I was trying to come up with a good way of porting the Flashback style gameplay to Apocalypse World but haven’t hit upon the best approach. Ideally the best approach wouldn’t add much in the way of additional rules on top of big standard AE. I was thinking of possibly trading a Flashback for a MC move. Or instead making a special Flashback Sharp move to be prepared.
Anyone got any good ideas?
I ran a game with quite alot of time hopping. I just decided that as a hard move I could change the time. Or when there was a pause in game. Or someone smelled the cinnamon bars I had boughy for the game. It worked like magic for one session.
You can just allow certain moves to have been done in the past.
Yeah, I’ll echo David Rothfeder here. You don’t really need a mechanic for flashbacks; just cut to a flashback, play through it as usual, then cut back to “now”.
Yeah that works. Simple is often best
I think it is useful to focus on the PURPOSE of flashbacks in Blades in the Dark. The idea is to head off the interminable planning by allowing people to have prepared in advance, even if the viewing audience didn’t see it happen.
One way to do this in a NON Blades in the Dark setting would be to have them “bank” flashbacks by spending time planning and spending time running errands with no clear purpose and talking to a great many people about a great many things. Only later do we (the players) find out what that character was up to.
(My point being, a flashback is an asset; how do you bank that ahead of time or pay for it later? It is a narrative currency. Of course you can do flashbacks for other reasons, but in this context, they are to add resources and preparation when the player’s character needs them.)
I really like that spending time planning thing. You could either leave it direct or even make a special roll out of it.
Time Spent Preparing
When you spend time preparing, you gain narrative use of a flashback of how you prepared. Each narrative use acts as +1 forward on a relevant move in the present.
* no time: 0 flashback
* short but enough: 1 flashback
* plenty of time: 2 flashbacks
* been planning this one for a while: 3 flashbacks
Prepare for the job
When you spend time ahead to plan what you are going to do before going in guns blazing, Roll + Sharp
On a 10+ gain flashbacks equal to the time you spend preparing plus 1 more. On a 7-9 gain flashbacks equal to the time spent. On a 6 or less, gain no more than 1 flashback and the MC gains 1 flashback with a MC move.
Maybe even have tokens you get (like what you do for “flashbacks” as a rating) so you can charge more or less depending on how complicated or insane it is.
Yeah tokens could be good if you want to enforce levels of flashbacks. Though I think with AW it makes more sense just to let it be narrative and then give them +1 forward to a relevant move. I say this as AW doesn’t have much in the way of tokens or levels like that.
Fair enough, I haven’t played it. What might be a local control that would differentiate between “Of course we brought extra gas” and “yeah, we subverted the bodyguard into a double agent last week”?
Hrm good point. Those are pretty strongly narratively different. Maybe tokens make sense then. Big flashbacks would require multiple flashback tokens but would gain the narrative advantage and also gain +1 per token forward.
p. 276 of Apocalypse World has a discussion along the lines of flashbacks.
Ah your right it does! I totally forgot about that. And the rule basically covers this pretty well. I guess I should have done a search of my AW PDF before posting here.
Now I’m curious. Would you summarize how AW does it?
Vincent proposes two ways to handle it.
It can be a roll based on a stat (sharp in AW) or it can be a roll based on wealth. In either case you have the three possible results: full success, success with cost/compromise, or the MC gets to do something awful.
He also has a third way for use when preparing to take on another PCs which is a roll based on Hx (your connection with the person).
Just to add for Andrew Shields sake it’s in the back Advanced Fuckery section which talks about how to write your own custom moves and change or expand on AW. Part of the beauty of AW is that there is an entire section of the book dedicated to talking about how your can hack the rules.
I’ve got that chapter on hacking rules for the game built into my head, I see it when I look at ALL games. I’ve been told it’s a problem.
Me too Andrew Shields — I’ve totally got the House Rule bug as a GM. Can’t leave any ruleset alone. Though I mostly I tend to expand upon rather than change the rules.
Though maybe that’s not exactly true. One of my most recent games I ran was a Lacuna game where I used my own Lacuna Dark rules (a hack of Cthulhu Dark and Lacuna).
It’s all good. Games are toys, made to be played. (And played WITH.)
There’s all kinds of different fun, like in tabletop miniatures games; I’ve known guys who just wanted to paint, and had no interest in setting up and playing the game. Or, who just wanted to play, and were irritated that they had to do modeling.
I believe there should be room for all sorts of fun with a game, whether it’s under the hood or standing on it while driving at high speed, or sitting behind the wheel, or enjoying the wind through your hair as you ride shotgun. =)