When I played base Apocalypse World as a Hocus, I was a little unsatisfied with the Hx rules, and the way the stat ended up just a number that cycled between +1 and +3, no longer really representing much about your relationship.
In a cyberpunkish hack I’m running over IRC, I’m currently testing out an alternative I’ve come up with based on two stats of trust and insight. My aim was to represent the same things that base AW’s Hx stat does, and allow things to change from session to session, but without your relationship needing to reset.
AW’s Hx is representing how well you know someone. The starting Hx rules seem to suggest this can come from them opening up and making themselves vulnerable to you, or from you observing and actively getting to know them.
So my idea is two stats to represent that. You can give trust to another player character, and you can gain insight on them. Their trust in you and your insight into them combine to form your history, which is what you’ll roll when you help or interfere with their moves.
But trust and insight are zero-sum. You have a finite amount of trust, which is distributed among the other players. And you have a finite amount of insight, which is also distributed across the other players. In order to give more trust to one character, you have to take some from another character.
Summarised, the rules might be something like:
– At the end of even sessions, we deal with trust. Each player chooses someone to take -1 trust from, and someone to give +1 trust to.
– At the end of odd sessions, we deal with insight. Each player chooses someone to lose -1 insight on, and someone to gain +1 insight on.
– When you help or interfere with someone, you add up the insight with them on your sheet, and their trust in you on their sheet, to find your history with them, then roll+history.
– If your history with someone is higher than +3, you just roll+3.
The amount of trust and insight players have available varies from character to character. In a game with 5 players, I used 3 as the default total amount of trust/insight a player will have. But the brainer-equivalent has 2-trust and 4-insight, for example.
We’ve only been running with it for a few sessions, and we’ve had missing players for most of them, so it still remains to be seen how smoothly the end of session move will work.
We introduced this part-way through a campaign, so I don’t have anything made up for how to assign the values during character creation.