I ran my first one-shot of Apocalypse World this weekend for a group that normally plays D&D 3rd edition (almost religiously). I sent them the playbooks I was willing to use and asked them to decide what they wanted to be before I got there, and then wrote generic love letters for each chosen playbook.
When I first sat down to make characters with them, the biggest thing was that they didn’t understand Hx. In trying to explain it one player in particular kept trying to push for ways of maximizing her Hx, and she seemed really confused that she could choose to give somebody’s Hx a -1. Going around the table for Hx was also a sticky point because everybody thought it worked differently. I eventually walked them through it step by step and it clicked for them.
Another player was confused as to why he could choose to have armor or not.
“Why wouldn’t I wear armor?”
“Because you wouldn’t like it, maybe? Or it gets in the way? It’s not your style?”
“That seems stupid to not wear armor.”
*shrug “That’s cool.”
They all asked about the countdown clocks, and after I explained how they work they all seemed a bit upset that they only had 6 hit points effectively. I told them “It’s really hard to die. In the game I’m playing we had a building fall on a character at the end of a gunfight and he’s still alive.” This seemed to mollify them for the moment.
We ended up with:
a Skinner named Dusk who specialized in being a con artist and tricking people out of their money and food, everybody else thinks she’s a stripper though nobody can ever remember her stripping
an Angel named Doc (not his real name) who really liked to drink booze and received his Angel Kit from his mother
a Maestro’d named Francois who ran a restaurant and brothel, the Mouton Noir, out of an old dilapidated bookstore
a Grotesque named Blakesly who ran around town with a musician, performing dances with her drones alongside the music
and a Savvyhead named Oliver, who had been set up in the hold of Lynnback for five years now and was an often relied upon member of the community
I went around the table and found out who these people were. Oliver was hit on by an enforcer named Foster but she turned him down cold. Foster found Doc examining a break-in and was about to arrest him, but Doc’s lack of tools slowed him up. Blakesly shared some of her food with an old crone and some kid started a fight with her about it. Dusk defused the situation, and she and Francois spent some time distracting enforcers who were insistent on searching the Mouton Noir. Almost everybody fell in love or lust with Dusk.
Then took a little break, treating it like the end of a session. The Skinner was the most active wih everybody else and she had set up two of her Hx at +3, which means when everybody said she knew them better she got two experience. When I came back from my 5-minute break, handed out the love letters and instructed them to re-highlight stats as if this were a new session.
It turns out Francois the Maestro’d had the highest Hx with everybody and he got a little overwhelmed. Most everybody highlighted the best stat they had, so I tried to push for Doc and Dusk to fight a little with Hard, and everybody else I either marked Sharp or Cool.
Doc had been invited to have dinner with the leader of their hold. I went around the table asking the players “What’s his name?” “What does he look like?” “Does he have a family?” “Why does he keep so man enforcers around his mansion?” and got some great answers. Rosebottom is a slovenly and overweight guy with a bald head and a scarred face, he doesn’t have a family because everybody thinks they got killed when he set this place up, or maybe he killed them, but he’s paranoid and protective of his house, he keeps the guards running around 24-7 because he doesn’t like unexpected visitors.
Dusk was invited to this dinner as the entertainment and she fumbled around trying to keep the focus off of her because she didn’t want to have to dance for Rosebottom or any of his enforcers. Doc kept looking for Foster since they had bad blood but he wasn’t around. Odd that. At the end of the festivities Rosebottom told Doc there was a patient he needed seeing to and they took Doc downstairs into the basement, where the entrance to an underground mine was hidden. In the mine, Rosebottom had slaves digging up some sort of coal that electrified the air around it. One of the slaves had these weird white lines along his skin, almost like they were scars but growing out from the inside of his body. Doc sat down to work on the patient.
Dusk, meanwhile (this was the game-y player who kept trying to maximize numbers remember? she also kept trying to combine the benefits of two moves into a single move) has rousing Francois because she thought Doc was being held prisoner. While Dusk was trying to convince Francois that they needed to go up and save Doc, a fight was brewing at the entrance to the Mouton Noir. When I asked Francois “What do you do?” he said “Nothing. This is why I hired Rum to be the doorman, he can handle it.”
“Cool. You hear a gunshot and when you look up Rum is flat out on the floor, looks like his face is gone.”
Blakesly’s musician friend, Krin, was fighting with Rum about their unborn baby and didn’t shine to his dismissive attitude towards her, and Rum had split her face open. She was now losing blood and it looked like her lips and nose were permanently fucked. Dusk and Francois disarmed Krin and Blakesly insisted on taking her to Doc, at this point also learning that Dusk thought he was bring held prisoner. They took Krin to Oliver, because they knew she had an infirmary in her shop, and after patching up a now-unconsious Krin they headed back to Rosebottom’s mansion.
Dusk had hypnotized one of the guards earlier and was now calling favors. They were let into the mansion and found most of the guards sleeping off the party from earlier. In the basement, they found Doc being guarded by an enforcer who was also in love with Dusk (she had been busy). They managed to get him out of the building just as a rival gang was rolling into town and shooting the place up. I ended with the Savvyhead acting under fire and trying to escape, she rolled an 8. Because nobody got hurt throughout the whole game, I asked “You can either take a bullet in the back as you’re fleeing, or you’ll have to kill one of Rosebottom’s guards with your crowbar in order to sneak away.” She chose to kill the enforcer.
All in all, everybody had a great time.
Would they play again? Did they seem talkative about what might happen?
Yes, they would definitely play again. They talked about playing different characters though. The Skinner’s player is a people person and at the end I said “You should definitely play a character that has followers, like the Hocus or the Maestro’d or the Chopper.” and she seemed to agree. The other players too, after learning the game, all eyed different playbooks and said something along the lines of “If we play this again, I want to play X.”
They live four hours away from me, so it kinda sucks that I can’t just GM an ongoing game for them. But I think it says something that they’re all still eager to keep playing. Even their regular GM, who played the Maestro’d, is eyeing Dungeon World now as a possible conversion for his regular game.
My goal was to broaden their experience and show them a good time outside of D&D, and I think I succeeded.
This sounds like a solid game. I like the “Why wear armor?” conversation and it sounds like you definitely got them thinking outside the D&D box.
Meguey Baker That player was the Angel so it didn’t occur to me that maybe people wouldn’t trust a medic who is decked out in fatigues. It never came up though, he only tried to heal three people during the game and managed to roll 6 or less every time.
sounds like the Angel in my game