Increasing difficulty? PC's never fail?

Nah, you're probably being too hard on yourself. You just didn't play up the scarcity angle enough, I think. If you make sure Cutter knows that woman he took on as a new assistant who's ratting him out was the ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD who can work with diseases, and you give whichever PC rounded up the infected people the disease, then suddenly "I shoot her and intimidate the others" becomes slightly less effective.

Or if the only person in the world who knows how to make decent shoes is kind of an asshole... even then what do the PCs do? Even with cool+3 it would suck to have to act under fire all the time because you've got broken glass in your feet all the time.

But you're right: If you're not very comfortable running a certain style of game, it really does help when you see someone else running it that way -- a lot more effective than learning it out of a book or from forum posts. I hope you get to play that game at some point.

I don't want to harp on this, because I agree with Johnstone that it sounds like you're being a bit harsh on yourself, but: if your PCs decide that the only way they can deal with your problems is to not care about any of the NPCs, then that probably means you were doing a pretty good job of running the game. It's pretty easy to deal with the apocalypse if you just don't give a shit -- though probably that will get you dead eventually (see: Johnstone's comments on what happens when you let important people die/fuck off.)

If they just started out not caring about any of the NPCs and so it never felt like a decision they had to make, that's a bit more of a problem, and that's where those first few sessions are so important for the MC. Those are the sessions where you figure out who they like, who they depend on for stuff, etc. so that later those are the NPCs you can put in triangles, threaten, demonstrate their particular thing-they-want, etc.

Anyways, I hope you come back to the game with better luck in the future.

At no point did any of the players or their characters give a shit about NPCs. The characters were always interested in our own particular goals, but NPCs that couldn't get on board were eliminated with prejudice. Pogroms solve more troubles than negotiations.

Not only that, but there seemed to be few goals that the mechanics made too tricky: need to have the Savvyhead build a tank/have the Angel cure the rare disease/anything else? Get your list of O NO ingredients and then... apparently there's almost no trouble that a Seize by Force won't solve. Hard drives the plot, everything else is just there to make things interesting on the way.

I mean, "change someone's ways"? LOL. No. Shoot them in the face, then nick their shit.

At no point did any of the players or their characters give a shit about NPCs. <<Snipped>>
I mean, "change someone's ways"? LOL. No. Shoot them in the face, then nick their shit.

I can completely relate to this. Unfortunately, this may be an issue where you and the group differ on what you want out of gaming. I was straight up told that gaming was "an escape from the the BS of society" by one player and he had no intention of "playing a game about about feelings" and that he just wanted to be a badass. I no longer try to play certain games with that player, it saves me a lot of frustration. We tend to stick to Rifts or M&M because that works for us.

If you haven't already, the best thing to do is talk to them. Ask them why they went the route they did and then decide if thats the logic you want to drive the games you play. They may not want to explore another type of story and are happy with trying to out badass each other. (Its as valid as anyother game.) If so, and you still want to try and change their opinion. you can point out to them that in history when people pulled that shit their neighbors would eventually organize and kill them. I mean if they go for the nuclear option, so will others.... anyway, just my 2cp.

So, basically they played it like D&D? That's cool, but it's no surprise AW didn't deliver, and if that's the way they want to play, it never will, because it's not the mechanics that make things difficult, it's the fiction. The mechanics don't tell you how hard it is to cure a disease, you tell the mechanics, and then the PCs have to live up to that.

I think you guys should try Dungeon World.

So what happens when your bed explodes after you killed someone that someone else loved?

Or take a sniper's shot to the head because you were just shooting folks instead of reading the sitch or making friends?

What happens when, the next time you go to pillage the "farmers in the next valley" and find that they've given up on this locale and moved on and your little tin cup is empty?

When you're not giving the curing of the local disease any effort and everyone dies, what do you have left?  Just move on?

Why wouldn't there be any ramifications to the PCs' antisocial behavior?  Make Apocalypse World seem real.

We weren't antisocial: we were effective. With Sharps at +3 (or greater) and Hards at +3 (or greater), it gets pretty trivial to find out who your enemies are and then eliminate them. Apocalypse World's mechanics encourage some seriously easy mind person reading.

I mean, why pillage farmers when you can make a better world with, say, a windmill powered by hope, and then convince those farmers to join up with you because you basically can't lose gang fights, are being nice, and are devastatingly effective at eliminating threats the moment they're detected? This wasn't about HAHA NO ONE CAN STOP US KICK THAT PUPPY FOR FUN, it was more, "hey with a few dierolls we know more than everything we care to about our opposition and then with a few more we can eliminate them and a few more by the Angel and Savvyhead we can invent all kinds of mechanical and biological solutions to resolve the immediate post-apocalypse-ness in this neck of the woods".

I mean, the disease cure was brutal and effective - eliminate the sick, heal the well. So was eliminating the raiding gangs and using the power vacuum to insert our own gang as armed transport and trade facilitators. So was a lot of other "find evil, shoot it in the face" sort of solutions.

If anything, the "realness" made things trivial; it seemed only contrived crapsack grimdarkness would keep the challenge coming. The AW mechanics support some pretty easy rides to glory: playing it real made the PCs' jobs easier.

Can the OP provide some details, especially about the disease front? I mean, even if you kill all the sick, wouldn't that depopulation severely weaken the holding's economy? Wouldn't there be uprisings from the healthy with sick relatives/loved ones? Would you be killing some essential workers?

Like if you get all you need from an Angel or Savvyhead then kill them, what happens if you need an Angel or Savvyhead later?

And the post about a medical assistant involved with a Touchstone, was that a romantic relationship, or just "friends"? Did the Touchstone not care that the med assist was executed by the other character?

If at no point did anyone care about NPCs, how does it follow that the behaviour was not anti-social?

If on the contrary, the PCs were solving problems in productive, sociable ways, that doesn't really seem like a problem -- that's what the game starts to turn into once PCs reach a certain power level.

But also, at least based on the description it sounds like the workspace moves were perhaps being used a little generously -- that or all the PCs were ultra-cooperative, problem-solving geniuses. I mean, you can't actually just invent whatever you want using a Savvyhead's workspace -- it's entirely legitimate for the MC to look at the list of questions, look at what you want to make, and tell you that it will take you years of work and lots of resources you don't even know the name of. You can't be like 'I want to make a modern computer' when nobody even knows what a circuit-writer is.

Either way, it sounds like part of the problem was that the PCs never had any reason to disagree with each other about what to do? Or did each and every player have all their stats at +3 somehow? Creating PC-NPC-PC triangles early on is pretty crucial to keeping the game interesting, even once the PCs have started to overcome some of the most immediate threats. If the PCs never care about any NPCs, or are never dependent on any NPCs in mutually-complicating ways, then those triangles won't work and the game will probably fall flat.

The PC-NPC-PC triangles are even more crucial than the Fronts, because they're the meat and potatoes of character drama which is, frankly, the point of Apocalypse World.

If Fronts get resolved, they should reveal something more disturbing.
If Threats get resolved, it came at a cost.
If the players never fail a dice roll, then tap your way into other avenues of emotional investment (love, hate, envy, hope) that will yield better fruit than success/failure vs. immanent and obvious threat.

The other thing about Apocalypse World is how mysterious you can make it: even if the players read situations until they're blue in the face, there will always be some unexplored aspects, things they don't quite understand, and layers upon layers upon layers of shit to deal with.

There is no status quo, even when your protagonists are ruthlessly competent.

Personally, I have noticed that in AW campaigns I've played, there's an unspoken a countdown clock that's closely tied to XP.  Around the time people are settling into their second playbook and/or retiring, things have always fallen apart. Having a Quarantine, Touchstone, Insight (or its variants) or just someone who loves to Manipulate other players and offer them XP can speed up that process. Having more than one can shoot XP through the stratosphere. In one (online) game I played in, this was about session 4, with my Quarantine having come in at Session 2 and still caught up with everyone else.

By then your PC's probably have +2-3 in their major stats and have taken stat replacement moves to duck around their 0 and -1 stats and have as many moves as they can get on that playbook. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that means they don't really have to worry about the neighboring raiders and the like. There's a paradigm shift that happens at this point that isn't easy to manage. Now that your PC's can do anything, what is it they want to do? Who's going to come to them for help? How do they play off of each other? What can they be convinced to do today that they'll regret tomorrow? How do the new PC's from "play a second playbook" react to the demigods they're thrown into the mix with? I'm not sure I have an answer but I can at least see the outline of the issue.

Not caring about NPCs is a symptom. The game works on caring about NPCs. That's what PC-NPC triangles are all about. I can't imagine playing a game of AW where I didn't care about the NPCs. Some of them I hate and want nothing more than to see them lying bleeding in the street. Others I am protective of and risk death to save them. But indifference?

If I found myself not giving a shit about the NPCs, I'd bow out of the game.

I mean, the disease cure was brutal and effective - eliminate the sick, heal the well.

What were their names?

Which one of you killed the children? What were their names?

So was eliminating the raiding gangs and using the power vacuum to insert our own gang as armed transport and trade facilitators.

What were their names?

HAHA no one cared. I mean, I remember the name of the gang leader, Kettle, and his Grotesque aide de camp which escaped (Gurt), but mourning the dead was something we got over after the first game. As soon as it became clear that awful things were going to happen to the NPCs (hard moves!), there seemed little point to get attached to them: they were disposable. The MC tried, laid out the names, gave stories, fleshed things out, but it got clear, quickly, that they were distractions or obstacles.

You can only stare into the Abyss so long before it stares back. For us, that was about one session in.

It's not a hard move to destroy something no one cares about.

That was actually part of the problem: once it became apparent that everything was disposable, then... everything became disposable.

Maintaining the tension of keeping NPC important yet completely expendable is a tough lift. For us, once it was clear that NPCs (and gear, and just about anything) could be eliminated by an endless number of methods, it became difficult to ascribe any weight to them. No one mourns toilet paper. The only schemes that mattered were our own, since NPCs were just there to impart pathos and import rather than able to actually meaningfully affect the story.

That's actually a large part of their expendability: they have no mechanical role in the system other than being there to try to marginally fuck with you - say shit, do shit, whatever - but as they can't effectively roll dice against you, they just push you to the limit and force you to make the roll... at +3 or more. Their large and obvious divorce from the mechanics of action resolution naturally divorces them from heavy PC consideration. In some sense the game plays like a superhero game, in that most folk you encounter provide only noise and background, and only supervillians - Fronts - really can do anything meaningful. Toss in the post-apocalypse despair and it's little wonder to me why I marauded through the game like the Punisher.