In your experience, if you’ve MC’d Apocalypse World more than once, does the game work better with lots of small threats to the players, or a small number of bigger ones? Discuss.
In your experience, if you’ve MC’d Apocalypse World more than once, does the game work better with lots of small…
In your experience, if you’ve MC’d Apocalypse World more than once, does the game work better with lots of small…
., because I only say “it depends. Also, i am not smart enough for a bunch.”
Too many threats will water each other down. It depends on what you aim for. Less threats mean each gets more screen time and atention from players. Is more vivid and has more impact on the resulting plot.
Game will work the same way.
Fewer threats for short-run games, more for long-run games.
I like 3 big threats, each with 2-4 small (somewhat independent) threats. Then I throw most of those out because the players just want to mangle themselves in other ways.
Yeah; you need to be able to feature two or three a session, no more, but long-term you want to see those two or three in context with more going on.
I write tons of threats. I am on session 5 (which is tomorrow!) of the apocworld campaign I have been running using the 2nd ed previews and the 1st ed book for the rest.
I make tons of threats. I tend to have a lot going on, but not all of them are constantly being investigated. I actually have about 4 or 5 that are just sitting there doing there own thing so that i can have stuff to fill in information or have it so that the world does function on its own amd interact with itself offscreen.
So, i guess i have tons of small fronts? Most of them were “hey i created an npc, what is there agenda and who do they know? If it is big enough to effect a couple blocks in the city, made it into a threat.”.
Then, if they go off and do something else, maybe the people they deal with had dealt with someone who was on the wrong side of a stick with the group that the npc is a part of.
So, i have tons of them. But most are just for me to keep track of the world or as subs that interact with the larger.
frankly the more i run AW, the farther i drift from the strict fronts/threats model. i usually have one big thing in the back ticking away and then a bunch of ‘whatever the pcs do going inevitably wrong’ to start things off, and then just follow the moves snowball
I tend to do a lot of small threats with immediate impacts because the big threats get invalidated so quickly.
A couple big fronts and then a large number of ‘orphaned’ threats, some of which sometimes join up into a new front.
One or two major bads that the PCs can hate. New minor threats, and add’l ones when the PCs start kicking around, looking for trouble.
If you think Scarcity, you’ll find all kinds of threats.
For my current campaign, I went through the entire “after the first session” process and generated over a dozen threats. It made the world come to life. There are four other very different hardholds in the region. Ours is a biological disaster apocalypse called Poison Planet, so one thing that happened was the PCs hardhold having to all hole up in one building while a poisonous blizzard raged outside.
It forced me to think outside the box and build a world with deadly flora and fauna, multiple dangerous zones for exploration, and no shortage of villains to work against each other and the PCs.
I think the trick was to introduce them slowly, letting some of them build up drama over time, and also to follow the players’ lead as to which threats take center stage.
I aim for approx 3 fronts of approx 4 threats with some orphans. More than that is hard to handle.
The crucial thing is not to get hung up on any given threat. You’re playing to find out, and that means the campaign might not turn out to be about that threat. So you need enough to remain flexible.
Me, I write down everything, introduce new stuff on my whim, and focus down on one or two threats at any given time, according to what the session seems to call for.
Start with a small number of threats and see where it goes.
“A whole bunch of small threats” can lead the players around in circles, where they don’t get to feel like they resolve anything and they’re unsure what to do next. It depends on your players, IMHO. Some groups might be fine with loosely defined objectives, but especially when I’ve MC’d less-experienced-at-RPGs players, I found they can take a while to decide “what to do next” (and the discussion about it doesn’t tend to be very interesting or feel well-paced).
You can always add threats later, but you can’t really remove threats once you’ve introduced them (except by explicit player action, or if you find some way of having some off-screen action in which a threat gets neutralized by something else scarier.)
I should have mentioned I didn’t have a ton of small threats in session one. They just build in number over time
In our last game I had 27 threats (including Hocus followers. Maestro D’ gang and Jaggernaut battlesuit). Some never worked and in the end they boiled down to about 4-6 major threats. Some of them stuck together forming fronts of the kind.
So I’d say lots of minor threats that gradually turn bigger and scarier.
Also: I really liked running AW without fronts.