I liked this thread because I’ve been avoiding changing playbook for my Operator in my Apocalypse in Space game because she still has so much she wants to do. She’s hard fought her name to maintain her rep and now she’s finally got there.
In particular I liked Vincent thoughts on the options when characters run out of improvements; I’ll now consider angling for a custom path. “If you’re playing absolutely strictly, that 5th experience [when all other advancement options are filled up] means that they have to retire or change. There’s no reason to play that strictly if you don’t want to. The MC can create custom advances, or else the character can just stop tracking experience and advancement, or whatever the player and MC work out.”
And I also liked Vincent’s point about AW’s focus on pursuing or disrupting stable situations: “Mechanical game balance is useful in some types of games – games where your character’s effectiveness in combat is the same thing as your ability to participate as a player, for instance, like D&D4 -but Apocalypse World balances across non-mechanical lines. In Apocalypse World, your ability to participate as a player is your character’s ability to disrupt and/or pursue stable situations, not your character’s mechanical effectiveness.”