A sample of three opinionated individuals hardly makes a case against this being a weird move.  Should other internal features of characters be influenced by dice rolls? 

Well, the answer is clearly 'yes, if that's how the game works.' The game designer made a very specific decision to have Turn Someone On work this way, which he attempted to support with an entire sub-section of play advice and explanation. The game chooses this one specific "internal feature" for a reason, and it explicitly steps over a line that lots of roleplayers are uncomfortable with. I think it does so for good reasons and with good effect.

As before, I'd just suggest you play a few sessions before deciding this move doesn't work for you -- as has been mentioned, it's likely to be a self-correcting problem, since your group (or specifically, the MC) will only call for the move when they perceive an actual possibility of sexual arousal. The game explicitly suggests that this could happen in unexpected ways, but there's no need to take that to heart if it's going to ruin the game for you.

still finding this move particularly weird, and I think it should feel so for everyone -

Well as you can presumably see from this thread, it doesn't? So that's something to consider.

Attraction leads to orientation, I think it's false and in bad faith to just say "oh, well you're attracted to this or that, but you don't have to feel it or do anything about it, you get to chose your response after this response is chosen for you".

I don't think anyone has suggested that you don't have to feel it. But what you choose to do about it is determined by the move, and the choices it provides. And what you decide it means about who you are as a person is completely up to you. That's the element of choice I was emphasizing.

Which follows to, if I'm repeatedly finding myself swinging one way or the other or back and forth how can I just say "no, that's not really how I feel"?  

With increasing difficulty, I am guessing. Welcome to being a teenager who is confused about their sexual identity? Or maybe you won't say that, maybe you'll be like 'I guess I'm X', or maybe you'll be like 'fuck it, I'm going to get drunk and kiss whoever I feel like' or... who knows what? Maybe you'll have all these crazy feelings for the people around you and that will let them manipulate you in damaging ways? That's kind of what the move is for.

Because that is what the dice will do to your character.

Well, it's what the move will do to your character, yes.

If I get shot in game, I don't argue about the harm, oh well, I got shot, deal with the consequences, maybe I should have thought out the plan better.  If I do the research roll, I found out the ancient secret or not.  Maybe I try again later, maybe I have to change tactics, whatever.  The fact this roll waffles -- well, it happened, you felt like this, but you don't have to *really* feel like this -- is a cop out.

You're going up against this straw man over and over and over, so just in case this was a response to my post: I did not mean to imply that your PC does not "really feel" turned on. That is absolutely not how the move works. You are absolutely turned on, assuming there is a hit on the roll. You absolutely and totally feel sexually aroused. That is absolutely what happens to your character, in that moment.

I dig the youth aspect, I dig the supernatural horror, but mechanizing sexuality is proving to be unsatisfying.

Have you played a session yet? I'd definitely recommend trying it out, and seeing how it works.

--

I mean, this is really a self-governing issue. If you and your players all share this same level of trepidation, then presumably you aren't going to actually roll to turn each other on willy-nilly, at the slightest provocation -- you're going to respect your understanding of the fiction, and be like 'well he's straight, so I guess there's no way he could be turned on by me, oh well' and the move won't come into play.

Or maybe you'll find yourselves looking for cases where it actually does make sense, despite these concerns. And maybe that will result in some interesting play? The assumption that 'the dice' are just going to descend in some arbitrary way and make a mess of your previously-coherent and totally-unshakeable view of your own PC's sexuality seems a bit paranoid, when you consider that you and the other players will have total control over when those dice are rolled.

But more generally, this move does mean something important about the world and about the PCs. It means their sexuality is extremely fluid and confusing and powerful. It means they don't actually know yet what will and will not turn them on. And they don't know yet how they will and will not react to being turned on. They don't know who they are, and that's part of what you play to find out.

Or can the 'turning on' be something non-sexual?  An attraction to be like someone you wish you were? (as a friend suggested)

That's certainly how many self-identifying straight teenagers are likely to interpret their feelings, in that situation. Repression/sublimation are useful tools for coping with a complicated existence. Trying to decipher the difference between 'I want to BE you' and 'I want to DO you' is one of those fundamental teenage romantic difficulties, IMO, especially when it comes to the same sex.

I think this focus on whether or not they are being 'turned gay' is pretty far past the point; if the PC is heterosexual prior to the use of the move, then at most they would be 'turned bisexual'? Whatever that means?

The idea that these labels are prescriptive rather than descriptive is one of the things the game and this move are challenging. Not everyone is a 0/6 on the Kinsey Scale, and so even if you as a player have not had these sorts of experiences what the game is telling you is that your character does have them, sometimes, and how your character deals with that is probably going to be fairly interesting.

It seems to me you are asking the move to tell you too much about the characters. All it tells you is that, in that moment, they were sexually aroused/engaged by that other character. The idea that this fact, alone, could account for their sexual identity (they must be gay! now they're straight!), is not only wrong but also undermines the degree to which the move is specifically meant to show how that isn't so. The move provides an opportunity for your character to shape their sexual identity based not on how they feel or how their body reacts in the moment, but how they choose to act in response.

Feedback is appreciated, I'm worried that it might be too boring.

Yeah, it's a little boring. Who is this responsible, competent, inspiring person and what the heck are they doing in a Monsterhearts game? Needs a solid dose of dysfunction, ASAP:

* How about a 'Ripper' move -- unexpected resources/skills/memories/edginess from the character's past that help and complicate things in sexy ways.

* Voice of Experience is too easy -- when the Mentor gives advice in the MH genre, it never works out that smoothly. I'd love to see a move with some juicy 7-9 results, like offering experience to do the OPPOSITE of what the Mentor said, etc. I mean come on, since when do teenagers just listen?

* Apprentice is kind of neither here nor there. Is this person core to the skin or not really? I like the idea suggested above that the apprentice is automatically included, in which case the move could maybe be made more double-edged; after all, having an Apprentice is a responsibility. If they die under your tutelage that's a big deal, and they're a crazy teenager who never listens!

* An even stronger option along those lines would be to have the Apprentice work similarly to the Mortal's true love (look at Giles and Buffy and tell me these people are not dangerously co-dependent.)

* The Darkest Self makes sense, for an NPC -- for a PC it seems really passive. DSes should prescribe action, not inaction (the Ghost DS kind of has this problem too) -- becoming your Darkest Self is about becoming a monster, not becoming a less effective human.

* Voice of Reason 7-9 result: you can choose to become your Darkest Self in exchange for them leaving theirs? In fact I would make this the only way it works at 7-9 (or maybe add some other equally difficult options) and make the current 7-9 result the 10+ result. Forcing PCs to leave their DS seems sketchy to me.

* The Sex Move... are you telling me if Giles had sex with <any of the younger characters on Buffy> it would be a positive, fulfilling experience? Are you sure you wouldn't instead want to throw your television out the window and scrub yourself down with a wire brush? I don't want to sound moralistic here, but authority figures having sex with teenagers is not an unproblematic, easily-managed experience that works out well for everybody involved. And even if that could theoretically be true in real life, this is Monsterhearts! You're throwing away a huge opportunity to get some bloody fingerprints all over this skin.

--

I think in general the current skin reads like all the upsides of being the go-to authority figure with none of the downsides. Maybe as a secondary playbook for a PC who is already full of angst and screwed-up teenage responsibilities, it will still work out, but I think the moves need to point much more strongly towards all the serious, engaging emotional difficulties that come with trying to be a mentor to a (monstrous) teenager. Especially a Mentor who is not their parent, and is some kind of monster themselves.

This is not an easy job, and more importantly it's a job that is rife with great fodder for drama -- especially when you realize that the Mentor in question is probably going to be just out of high school themselves, and only barely managing to keep this 'adult' shit together. (Not to harp on the sources, but think about Buffy trying to be Dawn's 'mom' in the later seasons, work at the high school, etc.) Adding that element in to the existing moves, or creating some new ones along those lines, could definitely help keep the boredom at bay.

Thematically/source-material wise, I would also think about characters like Lupin/Sirius from the Harry Potter books as well. Mentors should have lots of unsettled scores and regrets, and resentment at not being able to just do things themselves.

[quote author=Epistolary Richard link=topic=6217.msg26479#msg26479 But, as I said in the AP, I think it's always a good idea to have some external focus running around or risk exhausting the potential in the relationships.[/quote]

For sure -- I thought those comments were spot-on. It's a fine balance between the pleasure of watching the game run itself (as the PvP/love triangles kick in) and making sure it doesn't run itself out too quickly.

Ironically, it's often easier for players to draw a veil and say 'yeah, we had sex' rather than get into the details of what activity counts and what doesn't. :D

Oh, absolutely -- but that's part of what I am interested in, too. It's not that I want some sort of endless prurient detailing of sex acts, but how your character deals with all the various parts of teenage sex can be super-interesting and super-revealing. Leaping straight to sex moves can definitely short-circuit a lot of that stuff.

- allow greater flexibility with the Turn On 7-9 result i.e. "give themselves to you" doesn't actually have to mean sex. I typically interpret this result as 'sex' however it doesn't say that in the rules or in the long example.

Oh, I've never interpreted 'give themselves to you' as meaning sex -- if nothing else, that basically rules out choosing that result in probably the majority of cases, since people are constantly turning each other on in public, or turning on reluctant NPCs (often adults) who are super unlikely to just up and screw a PC based on a single base impulse.

It definitely means a concrete action, but that can mean a sudden, brief kiss; or an unexpectedly flirty note passed in class; or an awkward request for a date; etc. It's definitely a much more interesting choice when it is more broadly interpreted as 'do the most sexually-forward thing that is narratively available to your character'.

And that last bit is really where you're going to find the more fruitful sexual-tension area I was talking about, I think -- a lot of your suggestions feel too much like trying to deny something to the players, or punishing them, whereas I'm more interested in ways to encourage people to revel in the weird teenage world of denial and fantasy. I definitely like the suggestion of having people stumble in at inconvenient moments, or just having less privacy (or more tenuous privacy) available to the PCs.

I like the Fae sex move, for example, because it doesn't mandate actual intercourse, and I think if I was MCing a game and trying to push it in the direction I'm talking about, I would consider an up-front statement that 'what counts' for triggering a sex move would be more liberally interpreted, based on the characters involved. (I've seen this done in play a lot, and it was usually because some seriously sexy stuff happened between PCs that was nonetheless definitely not sex; there's a sort of table-consensus threshhold being passed.)

This is great stuff.

Having just played a sex-move-filled one-shot at a con, I found the reflections on the degree to which the game pushed the players into amping up the sex pretty interesting.

I do sometimes feel like there is much more fertile psychological/narrative ground available in the place between tepid/network 'teen romance' and all-out HBO 'everyone screws everyone' -- especially for teenagers -- but the existence of Sex Moves really does tend to push players to trample directly over that ground at the slightest provocation.

So much of (my own) teenage experience around sex and romance had to do with the interaction of fantasy, accidental provocation, and social incompetence -- all things that Monsterhearts actually models extremely well -- that it seems kind of weird when all my Monsterhearts PCs have no trouble getting it on at the slightest provocation.

Obviously the goal here is not some sort of high-school verisimilitude (not at all!), but even when the goal is 'melodramatic sexiness' I can't help but feel like it might be better-served by a little more sexual tension, and a little less sexual release.

Of course, that's a lot more likely to work in an ongoing campaign than a one-shot, but it almost makes me want to play my next Monsterhearts game with an explicit goal to not-quite sleep with anybody.

I'm just saying such questions need answers.

As you yourself point out later in the post, this isn't really true: the default answer (#6) is that the question is only important if somebody starts to give a shit. Of course, the MC is on the list of 'somebodies', so it's pretty legit to always need an answer to such questions if you happen to be a person who worries about technological logistics. (Which it sounds like you do!)

Cool. Yeah, countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. They can advance because someone missed a move (mechanical), but they advance in the fiction -- by doing something concrete. And sometimes the fiction advances first -- whatever was on the clock happens naturally as part of the story -- and you mark the clock to catch up to where the story already is.

One thing that helped me when I started making Fronts was not to be too worried about every Threat being exactly one thing: exactly one threat type, or representing exactly one type of scarcity. You can have a Threat that is both Brutes/Family and Landscape/Prison, so long as that makes sense to you as the MC. Maybe the psychic maelstrom is primarily a Landscape/Mirage, but it's also a Warlord/Slaver.

Having secondary threat types/expressions can often make for really interesting Threats, but more importantly it lets you not worry too much about picking the One Perfect Thing for each Front or Threat -- the goal of all those choices is just to give you inspiration and tools, as the MC. Sometimes a combination or expansion of types is going to be more inspiring, or give better tools to fit the idea you already have in mind.

Sure there is: you say 'hey, how about this thing is true about our characters' relationship?' and then the other player is like 'no, that doesn't make sense' or 'sure, okay' or some in-between variation.

I would also be reluctant to give the Battlebabe a bar, but having them work at one seems fine. Same with the Angel delivering drugs -- that sounds super juicy for fuckery. The 'gigs/moonlighting' combo is not the only way to have a job in AW, it's just the most mechanically clear-cut.

The reason 'having a bar' seems like too much mostly has to do with the status quos of AW. In my experience as both MC and player, it is challenging to create backstory for your character in a way that does not start to look like a status quo -- players tend to describe their character as always having been doing this one thing, or having been in the area for years and years, or having owned that bar since they were two, or whatever.

So it's fine to let people start with a job ongoing, but it's important as an MC to immediately put that under pressure in a way that suggests that it is impermanent and tenuous -- and since it's not really part of what makes the character, you can push way harder than you would if you were threatening an Operator's gigs or a Maestro D's establishment. Similarly, if the Angel weathers the difficulties with her drug-smuggling/distribution scheme for long enough -- either long enough to get an advance and buy 'gigs', or long enough that they have descriptively secured that activity -- then that should go on their character sheet and your attitude towards it should shift a little bit.

Because now they've earned it, basically. Playbooks start with some stuff pre-earned, but they also tend to point towards other things (with the Hx moves, generally.) If a player seems like they're trying to grab a lot of stuff in chargen that they haven't earned, then sure, you CAN just be like 'whoa, dial it back, that's not on your sheet' -- but you can also take it as the player establishing what their initial goals are going to be as a PC, and bring some MC pressure to bear until we find out whether or not that's really something they can pull off.

On the fundamental scarcity-thing, I really struggled - and am struggling with it. In the Inside Hatchet-City-threath from the Core Book it just says: "Corruption".

The clue is that I want the Wilderness the represent a danger - and to make those who dare enter them cool/though/hard

Well that's a good starting point: what is the danger of the Wilderness like? Which of the scarcities seems like the best fit? Is the danger of the wilderness one of Thirst -- is it dry and parched, does it suck all the moisture/emotion/joy out of people who go there? -- or is it a Decay sort of place, full of dust storms or suffocating humidity, and fallen-apart cars and buildings, that threatens to erode and destroy anything that tries to grow/go there? Or is it a wilderness of hunger, where nothing grows; or envy, full of secrets and treasure that draws people in?

Usually a Front will have a sort of iconic Threat -- the threat that seems most crucial, or that started you building the front in the first place. Thinking about which scarcities are driving that Threat is often easier than trying to pick for the Front as a whole. Imagining how the Threat would be different if it was more about Envy, or more about Thirst, can help you get familiar with that sort of metaphorical thinking.

Though really, if you've already built the whole front, at that point the scarcity may be a bit superfluous -- I find them most helpful when I have only one or two semi-formed Threats in mind, and I need inspiration for additional threats or countdown clocks or whatever.

but I am struggling with countdown-clocks and whatnot. Gaming (ApW) in two days, hopefully I can "bring it" at the table.

Countdown clocks are linked to the Dark Agenda. The easiest way to think about it is: you decided these threats exist, so what does it actually look like when they do threatening things? If Uncle's Compound is a threat, that must be because it is going to do something -- in fact you can probably imagine a bunch of different bad things that could happen. So just list them all out, then see if some of them fit together into a sort of sequence or escalation -- those are the ticks on your Countdown Clock. It's just bad stuff that the Threat might do, and probably WILL do eventually if the PCs don't ever get in the way.

Anyways, best of luck. I am running session #2 of a new game tonight as well, so all this has been on my mind. (Though honestly I think you are further along on your Fronts than I am!)

In a campaign all about weaning ourselves from salvage and literally rebuilding, it seems odd that there are all these cool dice-centric moves involving barter and buying things at markets, but none about making and fixing.

Well, the barter moves are optional, but I agree that you should support what your players are up to with cool moves, whenever it makes sense.

As for whether a Savvyhead in a workspace is fundamentally more, sure. I mean, they are the Savvyhead. But there is a lot of room between 'everyone uses a workspace the same' and 'the Savvyhead is the lord and master of technology, and is weird, and therefore a workspace is fundamentally different than making a bow and arrow by hand.' It's that latter impulse/reading that I was pushing back against, at least a little.

(As to the Angel, consider that there are moves that give people medical kits that act mechanically identical to the Angel's kit.)

But I mean it seems pretty clear to me that a non-Savvyhead could still use a workshop. Apocalypse World is full of non-Savvyheads, after all (the PC is the only one), and they are still fixing stuff.

Based on what you've described, it sounds like the tension in your game is between scavenging old things and making new ones, not between two different ways of making stuff. I think the workspace rules cover all of that pretty well -- and there's no reason not to use them as guidelines for someone making stuff without a workspace.

But another way of looking at it is that if they are making something that's not complicated enough to even require a workspace, why are you rolling dice for it? What are the variety of interesting outcomes you're going to be choosing between? The move you have right now seems like it's just going to make the MC's job harder, when it comes to making Apocalypse World seem real: usually the workshop questions are structured to give the MC maximum flexibility, so they can make sure that stuff that is hard to make is hard, and stuff that is easier is easy. What happens when the player hits a 10+ and wants to make something that absolutely should require two things on that list? How difficult is it going to be to contort the fiction around that? Or what if they're trying to build something pretty simple, but they miss? How do you explain that they can just never figure that out? I think the current workspace rules avoid a roll for good reason.

I don't really know the details of your game, but I don't know that I really see a 'move gap' there. While it's true you want to support your players with relevant moves, just because the game is turning out to be 'about' crafting and rebuilding, doesn't mean those things necessarily need to become more mechanically complex. There are lots of things in the default game that are 'core' but still decided by the MC -- even things that start from a move (like the +wants of a Hardhold) require the MC to become real in the fiction.

What do you think? Overly complicated?

Yes. You don't roll +weird to use the Workspace moves, right? You just use them.

I don't mean to dismiss your conception entirely, but I think it's worth challenging. The thing that sets a Savvyhead apart when fixing high tech objects is not just her workspace, it's access to Things Speak. Not all Savvyheads even have that move.

The workspace rules are after all still subject to 'make Apocalypse World seem real': a Savvyhead without Things Speak and with no fictional reason to understand golden age tech does not automatically get to fix a painwave projector, or a computer, just because she has a workshop. Sometimes one of the things the MC says is 'first, you'll have to figure out how to manufacture silicon chips', because that's just what the fiction demands. The workshop is not a magic place, absent the laws of logic and narrative: it's exactly the opposite, it's the catch-all set of rules for doing anything, within the framework of Apocalypse World. (That's why for example they are just ported over wholesale to an Angel's infirmary, etc.)

Which also means that a move that gives other players access to the workshop rules is a totally cool and workable idea. But right now that move just reads like 'the workshop rules, but with a roll, and some weird modifiers' -- it's not really bringing a lot to the table. And also, consider that everyone else needs some sort of resource before they can access that move at all: an infirmary, a workshop, etc. Why do these people get to bypass that?

I mean obviously you are going to consider their resources as the MC when you choose from the list -- if somebody has a garage, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to fix a car -- but I'm not really sure what is driving you to take away the prerequisite of: you need some kind of workspace? Remember that even PCs who can't take a workshop as an advance can always acquire such a resource proactively in the fiction.

It seems to me that if all the major holdings with which the PCs are (or have been) associated are becoming stable, then it's time to either end the campaign or relocate to some other more contentious part of the Apocalypse.

I think it's totally legit for a Hardholder to retire to safety in a way that suggests the holding itself is also relatively safe -- provided they've earned that in the fiction as well. But I would be much less inclined to continue to use said 'hold as setting for the activities of other PCs, because at some point your obligation to the safely-retired is going to start interfering with the 'no status quos' and 'make their lives interesting' principles.

Also remember that Fronts are based around a fundamental scarcity. You have threats listed under each Front, but don't mention what scarcity they're based around.

I wouldn't say it's essential, but it can help find connections between threats that might not immediately seem to group together.