Generic Apocalypse World, which AW Hacker “All-Stars” fear to tackle and Vincent apparently thinks will take a long…

Generic Apocalypse World, which AW Hacker “All-Stars” fear to tackle and Vincent apparently thinks will take a long…

Generic Apocalypse World, which AW Hacker “All-Stars” fear to tackle and Vincent apparently thinks will take a long time to make:

 

Stats: No stats. Characters have four aspects, one should be mostly negative. You know, aspects, like in FATE (oh crap, I already messed up what you think this is, didn’t I?).

 

Moves: There is only one move, just like in World of Dungeons. When you do something risky, roll 2d6. On a 10+, you do it well. On a 7-9, you do it but there are consequences. On a miss, the GM makes bad things happen. If you have any aspects that apply, take +1 for each. If any of your aspects would hinder you, take -1 for each (you can only apply a certain number of aspects to each roll, but that is based on scopes, which are defined with each setting, not in the generic rules).

 

Hit Points: You have 4 hit points in any one area of conflict (mental, physical, social, etc). You can take up to 1 damage on a partial hit (7-9), and 2 damage if you roll a miss or another player rolls a 10+ to damage you. If you ignore a soft move, a subsequent hard move can do up to 3 damage to you, GM’s decision. When you run out of hit points, you are taken out (whatever that means).

 

Bonds: You start with a number of bonds equal to the number of players, including the GM (or GMs). When you want to help or hinder another player’s character, mark an umarked bond with them and give them +1 or -1 to a roll. You can remove a bond with another player’s character in order to offer them 1 xp to do something you want them to do. If they do it, they get 1 xp.

 

End of Session: At the end of a session, unmark all your bonds and write a new bond with your character for one of the other players’ characters. They can write that bond down on their sheet if they wish, or not. You may only offer one bond to one player per session.

 

Experience Points: If you miss a roll after taking -1 because of one of your aspects, you get 1 xp. If your total xp equals the number of apsects you have, erase them all and write a new aspect.

 

GM’s Agenda, Principle, and Move: Describe the situation the players’ characters are in and ask them what they do (soft version is charged, hard version is harmful).

Bonus Rule: If you want to do something and the GM says it will take a long time, or multiple steps, use the workspace rules.

 

Settings: Each setting introduces custom moves, determines scopes (which limit how many aspects you can apply to a single roll) and what kinds of hit points you have, and has lists of stuff that limit and focus what aspects and other things you can take.

 

Done, you are welcome.

28 thoughts on “Generic Apocalypse World, which AW Hacker “All-Stars” fear to tackle and Vincent apparently thinks will take a long…”

  2. It’s not that this can’t be done, it’s that it’s boring as hell and basically pointless. Anyone can munge up some resolution mechanics and handwave the most important parts (character creation, for one). Starting with this is probably worse than starting from scratch, since we get the assumptions built into this (not “generic” after all!), which probably don’t suit whatever it is we’re trying to make.

  3. I kit-bashed a version of Cortex Plus for a Demon Hunters game at Berzerkon out of pieces of Fate Accelerated and Cortex Plus Action and yet that still doesn’t mean the Cortex Plus system is a generic system. Games like *W and Cortex Plus are essentially recreated every time and 100% better when you have a goal in mind – adapting a genre or property, telling a kind of story, etc.

    As John Harper says, your “generic” system carries its own baggage with it, making it work to throw that stuff out when you’re applying it to the kind of game you actually want.

  5. My take is that you could make a version of Apocalypse World proper that is generic enough to work very well for the larger genre of which the sexy cinematic post-apocalypse is part: the sexy cinematic character-driven action-drama genre. If we’re talking about movies, expanding from  The Book of Eli etc to include, I dunno, The Terminator, Gangster Squad, and Appaloosa. Or whatever.

    That’s a legit thing to want.

    But it would call for some very carefully-designed vagueness and some very carefully-designed modularity. It would call for more design, not less.

  11. Joke comment or not, it’s something I’d love to discuss.

    One of the hacks I’m working on is running into the problems that John Harper and Vincent Baker asked here, and they discussed in the All-Stars podcast.

    The base hack combines elements of PDQ# and FATE with the core mechanic of PBTA, so instead of everyone having standardized stats, the players pick descriptive words to define certain aspects of their characters that they feel are important. This means that there are no character classes, players define their character’s roll based on the words they use to describe their character.

    This means I’m running into two major problems – because the stats can range from incredibly broad to incredibly specific, and aren’t standardized, it’s hard to write player-facing moves beyond “Act under fire” or “Defy Danger”

    The other problem is just as has been discussed. because the system at them moment is so broad, designed to be adapted for people playing different genres that contain people with unnatural powers, when people rad it, they ask me “What’s it about?”

    There really aren’t any genre-specific moves baked in, because at the moment I’m not trying to evoke just one specific genre. This makes the game feel somewhat rudderless and tepid.

    My answer to the problem at the moment is the modular Playsets idea – brief documents with an elevator pitch, example stat options for the players, more thematic moves for the players and MC, and some example NPCs and obstacles the MC can use. The idea is, you can take a playset for a 1940’s creeping horror genre, plug it into the main game, and play.

    Vincent Baker is right, it’s a lot more design to make what is essentially a more complex Simple World hack. Still, I’m interested to keep messing with the idea, simply to see if I can make it fun, because it’s a space I want to explore – just to see what’s there.

    I might come back and say “Nothing interesting – there be no monsters here”

    I’m at (probably beyond) the point they talked about playing your unfinished hack in the podcast, where there’s enough game to run it but it’ll probably be bad, so as soon as I get a few consecutive hours free, I’m going to run a game or two of it, if only to see where it breaks.

  12. I feel like you main problem, Adrian, is that you haven’t nailed down exactly what you want the game to be. This can be hard to discuss, too, because the word “generic” is a bunch of bullshit. A game cannot be generic because it (the game part) defines how we go about having a conversation — Jonathan spoke about this in the video.

    Fiasco uses playsets brilliantly, to increase replay value, but Fiasco is only “generic” in that the specific details of a setting are interchangeable. You are still “playing a Coen Brothers movie,” ie a GM-less game played out in scenes with a limited amount of parameters to determine resolution and stuff like that.

    Whereas GURPS, at heart, is a wargame. Even if you don’t use minis and a board, you are still playing a game about moving pieces around on a board. Doesn’t matter if you play GURPS Japan or GURPS Bunnies and Burrows or GURPS Psionics. Hell, even if you play GURPS Vampire, and Vampire was a game that was trying real hard to not be a wargame.

    So two design questions I think you should nail down are:

    1. What do you want to be specific about your game? There has to be something the same about every setting you are going to use it for, otherwise it can’t be one game.

    2. What is the range of different settings you can use for it? Like Vincent’s concept for a generic AW seems to be a generic action-movie game, where you can swap out which action movie it is. And then of course, you need to work out which rules work for all action movies and what type of conversation makes you feel like you’re in the Platonic action movie that all real action movies descend from. And finally you can then start churning out specific settings.

    (Doing the initial design work for such a thing, incidentally, is another example of How To Not Make Money, while churning out the setting books is the opposite.)

    The interesting thing about player moves is that they don’t actually dictate how the game is played. They are part of the specific setting, basically.

  14. Johnstone Metzger this is something I’ve been pondering, and at its core, the game is about characters who get into trouble because they are flawed or have their own personal drives, and then have weird powers they can use to help or make a bigger mess.

    The main mechanic is that when one of your complicating stats (a foible, a desire, and a fear) makes you act to your disadvantage, you gain hold that can be spent to use your power to do something amazing.

    Perhaps this is still too general, but I imagine Playsets that made the game play like a superhero comic, or a paranormal detective story, or a goofy game about teenage aliens that came to earth to start a rock band.

    Maybe I don’t need to say what the characters are good at – maybe its just what gets them into trouble, and their weird power that matter to the game as I described.

  15. Okay, so it’s character-driven drama where the protagonists have fantastic powers and there are playsets that add a thick layer of genre overtop. Is that a fair tag line?

    I was going to say this seems a lot more like FATE than AW, but actually you really don’t need much more than a Foible, a Power, and a Setup for each character do you? What part of AW is it that you want to be a part of the gameplay? Is it mainly the fast-paced, moves snowball, we-improved-everything-and-it-was-awesome thing, or am I forum-profiling you as a goon in assuming that?

  16. That’s a fair tagline.

    A big attraction to AW for the game is the modularity of the moves, both player facing and MC facing. A game of AW or DW can change a lot by the playbooks in play – the moves players have access to, because those are the things the players will be doing more of.

    I also wanted something that flowed better, and was more explicit about guiding the conversation than PDQ# is.

    Since players don’t have individual classes for their characters, the experiment is to see if a ‘class’ playbook can be developed for the specific games to play within the “Flawed characters with fantastic powers” genre.

    To use Vincent’s example, it would be like the base game is for “Intense Action movies” and each playset would be “Superheroes”, “Zombies”, “Comedy Gonzo Aliens” etc.

  17. It’s kind of like the difference between basic moves and playbooks: basic moves is the stuff every character can do, playbooks include all the stuff that makes each character unique. Only you have to do that with the whole game.

    Well, at least it’s something different and new, and not the same old Game of Thrones, Cthulhu, or Mass Effect hack that everybody else is working on!

  18. Yes, the major difference is that the Characters don’t have specific playbooks, the games do. It will either work or crash and burn. Either way, I’ll learn a lot!

  19. I started writing a far future sci-fi hack for AW that borrowed heavily from Classic Traveller and I ended up with a just a stripped down skill list as moves and training checkboxes on character sheets. Essentially, I have a long list of moves for the untrained person, and then being trained in something replaces the untrained move with a more competent and powerful move.

    For about two weeks now I’ve been hesitant to share it with anyone because I thought I had deviated from the more simplistic format of just basic & character moves, but the discussion here has convinced me that I’m on the right track for what I want the game to say about characters and the world(s) they line in.

  20. One bit of advice I took away from the all-star podcast was to try and play your game once you have enough to try. Finding out what works and what needs to change early on makes your iterations easier, and it means you’re wasting less work.

  21. Patrick, I did a thing in one of my game drafts where there’s a “do something dangerous” move that really kind of sucks to use, but it’s there because not everybody gets all the moves that would normally be considered “basic.” Characters start with some and can get the rest later, but initially this limited number reinforces their archetype. There were special moves for each archetype too and it felt a bit weighty, like maybe there was too much crunch, but I dunno because other parts of it aren’t done.

  22. Adrian, another thing that Jonathan Walton would likely suggest is to start playing with the minimum amount of rules possible, and only start adding in more when you actually feel the lack in play — as opposed to editing out the stuff you didn’t use. Even if that means playing with only the MC agenda and principles. You might find that useful.

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