Apocalypse World

I'm thinking about running a game of Apocalypse World, any advice?

I'm looking for a game that's easy and simple, and not too gritty, so that I can get over a long stretch of nothing and get back into running games before I move on to something more serious. Is this a good choice for that? It seems pretty rules lite, though unlike other simple games I've seen, it's 300 pages and has character advancement rules.

I'll admit I'm still reading over the book. So far I skimmed through the playbooks. Apparently I'm not actually supposed to have a plan before the first session.

Play with what you're comfortable. AW is certainly lite; very open to interpretation. Lots of gm calls. "Collaborative storytelling" more than "rpg"

>Apparently I'm not actually supposed to have a plan before the first session.

It's really more like "don't have a pre-planned story". Have images, have ideas about the apocalypse, have ideas about what you'd like to see in a game like this, but don't do any planning with them. The planning comes after the first session because the first session is always character creation and then following them around on a normal day. You need to know the status quo of the game universe you and your group have created before you can make plans to break it.

Another piece of advice: be prepared to improvise. Fronts are blueprints and having custom moves based on them are handy, but don't use them as a crutch. Also, be merciless with the doomsday clock.

That's just banter.

And yes OP, you don't prepare the story before playing it. And the first session is more or less an introduction to the players characters and the setting that comes from their interaction.

Fronts are what you actually do to advance the story. They're... well, like actual fronts: imagine a menace that opposes the PCs. They're a tool for tracking how the menace proceeds. Maybe they'll win over it before SHTF, maybe not.

Well, it talks about getting everyone involved in making the world. I do know that me and the group will have to come to an agreement, since I prefer more The Last of Us and Walking Dead style foresty apocalypses, while others prefer Mad Max and Fallout style wastelands. A forest would also probably render the Driver a little less viable.

Tell me more about the Doomsday clock, and how merciless I should be. Like I said, I'm still reading over this.

>And the first session is more or less an introduction to the players characters and the setting that comes from their interaction.
Hrm. Taking a look at it I always assumed it was going to be good for one shots. Seems it might be a little longer than I expected. Though that's not necessarily bad, since it gives me time to prepare for a Mage game.

>A forest would also probably render the Driver a little less viable.

Not necessarily. Tractors and construction vehicles are covered in potential Driver car builds.

>Tell me more about the Doomsday clock, and how merciless I should be. Like I said, I'm still reading over this.

When you get to Fronts, you're going to see that there's a countdown attached to them. That's what I called the Doomsday Clock. You're going to attach events that will happen to your Front if the players do nothing to address it. Be merciless with it, because you're trying to make the world seem as real as you can, and the world after the end is not nice. That said, when they do interact with the Front head on, that's when you put the Countdown to a stop. If things go REALLY bad, though, you might end up resuming it anyways.

Also don't sweat the views of your players conflicting with your own. You'll all make it work, when you Barf Forth Apocalyptica.

>Hrm. Taking a look at it I always assumed it was going to be good for one shots. Seems it might be a little longer than I expected.

It'll take a few sessions for things to really cook off. It IS good for one-shots, but you can't run it in the traditional way, you'd need something called a Love Letter to kick things off. You'll read about those later in the book.

Well, yeah, but you can't go doing donuts and shit in a forest. I imagine that when most people think "DRIVER", they think the Pursuit Special speeding through the desert.

>Doomsday Clock
Ah, so basically there's no going off to deal with the Civil War and max out your Enchanting while Alduin the World Eater is off summoning dragons and hastening the end of the world.

My advice: trick one of your players into choosing the Hardholder playbook because that presents the most opportunities to fuck with them. Threatening the starter town and/or its inhabitants has a lot more weight when one of the PCs is in charge of it.

Nah, actually if there is something that PBTA games don't do that well is oneshots. Oddly enough, execpt maybe for Dungeon World to an extent, though it's still a less than stellar option if you ask me.
AW is mostly a game about how the PCs go on with each other and manage at the same time their desires and personal situations, beyond the trapping of guns and wastelands, and this usually is still there in the other games with this system. But I digress.

On the setting creation: do it with your group at any cost, possibly the same night you do the characters. Ask the other players many questions abou the setting that stems from their choices. "Operator, where was your last jig? What kinda place was it?" "So Hocus, where is the greatest temple in this region? What do people worship there? Are those your gods?"
Or even with the opposite approach, ask them directly great things like "Driver, what do the flag of the Golden Age on your tank mean?"
(this might be done in subsequent sessions, of course, but ti seems you need to spice it up a bit)

In general, certainly you can and probably should take some ideas like "Mad Max wasteland", but I suggest to be wild. Consider shit like Waterworld or the Cthorr series for example. Should that mean that, I dunno, you can't have normal settlements, fuck that, use ships a là Gargantia. Consider doing fucking Mars and they have laser guns or something - don't worry, it's not gonna be the weirdest thing in the game. The Maelstrom is there for that.

That's one way to approach the Driver, but the thing about the Playbooks is that you can read a couple archetypes into each one. Frederic Henry, Max Rockatansky, and Speed Racer could all fit within its purview.

And yeah, the world never ceases no matter what the party is doing. Another thing to consider is that more than likely, you will not keep the party together in one group. Think like a TV series writer: you're going to have A-plots, B-plots, and even C-plots when the season gets going. That's not to say you're going to be juggling scenes between characters all the time forever, but don't be as afraid to split the party as you might in other games.

Oh and you might want to check out the LE playbooks OP.

Aside from the SMM and the Marmot, that's Ben Lehman being Ben Lehman.

"Make PC/NPC/PC" triangles is one of the best suggestions in the book. The party is a party, and should be allies by default, but the game is written with conflict as a given. Make every other NPC you create (if not ALL of them) on one PC's good side and one PC's bad side. Maybe the Chopper's right-hand man steals pills from the Angel.

But don't let this lead to too much planning in advance. You'll be surprised how much drama can flower naturally when you need to slap character traits onto people as you go.

Here's a great example from my game: Chopper has a lackey named Nitro (full name: Nitrous Oxide). I was playing him as an uncomplicated, cocky loudmouth who rags on the Chopper for any act of caution. At one point I ask the Brainer--a real sneaky creep--what they know about Nitro from lurking around the biker barracks. The fact that they had done this was established during character creation. The Brainer makes an offhand mention of Nitro having pages of his own awful writing stashed in his bunk. I think "that's a neat detail" and move on... but days later, between sessions, I remember another scene with the Hardholder. They said something to the effect of "I'm trying to rediscover written language for the settlement." That meant Nitro, a jackass goon, was a unique bastion of lost knowledge. As soon as this gets brought up in-game, BOOM CONFLICT, because the Hardholder wants this guy as their scribe but the Chopper isn't about to hand him over. They reached a peaceful compromise, but Nitro remains a one-man political powderkeg, all thanks to some unrelated player improvisation and my ability to capitalize on it.

>Nah, actually if there is something that PBTA games don't do that well is oneshots.
Oh. Well then. I wonder if I should rethink things, or just settle in for a short game to get my shit together that isn't a one shot. I'm too terrible with time management and pacing to run a true one session wonder anyway.

Oh shit, why is there a marmot.
Oh shit, why is there a space dolphin.

And you didn't even see the Grotesque.

Vincent Baker himself says that the game doesn't really get going until about six sessions in. I'd say it's more like four, but either way, an optimal AW campaign is probably 20-30 sessions long, and that's just if everyone is still only playing their first character. Considering that you can change play books and even play two or more characters at the same time, it could go on for even longer.

>an optimal AW campaign is probably 20-30 sessions long
Good lord, I know it's a narrative character driven game where the players are creating most of the plot, but holy hell, I was worrying about keeping a Mage game running for three months. I've run like one game that long.

>20-30
Are you kidding me? I don't feel they work beyond 12-15.

Why the scare? It is really that hard to go on for so long with the same characters?

It's less "with the same characters" and more that games tend to fall apart.

Don't be scared off. I've played a couple of one-shots with it. But you're missing out on the emergent aspects of the game, the way something tossed out off hand in session one, comes back to bite you in session three but turns out to solve that thing that happened in session two when session four turns everything on its head.

Right now, I'm psyching myself up to run Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, a post-apoaclyptic PbtA game that involves generational play. PCs choose a Family Playbook that they keep throughout the campaign and a Character Playbook that represents the current generation of their family.