anyway.

I am enjoying Human Contact so much. It's (one of) my first regular, ongoing games in about 10 years (or more) and it's just fabulous. Particularly fun is the embroidering of setting we're doing. I love how we'll spend ten minutes at a time talking about the setting, or describing the environment we're in.

It's pretty fucking sweet. I just started today to compose a blog post about the games we're playing out of an abiding interest in resparking the "link the stuff you're excited about" culture of indie game development.

Apparently the playtest report of Apocalypse World at The Forge did not quite qualify as a playtest report. Oops. It's easy to forget that really enjoying oneself is not enough.

I'm just seconding everything everyone else said. Oh boy this is fun! I'm trying to figure out how to answer Ron's "Hey, what got playtested?", but all I can come up with it "It's awesome!"

Nah, Ron's good. There IS something I want to discuss there.

...And THERE'S a brain-dump and a half. I hope somebody out there can make sense of me!

Rob: yeah. Both games are hitting me right in the sweet spot, pace- and development-wise.

Well, here, this is what I'm hearing. Let me know if I'm getting it right.

So, in this game, NPCs are associated with a particular type of move. Each move comes in two flavors: maneuver and "punch in the face". However, you can only use this move if the NPC is actually free to act in the fiction. So, in a sense, each NPC becomes a GM resource whose availability is adjudicated via the fiction. Therefore, players can control the availability of this resource to the GM through their actions in the fiction.

Did I get that right?

(Aside: can you escalate "punch in the face" to "face stabby"? Just curious... ;-] )

Hey Seth! Can we have this question in the Forge thread instead?

Absolutely! I'll repost over there.

"I'm pretty convinced now that they're Ben's offering an opportunity and taking an opportunity, which is exciting to me."

Hey Vincent, might be time to start looking back at Mo's Push & Pull stuff.

I dunno, Chris. I have a pretty strong recollection of Mo telling me that Push and Pull were emphatically *not* about that.

Huh.  Then maybe I completely misunderstood what she meant by Pull.

Could have a mistaken memory.

Let's go ask her!

Neat! That reminds me of a mechanic I came up with once, except it was in the context of re-creating dysfunctional gaming situations (Presence of Wizards means I can pull all kinds of horse-shit)

I've read a couple of posts now about Apocalypse world and I still can't grok how it looks by default - I'm imagining Tribe if everyone was naked and covered in blood all of the time.

From the back of my character sheet/splat book:

"The Hardholder
There is no government, no society, in Apocalypse World. When hardholders ruled whole continents, when they waged war on the other side of the world instead of with the hold across the burn-flat, when their armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they had fucking boats to hold their fucking airplanes on, that was the golden age of legend. Now, anyone with a concrete compound and a gang of gunluggers can claim the title, and dare you to say otherwise."

Does that help, Sean?

oh, okay, now I ..... wait, what? Character sheet/splat book?

Each character type (Hardholder, Battlebabe, Brainer, Gunlugger, etc) has a little booklet, like an 8.5x11 sheet quartered and saddle stapled, that has all the pertinent information for that type. The center spread is the character sheet. It's excellent.

Yeah and they're going to be passed around and given out for free. Clever stuff!