@Frank: I'm really getting sick of responding to your points with quotes from myself:
Seriously, this is falsifiable: Is there any point in the book where something is referred to as "offscreen" in the sense of "hidden, but still potentially an immediate threat?" Because every reference I've found, it means "out of scene, not an active threat, you can, for now at least, ignore it just by walking in the other direction and neither you nor your character's stuff will be negatively affected."
It's not just this thread. You do this a lot. Try to pay attention.
Also, if you want to talk about Webster's definition of "offscreen," here it is:
1: out of sight of the motion picture or television viewer
2: in private life
Feel free to tell me which of those two you think AW was using. The term is obviously redefined because none of the existing definitions can possibly apply, and what it's getting at is obvious from context. You don't have to study AW. You just have to read it in good faith.
@DSM: The flubbing you're looking for doesn't exist. It's just another product of your fevered imagination. You've put up nothing but one strawman after another, and have constantly retreated from actually arguing the point to simply declaring yourself correct. Running down the latest pileup of wildly false assumptions:
-No, discarding unused material does not apply to non-railroad prep equally to railroad prep. If you're railroading, unexpected actions by the PCs will ruin your carefully constructed pre-planned scenes. If you're running sandbox, monsters they choose not to fight are still
there and can jolly well wander somewhere else or just go about making messes until the PCs decide to go take care of them. It is, of course, possible that the PCs will just decide to not ever take care of them, but that's much, much more rare. And if it happens, it means you've made a mistake.
-No, I am not retconning my argument when I draw a distinction between different kinds of prep where previously I didn't. You remember how I was surprised that I had to actually explain to you the difference? I kind of assumed we were both on the same page as to how sandbox games worked, so I didn't bother to back up and explain it.
-No, you do not have to leave things quantum when keeping track of what enemies are up to offscreen. You can totally just say that at time X they are in location A, and at time Y they are in location B, and if the PCs don't interfere you can no instantly update their present location whenever time X or Y rolls around, without having to stop and think about it.
-I don't really get your point with the notes on the countdown? Yeah, they're brief. They aren't the complete notes for the entire conflict, they're a cheatsheet to remind you of how far the conflict has advanced. They don't have to make sense to someone who doesn't have access to the relevant fronts because the MC
does have access to the relevant fronts, and already knows what the quarantine is, who breached it, who Uncle is, what the ultimatum is, etc. etc.
And then there's this:
And when people criticize Apocalypse World for relying too much on "the DM bullshits it up as he goes," that does not put them in the uncomfortable position of demanding the game's world be modelled with complete accuracy at every level of detail.
Which just makes me wonder if you're even reading what I'm writing? What I said is that you claim retroactively deciding what NPCs have done for the last five minutes is terrible and bad. But then you also say that updating the game world every five minutes is impossibly difficult. Taken together, those claims say that running a good TTRPG is
impossible. Updating every five minutes is too much an invalidation of player choice, and updating faster than every five minutes is too difficult to be done.
@ACOS: Baker's campaigns do not make a difference to Baker's actual products. If Baker wants to get together with a bunch of rape fetishists and get off on rape, that is
weird but does not have anything to do with other people's games of Apocalypse World. It's an ad hominem attack. It's saying that riding on a subway built by the soviet regime is wrong, which will put big chunks of eastern Europe and Russia out of public transportation. To say that supporting Apocalypse World is wrong you can't just demonstrate that bad people are associated with it, you have to demonstrate that supporting it actually harms people somehow. AW itself does not fetishize rape or encourage rape fetishization.
Also: The sound of gunfire is on the screen, the source of the gunfire is not. The plume of smoke is onscreen, its source is not. The explosion is heard onscreen, but its cause is not. Nor is any report of what their cause might be shown on screen (it's not "so-and-so totally blew up a car" or whatever). An onscreen announcement is made to show something going wrong offscreen, giving the players an opportunity to investigate and thwart it, as opposed to the MC informing players that they are actively under attack right now.
Also, also: Countdowns are leading up to "something bad happening." In the case of the one DSM posted, Uncle getting shanked or something. They are explicitly not inevitable:
Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer
makes sense, just scribble it out.
