Help: Breaking Orthodox Inhibitions and Getting Bloody

The MC guidelines are fantastic advice, and I have read through them numerous times. They make sense to me on an intellectual level.

When I run my game, I find that am still strangled by inhibitions when I MC (or I'm just really bad at improvising). I feel like Jack Skellington experimenting on Christmas to see what makes it tick.

For those of you who didn't get it at first but struggled to become good MCs:

What tools, mechanisms, techniques or watchwords really snapped you out of the rut of orthodox GMing and into the game of putting your bloody fingerprints on everything?

Can you give some examples from your actual play?

I'm always finding myself at a loss as to which MC move to make when the table goes quiet.

Admittedly, the players are cooperatively and proactively dealing with a pair of outside threats: a plague has broken out and they are motivated to contain it and minimize risk to their hold; also, the local slave lord's slave gang recently made a move on some of the hardholder's people who had caught the plague while out scavenging.

My suspicion is that I'm not documenting/detailing enough about NPC motivations and relationships with the PCs. Also, most of the scenes are PC-centered, which is to say, a PC is acting to solve a problem, rather than an NPC giving the PC a challenge or pointing a gun in someone's face. I feel as if I'm reactively MCing, and I'm finding it hard to swing the momentum the other way where I'm the one punchig their characters where they are vulnerable.

The proactive questioning, the shoving guns in faces: I'm still slow when it comes to that stuff, and I wonder if really doubling down on the NPCs and their needs will give me more improvisational fodder for when that quiet moment comes.

As for actual play examples: the scenes that happened, happened, and while there may have been rules glitches, I managed them successfully enough.

One recent example in our third session of play: the Angel, Hardholder and Brainer went out to gather some samples of the plague fungus that a few of the Hardholder's people had eaten in desperation (the hunger want had been indicated in session 1, and this is continuing activity on that subject).

I set up a mob of bastards from the local slaver camp, out to avenge a recent loss at the hand of this hardholder's gang. The firefight was a "seize by force" slugfest punctuated by the Brainer doing some mindfuckery, thankfully made shorter by the hardholder remembering to use the autofire advantage of his machine gun against the slaver party.

The Angel got pretty wounded, made it to 9, and so I let him use his Angel kit on himself: he blew the roll, so I let the Hardholder and Brainer roll Hx to help him out. They brought his 5 to a 7, so I chose to put him in a 24-hour coma, and spend an extra unit of his Angel kit.

Another moment was the Angel giving in and using Healing Touch on the Brainer. He rolled 7-9 (success, but "acting under fire"), and then blew the "acting under fire" roll. I just didn't know what to do to him at that point. I didn't give in to the temptation to go back and undo the success of his move (thankfully, this was borne out here on the board), but I just couldn't think of a good followup move at the time. And my grasp of my world's Psychic Maelstrom was so tenuous and underformed that the logical step - have the Maelstrom happen to him - stressed me out more than just letting the roll work. I've since had some good suggestions about what to do when that roll is blown for that ability, but I'm choking when I'm at bat.

The best thing to do when you're not sure what your move should be is to ask provocative questions.

For instance, if a PC rolls a miss on a "open your brain", you might ask:

"What's the scariest thing you've heard of the psychic maelstrom doing to someone?"

You don't have to use their answer on that same character, exactly, but it certainly gives you something to work with!

Same deal for other types of scenes. "Hey, Duke: which member of your crew do you find most suspicious? Why? What do you notice about him?"

Now you can use their answer to frame a scene.

"Ok, well, the next morning, sure enough, there's the suspicious dude doing that thing again... but this time he's got these weird goggles on and he keeps looking around, like he's seeing things no one else is."

Another good technique is just to consider the repercussions of any actions the PCs undertake. They killed someone? Someone's going to be pissed off about that. What do they when they found out?

They helped someone? Someone's going to be jealous about that. What will they do when they hear about it?

And so on.

Once you've got your Fronts written up, all the Fronts moves are for this purpose, as well.

Cool. Okay one quick comment. When Angel missed that was your cue to make a move, rather than allow Hx to help. If they wanted to help, they shoulda done that shit up front. But no worries.

Okay, next thing. If you don't know what to do, announce future badness. Thats your go to move. Barf forth apocalyptica and put your bloody fingerprints on everything. I think I may be parroting John Harper there.

Anyway, when asking questions, remember you're either making a move or setting up your move. Hopefully both. So, when you ask the Angel where he gets his medicine, lets say, You're announcing future badness. You're suggesting in that question that he doesn't have control of his supply. His sources are scarce and he has to rely on someone for his stock. So, look for where their not in control and set up future moves.

When he rolls a 7-9 on healing touch, you've got easy answers now. Offer him a hard choice. "You can heal yourself just fine, but its going to use up the last of your stim." Because of your questions you know that means he's gonna have to go see Wisher and deal with him to get some more stock.

Whenever you speak make a move, or set up a future move. If you don't know what move to make, announce future badness and then ask questions. Does that help?

Oh man, you didn't say the Angel was using healing hands on the Brainer! You have a great opportunity there to grab the Brainer's playbook and start using his moves on the Angel. Brain scan him, or put some puppet strings in there, give the maelstrom some hooks in him.

Building on Paul + James's advice, you can also just talk about how shitty things are. When the PCs go somewhere, you can casually describe it and talk about how everything is destroyed (post-apocalypse) and dirty or makeshift or skeevy or whatever. This is what Vincent means be cultivating apocalyptica. Just thinking about how screwed up things are in a post-apocalyptic world will get you on track for creating interesting problems for the PCs and for describing a cool and evocative setting around them. And it will start to make all the other jobs easier.

Rolling Hx to help after the fact seems totally legit to me. The help roll only has a point if the initial roll is at a very specific interval, and I hate having my players roll something for nothing.

As for the general problem...

First, stop worrying about the PCs, if you are at all. They can take a punishment, so if on a miss you go "Er, um, uh... Flying bears from the sky descend upon you!" and when they go "What?", you can very safely say "You heard me!" There's really no delicate balancing of appropriateness required, so if a part of your brain is worrying about "but will it kill them?", you can stop using that.

Next - not knowing what to do is natural at the beggining of every new game. The fiction builds up with time and makes your other decisions easier, though. For example - whatever you chose for the Angel's opened brain miss, it also let you get a better handle on what the maelstorm is all about, no? If so, you'll be able to draw on that next time someone botches (or hits) a roll.

You can always help yourself by taking some time to cultivate appropriate imagery. If at the beggining of a session you describe the plague ridden hardhold in detail - how the people move slowly and carefully to avoid contact with others, how someone intently looks at another's eyes or arms, how there's this inescapable smell that comes and goes with the wind from the west, it'll be easier for you to pull random details for busted moves whenever that's what you need.

As for being reactive - that's all well and good, more or less played the way it should be. Just have your NPCs react appropriatelly to what the PCs do, and don't worry if the PCs can deal with it.


So, basically - seed the fiction with details at every opportunity, have no worries about challenging the PCs or not. It's a mean world, and all you have to do is play it to a hilt.

Paul T has given you the best advice! "The best thing to do when you're not sure what your move should be is to ask provocative questions."

But also, don't worry too hard about breaking free from orthodox GMing and worrying about which move to make. It may well be that whatever you would have said as an "orthodox" GM is a perfectly valid MC move. MCing AW is probably not as different from what you usually do as you're worried it might be! Really, all the prep is just thinking up long lists of things that might go wrong or get complicated for the PCs so that when you have that moment of wondering what to say you've got a lot of material to choose from.

Honestly though, and enormously, any time you feel like you don't have a good idea what you're meant to say is a golden opportunity to ask a question.

Rolling Hx to help after the fact seems totally legit to me. The help roll only has a point if the initial roll is at a very specific interval, and I hate having my players roll something for nothing.

In a world of scarcity and shit, the fact that someone helps you always matters.

To me, on a miss, the MC should be making a move, rather than waiting for folks to decide if they're gonna help. Just like on a hit, you get your result. It's too late for someone to decide to roll Hx to Interfere.

I'm of two minds about the helping after the fact, and it stems from one of the mantras of a friend who runs Villains & Vigilantes games for us at conventions:

We'll always let you roll.

Because the "helping another" roll itself has a Fail condition (or if it doesn't already, I can incorporate one in cases like this), there is technically a downside for the last-minute helper(s). So long as I keep to the principles, of course, and actually put entertainment and/or teeth into such failures.

But yes: helping someone in AW seems like it should be a big deal, undertaken with resolve, not dropped after the fact.

But they might blow the roll...

IN any case:
I'm going to print out cards with the MC moves on them (maybe with examples) as handy referents, as well as some other advice. I also made an NPC card template with spots for their damage clock, another clock for any schemes or conditions they may have, and spots for notes, relationships, and threat/front placement. If they work, I'll post them to the play aids.

My takeaway so far is that I need to do more of the following:
Set up more scenes _in media res_ (rather than faithfully following a line of consciousness) and then ask "what do you do?"
Threaten the PCs with scarcities and with NPCs that have scarcities.
Be more diligent about establishing and yanking on relationships between NPCs and PCs.
When all else fails, announce future badness, or ask questions and then barf apocalyptica/smear blood on the answers.

Should we take this help/interference thing off-this thread, maybe? I feel like it could be interesting discussion - because I think that help/interfere is a badly designed move and what we're (me explicitly, you, I think, implicitly) are talking about are ways of fixing it.

In a world of scarcity and shit, the fact that someone helps you always matters.

Gotta tell you, my opinion is that that's a bullshit platitude. It's true in the sense that, in the fiction, sure. If people help you, that's great, you might get the warm fuzzies inside, woo.

The other thing, though, is that the design of the help/interfere rules is the most lackluster thing in the whole design of AW.

It fails as a mechanical rule - you roll your dice with a risk as great as any roll, but you're only going to have any positive mechanical influence over the roll 14.6% of the time (42% fail, 44% whiff).

It fails as a fiction cue (as compared to other moves in AW at least) - when was the last time you did a help/interfere roll that made it matter what your actual history was? The move is completelly generic, and you can always do the same thing to a dude regardless if you watch him sleep or if you poisoned someone together.


There are two fixes to the move - one is to only even let it apply when it matters (other dude rolled a 6 or 9), and the other is one that I *think* you're implying is to have the in-fiction action of helping have an effect regardless of what the result of the roll is. But since I'm an AW MC, I'm always already doing that second thing. The hell do I need to waste my time with a meaningless extra roll?

Should we take this help/interference thing off-this thread, maybe? I feel like it could be interesting discussion - because I think that help/interfere is a badly designed move and what we're (me explicitly, you, I think, implicitly) are talking about are ways of fixing it.

I don't mind if you make that a separate thread, no. That said, I'm not implicitly criticizing the help another move, myself. I'm still getting used to the system. I look forward to seeing what the community has to say.

Ah, I think I see where we are looking at it differently. I don't think of help/interfere as a roll, I think of it as a move. It starts with, what are you doing? So, the Core's hit and he's bleeding hard. He clamps down on the wound hard. Proust is like "can I help?" The MC asks proactive questions "I don't know. You ever dealt with this kind of thing before?" "Sure," says Proust "the apocalypse is a deadly place. I've been a scrape of two." The MC asks "You've seen folks die? Who?"

Now, that Proust bonfides are established the MC asks "how do you help, Proust? What are you doing? Better be quick, Core's not looking too good." I reach for his kit "yelling tell me what you need, man." Okay, now we might have triggered the helping move. Or the MC might make a move like "you're gonna have to take your eyes off the road (tell them the consequences and ask).

That's awesome helping. But, yeah just rolling Hx for a + is blah.

This is more specific advice to your game, but: you need some internal threats. You need some NPC triangles with the NPCs inside the hold, that connect them to the plague and to the slavers in a way that simply reinforcing the wall between Inside and Outside will not solve.

When 3 PCs go out to perform a task together, throwing an external threat at them is usually less effective than exposing one of their triangles -- not to make banding together impossible, just to make it more interesting. Maybe the PCs know some of these slavers, maybe it turns out the plague affects some of them differently than others, etc. (Random example: plague victims' brains are easy to control, +1 to Brainer moves against sick people.)

For more general advice, I think having one or two MC moves on cards is a good idea -- but not all of them. Just think about your game situation and pick one or two MC moves you rarely use to practice each session -- don't try and use the whole list at once, that will just be overwhelming. Threat-type moves are also good things to write down on cards.

Yes. Who in the hardhold that the PCs care about needs these slavers or needs things they can provide?