Awkward armor custom moves

I wanted a custom rule to disincentive worn armor. I'm thinking:

ARMOR IS AWKWARD

- Its hard to move around wearing armor. When you act under fire, subtract from your roll the value of the armor you're wearing.

- Armor also puts you in the mood to bust heads. Armor of a gang is subtracted from Leadership/Pack Alpha rolls made for them.

I figure I'd keep vehicle armor as written, because its a much smaller part of the game as is, and roll+cool-worn armor-vehicle armor(+vehicle power?) is a bit too much for me.

Terrifying! The only problem I bring up is

1. People hassle you when you travel since you're obviously some kind of warrior
2. Foot chases (long), the least armored person wins


If I made a custom move it'd look something like:

When you wear armor an entire day roll+armor.
7-9, pick one, 10+ pick both
-1 ongoing till Stuka gives you a massage
your armor starts to smell like you x50 till washed thoroughly

You're worse at controlling your gang of violent thugs... because you're wearing armour?

Edited: wait, maybe I misread -- it's because they're wearing armour? I still don't get it, either way. Gangs of violent people wear armour... I really don't see how this has any effect on their leadership, either way. If someone was Going Aggro on them, then sure, they're more likely to suck it up -- because they think they can take it -- but that just doesn't apply to either of the moves mentioned.

The concept behind the Pack Alpha penalty is:

* You ask a gang member to do something they don't want to do. They're heavily armored. They don't feel threatened by you. You gotta make an example.

* You ask a gang member to do something they don't want to do. They don't have armor. They feel threatened by you. You don't gotta make an example.

The concept behind the Leadership penalty is:

* Your gang, in heavy armor, is slower, more awkward, and more in the mood to bust heads. They have a harder time making an advance, its harder to get them to show mercy. They might be more in a mood to bust your head.

I have a story about armor.

I was at a fantasy LARP playing an imperial soldier in a group of ten. We had fancy landsknecht uniforms but not much in the way of armor. The commander had a breast plate and gorget. We had a single helmet that nobody wanted to use because it was heavy and uncomfortable so we shifted it around as even as we could.

Night fell, we stood guard in a village. It was my turn to be on watch. Naturally I had taken the helmet off when the commander came by to relieve me and he was chewing me up for not wearing it when something stirred in the woods. A horde of maybe 40 zombies came shambling. I put on the helmet and soon the entire village was roused to join the desperate fight.

A huge zombie, two heads taller than me and probably 70 pounds heavier pounced me and I fell backwards hitting a pile of firewood with the back of my head. Didn't feel a thing thanks to the helmet, without it I would probably have suffered a concussion or worse.

The big zombie whispered to me "you're a zombie now, you only go down from hits in the head". I rose and went after the most visible people, my old group. The commander did hit me in the head but I figured the helmet could take a few hits and so I clinched and we started wrestling. That guy is a drill sergeant IRL so soon he got the better of me, unstrapped the helmet and hit me in the head with his foam hammer. The End.

The concept behind the Pack Alpha penalty is:

* You ask a gang member to do something they don't want to do. They're heavily armored. They don't feel threatened by you. You gotta make an example.

This just doesn't make sense to me. The guy in your gang knows you. You're the leader of his gang. You're not like, a random one-time threat he is evaluating anew when he considers disobeying you -- the example you have to make is not 'I hit him once, with the exact consequences of that isolated piece of violence'. If he disobeys you he is risking protracted retribution over time, in a variety of ways that may or may not have to do with violence, from someone who exists in his social reality, and who is demonstrably a bigger bad-ass than him. It's not the same thing as deciding whether or not you can take a shot from that guy's gun on the way through the door. You don't rule your gang because you can do more harm to them than they can do to you in a single exchange.

I mean I get that you are trying to come up with reasons for armour to be bad, and probably to some degree I am biased by my feeling that this is a silly thing to do -- but these gang-related adjustments seem like a stretch to me even so. I can come up with an almost endless list of hardholder-orders that a gang is more likely to take if they are heavily armoured than if they are not (like, say, pretty much anything that puts them at risk of gunfire?) Moving more slowly because of armour seems negligible in comparison with the feeling of security and power that results from possibly not being killed when someone shoots you.

Why is it silly to want armor to be not strictly mechanically optimal* while we pretend to be elves?

* "Strictly mechanically optimal" meaning that, there's fictional problems with armor which make armor a poor choice for wearing in many circumstances, but mechanically, its better than not wearing it, except for when moves say otherwise.

Because AW is a game that depends on hammering home the fiction! Like, if someone with a handgun said they wanted to shoot a guy 300m away you'd just say "that's not close enough, do you really want to waste your bullets?" and if someone says "I read her!" about someone who had their tongue cut out you'd be like "you have to find a way to communicate well first, do you know how to write?".

AW is also about what Vincent thinks is correct. Like, people listen to hard people (and only hard people) as leaders. To manipulate someone you need leverage. Most people do not survive a shotgun blast.

By changing the game you're saying something about how you think the world works and one of them if "wearing armor is not always the best choice". It clashes with other people's view of reality when you say stuff like "armored gangs are harder to lead". The only people whos perception matter of course is you and your players.

Back on topic, me telling you what I think armor penalties should look like :)

Since tags are a functional way to do fictional/mechanical stuff in AW, why not add the tag -cumbersome to any cumbersome armor? Then you can use the MC move "activate their stuffs downside" plus have a nice tag as reminder. So if they blow a roll to do some crazy stunt (or hit with a 7-9) you can be like, you won't make it being so emcumbered, doff your armor and you can do it.

If the effectiveness of armor is what irks you you could simply downgrade all armor. Light armor doesn't protect against harm at all (but maybe gives a bonus to the harm-move?) and heavy obvious armor give 1-armor.

You could say that quality metal and skilled armorers is fucking rare and that 2-armor costs like 6-barter and that nobody can start with it for themselves or their gangs.

2-armor must include a bullet proof helmet with a tiny slit to look through, to read a situation you must remove the helmet and thus downgrade your armor to 1-armor temporarily (then opening your brain during battle becomes a better option <3 battlefield instinct).

Bullets > frying pans. Armor only counts vs. melee weapons.


North Hollywood Shootout: a guy or two in homemade armor fight a medium gang of police officers for over half an hour.

I think the most interesting thing about nerfing armor is the way that it boosts the armor-like moves.  The nearly-naked Battlebabe is even more of a bad-ass in an Apocalypse World where armor is harder to wear. 

Why is it silly to want armor to be not strictly mechanically optimal* while we pretend to be elves?

* "Strictly mechanically optimal" meaning that, there's fictional problems with armor which make armor a poor choice for wearing in many circumstances, but mechanically, its better than not wearing it, except for when moves say otherwise.

Well Krippler put it much better than I could, or moreover demonstrated it much more competently with his suggested approach. If armour is going to be a problem then it should be a problem in a way that makes sense, not a way that feels like a mechanical shoehorn on a fictional problem. I think adding a tag to +armour equipment is a sensible way to signal to your players that armour will not always be the best idea, without trying to think of one or two isolated mechanical examples that -- because of the general scope/granularity of moves in AW -- will almost certainly feel awkward and inaccurate to the fiction on at least some occasion.

I mean, D&D (of some modern edition) has movement rules, and generic science-style spellcasting, so if you want to implement a penalty to movement for armour or a penalty to spellcasting the system is going to support that in a thoroughgoing, consistent way -- armour penalties will become just one of many things modifying rolls, in concert with other bonuses and penalties, etc. The level on which the mechanics and fiction interact will support these penalties, and the fact that in general the game is about optimal tactical choices (even when you are purposefully not making them, you are aware of them and expect them to have important consequences) makes having armour operate in that way a perfectly unremarkable idea.

My feeling is that AW doesn't really work like that. Adding a penalty for wearing armour that applies to x number of moves regardless of the fiction is not generally a good idea -- it's just like the first example Custom Move that Vincent puts in the book, that allows the MC to arbitrarily decide if something is harder or easier than average for the move, and then modify the roll with a bonus or penalty as a result. I think the idea of using armour (and possibly its tags) to inform the existing mechanics is probably more likely to get you what you want?

I'm going to say that the proposed solution of adding tags wouldn't fit my needs because that's another thing that I'd have to keep track of and be creative about, and I don't want to because I don't care about "problems-with-people-running-around-in-armor" enough to want to spend a lot of time thinking about it, compared to thinking about "oooh, maybe some psycho has a flamethrower" or "There's this drug dealer who wears a duct tape dress and she's smoooooth". So for my goal of:

1) Make a mechanical disincentive for worn armor.

2) Without having to think about it too much.

3) That makes enough sense to me.

"-worn armor to Act Under Fire, (with possible exceptions, the same way armor reduces harm with possible exceptions)" does the job better than adding a tag. Its quite possible that adding a tag would do a lot better job of #3 for you, but for me it would fail way to much on #2.

((I think this mismatch in game expectations for Apocalypse World probably owes to an interesting quirk of AW: I think that moreso than a lot of games, it puts risky color content pretty upfront, and its a somewhat likely (for people I've played with) that people will be unevenly excited about: "People running around with fancy weapons and body armor", "bondage gear", and "psychic maelstrom", though when people are totally on board with all 3 its usually pretty sweet.))

I wanted a custom rule to disincentive worn armor. I'm thinking:

ARMOR IS AWKWARD

- Its hard to move around wearing armor. When you act under fire, subtract from your roll the value of the armor you're wearing.

- Armor also puts you in the mood to bust heads. Armor of a gang is subtracted from Leadership/Pack Alpha rolls made for them.

Here´s why I think they´re not good:

-They mess quite a little with the core rules: the moves are pretty much always 2d6+stat, they almost never have circumstance penalties (other than -1forward), and that´s by design. You´re adding a new layer to the moves rules that goes against the design principles in AW.

-The penalties are BIG. First of all, 1-armor, by the book, may not be armor at all, just a leather jacket. I think it shouldn´t give you a penalty. And second, a -2 (if 2-armor) is SERIOUS SHIT: even a +3 will be turned into a +1, a big difference. You´re not making a little disincentive. Most serious players are gonna drop the armor completely.

-You don´t solve the armor tank issue. Let´s take a gunlugger. He always uses Hard, he´s even got a hard move to run away from combat. So the awkward armor moves don´t bother him: armor doesn´t interfere with seize by force and go aggro, and neither does it with his escape move.

-The move creates weird situations: Maggo wants to stay behind cover and avoid heavy fire until the end of battle. He rolls to act under fire, substracting his armor value. Why? You still have to think whether to apply or not the penalty case-by-case, so I don´t know if it saves you some time or not.

-The move nerfs gang users A LOT: every gang you create by the rules or playbooks has 1 or more armor. What your move does is draw out a lot of power from both chopper and hardholder pcs, who will be pretty much always rolling -1, and that´s a lot. This will lead to fictionally weird situations, like a gang leader telling their gang to drop their armors before heading into combat. Also, remember 1-armor may not be literally armor, so imagine a gang member feeling more secure because he´s wearing a leather jacket. Why?

I´d rather stay within the core rules and add a descriptive tag, like cumbersome, ridiculous or something like that. Tags are not so hard to use, they only pop up when it makes sense in the fiction, pretty much like car weaknesses. When they do, call for a move (like acting under fire), say something that makes sense (no way you´re sneaking into the building with that wonky armor, drop some pieces or you instantly call their attention) or use it when the player fails a move. Easy!

Double post -.-

The degree that my feelings on whether something is a feature or a bug mismatches with posters on this thread is remarkable. Not to imply there's anything wrong with the opinions expressed here, but it makes me think I've some kind of shift away from  the general demographic.

- Gunluggers with heavy armor are still unstoppable tanks? AWESOME

- People with armor find it more difficult to dive behind cover? AWESOME

You get -2 to a roll when someone who knows you does their very best to mess with you. So your rules say that wearing heavy armor is as much hinderance to dive behind cover as someone pushing you out of it.