Hi friends!

I'm going to be doing some tidying and straightening up around here soon, starting maybe next week, maybe the week after. I'll be paying extra attention to the hack forums and I might change some policies. Don't be startled.

Thanks!

-Vincent

Made!

Cool!

If you're playing absolutely strictly, that 5th experience means that they have to retire or change.

There's no reason to play that strictly if you don't want to. The MC can create custom advances, or else the character can just stop tracking experience and advancement, or whatever the player and MC work out.

-Vincent

I do it however seems best, case by case. All of those are legit. There's no reason to rule any of them out before the fact.

One way to resolve "can I win the savage biker nomads over?" is to spend an advance to get a gang. Resolved: yes I can, and yes I do. Choosing to elide the action isn't the same as plotting ahead.

Saying "I don't know whether I want these guys as a gang, let's see how we hit it off, maybe I'll take my advance after" is perfectly fine too.

As MC, I'm utterly unbothered by either.

-Vincent

Possibly so!

As it happens, this dynamic is going to underlie the Space Marine Mammal from the beginning, not just toward the end. For the Space Marine Mammal, the question is going to be when and whether you'll start pursuing experience and advancement, not what to do when you're running out of options.

-Vincent

Flatterer!

A serious attempt at an answer:

1. All I think about is the conversation. If a rule gets people to say something interesting, it's a good rule and it might get to stay. If it doesn't, it's not, and it absolutely has to go.

2. Designing a game means designing a bell curve. "The" conversation is all the conversations within a standard deviation or two of the norm, right? Any given conversation, and any given moment of every given conversation, might fall out in one tail or the other. That's okay. It's still "the" conversation, the center of the bell curve, that I design for.

3. The purpose of a game isn't to balance, but to fall rapidly out of balance and accelerate into an end state. Even an exquisitely balanced game like Go, in play, is an unfolding catastrophe, an inevitable disaster for one side or the other. When I design, whenever I find two players, two characters, or a situation in balance, I look for the most aggressive and expedient way to unbalance them. It's usually a simple thing to do: just make somebody's decision binding.

I'd be pretty surprised if this helps! Ask me more questions if you want.

-Vincent

"You don't have to advance if you don't want to" isn't by-the-book play. Technically speaking, it's a custom move on your home front, and it's a perfectly legit one. If you like the effect it's having on your game, by all means keep it.

When you retire to safety, if there's any question, handle it the same way you'd handle changing playbooks: work out with your MC what's an essential part of you, and what's just part of the circumstances of your old life. Retire the former to safety with you and leave the latter behind to fend for itself.

-Vincent

Oh sure. It's not a big thing, it's just that differences in value are what make decision-making possible.

When you go to choose a move from another playbook, all the moves from all the other playbooks aren't equally valuable. You'll reject most of the moves without even weighing them, and really consider only a subset. For instance, if you have weird-2, you're most likely going to skip over all the moves that have you roll+weird, right? But if I have weird+2, those are the moves I'm going to be looking at first.

Same thing with the ungiven future advances. Is it all equally advantageous to you to advance some basic moves, change playbooks, increase a stat, and retire to safety? No! Not at all. Depending on details of your character and her circumstances, some of those will be obviously better choices than others.

There's no reason for all your options to be equal, and, in the same way, no reason for any given option to mean the same thing to you as it does to me.

Mechanical game balance is useful in some types of games - games where your character's effectiveness in combat is the same thing as your ability to participate as a player, for instance, like D&D4 -but Apocalypse World balances across non-mechanical lines. In Apocalypse World, your ability to participate as a player is your character's ability to disrupt and/or pursue stable situations, not your character's mechanical effectiveness.

Does that even make sense? I'm always happy to answer followup questions, so feel free!

-Vincent

Ewokbloodhunt: You aren't missing anything.

-Vincent

Maybe this post? This would be my first guess.

 http://lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=22

-Vincent

Right! Every threat has room for a whole cast of people in it. It shouldn't always be one person one threat.

-Vincent

Also: B.F. Skinner. The puns and references are thick in this game.

Narrattiva already translated these into Italian, though. You should be able to get your hands on them, can't you?

-Vincent

Nice, me too.

Sure thing!