My normal Apocalypse World crew was down a player this week, so I ran Lady Blackbird for 'em. It was my first time running the game (and we all had a blast), but I got rather confused when playing the characters not chosen as NPC's, specifically in regards to having them do things that are contentious.
Here's a concrete example from last night:
Snargle wasn't chosen by any of the players, but he's the pilot. So when it came time to escape from the Hand of Sorrow in The Owl, the players were of course expecting Snargle to do it. This was tricky for me. I'm playing Snargle as an NPC in a situation where I would definitely be making the players roll to find out what happens and I wasn't quite sure how to handle that mechanically. The way I saw it I had three options:
- Just decide, arbitrarily or via coin flip. I did this once and it felt thoroughly unsatisfying.
- Have another player roll, and give him/her all the dice from the activated Traits/Tags. This is what I did most often.
- I roll as if I'm a player. I actually hadn't considered doing this at the time, but in retrospect it probably makes the most sense.
In either case, I'm still guessing as to what I'm "supposed" to do. Anyone know?