Remnant Post
So I’ve hit a brick wall on the design of Remnant’s systems. And it might be due to not knowing how a game is suppose to come to a natural conclusion. In Apocalypse World the game naturally concludes as players 12+ their various problems out of existence. The game’s be curve starts at relative stability, introduces a significant amount of instability, and comes to a rest when those instabilities are solved or accounted for. I don’t know what that is for Remnant. How do you guys end your games? What tends to bring them to a close?
For Remnant as it currently stands the only options are:
1. Have your last little hold out of humanity collapse into the Ruin
2. Escape from whatever causes the Ruin (leave this plane of existence, get beyond the edge of the Ruin, however you like).
3. Forge something that will endure the Ruin’s fire and rot while you yourself die off.
The problem I have with this is that the setting is so unrelentingly survival oriented that there is no breathing room for a player to forge art for art’s sake, and that’s a big element of Remnant’s identity. So I’m dialing back the clock a bit. The Authority is still nominally in charge, the city is still populated with refugees, and there is still a culture intact. Rail gangs still scream around the freeways, bars are still filled with aggressive glitch-rock bands, menders still try and revitalize ash into living matter, and block bosses still nominally policeoversee local criminal enterprise. The color everyone needs to live still gets rationed out, but it’s never enough for everyone, and people end up drinking salve more often than pure.
It’s a setting that has time to breath while still having the pressure of scarcity alive and insistent.
A good question, and the answer might be ‘NO!’
I’m still in the process of figuring out what this hack’s setting is about. It has a lot of themes and focuses, and not all of them are in line with one another. Figuring out what the rough arc of play looks like, including how a campaign would come to a close is what I’m after.
Ending my games always has more to do with the fiction than the mechanics.
And that’s cool too. Nothing in AW insists that when you +12 all the current fronts that the game has to end there. It just creates a natural divot that the narrative can come to a rest in should the group choose to.
That’s a subtle and attractive thing to me. It says things about the intent of the game that it has that potential ebb built in. I don’t know what those things being said are, but I’m interested in considering what they might be as a way to help me push my own hack forward.
I don’t understand what it means to “+12 a front”
Ah, when players unlock the advanced moves in Apocalypse World they gain a new level of success if they roll 12 or higher. The outcome goes from merely successful to definitive. For example a successful Seduce or Manipulate on a 12 or higher can make an NPC look out for your best interests permanently. Convince that gang of raiding bikers that your interest is the town they keep tipping over each week and they’ll back off. It’s a way of permanently solving ongoing problems in a game that is otherwise simply about preventing the worst outcomes of those problems.
The odd thing about the concept of +12-ing problems is it assumes there aren’t more threats out there besides the ones who have already been introduced. I mean, all you’re really doing when you de-fang threats is setting yourself up as the new local Warlord.