I’ve played in a handful of long running AW games, and I’ve found that they tend to work best when the setting’s community is pretty tightly knit. Something similar to Deadwood: where neighbouring holds are sometimes mentioned, but rarely visited on screen.
Has anyone played in an AW game that’s more spanning? I’m toying around with a SciFi hack where the Galaxy is at stake, and I’d like some opinions about how you can take something as spanning and huge as a galaxy and condense it into something that can fit comfortably in the player’s mental space without making it seem small?
If you allow FTL communication (or at least ignore that sort of thing), you can have virtual communities of the size that you are used to—plenty of friends and enemies you’ve never seen face to face, and no need to interact with the mass of folks who may be nearby.
An alternative would be to have a whole bunch of automation, and automatons, responsible for stuff. People are very spread out and the population may be huge, but you don’t go somewhere you don’t need to, and even a visit to a new station may only mean meeting one or two real new people.
In terms of running games that are more spanning, I’ve run ones where interaction with another hold / raiding happens. In those cases I tend to end up with a Front that is just about the shared no man’s land around the holds. It helps contextualize why the communities don’t interact more, as well as giving options for engaging with the physical world itself which I find becomes more common if there are lots of places.
I’ve also run a mobile game, which started with a regular circuit for the PCs, but soon they were striking off in their own direction. It didn’t continue past them all establishing a hold.
I played in an AW game set on a zeppelin that traveled from town to town. The denizens of the zeppelin and their interactions provided a hardhold-like consistency, while the different towns let us mix it up a little.
I agree Adam. The best games I’ve run or played in have been those tight-knit settings. There is just something more engaging in it for me.
Rootlessness makes it harder to make everyone human. A constantly rotating cast quickly turns NPCs to caricatures as you quickly pump them out. This is a huge problem in AW. Of course if you’re on the move, you should have NPCs along as well. Gangs, followers, a hold that is essentially mobile (I’ve wanted to play a Hardholder whose hold is a traveller caravan of sorts or a Maestro D’ who is a ring master type): those things can work to create landscape variety without also introducing the cast variety that can be problematic.
I think you’re on to something there Joe Beason. I remember a game of Poison’d I played with a bunch of friends where the central location was (not surprisingly) the ship the pirates served on. The important NPCs were the crew, and the recurring baddies were other ships.
Maybe taking a page from Mass Effect/Star Trek and making the ship, and the crew on it, a travelling hold would help make things more intimate. Requiring ships to be more like old warships, run by crews much larger than a skeleton crew so you can sit down and chat with them when they’re off duty, and spend a lot of time with them building interpersonal relationships.
You’re also touching on some important thoughts Tim Groth. I think what makes AW games strong are when you feel emotionally invested in all the characters you meet – so every character that gets screen time has to mean something important to somebody. Giving the players a sense of closure with characters they leave behind might help alleviate some of the “disposable NPC” issues a travelling setting has. Especially if they can revisit the memories they’ve made with some of those NPCs at a later date.
Maybe I need to look at the Poison’d rules again and think about how they turned time at sea into something narratively interesting. Thanks guys! This is great stuff!
Another idea, depending on how you want your tech to work would be teleporter booths. Couldn’t tell you the name of the book that’s from… wait, was it Shrike, or whatever it was called? Anyway, galactic empire made small by teleporter booths as common as phone booths (used to be).
Yes! That’s it!
So, when working on my spacey hack of Powered by Apocalypse, I worried about losing the community aspect and the social meat-grinder that Apocalypse World (and Monsterhearts) create.
Then I realized a spaceship is just a space-car, and there’s a Driver who’s sex move is to runaway.
It made me feel much more comfortable about multiple holds — or planets, colonies, etc. It’s already supported in the game, basically.