Okay, putting this out there to get the kick in the pants I need to work harder on this.
A friend and myself are working on an AW hack inspired by medical dramas (and comedies!) that we are currently calling “The Ward”. It’s very early in the development, but I hope to have something semi-presentable for +JiffyCon next weekend. So, I’ll post the “back page” to start things and then move on to the, current, Basic Moves.
_Love, laughter, loss… and reputation… all while walking the tightrope between life and death.
The Ward is an in-early-development Powered by the Apocalypse game of medical drama, comedy and/or tragedy.
Inspired by shows such as ER, House, and Scrubs the players take the roles of doctors, nurses, and other medical professional fighting the good fight against the forces of chaos and the lack of caffeine, juggling life and lives while trying to remain human._
(Can’t seem to do formatting in the initial post, but I can in the following ones… weird.)
The basic moves are: Act Professionally, Display Expertise, Feign Competence and Show Compassion/Contempt and here they are!
Basic moves:
When you try to Act Professionally in a difficult or dangerous situation roll+guts:
On a 10+: You keep it together.
On a 7–9: You slip, crack, or hesitate: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or a minor complication.
On a 6-: Things get complicated
When you Display Expertise about a problem at hand roll+brains:
On a 10+: All three
On a 7–9: Choose two
• You’re actually right: tell the MC what’s really going on or ask the MC a question about the current problem.
• Everyone realizes you’re right
• You’re not exposed to what’s going on
On a 6-: You’re wrong.
When you Feign Competence in the face of a difficult or dangerous situation roll+nerve:
On a 10+: Choose two
On a 7–9: Choose one
• Your peers accept you
• Your patient trusts you
• Your superiors find you credible
• You’re actually right
On a 6-: They see through your façade.
When you interact directly with someone in need or difficulty, roll+heart:
If you Show Compassion:
On a 10+: Hold 3
On a 7–9: Hold 2
On a 6-: Things go poorly.
While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
• What’s really troubling your character?
• How can I help your character?
• Where is your character vulnerable?
• What would your character like me to do?
If you Show Contempt:
On a 10+: It goes badly.
On a 7–9: Hold 1
On a 6-: Hold 2
While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
• How could I get your character to _?
• Where is your character vulnerable?
• Is your character telling the truth?
I’m not fully committed to the various results/questions, but I hope people can get the gist of the things we’re going for.
Reputation and Stress will be the representations for Harm and Advancement and there are helping moves and other ancillary things that are still being worked on.
I wrote this to model burnout in high-performance, high-stress careers:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=6860.msg30198
Feel free to use it or tweak it.
Very interested in this! I think medical dramas are completely underplayed in RPGs and your moves definitely push down an interesting road. Let me know if you want to talk more about them!
I might take this in a MASH-related direction, if you’re looking for playtesters.
Cool! Yeah different “types” of medical establishments/areas is one of our later tier development ideas for playsets to mix things up. I’ll keep you posted, Kevin Farnworth
For Act Professionally, take out minor, just “a complication.” For Display Expertise, telling the MC [all of] what’s going on and asking a question are kind of imbalanced. Why not the MC will tell you something useful or answer one of your questions? Can you say more about “You’re not exposed to what’s going on? ”
While we’re requesting sub-genre service, have you ever seen Kingdom Hospital?
Is there a “stay awake” move?
Feels like you’d want a deck of faces to use as patients.
You having Bonds or Issues? It’d be cool to use them to randomly generate a set of patients for an episode.
So, at the start of the session we roll some dice to, and find out one of the patients ties into My PC’s Issue, as a Dark Future. Say my PC has started taking simulants to make it through a shift. The GM might bring in a broken down addict for treatment, and gradually reveal this person was in a similar high stress job and lost it all.
Brainstorm: What about something like B-plots that characters work through over 1-3 sessions. One character might focus on a particular patient interaction (tough diagnosis/prognosis, ethical dilemma, troublesome), another might focus on personal drama (family, romance, finances), while another focuses on career advancement (pharma reps, review, interviewing), etc. You could have different mechanisms for advancement and a new move or two to be gained tied to each focus and then, when you’ve worked through it, you get a new one.
Season finales could be a thing – mass casualty event, outbreak, fire, close the hospital/layoffs, hostage situation, etc.
Do you see play starting with characters that are entrenched in their positions or do you see the characters all being new doctors that are all coming to the hospital at the same time?
Are The World’s Most Giantest Doctor and Psychotic Janitor playbooks?
Being an emergency medical professional for the last decade and a bit has given me a rather warped sense of humour to say the least 😉
I think this hack has all sorts of potential. Especially since I could theoretically play myself!
Jesse Coombs Staying awake would probably be Act Professionally or Feign Competence, depending on the situation!
Marshall Miller “complications”, both minor and major are what we’re currently calling soft and hard MC moves… I think I’m going to change the word in the basic move to “side effect” or something similar. And, yes, a “deck of faces” would be awesome… but I think we’re a ways out from that!
Shane Donohoe we’re working on a way to tie PCs together, and maybe even NPCs; our current idea is “Favor”, so doing or owing favors. “Issues” is a cool idea, we’ve got some concepts going about addition, “blowing off steam” in unsafe ways, and other “stress relief” that may tie into that. I do like seeing these things mirrored in the patients being treated!
Nikos Carcosa (and Marshall Miller ), we’re looking at setting up some “tone” switches or dials that would allow the level of comedy, darkness, weirdness, etc to be set, or at least discussed, in the first session, but we don’t have anything solid there yet.
Nathan Roberts Ohhh! I may have to pick your brains! My wife is/was a health care professional, is a prof and researcher now, but was in rehabilitation not emergency response… so her input into this isn’t quite that warped.
Mark Diaz Truman definitely would like talking with you! I know you’re helping Andrew Medeiros with Urban Shadows, and that’s looking great!
Going to try to update some things and grind some more out; I’ll try and post some more responses later this evening.
Thanks for all the input and encouragement!
Mark Truman is a very smart person to speak with re: pbta hackage!
Marshall Miller Display Expertise isn’t just supposed to be a “Spout Lore”-type of move where it’s simply a display of knowledge, but also to represent actually doing things, ranging from “serious medical shit” and saving a life to nailing the Kingmaker question at Trivia Night and impressing that cute new paramedic. The “not exposed” part is there to, if selected, prevent the character from catching the infectious disease the person you just saved had or attracting the ire of the cute paramedic’s wannabe other suitor. Yes, the “tell all” nature of being right is probably too much, but I didn’t want the answers to always be just from the MC’s mouth.
All the moves are supposed to have broad application in the three, for lack of a better word, arenas The Ward is attempting to encompass: Medical, Social, and Emotional. Going with separate lists of moves for those arenas, similar to the Day/Night dichotomy in #NightWitches , is a possibility, but I think they’ll… (puts on shades) …bleed together more in The Ward, so the hope is they’ll be robust enough to carry through all areas.
You will, of course, put bleed puns in the text.
Shane Donohoe you’ll just have to wait until you’ve… (puts on shades) …red the book…
A start to the list of MC moves:
• Put a life in the balance.
• Increase the pressure.
• Impose a condition.
• Worsen a condition.
• Reveal complications.
• Reveal trouble in the wings.
• Tarnish their reputation.
• Increase their stress.
• Call in a favor.
• Feed their addictions.
Dunno if you want this in the MC moves or where, but one thing in these shows (and what I understand of medical life) is the constant tug of war between feeling like a machine or production line, vs making or noticing the human connection. So those could be two MC moves.
Shane Donohoe that’s a good point! Under our tentative list of MC Principles we’ve got:
• Challenge their humanity
So that can be the wrapper for any move the MC makes to explore that facet.
Sounds good. I think a lot will depend on just how you phrase it.
It might be best for the push to maintain human connection to come from players. I’m thinking of how those shows will often spring moments of grace on their characters. That might be akin to AW’s “Sometimes, give them exactly what they want “.
Will the game come with a list of afflictions and their symptoms or do you make all that up as you go?
The choices on feign competence seem messy. They feel a bit samey.
Tim Franzke , we’ll probably have some common (and obscure!) conditions as examples, but, as the game is more story-driven than technical driven, I think it’ll be up to the participants on how realistic they want their medicine.
As to Feign Competence‘s “samey”-ness, it’s kind of intentional; it’s about the player deciding what their character really cares about and, we hope, will be a subtle test of their humanity. We’ll probably try to reword it, but it is supposed to be a three-edged sword kind of thing. Perhaps the current wording is too similar to show that, but is the basic concept coherent?
The basic concept of the move comes from a pre-med class I took a looooong time ago that espoused the philosophy of maintaining a “cloak of competence” as a medical professional, and that idea always stuck with me: “Pretend you know what’s going on, and most will believe you, until you prove yourself wrong.”
(P.S. I am not a medical professional, it was an elective about the philosophy of medicine.)
And some peripheral moves to do with Reputation and Stress:
When you do something to Blow Off Steam, wager 0-3 stress and roll+stress wagered:
On a 10+: Things blow up instead.
On a 7–9: Reduce your stress by 1, but there are complications
On a 6-: Reduce your stress by the amount wagered.
When you Stake Your Reputation on being right, roll+reputation:
On a 10+: Change a failure to a weak success or a weak success to a strong success.
On a 7–9: Spend up to 3 Reputation 1-for-1 to increase or decrease a roll by the same amount.
On a 6-: You lose Reputation.
Stress is kind of like harm in this game, it’s a “clock” that goes up to 6… at 1-3: no real issues and you can decrease it fairly easily, 4-5: you’re at -1ongoing, and it’s tougher to decrease, 6: you’re at -2ongoing… and, yeah, physician, heal thyself. And, yes, it’s intentional that a highly stressed person will have a much easier time Showing Contempt!
And our Aid/Interfere move:
When you Stick Your Hand In to someone else’s situation roll+Hx:
On a 10+: If an NPC, they succeed or fail, your choice. If a PC, they take +2 or -2 to their roll, your choice. If they succeed, they owe you a favour or, if a PC, they can give you +1Hx instead.
On a 7–9: If an NPC, they succeed or fail, your choice. If a PC, they take +1 or -1, your choice. Regardless, you’re exposed and/or vulnerable.
On a 6-: You definitely don’t help.
(We’re still on the fence about “Favour”, but we’ve left it in for now.)
Just finished up a set of basic playbooks… and tomorrow at JiffyCon East will be the first exposure!
So excited!
Good luck and hit me up if you ever want feedback on the text.
Ran a really fun very first session of The Ward at #JiffyCon on Saturday. Lots of fun, lots to learn, but it was just plain nice to put it out there.
Four fantastic and understanding players and the Haunted (Rumored!) Honolulu Children’s Hospital was a completely unexpected creation of a setting for it. Looking forward to doing more work with this and playing a lot more of it. Thanks for everyone’s input and there’ll be more to cut into soon!
Great to see you over the weekend. So glad the game went well!