When I played base Apocalypse World as a Hocus, I was a little unsatisfied with the Hx rules, and the way the stat ended up just a number that cycled between +1 and +3, no longer really representing much about your relationship.
In a cyberpunkish hack I’m running over IRC, I’m currently testing out an alternative I’ve come up with based on two stats of trust and insight. My aim was to represent the same things that base AW’s Hx stat does, and allow things to change from session to session, but without your relationship needing to reset.
AW’s Hx is representing how well you know someone. The starting Hx rules seem to suggest this can come from them opening up and making themselves vulnerable to you, or from you observing and actively getting to know them.
So my idea is two stats to represent that. You can give trust to another player character, and you can gain insight on them. Their trust in you and your insight into them combine to form your history, which is what you’ll roll when you help or interfere with their moves.
But trust and insight are zero-sum. You have a finite amount of trust, which is distributed among the other players. And you have a finite amount of insight, which is also distributed across the other players. In order to give more trust to one character, you have to take some from another character.
Summarised, the rules might be something like:
– At the end of even sessions, we deal with trust. Each player chooses someone to take -1 trust from, and someone to give +1 trust to.
– At the end of odd sessions, we deal with insight. Each player chooses someone to lose -1 insight on, and someone to gain +1 insight on.
– When you help or interfere with someone, you add up the insight with them on your sheet, and their trust in you on their sheet, to find your history with them, then roll+history.
– If your history with someone is higher than +3, you just roll+3.
The amount of trust and insight players have available varies from character to character. In a game with 5 players, I used 3 as the default total amount of trust/insight a player will have. But the brainer-equivalent has 2-trust and 4-insight, for example.
We’ve only been running with it for a few sessions, and we’ve had missing players for most of them, so it still remains to be seen how smoothly the end of session move will work.
We introduced this part-way through a campaign, so I don’t have anything made up for how to assign the values during character creation.
/sub. This is very interesting indeed. I like HX but I don’t like the resetting thing very much.
I think bonds are much better.
This is a cool – I love the idea that Trust is limited and you just move it around. Could you simplify it by just having a single stat (Hx?) instead of two which you have a fixed supply of?
You could simplify it to just trust, and drop the insight component. I was trying to emulate the effects of the old Hx as closely as I could, though, which allows for someone to be able to strongly affect their enemies as well as their friends.
This might require some further hacking for the Wolf and Solace Hx-related moves. They may have greater supplies of Trust and Insight. (respectively?)
I disagree with sentiments that bonds are better – even if they may be better in the context of some games/situations.
Bonds seem to be more concrete or specific than Hx. A more abstract Hx can be advantageous in AW though where the character of the history can pivot drastically and unexpectedly. Hx calculation in The First Session can been seen as picking some Bond-like reasons for the Hx to be at a particular level. When it changes in subsequent sessions it can change for Bond-like reasons (in our games people like to explain why* the changes happen even though they don’t have to).
I find this more abstract approach highly beneficial because the nature of the history is in flux rather than nailed down. In no small way at all are our AW games about these “fluxions”.
*I ran an AW thing at a con in June and in one session the group kind of story-jammed out their Hx decisions. It was totally unexpected (for me) in the depth they went but it was good stuff and well with the initial time investment – as it turned out.
TL; DR
I like Hx and I like this too!
Agreed, very interesting. /sub
I think this could work nicely
Interesting approach. I’ve always been puzzled by the fiction-side implications of Hx resetting, but the XP gain from each reset always felt like a straightforward way to actively encourage PCs to involve themselves in one another’s business. I’d be curious to know whether this hack affects players’ inclinations to hurt/heal/mess with one another at all.
That’s something I was concerned about as well, Jason Tocci. I’m still not sure how to translate mid-session Hx changes like from harm and healing.
My current thoughts are to offer immediate opportunities to move trust/insight. So if another player hurts you, for example, you can immediately gain +1 insight on them if you choose (and lose -1 insight on someone else). Maybe you could also take -1 trust from them (and give +1 trust to someone else).
But because this is no longer a net benefit like the +1 Hx was, it’s not really an incentive to seek those situations out. It’s more just a mechanic for reflecting changing relationships.
On the other hand, it is more reliable as a tool for actually improving your ability to then affect that other player. In the unhacked AW game I play in, when I got hurt by a player was usually the moment my Hx reset, which felt more like a punishment when I really wanted to interfere with their next move.