Does anybody have experience with, and advice for, running Apocalypse World one on one?
I think that Hx with NPCs would be something to include in that case–if only to use the Hx options–but other than that, I’m not sure if anything needs tweaking.
Does anybody have experience with, and advice for, running Apocalypse World one on one?
Does anybody have experience with, and advice for, running Apocalypse World one on one?
Maybe start them out with two characters. Have a mix of scenes where they are both present and can aid one another and individual scenes. This way you can still set up PC-NPC-PC triangles and use HX but it’s not always one player talking between their characters.
I concur: PC-NPC-PC triangles drive a lot of the game. With only one PC, you lose that. I’d suggest setting things in a larger community so that it’s plausible that the PCs don’t actually interact much, but having the player play multiple PCs, just never more than one at a time.
Hm. I’ll have to think about that, as opposed to doing NPC-PC-NPC triangles in various configurations.
My gut reaction is that NPC-PC-NPC triangles are unlikely to be as interesting, because they are less interesting in a multi-player game: there are few consequences to the player’s choice. The PC-NPC-PC triangles in a multiplayer game turn into conflicts by proxy, which makes for more interesting relationships between PCs. I’m not sure whether that would translate into a better game or cognitive overload for a single player playing all the PCs.
I suppose my conclusion is that I’d be inclined to try one-player-multiple PCs with PC-NPC-PC triangles before I tried one-player-one-PC with NPC-PC-NPC triangles.
One player PC-NPC-PC triangles are always hard choices.
Brand Robins Robins and I played a long one-on-one campaign. It was the awesomesauce.
He MC’d, I played, and set up a handful of QPC’s that were PC’s representing different playbooks that were introduced for greater continuity, relationship building and exposition. I developed and used Hx with them.
I played a Hocus, so having a “community” associated with surplus and want ended up driving a good chunk of the early game.
I talked to Vincent about this one time, and he said to just drop Hx completely, in such a case, because Hx exists solely to make PC on PC interactions interesting.