Latest / Sessions Canceled / Tabletop Shout Out: Apocalypse World | Part. 2: Ep. 153

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Tabletop Shout Out: Apocalypse World | Part. 2: Ep. 153 · Sessions Canceled

• 0:15
  What's up Internet? The GM is knee deep in Reddit
• 0:17
  arguments bashing the new Last of Us show and saying how much
• 0:21
  he hates Bella Ramsey and we just.
• 0:24
  We just can't get him out. He's too lost in the sauce.
• 0:26
  So such sessions cancelled and we might be calling the police
• 0:31
  I. Just.
• 0:38
  What? I don't know, I thought that was
• 0:40
  so funny. It was like it wasn't any
• 0:45
  different than our usual fucking interest, but it's mindset.
• 0:54
  My dad, coincidentally, is not a huge fan of Billy Ramsey as
• 0:57
  Ellie, but he hasn't played the games so he doesn't really know
• 1:03
  why. He's like, I just don't, I don't
• 1:05
  know. I'm just not vibing.
• 1:06
  I'm like, I, I don't know what to tell you, but she's actually
• 1:09
  acts exactly the way Ellie acts for the most part.
• 1:13
  Not what I've seen. I've seen she acts quite
• 1:14
  different. In season 2 she seems to be
• 1:18
  departing a lot more. In season 1, she.
• 1:20
  Oh season 1 I was. I was referring to season 2.
• 1:23
  I don't even think he's seen season 2.
• 1:26
  Maybe not. Yeah, I mean, I think the
• 1:29
  problem, the main problem I'm seeing with Season 2 is she just
• 1:33
  does not have the gravitas to be the psychopath that Ellie is in
• 1:37
  the game. And so it just doesn't work.
• 1:40
  She just doesn't. She just don't got the vibe, you
• 1:44
  know, like Ellie is to be. Fair.
• 1:46
  I think very few actor actresses have that like.
• 1:51
  Psycho in that game. The only one I think who even
• 1:54
  comes close is Charlize Theron because of Fury and she just had
• 1:58
  that dog in her though. Well, that's kind of what they
• 2:01
  Yeah, they needed somebody who had that, that similar aura as
• 2:06
  Charlize Theron to be Ellie and Bella Ramsey is incredibly not
• 2:10
  that. Yeah, you know, actually, you
• 2:14
  know, oh, God. Maisie Williams, Arya Stark, she
• 2:17
  has that. Maybe.
• 2:21
  Yeah, that could have worked. Maybe I don't really.
• 2:24
  Think so she she's done some psychopath of shit.
• 2:27
  There's a whole chunk of the show in books where she's just
• 2:30
  carving people's faces off to make magic masks so she can
• 2:33
  shape shift. Nice.
• 2:38
  Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't know,
• 2:42
  like people will still complain about her not looking like
• 2:45
  Ellie. I don't actually think that part
• 2:46
  matters, but yeah, the gravitas is.
• 2:49
  A problem like the not looking like Ellie thing kills me
• 2:53
  because if you look at Ellie in the original game she looks like
• 2:56
  a Barbie doll. Like she is so her face is so
• 3:00
  perfect and like she it's almost chibi right?
• 3:04
  Her eyes are big fucking orbs and you got a little pouty lips
• 3:08
  and a tiny nose. She looks like if you were to
• 3:11
  run, you know, cute teenager or something into a fucking ChatGPT
• 3:17
  and that's what it would pop out.
• 3:18
  Like it's impossible to meet that standard.
• 3:21
  She's a mid journey model. Kind of yeah, like that's
• 3:24
  that's, you know, not really not literally.
• 3:26
  Like I'm not trying to shit on the work that the people that
• 3:28
  Naughty Dog did. Her visual model, especially for
• 3:30
  2014 looks great, but no human is going to look that like I'm
• 3:35
  in the apocalypse and I just woke up like this.
• 3:37
  You know what I mean? Like.
• 3:41
  Actually funny commentary people I've I've seen people mentioning
• 3:43
  is that everyone is really clean and has their makeup and shit
• 3:47
  done in the show. Like nobody looks grungy or
• 3:49
  dirty or like anything bad has happened at all to them.
• 3:53
  That's really funny considering there's a scene Last of Us Part
• 3:57
  1 like Joel just looks like shit though.
• 3:59
  Looks like. Oh shit, yeah, yeah.
• 4:02
  There's a scene it that I saw where Dina is like convincing
• 4:10
  Ellie to keep going on the mission of getting revenge
• 4:13
  because apparently in the show, for some reason Ellie is the
• 4:15
  reluctant 1 and Dina's the one who's like let's get this shit
• 4:18
  done. Which do with that information
• 4:20
  what you will. Wow, OK.
• 4:24
  Yeah, yeah. Do that what you will.
• 4:25
  I yeah, I know too much to unpack right now, but the
• 4:29
  actress for Dina, she her hair, she's like really long black
• 4:34
  hair. And she looks like she might be
• 4:37
  like Indian or Pakistani or something like that.
• 4:40
  So she has really like, thick, long black hair.
• 4:42
  And it is like Florida State blown out with like amazing
• 4:47
  curls to it, you know, like this.
• 4:49
  She looks like she was just on the runway.
• 4:52
  What the fuck? It's so, it's so jarring.
• 4:56
  That is that's one thing that I they they stopped doing this in
• 5:00
  in The Walking Dead. But like the like two seasons
• 5:03
  where where oh God, what's the actor for Rick?
• 5:07
  Oh, I can't remember his Andrew Lincoln where he had the the
• 5:09
  full beard and his hair always looked greasy and his jacket was
• 5:13
  always covered in blood and guts.
• 5:14
  And you're like, dude, you look like it's so bad.
• 5:19
  Even they even comments on in the show where where the first
• 5:22
  time Negan sees him and he pulls him a picture of what like Rick
• 5:25
  used to look like when he was in full Rick Tater ship mode and
• 5:27
  he's like that guy. I would not have fucked with you
• 5:31
  though. Nice.
• 5:33
  It's good. Listen, I mean, it makes sense.
• 5:36
  Post apocalypse, right? Using that segue of post
• 5:40
  apocalypse, we're talking about Apocalypse World again because
• 5:47
  we didn't finish last time, because I ramble too much.
• 5:51
  That's really all there is to it, Yapper.
• 5:53
  I'll be yapping. So we're going to get back to
• 5:57
  it. So if you miss Part 1, this is
• 6:01
  not a serialized situation, you are going to need to listen to
• 6:04
  Part 1 because we're just going to jump right from where we left
• 6:06
  off. And I'm not going to like
• 6:07
  backfill really. So go watch the other one,
• 6:12
  listen to God, whatever, whatever.
• 6:18
  Anyway, before we do that, hit follow, subscribe on your
• 6:23
  podcast platform of choice. It will prevent the apocalypse,
• 6:27
  I hope. Probably, maybe, probably not.
• 6:29
  Whatever. Almost certainly not.
• 6:33
  Yeah, almost. Certainly not anyway, so we we
• 6:38
  returned to Apocalypse World. We we left off going over the G
• 6:43
  miss moves. I'm just going to briefly say
• 6:50
  because I don't know if I actually explained this in the
• 6:53
  previous episode or not, so I'm just going to explain it now
• 6:58
  just to cover the base. Some people might be slightly
• 7:03
  confused in this game about when AGM, sorry.
• 7:09
  When the MC does a move and what a move is in a sense, the trick.
• 7:20
  The the trick answer to this, the the very high level answer
• 7:23
  to this is the G Ms. always doing moves.
• 7:26
  You are perpetually doing moves all time and forever.
• 7:30
  The more specific answer to that question is anytime there's a
• 7:34
  pause in the conversation, or as the game puts it, a player hands
• 7:38
  you a golden opportunity is when you enact AGM move.
• 7:44
  And a move does not always have to mean a bad thing.
• 7:46
  Like obviously the the moves are phrased like, you know, phrased
• 7:52
  in sort of a negative bent, But put someone on a spot or in a
• 7:57
  spot, for example, doesn't necessarily mean, you know,
• 8:01
  dudes jump out of the bushes and aim guns at them or something.
• 8:04
  It could mean put them in a social spot where somebody who
• 8:06
  they don't want to deal with shows up on the scene and like
• 8:09
  stresses them out or, But the idea of a move is when there's
• 8:12
  a, there's a break, you enact a move as an, as the MC.
• 8:17
  When a player fails a role, you enact a move that's the most
• 8:21
  direct. 1 is when a player fails a role, you, you enact a move
• 8:24
  against them. And generally when they fail a
• 8:26
  role, it's going to be what the game calls a hard move.
• 8:31
  There's no mechanical specificity to this, but the
• 8:35
  game refers to soft moves and hard moves.
• 8:39
  The idea is basically just some moves are very direct and some
• 8:43
  moves are sort of like leading the player along but not
• 8:47
  immediately doing something negative to them.
• 8:51
  So a soft move for example, would be the player walks into a
• 8:57
  room that they didn't check ahead of time and you as the GM
• 9:00
  say you hear something move around and you look around the
• 9:05
  room and you see the glint of metal.
• 9:07
  What do you do? That would be like a soft move.
• 9:10
  You didn't do anything to the player yet, but you are clearly
• 9:13
  telling them something is about to happen.
• 9:15
  A hard move is they ignore what you just said about seeing the
• 9:20
  glint of metal and they say I just keep walking and then use
• 9:23
  the GM go OK Someone pops out from behind a you know a pile of
• 9:28
  stuff and shoots you with a gun in the leg.
• 9:31
  You take two harm. That's a hard move.
• 9:33
  You directly are like punishment for ignoring what I told you or
• 9:38
  punishment for ignoring the situation or or potentially
• 9:41
  punishment for failing a role. So you're the the basic idea is
• 9:46
  you're always enacting your moves.
• 9:49
  You're always kind of looking back to them and you're always
• 9:53
  trying to there's when you're jamming, when you're I keep, I
• 9:58
  keep forgetting when you're MC ING Apocalypse World, you're
• 10:03
  really there's like a pyramid of there's like a hierarchy to what
• 10:09
  you do as the as the MC, where your moves are kind of at the
• 10:14
  bottom of the pyramid. They're your most common.
• 10:16
  They go on the most. Your principles are kind of the
• 10:20
  next step up, like how am I utilizing my move to fill in the
• 10:25
  principle? And then at the very top is your
• 10:27
  agenda, which is like the broadest scope.
• 10:31
  What am I trying to get done in the session and for the game?
• 10:34
  Very broadly speaking, yeah, that's GM moves.
• 10:42
  Did that explanation make any sense?
• 10:43
  I say. Yes.
• 10:45
  I feel OK. A lot of people have a hard
• 10:48
  time. I think a lot of people want to
• 10:52
  think about AGM move as if it were like an ability or
• 11:00
  something that you activate. Like you're playing DND and you
• 11:03
  activate the monster's ability, you know, the layer action or
• 11:05
  whatever. A lot of people want to think of
• 11:07
  GM moves in that sense, where there's sort of a a thing that
• 11:10
  the GM turns on to like do a thing, not really what they are.
• 11:15
  No, I mean I. Think.
• 11:17
  I think the terminologies would confuse people to me.
• 11:21
  And you know, I guess props to me if I'm just regurgitating
• 11:25
  what you just said, but anything AGM does is in this game is a
• 11:30
  move responding to a player. Like introducing villains,
• 11:35
  having shit go on in the background, having the fucking
• 11:38
  the the ambush go on. It's all moves, if not in pure
• 11:44
  terminology, in meaning. The easiest or the way that I
• 11:51
  had it said to me one time that made it or, or, or I was
• 11:55
  listening to a video or whatever that made the most sense was
• 12:00
  Moves in Apocalypse World are just taking the stuff that you
• 12:04
  already do when you're jamming any other game and giving them
• 12:09
  codification and definitions. And the purpose of that is just
• 12:14
  that that the codifying and defining helps you always stay
• 12:20
  on task essentially and always have a a thing to refer back to
• 12:25
  when you are unsure. Because effectively if you
• 12:29
  wanted to get really meta game design on it, you could watch
• 12:34
  someone running Dungeons and Dragons and point out all of the
• 12:38
  moves that they are doing when running DND.
• 12:41
  Because moves are really just the stuff you always do as AGM.
• 12:46
  But Apocalypse World is just about putting it in front of you
• 12:50
  as a comprehensive menu to sort of keep your brain in that space
• 12:55
  at all times and and always keep you on track.
• 13:00
  This is a really good game to teach you how to GM.
• 13:06
  This is a good game to teach you how to do soft GM skills, if
• 13:10
  that makes sense. Like the ID, the social aspect,
• 13:15
  the describing things aspect, the the keeping, the the keeping
• 13:21
  the game moving, the pacing of things, all of that sort of
• 13:24
  stuff. Apocalypse World is a really
• 13:25
  good tool to teach you those things.
• 13:28
  Like it's not necessarily going to teach you how to home brew
• 13:32
  monsters in, in D&D or something like that, but it is going to
• 13:35
  teach you how to respond when your player tries to do X and
• 13:38
  then Y happens. And then you need to figure out
• 13:40
  what the reaction to that is. Is very good for teaching that
• 13:43
  because it gives you this menu of stuff to always look back on.
• 13:47
  And then that menu gets deeply ingrained in your brain because
• 13:51
  anyone who runs Apocalypse World at any point, if they run it
• 13:56
  enough, it will get deeply ingrained in your brain.
• 13:59
  And the things that you did when you ran Apocalypse World you
• 14:01
  will just do for every other game you run.
• 14:04
  I've seen it happened multiple times.
• 14:07
  It infects you. It's, it does seem like it's,
• 14:10
  it's uniquely good at that about like teaching you without
• 14:13
  teaching you. It's the like the wax on wax
• 14:16
  off, so to speak, of gemming. It taught roundabout techniques
• 14:22
  that you can use that you can extrapolate into other
• 14:26
  situations. It's almost like it's almost
• 14:29
  like a gemming tutorial that you learn by doing, kind of.
• 14:33
  That you don't really know you're doing until you've
• 14:35
  already done it. Yeah, you like, don't know
• 14:36
  you're doing a tutorial, but you are.
• 14:39
  And again, I know it sounds like I'm glazing this game a
• 14:41
  ridiculous amount, but I'm not the only person who says these
• 14:44
  things. And I have seen I have AI have a
• 14:47
  dearth of evidence to point to all of these things that I'm
• 14:50
  saying. I don't, I don't even understand
• 14:53
  how it like Vincent Baker Dunbee, a dark wizard or some
• 14:57
  shit who made a fucking pact with Cthulhu.
• 14:59
  I don't know something about the way the game is written and the
• 15:03
  order of things and the structure of things.
• 15:05
  It just it just do magic. I don't I really I really don't
• 15:10
  get it. But the man has done entire
• 15:15
  several page long blog post explaining his design philosophy
• 15:20
  and theory about how he constructed Apocalypse World and
• 15:23
  how he constructs tabletop games.
• 15:25
  Broadly it it's like looking at a philosophy teacher's
• 15:29
  dissertation. It's fucking I.
• 15:31
  It's nigh incomprehensible bullshit.
• 15:35
  The man is deep in the sauce. I, I don't get it.
• 15:38
  But he's deep in the sauce anyway.
• 15:43
  So after after we talk, after the game talks about MC moves,
• 15:50
  it gives you a little rules in your prep stuff.
• 15:57
  It basically explains kind of what I was saying there where
• 15:59
  the game, it literally says the game's rules give you things to
• 16:03
  say. When a player's character goes
• 16:05
  aggro on someone, rolls a 7 to 9, for instance, the rules give
• 16:07
  you a list to choose from. Choose one of them and that's
• 16:09
  what you say. Say it according to your
• 16:10
  principles. Like I said, this game has this
• 16:15
  almost it runs itself kind of power.
• 16:17
  That's sort of reiterating that point.
• 16:20
  Your threat map also gives you things to say.
• 16:25
  When player characters opens their brain to the maelstrom,
• 16:27
  for instance, the rules might tell you to reveal something
• 16:29
  interesting. Something interesting.
• 16:30
  Question mark you look at your threat map.
• 16:32
  Joe's girl has joined the water cult.
• 16:34
  I bet you didn't know that. So say that.
• 16:37
  And of course, say it according to your principles.
• 16:38
  Maybe deep under the brain howling what you hear is a
• 16:41
  chanting a list of people's names chanted over and over 100
• 16:45
  times in subliminal voices or by a by subliminal voices.
• 16:51
  A few more things to keep in mind that are as the book books
• 16:54
  it these are these are just good practice and I recommend them.
• 16:57
  These aren't like rules. Make maps.
• 17:00
  Turn questions back on the asker or over to the group at large.
• 17:05
  Good question actually. What does the rag waste outside
• 17:08
  the holding look like? Digress.
• 17:10
  Occasionally include details as though you were looking idly at
• 17:13
  a scene in some detail. I like this one.
• 17:16
  She pinned rat furs to her wall. The pins are like souvenir push
• 17:21
  pins in the head, or tiny glass lenses with pictures of national
• 17:24
  monuments under them, Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Monument,
• 17:26
  etcetera. It's just a good mental image.
• 17:30
  Yeah. Allied action sometimes zoom in,
• 17:36
  zoom out, shift the focus. Sometimes one session might be
• 17:42
  right where the other one left off.
• 17:44
  Sometimes days go by. This game does not give a fuck
• 17:47
  about tracking time. It is very This game arguably
• 17:52
  actually sometimes works even better if you intentionally
• 17:57
  ignore time or just pretend like it doesn't exist because you
• 18:01
  just kind of jump around and things happen and when exactly
• 18:05
  they happened or how they might have happened or what doesn't
• 18:07
  matter just just do stuff. Weeks have passed since last
• 18:11
  session. Whatever stuff happened it just
• 18:15
  the free form nature of it almost makes it better.
• 18:18
  If you ignore like tracking days and counting and stuff like you
• 18:21
  might do at ADD campaign. Not worth it.
• 18:25
  Arguably one of the arguably detrimental.
• 18:28
  It's you know, I kind of like that because as someone who's
• 18:32
  run AD and D style game, that is the most difficult shit to be
• 18:37
  like, well, you know, I want a level of congruity.
• 18:40
  I don't want just skipping around the timeline.
• 18:43
  But then you're like, why the IT does this shit fucking matter?
• 18:46
  And as I'm learning in Lancer, it actually, I I think runs a
• 18:51
  lot smoother when you just act like it doesn't matter.
• 18:55
  And I, I have, it's gotten to the point where I've even been
• 18:58
  like, Oh, it's like a week and a half travel and then we, we have
• 19:01
  to go back there and I'm like, it's been 2 days and no one asks
• 19:04
  and no one, I don't think most people remember.
• 19:06
  And you're like, OK, so maybe this didn't matter as much as I
• 19:08
  thought it did. Well, some games care and some
• 19:13
  games don't, you know, like Stars Without Number and Worlds
• 19:16
  Without Number are two games that do care about tracking time
• 19:21
  because there's specific mechanics and things the players
• 19:25
  might do and the faction turn and all this stuff that where
• 19:28
  the exact time period can be important.
• 19:32
  But some games just don't give a shit.
• 19:33
  And some games operate in kind of a weird nebulous space like
• 19:36
  DND where most of the time it doesn't give a shit, but
• 19:40
  sometimes it gives a little bit of a shit, but only kind of, you
• 19:44
  know, like if you have a magic item that refreshes on the next
• 19:47
  dawn or whatever being one example.
• 19:49
  Or if you do a project to craft a magic item, then the game
• 19:53
  cares. But if you're not doing that,
• 19:55
  the game doesn't care, you know? So games kind of vary in their
• 19:59
  degrees of how much they care, but for Apocalypse World,
• 20:03
  definitely not. Just not worth it.
• 20:07
  Another thing, Speaking of the zooming in and out, as the game
• 20:09
  says, this goes from moves to. So making a dash under fire
• 20:14
  might mean crossing 3 meters of open ground in view of 1 of
• 20:17
  Dremer's snipers. It might mean crossing 100
• 20:22
  meters of broken ground with his gang arrayed thereupon.
• 20:25
  It might mean crossing the whole damn burn flats with Dog head
• 20:28
  and his gringo dingo cannibals in pursuit.
• 20:30
  Ringo Dingo, Hannibal. Oh, sorry, grinning.
• 20:34
  Sorry, I sorry I read that wrong.
• 20:35
  Grinning dingo. Grinning dingo.
• 20:37
  Cannibals going to fucking. Lose it.
• 20:40
  That would have been the funniest shit I've heard today.
• 20:49
  Point being, again, very different from AD and D, right?
• 20:55
  A move could cover a huge swath of time or a very short period
• 20:59
  of time. It kind of just depends on what
• 21:01
  you need it to do. Then it also talks about making
• 21:08
  sure everyone gets screen time and taking dedicated breaks.
• 21:10
  You know, usual good practice stuff.
• 21:15
  Then there's a very brief chapter on the first session.
• 21:19
  So this game's real explicit about the what kind of session?
• 21:27
  The first session of Apocalypse World should be.
• 21:30
  Essentially when you, you, so it very specifically says before
• 21:38
  the first session, familiar yourself with the rules for
• 21:40
  creating threats, but don't create any threats.
• 21:42
  So session 0, do not create any threats.
• 21:47
  Daydream some apocalyptic imagery, but do not commit
• 21:51
  yourself to any storyline or any particular characters.
• 21:57
  Essentially the first session in this game is almost like you're
• 22:05
  just establishing. It's almost like the first
• 22:08
  session and the world building happened at the same time.
• 22:12
  When you do the first session of Apocalypse World, you're playing
• 22:17
  and establishing things, and the first session is intended to
• 22:21
  just be a day in the life of the characters.
• 22:26
  Now that doesn't mean it has to be boring, it just means nothing
• 22:36
  super crazy is happening, yet it's just a day.
• 22:41
  And so it says it's just because it's the I quote, just because
• 22:46
  it's the first session. Whatever, you're still actually
• 22:49
  playing the game MC the game bring it.
• 22:51
  But especially do these describe bar 4th apocalyptic Elliptica
• 22:57
  Apocalyptica. I don't know that was hard
• 23:00
  spring. I swear I'm not drinking
• 23:02
  springboard off character creation.
• 23:04
  Ask questions all the time. Leave yourself things to worry
• 23:07
  about. Look for where you're not in
• 23:09
  control. Push there.
• 23:11
  Nudge the players to have their characters make moves.
• 23:13
  Give every character good screen time with other characters.
• 23:15
  Leap forward with named human MPCS.
• 23:17
  Hell, have a fight. Work on your threat map and your
• 23:21
  essential threats. Essentially for session 1 you do
• 23:27
  basically no prep at all for this game.
• 23:32
  It's kind of the easiest way to put it.
• 23:34
  You just start hitting dice on the table and operate on vibes
• 23:40
  and let the vibes flow. That's session one.
• 23:46
  And me personally, the way I have done it several times for
• 23:53
  the first session is I say something's happening.
• 23:58
  Like I say I pick a character or maybe a couple.
• 24:01
  I say this is what's going on, and then I say to the character,
• 24:05
  why is this happening? And then we go from there.
• 24:12
  To give an example, I had one game where the driver character
• 24:15
  was on his way back to the to the water bearer character's
• 24:20
  hold. Water bearer is like an extended
• 24:22
  playbook. And I said to the driver, you're
• 24:27
  driving down the waist towards the water bearer's hold.
• 24:31
  Several other cars are chasing you.
• 24:33
  Why are they chasing you? And the the driver player
• 24:40
  basically said, oh, I have, I have a kid in the car with me.
• 24:43
  I have a passenger who is valuable to them.
• 24:47
  And then we just kind of went from there.
• 24:49
  And that was how I kicked off Session 1.
• 24:51
  I had no plan beyond. He was moving towards the base
• 24:56
  and there were dudes after him. Those were all of the thoughts I
• 24:59
  had. And then we went from there.
• 25:08
  And I know that may sound, and perhaps you're thinking this
• 25:11
  right now, Isaiah, that's insane.
• 25:13
  Literally how? Because this game damn near runs
• 25:18
  itself. It's it's pretty easy.
• 25:21
  I would know. So I wasn't actually thinking
• 25:24
  how I I was really thinking about how my usual party would
• 25:26
  handle that. I don't know.
• 25:28
  I think some of them would would come to it pretty naturally, but
• 25:33
  others would really struggle. Yeah, I don't think I would
• 25:38
  struggle much because that's pretty much how I ran my first
• 25:41
  game. Well, and you've been on the GM
• 25:46
  side, which makes doing that kind of thing easier if you're a
• 25:48
  player. Yeah, the the Super snappy sort
• 25:52
  of immediate improv is much easier to me than my players, I
• 25:56
  think. I will say something that makes
• 26:00
  that trick work well. If you don't know exactly how
• 26:06
  your group is going to respond, find the player who you know
• 26:10
  will respond the best and focus on them to start.
• 26:16
  So do you know what's the player?
• 26:17
  Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
• 26:20
  That was Ant for me. He was the one who I could
• 26:23
  consistently be like, I'm going to throw a stick and he'll he'll
• 26:26
  just run after it. And that was a big struggle
• 26:29
  going into Lancer because Ant is not playing in this game.
• 26:32
  So I was like, fuck, I got to find a new one, right?
• 26:35
  Right. Yeah, because if you can throw
• 26:46
  it, if you can throw up the prompt, whatever it might be at
• 26:53
  the most responsive player, they will get the ball rolling and
• 26:56
  then everyone else will generally feel more comfortable
• 26:59
  to follow suit. Not always, of course, but
• 27:03
  generally. I feel like that is actually
• 27:05
  right now currently me in Fabula.
• 27:10
  I would say that is the case, yes.
• 27:16
  So then what do we after the first session, where do we go
• 27:22
  from there for the second, second session and onward,
• 27:25
  basically prep for this game. You think about the game, you
• 27:33
  look at your threat map, you make whatever adjustments you
• 27:37
  need to make to your threat map. That's about it.
• 27:42
  And then you give yourself questions, you put a lot of
• 27:44
  stakes questions and then you go from there because you don't
• 27:51
  need stat blocks, spells, magic items like rules, rules for
• 28:03
  running a business, because you don't need all of that other
• 28:07
  stuff. Prep for this game is a lot of
• 28:09
  thinking and writing down almost improv prompts.
• 28:15
  Like you're giving yourself if then questions or something like
• 28:21
  that. You're just giving yourself
• 28:22
  writing, writing ideas. And then when it makes sense for
• 28:26
  them to come up in a session, you, you let them RIP.
• 28:29
  Maybe you plan a couple of scenes, like I'll plan some bits
• 28:33
  and pieces, scenes that I want to hit.
• 28:36
  But also, again, because I don't really give a shit about time
• 28:40
  when I run this game or, or continuity at all really, I
• 28:44
  don't. I, I write the scene down and
• 28:49
  they can kind of happen in whatever order I want them to,
• 28:52
  whatever order makes sense. This is, this is also kind of
• 28:57
  why running Apocalypse World often feels it almost always
• 29:07
  gets weird and a little, a little subliminal.
• 29:13
  I don't know if that's the word I want.
• 29:15
  It gets a little like, wow, what's a word I'm looking for?
• 29:27
  It gets like heady. It Twin Peaksy like, I don't
• 29:30
  know, Apocalypse World always seems to get into this space,
• 29:33
  huh? Uncanny.
• 29:35
  Maybe it's what you're looking for.
• 29:37
  The IT kind of, yeah, like it always gets into this.
• 29:39
  It feels like the game always gets into this mental space of
• 29:44
  even if you don't intend it to feel this way, you always seem
• 29:47
  to end up in this place of did that actually happen?
• 29:52
  Did the characters do? When did this happen?
• 29:54
  What order was these event? Does these events matter?
• 29:56
  Like things just sort of seem to occur a little bit because you
• 30:01
  just sort of let the game do its thing.
• 30:04
  So it has this it it has a lot of that.
• 30:08
  Again, that kind of Twin Peaks Y thing of did that actually
• 30:12
  happen? I don't know.
• 30:13
  It doesn't matter. You know, something, and we'll
• 30:16
  talk about this a little more later on, is the the fact that
• 30:19
  the messy tag exists is like a perfect example of this.
• 30:24
  Yeah, because, and spoilers messy just means like you can
• 30:28
  have shit amputated from. Like, you know, if you get hit
• 30:30
  with a shotgun it's going to take your fucking arm off.
• 30:32
  Take an arm off, put a hole in you.
• 30:33
  Yeah, but then when you die, it's spoilers.
• 30:36
  You can die multiple times. You just get back up and your
• 30:38
  arm is back and like, how is it back?
• 30:40
  Why is it back? Who put it there?
• 30:42
  Who fucking knows? Yeah, or your arm might not be
• 30:45
  back. You could also, the player could
• 30:47
  say my arm's not back and that's what makes me weirder.
• 30:50
  And then go from there, you know, like there's a lot of,
• 30:57
  there's a lot of nondescript space to operate in there.
• 31:02
  I let's go. So remember we've talked about
• 31:06
  like, oh, you can die four times maximum.
• 31:08
  I think they act that that has increased.
• 31:12
  No, it's it's you three times. Then the fourth time you're
• 31:15
  dead. Dead.
• 31:17
  I OK and we'll get to it later, 'cause I, I saw something I, I
• 31:21
  don't know if I if I missed it. Fair enough.
• 31:27
  Yeah. So that's prepping.
• 31:28
  So I mentioned the threat map. So now let's go into dealing
• 31:32
  with threats. So as we said previously, Oh,
• 31:40
  actually 1 little thing I wanted to say stuff like that, Isaiah,
• 31:43
  that you just mentioned, and I think I said this in the
• 31:45
  previous episode, is also why no matter what you try to do,
• 31:50
  Apocalypse World campaigns always get fucking weird.
• 31:54
  You just, you cannot tame them because of shit like you said
• 31:59
  where you come back and then your arm's fine and it's like,
• 32:01
  why is your arm fighting? Like, I don't know, who cares?
• 32:03
  Stuff's happening. You're like, OK, it's very hard
• 32:09
  to keep the. Game grounded.
• 32:11
  I almost want to, if I were to run this game, incorporate that
• 32:15
  into the. Game itself, well, that's kind
• 32:20
  of what it a lot of people end up doing.
• 32:22
  Yeah, right. Yeah.
• 32:23
  It's like, you know, it's literally you didn't watch
• 32:25
  Gaslight District. It's a lot like Gaslight
• 32:27
  District. Well, it'll be it.
• 32:30
  Well, it'll be to get like A to make up an example.
• 32:33
  It'll be the kind of thing where a player gets shot in the arm,
• 32:36
  their character dies, they go down, they choose to come back
• 32:39
  with plus one weird like, that's the that's the life is untenable
• 32:43
  option they choose. They say, oh, I'm back and I
• 32:49
  have an arm again. And everyone's like, what the
• 32:52
  fuck? And then three sessions down the
• 32:54
  road, they take their their jacket off and reveal that their
• 32:57
  arm is an Eldred's beast that they attached to their body when
• 33:00
  they were dying to keep them alive.
• 33:02
  They're like crazy shit like that where you'll just be like,
• 33:04
  OK. And then the GM, you know, the
• 33:06
  MC looks at you and goes, all right, Eldred's beings are
• 33:09
  around. I guess, you know, you just kind
• 33:11
  of like that's what we're doing now because that's just kind of
• 33:15
  how this game flows. Like that's the spirit of the
• 33:16
  game. I mean, again, as I always say,
• 33:19
  you could just ignore the game and be like, no, you can't do
• 33:22
  that, right? You, obviously, but that's very
• 33:25
  against what the game wants you to do.
• 33:27
  Right, which we've said before, avoid that cause the game, the
• 33:32
  game doesn't like when you do that.
• 33:34
  Yes, the the game gets angry as we've established Apocalypse
• 33:37
  World is live the. The eldest abomination that is
• 33:40
  Apocalypse World will be upset with you.
• 33:43
  We do not want this. Yeah, All right, so threats.
• 33:48
  So the the previous edition of the game, you're going to always
• 33:52
  hear people refer to fronts first Apocalypse World 1st
• 33:59
  edition referred to them as fronts.
• 34:01
  Apocalypse World's second edition now calls them threats.
• 34:04
  It's the same basic idea. The main the difference is
• 34:08
  fronts. In first edition, a front was a
• 34:12
  collection of threats that would all be related to each other and
• 34:18
  would all be coming from kind of a similar place, whether that
• 34:21
  place be physically or thematically or psychically,
• 34:26
  they're all coming from a similar place.
• 34:30
  Threats in second edition are you have more of a as opposed to
• 34:35
  a list of fronts. You have a map and by map it's a
• 34:39
  big like circular graph. But the threat map is all of the
• 34:44
  different things that are around the PCs, both physically and
• 34:50
  like hypothetically, not hypothetically, both physically
• 34:53
  and and not spiritual conceptually, both physically
• 34:57
  and conceptually. That's.
• 34:59
  What we're trying to are we going to have an immersion?
• 35:02
  Conceptually, so the threat map you basically you put the PCs at
• 35:08
  the center and you build the threats around the PCs.
• 35:13
  The but the idea is that threats are these things that are always
• 35:18
  operating in the background. And if the players do nothing,
• 35:25
  the threat will move forward. And this is your your main, this
• 35:30
  is your main tool of prep in this game.
• 35:32
  You establish there is a threat and then you make it for most of
• 35:39
  them. You will make a countdown clock
• 35:41
  and then as that countdown clock ticks forward, things will
• 35:45
  happen. If the players stop it, they can
• 35:48
  stop the bad thing from happening or it might not even
• 35:50
  be a bad thing, could be a good thing too.
• 35:52
  They will stop the thing from happening, or they won't, and
• 35:56
  then it will move forward and then it will resolve and boom,
• 35:58
  back, boom, something will change.
• 36:02
  The the structure. The the the structural
• 36:07
  difference is that the threat map breaks them out a little
• 36:10
  more individually and wants you to position them in actual you
• 36:19
  position them on the map itself, and where they are positioned in
• 36:24
  the map is sort of a broad, vague descriptor of how they
• 36:28
  relate to the players. So you start with the middle of
• 36:33
  the map. This would be really easy if I
• 36:34
  could show a picture of the map right now.
• 36:37
  I mean like, how would you describe the threat map?
• 36:39
  Is it like? Is there an easy way to describe
• 36:41
  it? Yeah, it's, it is a, it is a
• 36:44
  graph of concentric rings with an inner ring, a middle ring, an
• 36:47
  outer ring. And basically the closer the
• 36:50
  rings are to you, it just which it is, it signifies the closer
• 36:53
  the threat is to your players. So it separates itself into
• 36:58
  immediate threats, threats that are coming up and then threats
• 37:02
  that are on the Throtten. Yes, and threats that are beyond
• 37:05
  the map are like really out in the distance but could
• 37:10
  eventually move towards you. They do actually mention them.
• 37:13
  They're called notional threats, which I think.
• 37:15
  Is also there is a. This is one of the.
• 37:23
  In some ways I like fronts better.
• 37:25
  In some ways, I like the threat map better.
• 37:28
  One thing I find a little weird about the threat map is it has
• 37:33
  cardinal directions. It has northeast, South, and
• 37:36
  West, and then it has on the intercardinals.
• 37:39
  It has in and out and up and down.
• 37:43
  Yeah. These are The idea is that so
• 37:49
  when it says in, for example, it means that the threat is kind of
• 37:55
  within where the PCs are, right? Like physically or, or
• 38:01
  emotionally or conceptually or whatever.
• 38:04
  It's somewhat. So for the example it gives the
• 38:06
  example threat map. It mentions the water cult and
• 38:09
  puts it in the in the in section.
• 38:12
  Because the idea is that there are members, there are MPCS that
• 38:15
  are close to the PCs that are already in the water cult,
• 38:18
  right? And that is, you know, within
• 38:21
  them, you know, and then you have up, for example, up could
• 38:26
  be like physically, literally up as in there's a weird gang on a
• 38:32
  Ridge above where they live or something.
• 38:33
  But it also could be there is someone who has a higher up
• 38:37
  status than them. I don't super love these because
• 38:44
  they kind of just, I don't know, they kind of.
• 38:49
  Get muddy in my brain. I don't love having the
• 38:52
  positions on this yeah no, that's fair.
• 38:55
  I I get why it was done this way because you can't like they
• 38:59
  could have rendered a more three like an omnidirectional map, but
• 39:04
  that would have gotten a little wacky.
• 39:07
  So I get why they did it this way, but no I I I agree like.
• 39:12
  The other thing? How could else could they have
• 39:14
  done it though? Like.
• 39:18
  I don't think you need those descriptors.
• 39:19
  I think there's enough. And when you design an
• 39:22
  individual threat itself, I think you're putting enough
• 39:25
  information in the threat box itself that you don't really
• 39:28
  need the, the up, down, north, east, West or whatever.
• 39:31
  Like, I don't think that, I don't think that adds a lot
• 39:34
  personally. But I also might be using it
• 39:39
  wrong, right. I might be misunderstanding a
• 39:41
  little bit what the intention of it is.
• 39:43
  I've always found it a little confusing.
• 39:48
  Another thing is the directions of the so the threats, it tells
• 39:54
  you to make a direction to the threat, like where it's moving,
• 39:58
  where it's going. And I just, I don't really know
• 40:02
  what the point of that is because on the example threat,
• 40:07
  Matt, for example, it says Dremers Raiders and then it
• 40:12
  shows an error. It shows an arrow moving
• 40:14
  counterclockwise. I don't really know.
• 40:22
  I mean if I can interpret it it. So like the thing?
• 40:25
  Yeah. How do you?
• 40:25
  Interpret it right, Yeah. So like drummer's Raiders I
• 40:28
  guess is is there signifying it is orbiting?
• 40:32
  Like it's it's around them maybe.
• 40:39
  That I was thinking the because it's face, it's it's going into
• 40:42
  out, it is affecting the players and maybe another faction that
• 40:47
  will also cause problem for the players.
• 40:49
  You know what I mean? It's like, Oh well, drummers,
• 40:51
  Raiders are bothering us, but they're also bothering Gastown
• 40:53
  and then gas towns Gastown will come bothering.
• 40:56
  US. Because they want drummers
• 40:58
  Raiders to fuck off. Could be that, yeah, maybe.
• 41:02
  I'm only thinking about like if you think about it, right,
• 41:05
  because it's aiming towards out. I think that's what the notional
• 41:08
  would be for is because that thing will shift over and
• 41:10
  another thing will come into the notional section of out and then
• 41:13
  slowly work its way back in. Could be yeah, that's an
• 41:19
  interesting way to put it. I've I've read how the books
• 41:22
  are. I've I've read the book
• 41:25
  describing it and it just yeah, I just am.
• 41:27
  I've all I'm a little wishy washy on it, but the way first
• 41:33
  edition did fronts, I did sometimes have some frustration
• 41:37
  trying to take all of the threats within a front and
• 41:41
  relate them to each other. Because I would often feel like
• 41:46
  when I made a A, when a new threat would come up, there'd be
• 41:49
  a lot of scenarios where I'd feel like it didn't fit in any
• 41:54
  of the fronts and it didn't fit with anything else.
• 41:56
  But the game recommends, you know, tells you when you create
• 42:00
  a front in first edition, it should come with three or four
• 42:02
  threats. So I'd have a singular threat
• 42:04
  that doesn't fit with anything else.
• 42:07
  But I don't want to make a whole new front 'cause then I have to
• 42:09
  add on top, you know what I mean?
• 42:10
  So that would get messy. So there's kind of pros and cons
• 42:14
  to both, both version, both types of displaying it.
• 42:22
  But broadly speaking, they both do the same thing, which is give
• 42:26
  you, they give you all these spinning plates in the
• 42:30
  background as the GM to mess around with and look at and go,
• 42:36
  OK, basically between every session you look at all your
• 42:40
  fronts and, or your threats. See, and I, I'm always going to
• 42:43
  call them fronts. Still, you look at all your
• 42:44
  threats and go, OK, does this one, has this one changed?
• 42:50
  Does it, does the clock advance? Does the threat move it?
• 42:54
  Did a character in the threat die?
• 42:56
  Ergo, maybe the threat's gone. This is another thing.
• 42:59
  The players will fuck with your threats.
• 43:01
  So if there's a threat that's a local lore war warlord, Jesus,
• 43:06
  local warlord, and the players just kill his ass, that threat's
• 43:11
  just gone. Like you don't keep it around.
• 43:13
  The warlord's dead. Someone, something new will
• 43:15
  probably pop in there, obviously, but it's gone for
• 43:18
  now. So the the idea is you're
• 43:21
  constantly spinning the plates and looking at them.
• 43:24
  And when the players do something, maybe they fuck with
• 43:26
  the plate, maybe they don't, maybe the plate moves.
• 43:29
  It's you're always referring back between every single
• 43:32
  session. And this is another thing why
• 43:35
  this is another reason why tracking time is not super
• 43:38
  useful in this game because you know, it might have been a week
• 43:43
  and none of the threats really moved.
• 43:46
  And then it might be two days and you decide you want to move
• 43:48
  a threat forward and increase the countdown clock.
• 43:53
  If you're tracking time specifically, that might not
• 43:56
  make logical sense. Like maybe there's some sort of
• 43:58
  scenario where a local gang is trying to reach the players and
• 44:03
  they shouldn't have gotten there that fast, but it would help the
• 44:06
  dramatic tension would be better if they get there, you know,
• 44:10
  next session or whatever. So you just tick the clock
• 44:12
  forward anyway, That's that's another example of sort of
• 44:16
  ignoring time being useful in this game and another example of
• 44:21
  the weird Twin Peaks E Time doesn't matter.
• 44:24
  Stuff just happens kind of shit, right.
• 44:28
  So when you make a threat map, you start with your essential
• 44:31
  threats, which is all of the stuff at the core.
• 44:35
  It's at the middle where the PCs are.
• 44:39
  The game uses the word threat, but threats are not inherently
• 44:46
  threatening by default. You can have a like everything
• 44:53
  has the potential to become a problem, but not everything is a
• 44:57
  problem by default. So the essential threats you
• 45:02
  start with where the PCs are, you create a landscape threat.
• 45:06
  If the PCs have any gangs, you create those gangs as brute
• 45:10
  threats. If the PCs have any other NPCS,
• 45:15
  because a lot of the playbooks will start you with NPC
• 45:18
  teammates or workers, employees or whatever, you could create
• 45:22
  them as brutes or a grotesque or maybe a wannabe warlord.
• 45:26
  If the PCs have any vehicles, create the create the vehicle
• 45:31
  threat. If there's any local populations
• 45:35
  that are around the PCs, give it a affliction.
• 45:38
  And then what kind of threat is the world Psychic Maelstrom?
• 45:43
  A great example of a threat not necessarily being threatening
• 45:47
  the vehicle one. The reason you create the PC
• 45:50
  vehicle as a threat is because there are threat moves, and
• 45:53
  having the vehicle as a vehicle threat means that you can
• 45:57
  incorporate the threat moves for the vehicle when the player uses
• 46:00
  it. So it's just another it it, it,
• 46:03
  it is threatening because the vehicle could, you know, screw
• 46:07
  the driver player over by driving him off a Cliff or
• 46:10
  something, But it's not like the vehicle is actively trying to
• 46:13
  murder him at every. Second, what's the movie
• 46:15
  Christine? I I don't know you've.
• 46:19
  Never seen the Stephen King book about the a movie about the the
• 46:21
  possessed fucking Cadillac or Mustang or whatever.
• 46:25
  It's literally just this nerdy guy gets a like car from an old
• 46:28
  junk dealer and the car is actually evil and possessed by
• 46:31
  like a jealous woman and then he starts slowly starts going crazy
• 46:35
  and evil. He gets like possessed by the
• 46:36
  car as the car which is now kind of his girlfriend is killing all
• 46:39
  his classmates. This sounds like Stephen King.
• 46:43
  Yeah, he he spends a lot of the book calling everyone shitters,
• 46:45
  which is like the weirdest insult.
• 46:47
  It's like calling someone fuck. Oh, it just doesn't really make
• 46:49
  a lot of sense. Listen to your fuck.
• 46:51
  Oh. You never not think of Army of
• 46:54
  Two? That's a reference.
• 46:58
  Yeah, 'cause fucking Elliot's like bucko.
• 47:01
  Who even says that? So when you create a threat, you
• 47:12
  start by choosing what kind of threat it is.
• 47:15
  Give it a name, copy over its impulses, describe it, and list
• 47:19
  its cast. Cast meaning if there is any
• 47:21
  cast, Cast meaning, you know, if there's a gang, list a couple
• 47:24
  important members of the gang. For example, impulses are
• 47:30
  exactly what they sound like it is.
• 47:31
  What kind of impulse does that threat have?
• 47:33
  What does it want to do? Place it on the map.
• 47:36
  If it's in motion, mark its direction with an arrow.
• 47:39
  This is that whole thing we were talking about of it moving
• 47:41
  around. List list its stakes questions
• 47:45
  if you have any, and the reminder.
• 47:47
  Stakes questions are questions that you as the MC write down.
• 47:52
  And when you write them down as a stakes question, you are
• 47:54
  committing to not answering the question yourself and figuring
• 47:59
  out how it's going to go in play in the moment and and letting
• 48:03
  the game fuel the answer. You're leaving it up in the air.
• 48:09
  If it's connected to any other threats, list those and then if
• 48:12
  it needs a custom move or a countdown clock, create it.
• 48:16
  Custom moves are another one of your big things that you will do
• 48:19
  for prep for Apocalypse World, where if there's something
• 48:24
  specific that a threat, if you need to make something specific
• 48:27
  to make a threat feel more unique or more important or
• 48:30
  whatever, that's where you can make a custom move to.
• 48:33
  To really hammer that home. There's seven kinds of threats.
• 48:41
  You have warlords, grotesques, affliction, brutes, landscape,
• 48:46
  terrain, and vehicle. They're they're they're all a
• 48:57
  little vague and opened on purpose.
• 49:00
  The idea is that everything should be able to fit into these
• 49:02
  seven, but how they fit in or how you decide for them to fit
• 49:05
  in, totally up to you. The impulses like I said, to
• 49:10
  give you a couple of examples. Oh also all the threats have
• 49:13
  sort of sub like kind subtypes. So for example, you have
• 49:20
  warlord, and then you could have a slaver, A hive queen, a
• 49:24
  prophet, a dictator, a collector, or an alpha wolf.
• 49:28
  And then they all have impulses. So a slaver's impulse is to own
• 49:32
  and sell people. A hive Queen's impulse is to
• 49:34
  consume and swarm. The profit's impulse is to
• 49:37
  denounce and overthrow. The dictator is to control the
• 49:40
  collector is to own the alpha wolf is to hunt and dominate.
• 49:44
  Again, these are not literal. Like a hive queen is not
• 49:46
  actually a swarm of bees or whatever.
• 49:49
  It's, it's a, you know, it's very symbolic phrasing.
• 49:54
  And then you have threat moves for each kind of threat, moves
• 49:58
  for each kind of threat. Examples for the warlord.
• 50:05
  Push the battle moves. Outflank someone, corner someone
• 50:08
  and circle someone. Attack someone suddenly,
• 50:10
  directly and very hard. Attack someone cautiously
• 50:12
  holding reserves. Seize someone or something for
• 50:15
  leverage or info. Make a show of force, Make a
• 50:17
  show of discipline. Offer to negotiate.
• 50:19
  Demand concessions. Your obedience.
• 50:21
  Claim territory, move into it, blockade it, assault it.
• 50:24
  Buy out someone's allies. Make a careful study of someone
• 50:27
  and attack where they're weak. Warlords, primarily.
• 50:32
  Warlords act primarily through their people, acting directly
• 50:36
  themselves only when cornered or caught out in a pen.
• 50:39
  The basic idea is the threat moves are just another an
• 50:42
  expanded repertoire from your basic GM moves to say OK,
• 50:46
  they're dealing with this specific threat.
• 50:48
  So I want to get a little more granular in how they respond.
• 50:51
  So someone tries to threaten a character and makes a role for
• 50:56
  it and fails. You know, the character might
• 50:59
  get out of their way and smack the gun out of their hand and be
• 51:01
  like what the fuck dude? Someone tries to threaten a
• 51:04
  warlord and fails. Then the warlord might just
• 51:07
  attack them suddenly, directly, and very hard, like just beat
• 51:11
  them into a pulp because they're dealing with a very specific
• 51:13
  kind of threat or a specific person.
• 51:19
  Each of them, each of them has that list of like subtypes,
• 51:23
  moves, impulses, yada yada. The one, the only one that you
• 51:28
  might find a little weird, is probably vehicles.
• 51:32
  Basically any vehicle as it describes.
• 51:34
  As it says, any vehicle distinct enough to describe individually
• 51:37
  is a vehicle threat. Hooch, the chopper's aggressive,
• 51:40
  roaring guzzler of a bike. Audrey, the driver's huge
• 51:43
  armored ram bearing tow truck. Rolf Ball, the warlord's garish,
• 51:47
  jacked up bulletproof limo. If it's Mad Max's fucking the
• 51:52
  V8. Interceptor.
• 51:56
  Yes, if it's Max's interceptor, it's a threat.
• 51:59
  Max's interceptor is a threat. The the war rig that Furiosa
• 52:03
  drives is a threat. Immortan Joe's weird fucking.
• 52:09
  Giant tires? Yeah.
• 52:11
  Monster truck fucking. Monster truck, that's a threat.
• 52:14
  Yeah, that's a threat. Any vehicle that like, if you
• 52:17
  think about in movie terms, any vehicle that has relevant screen
• 52:21
  time and is clearly special threat.
• 52:24
  The doofwarriors, of course. The doofwarriors.
• 52:28
  Sick Multi. Speakered the doofwagon, you
• 52:31
  mean? Yeah, that's, I couldn't
• 52:33
  remember the name of it. The Doofwagon.
• 52:34
  The Doofwagon's the vehicle threat.
• 52:40
  Side note, Apocalypse World 1st edition came out before Fury
• 52:44
  Road, and then Second Edition came out after Fury Road, and he
• 52:48
  very explicitly added a whole bunch of vehicle rules for no
• 52:53
  particular reason. I love that.
• 52:54
  I love that a lot. Yeah, Yeah.
• 52:58
  And then so you get a little section describing basically how
• 53:00
  to use threat moves, how they're different and similar, yada
• 53:05
  yada. The description and cast of a
• 53:08
  threat. Like I said, it's it's who's
• 53:10
  involved, right? If you imagine Immortan Joe is
• 53:13
  the warlord threat, the cast would be him Rictus erectus, his
• 53:18
  weird his his baby doctor guy you know.
• 53:25
  The. The guy who?
• 53:27
  The guy who pulls out the baby? Yes.
• 53:30
  The organic mechanic, Yes. Yeah, They're all the cast of
• 53:34
  Immortan Joe's threat. And then, like you said, you
• 53:41
  write down any stakes questions if you if relevant.
• 53:44
  Boom, bang, boom threats. Related threats are again what
• 53:54
  they sound like. So if you have a Morton Joe's,
• 53:58
  you know, is the warlord. A related threat would be the
• 54:00
  Gas Town warlord or the OR perhaps the Yeah, I was going to
• 54:08
  say. Or perhaps the People eater is a
• 54:10
  grotesque in fact, with his nipple nipple chains.
• 54:13
  Hell yeah. And his elephantitis.
• 54:20
  And then you slap a countdown clock if you need it.
• 54:22
  So when you're doing a countdown clock with or when you're doing
• 54:29
  countdown clock on a threat. Important thing to know by the
• 54:32
  way. I'm just say, 'cause, you know,
• 54:34
  we've mentioned countdown clocks and other games.
• 54:37
  Everyone's taking it from Apocalypse World as far as I'm
• 54:39
  aware. Just throwing it out there.
• 54:42
  Fabula and Blades and everything.
• 54:43
  Everybody's taking countdown clocks from Apocalypse World.
• 54:47
  I I'm sure the concept of a countdown clock type mechanic
• 54:51
  probably existed prior to Apocalypse World, but Apocalypse
• 54:54
  World giving it a name and and putting attention on it gave it
• 55:00
  power in the game design world and now every other tabletop
• 55:04
  game refers to it as a clock. In fact, I I believe Fabulous
• 55:09
  Ultima specifically calls out that they're taking clocks from
• 55:12
  Apocalypse World in there, if I remember correctly.
• 55:14
  I wouldn't doubt it so. But the thing to keep in mind
• 55:18
  with the clock is before 9:00, the thing that is coming might
• 55:25
  be is, is still preventable. Like there's still, there's
• 55:31
  still a chance to slow it down. Once it passes 9:00 and goes
• 55:35
  into the 9 to 12 range, bad shit's probably going to happen.
• 55:39
  Brace for impact. Once it hits 12, it's it's full
• 55:43
  on, it's activated. The bad thing is happening.
• 55:45
  It's fucked, shit's cooked, it's all over.
• 55:47
  GG. Yeah, yeah, shit's cooked.
• 55:49
  Another way to phrase that is the first 3 sections of the
• 55:52
  countdown clock are not as impactful and then the
• 55:57
  second-half the the last three sections are more impactful is
• 56:02
  another way you can phrase it because again, I really hate
• 56:06
  using the time numbers thing. I aesthetically it's cool, but
• 56:10
  in my head every time I look at it written down, I have to very
• 56:14
  consciously picture the countdown clock on my head and
• 56:17
  think about what they mean by the sections and shit.
• 56:19
  So yeah, that's why I, like most other games will use the phrase
• 56:25
  like something along the lines like step, like oh, steps, one
• 56:28
  through 3 of the clock. I much prefer that kind of
• 56:31
  phrasing. Again, I know it's mostly an
• 56:34
  aesthetic thing to use literal clock face numbers, but yeah.
• 56:41
  And then lastly, with your threat, you have your custom
• 56:43
  moves. So to to give a basically to
• 56:47
  give a couple examples, it says for one when you go into
• 56:52
  Dremer's territory, roll plus sharp on A10 plus you can spot
• 56:56
  and avoid ambush. On a 7 to 9 you spot the ambush
• 56:59
  in time to prepare or flee. On a miss you blunder into it.
• 57:03
  So that would be one for like a warlord's territory, for
• 57:06
  example, for one that could be a landscape or a terrain threat.
• 57:11
  If you drink water out here, roll plus hard on A10 plus spend
• 57:15
  a few minutes barfing, but you'll be fine.
• 57:17
  On a 7 to 9 take one harm armor piercing now and one harm armor
• 57:20
  piercing again in a little while.
• 57:23
  On a miss, take 3 harm armor piercing now and three harm
• 57:26
  armor piercing again in a little while.
• 57:29
  So it's, it's, it's kind of that thing where if you have a
• 57:32
  special boss fight in DND and you take an existing ability and
• 57:36
  modify it to work differently, like the characters are fighting
• 57:41
  a gargoyle or something like that, and you go, well, I don't
• 57:43
  want it to be a normal gargoyle. So you give it a couple of extra
• 57:46
  abilities and you throw a few spells on or something like
• 57:49
  that. Custom moves are that same kind
• 57:51
  of idea where you specialize the threat so that it feels more
• 57:55
  cool and unique. And then the last chunk of this
• 58:01
  chapter is just examples of threats and, and how to deal
• 58:06
  with them. And then a little description on
• 58:08
  between sessions, how to how to look at your threats, how to
• 58:12
  think about what to do with them.
• 58:13
  And then a big example threat map to use.
• 58:17
  So it also kind of shows you how a threat map can progress
• 58:24
  because there's a couple of very not variations.
• 58:28
  There are a couple of steps of the same threat map that it
• 58:30
  shows and how they they have grown.
• 58:35
  Then there's a chapter called Move Snowball.
• 58:38
  So I'm actually going to skip this one.
• 58:41
  But if you are confused, what I'll say about this chapter, if
• 58:45
  you are confused, like maybe you're someone who's read this
• 58:48
  book or perhaps you're listening to us and you're like, I just
• 58:52
  don't understand how this game looks in play.
• 58:54
  Like I don't get how it works. Read the move Snowball's
• 58:58
  chapter. It is basically a long extended
• 59:03
  example of how the play of this game actually flows.
• 59:08
  Go through it slowly, comprehend it, sort of take notes or
• 59:13
  whatever that will give you. It will give you the best
• 59:18
  understanding of the flow from point A to point B.
• 59:20
  You could of course also go find an actual player or something
• 59:23
  like that, but if you want to use the book itself, Move
• 59:25
  Snowball chapter. But in terms of discussing it,
• 59:30
  it's not I'm not going to read through it because A, it's kind
• 59:33
  of long and B, it's not interesting to just read it
• 59:35
  verbatim. It does also tell you how to
• 59:39
  handle PC versus PC situations, because those do come up quite a
• 59:44
  lot in Apocalypse World. Actually pretty pretty standard.
• 59:50
  Got a lot of characters trying to shoot each other or fuck each
• 59:54
  other or steal from each other, or, you know, any number of
• 59:56
  situations really. In one of your games, didn't get
• 59:59
  someone? Didn't someone get run over by a
• 1:00:01
  fucking combine? Yes, yes they did.
• 1:00:06
  They got or. No, No, they got in a fight on
• 1:00:09
  the combine, fell off the combine and then took a took a
• 1:00:14
  sawn off shotgun to the face. Yeah, 1 from 1 player to
• 1:00:20
  another. Even better, he chased them
• 1:00:25
  down. Oh yeah, I'm finishing this.
• 1:00:29
  That was a particularly interesting bit too, because the
• 1:00:33
  player that killed the other. So when it happened, we I also,
• 1:00:37
  we also took a pause and was like, all right, is everybody,
• 1:00:39
  everybody good right now 'cause we getting a little, we getting
• 1:00:41
  a little saucy here. Are we, are we, are we cool?
• 1:00:43
  Are we cool? Are we cool?
• 1:00:44
  Everyone's cool. OK, all right, we're cool.
• 1:00:46
  And then so me and the other players just sat back like
• 1:00:48
  busted out the popcorn Michael Jackson style.
• 1:00:51
  Resume. Resume go ahead.
• 1:00:55
  But The funny thing was so the the the driver player kills the
• 1:00:59
  brainer, brainer dies, comes back.
• 1:01:02
  I think she came back with plus one weird.
• 1:01:05
  And then shortly later, the driver dies and comes back as a
• 1:01:10
  gun lugger because he started getting a little shotgun happy.
• 1:01:12
  And he's like, well, I think I should be a gun lugger now.
• 1:01:17
  So yeah. This just feels right.
• 1:01:23
  Yeah, it did. So then the next chapter is the
• 1:01:26
  basic moves. I'm also going to skip this one
• 1:01:29
  because we we talked about the basic moves, but essentially the
• 1:01:32
  chapter on basic moves is a a very extended explanation of all
• 1:01:38
  the basic moves, how to use them, examples.
• 1:01:43
  Also examples of fucking it up, which I think is really cool
• 1:01:46
  because I feel like a lot of games don't don't show you how
• 1:01:50
  to deal with it if you fuck up the mechanic right?
• 1:01:53
  They tell you how to do it correctly but don't say how to
• 1:01:57
  course correct if you mess up. Apocalypse role very
• 1:01:59
  specifically gives you some examples of course correcting if
• 1:02:03
  you do screw it up. Especially because for some
• 1:02:06
  moves like act under fire is 1 where this happens a lot.
• 1:02:11
  It's really easy to kind of fuck up act under fire because your
• 1:02:14
  brain, the player gets a 7 to 9 and your brain really wants to
• 1:02:20
  be like kind of D&D esque of that's a miss.
• 1:02:24
  Like you failed. Like, you know, in D&D you miss
• 1:02:27
  the AAC score, but that's not what act under fire.
• 1:02:31
  That's not how act under fire should be handled.
• 1:02:32
  But you there's this, there's a, you have this urge to do it that
• 1:02:38
  way. So it gives you an example of
• 1:02:39
  how somebody might do that and then sort of adjust.
• 1:02:44
  But yeah, so it's just extended of all the basic moves and then
• 1:02:48
  also talks a little bit about interfering with each other and
• 1:02:52
  helping each other and how that can go back and forth in PC
• 1:02:55
  versus PC situations. I don't.
• 1:02:59
  Did we mention lifestyles and working gigs before the?
• 1:03:03
  No. No, right.
• 1:03:06
  Yeah. OK.
• 1:03:07
  So less commonly used, this is an these these two moves are
• 1:03:13
  examples of how everything is a move in Apocalypse World.
• 1:03:16
  Like every mechanic comes at the end of the day comes back to a
• 1:03:19
  move. So the lifestyle move is at the
• 1:03:22
  beginning of the session, spend one or two barter for your
• 1:03:25
  lifestyle if you can't or won't tell the MC and answer her
• 1:03:29
  questions. Basically the idea is you have
• 1:03:32
  to spend one or two barter at the beginning of a session to
• 1:03:35
  explain how you're surviving the apocalypse.
• 1:03:38
  And if you can't, then there's a list of questions that the MC
• 1:03:41
  goes through to be like, OK, is somebody else taking care of
• 1:03:45
  you? Do you have is, does an MPC owe
• 1:03:47
  you for something? Are you scrounging food
• 1:03:49
  somewhere else? And if you can't answer any of
• 1:03:51
  those things, the MC is going to be like, all right, well, bad
• 1:03:53
  shit is happening to you because effectively if you don't pay the
• 1:03:56
  barter, you're missing on a move, which means the GM gets to
• 1:04:00
  do a move in return because you missed.
• 1:04:04
  And then you have working gigs, and the working gigs move is
• 1:04:11
  exactly what it sounds like. This is the thing where I said
• 1:04:13
  how the operator playbook got chewed up into every other
• 1:04:18
  playbook. The operator's whole shtick was
• 1:04:20
  basically working gigs, and he just gave that to every playbook
• 1:04:24
  because it made sense for everyone to be able to do it in
• 1:04:27
  some capacity. And the basic idea is every
• 1:04:31
  playbook has a list of potential gigs that you could work.
• 1:04:35
  You work said gigs to get barter.
• 1:04:37
  The GM will reward you anywhere from 2:00 to 4:00.
• 1:04:39
  Barter. It recommends 3.
• 1:04:41
  Most of the time you say what the gig you're working is and
• 1:04:46
  then the MC will say to you, either you need to make a roll
• 1:04:49
  or let's play that scene out. Or maybe we'll do a little like
• 1:04:56
  we'll do a couple of rolls or something.
• 1:04:59
  Basically, it depends. Or you might just get it like
• 1:05:01
  the, the, the MC might just say, well, it just makes sense that
• 1:05:04
  you can just do that because of, you know, XY or Z actions you've
• 1:05:08
  done previously. So yeah, the gig is successful.
• 1:05:10
  Here's your here's your barter. This is another great example of
• 1:05:13
  not caring about time frames in this game because the Angel
• 1:05:19
  character's like, oh, I'm going to work a gig at the beginning
• 1:05:22
  of the session and then another player is like, oh, but I wanted
• 1:05:25
  to talk to your character and then use the MC like OK, Angel,
• 1:05:29
  you work the gig at some point during the week or whatever and
• 1:05:32
  then once you're done, you know, the driver character comes to
• 1:05:36
  meet you at your house. It doesn't fucking matter when
• 1:05:38
  the gig happened. We just know that it happened.
• 1:05:40
  You know what? I.
• 1:05:41
  Mean. Again, playing with that kind of
• 1:05:46
  weird ephemeral time situation. And then lastly there's the
• 1:05:49
  session end move, which is basically just go around the
• 1:05:54
  table. If a player character knows you
• 1:05:56
  better, they take plus one hex with you.
• 1:05:58
  If they know you worse, they take -1 hex.
• 1:06:01
  If your hex gets the +4 or -3 it resets to 0 and you mark
• 1:06:05
  experience. This is one of your main.
• 1:06:08
  This is one of your primary ways of doling out that XPI.
• 1:06:12
  Find that rule so odd because it's like you know them so well
• 1:06:15
  that now that you know them less.
• 1:06:18
  So he, I forget where, but he, he early in the book he talks
• 1:06:23
  about it. So it's not that you know them
• 1:06:25
  less. The idea is that you have,
• 1:06:30
  you've gotten, you've gotten to know them so well or not well
• 1:06:34
  that you have learned something new about them.
• 1:06:39
  So the, the rollover is you now learn.
• 1:06:42
  It's almost like a level up of your knowing the person like you
• 1:06:47
  knew they worked, you know, they worked a job or whatever, but
• 1:06:51
  then you get that plus 4 hex and it rolls over and now you know
• 1:06:54
  that they that they hate working that job that they have and, and
• 1:06:59
  you learn like a deeper amount of information about that.
• 1:07:02
  You learn like a new chunk of information.
• 1:07:04
  That's not that's not like totally codified, but that's how
• 1:07:09
  the book phrases and suggests it to you.
• 1:07:14
  So no, it's not that you know them less.
• 1:07:15
  It's that you've sort of hit the next step of the relationship
• 1:07:21
  mechanically. It it mechanically you do kind
• 1:07:25
  of know them less 'cause it does mean you are actually going to
• 1:07:27
  have a harder time helping that character.
• 1:07:30
  So in that regard, it's a little weird, but yeah, then from the
• 1:07:38
  basic moves we get to peripheral moves, and these are basically
• 1:07:42
  what they sound like, peripheral.
• 1:07:46
  They're not going to come up as often, but can be very helpful
• 1:07:51
  when they do come up. The peripheral moves, I don't
• 1:07:56
  think there were any in first edition.
• 1:08:00
  I think the peripheral moves are broadly new double checks.
• 1:08:14
  Yeah, I believe they're all new. So I mean, yeah, I'll just kind
• 1:08:21
  of go through them. So the first one is the the
• 1:08:24
  what's referred to as the harm move or the suffer harm move.
• 1:08:28
  Basically when you suffer harm, you roll plus the harm you've
• 1:08:31
  suffered. This is, I think, the only move
• 1:08:34
  in the game where you actually want to roll high instead of
• 1:08:38
  low, if I'm remembering correctly.
• 1:08:42
  You mean low instead of high? Low instead of high sorry yes,
• 1:08:46
  you want to roll you want to roll low instead of high yes,
• 1:08:50
  because on a miss it basically can mean like nothing bad
• 1:08:53
  happens. So yes, this is a move that you
• 1:08:56
  want to roll lower and the reason you want to roll lower is
• 1:08:58
  because you roll plus the harm you suffered.
• 1:09:02
  So if you suffer less harm, you have a better chance of rolling
• 1:09:05
  lower, which is better because if it was, if you wanted to roll
• 1:09:09
  high, that means you would want to take more damage every time
• 1:09:12
  to make this roll better. And obviously that's dump.
• 1:09:15
  So although I suppose you could have just made it a subtracting
• 1:09:21
  thing, you could have just said roll minus the harm you suffer.
• 1:09:25
  See, that's what would have made more sense just to me because
• 1:09:28
  everything else in the game is go high, not low.
• 1:09:31
  So. Yeah, it's funny 'cause it does
• 1:09:36
  say this. This first harm move is unusual
• 1:09:39
  in that it a hit is bad for the players and a miss is good.
• 1:09:42
  If you find that your players have trouble with this quirk of
• 1:09:45
  the move, roll it yourself against them.
• 1:09:46
  No grief. So yeah, use the GM could do it
• 1:09:50
  if they're like what? But basically the harm move is
• 1:09:53
  you do roll with the harm you suffered.
• 1:09:57
  If you roll high, a couple of things can happen, like for
• 1:10:00
  example you might only suffer 2 harm, but you roll really high
• 1:10:04
  on this roll and then one of the options the MC could choose is
• 1:10:06
  you're out of action, unconscious, trapped,
• 1:10:08
  incoherent, or panic. So like, you're not dead or
• 1:10:11
  anything but you just got fucking domed on the head so
• 1:10:13
  you're just out of the fight or out of the scene.
• 1:10:17
  It's worse than it seems. Take one harm and then there's a
• 1:10:20
  couple of 7-9 options. Basically the harm move is if
• 1:10:25
  you want to make a fight situation be a little more
• 1:10:28
  interesting, every time the harm is exchanged, you roll the harm
• 1:10:32
  move because it could potentially swing the advantage
• 1:10:35
  way in someone's favor or way screw them over.
• 1:10:38
  Or maybe nothing happens but it adds an element of like ah shit
• 1:10:42
  what's happening. The next harm move is if you
• 1:10:47
  inflict harm on another PC, the other character gets plus one
• 1:10:50
  hex off you for every segment of harm you inflict.
• 1:10:54
  Which I always think is funny because basically if you fight
• 1:10:57
  someone you get to know them better.
• 1:11:00
  Dante would be proud. Conversely, if you heal another
• 1:11:07
  character's harm, you get plus plus one hex with them.
• 1:11:11
  So similar thing, the difference being if you harm someone, the
• 1:11:18
  character gets plus one hex with you, whereas if you heal
• 1:11:21
  someone, you get plus plus one hex with them on your sheet.
• 1:11:26
  Excuse me? Then we have our barter moves.
• 1:11:30
  Basically, if you're throwing money around, there are moves to
• 1:11:33
  cover that too. If you give one barter to
• 1:11:36
  someone with strings attached, you're manipulating it.
• 1:11:39
  You can bribe somebody. Basically, if you go into a
• 1:11:44
  holdings bustling market looking for something particular,
• 1:11:47
  looking for some particular thing to buy, you roll plus
• 1:11:51
  sharp and then on A10 plus, yes, you can go buy it on a 7:00 to
• 1:11:56
  9:00. There's a couple of options like
• 1:11:58
  it's not openly for sale, but you can find someone or it costs
• 1:12:01
  one more barter than you thought.
• 1:12:06
  Then you have this one I think is funny when you make it known
• 1:12:11
  that you want a thing and drop the Jingle to speed it on its
• 1:12:15
  way. Roll plus barter spent Max of
• 1:12:17
  plus three. It has to be a thing.
• 1:12:20
  You could legitimately get this way so you can't be like I would
• 1:12:23
  like a space laser cannon. No fuck off.
• 1:12:27
  On A10 plus it comes to you, no strings attached.
• 1:12:30
  On A7 time it comes to you or something pretty close.
• 1:12:33
  On a miss it comes to you, but with strings very much attached.
• 1:12:37
  I I hate that they they use Jingle in caps to make it like a
• 1:12:40
  proper noun and I'm like stop that.
• 1:12:42
  I don't like the way that sounds.
• 1:12:44
  Yeah, it's Jingle. You got money on you.
• 1:12:46
  Yeah, I want some. I, I just, I don't like it.
• 1:12:50
  I don't know why I don't like it.
• 1:12:52
  Side note, if anyone's curious, the game does not have any
• 1:12:55
  specific rules or it doesn't tell you what barter or Jingle
• 1:13:01
  is. It's just abstract money.
• 1:13:03
  It can be whatever you want in your game.
• 1:13:05
  I remember I had one campaign where it was like rare tulips
• 1:13:08
  that people traded. Just whatever you want.
• 1:13:11
  Yeah, I don't remember how we came to that, but yeah.
• 1:13:20
  Then there's a couple of moves. There's a couple of peripheral
• 1:13:24
  moves it mentions to, such as Insight and Augury.
• 1:13:29
  Technically you can't do these by default, but your playbook
• 1:13:32
  can give you these abilities. Insight is basically ask someone
• 1:13:38
  for advice. The MC being you will give you
• 1:13:42
  the advice via the NPC and then you can take a + 1 to further
• 1:13:45
  roles and then augury which is you reach into the world psychic
• 1:13:52
  maelstrom and do weird shit. It's you're, it's scrying
• 1:13:56
  essentially. You do not get augury by
• 1:14:00
  default, but the hocuses followers or the savvy heads
• 1:14:03
  workspace can give it to you for example.
• 1:14:06
  And then the last peripheral move is changing highlighted
• 1:14:09
  stats at the beginning of any session or at the end if you
• 1:14:12
  forgot. That's literally what it says.
• 1:14:14
  Anyone could say, hey, let's change highlighted stats.
• 1:14:17
  Any player and you can feel free to say to as an MC.
• 1:14:21
  When you do, when someone says it, do it.
• 1:14:24
  Basically you just change out what statue I've highlighted
• 1:14:26
  because maybe somebody's like, I don't want to roll my hard for
• 1:14:29
  XP anymore or whatever. That's the peripheral moves.
• 1:14:34
  Then we get to the battle moves. So these are also new, a new
• 1:14:40
  thing that came around with second edition, 1st edition.
• 1:14:43
  You basically just had Seized by force and that was it.
• 1:14:46
  And some people, I think, just wanted a little more
• 1:14:48
  granularity. When a fight is like a bigger
• 1:14:51
  deal, like a little scuffler or whatever, Seized by Force is
• 1:14:53
  five. But when you want a little more
• 1:14:54
  something, something, you have the battle moves.
• 1:14:58
  Technically the battle moves are in play whenever you want them
• 1:15:02
  to be, but generally you're going to use them for a big
• 1:15:06
  battle or a fight that's more important, or any kind of
• 1:15:10
  conflict or you want to get a little more granular.
• 1:15:16
  The battle moves talks about exchanging Harm a lot.
• 1:15:19
  Exchanging harm is just both moves take harm, which is equal
• 1:15:24
  to their weapons damage minus their armor.
• 1:15:27
  That's it. If you exchange harm, you
• 1:15:30
  literally exchange harm. Your first main battle move is
• 1:15:35
  Seized by Force, which is one of the basic moves, so I don't need
• 1:15:38
  to go over that. There's a couple variations.
• 1:15:40
  It provides for seized by force. So if you assault a secure
• 1:15:45
  position, roll to Seized by force, but instead of choosing
• 1:15:49
  to take definite control of it, you can choose to force your way
• 1:15:52
  into your enemy's position. Then it has one for keeping hold
• 1:15:57
  of something you have seized by force, Fight your way free with
• 1:16:02
  seized by force, or defend someone else with from attack
• 1:16:05
  with seized by force. So it's the same move with a
• 1:16:08
  little extra bullet point tagged on there when you have two PCs
• 1:16:15
  battling. PvP is kind of weird in this
• 1:16:19
  game because essentially you both roll at the same time.
• 1:16:25
  Decide what choices you're making from the roll.
• 1:16:29
  So for example, you both roll to seize by force as you try to
• 1:16:33
  brutally murder each other. And let's say both of you get a
• 1:16:37
  7 to 9. You have inflict terrible harm,
• 1:16:40
  suffer little harm, take definite and undeniable control
• 1:16:42
  of it, or you impress, dismay or frighten your enemy.
• 1:16:46
  Each of you will select two of those and then the the MC will
• 1:16:51
  say OK, what did you pick and what did you pick?
• 1:16:55
  Contradictory examples cancel each other out.
• 1:16:58
  So if one player said I inflict terrible harm and the other
• 1:17:00
  player said I I suffer little harm, they just negate.
• 1:17:05
  And then the tech take definite and undeniable control and the
• 1:17:09
  impress dismay or frighten your enemy also negate each other.
• 1:17:15
  So PC combat can get a little weird, but it does mostly work.
• 1:17:21
  So yeah, then you have the single combat move.
• 1:17:30
  This one's a little weird. I, I almost don't like, I almost
• 1:17:36
  feel like this move is a little unnecessary because it's, I get
• 1:17:40
  why it exists, but it's like kind of boring because it's just
• 1:17:44
  damage. Basically when you do single
• 1:17:49
  combat with someone, no quarters exchange, harm, the first world
• 1:17:53
  plus hard. Basically it's just when you're
• 1:17:58
  just standing in the middle of the street throwing hands on
• 1:18:01
  each other or whatever. So is the idea that you're just
• 1:18:05
  always hitting, It's you're just at this point measuring damage?
• 1:18:09
  Like, no, you're not trying. No one's trying to dodge or
• 1:18:11
  block. You're just, you're just
• 1:18:13
  ensuing. This is a slugfest.
• 1:18:15
  Yes, you're just slugging the shit out of someone.
• 1:18:17
  Yeah, gotcha. You know, obviously if it's an
• 1:18:24
  NPC versus a player, the G Ms. just going to, you know, respond
• 1:18:28
  with the NPC as normal. But yeah, the basic idea is
• 1:18:31
  you're just fucking slugfesting each other.
• 1:18:35
  You're hurting it. You're going for it.
• 1:18:37
  There's only two options. Inflict terrible harm and suffer
• 1:18:40
  little harm. If you roll A10 plus on that,
• 1:18:42
  you get both of those things. So if you roll A10 plus and
• 1:18:46
  you're the gun lugger and you're gonna do 2 damage already, and
• 1:18:53
  then you inflict terrible harm and -1 harm, you're gonna throw
• 1:18:56
  hands with some random goober. He's gonna do no damage to you,
• 1:19:00
  and you're gonna knock his Dome out in like 1 one exchange.
• 1:19:04
  He's just going down because if you have the gun lugger move
• 1:19:09
  where you're treated as a gang plus one damage for you -1
• 1:19:14
  damage for him, he's just fucked.
• 1:19:20
  So I actually didn't mention the gang thing.
• 1:19:23
  I don't know. I don't remember where the book
• 1:19:25
  actually describes how that works, funny enough.
• 1:19:32
  It might be under gear, might be under the gear moves, I don't
• 1:19:36
  remember. After, after single combat, you
• 1:19:42
  have tactical and sport moves. These are the, you know, we're
• 1:19:47
  in a war with the other, with the enemy gang and bullets are
• 1:19:51
  flying and we need to, somebody needs to get to a different
• 1:19:54
  objective or whatever. So you have lay down fire, which
• 1:19:57
  is basically a move to provide covering fire or support someone
• 1:20:00
  or suppressing fire, that sort of thing.
• 1:20:04
  You have stand Overwatch. That is exactly what it sounds
• 1:20:08
  like. You, you, it's kind of like
• 1:20:11
  readying in action in D&D. You run stand over if you roll
• 1:20:14
  for stand Overwatch and then if somebody shows up, you know, you
• 1:20:20
  just, you just shoot them immediately.
• 1:20:22
  Yeah, overwatching is, is it's like suppressive fire, but
• 1:20:26
  you're you're firing at someone coming towards you to you're
• 1:20:29
  being preemptive about it. Yeah, you're giving someone
• 1:20:32
  Overwatch. They're like running away and
• 1:20:33
  you're you're laying down fire for them.
• 1:20:40
  Then you have the keep an eye out move.
• 1:20:42
  This is the the snipers on the roof checking things for you.
• 1:20:47
  Yeah. You can throw out plus ones for
• 1:20:49
  your team mates or you know direct or another one like
• 1:20:54
  direct an ally's attention to an enemy.
• 1:20:56
  If they attack that enemy, they inflict plus one harm.
• 1:21:00
  The battle moves are cool. It is, but it's funny they don't
• 1:21:03
  come up very much because you're not doing a lot of all out war
• 1:21:08
  type shit. Like if you're when you're
• 1:21:10
  busting out the battle moves, it's like a big set piece moment
• 1:21:12
  in the campaign. Oh, interesting, because I feel
• 1:21:15
  like I think this is just the leftover of me not having all of
• 1:21:18
  the satisfaction I wanted from playing Grant.
• 1:21:20
  But I keep wanting to play the sniper character, so I feel like
• 1:21:22
  I'd get a lot of use out of keep an eye out.
• 1:21:25
  I mean, you got a war situation. I mean, you can, you can as a
• 1:21:28
  player, of course, always push for like I'm trying to do this
• 1:21:33
  thing, like let me use this move.
• 1:21:35
  That's that's always on the table.
• 1:21:37
  I'm just saying broadly because battles don't tend to, you don't
• 1:21:45
  tend to have a lot of battles in the, in the bigger, bigger scale
• 1:21:49
  sense in Apocalypse World until it's a big moment.
• 1:21:51
  So they don't tend to come up as much.
• 1:21:53
  But you could definitely, as a player, go out of your way to
• 1:21:56
  push for them, or you could just be, you know, about that life
• 1:22:01
  and just be going after everybody.
• 1:22:04
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so we're just.
• 1:22:06
  Trying it in everyone's life. I really like hunt and prey and
• 1:22:08
  escape a hunter. Yeah.
• 1:22:11
  So then there's a yeah. So then we have the subterfuge
• 1:22:14
  moves, which are, you know, baiting a trap or chasing
• 1:22:22
  someone down or like fucking with somebody.
• 1:22:25
  So they're for ambushes and hunts and hide and seek as the
• 1:22:28
  game puts it. So you have to bait a trap move,
• 1:22:32
  which is literally you try to lure your opponent into a trap
• 1:22:36
  and then on a hit, you draw your prey into the trap.
• 1:22:40
  Otherwise they only approach your prey doesn't suspect you,
• 1:22:44
  otherwise they're alert or you don't expose yourself to extra
• 1:22:48
  risk. Otherwise any harm your prey
• 1:22:50
  inflicts is plus one. On a miss, the MC chooses one
• 1:22:53
  for you. Then you have you can also beta
• 1:22:59
  trap for another PC. They can interfere with that of
• 1:23:02
  course. Then yes, hunt prey as it
• 1:23:05
  describes it. When you're the cat, roll plus
• 1:23:09
  cool on a hit, you catch your prey out on A10 plus you're
• 1:23:13
  driven. You've driven them first to a
• 1:23:16
  place. If you're choosing say where on
• 1:23:18
  a 7 to 9 you've had to follow them where they wanted to go,
• 1:23:20
  they say where on a miss your prey escapes and then escape.
• 1:23:26
  A hunter is when you're a mouse roll plus cool on A10 plus you
• 1:23:30
  escape clean and leave your hunter hunt.
• 1:23:32
  Hunting on a 7 to 9 your hunter catches you out but only after
• 1:23:35
  you've LED them in place. A you're choosing on a miss,
• 1:23:37
  your hunter catches you out and the MC says where.
• 1:23:41
  Then there's some rules on PC versus PC cat and mouse.
• 1:23:46
  And then one that's really funny is turn the tables.
• 1:23:50
  When it's not certain whether you're the cat or the mouse row
• 1:23:52
  plus sharp on a hit, you decide which you are.
• 1:23:55
  On A10 plus you take plus one forward as well.
• 1:23:57
  On a miss, you're the mouse. Yeah.
• 1:24:07
  And then we have the road war moves.
• 1:24:10
  This is for living out your Mad Max Fury Rd. fantasies.
• 1:24:13
  Yes. You have boarding a moving
• 1:24:16
  vehicle, you roll plus cool minus.
• 1:24:18
  This is where the V these moves are where the vehicles, I don't
• 1:24:21
  know if you remember what the vehicles have stats, they have
• 1:24:25
  speed, handling and massive I believe it is for this one.
• 1:24:31
  If you board a vehicle roll plus cool minus its speed.
• 1:24:35
  So if it's a particularly fast vehicle, it's harder to get on
• 1:24:38
  there to board one moving vehicle from another roll plus
• 1:24:42
  cool minus the difference between their speeds.
• 1:24:46
  So you can't also jump from vehicle.
• 1:24:48
  Vehicle on A10 plus you're on and you made it look easy.
• 1:24:51
  Take plus one forward on a 7 to 9 you're on.
• 1:24:53
  But Jesus, let's quote on a miss the MC chooses you're hanging on
• 1:24:59
  for dear life or you're down and good luck to you.
• 1:25:05
  Then you have out distance another vehicle, which is
• 1:25:07
  basically lose them. You roll plus cool modified by
• 1:25:11
  the vehicle's relative speed. On A10 plus you out distance
• 1:25:15
  them and break away relative speed, meaning you know the
• 1:25:17
  difference from you to the other one.
• 1:25:22
  On a seven time you have to choose one.
• 1:25:24
  You out distance and break away, but your vehicle suffers 1 harm
• 1:25:27
  AP you don't escape them, but you can go ground to place your.
• 1:25:32
  You can go to ground in a place of your choosing or in a place
• 1:25:36
  you choose or they overtake you but their vehicle suffers 1 harm
• 1:25:40
  AP for the strain. Then you can overtake a vehicle
• 1:25:44
  which is the inverse of out distancing a vehicle.
• 1:25:48
  Then you have deal with bad terrain, which is just like, you
• 1:25:52
  know, driving through rough shit like oh fuck you know we were in
• 1:25:55
  the mud or whatever on A10 plus you roll plus sorry.
• 1:26:01
  When you deal with bad terrain, this is where your handling
• 1:26:03
  comes in. You roll plus cool plus your
• 1:26:06
  vehicle's handling. Now you might notice in this,
• 1:26:09
  wait a minute Josh, cool plus your vehicle's handling.
• 1:26:12
  If my vehicle has a handling of let's say 2 and I as a player
• 1:26:16
  have a cool of +2, I'm rolling plus 4I basically can't fail,
• 1:26:22
  correct? Yes.
• 1:26:23
  You basically can't fail in that scenario.
• 1:26:27
  Vehicles, if the the when the driver is in their vehicle,
• 1:26:31
  technically anyone can use a vehicle, but when the driver is
• 1:26:34
  in their vehicle, they are a golden God.
• 1:26:38
  This is kind of that. It's kind of that thing I'm
• 1:26:40
  always talking about with the thing D&D always bugs me where
• 1:26:48
  it's like, you can make an ability really powerful if it
• 1:26:51
  doesn't come up as often, right? The driver is not going to
• 1:26:54
  always have access to their vehicle, But when they do have
• 1:26:57
  access to their vehicle, they're fucking sick, you know?
• 1:27:00
  So because they don't get it as often, you got to make it really
• 1:27:03
  awesome as one example, and then you have shoulder another
• 1:27:11
  vehicle, which is just you fucking shoulder check them.
• 1:27:13
  You ram them on a hit, you shoulder it aside afflicting V
• 1:27:18
  harm, which is vehicle harm on A10 plus you inflict V harm plus
• 1:27:22
  one on a miss. It shoulders you instead
• 1:27:24
  inflicting V harm. V harm is just, it's like
• 1:27:30
  regular harm, but it is the attacking car's massive minus
• 1:27:35
  the defending car's handling step.
• 1:27:38
  So you do this, you do the math on that.
• 1:27:40
  That's how much harm the vehicle takes.
• 1:27:42
  And then you roll the V harm move, which works basically same
• 1:27:46
  idea as the regular harm move for a person, except it's, you
• 1:27:49
  know, it's a car. So you have different possible
• 1:27:51
  options that can happen, such as spinning out or crashing.
• 1:27:58
  And I think that's the that's the last Rd. war move.
• 1:28:01
  Yeah, it's the last Rd. war. So those are all the battle
• 1:28:05
  moves. Those are for when you want to
• 1:28:06
  get into the nitty gritty of shits going down the next
• 1:28:11
  chapter. I'm also going to skip.
• 1:28:14
  I know it seems like I'm skipping over a lot the next
• 1:28:17
  chapter's character moves. It is a very detailed breakdown
• 1:28:22
  of every move from every core playbook.
• 1:28:26
  I was wondering why this was here, but in hindsight I do
• 1:28:29
  actually like it because it does the thing that I keep talking
• 1:28:32
  about, where it goes. These are what these moves do.
• 1:28:36
  You'll see them used here, here, here.
• 1:28:38
  Here's an example of where you'd use it like.
• 1:28:42
  Yeah. That's the shit that I would be
• 1:28:45
  fucking. I would just have those stapled
• 1:28:48
  to my monitor. I know exactly what I just said,
• 1:28:50
  don't worry. Oh, staple deer monitor.
• 1:28:53
  That's dangerous staple. Gun.
• 1:28:55
  Staple gun through the screen, through the panel.
• 1:28:58
  Yeah, straight. Like that was like those old
• 1:29:00
  fucking ring maze videos where the kid just puts his first to
• 1:29:02
  the monitor. Yeah, nice.
• 1:29:07
  So yeah, I I'm not going to go through them all because take
• 1:29:10
  forever. Not not interesting or anything,
• 1:29:12
  but if you're playing one of the playbooks and you're confused
• 1:29:15
  about how a move works or you want to get a better
• 1:29:18
  understanding of your playbook, the character moves chapter is
• 1:29:21
  where you can look. Then we have the Harm and
• 1:29:25
  Healing chapter. Brother, we have 100 pages of
• 1:29:29
  this book. I mean, we're going to jump over
• 1:29:32
  a lot of shit Sonora Basic like the harmony healing chapter.
• 1:29:38
  I don't even really think there's a ton to go in here.
• 1:29:42
  We've talked about the Harmon healing, you know, role Harmon
• 1:29:45
  healing rules quite a bit. The main thing the main
• 1:29:50
  takeaways is like this tells you when would a player, like what
• 1:29:55
  circumstances does a player character suffer harm, right?
• 1:30:03
  And you know how much harm should they suffer in those
• 1:30:06
  circumstances. The useful bits of information
• 1:30:09
  in this are particularly for the MC 'cause really players don't
• 1:30:14
  need to know how harm works honestly, the GM will just tell
• 1:30:17
  them what to do so they can kind of ignore it.
• 1:30:22
  The couple of useful things in this chapter is 1.
• 1:30:26
  There is a list from zero harm to five harm examples.
• 1:30:33
  So 0 harm is things like grappling, dragging, physically
• 1:30:37
  restraining kids, throwing rocks at you.
• 1:30:39
  One harm fists and boots applied with intent, adults throwing
• 1:30:44
  rocks, a tumble down the stairs, a ricochet. 2 harm.
• 1:30:48
  A guy with a hammer, a crossbow, A handgun, SMG, A1 starry A1
• 1:30:52
  story fall, a glancing hit from a car 3 harm.
• 1:30:56
  Shotgun, assault rifle, Sniper rifle, Two-story fall 4 harm.
• 1:31:01
  A grenade in your lap. Serious fucking automatic fire.
• 1:31:05
  A three story fall on your head. Direct hit from a car, 5 or more
• 1:31:09
  harm. Big explosions being tied down
• 1:31:12
  and chopped in half with an axe. I just, I just really like that
• 1:31:17
  three story fall on your head counts.
• 1:31:19
  It's over piercing because fucking of course.
• 1:31:24
  Yeah, you're not wearing any Harbor.
• 1:31:25
  You're probably not wearing a helmet.
• 1:31:27
  It doesn't matter if you are, your neck isn't fucking.
• 1:31:29
  That too. Yeah.
• 1:31:30
  Yeah, that, that. Too, I just love the idea of a
• 1:31:35
  character getting pushed out the window.
• 1:31:37
  OK, he takes forearm armor piercing, of course.
• 1:31:40
  Armor piercing, of course. Yeah.
• 1:31:44
  So that's a really useful list when you, as it's basically the
• 1:31:47
  thing where you know, you're playing D&D and you're like, OK,
• 1:31:51
  they, they should probably should take some kind of damage
• 1:31:53
  here, but I don't know exactly how much damage.
• 1:31:54
  It's, it's a list like that, right?
• 1:31:56
  They should definitely take some harm in this scenario.
• 1:31:57
  What should I do? What kind of harm?
• 1:32:00
  This list is your best friend. You use it a lot when you're
• 1:32:03
  running this game. Now you might say also, why does
• 1:32:06
  it matter what 0 harm stuff is 'cause you could take 0 harm and
• 1:32:10
  still have the character roll the harm move.
• 1:32:13
  It would just be, they would roll 2D6 flat right, 'cause it'd
• 1:32:16
  be plus 0. So someone could get punched in
• 1:32:18
  the face or, or someone could get like a rock thrown at him by
• 1:32:22
  a child and it doesn't do any harm, but they roll badly on the
• 1:32:27
  harm move and then they like it hits him in the eye and then
• 1:32:30
  they're fucking fall to the ground and they're confused or
• 1:32:32
  whatever. Yeah, like there's still
• 1:32:33
  potential for things to roll into worse shit.
• 1:32:41
  Then it talks. It mentions a bit about, you
• 1:32:43
  know, filling up your segments and the as we established when
• 1:32:49
  the first 3 segments of your harm clock will heal by
• 1:32:52
  themselves. Once you get past that, you need
• 1:32:54
  medical attention. Once you hit six damage,
• 1:32:58
  effectively you're dead. When you die in this game, it's
• 1:33:04
  called life becomes untenable. You then have the option when
• 1:33:11
  your life becomes untenable, the player chooses one of these
• 1:33:14
  options. Come back with -1 hard.
• 1:33:17
  Come back with plus one weird Max of plus three.
• 1:33:20
  Change to a new playbook, or die.
• 1:33:27
  So essentially, you can die four times before your character's
• 1:33:31
  done, done, But you could also just die.
• 1:33:33
  Like your character could go down, life could become
• 1:33:35
  untenable the first time, and you're like, you know what?
• 1:33:37
  I don't want to play this character and they just die.
• 1:33:39
  You could do that too. Well, so that's kind of why I
• 1:33:41
  was saying it seems like you can die more than four times because
• 1:33:43
  you can come back up to +3 Weird.
• 1:33:46
  But it like let's say you have two hard, what then?
• 1:33:54
  Oh, these are all pick once. Yeah, You see?
• 1:34:01
  Yeah, yeah. You can't keep picking these.
• 1:34:08
  Where does it say that? I don't remember.
• 1:34:20
  Yeah. Because I I.
• 1:34:21
  Was reading through this section and I didn't notice anything but
• 1:34:26
  then I I was wondering like is the point in in this edition to
• 1:34:29
  just die until your little grungalow is so fucked up that
• 1:34:31
  you're like maybe, maybe it's time to retire this little guy,
• 1:34:34
  no. No, I, I, I'm I'm almost
• 1:34:36
  positive unless I unless, unless I and many other people online
• 1:34:43
  have been totally misunderstanding.
• 1:34:44
  If I remember correctly, these are like you can only choose
• 1:34:47
  them once. The buyer chooses, he decides.
• 1:34:58
  Yeah, I don't remember now, but I'm almost positive that's the
• 1:35:00
  case. So yeah, yeah, that's why it's
• 1:35:10
  that's why it's four times effectively.
• 1:35:16
  But I suppose I could be completely misremembering that
• 1:35:20
  That is possible. I'm going to give this quick
• 1:35:21
  Google search. Go for it.
• 1:35:24
  Grok How many times can you die? How?
• 1:35:27
  Many times can you die in Apocalypse World?
• 1:35:32
  So another important bit in this chapter is a when an NPC suffers
• 1:35:37
  harm. Because you may have thought to
• 1:35:40
  yourself, wait a minute Josh, you keep saying that enemies
• 1:35:44
  don't have stat blocks in this game, they do not.
• 1:35:47
  So how do you handle the PCs attacking them?
• 1:35:51
  So basically PCs all have a a harm countdown clock that's sort
• 1:35:57
  of like hidden in the sense that you don't need to write it down
• 1:36:00
  every time, but there's a little countdown clock example.
• 1:36:03
  One harm on an MPC is cosmetic damage.
• 1:36:06
  Pain 2 harm wounds likely fatal 3 harm, terrible wounds fatal 4
• 1:36:12
  harm immediately fatal. Mangling 5.
• 1:36:16
  Harm bodily destruction. Essentially.
• 1:36:20
  Most MPCS you can say have two, maybe three health.
• 1:36:27
  If they're a particularly important MPC, you might feel
• 1:36:30
  validated in giving them four or five, but that is generally not
• 1:36:33
  recommended Because people in Apocalypse World are normal ass
• 1:36:36
  people. Getting shot in the chest with a
• 1:36:38
  gun? You're going to have a bad time.
• 1:36:42
  They do. MPCS can obviously have armor
• 1:36:44
  though, so if you describe the MPC as having armor, then you
• 1:36:48
  know the they get shot with a gun minus the two armor, it
• 1:36:52
  might not do anything. That's the, that's the basic
• 1:36:58
  flow of it. You, the one thing you might
• 1:37:00
  need to keep track of is did this MPC take harm in this
• 1:37:05
  particular situation and are they wearing armor or not?
• 1:37:08
  That's pretty much all you need. And oh, and I guess what weapon
• 1:37:11
  does the MPC have if they're attacking the player?
• 1:37:14
  But also that could change very quickly.
• 1:37:16
  Like they could have a gun, lose the gun, pick up a bat, take a
• 1:37:18
  swing. You know, that's where the
• 1:37:20
  that's where the list of example harms comes in handy.
• 1:37:28
  So as the book describes it, NPCS don't get to take the first
• 1:37:31
  hit effectively for free the way PCs do when Keeler shoots an NPC
• 1:37:36
  in the face with her 9mm. Not like Bran the poor bastard
• 1:37:39
  is done. That's the basic idea.
• 1:37:45
  Well, so I guess, sorry, I'm still looking into this.
• 1:37:48
  The lowest your stat can go is -3 right?
• 1:37:52
  I believe yes. So I guess maybe that's the
• 1:37:55
  idea, right? Because you can take the plus 1
• 1:37:59
  + 1 weird several times to a Max of +3, so I don't.
• 1:38:04
  Think that's your. That's not what it's saying.
• 1:38:08
  I think it's saying if you already have weird +3 and you
• 1:38:13
  take that choice, your weird stat will not go up.
• 1:38:18
  Ah. Because you can already have
• 1:38:20
  your stat at +3 when you go down, right?
• 1:38:24
  So if you choose that option, the stat will not go up, but
• 1:38:26
  your character's still alive. Because plus 3 is the Max for
• 1:38:31
  any stat in this game unless something explicitly says
• 1:38:34
  otherwise. Yeah, weird.
• 1:38:37
  Yeah, I'm looking around and I don't.
• 1:38:40
  Some people are like, yeah, you can die four times, you can die
• 1:38:42
  five times. You can just sort of die until
• 1:38:44
  you're tired of dying and then you choose death.
• 1:38:49
  Interesting disagreements. Specifically, the disagreements
• 1:38:52
  are coming from second edition, so maybe it was different back
• 1:38:57
  in the dizzy. Oh, that's a great question.
• 1:39:03
  Was it slightly? I mean, I have the other PDF
• 1:39:05
  open. Let me see if I can very quickly
• 1:39:08
  find it because I don't actually remember.
• 1:39:15
  I think you. Yeah, I think in first edition
• 1:39:17
  you did. You did.
• 1:39:18
  I don't. Players choose to mark ability.
• 1:39:23
  She got stability, harm styles. Oh yeah, that's right.
• 1:39:25
  First edition had debilities but that wasn't for that was for if
• 1:39:31
  you didn't want to go past 9 gang.
• 1:39:39
  Oh vehicle suffers harm. I just don't remember.
• 1:39:47
  I don't remember if there was a a rule for once you Max out.
• 1:40:08
  I don't know, I'd have to. I'd have to fish around to
• 1:40:11
  remember where the fuck how it worked in first edition.
• 1:40:14
  It's odd, right? It seems like people online are
• 1:40:16
  also disagreeing so I don't know.
• 1:40:18
  I was under the my understanding of the impression was you could
• 1:40:20
  die four times because each option you could only take once.
• 1:40:24
  That was my understanding. Evidently that's not as cut and
• 1:40:29
  dry as I thought, right? Which is annoying anyway, that's
• 1:40:38
  that's the MPC in harm stuff. Then it mentions.
• 1:40:42
  So this is where it mentions the gang stuff.
• 1:40:44
  So gang sizes. So if you're basically this game
• 1:40:50
  abstracts any kind of mass combat out, basically if you, if
• 1:40:55
  you have a, if you have a gang, like if you are, if you as a
• 1:40:58
  player roll up with your gang, there's either you either have a
• 1:41:02
  small gang, a medium gang or a large gang.
• 1:41:05
  For every increment of gang size, you deal one more damage
• 1:41:12
  and you take one less damage because there's just more of you
• 1:41:16
  than the other guys. And when you're using your gang
• 1:41:25
  as a weapon, which is to say like you're not involved, you
• 1:41:29
  don't take any harm your gang does.
• 1:41:31
  So gang sizes 10 to 25 is small, 25 to 50 is medium, 50 plus is
• 1:41:35
  large. Gangs inflict and inflict and
• 1:41:39
  suffer. Harm is established as usual.
• 1:41:41
  They inflict harm equal to their own harm rating minus their
• 1:41:44
  enemy's armor rating, and the harm and the suffer and oh,
• 1:41:49
  that's a typo, and they suffer harm equal to their enemy's harm
• 1:41:53
  rating minus their own armor. However, if there's a size
• 1:41:56
  mismatch, the bigger gang inflicts plus one and gets plus
• 1:41:59
  one armor for each step in the size difference.
• 1:42:01
  Oh, I phrased it wrong. They technically get plus one
• 1:42:03
  armor, same effect, so and then it gives you a little countdown
• 1:42:10
  clock. One harm to a gang means a
• 1:42:13
  couple of injuries, some serious. 2 harm to a gang means
• 1:42:16
  many injuries, a couple of fatalities. 3 is serious
• 1:42:19
  injuries, definite fatalities, 4 is many fatalities, and five is
• 1:42:23
  widespread fatalities. Few survivors.
• 1:42:28
  There is also it talks about will a gang hold together?
• 1:42:36
  If you have a strong leader present, they'll hold together
• 1:42:39
  up to 4 harm. If you have a weak leader or a
• 1:42:42
  leader who's absent, only up to three.
• 1:42:44
  If the leader is both weak and absent, they'll hold together
• 1:42:47
  for one or two harm. If they have no leader, 1 harm
• 1:42:50
  and they're done. APC gang leader can hold a gang
• 1:42:54
  together by imposing her will on it if she has a pack alpha or by
• 1:42:57
  ordering it to hold discipline if she has leadership, which are
• 1:43:03
  those are two playbook moves, but otherwise it follows these
• 1:43:08
  rules. If the PC is a member of a gang
• 1:43:15
  taking harm. How much harm the PC takes
• 1:43:17
  depend on her role in the gang. If she's the leader or prominent
• 1:43:21
  or a prominent visible member, she suffers the same harm as the
• 1:43:24
  gang does. If she's just someone in the
• 1:43:26
  gang or she's intentionally protecting herself from harm
• 1:43:28
  instead of fighting with the gang, they suffer 1 harmless.
• 1:43:32
  So yeah, basically it mass combat super easy in this game.
• 1:43:36
  You just establish the two big gang chunks and then smash them
• 1:43:40
  into each other as necessary. And then of course also you can
• 1:43:43
  zoom in and out on the situation where, you know, you describe
• 1:43:50
  the two gangs fighting and then a player says I'm going to break
• 1:43:52
  away from that, I'll do a separate thing.
• 1:43:54
  And that's where you can kind of zoom the moves in and out as we
• 1:43:57
  established before. Then we get to using a vehicle
• 1:44:02
  as a weapon, which was kind of talking about the V harm stuff.
• 1:44:07
  You can run people over and shit, as you might expect when
• 1:44:11
  you're hitting another. When you're hitting another
• 1:44:14
  vehicle, you do the whole V harm thing.
• 1:44:18
  A direct hit inflicts 3 harm, plus its massive, minus the
• 1:44:22
  target's vehicle, minus the target vehicle's massive and
• 1:44:25
  armor. So you can just, you know,
• 1:44:30
  T-bone someone. You can also.
• 1:44:34
  There's also some rules for running your vehicle into a
• 1:44:37
  building if you are so inclined. And then when a vehicle suffers
• 1:44:44
  harm you get the same kind of little countdown clock.
• 1:44:48
  Vehicles essentially give you like a layer of armor.
• 1:44:51
  SO1 harm to a vehicle means 0 harm blows blows through the
• 1:44:57
  passengers. It's mostly cosmetic damage.
• 1:44:59
  Two harm means functional damage on the vehicle.
• 1:45:03
  One harm can blow through to the passengers. 3 harm means you
• 1:45:07
  know greater damage. 2 harm blows through. 4 harm to the
• 1:45:10
  vehicle means it's breaking down or barely functioning.
• 1:45:13
  It can be prepared in the garage, in a garage, but not in
• 1:45:16
  the field. 3 harm blows through the passengers. 5 or more harm
• 1:45:20
  the vehicles toast. Full harm blows through to the
• 1:45:24
  passengers, plus they suffer additional harm if the vehicle
• 1:45:26
  explodes or crashes. So if you would, if you want to
• 1:45:31
  just take your SMG and try to pepper into a vehicle like a Mad
• 1:45:36
  Men, you you can. Probably won't go well, but you
• 1:45:39
  can. Then it reestablishes V harm.
• 1:45:43
  It's funny, I didn't realize how much this book does the same
• 1:45:46
  thing I was talking about with Fabula, where it reiterates a
• 1:45:50
  mechanic when it is relevant to the section that it's in.
• 1:45:54
  I caught that with the, with the, the, the moves, how they
• 1:45:58
  they were like, OK, he gave you some descriptions.
• 1:46:00
  Now we're really going to go into it.
• 1:46:02
  Fairpoint Yeah, yeah. Then we have, then you have some
• 1:46:08
  rules on buildings suffering harm.
• 1:46:13
  This works essentially the same as as a my brain, essentially
• 1:46:20
  the same as a vehicle, but the buildings can take a lot more
• 1:46:24
  harm. But it's the same kind of idea.
• 1:46:27
  They take a certain amount of harm, and some of that harm will
• 1:46:30
  blow through to the people in the building.
• 1:46:34
  As with vehicles, when a building suffers harm, there's
• 1:46:36
  two considerations. Structural damage to the
• 1:46:37
  building and how much of the harm blows through.
• 1:46:39
  Harm to buildings and other structures is non cumulative.
• 1:46:42
  Don't bother tracking a building's harm on a countdown.
• 1:46:45
  Shooting a building's three times with your 3 harm shotgun
• 1:46:48
  doesn't add up to 9 harm and make the building collapse.
• 1:46:51
  So essentially you got to be able to, if you want to like
• 1:46:55
  destroy the building, you got to have a way to do some big chunky
• 1:46:58
  damage, which as you might imagine, is quite hard.
• 1:47:05
  But if you blast your shotgun, you know, through the window or
• 1:47:09
  whatever, you might get a couple of people in there.
• 1:47:14
  And then there's a couple of weird kinds of harm.
• 1:47:16
  So there's sigh harm, which is if the psychic, the world
• 1:47:21
  psychic Maelstrom decides to fuck with your brain.
• 1:47:25
  Essentially when an MPC suffers sigh harm the M the MC creates
• 1:47:32
  her as a threat if necessary. Essentially if an MPC takes sigh
• 1:47:37
  harm, they just crack and turn into a Rav.
• 1:47:41
  You know a mad like a their sanity shatters or they change
• 1:47:45
  into a different kind of person. Or the psychic maelstrom is
• 1:47:48
  fucked with them and they are a danger.
• 1:47:51
  And that's anytime they take one harm from the maelstrom.
• 1:47:55
  So sigh. Harm doesn't have a number
• 1:47:57
  attached to it. It's just harm.
• 1:47:59
  Oh, it's just a binary. It's basically a binary, Yeah.
• 1:48:03
  So like as it describes with the suffer sigh harm move, it says
• 1:48:07
  when you suffer sigh harm, roll plus sigh harm suffered,
• 1:48:10
  typically roll plus one. Which is to say it's essentially
• 1:48:15
  always a one. But because it's sigh harm, it's
• 1:48:17
  gonna fuck with you in a weird way.
• 1:48:19
  There's not a lot of ways to take Cy harm like there are.
• 1:48:22
  I think there are a couple of moves that can deal it on the
• 1:48:24
  playbooks, and obviously you as the MC could dish it out if they
• 1:48:28
  try to get in touch with the Zika maelstrom and fail.
• 1:48:31
  But it doesn't. It's not one that you're using a
• 1:48:33
  ton. And if an MPC is suffering Cy
• 1:48:37
  harm, that's probably as a result of like a threat
• 1:48:40
  countdown or something like that, like a countdown clock,
• 1:48:43
  then you have S harm. This is basically you're being
• 1:48:46
  stunned, disable the target without causing any regular
• 1:48:50
  harm, use it on APC. And doing anything at all means
• 1:48:54
  doing it under fire. The fire is you're stunned and
• 1:48:59
  then you have D harm, which is deprivation.
• 1:49:02
  This is strictly for acute cases of deprivation, for scarcity and
• 1:49:07
  chronic deprivation. Create that as an affliction
• 1:49:10
  threat instead. Individual NPCS may suffer
• 1:49:15
  Deharm. For PCs suffering deharm, tell
• 1:49:18
  them the effects that they're suffering and if they can't.
• 1:49:21
  If they can't or don't alleviate their deprivation, inflict harm.
• 1:49:25
  Regular harm alongside it in increments of 1.
• 1:49:28
  Harm armor piercing. So if you're deharm, air
• 1:49:32
  asphyxiation, warmth, hypothermia, cool heat stroke.
• 1:49:36
  Basically it's like environmental stuff.
• 1:49:39
  You can also be dehydrated, starving, or sleep deprived and
• 1:49:43
  you will, you know, get fucked up from that if you don't solve
• 1:49:48
  that problem. And then it also gives you some
• 1:49:52
  brief explanations on how to utilize it on NPC populations.
• 1:49:58
  And then the healing chapter or the healing chunk of the harm
• 1:50:02
  chapter, I should say basically, there's not like a whole lot to
• 1:50:07
  say on healing. If you have an Angel in the part
• 1:50:09
  in the in the player pool. I was about to say party, but
• 1:50:12
  you're not really a party in this game.
• 1:50:14
  If someone's playing the Angel, the Angel can take care of you.
• 1:50:18
  Cool. If there is no Angel, you have
• 1:50:22
  to go to an NPC. If there are neither of those
• 1:50:26
  things, you're probably fucked. That's that's pretty much it.
• 1:50:35
  You can't really if if you don't.
• 1:50:40
  If you don't have a local MPC or Angel character in the game, try
• 1:50:47
  to avoid getting into a lot of fights.
• 1:50:48
  Is kind of where it comes out to a.
• 1:50:50
  Little odd because I feel like it almost pushes you to like,
• 1:50:53
  well we have to, we need to make sure we have an Angel and I
• 1:50:55
  don't. I don't think the game is
• 1:50:57
  intended for that level of medic.
• 1:50:58
  Because you, because you have the NPC medic as the option that
• 1:51:01
  you can always use and it's, it's pretty reasonable to assume
• 1:51:07
  that there's going to be an NPC medic in the, in the like where
• 1:51:12
  you guys live basically in your primary location.
• 1:51:17
  Fair enough. Like I there's, there's very
• 1:51:20
  rarely, and even if nobody has established that a medic exists,
• 1:51:24
  some of the playbooks will let you just say, oh, I know an NPC,
• 1:51:27
  Oh, they're the medic. Like some of them will let you
• 1:51:30
  do that. Even if that's not the case, a
• 1:51:36
  player could just say, is there a medic around?
• 1:51:38
  Can we establish A medic? And then the GM is probably
• 1:51:40
  going to say yes. Like it's really not the kind of
• 1:51:43
  thing you're going to say. No.
• 1:51:44
  The only, the only time, the only time this would this is
• 1:51:49
  like important is if the players are out on like a mission or
• 1:51:53
  something and they're really far away from town.
• 1:51:56
  Somebody gets really fucked up and there's no Angel in the
• 1:51:58
  party. That's a situation where it's
• 1:52:00
  like, sorry bud, you're probably fucked.
• 1:52:01
  There's no one around, you know what I mean?
• 1:52:05
  But yeah, no, there's not reliable healing because it's
• 1:52:08
  the apocalypse. There's no drug stores or
• 1:52:10
  pharmacies or any kind of magical spells to heal you or
• 1:52:13
  any of that shit. The game also says you can
• 1:52:19
  create an NPC medic but she isn't important.
• 1:52:21
  Medical care is pretty much an abstract given they pay their
• 1:52:25
  barter and erase their segments one for one.
• 1:52:27
  You should still give her a name, but don't create her as a
• 1:52:29
  threat until she develops into a real someone.
• 1:52:33
  Basically. That's that's basically saying
• 1:52:35
  it's a given. There's probably going to be an
• 1:52:36
  MPC around I the one where it says she's nobody important.
• 1:52:43
  I don't particularly, I, I would always make the medic somebody
• 1:52:46
  important, but you know, you can sort of avoid that if you want
• 1:52:49
  to. It seems almost like a, dare I
• 1:52:53
  say, necessity. Like it's weird to be like this
• 1:52:55
  is the medic. They don't matter.
• 1:52:57
  Go. Ahead, well, it says they don't
• 1:53:00
  matter. Don't create them as a threat
• 1:53:03
  until she develops into a real someone.
• 1:53:05
  Which is to say, they don't matter initially, but if the
• 1:53:08
  players interact with the medic a lot, maybe they turn into a
• 1:53:11
  character who matters. You know what I mean?
• 1:53:16
  And then gear and crap. Just literally what the
• 1:53:20
  chapter's called gear and crap. Basically, this is this section,
• 1:53:28
  you know, it tells you how to use, how to utilize your barter,
• 1:53:32
  your Jingle as it were. Again, it reiterates the
• 1:53:39
  lifestyle spending. It's a basically there's three
• 1:53:45
  ways for characters to gain barter, which is at character
• 1:53:48
  creation, you can work a gig or sorry, option 1, character
• 1:53:53
  creation option #2 work a gig. And then the third way is
• 1:53:58
  basically to strike a deal with an MPC.
• 1:54:01
  Then there's four ways to spend your barter, which is your
• 1:54:04
  lifestyle at the beginning of a session.
• 1:54:07
  The second way is spending barter by striking up a deal.
• 1:54:10
  You know, as before A1 time barter expenditure is subject to
• 1:54:16
  availability, but it might count for bribes.
• 1:54:19
  A few sessions higher of a simple labor, a few sessions
• 1:54:22
  maintenance and repair. A few sessions, tribute to a
• 1:54:25
  warlord, material, material cost for a crash, resuscitation by a
• 1:54:30
  medic. Basically one barter gets you a
• 1:54:33
  decent chunk of shit 'cause it's the apocalypse and money is not
• 1:54:36
  really like a thing that's going around very often.
• 1:54:39
  You're not doing any kind of my new tracking of money in this
• 1:54:42
  game at all. Third way to spend your barter
• 1:54:45
  is to bribe people with it. Obviously bribe people with it
• 1:54:51
  or go into a market or something like that.
• 1:54:54
  And then your fourth option is the MC might tell you you have
• 1:55:00
  to spend the barter in some fashion via the MC move of make
• 1:55:04
  them buy or take away their stuff.
• 1:55:11
  Then the most important thing in this chapter is the tags on
• 1:55:16
  equipment. So you don't have you don't have
• 1:55:24
  like super specific stat layouts.
• 1:55:26
  You don't have any kind of magic weapon stuff.
• 1:55:28
  Basically a weapon, a piece of equipment comes down to what
• 1:55:32
  harm does it deal? What are its tags?
• 1:55:36
  That's the main shit. So all of the tags are a lot of
• 1:55:44
  them will give you, you know, something specific.
• 1:55:47
  For example, it'll say plus some amount of it'll say plus N
• 1:55:52
  armor. That means that thing gives you
• 1:55:53
  plus an amount of armor, right? Very mechanical.
• 1:55:57
  Some of them will be what the game calls constraints.
• 1:56:01
  So for example, ranges on equipment are a constraint.
• 1:56:07
  The ranges go from intimate hand, close, close, far and far.
• 1:56:13
  Basically if the GM tells you that somebody is far from you
• 1:56:18
  and you have a weapon that is has a range of hand you you got
• 1:56:22
  to go get to that person before you can use your weapon on them.
• 1:56:26
  Then you have the obvious ones like N armor or N plus armor, N
• 1:56:31
  being just a variable letter hold placeholder for a number
• 1:56:35
  those give you. Those reduce incoming armor or
• 1:56:38
  add to your existing armor. Then you have N harm N plus arm.
• 1:56:42
  They have plus plus bonuses which is like it might be a
• 1:56:45
  bonus to a stat plus one hot forward plus one sharp when
• 1:56:49
  eyesight matters. Something like that.
• 1:56:51
  Goggles for example would give you like a + 1 sharp roll a
• 1:56:56
  choice, A plus one choice which is you know you can choose from
• 1:57:02
  a move allows the player to choose one more option from the
• 1:57:06
  move than her role would normally give her alive.
• 1:57:11
  Which is to say the gear is a living thing.
• 1:57:16
  AP means it ignores armor. AV means it is an anti vehicle
• 1:57:21
  weapon. I believe Anti vehicle weapons
• 1:57:25
  just straight up ignore the vehicle's armor if I remember
• 1:57:26
  correctly. Applied means like it takes a
• 1:57:32
  little bit of intimate type, so like a poisonous ointment or
• 1:57:37
  something like that would have to be applied.
• 1:57:39
  You need to like tie the person down and rub them down with the
• 1:57:42
  ointment or something or they need to, you need to trick them
• 1:57:44
  into letting you do it. The area tag.
• 1:57:48
  This is one that I think stresses a lot of GMs out.
• 1:57:52
  The area tag, basically the targets of the thing are subject
• 1:57:58
  to an area, not a singular person.
• 1:58:02
  It fully effects everyone and everything there, which is to
• 1:58:04
  say, like a grenade launcher would have the area tag.
• 1:58:09
  And I know some people who have run other games will probably
• 1:58:12
  hear a rule like that and be like, but how many people like,
• 1:58:15
  how do I decide? And the basic answer is just
• 1:58:18
  follow the fiction. You know, if there's three guys
• 1:58:21
  in front of the player and then three more guys on the roof and
• 1:58:26
  they shoot the grenade, it's not going to hit all six.
• 1:58:29
  It's going to hit the three guys in front of them, that kind of
• 1:58:32
  thing. Auto fire is basically the same.
• 1:58:37
  The the gun has an auto fire option.
• 1:58:39
  Again, fictionally, a lot of these are fictionally relevant
• 1:58:43
  things that will change the moment.
• 1:58:49
  Braced is like firing a gun, you know, like a sniper rifle.
• 1:58:52
  Braced up close, close far. Implaced is like a mounted thing
• 1:58:57
  far in hand. Those are ranges.
• 1:58:59
  High tech is it's high tech, which could matter for a
• 1:59:04
  multitude of reasons. Implanted, you know, it's under
• 1:59:08
  your skin in some way. It's implanted in your brain.
• 1:59:12
  Infinite. Throw one away.
• 1:59:15
  The character has another one and another and another.
• 1:59:18
  She has as many as she needs. This is, you know.
• 1:59:22
  Infinite throwing knives, for example.
• 1:59:24
  I thought that was I, yeah, I thought that was really
• 1:59:26
  interesting to have A tag for that specifically.
• 1:59:29
  Yeah, yeah, it's literally like, oh, I don't give a shit.
• 1:59:32
  They had, they always have it. And then from infinite we have
• 1:59:37
  intimate, which is to say, again, you need to be real close
• 1:59:41
  to the person. You need to be able to kiss him
• 1:59:45
  or or grapple him. Loud.
• 1:59:50
  It's loud, messy. It's loud.
• 1:59:56
  Also, like we were talking about before, if you hit someone with
• 2:00:00
  a messy weapon, it's going to do some major damage.
• 2:00:03
  It's making a mess. It's ripping things apart, it's
• 2:00:07
  causing pain. If somebody gets shot with a
• 2:00:10
  shotgun, you as the GM it with a like because the shotgun has the
• 2:00:14
  messy tag. You as the GM can say you lose
• 2:00:16
  your arm. That's within your rights.
• 2:00:18
  That's part of the weapon. Refill just means they need to
• 2:00:23
  like you know, a mortar shell for example, you have to refill
• 2:00:27
  after every shot, that kind of a thing.
• 2:00:29
  You also have reload. This is kind of a fictional 1
• 2:00:36
  where it's like if they have a gun, they need to reload, right?
• 2:00:39
  The game doesn't track ammo, but you might say if they rolled A7
• 2:00:43
  to 9 on a seized by force, they shoot somebody or whatever they
• 2:00:46
  kill the person, they now need to reload.
• 2:00:50
  That's like the seven to 9 success is like you got what you
• 2:00:52
  wanted, but now you got to reload Somebody else jumps you
• 2:00:55
  while you're reloading or something like that remote which
• 2:00:59
  is you. You know it's a remote control
• 2:01:01
  something S harm. That's like a stunning situation
• 2:01:06
  slow. It has to be reloaded and
• 2:01:10
  furthermore, the character has to take a specific action to
• 2:01:13
  load or ready it the first time before using it.
• 2:01:15
  So again, the kind of gun you have to like brace up or set up
• 2:01:19
  or attached to something tag is to say the character has to
• 2:01:24
  touch her target to use it, but only an instant of time.
• 2:01:28
  So it's not the same as intimate.
• 2:01:30
  You don't need to like hold it there, but you need to like slap
• 2:01:32
  someone with it. Valuable means it's it's a
• 2:01:35
  valuable item. Fictionally it's worth one more
• 2:01:37
  barter and warn you have to be wearing it in some capacity.
• 2:01:45
  That is is all the weapon tags as you as are all the the gear
• 2:01:49
  tags, not just weapons. I hear there's quite a few of
• 2:01:54
  them. Yes, there's quite a few.
• 2:01:55
  I have small issue with the revolvers in this game.
• 2:01:59
  Why do the revolvers have the reload tag?
• 2:02:01
  What the fuck does? What?
• 2:02:04
  Because it takes time to reload every shot.
• 2:02:07
  Other It's a revolver. There's six shots in the
• 2:02:09
  cylinder. Does the game assume that you're
• 2:02:11
  just fanning the hammer with every shot?
• 2:02:12
  Oh no. No no, no no no.
• 2:02:14
  You misunderstand. The reload doesn't mean every
• 2:02:16
  shot I have to reload it reload. It means if I run out of ammo I
• 2:02:20
  have to take some time to reload it.
• 2:02:25
  So like revolver has the revolver has the reload tag
• 2:02:29
  because when you run out, you then have to reach into your
• 2:02:32
  pocket and pull out six bullets and individually load each
• 2:02:35
  bullet. So it takes time to reload as
• 2:02:37
  opposed to a mag which you just slap into the gun.
• 2:02:41
  That's why it has a reload tag. Yeah, it doesn't mean every
• 2:02:46
  shot. It's not that every single shot
• 2:02:47
  you have to reload. The reload tag is like, oh
• 2:02:51
  player, you missed your role, now I'm going to punish you with
• 2:02:53
  a reload or something like that. I.
• 2:02:56
  See. Yeah.
• 2:02:58
  Yeah, there's a couple of, there's some common weapons and
• 2:03:01
  some common firearms listed out. Several of the playbooks also
• 2:03:05
  get specialty weapons or custom weapons and stuff like that, or
• 2:03:09
  weapons that are specifically only for their playbook.
• 2:03:11
  Like the Brainer has a couple of like Brainer gear, which is
• 2:03:15
  stuff that only they get access to.
• 2:03:19
  It also mentions a little bit about armor.
• 2:03:21
  Basically you either have one armor or two armor, or that's
• 2:03:25
  it. Like armor doesn't really go
• 2:03:27
  beyond two. It mentions a couple of
• 2:03:30
  distinctive weapons, which are say weapons that look a little
• 2:03:33
  fancier, such as scalpels or ornate daggers or ornate swords.
• 2:03:40
  Firearms that give you pause, which is to say, big fuck off
• 2:03:44
  firearms. Assault rifle, grenade launcher,
• 2:03:48
  grenade, 2 mount machine gun. You know or not.
• 2:03:52
  I I say big, but also silence. 9mm is on there because
• 2:03:56
  silenced. So yeah.
• 2:03:57
  I mean, if you get clipped and you don't know where it's coming
• 2:03:59
  from, you're like. Yeah, and then some large scale
• 2:04:02
  weapons like a 50 Cal, a sniper, RPG, anti tank, missile, so on
• 2:04:07
  and so forth. And then it mentions specialty
• 2:04:10
  gear, which is basically specialty gear is stuff you're
• 2:04:12
  only going to get from your playbook.
• 2:04:15
  You can't normally take it from, you can't just normally take it
• 2:04:20
  as is, although the GM might let you, of course.
• 2:04:24
  And then it lists out your vehicles, some sample vehicles,
• 2:04:27
  bikes and some cars and stuff, battle vehicles, which is, you
• 2:04:33
  know, as opposed to just a big car, it's a big car with a mini
• 2:04:36
  gun or whatever, or spikes on it.
• 2:04:38
  You know, it's, it's your war rig, quite literally.
• 2:04:44
  There's a whole bunch of crap on different.
• 2:04:46
  There's quite a lot of like if you want to get into the if you
• 2:04:48
  want to play the car guy, this game is great for you.
• 2:04:53
  Then it reiterates creating a vehicle as a threat.
• 2:04:55
  And then it gets in a little bit about prosthetics.
• 2:04:59
  The rules on prosthetics are very vague.
• 2:05:01
  We went over them last time. There's not a whole lot going on
• 2:05:03
  there. It mentions workspaces a little
• 2:05:09
  bit because the Savvy head or the Angel, for example, can both
• 2:05:13
  have workspaces. Basically, if you get a
• 2:05:16
  workspace from your playbook, it's going to tell you some of
• 2:05:19
  the specific rules about how to handle it in the playbook.
• 2:05:23
  And then you'll make some choices about your play, about
• 2:05:26
  your workspace, and then you can do projects within the
• 2:05:28
  workspace. And then there's a bunch of
• 2:05:31
  questions. This is kind of like the, this
• 2:05:33
  is the equivalent of the project's mechanic in something
• 2:05:36
  like Fabula for this game where you start something, you ask the
• 2:05:41
  MC, can I do this? And then the MC gives you a
• 2:05:43
  bunch of stipulations to do the project.
• 2:05:46
  I think this is actually the first time I saw a long term
• 2:05:49
  project mechanic like this. Was this game I'm pretty sure?
• 2:05:54
  Is this? Do you think this is the first
• 2:05:56
  game to do projects like this considering when it came out?
• 2:05:59
  I don't think so, but it like maybe I don't know.
• 2:06:07
  I don't know enough on the history to really say.
• 2:06:10
  Actually I I don't remember exactly when Apocalypse World
• 2:06:12
  came out to be honest. Wasn't it 20?
• 2:06:18
  13 Why did we look that up last time?
• 2:06:20
  I believe so. 2010. They they very well could be.
• 2:06:25
  Then I. Don't know, not sure.
• 2:06:29
  I find that a little hard to believe.
• 2:06:31
  I mean, D&D is from the 70s, you know, like somebody had a
• 2:06:34
  thought. Projects like that though, no.
• 2:06:36
  No, I know. But what I'm saying is there's
• 2:06:37
  such a space between the 70s and there, you know, there's 40 some
• 2:06:40
  odd years. I feel like somebody had to have
• 2:06:43
  thought of a similar mechanic in some fashion it.
• 2:06:48
  Just clocks are so. So that's.
• 2:06:53
  So well, that like it almost seems that they were
• 2:06:55
  concurrently designed. Weirdly funny thing about this
• 2:06:59
  mechanic, The project mechanic in this game technically doesn't
• 2:07:03
  utilize clocks. Oh.
• 2:07:06
  Yeah, technically you're just supposed to tell the the the MC
• 2:07:11
  I'm working on it and then the MC will say OK and then you're
• 2:07:16
  just supposed to keep asking am I done yet?
• 2:07:20
  Like there isn't actually. Weirdly, the game that kind of
• 2:07:23
  came up with the countdown clocks thing doesn't use the
• 2:07:25
  countdown clocks for workspace projects.
• 2:07:27
  Oh, I kind of hate that, right? It's weird it's luckily it's
• 2:07:31
  super easy to just slap a countdown clock on it anyway, so
• 2:07:35
  like it's not a big deal, but it is super weird that it's not a
• 2:07:37
  thing yeah. So yeah, you ask all the you ask
• 2:07:43
  the question, the MC gives you stipulations, but one of the
• 2:07:46
  options is it's going to take a while and then the how long is
• 2:07:51
  not specified. So yeah.
• 2:07:55
  Or actually, sorry, what it says is it's going to take hours
• 2:07:58
  slash weeks slash days slash months, but there's no specific
• 2:08:02
  like amounts of time. Yeah, weird thing.
• 2:08:04
  I personally, I handle it by just making a countdown clock
• 2:08:07
  anyway. But yeah, technically rules is
• 2:08:09
  written. It doesn't.
• 2:08:13
  And then last little bit in gang stuff, it gives you, it gives
• 2:08:17
  you rules, it gives you the tags cause gangs get their own tags.
• 2:08:21
  So it gives you the rules breakdown for gang tags, which
• 2:08:24
  are all their own thing. This is particularly relevant
• 2:08:26
  for the Chopper and the Hocus and the hard holder, I guess.
• 2:08:33
  And then you get what was the, what's the and the oh, and then
• 2:08:37
  there's the surplus and want rules.
• 2:08:39
  It reiterates here. That's for the Hocus, basically.
• 2:08:44
  Surplus, if you're playing the hocus, is what can your
• 2:08:47
  followers give you if things are going well and want is what do
• 2:08:50
  they demand from you. If things are going badly and
• 2:08:53
  you have a move that you check at the beginning of a session to
• 2:08:56
  see how your how your cult is doing, it can go very poorly.
• 2:09:02
  It's one of those things that you start the game with and it
• 2:09:05
  can be awesome or real bad. I don't know if I would want
• 2:09:13
  like on one end. I, I'm, I, I know I'm the kind
• 2:09:16
  of player who would really take advantage of having just a squad
• 2:09:20
  of minions. Yeah, but I feel like I would
• 2:09:23
  get very quickly annoyed with them and just have them all
• 2:09:27
  murdered. I would just heaven's date them.
• 2:09:30
  That's certainly an option. It's very much an option for
• 2:09:34
  sure. And then it the last thing it
• 2:09:37
  talks about is followers, holdings and establishments.
• 2:09:41
  So followers are what they sound like.
• 2:09:46
  You have a bunch of options to add tags and stuff to the
• 2:09:49
  followers, which is, you know, again, ties in with the hocus
• 2:09:53
  and stuff you're holding is if you're a hard holder, it's
• 2:09:57
  basically you're standing out. What's the population?
• 2:10:00
  What kind of gigs do you do? What kind of equipment do you
• 2:10:04
  have? Do you have an Armory, stuff
• 2:10:06
  like that. Is your gang disciplined or
• 2:10:09
  unruly? Basically, when you pick one of
• 2:10:11
  these, one of the playbooks that has one of these options, you
• 2:10:15
  have to pick a bunch of various choices for your for your
• 2:10:19
  followers or your holding or whatever it is.
• 2:10:21
  And it it removes or adds tags and shuffles things around.
• 2:10:29
  And then the establishment rules is for the Maestro D and that's
• 2:10:33
  the one that runs either like a nightclub or a restaurant or a
• 2:10:36
  drug den or whatever the fuck you want.
• 2:10:41
  A lot of the stuff in the gear section is actually taking shit
• 2:10:44
  that already exists on the playbooks and just moving it to
• 2:10:47
  that section if you want to reference it separately from the
• 2:10:51
  playbook itself. And we're actually gonna kind
• 2:10:56
  of, it's kind of a weird place to stop, but we're gonna stop
• 2:11:00
  there because the last. Well, so yeah, I mean, I will
• 2:11:08
  very briefly mention. So the last two chapters are
• 2:11:12
  improvement, which just improvement is the phrase that
• 2:11:15
  this game uses for leveling up. I've already explained how the
• 2:11:19
  improvement stuff works. You get the necessary XP, you
• 2:11:23
  get an improvement. You pick a new option from your
• 2:11:26
  playbook. It's very easy to level up in
• 2:11:28
  this game. There's not much to say boom
• 2:11:32
  bang boom, so I don't feel the need to spend any time on
• 2:11:36
  improvement. It does give you some advice on
• 2:11:39
  some of the improvement options that are a little more
• 2:11:42
  complicated, such as retiring your character or playing 2
• 2:11:46
  characters because every playbook has an option to create
• 2:11:50
  a second character. So you know that's fun.
• 2:11:56
  That's definitely the first time I've ever seen that be
• 2:11:58
  recommended in a role-playing game.
• 2:12:00
  Typically that's avoided like the fucking play.
• 2:12:02
  Like the plague. Yeah, it used to be more of a
• 2:12:04
  thing back in old school D&D day days where characters were kind
• 2:12:07
  of simple and you were expected to have like a bigger party.
• 2:12:10
  You'd sometimes play multiple character.
• 2:12:11
  Like first second edition times I'm talking.
• 2:12:14
  Well, yeah, I mean, I guess because there's the idea of role
• 2:12:16
  play is just lessened there. The idea is that you're just
• 2:12:18
  kind of using them. You're playing it.
• 2:12:21
  They're a board game, right? Yeah.
• 2:12:22
  Kind of, yeah. Closer to a board game.
• 2:12:25
  So yeah, it, it gives you advice on how to handle that stuff.
• 2:12:27
  And then I guess, oh, I guess 1 little thing I will mention is
• 2:12:31
  every basic move has an advanced version.
• 2:12:38
  And essentially what it does is it gives you a crit role.
• 2:12:42
  So there's no crits in this game, but if you advance a move,
• 2:12:47
  it essentially unlocks a crit role for the move in question.
• 2:12:52
  So for example, if you advance the move, do something under
• 2:12:56
  fire, you get the new option which says on a 12 plus you
• 2:13:02
  transcend the danger, the pressure and the possibility of
• 2:13:05
  harm. You do what you set out to do
• 2:13:07
  and the MC will offer you a better outcome, true beauty or a
• 2:13:11
  moment of grace. So each of the basic moves has
• 2:13:16
  this advanced unlock that you can get where you if you roll
• 2:13:21
  A12 plus you just absolutely doggone a motherfucker, you
• 2:13:24
  just, you just kill it. The Seduce or Manipulate 1 is
• 2:13:28
  really interesting because you turn them into an ally that the
• 2:13:35
  MC just cannot touch. Oh.
• 2:13:39
  Yeah, so choose so on a 12 plus. The MMPC does what you want and
• 2:13:44
  choose one of the following. Tell the MC to release, erase
• 2:13:48
  their threat type altogether and write in it instead.
• 2:13:51
  Ally friend, ally lover, ally right hand, ally representative,
• 2:13:55
  ally guardian, ally confidant. Basically you just remove them
• 2:14:00
  from the threat map and they are your teammate.
• 2:14:03
  End of discussion. That's pretty cool.
• 2:14:05
  I like that a lot. Yeah, the the critical role on
• 2:14:11
  Rita charge situation lets you ask any three questions.
• 2:14:14
  You not you want not limited to the list the the psychic
• 2:14:19
  maelstrom 1. You reach through the world's
• 2:14:21
  psychic maelstrom to what's beyond it and then it just says
• 2:14:25
  I envy you're finding out. That's all the advice on that
• 2:14:30
  move. I envy you're finding out.
• 2:14:35
  And then yeah, so lastly, just to again, I'm not, we're not
• 2:14:39
  actually going to go into it because it's quite a chunky
• 2:14:41
  chapter. Basically the advanced fuckery
• 2:14:45
  chapter is once you've played the game for a long time and
• 2:14:48
  you're like, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to make some more,
• 2:14:53
  I'd like to customize my campaign a little more.
• 2:14:55
  I'd like to add some more specific moves and rulings.
• 2:15:01
  This is the advanced fuckery chapter.
• 2:15:03
  Tells you exactly how the designer makes moves, comes up
• 2:15:08
  with the mechanics of the game. He basically lets you peek
• 2:15:11
  behind the curtain and tells you this is how you do it.
• 2:15:16
  So if you want to make sick custom moves, here you go.
• 2:15:19
  If you want to break the game, here you go.
• 2:15:22
  He gives you examples for like creating a custom stealth move
• 2:15:26
  or a move to steal things or moves if you want to play in
• 2:15:29
  like a zombie campaign. There's all sorts of shit in
• 2:15:35
  here, new types of like character move stuff, the
• 2:15:43
  recommendation of love letters, which is just kind of an
• 2:15:49
  interesting one. It's the idea that you go out of
• 2:15:54
  your way to say basically a bunch of time has passed in the
• 2:16:00
  campaign. Players roll, make me a roll to
• 2:16:05
  see what happened in the time skip and then pick a couple of
• 2:16:10
  options and then I will then implement them into the next
• 2:16:12
  session. So yeah, the advanced fuckery,
• 2:16:17
  it it, it basically breaks down the core mechanic of the game
• 2:16:20
  and tells you how to fuck with it to your heart's content and
• 2:16:22
  make whatever kind of moves this advanced.
• 2:16:25
  By the way, it's literally called advanced fuckery.
• 2:16:27
  In case anyone's curious, that is the name of the chapter.
• 2:16:31
  Yeah, Advanced fuckery. The advanced fuckery reason is
• 2:16:41
  why is where there's literally a section in it called Powered by
• 2:16:45
  the Apocalypse, so that's where that term is from.
• 2:16:50
  That's why Powered by the Apocalypse exists as a concept
• 2:16:53
  is because of this last chapter in the book it says so yeah,
• 2:16:58
  based on Apocalypse World, but Apocalypse World no longer
• 2:17:00
  question mark. Fuck Yeah.
• 2:17:02
  Here's a new set up move by Ben Ray for use in an Apocalypse
• 2:17:06
  World based zombie game. And then it's a couple of, it's
• 2:17:09
  some sample moves and that. So yeah.
• 2:17:15
  Then he lists out example moves that other people have made.
• 2:17:19
  One of them is a dungeon crawl game.
• 2:17:25
  Not not by the person you're thinking by a different person,
• 2:17:28
  but but did get made in. You know that did happen.
• 2:17:33
  So oh, here's one Here are here's some new basic moves by
• 2:17:39
  John Harper for an Apocalypse World based parkour game.
• 2:17:46
  John Harper, for those who don't know, is the author of Blades in
• 2:17:49
  the Dark, which is a kind of a Powered by the Apocalypse game,
• 2:17:54
  but it's so different and so unique that it started its own
• 2:17:58
  movement called Forged in the Dark.
• 2:18:01
  So now you have Powered by the Apocalypse game and Forged in
• 2:18:03
  the Dark game, even though the original Blades in the Dark is
• 2:18:06
  sort of a Powered by the Apocalypse game, but also sort
• 2:18:08
  of not. Do without what you will.
• 2:18:13
  It definitely has evolved to become its own thing.
• 2:18:16
  Oh yeah, Forged in the Dark is its own thing now, for sure, but
• 2:18:20
  it was. I don't know if he intended it
• 2:18:21
  that way originally or not, but yeah, that's yeah.
• 2:18:29
  Apocalypse World. We're done now.
• 2:18:32
  I never have to talk about it again.
• 2:18:35
  But he will. But I will.
• 2:18:39
  Let's say don't lie to the people like that.
• 2:18:40
  Don't do that. I will, you know, I, I will say
• 2:18:44
  as a, as a final thought before we get the hell out of here
• 2:18:47
  because Brett's going to be a little salty at us.
• 2:18:53
  I will. Yeah, it is.
• 2:18:58
  It is kind of funny because I will sometimes see people say I
• 2:19:06
  want to learn, like I don't get Powered by the Apocalypse as
• 2:19:11
  like a subgenre. I want to try and understand it.
• 2:19:14
  Which game should I play to understand it?
• 2:19:17
  And the answer I think is still Apocalypse World itself.
• 2:19:23
  Like, I think it is still the best game in the subgenre, which
• 2:19:30
  is a little crazy because usually the way these sorts of
• 2:19:33
  things go is, you know, the second or third iteration of an
• 2:19:37
  idea ends up taking the first version and making it the best
• 2:19:43
  because they can kind of see where the first version kind of
• 2:19:46
  fucked up or whatever, right? And then prove upon it.
• 2:19:50
  I I I I think Apocalypse World might still be the best Pbta
• 2:19:53
  game there is, which I know is like firm statement but.
• 2:20:00
  I mean it. Here's the thing, right?
• 2:20:03
  I've looked at quite a quite a good chunk of them.
• 2:20:05
  Yeah, well, I was going to say that doesn't surprise me because
• 2:20:11
  what it did shifted things so much.
• 2:20:16
  So dramatically. And it's still like.
• 2:20:21
  There's a reason why it's. Still the blueprint, right?
• 2:20:24
  Because it literally created the blueprint.
• 2:20:26
  No one had to reverse engineer the blueprint off of it.
• 2:20:29
  It came with one which I think is kind of worth its weight in
• 2:20:34
  gold. I I it's just, it's just so
• 2:20:40
  elegantly designed and it's so it's such a banger in such a way
• 2:20:47
  that is hard for me to describe It it like, and I just look at
• 2:20:51
  it and I'm like, damn, it's still, it still hits the IT
• 2:20:54
  still hits the best. I just, I don't know, man.
• 2:20:56
  It just hits. Like still be hitting.
• 2:20:58
  It still be hit. Like, yeah, like, you know,
• 2:21:00
  'cause like, 'cause you, you know, even in like video games,
• 2:21:03
  right? You imagine like everybody's
• 2:21:04
  like, oh, the original first person shooter, Doom, It's like,
• 2:21:07
  actually, no, the original first person shooter was Wolfenstein.
• 2:21:11
  But Doom took what Wolfenstein did and improved on it so
• 2:21:15
  greatly and had such a huge impact that people kind of
• 2:21:18
  forget that Wolfenstein 3D existed, you know, because Doom
• 2:21:23
  was the second iteration that really perfected it.
• 2:21:26
  So you would think, you look at the Apocalypse world, you're
• 2:21:28
  like, OK, So what was the second iteration that perfected it?
• 2:21:32
  Like, I don't, I don't think there is one.
• 2:21:34
  The only game I could maybe argue would be Blades in the
• 2:21:38
  Dark, but Blades of the Dark just grew into its own thing
• 2:21:43
  completely. So you know.
• 2:21:46
  Yeah, and like blades. In a lot of ways, Blades does
• 2:21:49
  sort of does sort of improve on Apocalypse World, but in its own
• 2:21:54
  version of it, it's very much its own style of it.
• 2:21:57
  Right. And another thing on blades is
• 2:21:59
  that it because it is sort of taken on a life of its own.
• 2:22:04
  Did it improve on it? Yeah, but it it's also, it did a
• 2:22:07
  bunch of its own things. Its own shit.
• 2:22:10
  It became its own blueprint with the flashbacks.
• 2:22:15
  Yeah, there's all sorts of little yeah flashbacks and, and
• 2:22:18
  the setting levels of risk and stuff like yeah, there's a bunch
• 2:22:21
  of there's a bunch of mechanics that exploded out into their own
• 2:22:25
  things. I and also Apocalypse World had
• 2:22:30
  the countdown clocks, but Blades made clocks like a core central
• 2:22:35
  feature, right? Like Apocalypse World uses them
• 2:22:37
  a little bit for for threats and for NPCS and stuff, but Blades
• 2:22:42
  really made projects and countdown clocks like this
• 2:22:44
  really core feature and applied them to all these different
• 2:22:47
  facets of the game to the point where it's like, yeah, it grew
• 2:22:50
  into its own thing. Because now when people
• 2:22:52
  reference the like a projects mechanic, they usually reference
• 2:22:56
  Blades, not Apocalypse World, You know what I mean?
• 2:22:58
  Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all.
• 2:23:00
  Yeah, so it yeah, it's a crazy thing.
• 2:23:03
  If you're curious about power by the apocalypse, Yeah, my answer
• 2:23:07
  is still play Apocalypse World second edition.
• 2:23:10
  Like, yeah, unless, I guess unless you're really, really not
• 2:23:17
  down for the the post apocalypse vibe, at which point I don't
• 2:23:25
  know. And there is no pleasing queue.
• 2:23:28
  Yeah, I don't know, tough. I'd have to think about it.
• 2:23:29
  Tougher sell. You know what's funny though?
• 2:23:33
  The first, the first Powered by the Apocalypse game I played was
• 2:23:36
  Dungeon World. I played that before Apocalypse,
• 2:23:39
  yeah 'cause I was looking for something more D and DS 'cause I
• 2:23:41
  was looking for something fantasy.
• 2:23:43
  Yeah, I actually played Apocalypse World second.
• 2:23:49
  And I would not recommend Dungeon World as a great teacher
• 2:23:55
  of PBPBTA because, well, I don't think it's a bad Pbta game.
• 2:24:00
  I don't think it does as good of a job as teaching you how to run
• 2:24:03
  and actually play Pbta, you know what I mean?
• 2:24:08
  Like Apocalypse world. Apocalypse World does a really
• 2:24:10
  good job of of the teaching part.
• 2:24:12
  I think Dungeon World lacks that.
• 2:24:14
  It's funny. Matt thought about it and he
• 2:24:19
  told us he like, notoriously struggled trying to figure a lot
• 2:24:22
  of it's he was reading masks. Was he reading masks?
• 2:24:26
  Is that what it was? He was reading Masks, yeah,
• 2:24:28
  which arguably is an even worse teacher.
• 2:24:32
  Not because masks is a bad game, it's not.
• 2:24:33
  But Masks abstracts mass is kind of a weird game to learn from
• 2:24:40
  because it's like a third or fourth it, or it's like a third
• 2:24:43
  or fourth generation PBTA game. So it is abstracted so far away
• 2:24:49
  from the original that it it could be a little tricky to to
• 2:24:54
  fully understand it if you're not familiar, you know?
• 2:24:58
  Gotcha. And if you're coming at it a
• 2:25:00
  little too D&D pilled, which let's be honest, Matt is, it
• 2:25:04
  could be hard to to break Mass apart.
• 2:25:08
  I can't wait for this. Look like, like Matt is a little
• 2:25:13
  yeah, he's very D&D pilled. So he he's looking at everything
• 2:25:16
  through the frame of D&D and looking at Dungeon World or Mass
• 2:25:21
  or something like that through the frame of DND Kind of hard
• 2:25:23
  because it really doesn't map to it very well.
• 2:25:27
  I like, I love every time we, we like call Matt out on something,
• 2:25:30
  he'll just come into one of our voice chats and be like, fuck
• 2:25:32
  you guys. We'll just know.
• 2:25:34
  We'll just know. I'm not even saying it is a bad
• 2:25:37
  thing, I'm just saying it's a thing, you know?
• 2:25:39
  No, I mean, yeah, he's very DND brain for sure not.
• 2:25:43
  Yeah, sorry, but I can't really help you out here.
• 2:25:45
  Yeah, I mean, listen, we were talking about when we were
• 2:25:47
  playing Fabula, how the DND brain was fucking us up playing
• 2:25:50
  Fabulous, you know? So it's a thing.
• 2:25:54
  Anyway, I I could go on about the philosophy and the the game
• 2:25:59
  design stuff behind the maybe that should be a separate
• 2:26:01
  episode, just the philosophical standpoint behind Apocalypse
• 2:26:04
  World. That would be an interesting
• 2:26:05
  one. For sure, yeah, because I could
• 2:26:08
  go on and on and on. But anyway, let's be done
• 2:26:11
  because we we've run long and. That is going to fucking kill.
• 2:26:15
  Yeah, Brett's going to drop fucking tactical nukes on our
• 2:26:19
  houses. I I think this has.
• 2:26:21
  Been us. Brett threat has is still I'm
• 2:26:24
  going to turn what you're I'm going to what is it?
• 2:26:27
  Turn you, turn you into a dipod or.
• 2:26:29
  I'm going to turn you from a tripod into a bipod.
• 2:26:32
  Bipod. Yeah, that.
• 2:26:34
  Was that was such a loaded threat?
• 2:26:37
  Yeah, this has been us. If you enjoyed our ramblings,
• 2:26:44
  you can follow us on the social medias in the description Bang
• 2:26:49
  Boom Bang and go play Apocalypse World.
• 2:26:54
  Yeah. Giggity, Giggity.
• 2:26:59
  Jesus Christ.