I’m curious, has anyone ever tried any alternative advancement methods to the Faction marking, and how did they work out?
This may be entirely intentional, but that “impulse” combined with the Session Intro seem to make the narrative either overcrowded, or cutting chaff that does not even need to be there to begin with; leaving you either constantly littering the world with Threats or truly pretending the unused rumours just didn’t exist. I can see the appeal in that, it creates a city that is utterly overflowing with activity but for MCs and players who don’t like overflow, it can be irritating.
One idea I had is to change the Session Intro move to this:
SESSION INTRO – At the beginning of every session, choose the player of the character you trust the least to spotlight* a Faction for your character. Do this for each player. As a group, tell the MC about a rumour or conflict you’ve heard of and individually, about how your spotlighted Faction relates to it. Roll with that Faction:
On a 10+, you’re prepared for the conflict you laid out: you’ve got a Debt on someone in that Faction; a useful piece of information/equipment; or +1 ongoing when you roll that Faction (until session end), your choice. On a 7-9, you’re neck deep in it: you owe someone in that Faction a Debt, and someone in that Faction owes a Debt to you. On a miss, you’re caught flat-footed, unprepared, or unaware the MC will tell you who is coming at you; or you take -1 ongoing when you roll that Faction (until session end).
*When you make any roll vs. a member of your spotlighted Faction or roll with your spotlighted Faction, mark XP; when you reach 5XP, advance.
We only use the start of session move when we need to get the ball rolling. If it’s rolling, no roll.
That also tends to help push advancement toward cashing in debts, which is important!
Personally I really like the experience system as written. It forces interactions with all of the factions rather than just the one or two a character is most aligned with. Like Paul above, my group only uses the start of session move if we aren’t in the middle of things already (so far we’ve only had 2 sessions and only rolled in the first one, though we expect to do that again this coming session.)
If you are worried about your city having too many things going on at once I think I recommend either doing the above (only do start of session if you aren’t already in the middle of stuff), or perhaps instead when spotlighting a faction: “Tell the group about a new rumor or how you got dragged into an existing situation and roll….” The wording might need to be cleaned up, but the idea would be to allow characters to get entangled into existing conflicts rather than spawning new ones when there are already enough to juggle.
Charlie Collins You say it forces interactions with all of the factions rather than just the one or two a character is most aligned with, but if they aren’t the one choosing their spotlighted faction, surely that’s achieved through this method as well?
I do get the idea of skipping the regular Session Intro sometimes and I might continue with that in mind, but I guess I just have a pet peeve for optional rules. I’d prefer to have a Session Intro move that worked well every session, rather than one that potentially worked better, but wasn’t to be used every time. That may just be taste.
I am still curious about generally other advancement methods though.
Dylan Durrant What I meant by “forces interactions with all factions” is that for each advancement you have to have interacted with them all. In your above proposal, let’s say I’m playing a Spectre and you highlight power for me this session. If I spend my whole session doing stuff with the Power faction: investigating places of power, putting faces to names, hitting the streets with power, then I might roll Power 5 times and get an advancement without having interacted with any other faction.
By the book it is less about how many times you roll something and more about how many different factions you are interacting with, since repeatedly doing stuff with the one faction chosen in your start of session move doesn’t make you any closer to advancement. This is actually a feature that I personally like a lot over the base Apocalypse World engine. In Apocalypse World sometimes you have highlighted a stat that you roll a lot in a session, and sometimes you don’t which makes the advancement feel uneven.
Charlie Collins The thing is, although the current advancement system enforces more closely interacting with all the factions in order to get a single advance; the idea of this change to the move is that no, you won’t interact with every faction in the space of a session, or two sessions. But you will interact with them all over time, the game just focuses you on one per session in order to avoid this overcrowding and quickdraw Faction moving.
Here, the idea is that not only Faction moves get you XP, but just interacting with the Faction which one of the players thinks it would be interesting for you to interact with. There, you don’t have the problem of asking if you’re Acting Under Fire and then being disappointed when you’re not. Play the game, just this session you’re focused on one particular Faction, you aren’t spreading yourself too thin. Next session, you’ll visit another Faction. If this game calls after shows like Angel, each episode is keenly focused, not spread all over the place.
You shouldn’t have to do the start of session move at the start of every session. We’ve played around 10 sessions with my group, and we’ve only done it twice (and it’s questionable whether the second time was absolutely necessary). From the last part of the move description itself:
If you start a session in the middle of a chaotic situation or with plenty going on already, the MC might decide to skip this move.