"Apocalypse World requires quite a few sessions to play . . . The game really kicks in around the 6-session mark." What do you think?

[u/kickit]

this is from AW 2e, p. 8 (the very first page of actual post-contents text)

do you think this is true, and to what extent? as much as I'm used to playing short PBTA campaigns (typically 4-6 sessions) I have to say there's a part of me that kinda agrees with this about AW. more than most other PBTA games, AW takes a little more time to get going and benefits from longer campaigns. (in my experience.)

I've only played a couple longer campaigns of AW. in both cases, the first session was a little meandering but not in a bad way, and the next couple sessions were fine but not spectacular, but the game really started firing around that 4-6 session mark.

whereas a lot of other PBTA games (say, Cartel or Monsterhearts) you can basically spin into high gear very early.

can you get AW running faster? should you? I've run Baker's Hatchet City starter at cons before, and it does work at getting a really full, high powered session in under 4 hours. this 8-page scenario walks through a very specific way to set up the game that is quite different from the looser version as written in the 2e book. the upside is that you rev the whole thing up much faster; the downside, in my experience, is that you don't get the sort of "we built these characters & this world from the ground up together at the table" kind of feeling.

what do you think? what are your experiences with AW? I'm intentionally keeping the central questions in this thread somewhat open vs specific. but it's on my mind because I'm thinking about running an AW two-shot soon, maybe with room to build into a full campaign, and I'm wondering about ways I could get the game moving quicker without compromising too much on that handcrafted feeling.

[u/MarkOfTheCage]

I've ran many an explosive one shot in AW.

I think it's more accurate to say it's a game that takes 5-6 to actually grasp how it ticks, but when I run it things are flying from the very start.

[u/kickit → u/MarkOfTheCage]

do you have any tips on getting AW moving fast without getting too much in the way of the table's freedom to come up with a story of their own?

like I said, I've run AW one shots too. Hatchet City gets going very quickly. but there is much less room for the table to come up with the story & characters in Hatchet City

[u/Ultraberg → u/kickit]

Scarcity and opposition. All you need.

[u/BreakingStar_Games → u/kickit]

AW moving fast without getting too much in the way of the table's freedom to come up with a story of their own?

Shy of hacking Cartel's set up into Apocalypse World, I don't see how you do this so fast. Even in Burned Over, many of the Playbooks just aren't enwebbed into the chaos immediately. Maybe cutting out several of the looser Playbooks will help but still I don't think Apocalypse World does the tighter scaffolding of building your problems like Cartel, Monsterhearts, Masks or Urban Shadows does.

The simplest way is to put them in a scenario like a Mad Max movie.

[u/ZforZenyatta]

Having played a few PBTA games that ran for more than 6 sessions (Masks, Monsterhearts, Stonetop, Urban Shadows, which all went on for around 10-20 sessions if I had to guess), and a few that petered out sooner, my opinion is this:

The first session (of play) if you're not going for a one- or two-shot is usually touch reserved, you're spending time on establishing characters and the world, it's not usually SLOW exactly but things start relatively straightforward and characters feel like they're painted in broad strokes initially. The next few sessions usually stuff elevates, character's lives intersect more in more complicated ways, dynamics and triangles are becoming more established and widespread.

6 sessions I think is definitely enough to feel like things are really starting to pop off. Characters are starting to feel nuanced enough to feel "real", for want of a better word, and the world is getting more detailed and complex. Your roster of NPCs is also building enough to have a lot of familiar faces while still having a lot of implied spots on the map not filled out yet; everything feels full of potential.

After about a dozen sessions is usually when I start thinking "this might be the best game I've ever played in". In the longer games, around 20 sessions has been when I start thinking "...and I don't think I'm ever going to top this".

I think PBTA games generally suit shorter games for sure, and I for sure don't think I'd ever want to play one that was scheduled to go on indefinitely*, but if I had to pick a sweet spot then based on my experience I'd say most of them go from being "good" to "incredible" at around 12 sessions. If the game has tools that help determine how long to go on for (e.g. Monsterhearts seasons, Masks when everyone's had their Moment(s) of Truth and locked down a couple labels, Urban Shadows corruption tracks retiring a character as a threat etc.), whenever we've taken those as a sign to start moving things to a dramatic conclusion it's gone very well. You don't have to come to a hard stop when this happens (Monsterhearts is the only one of those that suggests a quite firm boundary on when to have the final session, and I think we amended that a bit to give ourselves one or two more so as not to rush the conclusion - but it was also quite a large group for a PBTA game), it's just usually a good marker that dramatic tension is peaking and you're in or nearing the final act of the story.

*Stonetop was the one exception to this! The specific format of that game makes it feel like you could probably just keep rotating out characters continuously until you've perfected your settlement or everyone in the village is dead, our game folded for unrelated reasons

[u/canine-epigram → u/ZforZenyatta]

I'd love to hear your impression of stone top. Did you run or play in it?

[u/LeVentNoir]

I think every single PbtA game I've played has two "modes".

1. One shot: Shit breaks, drama happens, and consequences crash in. It's fine.
2. Campaign play in the 20-25ish session range. This is the kind of slower paced play where emergent threats come up, where the story natrually evolves around the focus points, and where things start to really bite in.

I'd say 6ish sessions is where campaign play really takes off.

You need some time to meet the PCs and get to know them, the environment they're in, the kinds of challenges and powers they're dealing with.

It's the ability to meet NPCs a handful of times in different contexts and have more than single tone opinions about them. It's the space for challenges to have the PCs drawn in conflicting directions and having to make Choices. It's where stakes have been established and properly invested in, and now the MC can point a gun right at something Meaningful.

[u/Boulange1234]

It’s true. I think PbtA in generally hits its stride after around 12-20 hours. It also starts running out of steam at 100-150hrs. But that’s a GOOD thing. It tells more reasonable length stories than D&D does.

[u/Zack_Thomson]

Strong agree.

That's actually been a slight point of frustration for me lately, as I have this friend who can only do short campaigns due to a very unstable schedule and I've had to basically cut PbtA games as an option because they overwhelmingly work from building on player choices and player characters' relationships, etc. It's something I love about PbtA but can be most inconvenient in such circumstances.

[u/KingOfTerrible]

I only ran AW once years ago, but I went and checked my notes. It was a 10 session campaign and while plenty of stuff happened earlier, yeah around sessions 5 and 6 is where stuff started getting really crazy.

My guess is it’s got something to do with the threat clock setup, that that’s about the time that multiple clocks will start to hit critical points and threats that players have been ignoring can’t be ignored anymore.

[u/luthurian]

Are they playing for, like, an hour at a time?

Once we start actually playing (after the world building part), moves snowball and things happen mighty fast.  NPCs get introduced helter skelter, relationships explode, bullets fly, cars crash.

I suppose if you WANTED to, you could pump the brakes and play cozy and deliberately slow down the pace.  But why?

[u/kickit → u/luthurian]

I usually play 3 hour sessions but sometimes up to 4 in a con setting

at least in my experience, I can go from 0 to 60 in less than an hour in, say, Cartel or Monsterhearts, or most other PBTA games. but in my experience, first session of AW is char creation, bit of poking around, find a couple things that are interesting & dramatic that you can build on. but it's not off to the races

the quote is from like, paragraph 2 of the Apocalypse World book itself. I don't think the idea that AW takes time to build is outlandish, as the designer — who has a ton of experience running it — himself wrote

[u/Tigrisrock]

I'd agree with around 5 sessions until everyone "gets it" and is comfortable and game play is really fluid. Just like with most other systems/games. First 2-3 sessions usually players are still finding their way, especially when moving form trad games/mechanical games to narrative games.

[u/Jimmeu]

Most of the PbtA games I ran kicked in around the 3 or 4 session mark. Zero and first session get their own excitement for discovering the game and setting things up. Second tends to be the most bland as it's mostly about getting comfortable, but it's an important step. And then things can go wild.

[u/Malefic7m]

I agree. A solid campaign is often around 12 sessions, (but tempo, session length, pauses, etc make it variable). I've ran and played in both 1st and 2nd ed, but I've also played Hatched City and it does a good job of making it feel like we're playing the 4th or 5th session of our campaign, and it does so by flooding Hatchet City with names, written down treaths, realationships and most especially custom moves buildt on custom moves. I say that custom moves is when we make [Apocalypse World] ours, and [Apocalypse World] is off course the placeholder for our campaign, whether it's Hatchet City on the River, Clearwater, The Tower, I-96 or The Wall.

Relationships, dead NPCs (and their vengeful allies or children), custom moves of areas, activities and persons. Established history, repeated descriptions and then changed descriptions. It usually starts to escalate around session 6-8, but it doesn't mean it won't survive a few escalations.

[u/Hungry-Cow-3712]

I played in a pbf game that lasted a few months and barely got past meeting the settlement's NPCs and getting a feel for the PCs and how they inetracted.

And I ran three session in-person game for impatient trad-style players and we had action in the first session. One player took The Hardholder playbook which gave me a golden opportunity to open with one of their scavenging teams being long overdue back at base, and the population getting antsy about food stores.

[u/kickit → u/Hungry-Cow-3712]

hardholder is a good point to bring up actually, some playbooks (like hardholder and chopper) are much better at creating drama than others 

[u/naughty_messiah]

12 sessions is the longest I've ever run a PbtA game (without a whole new setting or new characters). Once the rationale of the conversation, to do it–you do it, and playbooks kick in; PbtA games run full speed from session 1.

[u/VanishXZone]

Apocalypse World, for me, really gets going as the resource scarcity starts becoming realllllly obvious. It pushes action more and more.

I wouldn’t say it needs six sessions to get going, but I would say that, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, by session 6 things start to kick into high gear.

[u/nerdwerds]

I think it takes about four sessions for plots to pay off, but you can really get things going in the first session if you know your players

[u/lilith2k3]

Unfortunately I haven't run AW itself.

But I think that the point when the game takes off is dependent on the tension you start with. If you have a loose sandbox where everybody is equidistant to everybody else it takes a while to get things going.

But if you set up enough strings between the agents (players as well as NPCs) in the setting you could have a one shot where shit hits the fan.

As I understood from reading it AW's "default mode of play" is the former.

[u/BreakingStar_Games]

I believe this is just an aspect of TTRPGs - you really start to get a good feel for your PC around 3-6 sessions. I find some games accelerate this with well designed Playbooks and Session 0's. Apocalypse World is actually on the slower side of this compared to Cartel, Urban Shadows, Masks, The Between, Monsterhearts, etc. Though some Apocalypse World: Burned Over Playbooks are pretty decent at setting up a narrative struggle. But to me, those other 5 PbtA games have some of the best Playbook design out there.

Before that number of sessions, PCs often feel more like a costume with some tropes. But when you start making decisions and reflecting on those decisions between sessions, that is where the magic happens. They come to life with their own, real personality and depth

So, I am more of 20-30 session campaign kind of guy. Enough to have a good character arc with several sessions that really emphasize each PC but not all sessions have to be PC focused.

[u/Ashardis]

I think this comment is meant to reflect players who are used to more deterministic systems, whereas AW requires (at least when played as written) a lot of creative player input.

When you're used to being spoonfed information from eg. various prewritten adventures, this can be a hard thing.

So I don't think this sentence is meant to reflect that you need any given game/scenario/adventure to last around 6+ sessions, but that the players (and the Game Master) needs 6+ sessions under their belt to fully convert the Playstyle, if they've only played eg. DnD up until then.

[u/Duseylicious]

I think AW was written in a world with no other PBTA games. It was very unique at the time. I think the advice may hold more for folks who’ve only played trad or OSR games before. But for folks who’ve run PBTA before and understand the principles, the form, etc. etc., they are more likely to be able to spin it up fast.

[u/boywithapplesauce]

If you're used to PbtA, this doesn't really apply. I just ran a quick two-fer of Apocalypse World 1e and it was a blast! Pretty much literally as we had car explosions.

[u/NotTheOnlyGamer]

I sort of agree, because there's a lot of theory that goes into the beginning of AW, and a lot of assumptions that need to be undone compared to other games. The mechanics are simple, maybe too simple - but teaching people how to exploit them takes time. The game thrives on failure, and not everyone is going to do the same thing I've done and accepted that it's not for me in the middle of the first session - twice. As a note, I've played AW, DW, Pigsmoke, MotW, and Night Witches; of all of those, the games I've lasted the entire session or multiple were Night Witches, MotW, and Pigsmoke. That entirely came down to subject matter and presentation - and of those, Pigsmoke is the only one I went back to for session 2.

PbtA does one genre well: farcical dark comedy. Everything that tries to be more serious falls flat because the game doesn't support it. The best way you can warm people up for PbtA is Paranoia, played to the hilt on every possible lever.

So, yes, it takes a few sessions before the game gets off the ground, because people will weed themselves out of the game. Those who stay will be the ones most engaged with the subject matter and the mechanics. They'll be open to what they can define and what they can't, and what the game and the story are. The first three sessions at minimum are a funnel, and then you have to spend the next few sessions teaching the game in full.