1:1 AW- 'Last Man on Earth'

While AW says you should have 4 people including the MC, I'm wondering if it might make a cool one on one game.  You lose the tension between the players and the NPC/PC triangles, but everything falls on the sole protagonist.

For the steps of character creation that involve picking another player and saying something about them, I'd have instead that you name an NPC and say something about them.

Anyone try or think about this?

I've thought about it only a teeny bit. I think it'll probably work fine. You lose some stuff, yeah, but what's left is still sound; I don't think you lose anything fundamental, like you would in Poison'd or In a Wicked Age.

NPC-PC-NPC triangles are also very good in play.

-Vincent

Maybe this belongs in "extended mediography", but the film Far North may be good inspiration for a 1:1 NPC-PC-NPC triangle.

Far North is in the rulebook mediography. I just added them all to my Netflix queue this morning. :)

I've played it this way. It works fine, mechanically, with some common sense adjustments and rule changes. You just need to go extra heavy with the NPCs, and maybe toss a crew or gang or something like that their way.

I've been looking at this too, as I'm about to be in a cabin in the woods for three weeks with only one other human being within 50 miles of me...

My initial thought is that I might want some NPCs to become a bit less fragile than others, but not at the MCs (sole) discretion. (After all geeks gotta be in the crosshairs.) So, I thought that I might make it based on actions of the PCs, in reward or consequence. Something like...

When you induce major fuckery (in the good sense or the bad) in an NPCs life, and that NPC survives and knows it was you, they get Hx with you.*

When a character with Hx of 1 to 3 is helping you, they give you +1 forward. If their Hx is 4+ they give you +1 ongoing.

When a character with Hx of 1 to 3 is interfering with you, they give you -1 forward. If their Hx is 4+ they give you -1 ongoing.

Characters with Hx take damage more like PCs than NPCs. They’re a bit tougher to kill off. Still in the crosshairs, mind you, but they take a little more harm before their head pops like an extra in Scanners.

NPCs don’t have negative Hx, nor does their Hx reset or anything like that. It goes from 0 to 4, and that’s that.

In the solo game, start off like 3 NPCs (who look like PCs by type but don’t have moves cause they don’t roll dice) with Hx 1 to the PC. The PC can then mess with their Hx as normal.

The Player should probably have first crack at introducing these NPCs, followed by the MC.

*Things that count as major fuckery:

• Fucking them
• Trying to kill them and failing
• Mind fucking them
• Healing them from some painful screaming death injuries
• Killing someone they care about while they're standing there watching
• Healing/saving someone they were good and serious about killing so that that fucker can come back and kill them now, thanks asshole.
• Making an example of them
• Anything that makes everyone watching wince and/or say "Jesus Cripes"
• Doing what Marie would do

Well, it looks like our starting session is going to be reduced to one-on-one, at least for a couple of get togethers.

No problem, I like Brand's ideas, and Vx support of this gameplay. What I was wondering however is due to the intimacy of sharing authorial privilege that comes from this style of RP, whether the custom moves detailed in Advanced Fuckery on p.277 can take more of a forward seat?

We tend to love authorial player mechanics anyway, and I'm now very pumped to use the principals and ask lots and lots of questions in order to go deeper, spin a great story together and unearth the beast that propels our very own AW.

That said, I really like the move declare retroactively that you've already set something up. What I'm rather excited about is the potential of using either of the stat options (or even some of the other stats too), though I can see the NPC Hx option being used the most!

It would be primarily to achieve as Vx suggests, the players option to use a move to invest mechanically into NPC actions (or more realistically get into the MC's shit).

Anyone gone down this path of custom moves? Any advice in implementation?
Cheers!