Someone Getting a Hold

So I had some crazyness go on in my game of AW and my friend who is playing The Operator has no basically stolen by  force a hold from an NPC so is there any sort of things you guys think I should do with this or simply give him the Wealth move and kind of works things out as the game goes on?

Well, he's sitting in charge of the stuff, but every single week should amount to a missed wealth roll. There will always be other forces threatening to take the holding away from him, and for as long as he tries to forcefully maintain control without the advance, shit will go wrong at every opportunity. :)

I mean, by all means he should be allowed to keep it! Just... it is what it is, which is a mess of powerful individuals not loyal to him but to the old hardholder. Loyal being a questionable term to use, but in this case reference to whatever had kept the previous status quo in tact until the Operator removed it. Some people will certainly like it, others not so much. But the move is needed to actually take control. If the Operator cannot take a holding through his advances (I dont recall off hand) then maybe you let him do that at the cost of another advance on his list.

P.S. Getting a holding does not give you a gang, if the holding had a gang, they're most assuredly not the operator's yet.

So you're saying don't give him the wealth move and make him really have to fight to keep things in check?

Yup. He can get the wealth move when he buys it. Until then he doesn't have the move, her just has the chaos of the holding and all the unplanned and unknown strings that might be attached to the place. It will probably prioritize him taking the move asap, which is fine. But this is definitely how I'd run it.

To clarify. He has the HOLDING, but has not established the wealth from the holding.

Alright yeah I can work with that idea. Gonna be a bit rough but I guess it is supposed to be that way lol

I personally tend to go with a slash and burn mentality towards leadership changes. If the tyrant falls and someone with the advance isn't waiting there with the means and story to take over; then I let the leader die, throw massive upheaval into the holding, and normally decapitate its productivity temporarily. Then if a player returns or prepares the advance to take the place over, its always a yes, and then where did you get the stuff/people/tech you needed to repair whatever was lost from before? Not as a trick question, just as a prompt to the holding choice selections.

Yeah, to start of, I'd probably agree that the holdings works as if though the Operator is constantly failing his Wealth roll, because he doesn't have the Wealth move. That seems like a good (and interesting) way to go.

However, the rules are descriptive and prescriptive. If the Operator starts, in the fiction, to do stuff to establish his control over the hold, then I don't think he should need to take Wealth via the xp route. He could take the slow route, and build himself the Wealth move, so to speak. Routing out the opposition, securing a supply of food, etc, etc. Once the hold is secure and his rule unchallenged, I'd just give him the Wealth move. Of course, it will probably take a lot to accomplish that through the fiction.

If someone were to award a particularly dogged Operator with a very much earned holding and provide him control as prescribed from the narrative... Then I still wouldn't give them a wealth move. I would make up a custom move to represent that holding which is less then the holding move but still useful. For example.

The holding is X (where X is predefined and not up to player to detail). At the start of the session roll+hard, on a hit you can make use of some positive quality from the holding (probably not barter per-say, but maybe up to 1-barter for certain actions). On a 7-9 choose 1 problem, on a miss all. If the holding is contested then don't roll, treat it as a miss.

• tests of power
• the people are in need
• outside threats loom

...Where the choices for what goes wrong are very location specific and perhaps more aggressively problematic for the Operator rather then the Holding itself. If the people are in need, they expect the OP to fix it. If the people are testing his power, then people are making plays against (weaken, defame, attack) the Operator himself, not necessarily destroying the holding. And if outside threats loom, they loom primarily for the OP's ability to hold on to the holding.

You could also do this per hold too. Say a roll that awards x positive narrative benefit on a hit (not mechanical like barter), and then hold 1 on 10+ 2 on 7+ and 3 on a miss. Where the MC can spend that hold at any time, 1 for 1, to either have the OP show up at a new problem developing in the hold where the problem is always in half/full swing; or to have problems in the holding show up where ever the OP is, no matter what he is doing. For every problem he doesn't solve, he suffers a -1 forward on his next holding roll.

It would then be assumed when he finally buys a holding, that by this point he has pretty much calmed shit down, set it up how he wanted with the changes and such as he details in his holding selection. The holding at this point is his, and most people have come to accept this. Now he's getting barter and has full command over what wants his holding is suffering from.

I considered a partial control move as well, but I ended up thinking "What is the point"? What is gained by the Operative not having access to  the Wealth move, or lost by him gaining access to it? Assuming that the Operative needs to make the hold secure and his rule unchallenged, he has either conducted several sessions worth of maneuvering, been very smart, or stumbled into a hold where everybody, for some reason, accepts him as their legitimate ruler. Is anything gained by pushing the Operator away from complete control, until he makes the OOC decision of taking the Wealth move?

I guess it just seems to go against being a fan. Isn't it just as interesting to see what he is going to do with his new, now fully under his control hold?

I'm genuinely curious about your reasoning. Might change my mind.

Well I don't know if this would help reason things out a bit but he basically stole the hold from someone by holding her at gunpoint and revealing the bad things she was planning on doing while in control. There are of course gonna be people who doubt him or still trust the old leader and the way he took over might make people wary. So with all those things together I don't think I can just give him control super easily. 

As far as being a fan, that was most likely what got a non-hardholder in a position of control in the first place.  The wealth move is about barter and management of problems that arise in a controlled holding.  Without the wealth move I would imagine barter can still be extracted from the hold and problems can be handled, but the image of wealth management seems less fitting than that of cannibalizing resources.  Just because a player scores a vehicle, they do not instantly become a no shit driver.  A non-savvyhead trying to get lucky in a workspace is looking at the MC and asking what happens next for lack of a move to trigger.

Honestly, I might give the Operator an Obligation gig. Maintain the Holding (Things are good/Everything falls apart) and if they don't choose to work the gig then: Something goes wrong. Then say, while things are good, everyone in town acknowledges you and tends to be willing to do what you want, if sometimes begrudgingly. Maybe even a periodic +1 forward to a manipulation roll to account for this. When things start to crumble, make holding the hold harder then otherwise, people less cooperative, more secret, other powers swaying public opinion, whatever. And when everything falls apart, things really just go all the way bad really fast. Maybe that means the holds contested, maybe the Ops been framed, maybe he's run out of town, maybe half the population is killed, dies, or whatever is fitting the narrative. Embrace that dark future.

As always, when you give out an obligation gig, they get +1 juggling. When the gig has resolved the juggling returns to normal. And maybe when they take the advance, this resolves naturally. Or maybe because they're Operating like a dozen different things all at once... they have to keep juggling it like everything else in their life. That is what it means to be an operator after-all. 

NPCs are threats. Things are sources of weakness not strength. The is no status quo in Apocalypse World. That's why I wouldn't just hand the Operator a hold without all the inherent problems that accompany it. Because I'm a fan of the Operator, I get to watch her operate.

Things are sources of weakness not strength.

This does not seem to follow, and sticking it between two axiomatically true statements doesn't somehow make it true. There are lots of things in AW that are a source of strength. Guns, for example. Cars. Food. Fresh water. Violation gloves. Workshops. I mean, barter is just 'things that give you power' in an abstract form.

No doubt there are many things that, along with being useful, also have drawbacks, but this is a far cry from claiming that AW has some sort of weird anti-materialist angle on the usefulness of objects.

If I were the MC, here's the custom move I'd use:

"Roll wealth, but roll+cool, but on a 10+ you get the 7-9 result, on 7-9 you get the miss result, and on a miss, they reject your leadership. Later on, if you use experience to get the actual wealth move, you can still roll+cool instead of rolling+hard."

-Vincent