considers the character action, not the session, to be the fundamental unit of play.

For instance, play a character in a game with GM + 2 players, and she'll advance twice as fast per session, roughly, as the same character in a game with GM + 5 players. Play her with my group in our 2-hour sessions, and she'll advance half as fast per session as in a group that does 4-hour sessions, and a third as fast as in a group that does 6-hour sessions. I don't know or care, and the game doesn't know or care, how many players you're playing with, or how long and how often your sessions are. Within broad limits, it doesn't concern itself with these questions at all.

The questions the game DOES concern itself with are these: what fraction of a character's action should be moves? What fraction of a character's action should contribute to the character's advancement? How much character action should it take to resolve a front? How many fronts should a character resolve, in her lifetime as a character? What's the minimum amount of action before she should count as a character, what's the minimum amount before she should possibly be finished as a character, and what's the maximum amount before she should definitely be finished as a character?

The game has answers to all these! I'll be happy to talk you through them. Along the way, we can hit "does a character with all stat-substitution moves advance faster than she develops (if you see what I mean)? Can a character's advancements make her resolve threats faster than they deserve?" We can even wrap up with per-session stuff, if you want to, but I think by then you won't find it any more interesting than I do.

With me?

Everybody else, please keep holding off for now. Thank you!

-Vincent

Daniel, Thanks so much for taking the time to post your experiences.  I found them an interesting and mostly reassuring read. 

Vincent, your point about the uselessness of "session" as a rubric is well-taken.  I guess I was treating "session" as a unit of playtime rather than and individual meeting, I guess I care less about improvements/session than improvements/45 minutes of spotlight.  (that's the same as per-session for a 4-player, 3-hour session.) 

I also especially like your formulation of the problem as advancement vs. development, and I think that's really the heart of my concern.  It takes time, or perhaps a better way to phrase it would be, it takes moves to set up a character for an improvement to be fictionally appropriate, so the question becomes, can you justify a stat-substituting character's improvement in the potentially as few as 5 moves it takes to earn that advance.  I can certainly imagine a number of five-move sequences that could leave the fiction wanting an improvement, but I'm not sure yet how often moves will be spent "dithering". 

I also realize that I've assumed that the game ends at the same point for all characters, but it sounds to me as though you're suggesting that characters can phase out one by one as theirs stories end.  I guess my only concern with that is whether it's practical to introduce a new character if you know practical constraints will limit the lifespan of the group. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to look at this, and I regret the adversarial tone I ended up taking. 

Sure thing.

Playing with an externally-imposed end date means that you risk leaving some characters hanging. Many or most of us have gaming stories like "man, I wish we'd gotten to finish that campaign...," especially from college. There are worse fates.

Okay. Next thing to notice is that it's perfectly possible to advance in 5 moves even if you don't have stat substitution moves. (Fewer than 5, in fact, occasionally, because of Hx, but set that aside.) Be a gunlugger going into battle with your hard and your sharp highlighted, for instance, and you get an advance in 5 moves on basic moves alone, in about 20 minutes of play.

So now, "is 5 moves per advance too many?" The answer is no, not in absolute terms; if it were, that gunlugger would be a catastrophe. In fact, probably all of us have seen it in play, with no ill effect. I know that I have, a bunch of times.

Stat substitution moves don't increase your maximum speed at all, see it?

They might increase your overall speed, right, decrease your average moves per advance. But I see two interesting possibilities. Check these out.

Possibility 1: a character takes action without regard to her highlighted stats. There are 7 basic moves assigned to 5 stats, two of which are highlighted, so let's say that this character marks experience 2-4 times per 7 moves, for an overall rate of 1 advance per 9-18 moves. Two stat substitution moves would bump this up to 4-6 xp per 7 moves, 1 advance per 6-9 moves.

Possibility 2: a character takes her highlighted stats into account and makes her moves to pursue them. Let's say, a little generously, that she can choose her moves so that 2/3 to 3/4 of them are highlighted stat moves. This puts her at 1 advance per 6-8 moves. The price for playing this way is harsh: you are not your character's master. She's driven around by impulses she doesn't understand.

What happens when this character gets some stat substitution moves? It's a big relief. Now you can keep your 1-advance-per-6-to-8-moves pace, but your character's yours again. You never really go to 5xp per 5 moves -- there might be a way or two, but they'd require some serious dedication. What happens instead is that you have more choices at 2xp per 3 moves.

These 2 possibilities are the ends of a spectrum, of course; most characters fall in between. But in both cases, and thus anywhere along the spectrum: two stat substitution moves means that you can play the character you want to play, at a sustained advancement rate of 6-8 or 6-9 moves per advance.

Still with me? Next we look at the advancement options.

-Vincent

So I take it the game assumes that advances will come more like 1/8 than like 1/15 anyway?  That does make sense. 

One thing nobody mentioned yet is that the alternative to taking substitution moves is frequently taking moves that themselves offer opportunities to roll.  Merciless doesn't intrinsically earn XP (except for making it a hell of a lot easier to *survive* rolling your hard), but if you pick up Augury, Lost, and Healing Touch there's a *lot* of opportunities to roll Weird.  I initially discounted that because playbook-move based characters are easier to regulate--you could just refuse to highlight Weird for a couple sessions if your Brainer was advancing undesirably fast, but it's quite possible that moves like Sexy & Dangerous, Hypnosis, and Fuck This Shit let you keep pace with the substitutions with favorable highlighting. 

At this point I'm pretty convinced that stat substitution moves are not, per se, a problem--as long as advancing every 7 moves or so isn't.  And I don't have a clear enough perception of how the game plays to take a stand on that, so I'm happy to take my chances.  That said, I'd certainly love to hear about what that rate of advancement looks like and how it plays out.   

The first game I ever played, I was a Gunlugger with the move that let me roll Hard to Act Under Fire. I also had Fuck This Shit (Only used it once or twice though) I had Hard highlighted in pretty much every session (the player doing my highlighting was using my character as musle, so it was beneficial for both of us). I usually advanced about one and a half times per session we played (probably about 3-4 hours on IRC with 4 PCs, although one wasn't particularly active). I pretty quickly got a move or two ahead of the other PCs and stayed there (maybe even three moves ahead eventually). Eventually, I pretty much ran out of advancement options, so I started playing a new character.

He was a Brainer who used Wierd to Go Aggro and to Act Under fire (Also he used In Brain Puppet Strings a lot). Again, his Wierd was highlighted 90% of the time and I advanced like crazy.

Our game never broke or became unfun. It ended because the hardhold I had taken over was burnt to the ground in a war with the mutants, not because we ran out of advancements or anything. (I never retired my character to safety because him being in danger was fun and a driving focus of play.)

I've played with a different group where advancement was much slower and less "powergaming" focused. Both games played out pretty similarly as far as I can tell.

Is there anything specific you want to know?

So far in our games, it's been more about incenting sides of the PCs we want to see, rather than figuring what the advantages might be. So I'm likely to say "Amanual, I wanna see your cool" when I'm curious what it looks like when Amanual acts under fire, regardless of what her strengths may be. This leads to some sessions when there's much less marking up than others. Sometimes players will check that and go for the highlighted stat instead of something they might have defaulted to, which is always fun to see.