16 thoughts on “I’m going to be starting a new AW game with a group of hardcore GURPS players. Any suggestions?”

  2. Don’t skip the setting creating part when you sit down and talk about what you want the game to be about. My first time running AW was disastrous because we all weren’t on the same page about what we expected from the game.

  3. *cough**Watch the World Die***cough** 😉   Play it as session 0 and play it seriously: this will give them some low-pressure practice at making up stuff they have to stick with later.  Make sure they understand, for instance, that if they want the AW world to have mech armor (even a slight chance of finding it), they have to come up with it in the fiction of the past.

  5. Christopher Stone-Bush What are some examples of the “players on different pages” problem you encountered? For example, I discovered that one player hated any game that has potential for PC v PC conflict, and Apocalypse World has a lot of potential for that (although it doesn’t necessarily mean it HAS to happen). 

  6. Post apocalypse is such a vast genre that I feel you really have to nail down what’s going on in your setting. My players were unsure how to react to things because they felt they didn’t have enough information about what the world was like. Granted this was the first time we ever played a game where the players had so much control, and they froze up a bit.

    I also rushed the first session brainstorming session. As a result, instead of reacting to situations, my players were often breaking character to ask “is this normal?” which kind of killed the game a bit. I’m saying to do all that in the first session as instructed.

  7. The reason I wrote WTWD was to solve exactly this problem in my own AW campaigns.  New players can be persuaded that it’s ok to make up details of their personal backgrounds, right?, but they look at you a little more incredulously when you tell them they can make up stuff about the whole world.  You often get the deer-in-the-headlights thing.  So I wrote a narrative game to use as “Session 0” which does not break the narrativism of Session 1.  Basically this approach separates out those portions of creative agency that deal with world from those that deal with character, it handles them first, and it gives the players a less invested artifact than a PC to work on (the timeline).  By the time they get to the Great Dying, they’ll already have some clearer ideas about how their PCs will fit into the world they’ve created.

    One thing: I actually don’t recommend sliding straight from WTWD Session 0 into AW Session 1 on the same night.  The Session 0 stuff should be discussed a bit by the whole group, let it sink in, let the ramifications arise, before you rush to chargen.  Remember there’s still 50 years.

  8. Print out the principles, agendas and your GM moves and keep them in front of you for the first few sessions. Following them closely will take you far.

    Make sure the players understand fiction->trigger->move->fiction. New *World players tend to pick up the dice and ask permission if they can make a roll, instead of just doing stuff (that may trigger a move).

  9. Everything Christopher Stone-Bush  said is golden!

    Make sure your players have the same thing in mind when it comes to the world and the setting and don’t contradict their expectations. If you follow the agenda and principles and follow up by asking lots of questions, letting the players define their characters and inserting details wherever they’ll let you, then you should be fine.

    The first time I MCed with an old school gamer present he kept making announcements for what his character was doing that he expected to act as trumps so that I wouldn’t be able to narrate something without it going by him first, but when another player’s move changed the situation he would protest a little. I’ll give you an example, the Maestro d’ used Fingers in every pie and rolled a 10+ right after this gamer said “I’m guarding the door, nobody gets in without going past me.” and so I said “Cool, Toyota has returned and he’s dropping a bag of ammo onto the counter.” to which the OS gamer said “Wait a second! I’m guarding the door! He can’t get past me.” I had to explain that guarding the door put him into a position fictionally to be able to intercept people but that didn’t trump Fingers in every pie, all it did was allow him to interfere with the move if he wanted. It brought the action to a halt and even though we had already explained this concept earlier, we had to explain it again. I would say: Be prepared to have those kinds of conversations.

    Fiction first. and Declarative statements don’t equate to successful action, just fictional positioning.

  10. Total plusses to Tim. You didn’t say whether you’ve run AW before or not, but to this day I still keep the moves and principles right in front of me.

  11. Well, the move says the thing shows up “like magic” so assuming the Maestro D’s player nailed their roll, I would say that the OS guy can’t prevent the thing getting there. But it still has to be explained. “Like magic” doesn’t actually mean by magic.

    Also, the Maestro D still has to put the word out to trigger fingers in every pie. If that means walking outside to talk to people, then the OS guy could totally mess with that.

  13. Nathan Riddell We were close to the end of the session when it got used so I told the Maestro D’ he had to address his crew on the main floor of his bar to gather up some ammo and he rolled a 10+ so I declared that Toyota, his worst regular, showed up with a sack of ammo like magic to pay off his bar tab.

    Then we had a nice little conversation about how the OS gamer could interfere with that if he liked, but otherwise the move takes precedence over his ability to stand by a door. And then we did our end of session moves.

    Does that clear up any confusion? 🙂

  14. Makes sense to me.  Besides there’s no indication of where Toyota got the ammo from.  Maybe he keeps it in his pants.  Maybe he talked to a friend in the bathroom who had several bandoliers.  Maybe he had it hidden under the floorboards.  There could be a whole other story there that the PC doesn’t even know about.  “Like magic”!

  15. As If Earlier in the campaign we’ve established that the psychic maelstrom will teleport people seemingly randomly, and a few characters have visited the maelstrom as a physical place using augury

    But I did also establish in that scene that the Maestro D’ has a secret door leading from his main floor to his bedroom, so Toyota came through that. Nobody ever questioned what Toyota was doing in the bedroom.

  16. Patrick Henry Downs That property of the maelstrom totally makes sense, because we already have the “Lost” move.  I bet it also comes in handy when someone does “Bonefeel” 🙂

Comments are closed.