Has anyone played Apocalypse World with 2 players, where each has a character or two, and also GMs, rotating duties? Sort of a combination of Co-GMing and GMless.
Looking for tips and techniques for playing this way, even if it’s for another game.
#gmless #cogm #apocalypseworld
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If you are both good at coming up with details yourselves, and you play the game in a very “ask questions” kind of way, and you’re both good at roleplaying NPCs as self-determined entities, then you can have some awesome games. There are a couple caveats, however:
– Don’t advance too many Fronts at once. One player can only deal with so much stuff at one time.
– Give Hx with NPCs. This is an optional rule that lets you play the significant people in the PC’s life, complete with helping/hindering. Play those NPCs with great seriousness and depth of character. If a PC develops a strong relationship with one of these NPCs, don’t look at that NPC through crosshairs (at least not for a while). Then you can set up PC-NPC-GMPC triangles that work almost as well as PC-NPC-PC ones.
– Give the PCs access to medical attention. If a PC doesn’t have any means of healing themselves, sooner or later (probably sooner) they’re going to need to have recourse to an Angel or someone with a custom medical move, either in town, or traveling around the area, etc.
– Play more than one character. This is just an option but it’s worth mentioning. Some of the coolest movie “heroes” are duos.
The pros and cons of co-MCing depend on the two people involved, and the way you relate to each other creatively. The game is not really about having “secret plans” anyway, so if you’re good at maintaining the wall between what you know and what your character knows, that’s not a problem. The only special “rule” might be something like this: The acting MC promises not to view GMPCs through crosshairs, and instead just treats them like other PCs. If you do it right, playing a GMPC is just like playing a character: You think about that character’s drives and concerns, and then you just do whatever they would do.
Remember: Both the MC and the PCs are setting up dramatic situations involving personal interaction in a world of limited resources and then playing to see what happens. They’re not playing simply to antagonize each other. So if you’re both dedicated to seeing that vision play out, co-MCing will not be a problem for you. It will be a lot like co-writing a movie.
As If has solid advice here.
A subset of my group just set up characters for a two player pickup game, so it’s two PCs, and three NPCS statted up like PCs but run by the MC. The purpose of the game was to fill gaps when one of our regular players isn’t available, so we haven’t started properly yet, but when we do I’ll post writeup here to let people know how it goes.
Read Dream Askew for an AW-based game with that structure as a major pillar of design: http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/dream-askew/