How Much to Prepare?

Hi guys! Long time reader, first time writer. I have a question about prep.

So, some months ago I ran a session of AW, my first and only one. I had a Mastero'D, a Faceless, and a Savvyhead in a enclosed jungle roadway town. I assumed that I could create the world these people lived in with their help (and I was successful in this endeavor. World building is something I enjoy emmensly.) However, when it came down to actually giving the PC's shit to do.... I fell flat. I had few ideas for encounters, NPC's or even hooks to keep them interested. (It wasn't a very fun game, I have yet to play with that group since.) Now I'm looking to start up another game through roll 20, and yet I am still plagued by this. How much do I prep? Should I go in with a clearly defined world? Or should I have potential plots or enemies prepared? How do I keep the players interested, get them to *adventure*?

Sounds like it went really well, except you didn't get enough tension in the setup so you can have the Fronts you need to drive action. More questions to draw out "who do you hate/fear/love?" will give you that without any need for more prep. You are doing it right, but re-read "The 1st Session" again, and especially from "Look for where they are not in control".

By the end of our recent first session of a new AW campaign (with no MC) I am terrified of all the complications and implications for our characters because of the tension we came up with by pushing where we am not in control and leaving questions unanswered:
- radiation storms (what is out in the desert?)
- mutants below (what do they want?)
- sealed off areas (chances to find forgotten tech, or death traps?)
- rumours of high-tech cannibals above (or are they?)
- a gang trying to get in the hold (who is backing them?)
- little Timmy has a strange disease (what is it? why were those thugs talking about it?)
- internal politics x hardholder (why has he given up?) x lieutenants (what do they want?) x merchants (who will step up now their leader is dead? who started the fire?) x ...

Have fun!

Well, to be clear. Apocalypse World is more about the people and their stories, who/why/how, then about "adventure". Adventure somewhat assumes that the group are all gathered together for a similar purpose, and all need to do things to push towards that purpose in a very gradual type of way. If you used "adventure" in quotes to acknowledge the difference then ignore this part. :)

My first suggestion. Play in an Apocalypse World game.
You'll be able to see what other people and do and how they do it.

Second suggestion, Do not create a world alone. It is not your job to show them what you've done or let them find what you've hidden. It's your job to make what they are cool, relevant, and interesting. If you've a guy that wants to be a hero, then provide him situations to be a hero, then make the situations complicated with hard moves. If you've got a guy that like to be impulsive and awesome, then give him awesome shit to do, but have ready: reasons doing it impulsively (no read a sitch, maybe?) might've been a bad idea (to use on a miss). Those are cool ways to prep, bad ways are answering all the questions about a person the players haven't met or shaped yet.

THE MAELSTROM
I would put one of the MAJOR goals of the first (few) session(s) to define this: "How is your character weird?"
The weird score shouldn't be how weird they are, it should be how much that weirdness helps or hinders them. Everyone should be weird, unique, different, special, what have you. After you know how they're all weird, define the maelstorm privately to yourself. Just one line.

For example:
The maelstrom is the corrupted prophetic memories of the people they've killed or watched die. (haunting/psychological)
The maelstrom is a malevolence in the dark places, watching, hungry. (be afraid of the dark)
The maelstrom is the hopes, dreams, and morals of the golden age creeping in people's hearts. (goodness/weakness)

This is really the definition of what is fantasy about your world. It is that foundation for how your setting.. sets. This is what makes every AW game different then the last. You cannot make this before you meet the cast, you cannot build this on your own and it will take time to define clearly. This is the front that is universal in every game, it matters, somehow. It might be coming to get them, it might be trying to save them form themselves, whatever the case may be--make sure characters are tugged both ways. Its good to be close to it, its bad to be close to it, why? and why? That is will help make the strangeness mean something over a medium/long story. In single shot games, you build this fast, but you still build it with them.

The reason you want to know about the character's weirdness, is you can look at it all together and make something more of it. Begin to theme the visions that oracle sees when she closes her eyes. Bard forth description into the details that genius is assembling together. Make each character interact with the weirdness when they are and when they aren't rolling, but make it "get into them" on a roll, if it hurts or helps? That's for the roll to decide.

NON PLAYER CHARACTERS
Personally, all of my Prep concerns the non player characters. I go out and make images for anyone that stood out. I try to keep a record of the character's opinions of each NPC, and then just add new lines underneath as their opinions change. That way I can clearly see if a non player character needs to interact with another character, or if one of them hasn't formed an opinion, or if the opinions haven't changed in a while. It gives me... sort of an indicator privately on which NPC I should be considering ways to drag into a scene, into someone's heart, or into someone's way.

I'll provide an example:
She is DOLLIA, and none of these character opinions will come from her. What she thinks doesn't really matter, what matters is what other people see her thinking, and what does that mean/entail/invoke. Basically, I know why, generally, she acted that way, but I make sure to define the character by what happened on screen, not silently in my head. This way you can change as needed, adapt to a new situation, or use an old loose thread to string the npc into another relevant conflict.

CHARACTER NAME and then that player character's opinion of her
RORYN I trust her with my life, and more.
HAVOC I'm not impressed by her, flinching at my wrath
ASHIVA I saw her happy, she loves Roryn behind his back.
QUIIN I think she cares about her duty, but she looks my way often lately.
RORYN I slept with Winona, she (dollia) seemed to break. I didn't realize until later why.
HAVOC She asked me why violence, I told her, because that's how things are. She feels good.
QUIIN She almost killed me, she murdered Winona, then she dragged me into her lies.
ASHIVA She had something interesting hidden in her room, I took it. (proof of her crime)
RORYN I told her how I felt (he suddenly loved her), and that I must marry another (but they'll never be together).
HAVOC She confessed everything to me, what a mess.
RORYN She's been acting off lately, distracted, emotional. I put her leave, she took it hard.
HAVOC I gave her a job, and I'm teaching her what I know. She tastes good.
HAVOC She want's to see the world, to be free. I want to help her find it.
QUIIN Eh... Why hold a grudge, let's play a game instead. You're my girl on stage.
ASHIVA I looked inside and saw hurt and hate, but she was smiling despite it all.
QUIIN She risked life and limb to save my ass.
HAVOC She and Her keep mixing together, I don't know what I'm feeling
RORYN She told me and I forgave her, but I couldn't go with her and she couldn't go with me.
HAVOC It hurts to lose a friend, but she's deserves a chance to live. I gave her my other bike. Goodbye.
QUIIN She's spectacular in this role, dazzling, a beautiful performance as our final stand.
ASHIVA We took the airship, fighting side by side. She smiled like she was free.
QUIIN I met up with her in Mecho a few weeks after, I asked her to come with me and she said yes. We set our bearings on the horizon, and fly.

Table of Contents:
RORYN hardholder (benevolent tyrant)
QUIIN skinner (playwright)
ASHIVA brainer (creepy observer)
HAVOC gunlugger (delusional hero)

This NPC started as the second in command of the hard-holders guard, and I wrote down a description of her when the game started "She's calculating, quiet, and merciless – because she loves him". One quick line, and everything started from that. You start doing things like this for a dozen, two dozen npcs over the course of a game, you can see all this mini stories starting to form. You can ask yourself questions like... Why did she love him? Why is she quiet? Where does her Hate come from? How did she get this job? etc. The key is not to settle on any of these being predetermined, let the story and the players help shine a light on these things. But thinking about them can help you be quick on your feet should some curve ball come your way.

End-Game Description
BACKGROUND
She was born to a whore-slave, and abused in the worst ways as a child. As she grew so to did the magnitude of the assaults. She was barely a teen when she killed her drunken father with his own gun. She would have been killed for murdering an Guard, but young Roryn begged his father for mercy. Feeling benevolent, his father commanded that the child join the Guard and fulfill to him her father's duty. And so she did. She would serve as the Hearth's first non-pure blooded Guard, and rise again to Commander upon Hardholder's Roryn's ascent to the throne. She would also become known as the first Commander of the Crystal Keep ever be relieved of the position. During this time she learned who she was, saw the world outside the keep, saw horrors and death, but made real friends all the while. She started in chains, rose with weapons, threw them aside for the wind, learned to dance and sing and fly. At the end of all things... Dallia Moore truly found what is was that she always sought, Freedom.
GROUPS: The Guard, Havoc's Crew, Quiin's Crew

This doesn't mean as much alone, but I did this for every npc and every player character. The records were kept online for the roll20 game and all the players could come by and read them. It was rather neat that despite every single PC getting a pretty epic end of the story departure, but all of the main npcs had their stories told in cool ways too. Some were tragic, some were cut short, some had some great irony. The thing was, that nothing ended like it began, so those 8 sessions basically changed the world. That change? That's the story.

FRONTS
You can look at Fronts as like an on coming storm. A storm hits things on its way to you, it some times hits hard, sometime builds slowly. Think about how you can use or introduce npcs that can show these things to the players. If there is a potential drought, prep a clock (or whatever):

before 3pm: No signs of the drought.
3pm: people in town talk about water a lot, its a thing people are trading around.
6pm: rumours that the farms around the town are failing, people getting anxious
9pm: its damned hot outside, no clouds just the fucking sun. Everyone out there is sweating or hiding in the shade.
10pm: the main well's gone dry, fights are starting to break out over the other water sources. violence then peace, violence death and the peace, violence and destruction, whatever.
11pm: travelers are starting to wander into town, hungry, thirsty, and wanting.
12pm: the last well has gone dry...

That might be example prep. None of that is set in stone, you'll need to prep npcs to bring out this issue and make it relevant to the characters. Make them make hard choices, push the "storm" closer and closer, but give them something to react to at every step. Problems that need to be fixed for the settlement to continue, people that need to be killed, people that need to be saved, however you wanna swing it.

Re-reading your post, I might've been a bit tangential.

If your issue is making things happen, I have some other suggestions. If this story was a hollywood movie, and you know the cast, what might be happening that interacts with all of them? Is it an action flick, a drama, a thriller? If you don't know, then ask them what they think. Or ask them what they've been struggling to do lately, and why it's been difficult.

So you've a jungle town on a mostly overgrown highway. Maybe something's coming down that road, and the people here are reacting to that something differently. Maybe someone's gone missing in the jungle. Maybe someone that hurt the faceless shows up to help another character, or hurt another character.

I honestly suggest dropping all of the non core playbooks until you're comfortable with the system. I've found that most of the other playbooks are flat in comparison to the main tropes that the main come laden with. That can vary from group to group, but it can also stifle you when you are learning to look for fertile ground.

MaestroD.... has a bar, yup. That's his thing. This playbook doesn't necessarily come with the same conflicts as say... the Skinner. The Skinner is something people want, they have stuff, songs, beauty. People want them, need them, love them--but it also brings up the questions, who feels forgotten, betrayed, stepped on. Whose husband cheated on them, whose wife became a whore, whose sphere of power is the skinner moving into? Which other powers want the skinner and what will they do to get her?

The MaestroD might have all of this too, but it means you have to ask them what their establishment is, why it matters, and start from the ground up. There so much less defined that it could go so many ways, that means the player and the MC need to know how to push it to make it interesting. What the shop need, what does it lack, who comes there, who doesnt, is a base for a gang? What gang? Are they hostile to the MaestroD? Where is the tension? Don't have any? Make some, Now.

This type of practice comes easily after awhile, and thankfully you dont have to do this alone. You can ask the players who'se been fucking with them recently, or what they're hoping to achieve, or what they enjoy doing. Each of these provides ways for you to give them things to do that they'll enjoy, react to, try to get around, through or over. That trying means tension, the possibility of failure means rolls. Rolls set shit into motion. Embrace the motion.

I've read all of your advice coming out of a smaller, two PC game. I feel that I understand the basics of the system for the most part. More study! More study is allways needed (while I feel confodent in my grasp of the system, implementing MC moves for certain things, like missing a roll, is kinda shaky) Yet, I feel a driving force as to why I get a little bogged down is the comfort level of my players. Now, some of them are actors, and most of them have played rpg's before to some extent, but most of them came from rule heavy systems like D&D. Most players assume that the MC should have all the awnsers, and because of this they shrink back from making big, interesting decisions. I had a fantastic time during this session, but I often found myself prompting the players with suggestions and even truly they'd say "Yeah, I say that," or "Yeah, that's what I do." Don't get me wrong, our session was amazing (I'm looking forward to corrupting my unsuspecting Quarantine into a champion gladiator), and yet I still feel that I'm falling flat as a MC. (Edit: to be more specific about the players, I feel they aren't pushing for where they aren't in control. Is it simply a matter of asking the right questions, throwing them off the deep end?) I agree, I need to play more AW from the other side of the table, but none of my friends are really able to take over, and finding games in my area's hard given the indie nature of the game. You all have given me a lot to mull over as I prepare for my big official full campaign.

The players don't push for where they aren't in control. You look for where they're not in control and push there. That's a GM thing. You do that by asking questions and building on the answers. "Where do you get your ammo? Who do you know best in the hardhold? Why is Bix out to get you?" And then you set up PC-NPC-PC triangles that revolve around those things, so they come up in play.

I would seriously try to avoid ever suggesting a course of action to a player to the degree that they can say 'I say that' or 'that's what I do' unless it is a refinement of a general suggestion they have already made, and they just aren't sure how to make it happen in the game (like 'I really want to manipulate this guy, but I don't know what counts as leverage, any ideas?' or whatever). If you are still doing this/having to do this by session 3 it seems like a pretty serious red flag; your players need to be able to internalize the world & its consequences well enough to make decisions on behalf of their characters. If they can't do that, it's either because they aren't interested or you're not communicating clearly (or you keep presenting them with complete courses of action that they choose between, which is a sort of combo of the former and latter.)

The job of the players is to decide what their characters do and who they are and if you get into the habit of doing that for them the game will not work. "I'm looking forward to corrupting my unsuspecting Quarantine..." just sounds like a disaster flag to me but maybe this is just a phrasing issue. Suffice to say the question of your Quarantine's corruption should be something you Wonder About; you should be looking forward to finding out what happens with the Quarantine's possible corruption, not attempting to achieve a binary-framed goal concerning it. In any case it won't be very interesting if the player of the Quarantine is not the one making the decisions about how to act and what to do.

Noclue already covered the 'where they aren't in control' thing -- it's not the players' job to make their characters lives' interesting, after all.

--

Going back to the OP, you say you had a lot of fun worldbuilding, and I'm going to assume the players were involved in this and that it was not an activity separate from playing the game -- in any case it shouldn't be. One pitfall in terms of creating interesting situations can be to build the world at too high a level of scope, without filling in immediate concrete details that affect the PCs; basically you shouldn't worry about building a world and should worry about building a community that includes the PCs and NPCs. If someone suggests some neat high-scope detail (about the Maelstrom, or some sort of nearby cult) that's rad: you should immediately find a way to connect it directly and concretely to the PCs and their community.

Example: the Maelstrom in your game is developing into this sort of weird ghost-possession thing, where sometimes it tries to take over people's minds or make requests of them that seem to come from the long-dead past. At some point while this is being discussed a player is like 'hey wouldn't it be rad if there was like a group of people who LET the Maelstrom possess them, and who get all addicted to the experience?' This seems cool so you are like 'yeah! So is your sister one of those people? What's the worst thing the Maelstrom ever made her do?' You can replace 'your sister' with any existing NPC the players already know/care about for other reasons.

The key is to make sure all the neat ideas and creative energy everyone has for the apocalypse at large gets funneled down into the situations that the game is actually going to be about, and usually that means having it affect the individual people that the PCs interact with -- you have to resist the classic RPG temptation to generalize everything into classes or groups or factions, or to just paint it into the elaborately beautiful background painting that everyone ends up playing whack-an-orc in front of.

I don't know how much other people read the MC moves, I certainly don't ever reference them while in a game. I consider them as general suggestions, or useful tips for those that need them. Primarily, once you get an understanding of when to do HARD things, and when to just do THINGS, you don't need to worry about the particular rule. You can just focus on the story.

I'm not saying, disregard all rules... well maybe I am. The rules are there basically to create an understanding and expectation between the people sitting around the table. If you and your group trust each other, they definitely more like guidelines then anything else. If you feel like you are bogged down in an attempt to do things per the book, your players will notice. My suggestion is to always do what feels natural for the story. Instead of thinking about what the rules say, ask yourself, what could go wrong here? If they miss a role, push there.

If everyone around the table is seeing the same thing, and has the same understanding of the situation (you can always ask, and it never hurts to barth forth more), a realistic occurrence will always be stronger then--- and something completely out of the blue happens and splits the group! :)

There is always going to be lag on certain rolls, and that's fine. Its better to do something cool slowly then something half-asses right then. Your players will probably also appreciate the extra second of consideration when their character's lifes are in your hand.

There are two issues at work here, which are game prep and session prep.

For game prep, I often do very little. I like to pull as much input from the players as possible. I too enjoy world-building, but I think it's best done as a collaborative venture. For what it's worth, this is a great way to get "buy in" from the players. They are much more likely to be enthusiastically engaged from the jump if they feel like they have had a hand in creating the setting. The thing to do here is to ask a million questions and work through some of the ramifications of their answers. You can do this in a couple of ways, either starting at the top level and drilling down, or starting at the personal level and building up. I've done it both ways and have no strong opinions on which is easier or more effective. I usually just go with whatever groove the table has going.

Just don't try to nail down everything at once. Leave gaps and holes and spaces to fill in or expand into later.

But once you have the skeleton of your basic setting worked out, I find that session prep really depends on the questions at a personal level. With whom are the PCs regularly interacting and why? What is the nature of those interactions? What are the complicating factors? Ask yourself (and the players!) these questions on a regular basis. Keep track of every NPC you introduce by name and distinguishing feature. If you make these people real, and play them with believable motivations (and even insane or totally alien motivations can be believable in the right circumstances), in a very short amount of time, your game will run itself. You won't need to prep because the setting (i.e. you as the MC) will be reacting organically to the PCs and vice versa.

Also, don't think of it so much as getting them to "adventure" as getting them to take action. And the best way to get someone to take action is to present them with a situation that they can't ignore. It's not about dangling potential plot hooks in front of the PCs and seeing what they do, it's about punching them in the face and saying, "whaddyou gonna do about it?" That's the idea behind "pushing where they are not in control."

I give an example of exactly what I'm talking about here in the thread on session starting scenes.

In terms of what I do to prep for any session after the first, I find the best thing to do is to read over the game log. Oh! Yeah! Keep a game log! It's invaluable to help you remember what happened, such that you can bring back that asshole NPC from session 2 at the perfect time to really screw with the PCs' heads in session 10. But once I have the thread of what's going on in the game world fixed in my head, session prep consists mainly of thinking about what all the various NPCs are up to and making moves accordingly. The rest just flows.