Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

2 episodes in and I'm really loving this one

I do like that psychic powers are an actual thing in the Doctor Who universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67O1OcCSaq

oh gods, another white actor doing a horribly racist accent, nooooo

I'm excited because I've heard good things, but nervous because the previous 2 stories in this season weren't very good at all...

Time to watch the final 3rd Doctor story, Planet of the Spiders.

I'm both excited and nervous

hi hi~

it's also annoying that they undid something cool:The Curse of Peladon makes a point of making the ice warriors seem to be villains, but turn out to be protagonists – a shock to an audience who had only ever seen them as villains.

But The Monster of Peladon just makes them villains again, and it's... boring.

I finished The Monster of Peladon.

It was well made, but felt... insincere?

They were trying to make The Curse of Peladon again, but with a slightly different twist.

I gave it a "Maybe", because it wasn't a chore to watch.

I think next time, I need to plan my sessions a bit more concretely.

And when I do, I should plan them as though we only have half the time available – it's always best to end a session early.

I think having session boundaries coincide with downtimes is the most needed change.

AW already pushed for session boundaries to be in downtimes, but 2nd edition pushes this a bit more by making the start of the session be when people have to pay their expenses.

(fin)

• I didn't push the pacing enough, so many sessions were way too slow, and often we had to end in the middle of a tense scene and continue it next week. I know that story games generally are pretty slow paced compared to other improvisation drama, but it felt like we were consistently spending 5 minutes on 30 second scenes, and 30 minutes on 5 minute scenes.
I feel mostly to blame for this, but the players could have taken a more active role in the pacing too

I made many mistakes when I last ran AW. Some concrete mistakes were:

• We made the setting too sprawling — there were several different towns, seperated by vast wastes, and different players were scattered all over, so having sessions where they interacted was hard.
• I didn't emphasise character relationships enough, and I didn't push PC-NPC-PC triangles where I should have. The supporting cast was too large.

(continued)

I wanna run Apocalypse World again, this time with:
• the foreknowledge of what I did wrong/poorly the first time
• players who are slightly more willing to take control
• 2nd edition, which changes a bunch of small things to make them a lot smoother