A few questions on making fronts.
So the first step in making a Front is to choice a Fundamental Scarcity. For this example I am picking Ambition. Next I create 3 to 4 threats.
This is where I get a little lost. So I have already talked to my players in the first session and we have 25 NPCs from me just asking questions and them giving me answers. This 25 includes their crews, love interests, fellow escaped slaves, local movers and shakers and a few overt dangerous types.
Do I pick the threats from these NPCs?
Let’s say I have two unconnected NPCs that Ambition would work for, do they both go on the same Front? Is this front for all Ambitious threats, or just ones that fit in to an overall theme?
If I am just supposed to list threats on the front that share more than ambition, like some sort of story connection. Would I do it like… Drugulla the Hutt (this is a Star Wars game) is a threat, and then the other connected threats are his various henchmen?
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Yeah, pretty much! You should have asked them about a bunch of the people that are in their world. Now you find the ways that those people’s needs and wants are incompatible with the PC’s way of life. You’re looking for Untenable Situations. So the Trooper gets ammo from a middleman of Dargulla the Hutt? Cool, that will be dangerous when it turns out the middleman is striking out on his own an Dargulla targets his new clientele, including the PC!
Scarcities work best in AW because the game is about how having and not having drives conflict. In AW you can have Grungefucker the Warlord and Skiddo the Child Soldier both as Ambitious Threats (for example) even if they’re entirely unconnected. The Front doesn’t care that they have nothing to do with one another, it cares that the same need drives them. This is super different from default movie or comic Star Wars, where we don’t care that tons of people are Greedy or whatever but we only care about particular villains. Still, no need to really modify this. Yes, technically your Ambitious Front is for all the threats that you care about. Don’t bother categorizing all 25 NPCs.
> Do I pick the threats from these NPCs?
Generally, the NPCs created through discussion cover things the PCs are interested in and care about, so it’s in your best interest to use them. You can add threats that were not part of the game conversation, but you’d do well to tie them into the existing world people created.
Example: The PCs are part of an NPC’s hold run by a woman named Clank. Maybe you don’t want Clank to be a Threat, but you want to tell her story because you and the PCs spent a lot of time talking about her. So you use Clank’s girlfriend or maybe Clank’s estranged mother who’s back in town.
> If I am just supposed to list threats on the front that share more than ambition, like some sort of story connection.
I’m not sure of the original intent, but I do not particularly attach my threats to each other. They are wholly independent. What brings them together is this very Front. Drugulla and Clank might never have met before, but now that they’re both vying for control of the fuel tank discovered outside of town, they become aware of each other.
Alfred Rudzki stop copying me 🙂
Never Aaron Griffin!
LOL
Thanks guys. The players have made a pretty interesting SW setting for us, and I want them to see how their input really shapes the game, because that’s really different from how we normally play. I wanted to pick the threats from the 25 we have, but I didn’t know how all that was organized. I didn’t know if I needed to make up some new ones if they all had to be connected.
Now that I know all the Ambitious ones go in one threat and it doesn’t matter if they are connected or not, this just because so much easier.
Of that 25 I have 8 that I know will be a threat of some sort, and another 4 that are part of crews that are just there to keep things from being too smooth sailing.
Thanks again. I have found this community to be incredibly welcoming and helpful. I wish there were more like this one.
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I’m trying to remember AW fronts from memory and may be mixing in a bit of DW and a bit of MotW. Someone correct me if I’m wrong on AW specifics here.
But, you don’t even need to put all the Ambitious people in one front. In DW, I like to put threats together that are at cross purposes, so that the PCs can pick a side, or have a A vs B vs C style standoff.
As a random example, you could have three different threat all vying for a single ship, one threat trying to get his family off planet, one planning to lead an attack on an Empire outpost, and another trying to sell it for parts.
Aaron Griffin ooooh now I like that idea. Hmm which means I need to think a bit more about the fronts I make…
My 2nd session, and the start of real play is tomorrow. How much of an issue is it if I don’t have all my Front work done before the start of the game?
The Front is just an organization tool to help you get some things occurring to involve the PCs in. If you only have a rough idea of it, that should be totally fine.
Ryan Good they are just a way of organizing your prep.
You know how in another game you might organize your threats by how they are related in the fiction? Like, the boss goes with his gang, the rival gang, the landscapes they inhabit and the resources they are fighting over, or something like that, all on one front? Apocalypse World tells you to instead organize your threats around the fundamental scarcity they express, manifest or threaten, instead. So yes, right on with putting all the threats that express or threaten ambition together in one front. That means the Hutt mobster and his gang, the bounty hunter, the governor, and whoever else, even if these threats don’t actually make contact with each other in the fiction.
Sometimes, you’ll have this weird thing happen where you’ll have the mobster + his gang expressing ambition, but one of the guys in his gang should actually be a threat on another front. All fine; just put him on the other front.
But don’t get too sucked up into doing Fronts ‘by the book’ here. You can play with the form, as Aaron Griffin and others have suggested. You can organize them around where they are located (so the Tatooine threats are together and the Hoth threats are together, etc). Heck, you can just list out threats without collecting them into fronts if you want (this is the Home Front in AW). All of that’s fine too. There’s not just one way of organizing threats, in my opinion. AW in particular (my interpretation here) wants you to organize them thematically. DW doesn’t care.
How much of an issue is it if I don’t have all my Front work done before the start of the game?
Not too much of an issue. The front work is there as a prompt you’ve given your self ahead of time for when you’re in the moment and have to say something. You look down, you’ve got the description and cast of a particular threat and its countdown, and that hopefully gives you enough of a prompt to improvise something.
It’s easier if you have at least half an inkling of what your threats are about or what they’re working towards or how their course of action impinges on the PCs’ lives. If you don’t have at least that much, just lean heavy on the first session techniques. The fact that moves snowball means you can show up with very little and let the snowballing consequences of PC action carry you through most of the session. So especially try to look for where they aren’t in control and push there and give them good screen time together. As always, ask questions like crazy, but be mindful to not make session 2 a repeat of session 1’s giant world-building.
Oh I forgot: re-reading your OP, the first step is to go over your First Session worksheet and, in the cold light of day, decide if that mobster really expresses ambition or maybe if he actually expresses some other fundamental scarcity. Re-organize your first session worksheet. Look at the NPCs you’re most interested in at this moment. Those are the fundamental scarcities you select to build your first fronts around. Take these interesting NPCs/groups, put them on the fronts for their respective scarcities, then find or invent more NPCs/groups that express those scarcities.