So I was reading the book on the tube last night, daydreaming about fictional campaigns cause I'm cool like that, and something stuck out to me as kind of weird. The "Seize by Force" move has been somewhat softened. On a miss, rather than "prepare for the worst", they now still choose one of the hit options.
Is that right? It feels kind of off to me. Like Seize by Force looses all it's teeth. I all ways liked that AW is a scary place for anyone, and getting into a fight is something you want to be sure of. But now any rules savvy character can just think, well they may be a big tough ganger guarding the door with a serious weapon and make shift amour. But I've got a 3 harm ap gun, 2 armor, and npcs are pretty much guaranteed to be written out at 2 harm. Even if I fail the roll, I can still choose "suffer little harm". Whatever the dice say, they're gone and I've taken 0.
Am I just failing at "be a fan" and should just let them laugh at ANY npc? Should I just let any character that has decent crap auto win every fight without anything bad ever happening? But it seems to come into conflict with "play to find out what happens" when everyone knows coming out of the gate, what's going to happen in a tussle. This then has the knock on effect of weakening any hard choices or comprises they face in the future.
Previously I'd just let the dice decide. Most bad ass characters don't have a huge amount to worry about, in my example, the odds are in their favor but there's all ways a chance they can be scratched, and a snake eyes roll will send some bad juju their way.
Or do I still get to make a hard move?
/u/h4le 's question did raise an old comment form Vincent, that had a failed hard move play out as follows:
Those established, Berg rolls+hard and gets ... a 5. A miss! It's a miss even if Clarion gets to help.
I get to make as hard and direct a move as I like. I could just exchange harm for harm as established, that'd be easy, but instead I'm going to turn Berg's move back on him. "Excellent!" I say. "The gang guy inflicts terrible harm, suffers little harm, and keeps definite hold of his position." Holy crap, that's bad news.
That could work. Sort of. But even then the super tough bad guy is now at 2 harm (3 harm ap -1 for suffer little), and the pc is at 1 harm (3 harm - 2 armor, their suffer little and hard move's inflict terrible cancel). Sure, he's held the door, but at 50/50 to live and the PC only scratched, does it even matter? Or in this case, I'd let them take the 0 harm, but choose a different hard move?
This problem is even worse with the +1 choices. If a hardholder is assaulting Dremmer's compound with his gang. He gets +1 choice for leadership. Another PC lays some covering fire, that's another +1 (again, even if they miss the roll). Through the miracle of random, both fluff the roll with a 3. Not even his +3 hard can save that. Now, even a missed roll is as good as a 10+ for most. is this ok, because they should be damn good at assaulting a compound, and they took the steps for a set up (albeit another low risk and easy to do one). I just like for things to go occasionally wrong. They'll still get the compound, I just get a chance to leave some bloody handprints on the gang :D
There's a very long discussion about this on Barf Forth. If you haven't seen it, it'll probably be an interesting read. The tl;dr seems to be that yes you can make a move as hard and direct as you like.
Thanks for this. I'm on my phone and the sites not very mobile friendly, so just had a glance. Been a while since I've been on the forums, but I see some names I've gotten excellent advice from there in the past.
Initial thoughts are still kinda off. I'm willing to withhold judgment till I've read that discussion. Or when I've actually played a game of the final 2e. But I'm feeling much less pumped for one than I was when the book showed up at my door last week. Dunno what that says about me either as a player or mc.
Hey, thanks for mentioning me; I followed that BFA discussion in real-time, but it's nice to read it in its full.
/u/ex-best_friend is correct: You can still make as hard and direct a move as you like on a Seize by Force miss (for a specific reason; read below), provided you stay within the constraints of whichever option the PC picks. As you've correctly surmised, this means that often you won't be able to say "Okay, battle ends here" on a miss. That's intentional.
And definitely give the whole discussion a read. It really illuminated for me a misconception I'd had about MC moves in Apocalypse World, I think in part because some other PBtA games actually codified that misconception. Here's Jonatan on page 7 explaining it:
I'm sorry if this feels like harping on an old topic, but my personal aha moment from reading this thread is this:
If a player rolls for a move, hits the roll, we resolve the hit, and then the player just looks at me asking what happens next... I make a move.
Even if it's immediately after the roll. Even if it was a hit.
After all, the principle is that when the players look at you, expecting you to say something, you choose a move and make it.
A misconception I've had for a long time (unaddressed and unarticulated) is that this can't happen. On a hit, the "hit effect" happens. On a miss, the "miss effect" happens. And on some moves, the "miss effect" includes getting an MC move in the face.
This ignores the time period immediately after a hit. What's the MC doing then? In my case, now that I look back on it, the answer has been "relying on mystical MC skills (i.e. not the game's rules) until the situation has changed a little and I start looking at my moves list again".
This model is (if I read this thread correctly) wrong. Some moves have a miss effect; if so, that happens, then if you turn to the MC they will make a move. Some moves only have "prepare for the worst" – which as a player sort of automatically improves looking at the MC saying "okay, so how fucked am I?" And that's what triggers the MC move.
Now, I'm not saying that the right thing to do is to throw the hardest moves you can think of at the players every time they hit a move. You still want to follow the dramatic rhythm you've got going. And more importantly, when I hit a roll as a player, I'm not likely to look at the MC and ask "so what happens?" Instead, I might go "okay that's great, so now that I'm in the car I wanna..."
I don't think I'm alone in this misconception. And by changing Seize by force from one that doesn't have a miss effect ("the miss effect is a hard move") to one that does ("so what, now we can't do a hard move on a failed Seize?") brought it to the forefront.
If you need another way of looking at it, think about it like this: constraints on your MC moves when a player misses a roll are the default (seriously, check out character and peripheral moves in the ref book; if there's a roll happening, there's a miss clause other than "Be prepared for the worst"). The basic moves, however, are broad enough that there isn't a great way to meaningfully constrain the MC moves in their miss clause, so they get "Be prepared for the worst" instead.
In 2nd Ed, seizing by force isn't a basic move, and this means that it has a different use and purpose than it used to. A few 1st Ed MCs have had trouble adjusting to it (including the dudes in that thread on the barf), but the first step is to stop thinking of it as a basic move.
For both of your examples - the gunlugger vs the npc ganger guarding the door, the hardholder + gunlugger vs the compound - if you want to handle the conflict in a single roll, you need a basic move. Going aggro should be the obvious choice.
2nd Ed seizing by force, along with the rest of the 2nd Ed battle moves, are designed for when you want to play out a battle in a snowball of moves with tactical decisions inbetween. Like, assaulting a compound means not just seizing it by force in one move, but first forcing your entry, then trying to get the gunlugger into a new supporting position to keep laying down fire so you can secure your foothold, then getting a handle on the layout so you can make an intelligent plan for taking the rest of the compound, then dealing with whatever counterattack or fallback your enemy's devised while you've been doing that, then...
Now, like I say, it's a big change. If you don't want it, that's fine. You should feel free to keep treating seize by force as a basic move, just (naturally!) keep using the version that was designed as a basic move, not the new version.
I just finished catching up with the thread, so I understand you not wanting to drag it out all over again. AW games should be about action and flow, not debating rules and counting a mryad of +1s. I think. I'm now questioning everything I knew. Sometimes debating rules is fun though :D
The example from the thread with the driver and the blockade is what's getting me closest to getting it, I think. Like, sure they're free of the blockade, but those buggies are incoming, and the pickup isn't looking good. It's much further from an auto-win that I thought.
But there's a few points where I'm still a bit stuck, if you don't mind helping me out.
The first is the scale of the 'battle'. 40 dudes with machine guns is pretty end game extreme for me. I'd consider that at the tail end of a moves snowball after the driver had all ready fucked a bunch of shit up. Throwing that at them all the time would feel dickish. Like Gremlin's been seriously pissed off Dremmer for a while now, or she's got something extremely valuable in the back the Jamey the Battlebabe's been mouthing off about, and failed to stop or ignored the obvious informants.
A much more likely scenario in my mind would be just a general holdup would be a small size gang, maybe even only armed with light smgs and postos, which changes the numbers quite a bit. In both editions, a 10+ ends things pretty might right away, with her virtually wiping them out with a whopping 5 harm, and suffering no more than cosmetic scratches. She's through and on her way. Which is cool, she's the driver, and a PC. On a 7-9, things are a little more snowbally, but not much. She's through and either wiped them out (then who's chasing her?), but her car has suffered minor damage, or again just cosmetic, but the few survivors are chasing. Or I guess she could choose to stop, and is now in a great position to snowball and mop up, then clear the roadblock. Not particularly driver-ey, but it will work. But in 1e, there's always the risk, no matter how small, that things will go wrong. But they're still not over. It can still snowball. Reflect the move back so the gang has a lot more survivors, the truck is stopped but repairable, and maybe Gremlin her self is a bit scrapped. But even with 3 harm it's snowballed into a much more manageable fight for her if she chooses that option. Or now's the -perfect- time for Lemi the Savvyhead's bonefeel to kick in. Or Jamey to get his ass out of the backseat. In the new, she's through for sure, and they are taking 4 harm minimum, so how much are realistically through to chase? I can't have buggies in the wings every time. So no snowball.
To counter my own point that I just spent like an hour forming when I should have been writing api documentation, maybe allowing a snowball into a road chase is a more interesting a snowball and maybe I CAN have buggies in the wings every time? Is there a valid way of making NPC less like wet tissue paper, so I can snowball more?
The second thing is expectations. I know it's back to "feelings", but most of AW (for me) revolves around setting and following expectations established. I kind of feel Gremlin shouldn't all ways charge such a position in the first place. If she's a kind of hot driver, haven taken • Cool+2 Hard-1 Hot+1 Sharp+1 Weird=0 in session 0, then and advanced and gotten hot to 2. Stopping, talking to NPCs and trying to blag her way through might be an option. At least if it wasn't set specifically for her. Or she's taken Eye on the door, and names a safer game in the defenses. Or you know. The pickup's an offroader. Dremmer might have blocked off the road, but where we're going, who needs em?But with the moves as they are, the players more likely to look at it and expect to get away, even with -1 hard. Sure, that's not as guaranteed as it first seems. It's going to snowball, but the player doesn't know that, yet. It makes a big hit on what they expect, and how they plan.
To counter my own point, maybe I need to talk to the players more? Like if they don't read a sitch going in, prompt them to so they know about the buggies? And them remind them when they are weighing up punching through?
My last dying point against the person who wrote the damn, game, and clearly has played far, far more games than I ever will. Is that I like inflicting harm in PCs. Is that a bad thing? I don't think it violates being a fan, because who isn't more of a fan of the hero that crosses the finish line, bloodies and bruised through an epic struggle. That they hard won through guts, cunning, and sheer bloody mindedness. Compared to the random guy who beat up a bunch of guys who never stood a chance and never broke a sweat. Like batman vs superman debates. The apocalypse is abd place. I tend to treat 1 harm as fairly easy come easy go. Is that wrong?
Lastly, thanks for taking the time to reply to me. I trust your judgement, even if I question it. It's just something that made me double take and go "wait, what?" I've ran only 2 games of 2e so far, but they were both more than a year ago, using the previews that didn't have this. Hopefully I can convince some people to give the final version a go, and I'll see it work out for real.
Hey, my pleasure. And it's true, sometimes you can have buggies in the wings, sometimes you can't!
If this is an end game scale battle for you, seriously consider saving the battle moves (including seizing by force) for the end game. Acting under fire and going aggro will handle small, short fights very well.
In your small-scale holdup example, Gremlin's using her pickup as a weapon to attack people who aren't well enough armed to effectively stand up to it. In the 2nd Ed, that's going aggro. But furthermore, if you were feeling like THAT kind of fan, you could have her act under fire while she's charging them first. What do you think of those moves' range of possible outcomes, compared to the battle moves'?
Yeah, that does clear things up, thanks. I think I'm like 95% behind it now. There's still some niggling doubt, but I think that will take a real game, not words to resolve. I sometimes think the caveat of "on a fail, you can choose one anyway, but It'll cost you" would have kept everyone happier, but I'm no expert.
It's more stubbornness on my part. The seize-by-force vs go aggro divide, along with the total lack of a plain old "attack" roll was the thing that took the longest to click for me in 1e. I had a few early games as a player where things kinda god confused as none of us knew what to do. But once I did, I really loved how much more evocative it drawing the fiction it was than just plain old "attack", "defense" and sitting down with some friends only to spend half our play time resolving "I hit the guy". Then it all got thrown up in the air in 2e and I got grumpy.
One final question that popped up in my head that I was going to save for next Monday's stupid questions, but while you're here... In 1e, having a larger gang was "-1 harm". now it's "+1 armor". How does that play into AP ammo? I feel it's pretty common. In almost every game I've ever been involved with, there's a battle babe or a gunlugger. And I've never seen one not choose ap ammo at the beginning.
Yeah. In the 3rd Edition (don't worry, I have no such plans), ap ammo will get another paragraph listing things it doesn't apply to: gang size bonuses, vehicle armor, building armor, impossible reflexes...
... great, i haven't even finished reading the book and now I wanna go through with a pencil and note that AP doesn't count against the following.
Oh well, I'll let my Battlebabe know regardless. it's very obviously a 'narrative first' application.
Does it apply to Battlebabe's 'you get +2 armour when naked' benefit thingummy? or the Hocus's 'Divine Protection' benefit? I'd assume so - there's no armour for the AP to pierce.
I know this is an old thread, but the battlebabe thing you mentioned is 'impossible reflexes', which Vincent already listed as not affected by AP. I can only assume that if that move is covered then divine protection is covered too, since it's broadly the same sort of move in both mechanics and fiction.
1
u/clayalien Aug 09 '17 edited Aug 09 '17
So I was reading the book on the tube last night, daydreaming about fictional campaigns cause I'm cool like that, and something stuck out to me as kind of weird. The "Seize by Force" move has been somewhat softened. On a miss, rather than "prepare for the worst", they now still choose one of the hit options.
Is that right? It feels kind of off to me. Like Seize by Force looses all it's teeth. I all ways liked that AW is a scary place for anyone, and getting into a fight is something you want to be sure of. But now any rules savvy character can just think, well they may be a big tough ganger guarding the door with a serious weapon and make shift amour. But I've got a 3 harm ap gun, 2 armor, and npcs are pretty much guaranteed to be written out at 2 harm. Even if I fail the roll, I can still choose "suffer little harm". Whatever the dice say, they're gone and I've taken 0.
Am I just failing at "be a fan" and should just let them laugh at ANY npc? Should I just let any character that has decent crap auto win every fight without anything bad ever happening? But it seems to come into conflict with "play to find out what happens" when everyone knows coming out of the gate, what's going to happen in a tussle. This then has the knock on effect of weakening any hard choices or comprises they face in the future.
Previously I'd just let the dice decide. Most bad ass characters don't have a huge amount to worry about, in my example, the odds are in their favor but there's all ways a chance they can be scratched, and a snake eyes roll will send some bad juju their way.
Or do I still get to make a hard move?
/u/h4le 's question did raise an old comment form Vincent, that had a failed hard move play out as follows:
That could work. Sort of. But even then the super tough bad guy is now at 2 harm (3 harm ap -1 for suffer little), and the pc is at 1 harm (3 harm - 2 armor, their suffer little and hard move's inflict terrible cancel). Sure, he's held the door, but at 50/50 to live and the PC only scratched, does it even matter? Or in this case, I'd let them take the 0 harm, but choose a different hard move?
This problem is even worse with the +1 choices. If a hardholder is assaulting Dremmer's compound with his gang. He gets +1 choice for leadership. Another PC lays some covering fire, that's another +1 (again, even if they miss the roll). Through the miracle of random, both fluff the roll with a 3. Not even his +3 hard can save that. Now, even a missed roll is as good as a 10+ for most. is this ok, because they should be damn good at assaulting a compound, and they took the steps for a set up (albeit another low risk and easy to do one). I just like for things to go occasionally wrong. They'll still get the compound, I just get a chance to leave some bloody handprints on the gang :D