Not so much a question about *W games as such, more about Fronts in these or any other game:-
Do you track opportunities explicitly, just as you do threats/dangers?
By “opportunities” I mean a pretty broad set of things – treasures, magical or technological items, possible allies, potential helpful suggestions (or offers of help) from NPCs, things that the PCs could do to strengthen themselves that they may not have thought up.
The Fronts guidance in both DW and AW doesn’t say anything about this – it only tells you to record the threats.
I think that’s because threats are almost always active. They have agendas and are actively working towards them, which changes the PC’s world.
Treasures and items usually don’t do that. They just sit there, waiting to be found and used. An intelligent item may have an agenda and the ability to make things happen in the game world though.
Nope. It’s pretty easy to make that stuff up on the fly, and what the PCs need most at any given moment changes over time anyway. When they do something that merits a reward (i.e. fictional acquisition of a useful resource or item), I just think of one and give it to them. You can always take it away later. Threats, on the other hand, need to have some thought applied to them beforehand, so you can play the NPCs properly.
I guess very loosely so? I have occasionally noted what resources are where on the map, so if the PCs get near I can keep that stuff in mind and add it to the “barf forth apocalyptica” or the questions or whatever.
I usually have a list of resources that are available by location, however I don’t introduce them unless the players go looking for what’s available. I’ve never had a Savvyhead in any of my games and I’m guessing if I ever do they’ll keep me busy but right now it’s just some generic tags under each location description. +food +liqour +brothel +water +medicine +ammo, stuff like that.
I have, occasionally, written up specific items that threats “drop,” like a modified shotgun and a flamethrower, but players in my games rarely pick these items up.
I folded the basic idea into my adventure Servants of the Cinder Queen, settling on the term “Discoveries.” The goal is not to obviate stuff invented on the fly, but to give the GM some prompts to glance at in a pinch.
Also, a goal should be to make the world interesting to the GM, not to create mcguffins that the PCs have to find. Goes without saying, but I said it anyway 🙂
Meguey Baker indeed – perhaps part of the problem is that I’m a long way from the “find the McGuffin” mindset, and from the “kill thing, take stuff” model. E.g. when I ran DW the PCs acquired virtually no money or equivalent through the whole run – they weren’t in the habit of looting corpses, and I wasn’t in the habit of assigning “treasure” to monsters.
The problems I’m having may be to do with the system I’m using (one of my own design with some awkward features e.g. rotating scene framing) and the game concept (the players have a capital starship with best-available-to-humans technology for everything). But I think that my Front-centric prep has been exacerbating things – when it’s my turn to frame a scene, the only prep I have to help me has been lists of threats and their possible next actions.
In that brief paragraph description, I’d look at the “best-available-to-humans technology” and make a big ol’ front about that! Stuff breaks, things need fuel, things have bugs. I’d also look at landscapes and see what different landscapes exist within the ship and what they want: that hallway on C deck that always feels a little slippery, the cranky door to the junior officer’s head, the hydroponics network that people seem to get lost in for 20 minutes no matter how well they know the place.
Also, how’s your relationship map? Have you got lots of PC-NPC-PC and NPC-PC-NPC triangles and people in motion following their parts around?
Meguey Baker has great ideas for the ship’s interior world. I’m gonna talk about stuff from exterior worlds. I didn’t know we were on a starship! Can we get off? Because that’s the most fertile fictional field imaginable – you can literally get away with anything on alien worlds. Since the PCs already have awesome tech, the “treasures” need to be more exotic, more advanced, or non-material gains (e.g.: reputation, honorifics, friendship, favors, love). As for the question of when to create this stuff: I think it’s a matter of personal style. It doesn’t actually matter whether you read it in the module that came with the book or you wrote it in your NPC notes last week or you lifted it from a graphic novel you read this afternoon or you just made it up this second.
The important thing is to recognize when the PCs need to reap a reward, discover a resource, get a boost, pay off a debt, be owed a favor, etc. It sounds like you’re aware of all that.
Ok so now we look at your threat. Are we on an alien world? The sky’s the limit, baybee! Steal from every book you’ve ever read. Or if we’re ship-bound, we can still bring in things from outside. Let’s say the threat is a visiting dignitary of some kind. Guaranteed he has stuff from his home world with him. He has some habits that will seem strange to humans. Think about his days and nights. Look around his cabin. Check his luggage. I promise you there’s some cool shit in there, from weapons to tools to drugs to communication devices to software to covert intelligence. If it’s useful to an NPC, it’s gonna be useful to a PC as well. Even if they can’t use it directly, they probably can sell it, customize it, or reverse-engineer it. Or they might learn about another NPC who can…..
Thanks for the ideas guys. Still struggling a bit with how to put these into handy notes so I remember them when I’m looking for what to do next.
I do have on-the-ship fronts, and in one of the games I’m running it’s been very active, full of space zombies and disease and alien semi-biological nerve fibres stealthily replacing the ship’s control wiring. That’s been part of the problem, actually – in that game, the on-ship fronts have been so relentless that the players have been a bit disheartened.
Meguey Baker it’s interesting that for this game I haven’t done an r-map. Does AW say to do that?… yes, I suppose does after a sense, that thing with the PCs in the middle and the drives/motivations around the outside. I didn’t use that, partly because I hadn’t thought about what the analogous motivations would be for my game.
Indeed, now that I’ve actually looked at it, the “thing with the PCs in the middle” (aka the First Session Worksheet, provided on page 28 of http://apocalypse-world.com/AW-basicplaybooks-legal.pdf) has a list of “resources” on one side, and as you fill it in you’re meant to assign resources to the various NPC factions you create. There was nothing, really, corresponding to that in my game prep.