I just started running a one-on-one AW game with a Hardholder, and I’m wondering about how to apply some of the descriptive/prescriptive things to do with their Holding.
For example, he chose a large population (200-300) which gives +1barter and +disease. Now, he’s been recruiting population into gangs, sending them away on missions or to occupy colony sites, and some have been dying of disease, so his population is approaching 150.
When it reaches the 75-150 population level of a standard Holding, should that trigger a loss of the extra barter and the disease tag? Or do those tags stick around until he buys them off with advances? Or something else? I think the former makes sense, but just wanted to make sure that’s how to treat Holding tags/upgrades…
The former makes sense to me.
I would lose the barter and keep any diseases that are currently in play (whether or not they are yet known by your player).
How are you going with 1 on 1? Any tips or pitfalls you could share?
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I was going to play it – a lot of his workforce is obviously ill, and reducing the population will ease population pressure and risk of transmission, but it won’t be a miracle cure for those who are already infected. We’ve yet to actually define the disease, but it only seems to be killing the old and the weak, so it’s probably fairly flu-like at the moment.
I got my player to write up a few NPCs in his “inner circle”, which he took to with gusto, so I have plenty of NPCs to muck around with. With one player I found things proceeded very quickly – I have a massive write-up due for the AP, and we only played for a couple of hours. He failed his initial Wealth roll, which lead to some great pressure and impetus to kick things off.
Obviously there’s no Hx connections, so that was something missing. It’s particularly important to identify the things and people the PC cares about. I also let my player largely define the look and feel of the landscape, and where they live; the Hold has several advantages, but also problems to deal with.
I’m trying to teach myself to make better use of MC moves; there were a few points where he went and did things that worked out fine, and I didn’t manage to snowball off them. I also ran out of steam once some of the initial situations had been resolved, so I need more practice coming up with new developments to keep things interesting. But that was only the first session, so now I get to go away and formalise Fronts and think about what’s going on.