thread: 2012-06-18 : Moves as Jumping-off Points
On 2012-07-01, Alex Abate Biral wrote:
Vincent, I am really sorry if this question goes in a direction you don't care to discuss right now. Please, feel free to tell me to bug you about this another time (or not at all).
But I have been in the last months trying to work on a "hack" of Apocalypse World that tried to be the most focused Step on Up game I could come up with. Now, of course, designing a game by trying to adhere to an arbitrary measure like this is not the smartest thing to do. But this actually started just as a mental exercise (for me to try to understand AW's design better), but the more I worked on it, the more I thought it would be a fun game, something worth of being developed.
So, on to my point. One aspect of AW I am trying to work on is how the moves work. In AW, as you explained in your post, the moves determine different places the action can jump off to, according to the dice roll and the specific situation at the table.
What I am trying to change is that, instead of jumping to a situation, there is one extra step. The die roll doesn't make the whole way through the IIEE model. It always stops short of the last E, and in rare situations might not make it even past the first I. Instead, it yields a result that nevertheless doesn't solve the current action. Then, it is up to the players (with the MC taking the lead) to decide how the action develops, according to the specific situation at hand and the imaginary details.
For example, in a fight, Zert (my character) decides to rush toward a spearman and cut him with his sword. Now, without any other details being present, this is a rather foolish action to take. The spearman has the range advantage here, and I didn't try to counter it in any way. So, what the dice say isn't if my character can do it or not. What they say is what kind of attack Zert executed. Maybe he rushed him recklessly. Maybe he went for it right as the spearman was recovering his guard. The group then might decide that in none of these cases I manage to get my intent (to do that, I will need to deal with the range problem). Instead, because of how the situation and my action fitted with each other, this is instead about how hurt Zert is from running straight into a spear (if I am lucky, maybe only a flesh wound to the arm).
So, the point of all this is to make the conflict resolution more about the player's skills, their capacity to invent ways to solve the situations at the table. But this seems a bit of a radical departure, I think. I am a bit afraid that doing this might be a bad idea. While the actual implementation involves a little more than this (combat for example, may involve some situational variables such as how tired you are and how "tight" is your guard), that is pretty much the gist of it. Do you have any thoughts about this change of the normal Apocalypse World resolution system?
