How to stop looking at NPCs through crosshairs

I'm normally totally on board with the idea of looking at NPCs through crosshairs. Normally, if a PC wants an NPC dead, it's going to happen no problem. But last episode, Sundown the Brainer and Mother May I the Hocus were hunting down an NPC named Baked Alaska, presumably to kill her. Sundown cornered her and began Manipulating her, and rolled a 12+. This poses some weirdness in the fiction. Sundown, who previously wanted to kill Alaska, now knows she's one of the most valuable assets it can have: a true ally, a friend who won't betray it. But that's fine, and probably not the weirdest thing a Brainer's ever done.

My issue arises in that I'm supposed to stop looking at Baked Alaska through crosshairs, but Mother May I (and by extension her cult) still wants to kill her. I figure if it comes right down to it, PC > Ally > NPC, (and she's already killed one cult member who tracked her down) but what about a whole cult of NPCs versus an Ally? She's laying low right now, but normally if Mother had her cult search the whole holding for her, they'd find her after a while, but is that still cool?

A lot of the issue here is that neither PC is acting directly--Mother is calling upon her role as the Hocus to send her followers after Baked Alaska, while Sundown is doing its creepy behind-the-scenes thing to try to manipulate people into doing what it wants. So I'm stuck adjudicating NPC vs. NPC conflict, but where one NPC is designated as special. I don't want to just say Mother can never find Baked Alaska unless she goes after her directly, since her whole thing is acting through her cult, but I also don't want to cheat Sundown out of the Ally its earned.

Any tips or ideas here?

Such a great question. There are Tonnes of ways to do this, and all of them right. So I'll just give you my first impressions, and let the conversation go from there.

When an NPC becomes an asset, it means they now are awarded the benefit of the doubt. What I mean by this is, if your Gang is getting close to her, announce the badness as if it was coming right at the PCs themselves. When the Gang corners her in some dark alley, it's during a time when the PC ally in question can do something about it. The NPC now is an extension of the PC that's allied to her, they're like one the Gunluggers guns. Even if you break the thing, and they certainly were involved in that choice, they can still try to do something about it before the gun is just as good as gone. 

Well, now if she dies, it has to be on purpose. Random bullet in a bar fight gone wrong: not on purpose. Throwing herself off a bridge because a PC rejected her advances: probably on purpose? A PC's cult specifically trying to kill her: definitely on purpose.

I agree. It's pretty safe to follow the fiction here and decide what you feel is right. You have all your usual moves at your disposal, of course, including "disclaim responsibility".

You're supposed to take the ally out of the reach of "casual violence"... but another PC coming after them (whether second-hand or not) is nothing but "casual".

Sure, it makes sense to be biased in the favour of a NPC ally... but I think having them just win by default isn't making Apocalypse World real.

My personal call in this situation would be to find a middle ground, I think - like a 7-9 result.

Like the Hocus's people won the fight against the ally... but Baked Alaska survived somehow, against all odds. Maybe she's horribly maimed and crawls to Sundown with her last ounce of strength. Or maybe her *ghost* comes to Sundown via the maelstrom, telling her about what those people did to her. Something like that: let the situation complicate itself without resolving itself fully just yet.

Yeah, becoming an ally doesn't mean becoming invulnerable. It's just not casual violence that will kill the character.

That makes a lot of sense. She won't die arbitrarily, but is still vulnerable to direct violence. I can work with that!

But what about when it's not straight-up violence? Baked Alaska can take out a couple people with her chainsaw, probably, but more than that and she'll get a bullet in her head. But it's not a battle; it's a game of hide-and-seek. She's hiding in one of many identical empty rooms in this huge holding, and the cult is pretty small--it'll take them ages to search every room. So I'm pretty inclined to say they just can't find her, but that goes against every GMing instinct I have. I hate just shutting down a player's idea like that, and if I was looking at BA through crosshairs, I'd just say one of the cultists got lucky and stumbled upon her at some point, but then I feel like that would be unfair to Sundown.

I just wrote up a whole thing about how I feel like none of the decision-making tools the game gives me help in this edge case, but of course Ebok has the right of it: I just have to hand the responsibility over to Sundown. "Mousse and Prius pass your room, heading down to the lower levels, where Baked Alaska is. It'll take them a while, but if they search every room they're going to find her eventually. What do you do?" I was thinking I couldn't hand responsibility to the PCs, since they weren't getting involved, but I'm MC! I can make it their business if I want, and if they choose not to get involved, then it's their fault when something bad happens. That seems super obvious in retrospect! Thanks a lot everyone, that really clears up the issue.

It's academic at this point though, since Mother May I tried to murder the Captain Matey the Hardholder last session and has had to go into hiding herself (again).

I just wrote up a whole thing about how I feel like none of the decision-making tools the game gives me help in this edge case, but of course Ebok has the right of it: I just have to hand the responsibility over to Sundown.

Page 115 (part of the section detailing the MC principles) speaks to exactly this situation, under "Sometimes, disclaim decision-making":

Say that there's an NPC whose life the players have come to care about, for instance, and you don't feel right about just deciding when and whether to kill her off.

To summarize the options there: 1. Put it in your NPCs' hands. (Is an NPC really going to kill her?) 2. Put it in the players' hands. (More or less what you've suggested.) 3-4. Make it a countdown or a stakes question. (Basically the same thing as 2 but with more decision points at which PC action could change the outcome.)

Yeah, that was the bit of that post I deleted; those were the tools that I felt weren't enough. 1 doesn't help because I know what all the NPCs are trying to do, but don't know which one will succeed. I didn't think 2 was going to work because the PCs weren't getting directly involved. 3 presumes a somewhat longer timeframe than this, I think. It was a mid-session "I tell my cultists to search for her until they find her," so a drawn-out countdown didn't seem appropriate (and I'd have a hard time fitting a systematic search into a countdown anyway). 4 doesn't actually solve the problem at all, just tells me that I can't make it up on a whim, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid anyway.

But of course, as Ebok points out, I was missing that I can hand it off to the PCs, and if they still refuse to get involved, then that's making a decision.