bonus
Episode Exploder: Separate Ways (s1e10) - Bonus
Stu gives a behind-the-screen view of how he runs PBtA games by breaking down a previous O!AA episode.
This one is for super nerds or people looking to run a PBtA game in the future.
Some spoilers in here, but nothing important.
Listen to Stu on the May 28th episode of GG: Level Up! Follow them now so you get that notification right when I'm on:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0VFnq5L9bjjHNgEKZGJInl?si=d3106a822ccf4a11
Transcript
Welcome to Oops!
Speaker:All Apocalypses, the show where we explore the collapse of society by playing fun, tabletop role-playing games.
Speaker:I'm your host, Stu Masterson, and today I'm joined by No One.
Speaker:This is a special bonus episode, and I would have loved to have Brady and Jacob here, but we've struggled on some technical details on how to do what we're doing with all three of us.
Speaker:We're gonna work it out, though.
Speaker:But what is it that I'm doing here?
Speaker:Well, I get asked all the time, Stu, what the fuck are you doing?
Speaker:And I assume what people mean by that is, hey, how do you run PBTA games efficiently, effectively, and without spending a ton of time prepping?
Speaker:What I'm gonna do in this episode here is break down a previously recorded episode, step by step, and explain my thought process of what's going on.
Speaker:What am I thinking during these roles, during the questions they ask me?
Speaker:How do I guide it through the full story?
Speaker:And kind of give some guide rails for how PBTA games are traditionally ran, or at least how I run them.
Speaker:Because it is actually easier than it seems.
Speaker:If you are a new listener or haven't fully caught up, there will be spoilers in this episode, but I specifically chose this one because I don't think it has anything that's too bad to be spoiled, and it's a very early episode.
Speaker:This is actually going to be an exploded view of episode 10, Separate Ways.
Speaker:For people who have listened, this is the episode where Book and Ocean are separated in both time and space in Subtropolis, the very large city that they like to plunder.
Speaker:Book delved into there to try to find Ocean, who he thought had escaped into Subtropolis after a very minor mishap where he may have thrown a shovel through someone's clavicle, while Ocean realized Book went after him a few days later and is trying to trace through his steps.
Speaker:This will be me playing that actual episode through this recording that you're listening to right now with brief intermissions for me to talk about what's going on behind the screen.
Speaker:Those intermissions will be identified by this little sound here that I haven't quite figured out yet, but I'm going to spend a ton of time in the next hour figuring out the best sound that is not annoying to hear 20 times during one episode, so I hope I did okay.
Speaker:Since Brady and Jacob aren't here, I'm not going to do an intro for you guys.
Speaker:That seems like a waste of time, and I've kind of already done that, but I do want to say very briefly before we get kicked off, that I'm going to be appearing on an episode of GG Level Up next Tuesday after this is released.
Speaker:I don't know when this is getting released, but it will be right before that Tuesday.
Speaker:Go subscribe to them.
Speaker:Go listen to that episode.
Speaker:It's going to be me talking about PBTA games and more at a macro view than this.
Speaker:Not quite the detailed, in the weeds, episode explosion you're about to listen to, but more of running the game, what makes them different than other systems, how they're unique, why I like them so much, and some good examples of other fun PBTA games besides Apocalypse World, which is what we play mostly during this podcast.
Speaker:That episode also has a PBTA quiz where I go head-to-head with one of the hosts and compare our Powered by the Apocalypse knowledge, so listen to see if I come out on top or if I don't quite make it.
Speaker:That would be really embarrassing because I'm supposed to be the expert.
Speaker:I will put a link to their podcast, GG Level Up, in the show notes for this, so go click that.
Speaker:But for now, let's get to the explosion.
Speaker:The first thing I want to talk about is before the episode actually kicks off.
Speaker:What am I thinking about?
Speaker:What's my prep look like?
Speaker:Spoilers, I guarantee it's even less than you expect.
Speaker:The episode before this one had both of our characters separated from each other in pretty perilous situations.
Speaker:Ocean is trapped in a bunch of buildings in Subtropolis surrounded by these people and yellow humvees who have noticed him and are trying to close in on his position.
Speaker:And he's trying to escape hide, something like that.
Speaker:We don't know yet.
Speaker:Book, meanwhile, has gone back into the sewers where they had previously discovered this horrific monster with fingernails that grow at a visible pace and weird stretchy skin that snaps off into horrible teeth, hoping that that was the direction that Ocean had went.
Speaker:Now, something that is very important not to do is to sit there between sessions and think what is going to happen in the next session.
Speaker:I never plan out different beats, different things I expect them to see, different things I expect them to interact with, because that plan will never survive first contact with the players, really in any TTRPG, but especially with a PBTA type game, where so much of the narrative is getting developed collaboratively with the players and based on these dice rolls and mixed successes and things like that.
Speaker:To guide what you're thinking about, every PBTA game, every good PBTA game, this may be a little bit of a simplification, but there are many, many PBTA games.
Speaker:And one of the things I look at very quickly to tell if it's one that I think understands the system well is if they have a page on the MC, which is what they call in Apocalypse World or Game Master, whatever jargon they choose for that.
Speaker:If they have a page describing their agenda and their principles and the moves that they can do against the players, they have a good concept of what PBTA is all about.
Speaker:There are a lot of systems that completely ignore that.
Speaker:Maybe some are for very good reasons, but a lot of times I think it's systems that just go, oh, this is a good way of making a very fiction-specific, archetypical game.
Speaker:So I'm going to grab these rule sets and throw them onto mine.
Speaker:If they don't have tailored, unique rules for the game master, I think they're kind of missing the mark.
Speaker:For Apocalypses World, there are very specific principles that tie into how the fiction should develop.
Speaker:A few of the big ones that I do between sessions are looking through crosshairs, which basically means I look at any important thing that exists, an NPC, a building, a power structure, and think about destroying it.
Speaker:Who wants that destroyed?
Speaker:Who wants it to collapse?
Speaker:Who wants it to burn down?
Speaker:And what are ways that that could happen?
Speaker:And what are the impacts of that?
Speaker:Just think about it.
Speaker:You're not planning to actually do this thing, but you're going, what would happen if this got destroyed?
Speaker:The second big one is Barf 4th Apocalyptica, which is something I probably spend 90% of my time on between sessions, which is just thinking about cool apocalyptic shit.
Speaker:You don't even have to spend a lot of time thinking about where they fit in or what caused them.
Speaker:Things like the creepy fingernail monster or a warlord who only gets things off of Sky Mall or semi-robotic seeming high tech individuals rolling with yellow humvees are all things that I was just thinking about how interesting it would be to exist in a world.
Speaker:You want as many of those things as possible in your back pocket ready to throw them out as soon as there's a situation that even seems like it may possibly fit.
Speaker:That actually happened in the previous episode to this where Ocean got separated.
Speaker:He was following some tower that he rolled bad enough on that it became a magic mystical tower that could disappear.
Speaker:And the threat I decided to throw at him were those yellow humvee people.
Speaker:These high tech individuals with very advanced weaponry rolling around in these kitted out yellow H2 Hummers.
Speaker:The other main thing I do between sessions is think about the threats, what they're doing and where they may be going.
Speaker:You may have heard me mention threat maps before.
Speaker:That is simply just a drawing out of all the different threats that have interacted with players or potential threats that may come up soon.
Speaker:And they're kind of short term, long term goals and plans.
Speaker:And none of these are very concrete.
Speaker:You don't want to say this is exactly what they want to do.
Speaker:Through the fiction, certain things develop.
Speaker:For example, last session I introduced those yellow Humvee people.
Speaker:That doesn't mean between my next session I sit there and prep, okay, who exactly are they?
Speaker:What are they trying to do?
Speaker:What are they trying to accomplish?
Speaker:I think about important questions like, why are they chasing Ocean?
Speaker:Why do they seem to have better gear than everyone else?
Speaker:Why are they all dressed exactly the same?
Speaker:And then super, super important part is you don't answer those questions between sessions.
Speaker:You think about what would kind of make sense.
Speaker:Keep those questions floating in the air, and as you play the game, answers are going to naturally develop.
Speaker:And you may narrow it down to kind of a few different vague ideas, like, oh, these few things seem interesting.
Speaker:And then really what gets solidified is what comes up while you're playing.
Speaker:And a lot of times that can even be directly the result of roles.
Speaker:Maybe I'm sitting there thinking, why are they chasing after Ocean?
Speaker:And it would make sense maybe they just kill anyone in their territory and they want to take him out aggressively.
Speaker:Or maybe I think they want to capture him for some reason, and I start thinking, why would they capture him?
Speaker:The differences in that coming up in session may even tie to a role Ocean makes.
Speaker:If he completely fails a role, it may be, oh, they just want to kill him.
Speaker:They kill on sight.
Speaker:And that immediately changes how that threat acts, the purpose of that threat, the meaning behind that threat, that develops over time.
Speaker:Where if your role is maybe a mixed success or even a full success, I'll go, okay, they want to try to capture him for some reason.
Speaker:And that just adds more interesting questions on top of that.
Speaker:So basically, come up with questions, but do not answer.
Speaker:Do not come up with any answers.
Speaker:Do not plan any part of the actual session as it's going to go out.
Speaker:Just think of hypotheticals and then let the dice, let the players, let what makes sense in your mind at the time guide where it goes from there.
Speaker:And I'll get specific on that and some of the roles coming up in this exploded episode.
Speaker:So let's start with the actual audio.
Speaker:Book.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:You are on your back, water rushing over you.
Speaker:You thought you heard some strange skittering sounds.
Speaker:You thought you just saw a pair of eyes.
Speaker:Do the skittering sounds sound familiar?
Speaker:Well, now you just hear rushing water.
Speaker:And you start feeling a lot of small little pinpricks all over your body.
Speaker:Man, I knew I would not be able to shut up for long.
Speaker:Just really quick here.
Speaker:What I did hear was I didn't answer his question, which is normally very bad.
Speaker:He asked me a very concrete question that you should probably know the answer to.
Speaker:99% of the time, you want to just give that answer to the player.
Speaker:Be like, yeah, that skittering sounded roughly familiar.
Speaker:Maybe like that monster.
Speaker:But there's this new challenge you need to focus on.
Speaker:The reason I blew him off there was because I knew it wasn't important to the immediate action, and I wanted to keep that pressure on him, try to continue the momentum from the end of the last episode where he was in a very bad position and a bunch of stuff went wrong.
Speaker:He had a very poor role that put him in a bad situation where he got knocked over by this rushing water.
Speaker:And I wanted to keep that threat on top and not divert into a discussion on, hey, where exactly are, what information, what can I see, because I want to focus on the action.
Speaker:And you start feeling a lot of small little pinpricks all over your body.
Speaker:Because it's dirty water, I assume.
Speaker:Maybe.
Speaker:Okay, that's fun.
Speaker:Or is it fucking parasitic water?
Speaker:I'm gonna stop speculating.
Speaker:His self-preservation instincts kick in.
Speaker:I try to sit up to get the spotlight out of water so that I can see what's going on.
Speaker:Give me an act under fire role.
Speaker:I'm under fire?
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Should I be reading a situation, then?
Speaker:Nope, not yet.
Speaker:The reason I went with act under fire here is because he had already failed a previous role where these little insect creatures were already attacking him, honestly.
Speaker:Him trying to get a good look around and understand the situation maybe with a read-a-search role was a good idea, but he first needed to react to that initial threat.
Speaker:It's an act under fire because this is something sitting up, pulling out a light, making sure it works.
Speaker:It's something that would be very easy to do if he wasn't under immense pressure and getting bitten on and rushing water in a very scary place.
Speaker:So act under fire represents how cool you keep in situations like that.
Speaker:That contrasts with try something challenging, which uses the agrostat instead, which comes up a lot as well, which is something that even in ideal situations you may potentially fail at.
Speaker:As I'm asking him to roll this role, I go ahead and start thinking about, okay, if he rolls a mixed success, what's going to happen?
Speaker:If he rolls a failure, what might happen?
Speaker:A lot of times with those mixed success, I like to give the players an option, so I'm trying to think of as many different things as possible before he gives me that number on a roll, and then I usually just stop right there and say what's in my brain.
Speaker:In this case, I was kind of thinking maybe on a mixed success, his light won't work.
Speaker:He'll come out of it, and it'll be kind of flickering, and he'll see some stuff in the quick flashes of light, but then it'll be out.
Speaker:I could have even already made him take damage from the things attacking him, but I thought it was more interesting to give him kind of that horrific feeling of these insect creatures crawling up him before it's just a mechanical, you-take-harm type thing.
Speaker:So I basically did a pretty soft move before this to set up that situation, and then he ended up rolling a full success here, so I decided not to hurt him, make his light work, and just put him in the very clearly understood bad situation that was set up in the previous episode.
Speaker:If you say ten, I swear.
Speaker:Yeah, that's a fourteen.
Speaker:This was back when Brady always rolled tens on every single time he rolled.
Speaker:We don't actually think he was cheating.
Speaker:We just like giving him shit.
Speaker:So you got a natural twelve?
Speaker:I did get a natural twelve.
Speaker:We rolled 2d6 this year, everyone.
Speaker:I don't think we've acknowledged that yet.
Speaker:We mentioned it briefly in the intro episodes, but you roll 2d6, in general, 0 to 6 fails, 7 to 9 is a medium success where you do it, but there's some sort of complication, and 10 plus is generally a complete and full success.
Speaker:Something like a 14 is nearly unheard of, and he does it to perfection.
Speaker:You sit up.
Speaker:Fuck yeah.
Speaker:Mission accomplished.
Speaker:No, you sit up, you pull the light out, and it flickers for a second, but when you hit it on the side, it re-illuminates and beams forward.
Speaker:I made a little jokey joke there about him sitting up perfectly with his perfect roll, but that is a good opportunity to kind of talk about, you should never roll in a PBTA game if there's not going to be some change based on the outcome.
Speaker:If him rolling a full success really is just him sitting up, he shouldn't have rolled.
Speaker:That would have just been, hey, you're fine.
Speaker:Just sit up.
Speaker:You sit up and check your light.
Speaker:That's okay.
Speaker:But in this case, he's covered in sludgy sewage and he's being crawled on by all of these insects and he's in the den of a monster who almost certainly wants to kill him.
Speaker:So this act under fire is warranted and more things happen than just him sitting up.
Speaker:You've been pushed back down the tunnel you came from a little bit, so you actually can't see around the bin to where you thought you saw those eyes.
Speaker:Spooky.
Speaker:But what you do realize right now are there a bunch of very small, strange bugs that are crawling up your arms?
Speaker:Some of them are like on your feet.
Speaker:It's all where you were underwater.
Speaker:Most of them were on your arms and legs, but there are a few...
Speaker:It seems like they're all trying to get higher, like maybe out of the water or at least higher up towards your face.
Speaker:This is actually based on ticks that genetically crawl upward because for most of their prey, I don't know, hosts, I guess, since they're parasites, that's easier for them to get the good blood.
Speaker:So I thought that was just a little fun thing to add here.
Speaker:That's why you'll find ticks on like your neck and not usually on your feet.
Speaker:Sorry, this was a gross aside.
Speaker:Book does not like this one bit, so I start swatting the brushing the bugs off of me, trying to shake them off.
Speaker:I'm trying to get on my like, I got my arms behind my back to make sure there's not any on my back.
Speaker:I'm in my hair, mushing my hair, trying to get all the bugs off me.
Speaker:Give me an attack someone role.
Speaker:I knew you were going to say that.
Speaker:God.
Speaker:This is technically actually going to be doing battle.
Speaker:The mistake I made and corrected right there is that when you attack someone, it's when they have no ability to fight back, basically, while a doing battle role is almost a combination of an attack someone and an acting under fire, and that is when they are able to hurt you back or fight back in any other way.
Speaker:So if you're shooting someone and they only have a shovel and they're a hundred yards away, it's going to be an attack someone.
Speaker:You may roll and you may miss, you may succeed, but you're attacking someone.
Speaker:Doing battle always means there's going to be an exchange of harm with you pretty much no matter what.
Speaker:I got an eight.
Speaker:No, I got an eight minus one.
Speaker:So I got a seven partial success.
Speaker:You get a seven or nine both on attack someone and act under fire.
Speaker:When you get a seven on this roll.
Speaker:I didn't roll for act under fire.
Speaker:That's how doing battle works.
Speaker:You roll one hard roll and on a seven to nine, you hit both attack, attack someone and act under fire.
Speaker:Oh, I didn't realize I was under fire.
Speaker:OK, you get to choose one of those effects under attack someone with a seven to nine success.
Speaker:You have to choose either inflict terrible harm, seize hold of something, get something out of your way, impress, frighten or dismay them or pin them down.
Speaker:I'm going to dismay the bugs.
Speaker:I would like to...
Speaker:What's the...
Speaker:Do I know the health of the bugs?
Speaker:Don't know it, but there are many of them, but you're dealing with them kind of as a swarm.
Speaker:And as you're brushing them off, you see they are fully symmetrical, which is weird.
Speaker:There's not like a front way, but both sides of them kind of taper into two long, very thin looking, like, thorns.
Speaker:Hate that.
Speaker:Ovipositors, basically.
Speaker:Like the backside of crickets, you know?
Speaker:It's like that on both sides, but sharper.
Speaker:Here I could tell Brady was struggling making a decision, so I decided to give him more context.
Speaker:It wasn't fair for me to hold back that information.
Speaker:So I went with describing how horrific these things were, how many there were, so he understood the full context of his choice.
Speaker:Which hopefully made him make a good one.
Speaker:So I'm going to choose get them out of your way, because that describes you knock them down, drive them away, or fight past them.
Speaker:I would like to drive them away.
Speaker:Yeah, you go brushing them off of your back, trying to turn around, reach the hard parts.
Speaker:The last ones on you seem like they're trying to crawl into your tear ducts, but you're able to pinch them away at the last second and throw them back into the water.
Speaker:And you jump out of the amount of flowing water right now.
Speaker:It seems like they're mostly water borne.
Speaker:So now that you have all of them off of you and you can kind of stand on the side, you are okay for now.
Speaker:Ew.
Speaker:You certainly didn't kill them all.
Speaker:When you were trying to smacks them, they were pretty hardy, kind of like a good roach.
Speaker:Disgusting.
Speaker:A roach trying to crawl into your tear ducts.
Speaker:I didn't like that they were on my face.
Speaker:Oh yeah, no, they were all trying to get up there, but only a couple of them started sinking their little pointy boys into your tear ducts.
Speaker:So don't worry.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:You do take one armor piercing harm.
Speaker:Why is it armor piercing harm?
Speaker:Because they were bugs and because my armor is a cane?
Speaker:Refuse to answer that question.
Speaker:So this encounter was actually pretty much solved with just one mixed success roll, which may seem a little crazy, but in these sorts of games, it's much better to allow things like that to happen most of the time.
Speaker:I already know he's in a very bad situation.
Speaker:There's a even bigger threat just around the corner from him that everyone already knows about.
Speaker:He didn't kill these insects, so they're still there as a threat.
Speaker:And if this was something else like if he chose that option for armed men, it may have driven them back, put them in a different position, made his position better, but the combat would have continued.
Speaker:He would have still been able to do battle.
Speaker:He could have tried to escape, things like that.
Speaker:These little insects and the move says that he drives them back.
Speaker:Driving them back is going to allow him to get enough room to get away from these water borne insects in this sort of situation.
Speaker:So it doesn't make sense to kind of hold on to that and want this combat to go longer just because you like the creepy little things you came up with.
Speaker:They already did their job.
Speaker:They were very creepy.
Speaker:They scared them.
Speaker:Now everyone knows there's these sorts of strange things in the world.
Speaker:And it added a little bit of disgust to the players, which is probably what I was going for at the time.
Speaker:Just always be fine moving on to the next thing.
Speaker:There will always be more threats.
Speaker:You'll always be able to come up with more horrific things for them to deal with.
Speaker:So Book leaning on his cane because his shoulder is still fucked up, and he now has pinpricks all over his body.
Speaker:Yeah, it's like a burning everywhere.
Speaker:Like when you go through a field with a bunch of thorns in it.
Speaker:Have any of you sprinted through a cornfield without a shirt on before?
Speaker:Well, not without a shirt.
Speaker:Stu, what the fuck were you doing?
Speaker:Running from something.
Speaker:Nice.
Speaker:But you get a bunch of little tiny cuts all over.
Speaker:It's like that.
Speaker:You have this kind of burning, itching.
Speaker:Okay, so now that I've gotten rid of those fucking disgusting little fucks, I'm going to start sweeping the spotlight around me again to make sure that nothing's creeping up on me.
Speaker:Okay, give me a read a charged situation roll.
Speaker:Oh, guard.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:I don't know how this keeps happening, but I got another eight, which means it's a ten.
Speaker:So in Apocalypse World, all moves have triggers and their actual effect or the role associated with it and what happens.
Speaker:This was almost the most clear, concrete version of reading a charged situation you could have, where he knows he's in a bad spot.
Speaker:He lifts up his light and looks around and tries to get more contacts.
Speaker:From an MC perspective, I don't know at the time of asking these questions the answers to really any of them.
Speaker:I may have good ideas for what some of them could be, but you have to come up with those answers basically on the spot.
Speaker:It may be based on some of your prep work, where you're thinking about what these different things are trying to do, how your different threats are interacting, but a lot of times you just have to focus on what would be interesting in the scene that's happening right now.
Speaker:And the questions that players ask can actually heavily impact that.
Speaker:The questions will actually meld the world to create kind of the threats that they're going to interact with, but they're going to be prepared for it because of this success on the role.
Speaker:Okay, you get to ask me three of those questions.
Speaker:Stu, I would like to know, what should I be on the lookout for?
Speaker:I would also like to know what represents the biggest threat to me.
Speaker:And also, I don't know what else I want to know.
Speaker:What represents the best opportunity for me to get past the water that's flowing towards me?
Speaker:Because I'm still trying to advance towards that corner, where I think Ocean went to hunt down that thing.
Speaker:As that water seems to be dying down, that specific bulkhead seems to be closing.
Speaker:The water starts slowing down a little bit.
Speaker:It starts kind of equalizing around your feet that you're kind of straddling this flow.
Speaker:With the reduction in flow, you're able to hear that skittering again on the other side, and you do hear that telltale sound that you recall from before of fingernails on a chalkboard that are just scraping against the side of the walls.
Speaker:As this mechanism is closing up, you notice that one about eight feet behind you is starting to make some strange noises.
Speaker:So you think this is kind of answering both of your questions with one connected fact, but you deduce that these bulkheads open in sequence and it's opening behind you right now.
Speaker:So to progress forward, you're just basically gonna have to wait for this first one to close and that other one to go.
Speaker:You will be at some risk of that, again, flowing more water towards you, but you're going in the right direction for that if there wasn't some sort of horrific monster in the way.
Speaker:Right, right, right.
Speaker:Good.
Speaker:You should be out, sorry, to be more concrete.
Speaker:The biggest threat is the monster.
Speaker:What you should be on the lookout for is the second bulkhead that's going to be opening up, and your best opportunity to move forward is to wait for this one to close and that other one to open up before you continue on.
Speaker:Gotcha.
Speaker:That clarification there at the end is pretty important, where you really want your players to understand the full context of these threats.
Speaker:When you're identifying threats to them, you want to know how those are interacting with the world and what that impact may be on them.
Speaker:So that's why I kind of gave that recap of tying them to his specific questions so he understood that very well.
Speaker:Kind of to elaborate on what I talked about last interjection, before his questions, I had no concept of some weird automated sewer mechanism where it would flood different sections in sequence.
Speaker:That was all came up with on the spot just as an interesting way of letting him still be able to progress forward while they're remaining a threat of these sort of insect creatures behind him and even being cut off and stuck with this monster.
Speaker:The biggest threat answer kind of seemed like a little bit of a cop-out.
Speaker:Everyone was pretty sure this monster is down here, but this is really the first time that he is confirmed for 100%.
Speaker:He knows this monster is on the other side of this water.
Speaker:And that's a very important thing for the MC player interaction, where they have to fully be able to believe the things you say.
Speaker:I'm never hiding facts or misleading them when they're doing these read-and-anything type role.
Speaker:They have to be able to trust exactly what I say is true.
Speaker:Even if I say it in the way like, hey, you think this is how it works, that's how it works.
Speaker:I'm not going to undo that.
Speaker:So with that in mind, Book is pretty sure that the salad fingers, that's not salad fingers according to Stu, so the top half Goku, bottom half salad fingers, with the nails of salad fingers and the face of salad fingers, so it's pretty much just a jacked salad fingers too, is a head.
Speaker:So I'm going to take the machine pistol out of my holster, and I'm going to basically, which shoulder did I get shot in actually?
Speaker:It grazed one of your traps, I think.
Speaker:We'll say it's your offhand.
Speaker:It grazed your left shoulder.
Speaker:This is a dumb example, but one of the principles is also be a fan of the player's characters.
Speaker:Making the wound on his offhand side right now is just an easy way to not make his failures in the future be just bumbling dumb shit and actually be more interesting.
Speaker:It's more interesting for him to deal with a wound on that side while still being able to excel at the things he's good at.
Speaker:That may never actually come up, but it's just choose the nicer option most of the time.
Speaker:I'm going to hold the cane in my left hand with the end pointing forward.
Speaker:I'm going to rest my dominant hand, my right hand holding the gun basically on top of that left hand so that I have a way to kind of push the thing away from me, and hopefully I won't have to shoot it.
Speaker:And I'm going to advance forward and peer around.
Speaker:I'm going to wait for that bulkhead to close, the one behind me to open.
Speaker:I'm going to advance forward and try to avoid any more bugs.
Speaker:Okay, this sounds like it's taking up a lot of your hands.
Speaker:What's the light doing right now?
Speaker:You're just letting it flash as it may, dangling around your neck?
Speaker:So I'm picturing it literally mounted on top of my shoulder pointed forward, but that means that I am...
Speaker:Okay, you don't have much control over it basically.
Speaker:Right, I don't have much control over it, but it's still pointing generally forward.
Speaker:Okay, that's fine with me.
Speaker:This shoulder mounted light has become a continual character in our show, and I still cannot picture it for the life of me.
Speaker:I don't know what Brady's going for with the shoulder mounted light type stuff, but it also isn't important, and I think he thinks it looks really cool, so I just say, yeah, makes sense.
Speaker:Okay, so it's pointed forward.
Speaker:And also, my arms are probably blocking some of the light, I should say.
Speaker:That light splashes against the bulkhead in front of you as you watch it close up.
Speaker:As you advance around this corner, are you trying to remain hidden in any way, or are you slicing the pie?
Speaker:I'm going to get on basically the far side of the sewer from this corner, so that I am maximizing the distance between me and the opening when I turn.
Speaker:Okay, so you hop around the corner right as this bulkhead closes.
Speaker:You hear that other one starting to open up, and you see this light shines in front of you.
Speaker:It's about six feet away from you.
Speaker:Your good friend, Mr.
Speaker:Pokefingers, is staring right into your face, and you see its mouth starting to do that horrific opening motion again as it spreads apart like a grilled cheese sandwich.
Speaker:Do I...
Speaker:And we'll jump back over to Ocean.
Speaker:So Powered by the Apocalypse games are usually pretty good at having multiple players kind of doing their own thing.
Speaker:It's not like a kind of D&D Pathfinder game where there's the big don't split the party.
Speaker:System usually works great splitting the party.
Speaker:What you gotta make sure is everyone is still getting their moment in the spotlight.
Speaker:So we had been with Just Book for about 12 minutes at this point, which is a little longer than I would have liked.
Speaker:So for a while there, I actually had in the back of my mind thinking when's a good dramatic moment to jump over to Ocean.
Speaker:Normally you want to leave it on something hanging, a question that everyone can kind of be thinking about.
Speaker:So like in this case, Book can now sit there and think about how does he want to approach this horrific monster.
Speaker:I can think about, okay, what's it going to be like if he actually decides to fight this thing?
Speaker:Does this thing want to eat him?
Speaker:Does it want to kill him?
Speaker:Does it want to scare him off?
Speaker:That stuff can be running through the back of my head while we shift focus over to Ocean.
Speaker:Another good opportunity to jump is usually if a player doesn't know what to do next, that's a good opportunity to go, hey, let's go look at someone else while you think about that.
Speaker:And that usually works out well.
Speaker:Sucker.
Speaker:Ocean, you are staring down this long alleyway, and you see this humanoid figure with a very futuristic looking helmet with these large, perfectly circular red disks on them.
Speaker:Okay, so I'm in the alley.
Speaker:They pointed directly at me, right?
Speaker:Yes, they clearly see you.
Speaker:It looks like they may have been talking or motioning to someone else and point directly at you.
Speaker:How far awa...
Speaker:So how big is this alley?
Speaker:They are pretty far away, down this alleyway.
Speaker:It's probably like three buildings.
Speaker:Three buildings?
Speaker:So yeah, like almost a quarter of a mile-ish.
Speaker:This is another example of something I had no idea before you asked me that question.
Speaker:I chose that answer basically to just give them some room to work with.
Speaker:They obviously see him, he's in danger, but I don't want it to just be like, hey, one roll, he's captured or gets out safe.
Speaker:And again, at this point, I don't know if these guys want to kill him, capture him, talk to him.
Speaker:They're actually just friendly dudes.
Speaker:None of that's really nailed down yet.
Speaker:Are the buildings I'm near actually like big, tall, multi-story buildings, or is it mostly just like little mom-and-pop shops that I'm nearby?
Speaker:It's definitely multi-story, but not like skyscrapers.
Speaker:These are all like five or six stories tall.
Speaker:But they're all also dilapidated and falling apart, so some may have been six and are now one or.5.
Speaker:Okay, I am going to duck into another building.
Speaker:I'm going to duck in, so I'm looking down the alley.
Speaker:I see them.
Speaker:They pulled up at the end of the alley.
Speaker:They pulled forward.
Speaker:I see them get out.
Speaker:They're pointing to me in the end.
Speaker:I'm going to duck into a building to my left.
Speaker:Okay, you dive into this building.
Speaker:Are you trying to hide or get away?
Speaker:I'm trying to get away.
Speaker:Okay, so you're moving quick.
Speaker:Okay, give me a Try Something Challenge.
Speaker:Those follow-up questions are super important to really get a good idea of what the character is both trying to do and what they want the outcome to be.
Speaker:All of the roles are predicated on the full success or even a partial success of them accomplishing that goal to some level.
Speaker:So if the MC doesn't have a perfect concept of what that is, you should ask clarifying questions.
Speaker:And if you do make a mistake, you should accept the player saying that, Oh, I wasn't trying to do that and completely roll it back.
Speaker:That's not a problem at all.
Speaker:That usually doesn't come up too much in this game because we're usually on pretty much the same page most of the time.
Speaker:And if it does come up and it's not fun to listen to, I'll just edit it out.
Speaker:But even things as big as them making a decision and then saying like, OK, you're going to do battle with them.
Speaker:He's going to shoot back at you.
Speaker:If the player then goes, Oh, I didn't know this was going to be a gunfight.
Speaker:I just kind of wanted to threaten him a little bit, then roll that back, let them choose a different course of action, and everything's going to just work much smoother.
Speaker:The whole system kind of assumes everyone's working together to tell a story, and you don't want to be pulling the rug out from anyone, or they're going to make worse decisions, or at least less interesting decisions, that are going to be harder to play off of.
Speaker:It's very improv-y, where everything flows together great when everyone's on exactly the same page.
Speaker:If you have different images of what's going on in your brain, you're almost telling kind of two different stories that don't meld together well.
Speaker:In my TTRPG history, I think 99% of problems where the DMs like, my players did something stupid, or the players were like, man, my DM was so harsh, is really tied down to that concept where you have different pictures of what's going on in your mind.
Speaker:Being explicit about it and being OK rolling stuff back and correcting it just really makes everything run much smoother.
Speaker:So even when you're playing those other games, try it out and see if it works for you.
Speaker:God damn.
Speaker:Four.
Speaker:Why can't I have Grady's dice?
Speaker:God, I'm so jealous.
Speaker:Tens and 12s and 14s.
Speaker:And I'm like, fours, twos, threes.
Speaker:You cut into this building and this building is like, this one's done all been scooped out.
Speaker:It's basically just four walls.
Speaker:So you keep running through it and you hit up a parallel alleyway.
Speaker:So you look down one side and you see another one of those hummers come and park at the end of that alleyway.
Speaker:And as you turn and start running in the other direction, you see another one park at the end of this alleyway.
Speaker:It seems like they are surrounding all of the exits to this.
Speaker:I'm going to say this is like a four by four city block that you're in the middle of right now.
Speaker:And it looks like they're trying to block all the alleyways and entrance roads.
Speaker:So right now there are a lot of them.
Speaker:So like you've seen at least like six vehicles that have at least one person.
Speaker:And they all have guns and these big red eyes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So he rolled a full ass failure here.
Speaker:So as an MC, that actually lets me make a move as hard as I want to against him, which means I can do pretty aggressive things.
Speaker:I could have honestly had him completely fail his escape from this one roll.
Speaker:I could have had him try to like jump into a building.
Speaker:He finds a garage door that he rolls back.
Speaker:And when he opens it, there's six of them with their guns trained on them.
Speaker:Something like that is completely allowed in the rules.
Speaker:In this case, I actually made a relatively soft move against him.
Speaker:And I did that because I had already established he had a lot of breathing room around him in this little area.
Speaker:So logically, it would make sense.
Speaker:But then also from like a storytelling perspective, we don't know what they want yet.
Speaker:That can come up through more dice rolls, through more decisions.
Speaker:We also just spent a ton of time over at Book and just got back to Ocean.
Speaker:So a more extended scene here is probably going to be more interesting than him.
Speaker:Oh, you're captured.
Speaker:Fade to black for now.
Speaker:I could have also gone in a direction where, oh, it's no longer an escape.
Speaker:Now it's a fight.
Speaker:They've run up on you and are now doing battle with you.
Speaker:And that kind of changes how the threat's interacting with them.
Speaker:I do think that would be interesting, but I wanted to kind of push on the creepy, repetitive nature of this threat, these Yellow Humvee people I had come up with.
Speaker:And I felt like it would be a more long-term beneficial thing to establish that there are a lot of them.
Speaker:So instead with my move, I made his situation significantly worse.
Speaker:He's now basically surrounded.
Speaker:He's going to have to come up with something.
Speaker:I'm pushing the creativity basically back on him.
Speaker:Okay, you're in a very bad situation.
Speaker:What are you going to do about it?
Speaker:Instead of me just saying, okay, we're done playing here.
Speaker:Let's move on to a different type of battle.
Speaker:And if I'm remembering correctly, I think he actually did take this in a very interesting way.
Speaker:Let's see.
Speaker:Okay, I'm going to try something strange here.
Speaker:So I know that I was near the Big Wolf Tower that we were at, right?
Speaker:Theoretically, and then it started disappearing.
Speaker:I know that book.
Speaker:I think Ocean thinks he knows that book is in the Big Wolf Tower, and he knows the wolves have something to do with the Psychic Maelstrom.
Speaker:So Ocean is going to open his mind to the Psychic Maelstrom.
Speaker:Oh, fuck yeah.
Speaker:And try and see if he can call the wolves to him.
Speaker:I obviously did not plan or expect this at all.
Speaker:Opening your mind is almost like a kind of get out of jail free move, but it is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker:So it's not a very good get out of jail free move.
Speaker:It's more of a last resort, something to try.
Speaker:For our long time listeners, you know, eventually there is a very concrete connection between the wolves, between the tower, between these yellow Humvee people.
Speaker:At the time of recording this though, none of that really existed.
Speaker:There was a vague connection between the tower and the wolves.
Speaker:They saw them run off there one time, but none of that other stuff was nailed down, and it wasn't even really in my mind yet.
Speaker:So really, that connection is all rolled up into one, Ocean's idea right here, and two, the result of this roll.
Speaker:If he completely fails it, it may be there actually is no connection.
Speaker:It's not going to help him get out, and now there's a new threat because he failed opening his mind in such a horrific way.
Speaker:I can't remember if he got a full success or a partial success, so I'll stop talking now and we'll get back to that.
Speaker:Let's see your weird roll.
Speaker:I don't think you're particularly good at weird, right?
Speaker:I have plus one weird actually.
Speaker:Okay, plus one weird.
Speaker:I'm shaking them a lot.
Speaker:Make sure they stay randomized here, because I've been rolling a lot of fours and fives.
Speaker:I don't think that's going to be randomized here.
Speaker:Okay, that's actually really good.
Speaker:That's a 12.
Speaker:A 12.
Speaker:Okay, we have not experienced you opening your mind to the psychic maelstrom yet.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:As we mentioned like eight episodes ago, it's different for every individual.
Speaker:What do you think the psychic maelstrom looks like for Ocean?
Speaker:So Ocean is going to close his eyes, and you know, he's got like a lot of thoughts going on.
Speaker:He's left like panicking, freaking out.
Speaker:He's got all those fears of him being violent.
Speaker:He's got a lot of things going through his mind right now.
Speaker:He's looking for a book, but he's going to clear his head.
Speaker:He's going to take some deep breaths and clear his mind, and he is going to picture just a bright light that...
Speaker:He's going to picture that bright light that he saw in his dreams, that his vision.
Speaker:That bright green object.
Speaker:He's just going to picture it as like a pulsating slowly to like focus it on.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:I think it's very important for everyone's Psychic Maelstrom experiences to be kind of their own unique thing.
Speaker:I believe that's also in the rule book that you should ask the players the first time they open their mind what it looks like to them or how it interacts with them, and then you add your own stuff later and later.
Speaker:I think it's a very good kicking off point to kind of tie different players' experiences together.
Speaker:Psychic Maelstroms are always going to be a big mysterious thing, but it's nice for them to get little hints of information as time goes on.
Speaker:Also, I ask questions like this when I need to stall for time and think about what I'm going to say next.
Speaker:I'll throw something on them that maybe helps me trigger a good idea coming forward, but I'm also just in the back of my mind running through, okay, what's happening next?
Speaker:This light overcomes your vision, and through each pulsing, it's like it almost echo locations out through this city block, and your brain opens up, and you get a perfect mapping of all of the routes in this area.
Speaker:You can see within the buildings what parts lead to other buildings.
Speaker:You pinpoint, you can tell that there's exactly seven of these Humvees blocking these different exits, and you know exactly where they're at, and you look up to where you would expect that tower to be, and you see it, and it looks, you wouldn't know this, but it looks almost exactly like when Book opens his mind to the psychic maelstrom, how there's this large tower with this huge light on the top of it, beaming outward at him.
Speaker:You see a vision of that with the eye just darting around the sky, almost like a lighthouse.
Speaker:But you're still, you still have your mind open, so since you rolled a full success, I guess that hasn't happened yet, so we should talk about what happens.
Speaker:I don't think we've succeeded on any of these yet.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:On a 10 plus hit, you can try to control it and or interrogate it, but on a 7 to 9, you're just along for the ride.
Speaker:This is obviously one of the weirdest moves in a game full of very weird moves, but the way I adjudicate this, those different levels of success, is if it's a full success, what I like to do, and I hope I do this here in just a second, is kind of give some anchoring information that they get immediately and then ask them questions and ask them follow-up questions and figure out more and more of what they're trying to get out of it, kind of more probing questions, and let them do more of the improv coming up with ideas side, while if they get that mixed success where they're just along for the ride, I'll usually ask them like a single question up front.
Speaker:I'll give a kind of a framing, ask one question, and then I run with it.
Speaker:This was our first full success, so I don't know if I did a good job, so let's listen.
Speaker:But so your first, when you first open your mind, that's what it spoke back to you.
Speaker:It spoke to you kind of these routes to safety.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And where these individuals were.
Speaker:So what are the...
Speaker:You can try to interrogate it further or you can try to do anything else.
Speaker:Okay, I'm going to try and interrogate it more.
Speaker:I'm going to try and get more information about these people that are after me.
Speaker:And do I sense Book's presence anywhere with this vision?
Speaker:You feel like there is actually some connection between the tower and these individuals.
Speaker:You see, you visualize it as this string connected from the top of this tower, like, sparkling with electricity, going all the way down into the backs of the heads of all these different people.
Speaker:Like, there is some sort of connection between them and that tower.
Speaker:And you feel that Book is in the bottom floor of that tower.
Speaker:For this moment, that connection did not exist.
Speaker:He basically asked me a binary question, what is the interaction between these two things?
Speaker:And the answer could be, not a connection or is a connection.
Speaker:And I thought it would be more interesting if there was a connection, since this was something he was thinking about.
Speaker:This ends up impacting the rest of the entire story we tell with this connection existing and being critically important to a lot of the main antagonists in Oops!
Speaker:All Apocalypses Season 1.
Speaker:For the Where's Book question, that was very fun because obviously in the game, we have no idea where he goes next.
Speaker:We're playing asynchronously, jumping back and forth between these characters actually over a different two-day period.
Speaker:So all the stuff we've dealt with Book was two days in the past.
Speaker:So I had to just make a decision here on where's Book?
Speaker:Where's Book in two days?
Speaker:Which obviously we're going to still play to figure out how that happens.
Speaker:But since he's asking me, I came up with an answer that I also thought was the most interesting at the time, which was in this tower.
Speaker:I wish Brady was here so we could kind of go into what was going through his mind when I said, hey, you're in this location in two days.
Speaker:But I think that's going to start turning some cogs in his mind too to go, okay, how can we satisfyingly get to that location and kind of pare down some of the options on where the story goes based on that now agreed upon end point.
Speaker:If Brady came back to me and was like, I don't think I would ever end up there.
Speaker:That seems dumb.
Speaker:Then I would have just changed my mind.
Speaker:But I think he actually got very, very excited.
Speaker:Okay, that's bizarre.
Speaker:I was not expecting the tower to have something to do with these people.
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:I love that they're in Hummers.
Speaker:H2s.
Speaker:And I picture every H2 with like a sort of a like a Carolina blue color, because every H2 I've ever seen was that color.
Speaker:All the ones in Virginia were yellow.
Speaker:Literally 100% yellow or black.
Speaker:Wow, that's interesting.
Speaker:Okay, so am I...
Speaker:How long do I stay in the Psychic Maelstrom?
Speaker:Is that just me until I close my mouth off?
Speaker:Until you try to snap out of it, but this is not a...
Speaker:Even though you rolled a full success, it's not like, ooh, this is a great place to be.
Speaker:Yeah, I know.
Speaker:So you're able to interact with it in the way you can right now, but that doesn't mean there won't be dangerous things while your brain is open to the Psychic Maelstrom.
Speaker:Okay, Ocean is going to start veering towards the tower.
Speaker:He's going to...
Speaker:With the route that they were sent him, he's going to try and navigate a route through these buildings using the brain map that is currently being beamed into his head on the best way to get to this tower without encountering any of these humbies.
Speaker:Okay, give me A, act under fire with advantage.
Speaker:Act under fire with advantage, okay.
Speaker:That is going to...
Speaker:And advantage is you pick the higher of the two dice, right?
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:So that is going to be an 11.
Speaker:So I made him roll here because he had already gotten a lot of useful information out of this open his mind roll.
Speaker:He basically had found his path to safety, and I thought it was definitely fair to make him earn that extra little bit to keep going on.
Speaker:Psychic Maelstrom, always a dangerous place, like I mentioned there.
Speaker:You should always look for opportunities where moves can interact or trigger other moves, or result in players wanting to do other things that use more parts of their character's playbook, their equipment, their items, their background, all those sorts of things.
Speaker:Just keep your mind open for those sorts of opportunities.
Speaker:Nice.
Speaker:That is a full success.
Speaker:You see this vision open up in your mind, and you just follow it.
Speaker:It's almost like a Superman for the N64 series of rings that you run through.
Speaker:What a great game to compare this to.
Speaker:You know exactly the steps you need to make, and it's not just like, oh, a straightforward this alleyway and then another one.
Speaker:It goes through these buildings.
Speaker:You have to climb up to the second story of one that's starting to collapse, break through a bathroom, go down through this floor that you happen to know is almost rotted away.
Speaker:You just whack it once with your shovel and it collapses down.
Speaker:You jump down to the bottom floor, and you sprint out right when you feel like these H2s are starting to rotate around to where they would catch you.
Speaker:You get out just in time, book it across the corner to another building, and as you dive behind it, you see the Hummers kind of rotate, stop, and a bunch of people get out and start scoping the area that you were around before.
Speaker:You think from what you see right now, they would have no reason to believe you're not still in there somewhere.
Speaker:So I just said a whole bunch of stuff without any dice rolls, any interaction from him.
Speaker:Maybe what would have been better is me just saying something like, okay, you get out successfully.
Speaker:Can you describe to me how that happens?
Speaker:That would be a nice way to kind of give the power to him to choose what cool way he escapes.
Speaker:But what I didn't want to do was have it turn into a whole bunch of other rolls.
Speaker:He had already fully succeeded on a couple few rolls in a row.
Speaker:And since there are so many opportunities for a roll to be triggered, it's really easy for an MC to just keep having roll after roll after roll, and it eventually makes it impossible to succeed on anything.
Speaker:So when it seems like it's a good opportunity both thematically, or what the dice are saying, or what the flow of the moment is, just let it be a success.
Speaker:This also ties to a good example of how you can kind of slow down and speed up time, and tie to that the number of rolls required to do stuff.
Speaker:In Apocalypse World, a single roll could represent an entire battle you have with someone.
Speaker:If there's no good reason to go into any finer detail, it can just be one roll, see how it goes, and adjudicate the results from that.
Speaker:Other times, it's way more interesting to zoom in on all the little minute details.
Speaker:This episode is mostly about the players trying to find each other.
Speaker:Ocean trying to find Book, Book trying to find Ocean, and both of them trying to survive.
Speaker:I personally thought it'd be more interesting to get more back to that instead of focusing more in on the action, especially since, comparatively, Book's action has been super hyper-focused, like almost slowed down time.
Speaker:Like, honestly, the entire 12 minutes we talked to Book was probably 30 seconds of real time.
Speaker:So I thought it'd be a good contrast to have Ocean adjudicated more this way.
Speaker:I am going to, while I'm going to still make my way to the tower, I'm going to kind of run that way.
Speaker:But I want to try and interrogate the psychic maelstrom one more time before pulling myself out of it.
Speaker:Ocean wants to know whether these guys are being controlled by the tower or if either just connected to the tower.
Speaker:Ooh, give me a sway someone role.
Speaker:Sway somebody.
Speaker:Ocean was definitely pushing his luck here where he had been in the psychic maelstrom for quite a while.
Speaker:Usually an open your brain to the psychic maelstrom won't ever extend more than like one scene.
Speaker:And this is clearly like a transition point between the previous scene where he was trying to escape these people and he's done it.
Speaker:But this was an interesting enough question, especially the way he worded it, that I wanted to come up with an answer for him.
Speaker:And this is actually the first moment that I decided to give some sort of personification to the psychic maelstrom.
Speaker:This ends up becoming much more important later and ties in very closely to Ocean's backstory, which has not been revealed yet since he plays a character who does not remember his past at all with the No One Playbook.
Speaker:But this kind of kicked off that whole section of the story, which I think that's interesting that this happened, all the way in episode 10.
Speaker:That's a 7.
Speaker:As you're...
Speaker:Are you still sprinting full speed to this tower, or are you trying now that you're out of there?
Speaker:He's gonna still be trying to make it to the tower, because he doesn't want to slow down and get caught.
Speaker:Okay, as you're running towards the tower, you look up at these wires that are still in your vision, connecting the top of this tower down to each of these individuals.
Speaker:From this perspective, it looks like almost this coil coming out and then splitting at the bottom, reaching all these people who are now sweeping this series of blocks for you.
Speaker:And you see this kind of flow of information going through it.
Speaker:You feel like there's some sort of information coming directly from this tower into their brains, is at least how it's represented in the Psychic Maelstrom.
Speaker:There's a few ways that could be interpreted.
Speaker:Dang!
Speaker:Yeah, that's why it's a Nick's success.
Speaker:So the tower is sending them commands and they're listening, or are they just using the tower in the same way that I am and just using it as a big ol GPS, essentially, like a psychic GPS?
Speaker:Those options he listed are the same sort of thing I'm doing between sessions right now, while playing, thinking about what could those reasons be.
Speaker:I don't have an answer yet for any of those things he just said.
Speaker:Also, it wasn't until this role that there was any connection between those yellow humvee people and the tower.
Speaker:Give me a Act Under Fire role.
Speaker:I dropped my dice on the floor!
Speaker:Oh god, that was a really good role too.
Speaker:I'm gonna roll it again even though, because I dropped it.
Speaker:Those are the rules that we all follow.
Speaker:That's gonna be another seven.
Speaker:You're running, you finally, you can, this whole time you've been able to see this building, even through other buildings that you're in, it's been kind of the central focus point, even on when it seems like it should be out of your periphery, it's like you can still see it out there.
Speaker:And now it's right in front of you, there's no buildings blocking the way, and you're about to run out into the street, but you stop just in time, as you notice, prowling around the third floor of this building.
Speaker:There are these balconies, and you see those same, well, you didn't see them very clearly before, but you see one of those wolves that you saw a flash of that looks exactly like how a book described it to you.
Speaker:You see a series of them prowling around the outskirts of some of the balconies on this tower.
Speaker:And you think if you just ran into this opening, they would certainly be able to see you.
Speaker:And they look like they're on alert for some reason.
Speaker:Like they know someone's coming.
Speaker:It's not like this is just their standard behavior.
Speaker:They are.
Speaker:You've been around some dogs.
Speaker:They're prowling.
Speaker:Their ears are up.
Speaker:I think at this point, I'm now going to try and shut my brain off from the psychic maelstrom.
Speaker:How are you going to try to do that?
Speaker:He's going to visualize that light again, and he's going to visualize it pulsing and getting dimmer and dimmer until it turns off and everything just goes dark.
Speaker:And then all of his memories and thoughts and stresses just flow back into him.
Speaker:Flow back into you, and as they do, I'm going to have you have a vision.
Speaker:Ah!
Speaker:Is this a moment of transition, or is this using two?
Speaker:That's the question.
Speaker:I think this is using two.
Speaker:It's almost a moment of transition, but we are going to literally transition over to book while you think of what visions you want.
Speaker:I decided to trigger one of his visions here.
Speaker:That's something that I can do at any moment based on how much hold I get based on one of his roles during the beginning of a session, so none of that came up in this episode, but basically I can interrupt any of his actions to trigger a vision.
Speaker:I chose that here because he had just done a lot of psychic mails from stuff.
Speaker:He had just seen these wolves.
Speaker:And then also thematically, I thought it would give me a good point to be able to jump back between his vision and book if that became necessary.
Speaker:I don't think it actually did become necessary.
Speaker:I also chose to transition after this moment so he could sit there and pick options that he thought would be very interesting or maybe relevant to the situation instead of putting him super on the spot.
Speaker:Sometimes it's better to put people on the spot to say, hey, pick two right now and just go with it.
Speaker:But he had just gotten kind of overloaded with a lot of information very quickly.
Speaker:I wanted him to be able to process, so I did a transition scene while he thought.
Speaker:If I was a coward, I would have gotten him to tell me what options he chose before I transitioned so I could kind of start thinking of what vision I wanted to give him while we were running through book stuff.
Speaker:But for Ocean's visions, I really, really like to come in really hot based on his two prompts.
Speaker:Treat it very much just like an improv exercise where he gives me a place and a person, and I have to tie that together to some sort of vision.
Speaker:Especially early on, because there's basically nothing concrete to tie it to.
Speaker:So this stuff is kind of just coming out of the ether.
Speaker:And I don't want to overthink it.
Speaker:I think in the rest of this episode, we actually don't get back to the vision.
Speaker:I think that's next episode.
Speaker:But that was another very important vision that was fully came up with on the spot that ended up having very lasting implications on the storyline, including an entire clone robot subplot that was not planned for at this time.
Speaker:Cool.
Speaker:Cool, cool, cool.
Speaker:Hey, Melted Cheesehead is opening his mouth several feet away from you.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Do I see any signs?
Speaker:Like, do I see any other bodies?
Speaker:Any signs that Ocean might be down here?
Speaker:Do I see like any signs of struggle?
Speaker:Things like that.
Speaker:You are not going to have much time to look.
Speaker:I'm going to say, how do you want to do that?
Speaker:I am going to try to...
Speaker:Is it like keeping your eyes on him and just trying to see if there's anything else aware?
Speaker:I'm going to basically try to keep my shoulder as steady as possible and aim that light.
Speaker:Try to aim that light at him while I basically use my peripheral vision and just kind of dart my eyes around and see what I can see.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:You're going to hate this, but I think this is a try something challenge.
Speaker:I don't hate that.
Speaker:I think that's fair.
Speaker:That's fitting.
Speaker:I got a four.
Speaker:This is one of those times where it seems like there's kind of a difference in perspective from what I'm expecting and what the player is thinking the situation is.
Speaker:So I tried to make it clear that he was in imminent danger before he was trying to look around and get information.
Speaker:This wasn't just a read a situation role.
Speaker:He is effectively almost basically in a battle already.
Speaker:I think I could have been more clear about that to say like, hey, if you look around, he may be on top of you and stab you before you're able to figure something else out or even just try to push that aside and say, hey, you can't really focus right now.
Speaker:There's a giant monster in front of you.
Speaker:But at the time, I just went with A, try something challenging, which represents him trying to very dexterously, quickly look at all these different areas and pick up any information.
Speaker:The types of thing he asked for is stuff that wouldn't really be in a read a situation role anyway.
Speaker:It's kind of stuff you would be able to just see, which is another very important thing.
Speaker:If a player can just do something or see something or know something, you can just say that.
Speaker:Definitely doesn't have to be a role behind it.
Speaker:You can even interrupt your responses to, like, a read a sit role to give them additional context or if they ask a follow up question between the hold, you can go ahead and tell them that additional information they should know.
Speaker:But Brady failed the role here, so he's going to get the information he would know just by seeing it, but he's going to be in a very bad spot.
Speaker:You go and look around.
Speaker:You see there is some blood on the wall, and you're trying to see where it flows to.
Speaker:And as you look away for a second, your light completely goes out.
Speaker:As you hear this shattering sound, this monster has lunged forward, and those fingers are even longer than you remember, and he has completely shattered the light bulb inside of it.
Speaker:It is now pitch black.
Speaker:Zero light is in here.
Speaker:Oh, fuck.
Speaker:Okay, well, I can't shoot what I can't see.
Speaker:Not well.
Speaker:And you hear this snapping of skin, as you can tell, you know his mouth is opening wider and wider, and those little connective tissues are popping, popping, popping.
Speaker:So, Jacob, genuinely, this was my plan for how I was going to handle if things turned bad here.
Speaker:So don't be offended.
Speaker:But, uh, book, knowing that he has basically no chance of fighting against this thing in the dark, and seeing, thinking of the viscera that he kind of waded through to get here, and knowing the damage that this monster can do, knowing that he is powerless to stop it, is going to open his mind to the psychic maelstrom.
Speaker:And howl at the top of his lungs, both inside of his brain and, for real, in IRL.
Speaker:Oh, that's so interesting.
Speaker:Okay, I like that a lot.
Speaker:I liked it because at first I was like, oh shit, this is going to sound so tacky because I'm just copying you.
Speaker:But then I was like, you know what, this is good because it has a mirror.
Speaker:No, it's highs, yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, it mirrors.
Speaker:There's all, oh.
Speaker:This was such a good idea by Brady.
Speaker:This is very interesting.
Speaker:One, at this point in the story, there's no concept that the wolves would even be amicable to him at all.
Speaker:So this is just like a straight up risk.
Speaker:Could be making the situation worse.
Speaker:It's also an interesting choice because we've already established that somehow, two days from now, he ends up in the tower that the wolves are involved in.
Speaker:So it definitely makes sense that at some point during this kind of side adventure he's going on, that he would interact with the wolves in some way that eventually gets him there.
Speaker:None of us know how that's exactly going to happen.
Speaker:This is another one of those roles with some long lasting implications potentially where depending on how successful he is, I have to figure out why did the wolves come to help him or why did they not come to help him, or is there any reason they should even be involved in this.
Speaker:But if he's successful, there's a reason they're going to be involved in some way, especially with a full success.
Speaker:With a mixed success, I get a lot more options, so I'm sitting there thinking how could this kind of go wrong, how could they still be involved, and we'll see how that turns out.
Speaker:Okay, give me an open your mind roll.
Speaker:Alright, that's plus weird.
Speaker:Please be good.
Speaker:That was an eight, actually.
Speaker:You let go this howl.
Speaker:And Ocean, two days in the future, you hear it on your radio.
Speaker:This ties back to something I did in the previous episode where when he tried to use his radio to find a book, instead he heard panting, and then as he pressed it harder and harder, eventually he heard the garbled screams of a wolf's howl.
Speaker:When I said that, I had no idea how it would come up, so I was very happy to be able to tie it back in here.
Speaker:But you want to leave yourself a bunch of breadcrumbs like that, like, oh, this could come back and work later.
Speaker:So just bar forth Apocalyptica whenever you can.
Speaker:If it doesn't tie into anything later, at least it was probably at least creepy or interesting or something.
Speaker:The echoes of my psychic howl are still reverberating in Subtropolis.
Speaker:So as you open your mind, last time you did it, you saw this big shining light on you, but right now it's just silence.
Speaker:You don't even know if it really worked.
Speaker:You hear reverberating down the tunnels, that echo, and it just keeps getting quieter and quieter.
Speaker:You hear it coming from further and further away, echoing, echoing, echoing.
Speaker:And then it seems like the echo starts getting louder and louder, and then it's a little different pitch.
Speaker:And you realize that that isn't your voice that's echoing and that there are wolves of the maelstrom approaching.
Speaker:So that's actually the end of the episode.
Speaker:If I was running this game in person or not for a podcast, I probably would not end it there because it's obviously a very exciting moment.
Speaker:And I want the player to kind of either get success or get failure and know where they're going.
Speaker:That's probably one of the biggest differences doing this as a podcast is we try to end every single episode on something interesting, either a joke or a cliffhanger or something like that, which when I'm running Apocalypse World in real life, normally a session ends with kind of a nice cool down period where you do those end of session moves.
Speaker:Some of those can still be pretty dramatic, and we have ended some episodes sometimes with kind of answers to those end of session moves because that's like books, mysteries or things like that can get resolved there.
Speaker:But I always got to keep my podcast hat on and try to find good moments to cut it out where it's a good time to end it.
Speaker:I don't like any of our episodes to kind of just drag off at the end, probably like this episode is going to do.
Speaker:I'm pretty sure playing wise, we actually continued playing after this.
Speaker:This ended up being one of those episodes we cut from a longer one and kind of Frankenstein back together.
Speaker:But normally at the end of a session, there's really not too much to do.
Speaker:You usually got to update your threat map.
Speaker:So I would be updating some of the sorts of questions I have.
Speaker:So like maybe a question before was, why do the Yellow Humvee people exist or shoot people on site or have such good equipment?
Speaker:Now I'm going to add some questions that are like, why are they interested in Ocean?
Speaker:Why are they connected to the tower?
Speaker:Are the psychic wolves of the Maelstrom connected to the tower and also connected to the Yellow Humvee people?
Speaker:All those are kind of new questions that got added up through this.
Speaker:Then I would start adding things like, why is Book able to communicate with them?
Speaker:Why did they come when he called them?
Speaker:Are they coming to help?
Speaker:Are they coming to hurt?
Speaker:All those things should still be questions before you actually play the next session.
Speaker:Again, don't want to answer any of these things.
Speaker:You then got to fill up your tank of Apocalyptica stuff, because I used a couple things here during the session, like mysterious disappearing towers, weird tick-like waterborne creatures.
Speaker:And now that those are barfed out there, I got to fill up my quiver with more things to hopefully horrify my players with.
Speaker:Well, that was Episode Exploder, and I hope some people like this.
Speaker:I know this is a very small cross-section of people who would actually enjoy listening to something like this, but I'm one of them, so hopefully there's a few more people out there who like it.
Speaker:If you want this again, if it was good, then email me at oops at stu.cool.
Speaker:That's s-t-u dot c-o-o-l.
Speaker:And let me know any other episodes you think this would be fun to do with.
Speaker:If you would really like to get Brady and Jacob in on this as well, let me know.
Speaker:I really just chose this episode.
Speaker:I don't think this is the most exciting episode, most fun episode, but I think it had a pretty good cross-section of different types of moves, and it was definitely a weird, fun one where it was jumping across timelines, which is something that is much easier to do in a system like Apocalypse World where nothing is planned out anyway, so you don't have to worry about breaking your plans by weird timey-wimey shenanigans.
Speaker:If somehow this is the first time you've listened to us, maybe I'll share this out to people who are just interested in PBTA stuff, but if you are, listen to our real podcast that's on the same feed as this, called Oops!
Speaker:All Apocalypses, where we have like 50-something episodes at this point of this story going on.
Speaker:Don't worry about any of the spoilers here.
Speaker:They're not too important.
Speaker:And then also remember to go listen to me on GG Level Up, a fun geeky trivia podcast where I talk about PBTA stuff in the next guest episode I'm on, which is May 28th, I believe.
Speaker:Well, thank you all for listening.
Speaker:I'm not going to do any outro music, so just love you, bye.
Speaker:Bye.
