[Apocalypse World] Tent City

[Mikael]

WARNING: This post is fiction only. I will continue with the playtest notes as soon as I get them typed up.

Ok, after repeated reschedulings we got to play our "Apocalypse Finland" playtest campaign again. Very satisfying play, and not much monkeying with the rules.

Previous session can be found here.

Characters were: Snow White, male, battlebabe; Mercury, female, skinner, Jag, male, driver. All players match the gender of their characters - or is it the other way around?

We cut directly to all the characters driving away from their holding, in Jag's Tank. They have Joshua the mechanic with them (NPC). Flashback: Allison, their holding's 2nd-in-command has sent them on a spare parts gathering mission to the Car Mountain. Jag has a vested interest in working cars, and thus has a motivation to go for spare parts. Joshua is needed to see which parts are worth salvaging. Mercury is along for the ride, essentially sent away from the holding until the Tax Collectors can be persuaded to do with normal taxes instead of her. Snow White is ostensibly there to protect the valuable resource bundled into the unhappy shape of Joshua the mechanic, but really his mission is to find and retrieve a lost angel, and/or to punish anyone responsible for the fact that the angel is missing in the first place.

Again, we use a Google Maps image to tie the action to surroundings that are easy to imagine.

Driving to the semi-familiar destination, they first encounter The Gash, a massive deep cut in the ground, with water at the bottom. Over this, a rickety metal structure has been built. Somehow, the crossing is more daunting than Jag remembers from his wilder, younger days. After some scoping they decide to let Mercury and Snow White cross on foot, and Jag drives over - much ado over nothing, with their successful die rolls.

As they continue driving, Jag spots some canine forms running along, incredibly keeping up even in the few spots where he can drive faster. A man of action, he stops and shoots a barrage of grenades to the side of the road. Snow White finds the remains of one or two dogs, hard to tell.

Then they hit the Tent City, a vassal holding perched right beside the Car Mountain. The Car Mountain itself is made of carcasses of cars, a huge pile surrounded by a big, flat area that used to be a staging lot for new cars. Who or what piled the cars remains a mystery.

Before they go on getting spare parts, they hail the leader of the holding, Kobe. Kobe seems like a cool dude, and Mercury decides to accept his invitation and spend a pleasant evening, and the night, in his tent. Jag barters for a tent for the night, complete with someone's sister to warm his bed.

Snow White reconnoiters and, through some active and overheard discussions, learns that the local dogs have gone missing, and possibly some of the guards as well. Then, barks and screams are heard from outside the Tent City, and a badly wounded guard is carried to a nearby tent, sobbing "Rover! It was Rover!"

After some sneaking and off-handedly killing a teenage guard, Snow White gets to take peek at the insides of the tent, and locates the missing angel tending to the now-unconscious guard, with another guard in attendance. Third guard is hidden but easily spotted by Snow White's practiced eye. He takes out the two conscious guards with quick knife strokes and good rolls, and manages to keep the angel, Gabe, from screaming at his bloody face. Then, they sneak away, leaving Mercury and Jag blissfully unaware, sleeping in their respective tents with their respective companions.

The bodies of the guards are found and an alarm rised. Mercury and Jag manage to get to the Tank with the help of Joshua's suppressive grenade fire. As they madly swerve out of the Tent City, Jag makes the call of hitting a barrier made of sand bags instead of a guard, luckily not disabling the car.

They speed into the night, with a lot of unanswered questions, many of them moral.

Coming up, rules stuff.

[Mikael]

All right, on to the details.

Overall, people were familiar with the rules, and play progressed smoothly.

Somehow, during our first session, "doing something under fire" was not revealed as the interesting beast it is. The 7-9 result, "worse outcome, hard bargain, or an ugly choice", makes this move much harder on the players than any of the others. Even if the dice were really hot, with players often rolling in the 10-12 range, it really did not feel like they were having too easy a time with it. Examples of this result included "give up sneaking to the tent or kill the teenage guard" and "choose between hitting the sandbags or the guy who just rented his tent and sister to you".

Also, this time actual sex happened, and I only now realised that the "specials" for the different character types only concern sex between player characters, not between player characters and NPCs, right? It is not clearly stated anywhere, so I had rule it based on the fact that the specials for several character types concern the Hx values, which would not make sense with NPCs.

The moral stuff starts to slowly rear its head. Our group of traditional players tend to either be predictably good or totally merciless, with neither approach providing room for any interesting shades of grey. Only one of the players in our group is really interested in "changing the character through play" - and he is not even playing in this game. That said, this session at least gave me some ammunition to challenge the "cold killer" stance of the battlebabe, as none of the killings was clearly justified; it was not even clearly established that the angel was held as a prisoner! Somehow, even though the battlebabe has pretty much breezed through every obstacle so far, it seems that the game is seen as dangerous by the players, and that they prefer to take no chances with talking and other such nonsense. Which is curious, since the skinner could really make anyone talk.

I had planned to use the margin of failure as a guideline to how hard my hard moves would be. In practice, I did not remember or want to do it, as the situations themselves were clearly such that I had a specific response in mind well before considering any margins. So, scratch that.

The other local special was constantly in use. I had a list of prompts in front of me during the whole session, and used those to ask about details throughout the game. I am not sure if they made a profound difference, but I felt they added to the feel of the setting, and somewhat increased the 3D feel of the characters. (For what it's worth, the prompts were: Feeling, Sound, Detail - thing, Thoughts, Pose, Smell, Need, Irritant, Texture, In sight, Relations, Taste, Detail - place. Some of the actual questions prompted: "Why can you only fit two people in the cabin of the Tank?", "How do the people of the Tent City make you feel?", "How do her lips feel under your palm?")

Oh yes, the third special was that I kept a running tally of bonuses and minuses to the players, awarding them as appropriate for the situation, and keeping them balanced around zero during the session. The idea was that this way I could award good ideas and perhaps make tough NPCs be a bit more mechanically tough - in practice it felt contrived and keeping the records on the bonuses and minuses felt like just another chore, so I will skip that as well going forward.

I had the same hiccup as in the first session. When a character just wants to kill someone, by surprise and from hiding, I feel that going aggro does not cover it, and the battle rules are more suitable for an all-out battle, not for a situation where someone needs to take an NPC out, swiftly and quietly. Regardless, I used going aggro as the guide, but simply applied success/failure and the harm from the weapon to determine what happened. Any guidance on this?

[lumpley]

Great! It sounds like it's going well.

Lots of the sex abilities work only PC with PC, yes. The ones that don't - the brainer's comes to mind - I always go ahead and make them work PC with NPC too. I recommend that. I also recommend following the spirit of the ability with NPCs, when you can, even though there's no mechanical enforcement.

Doing murder isn't a mechanical move, so there's no one set way to handle it. Depending on the circumstances, yes, sometimes the character's going aggro, but sometimes the character's making a break for it or acting under fire instead.

How out-of-control the situation is for the PC is an important variable to consider. Check this out:

Going aggro is good for when the PC has the drop on the victim but the victim still has the ability to act and respond, especially if the PC cares more about what the victim does than whether the victim lives or dies. Take the current murder attempt and imagine whether saying "you're not sure where you hit him, but he falls down and drags himself behind the stack of old tires [or whatever]" would fit. If it would, going aggro is suitable. (Saying that would use up 2 hold, by the way: one for getting out of the way, one for not shooting back.)

Acting under fire is good when there's not any doubt that the PC can and will kill the poor bastard, but can she do it quickly enough and without making too much noise? The "fire" she's under is the need for stealth. I think you can see how much fun this one will be.

And making a break for it is good for cases in-between. Like, here's our PC hiding behind a doorway with a garrote, and she jumps on her victim when he comes through, but he has a gun. She might kill him, but he might shoot her too in the struggle, so the range of outcomes for making a break are a good fit.

...the prompts were: Feeling, Sound, Detail - thing, Thoughts, Pose, Smell, Need, Irritant, Texture, In sight, Relations, Taste, Detail - place. Some of the actual questions prompted: "Why can you only fit two people in the cabin of the Tank?", "How do the people of the Tent City make you feel?", "How do her lips feel under your palm?"

This is very good, I like it a lot.

-Vincent

[Mikael]

Thanks Vincent! Very helpful.

So, more sex up and coming, and there's now at least 1 NPC who will be simply "hypnotized" by the skinner AND the driver's got another thing coming... Hey, re-reading the hypnotic move rule for the skinner, I notice that it speaks about Hx as well. I guess that should be applied to NPCs "in spirit" just like the sex moves?

I appreciate the difference between "killing" and "murder", and will strive to make that heartfelt for the players as well. Your advice on the different ways one might accomplish murder essentially sets me free - there is no "correct" way to do it, just the most appropriate one in any given situation.

Having said that, using "making a break for it" for murder is a source of some cognitive dissonance for me. Even if the result options certainly look appropriate, the name does not, which somehow "breaks the game" for me. For anything else, I have been able to feel that the names fit the fiction.

I really like "doing something under fire" for the stealthy murdering - the mid-range option is just delicious for this kind of thing.

As for the question prompts, I have to give the credit to Callan. His post on "A small feeling - small potato issues" really drove the idea home even before your more recent posts on the same issue.

[lumpley]

"Make a break for it" is the move whose name has changed the most, and whose name I'm least happy with. I know the name doesn't fit everything the move's good for.

-Vincent

[Mikael]

"Go for it"?

As an additional data point, two three-hour sessions in, with character generation and reasonably frequent rolls, one character is one check away from an advance, others need more. This seems ok to me; expect a feeding frenzy when first one gets to choose something cool.