Explain this in Apocalypse World
So what does River’s player do in that scene? I mean she is not rolling moves on every single one of these guys right? On first watching I thought: “Hey, this is where she changes playbooks to Battlebabe”.
That might still be right but right now I feel like this was either a failed Acting under Fire roll or a Golden Opportunity and everything she does there is just a Hard Move by the GM, akin to the “2 days later in the slave pits”.
What do you think?
She opened her brain and violence came out. These things happen when you fail a weird roll.
I think this is more Not To Be Fucked With than anything else.
Could just be Seize By Force, really.
Seizing the bar?
Nevermind. Guess I should watch the video first. Definitely Open Your Brain.
“aaah, that’s a 6-. You wake up. You’re in a cell, and Dustwich is telling you that you’ve killed three people, and left about 15 others variously injured. What do you do?”
Not sure this move would actually be permitted to an MC, but it sure would be a blast.
That move is allowed I think
Looks like she took Psi-harm to me.
Player: So I’m not going to be here next week…
MC: That’s cool. Can I use your character as a threat for the next session? Maybe I’ll explain some of the reasons why you’ve been going catatonic when you miss rolls. I’ll definitely have something cool for you when you come back.
Player: Sure, just don’t kill her off.
Player: What if one of the other players tries to kill me again?
MC: Well, Jane’ll be acting under fire if he tries anything, and I doubt Mal would kill River outright since he’s treating her like a meal ticket now. I’ll give the other players incentives for keeping River alive. Sound good?
“Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ’em right back!”
I really like this as a failed roll. There’s a show on Netflix called The 100 that’s a straight-up AW game, you can see characters have different stats highlighted for different episodes. At one point a pacifist character clearly fails a roll trying to keep control of a situation, keeping hostages he didn’t know were just innocent people, and when they try to escape he instinctively mows them down. It’s brutal and heartwrenching.
First: this is a roll of 15 in an Advanced version of some custom Mind Of Ordered Chaos Move… that was intended to bolster a Seize The Lives In This Location By Force Read The Sitch… resulting in her treated as a small gang vs. a small gang, and her decision who lives and dies..
no wait… this was the scene where her quiet and strange ‘mask’ falls off, and the Faceless Horror Within takes over — fact is River Tam is her own Playbook.
And if she were a player character… it would probably be a rather chaotic psycho with a troubled past.
Or some twisted combination of Hocus, Faceless, and Afterborn… her own Faceless Horror Within allows her to have a Mind of Ordered Chaos but perhaps in this scene it was a failure that awakened the chaos, and the Walking Time Bomb turned her into a Temporary Threat that the MC could use like an NPC — she carries around her own hidden Front in this way.