Crafting moves

So I know that the Savvyhead is the main crafter -- maker of things -- in the game. The Savvyhead is a Weird character; the world's psychic maelstrom is what's allowing human beings to keep pre-apocalyptic artifacts running, when by all rights they wouldn't be able to by their own wits and knowledge. There are no schools anymore, no libraries, no Wikipedia; and the graying shreds of paper Owner's Manuals, or flickering corrupted files on screens wired up to fading car batteries, don't really contain enough information for a person to know how to fix a loom or a carburetor or a mechanical LP jukebox -- never mind an iPod or a violation glove -- without opening her mind to the world's psychic maelstrom.

However, not every hardhold has a Savvyhead magicking up tech, and yet somehow some things are getting made and fixed. And in my game I have a Touchstone whose inspiring vision of hope is all about weaning ourselves from salvage, returning to technology we can understand, and creating something sustainable in the ruins of the unsustainable -- going back to the loom, the plow, the kiln, and the forge. In game mechanics terms, this Touchstone stands for the proposition of rebuilding the world by rolling Sharp rather than Weird. Naturally he is therefore all about bows and arrows and hand-forged machetes and living off the land.

I like this angle and am happy to take the game in that direction (especially since there seems to be a fruitful tension on this question between the Touchstone and the scornful, salvage-addicted, Golden-Age-worshipping Hoarder). But it seems to call out for a special peripheral move -- not belonging to the Touchstone character in particular, just answering the question "what happens when someone who's not a savvyhead tries to fix or repair a thing?"

First off, I thought I'd divide technological artifacts into four types, because it seems to me that there are four levels of technology implied by the game's backstory. I'll quote at the end of this post what I wrote the players about that, but for now, let's just say bows and arrows are "From Scratch", forging a blade with a hammer-and-anvil-and-salvaged-propane-blowtorch is "Tinker", an M-16 is "Golden Age", and a painwave projector is "Pre-Collapse".

So here's the proposed move, which is a hybrid of the Savvyhead's workspace rules and the "when you go into a bustling market" move:

When you try to fix or craft a thing, and it’s not obvious whether you should be able to just like go fix or craft one like that -- for one thing, you've never done it before -- roll+sharp, with the following modifier by tech level:
   +1 for From Scratch
   0 for Tinker
   -2 for Golden Age
   -3 for Pre-Collapse
On a 10+, the MC chooses one of the following. On a 7–9, the MC chooses 2-3:

• it’s going to take hours/days/weeks/months of work;
• first you’ll have to get/build/fix/figure out ___;
• you’re going to need ___ to help you with it;
• it’s going to cost you a fuckton of jingle;
• the best you’ll be able to do is a crap version, weak and unreliable;
• it’s going to mean exposing yourself (plus colleagues) to serious danger;
• you're going to need a dedicated workspace first, and it'll need to have ____ in it;
• it’s going to take several/dozens/hundreds of tries;
• you’re going to have to take ___ apart to do it.

The MC might connect them all with “and,” or might throw in a merciful “or.”
On a miss, you're never going to be able to fix or craft that sort of thing -- this is a job for experts.
If it's a new thing, and you manage it, the MC will stat it up.

What do you think? Overly complicated? The idea is that an ordinary non-savvyhead person can act somewhat like a Savvyhead with a workspace on a hit, although they are at a serious disadvantage with regards to sophisticated technologies; on a miss, they're going to need a Savvyhead....

Here, as an addendum, is what I wrote to the players about how the different tech levels figure in our campaign:

From Scratch (Neolithic)
If your access to salvage is totally cut off, or your salvage has run out, and you're living off the land, you're basically in the stone age. Much of daily life is at this level, particularly agriculture, which in many places involves a lot of hunter-gatherer activity.

Tinker (medieval through early 20th c)
This is salvage which you can understand without special insight or complex knowledge: analog stuff. A sharp tinkerer who finds a record player and some LPs is probably at some point going to figure out how it works; she may have to bypass the electrical system and crank it by hand, but simply running the needle through the grooves and amplifying that sound (eg by means of a gramophone bell) is going to produce a recognizable sound. It's discoverable. (Try that with a CD.) You can't blow glass or smelt iron or make tubing, so you need salvage to create a still or a blacksmith's forge or a plow or a barbed wire fence, but if you have one of those around, you can pretty much inspect it and figure out how to make another one out of salvaged raw materials.

Golden Age(late twentieth to early twenty-first century)
This is the stuff we have today, and, in my imagination, it's relatively common in Apocalypse World, more common than the subsequent category. Of course the functional categories don't necessarily map to time periods; a ballpoint pen is Tinker even though it's a modern item, because you could probably make a second one by inspection (using anything staining for ink). But cars, guns, and iPhones are in this category because nobody's really up to making them (there are no examples of front-loading muskets and black powder lying around to copy from -- so Tinker armament is limited to the bow, knife, etc) or even, really, fixing them without Savvyhead weird insight or some painstakingly preserved pre-Apocalypse tradition.

Pre-Collapse(future tech)
This is the freaky stuff in the rulebook -- painwave projectors, violation gloves, temporal transmitters, and so on. Clearly, the Apocalypse happened sometime after now, because Pre-Collapse civilization had a chance to make this suff. You may wonder, then, why I say this stuff is rarer than the Golden Age stuff. I offer one out-of-game reason and one in-game reasons.

The out-of-game reason is that I think that the game is more concrete, vivid, and interesting when most of the stuff the characters are using is stuff we all have the same image of. When someone pulls out a sawed-off shotgun we have an instant common image, set of associations, etc. Pain wave projectors are also cool, but it's good, I think, for me to insert them a bit sparingly, as spice to the meat. Since they're freaky and awesome to us, it doesn't hurt if they're also freaky and awesome to the characters.

The first in-game reason -- and this is, at this point, just a guess, a suggestion I glean from the backstory -- is that AW is set in the United States of America, and in late Pre-Collapse times the USA may not have been at the leading edge of tech. If the collapse happened in 2013 and the campaign was set in a remote area of Gambia or Pakistan, there'd be plenty of stuff lying around that was 10, 20, 30, 50 years behind the current technological standard (as well as some stuff, like some of the cell phones, that was cutting edge). The US was perhaps in decline long before the Apocalypse hit, and so most of the pain wave projectors and brainer violation gloves are import -- and sometimes the instructions are in Cambodian, Javanese and Estonian, another barrier to the non-Savvyhead tinker.

The second in-game reason that the backstory suggests is this: a lot of these pre-Collapse technological items actually use "the world's psychic maelstrom". They are connected to it, designed for it. That says to me that the maelstrom wasn't something that just showed up one day and boom, the next day society collapsed. There was a period of coexistence. Whether the maelstrom, including its apocalyptic effects, came from the outside but not everywhere at once, so that some areas adapted to it and produced goods exploiting it before succumbing -- or whether the causal relationship is the other way around, and human experimentation with something which was, produced, or presaged the world's psychic maelstrom was the cause of the Apocalypse, isn't clear. (Though it's suggestive that an apocalypse that happened in 1960 would have been an Atomic Age apocalypse, leaving radioactivity as its calling card, and the apocalypse we expect today would be all about climate change; of course, in AW the climate may be screwed up and there may even be radioactive traces of small-scale tactical nukage, but those are secondary effects of the real Bad Thing That Happened -- our descendant's chickens, as opposed to ours, coming home to roost). In any event, pre-Collapse tech, as opposed to Golden Age tech, is from a time when limited areas of humanity were producing maelstrom-ready goods, while many other places were already reverting to wilderness.

What do you think? Overly complicated?

Yes. You don't roll +weird to use the Workspace moves, right? You just use them.

I don't mean to dismiss your conception entirely, but I think it's worth challenging. The thing that sets a Savvyhead apart when fixing high tech objects is not just her workspace, it's access to Things Speak. Not all Savvyheads even have that move.

The workspace rules are after all still subject to 'make Apocalypse World seem real': a Savvyhead without Things Speak and with no fictional reason to understand golden age tech does not automatically get to fix a painwave projector, or a computer, just because she has a workshop. Sometimes one of the things the MC says is 'first, you'll have to figure out how to manufacture silicon chips', because that's just what the fiction demands. The workshop is not a magic place, absent the laws of logic and narrative: it's exactly the opposite, it's the catch-all set of rules for doing anything, within the framework of Apocalypse World. (That's why for example they are just ported over wholesale to an Angel's infirmary, etc.)

Which also means that a move that gives other players access to the workshop rules is a totally cool and workable idea. But right now that move just reads like 'the workshop rules, but with a roll, and some weird modifiers' -- it's not really bringing a lot to the table. And also, consider that everyone else needs some sort of resource before they can access that move at all: an infirmary, a workshop, etc. Why do these people get to bypass that?

I mean obviously you are going to consider their resources as the MC when you choose from the list -- if somebody has a garage, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to fix a car -- but I'm not really sure what is driving you to take away the prerequisite of: you need some kind of workspace? Remember that even PCs who can't take a workshop as an advance can always acquire such a resource proactively in the fiction.

Interesting -- so if I understand you correctly, you don't think that the workspace "diceless move" is actually a Savvyhead thing in particular at all; it's just what a workspace gives you? That is, if the Hardholder happens to have a guy with a workspace in her hardhold, and feels a hankering to get her hands technically dirty today, she can just say "step aside, bub", roll up her sleeves, and use the workspace move described on the Savvyhead character sheet -- and that any difference between what the Savvyhead can do there, and what she can do, is wholly down to the fictional positioning ("well, unlike the Savvyhead, you don't happen to know how gears work, so...")

So the basic Savvyhead thing then, in terms of mechanics, is just "happens to be in possession of a workspace", and any, like "has been tinkering with things on and off for her whole life and has a weird affinity for objects" is a totally common-but-non-obligatory element of the fictional narrative, essentially separate from the mechanics?

I was sort of assuming that the Savvyhead in a workspace -- or an Angel in an infirmary -- is mechanically more than just someone standing in a workspace or an infirmary. That is, I figured that the Angel move "infirmary" means "you have obtained access to a physical space equipped to maximize your particular talents". So that if a Chopper and her gang, within the fiction, rode up to an infirmary, mowed everyone there down, and said "this here's my infirmary now", that it would be the game's mechanics -- not just the MC's reading of the fiction -- which would say "well, but that does not actually mean that you can work on patients there the way a Savvyhead works on tech".

I was imagining that even a Savvyhead without Things Speak has at least -- mechanically speaking -- a special set of skills -- if not a weird affinity for tech -- which enables the workspace move. But maybe that's not the intent. I find it hard, with both the Angel's kit and the Savvyhead's workspace, to understand if the mechanics are all about the thing, or about the dude with the thing. Is this an intentional ambiguity?

I guess there's a second point here, which is -- the dramatic tension of this particular campaign seems to be about crafting -- since that's the ideological divide that separates the PCs. So just as a campaign focussed on stealth would want the optional "sneaking" periperhal moves described in the Advanced Fuckery section, it seems to me a crafty campaign would want special moves to allow the dice to get in there. The design principle I guess being that if an issue isn't core, the MC should just go ahead and decide it, but if an issue is emotionally charged and dramatically meaningful, it's more fun for there to be a roll -- for the mechanics to do some of the heavy lifting.

In a campaign all about weaning ourselves from salvage and literally rebuilding, it seems odd that there are all these cool dice-centric moves involving barter and buying things at markets, but none about making and fixing.

she can just say "step aside, bub", roll up her sleeves, and use the workspace move described on the Savvyhead character sheet

Well, Not exactly. I mean, yeah she totally can, but she doesn't, in terms of the fiction, necessarily have the background and technical knowledge to do so. So the MC can say "sure but first you're going to have to figure out how internal combustion engines work. How do you figure that out? Well first you're going to have to add a library with books on the subject to your workspace, and its going to cost a fuckton of jingle to assemble the books, plus you'll need Bran [or whatever NPC savvyhead type] to help you"

The demands the MC can make to accomplish something in a workspace can work on a sliding scale based on what we know about the characters as established by the fiction.

Also, I'm sure that a hardholder pushing one of her own crew out of his work station is going to cause some waves, I know I hate it when my boss micromanages.

So in other words: "and that any difference between what the Savvyhead can do there, and what she can do, is wholly down to the fictional positioning." :-)

In a campaign all about weaning ourselves from salvage and literally rebuilding, it seems odd that there are all these cool dice-centric moves involving barter and buying things at markets, but none about making and fixing.

Well, the barter moves are optional, but I agree that you should support what your players are up to with cool moves, whenever it makes sense.

As for whether a Savvyhead in a workspace is fundamentally more, sure. I mean, they are the Savvyhead. But there is a lot of room between 'everyone uses a workspace the same' and 'the Savvyhead is the lord and master of technology, and is weird, and therefore a workspace is fundamentally different than making a bow and arrow by hand.' It's that latter impulse/reading that I was pushing back against, at least a little.

(As to the Angel, consider that there are moves that give people medical kits that act mechanically identical to the Angel's kit.)

But I mean it seems pretty clear to me that a non-Savvyhead could still use a workshop. Apocalypse World is full of non-Savvyheads, after all (the PC is the only one), and they are still fixing stuff.

Based on what you've described, it sounds like the tension in your game is between scavenging old things and making new ones, not between two different ways of making stuff. I think the workspace rules cover all of that pretty well -- and there's no reason not to use them as guidelines for someone making stuff without a workspace.

But another way of looking at it is that if they are making something that's not complicated enough to even require a workspace, why are you rolling dice for it? What are the variety of interesting outcomes you're going to be choosing between? The move you have right now seems like it's just going to make the MC's job harder, when it comes to making Apocalypse World seem real: usually the workshop questions are structured to give the MC maximum flexibility, so they can make sure that stuff that is hard to make is hard, and stuff that is easier is easy. What happens when the player hits a 10+ and wants to make something that absolutely should require two things on that list? How difficult is it going to be to contort the fiction around that? Or what if they're trying to build something pretty simple, but they miss? How do you explain that they can just never figure that out? I think the current workspace rules avoid a roll for good reason.

I don't really know the details of your game, but I don't know that I really see a 'move gap' there. While it's true you want to support your players with relevant moves, just because the game is turning out to be 'about' crafting and rebuilding, doesn't mean those things necessarily need to become more mechanically complex. There are lots of things in the default game that are 'core' but still decided by the MC -- even things that start from a move (like the +wants of a Hardhold) require the MC to become real in the fiction.

So in other words: "and that any difference between what the Savvyhead can do there, and what she can do, is wholly down to the fictional positioning." :-)

And also, she doesn't have Workspace on her character sheet, so when she goes into the workspace to get to the bottom of some shit, no move is triggered. Everyone looks at the MC and the MC makes a move.

I think this entirely depends on the game you're playing and there's no hard rule for what defines tech, how it can be fixed, or whee it came from. I've played an AW game where the apocalypse happened in the 1980s, and I'm running an AW game where it occurred in 1947.

I'm confused by your definitions as well. Pre-Collapse is synonymous with Golden Age in my opinion.

So you all have convinced me not to add a special move. I'm going to try just interpreting the standard Workspace move from the Savvyhead character sheet as "this is what it looks like when someone works in a workspace -- Savvyhead or not -- and your results will vary widely depending on your skill level and how well equipped the workspace is, but that's already in the move"... and interpreting "workspace" very broadly (could be as simple as a box of tools in the trunk of the car, but then the MC responses will vary accordingly).

So no reason to include them in the mechanics, but I still like the tech categories for the fiction.

The idea of an AW game where the apocalypse happened in 1947 is pure awesome. My question about that game is, who built the painwave projector? Who built the violation glove? I can think of lots of neat answers to that question (they were secret WWII government  research projects, or there are mysterious islands of high-tech survival AFTER the apocalypse still producing such things?) -- I'm just saying such questions need answers. The fact is that the AW rulebook includes technology we do not have now. We do not have violation gloves. So how are they in AW? There are basically, I think, at least six principal answers to that question, and which you pick (perhaps in the course of play) says something about the world (and fictional genre) your campaign is set in:

1) Future history. The Apocalypse happened after now, in our timeline, and the violation glove was developed in our future.
2) Alternate history. The Apocalypse happened in a timeline where people had violation gloves already by now or whenever.
3) Secret history. The Apocalypse happened in our timeline, and now or earlier, but there are actually violation gloves now. The CIA just isn't telling me about them.
4) Partial apocalypse. The Apocalypse happened when there weren't yet violation gloves, and they were developed subsequently. That means there is an island of tech out there somewhere where people are doing basic research on the world's psychic malestrom and turning it into industrial-grade products. It's sure as fuck not in this hardhold, though.
5) It's not tech. A violation glove? Dude, it's just a glove. The savvyhead's eyes got weird and he mumbled some shit over it and now the Brainer can... well, I don't want to talk about what the brainer can do. Who knows if the glove is doing anything? Maybe it just convinces the brainer. Or maybe the world's psychic maelstrom just likes it. Same with the painwave projector and all that shit.
6) Who the fuck knows?

I suppose 6 is really the canonical AW answer, but I felt like specifying. So my campaign is based on 1 and 4: there was a period in the run-up to the apocalypse where shit was falling apart but it was still possible to manufacture high tech objects. YMMV.

The rulebook clearly uses pre-Collapse and  Golden Age as synonyms, but the rulebook also has mostly now-ish tech salvage (cans of peaches, cars, submachine guns) with a sprinkling of weirdly superhightech objects mostly leveraging telepathic-like powers. I wanted to explain that by distinguishing between now (Golden Age) and after-now-before-the-Apocalypse-but-shit-was-already-falling-apart (pre-Collapse).

I'd actually be really curious to hear how your 1947-apocalypse world produced violation gloves, nerdwerds.

I'm just saying such questions need answers.

As you yourself point out later in the post, this isn't really true: the default answer (#6) is that the question is only important if somebody starts to give a shit. Of course, the MC is on the list of 'somebodies', so it's pretty legit to always need an answer to such questions if you happen to be a person who worries about technological logistics. (Which it sounds like you do!)

Well, you're right of course, and I fully embrace your pluralistic approach. In MY brain (which as you point out obsesses over such things), #6 is actually still an answer, with genre implications -- if 1 positions us in apocalyptic science fiction, 2 in apocalyptic alternate history, 3 in apocalyptic secret history, 4 in science fiction which includes an apocalypse, and 5 in apocalyptic fantasy, then, I think, 6 positions us in "liminal apocalyptic fiction" -- (in, since while I'm geeking about this I might as well go whole hog :-), Farah Mendelssohn's sense of "liminal" from Rhetorics of Fantasy) -- a world in which some very fundamental things about the world we're in remain forever (so far) mysterious.