nerdwerds: comfortable curmudgeon

Advanced Apocalypse World

Apocalypse World is what I would call a narrative role-playing game because success-failure always leads to narrative and fictional consequences for acting. Threats are capable of operating with narrative clocks that advance when players miss rolls, but what if the clocks were literally clocks. You find out Dremmer is trying to overthrow Gibbs, but not acting on that doesn't delay it, the MC sets a timer for when Dremmer accomplishes his goals and those things will happen if the players focus their attention elsewhere.

"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice."
Fronts are no longer abstract countdowns, now they're dated ones. A front advances on its schedule whether or not the PCs are looking at it. Not acting is a choice with a cost, which AW currently only simulates through MC discipline.
Costs are added to everything every day offscreen (travel, workspace projects, healing, gang recovery, reputation repair, etc.) so now "I'll deal with that later" has a price tag.
Every season gets a scarcity clock. Water, ammo, fuel, medicine each have a scarcity rating that can ratchet with use. This is the psychological maintenance AW already asks the MC to do by feel, but now you have hard lines delineating when things will run out.

"You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife."
Playbooks are removed, replaced by Origin which gives you a debt and gear. Moves remain, and there are big moves and small moves; big moves are things like Leadership and Workspace and an Angel Kit, and you get one big move and one small move to start.
Advancement becomes longer, not necessarily harder, but stat increases and advances moves need to alternate, advanced moves arrive later.

"Out of the blue and into the black, They give you this, but you pay for that"
AW already has a robust tag system, but now it's expanded. Every piece of gear has a condition, and repair costs time. Every pile of ammo gets a 4-segment clock (clocks are still better than counting bullets). Barter is de-fungibled, split into food, fuel, ammo, medicine, and luxury; nobody trades medicine for luxury at par during a fever season. This alone generates more complexity than anything else.

"And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking."
Some moves alter completely because a session is no longer an episode, you could move from minute to minute between sessions rather than days or weeks or months. The clocks define time moving forward, not the moves or the sessions.
Start of session moves model states rather than events. These need to be replaced to model events and thus, they gain time limits. For Wealth specifically, the state it models is standing discipline and loyalty in a holding and that degrades faster than supply does. A week is long enough that it isn't a chore, short enough that armed people don't drift for a month unremarked.
Wealth: If your hold is secure and your rule unchallenged, after a week has passed roll+hard. On a 10+, you have surplus at hand and available for your needs during the next 7 days. On a 7–9, you have surplus for the next 7 days, but choose 1 want. On a miss, or if your hold is compromised or your rule contested, your hold is in want.
Narrative consequences remain, but time becomes the factor for rolling. If a leader fails to roll after a week, like say if they're gone from the holding for more than a week, then a -1forward could be applied for each segment of time they are missing from the hold - or maybe after a certain amount of time their holding is simply contested.
The MC might demand a roll if the fiction dictates. Under advanced rules some rolls aren't optional.

#Apocalypse World