Help refining or coming up with options. Second session is this Sunday, and the group suddenly has a pilot so now this is actually pertinent. Here is my rough sketch of a move. (also looking to make one dealing with vacuum exposure)
Hard burn: Travel at High Thrust To Get Somewhere ala The Expanse.
“If you strap into a crash couch and go for a hard burn, roll +Meat… (+Synth if you’re a jacked in Pilot?)
On a 7-9 choose one
You don’t take Damage as established by the fiction.
You don’t take -1 forward/ongoing to Meat rolls
You don’t take -1 forward/ongoing to Mind rolls
A piece of cyberware isn’t damaged, (based on tags or player choice)
Another piece of cyberware isn’t damaged. (based on tags/player choice)(?)
You don’t pass out in transit
On a 10+ choose three
On a miss, you need medical attention, and may take damage based upon the fiction.
forward/ongoing: determined by how much you need to push your burn to arrive on time. Stakes related. Optionally, high burn might force you to choose fewer options, while lower burn might let you choose more?
To be blunt, I don’t like any of the underlying philosophy of this move. Just getting from point A to point B can cause you to take ongoing penalties to two of your stats, take harm, leave you with probably all of your cyberware totally screwed (which, for some characters, effectively means losing access to all of your class’s abilities), and possibly lose all your agency by passing out? And having all of those except one happen is the partial success result? Why does something as simple as a scene change merit all that heartache?
It’s my first move. It may very well be terrible. That said, given the scale of the solar system, I wanted some potential downside to trying to exceed the limits of safe travel if you really needed to get somewhere fast.
I can kinda get that, but in general, modeling realism is less important than modeling genre conventions in PbtA games, and extreme costs should only be brought in if what the characters are ‘buying’ with those costs is sufficiently important to the genre. The Sprawl assume the PCs are hypercompetent action-movie characters, so seriously damaging that competence in the way this move does, just for the purposes of what’s effectively a scene transition, seems unfitting to me.
I’d say 6 options is a bit much. And the fact that the best case is you can pick 3 out of 6 is pretty rough. If you’re trying to show how rough this is, alright, but I’d say 3 options and ‘pick one on a 7-9’ would do it.
If passing out matters, it seems like this isn’t just a scene change, but the start of something like a high-speed fight or chase. I think then you’d want -1’s to be forward and not ongoing, so the PCs could shake things off and get back into the thick of it.
Honestly I think you might want to consider not having a custom move for a hard burn in an acceleration couch. The PCs will get pumped full of awful drugs and, as veterans of space combat, will probably be fine. What you’d want is a custom move for not being in the couch, and make sure there’s no ‘you are ded’ option. I know that’s less realistic, but, eh.
You might also like reading the varying list of custom moves here:
http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/13109/apocalypse-world-custom-moves-make-the-game
story-games.com – [Apocalypse World] Custom Moves make the game!
Oh, thanks for that. All very new to making things in this system. I’m going to take another crack at it. Thanks a lot for your links and insights. New GM to this system, so I look forward to getting the hang of it.
No problem. Moves are tough, like moreso than one would expect if judging them by their length. The best advice I’ve gotten for a space-related custom move was, ‘why not just use act under pressure’? It’s not a bad way to think about it. Act Under Pressure is simple and yet quite flexible. You need some kind of obvious danger, which could completely occur, or the player can succeed but the danger is looming over them.
Not to say you should just use it instead of a custom move for this, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
I’d agree with what others have said – in the best case when everything has gone as well as possible, you’re still hitting the character with three different penalties, almost all of which represent persistent injury.
Given the existence of such a move, why would any player ever want to trigger it? Even if nothing goes wrong, the best outcome is that they reach their destination quickly, but half-dead.
Ok perhaps this is another spin…
Hard burn: Travel at High Thrust To Get Somewhere ala The Expanse.
“If you strap into a crash couch and go for a hard burn to get somewhere fast, roll +Meat… (+Synth if you’re a jacked in Pilot?)
On a 7-9 choose one
You get there in time, or as advantageously as speed will allow.
Your passengers are in good shape.
Your rapid transit does not come to someones attention (+Stealth avoids)
Your ship is not damaged in the transit.
On a 10+ choose three
On a miss, either people need medical attention, or the ship reactor is burned out upon arrival and needs repair, as guided by the fiction.