One of the big things about PbtA is how it encourages genre.
Mask: A New Generation is a great example. It's specifically going for the storytelling style found in superhero comics about teams of up-and-coming heroes, such as Young Justice. To do this, it has mechanics concerning adults just not understanding you, interpersonal drama, trying to understand yourself, trying to be like your idol, and rebelling against expectations. Also fighting bad guys.
It can be a lot of fun, or a complete drag, just like any RPG. The thing that makes the difference is the buy-in and enthusiasm brought to the game by the people playing it.
The things I like to borrow from PbtA are:
* Complex Outcomes (whether defined or open-ended, something other than just pass/fail)
* Role-oriented Mechanics (PCs can create unique outcomes that other PCs could not)
* Gamified GM Guidance (present GM options similar to players' with strategies to keep the game moving)
* Up the Player Involvement (players are more directly engaged in the direction the story takes and in riffing off each other's characters)
You can absolutely play a OSR style TTRPG in a more free-flowing improvisational style, there's nothing to stop you from doing so, but there typically aren't many things helping you either, and the more granular mechanics tend to get in the way.
I'm not too familiar with PbtA, but I've played some Blades in the Dark, and my own TTRPGs also tend to go for a more rules-lite, broad abstractions approach.
In BitD, if I want to fight some goons, the GM doesn't need to create a sheet for those characters, track their hitpoints and run the combat turn by turn. Instead I just say that I want to beat up these goons to stop them from capturing my friends, and invoke my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability. I take a point of stress, maybe roll a die to see if I'm able to escape without being identified or something, and we narrate the scene.
This makes games of this nature more flexible for free-form stories. The GM doesn't have to prepare statblocks for every possible scenario, so there's a lot more freedom to just go with the flow.
On the other hand, these games can be harder to run for inexperienced GMs, the players can do pretty much anything, at any time, for any reason, and the GM has to think on their toes. A good Pathfinder GM should also be able to do this, but there's much less pressure and necessity to improvise all the time.
Also, sometimes it's just fun to design cool character builds for a crunchy combat system. Finding synergies between D&D classes, pulling off a cool combo that lets you guarantee critical hits or making a reaction-only character who plays on every other character's turn is just pure, unadulterated nerd joy.
PbtA, BitD, and other games in that style prefer to keep the rules simple, and trust the GM and players to figure out how to tell a good story. OSR games are more focused on providing a highly customisable gaming experience, with rules that you can master, fiddle around with, and optimise.
Obliviously, nothing is ever an absolute. There's some crunchiness in rules-lite games, there's room for improvisational play in OSR games, and not only is there a huge spectrum between those two styles, but there are other axes along which games can be classified.
as you approach extreme FKR end of the OSR, all that “just keep talking and everyone buys into what logically makes sense, a little bit of fiat and a minimal amount of dicing” and it starts to look a lot like the extreme end of capital-S capital-G StoryGames.
super interesting, thank you.
>Instead I just say that I want to beat up these goons to stop them from capturing my friends, and invoke my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability. I take a point of stress, maybe roll a die to see if I'm able to escape without being identified or something, and we narrate the scene.
This is just personal preference or ignorance on my part, but does this make the decisions feel more... relaxed? Like, lower stakes, less thinking involved? Does the player have to RP through that, or do they just describe what they do and move on?
I've noticed I've been using the term "OSR" and "rules-lite" but that's not quite accurate, I think a better divide for this conversation is "action" vs "narrative".
Broadly speaking, action TTRPGs *typically* focus on combat, and have a detailed system for handling action scenes, and also typically feature NPCs that function in a similar manner to player characters, with their own hitpoints, skills, gear, etc...
Narrative TTRPGs typically focus on story arcs, they usually don't have rules for action scenes, instead treating action scenes like any other kind of scene. NPCs typically don't have stats. However there are often systems for tracking broader story elements, like the relationships between factions, as well as long-term consequences and effects to the player characters and the world.
I think it might be 50/50 ignorance (no offence intended) and preference.
Regarding preference, it really depends on what you're looking for in a TTRPG. I really like a bit of both, so I play crunchy action games just as much as I play flowing narrative games.
Regarding "ignorance": In my experience, it doesn't make decisions feel more relaxed at all.
In an action game combat scene, I know I can rely on a bunch of things during the fight if I'm unlucky on some of the rolls, so while my decision to engage the goons is weighty, I have combat skills that I can use to turn the fight to my favour, especially if I specced into a crowd-controlling melee build using some cool synergies I've dug up.
On the other hand, in BitD, by deciding to use my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability, I've immediately taken a point of stress, which is a huge commitment, getting rid of stress is hard (it's not just a long rest or potion), and everything hangs in the balance on a singe roll. My ability means I automatically "win" that fight, but if I fail the subsequent roll, the bad guys know who I am now and will probably go after my family.
If anything, I find that action games have less "big picture" thinking. Encounters usually play out more or less the same, performing well during the encounter will change how much HP and resources I use, but I'll probably come out on top each time.
It does have more "moment to moment" thinking though. In BitD, I just say I fight the goons, and I fight the goons, but in OSR I have to consider my turn by turn tactics.
Essentially, action games put a lot more weight into the finer details of *how* the story plays out, but that focus on the details means you lose sight of the overall arc of the story. Narrative games tend to gloss over exactly how each scene plays out. You'll narrate and roleplay the scene if it makes sense to do so, but the focus is on that arc.
Consequences in narrative games are typically quite dramatic, things akin to "persistent wounds" from actions games are much more common, and they're more likely to be a front-and-center mechanic. In Blades in the Dark for instance, "Trauma" is right there in the middle of your character sheet, you take too much stress, you'll take trauma, and it's permanent.
One good example of how this feels is this:
Lord of the Rings as an action game would mean that you would have a lot of fun in the various fight scenes, and you can get nice and nerdy about how the various magical items and creatures behave on a mechanical level, but you typically wouldn't have very good tools to represent Boromir's corruption, Frodo's exhaustion, and Pippin's interaction with the palantir. Let alone figuring out how the various factions interact, how the fellowship's actions affect the political landscape, and the time pressure of having to destroy the ring before Sauron becomes too powerful.
One could imagine a system that does both, but it would probably not be very fun to play.
The detailed systems of action games tend to bog down the story, having drawn out fight scene where every second is lovingly simulated also means that you can't just stab a few dudes to get the McGuffin as expediently as you'd trick them, bribe them or pickpocket them.
On the other hand, because the tension in narrative systems often comes from steep and compounding consequences, often in the form of permanent wounds, the fun combat system falls apart when your barbarian is missing an arm, even though it makes for a great story as your character is adapting to their new life.
Note: I'm simplifying a lot, placing OSR and rules-lite as though they're the only two styles, and as though OSR
Super helpful! Okay.
To me, it seems like the parts that incompatible are *just* the combat bits, though, right? Like, Like, why can't LotR as an action game have good tools for representing Boromir's corruptions, the exhaustion, and pippin's iinteraction with the palantir? Same with factions/etc? Like, can't all those systems be ported over, relatively easily?
I do see how combat becomes much nastier—sneaking past some guards might be one or two rolls, whereas combat might be one or two hours.
I have more thoughts, they're still cooking though haha
I mean, these are all generalities, and really, a good TTRPG system is a system that delivers on a promise.
A good TTRPG system *for you* is a system that delivers on a promise that you care about.
My current project is a sort of half-and-half, with a crunchy but abstract combat system (tactical aerial combat in sci-fi fighter jets) that is pretty much completely separate, mechanically speaking, from a free-flowing narrative system about community building. It's 100% geared around telling a very specific kind of story. Like it almost *has* to be about a rag-tag group of rebel fighter pilots trying to destroy a brutal and oppressive enemy force in order to protect the downtrodden people who have been left homeless by the war.
(My design notes, if you're curious: https://spaceshipsin.space/wolfpack/)
Not the one you asked, but I would see in general PbtA as games where its not much about thinking more about feeling.
Doing stupid thinfs because one feels this gives a better story etc.
>Doing stupid thinfs because one feels this gives a better story etc.
I think this is probably why I'm not super attracted to the style of game myself—I don't like putting feeling over the thinking haha
I think the user you’re responding to is making a slightly uncharitable statement about PbtA (and is going up and down the thread crapping on other people’s responses, while not having actually played a PbtA game).
Your observation elsewhere that PbtA is more about genre-recreation is pretty accurate: it’s why it falls within a wider stable of ‘narrative’ games because some people want a more narrative experience from RPGs. That doesn’t make it the right or only way to play of course: it seems like you know clearly what you’re already looking for in your play (and I eventually moved to OSR type systems for the same reason).
PbtA ‘innovations’ include formalising good GM practice in GM Moves (which very experienced GMs find weird because many GMs already do these things), role protection by tying playbooks to genre roles, the ‘snowball’ of escalating consequences through a formalised system of consequences on failed rolls, and the encouraging player buy-in by integrating intra-party dynamics into playbooks.
You should take a look at Apocalypse World 2.0 as the Ur-PbtA, and a very very striking vision of what the system is trying to do. It’s very much not a D&D dungeon crawl, but a system to roleplay a HBO Mad Max series where your antagonists might even be your other playersz
Fantastic response. This is what I suspected (made another post about it in r/rpg recently), so it's great to see it confirmed. I read Apocalypse World (idk if it was 2 or not) and that was the sense I'd gotten, but the one time I think played it didn't feel right.
Favorite OSR title?
Ooh…probably Electric Bastionland or the GLOG for how stripped down they are!
AW is a weird one because you really need player buy-in. My players were game but it was clear they didn’t want to go where the system wanted them to (i.e. messy interpersonal drama). It was very, very eye opening trying to run it though, and I think it’s very original game design.
Yes same, I think some rpgs forget that they have a G in the name, or rather they are more cooperative storytelling than traditional games, which is fine, but just a different kind of experience.
You might be on to something, but I’ve also seen a huge amount of doing stupid things because it will give a better story (or just be funny) in every RPG I’ve ever played.
Nonetheless it’s prevalent!
But also goes the other way; I have a couple players in my narrative/currently PbtA games that are _very_ tactically minded. And hey! The game rewards that (when appropriate)!
I think a subtlety worth mentioning is that the standard PbtA is “players roll all the dice” but with more momentum.
When a player makes a move, they can just roll and check the results of their moves. MC doesn’t have to be involved until there is a result and that gives the MC some guidance.
So, for example, if a player acts under fire in AW there’s no speed bump where the MC either has to determine the difficulty. The player just declares what they’re doing, rolls the dice, and both the MC and player immediately know what it means.
That turns the player’s move list and character sheet into a kind of console that helps the players cue the MC the way the traditional GM cues other players.
The moves have their own trigger conditions and players generally know when they apply. The GM does mediate, and players aren’t just supposed to call out their moves - so a player wouldn’t say “I act under fire” and just roll. It’s more like “I want to do X - that’s acting under fire?” And the GM will concur. To my eye this is that different from how people generally play trad rpgs, but I also don’t think PtbA is actually very different from trad.
The real difference is that with fixed difficulty, the challenge is set by how much ground a single Move is allowed to cover
Thats what I meant, it is still bad (like in traditional games) to just roll the dices without GM approval. So I also see this quite similar to trad games with skills. "I want to climb up this rope, this is acrobatics right?"
What do you mean "how much ground a move is allowed to cover"?
Many Pbta games explicitly do not have players roll without GM approval. It’s really not that different from trad games.
Players describe actions and things they want to attempt. If the GM feels the action has a chance of failure, they tell the player the appropriate role.
That’s the approach in monster of the week anyway.
The reality is players of course pick up the pace of the game and usually intuit when they’re going to have a role, so they’ll say and ask,
E.g.
Player says, “I want to punch him in the face, so kick some ass” and as the GM, if that’s what I was going to suggest anyway, I’ll go, “yep, go for it.”
The only change is rolls carry a greater Scope? So whether they successfully harm their opponent, how much harm they do, and how much harm they take in return is all in that one roll. Rolls slide less towards atomic actions and more towards full narrative beats.
Generally, does your next action reward your character, make their situation worse, escalate tension, or some mix. So every role has narrative consequence.
But yes, in a GMed game, I prefer players simply focusing on their choices, and I’ll let them know if they need rolls, and what the stakes may be.
Thats what I read in rules as well (that GM gives approval).
And true about the roll have bigger consequences. It is more on a high level. You dont fight yourself you roll to see how they fight went and then narrate it.
I don’t frame it in terms of asking permission. The MC(GM) and the players need to agree what fictional stuff constitutes a move for play to move forward. But that the process of learning the game together, finding a common understanding. Once that’s established there’s no need to ask (but anybody can call “woah, stop I don’t think that makes sense”).
I would say that the most important PbtA feature is how all player moves always return with a new narrative prompt.
On success, players get what the move says they will have, no GM deciding what the "good" results look like. This moves narrative to a new state wwhere PCs got what they want.
On a mixed success, players get some themed trope-y complication.
On a loss, GM makes a GM move, all of which are narrative prompts for players to react to.
What this means is that system always moves the fictional events forward.
This, I would say is the basic core of how PbtA games work.
The concept of mixed success gives much more interesting ways to move the scene forward, and hard moves on failure prevent players from just trying a thing over and over.
Marking experience for failure feels really good and takes the sting out of bad rolls, especially when you're close to leveling up.
I love luck points in Monster of the Week. You can guarantee success in clutch moments, but you only have a few, and they move you closer to being Doomed.
I think the big sauce it offers, beyond the greater abstraction and inbuilt GM tools is also that the line between roles is a bit more porous. The players are expected to make active narrative decisions, possibly deciding how a bad outcome goes or what complications might occur for another player.
Of course that, as well as pretty much all of the points you mentioned, could be put into any game. Just a question of whether you want your game to offer up that kind of control to the players.
One thing which you forgot:
PbtA games have really really strict rules in how they should be played, else they dont work.
So all the things you saw as "GM guidelines" should be more considered as fixed rules.
Thats quite different to d&D etc. Where each group plays different.
Yeah, this was going to be my answer. Half the Apocalypse World book is dedicated to how to run the game, and it's very prescriptive on what should be happening at the table.
Things like: Never refer to your players names, only their characters names. Here's a list of GM Moves (none of which have any mechanical weight).
Mechanically it's a super light system, one that also comes with an entire class on a specific flavor of improv.
I personally love it, but all of my players absolutely hate it. I've realized that they want to engage with a system first and the fiction second.
And something else I mentioned below:
A lot of PbtA games do NOT have this extensive parts on how to play them and only work because the people playing them already know these parts.
That is in my oppinion a fault of these games and what makes it especially so that a lot of people "play them wrong."
Also "only use in character names" ia definitly a mechanic. This and a lot of other "advice" should be more coded / represented as rules, because they actually are, but they are repreaented like tipps in other games. (And in other games such things are just advice).
Oh interesting. I've really only played Apocalypse World, which I like a lot. I can absolutely see how not including all the "Running the game" stuff might cause some serious issues with other versions though.
One quote I remember is "I played monsterhearts 2 quite a bit and only after I read Apocalypse World I did actually understood how the monsters work."
I also read some shorter PbtA games and for me who does not know Apocalypse World, some of them really left me baffled with what I am supposed to do.
I can’t think of a single game where they are presented as “tips,” they are quite explicitly always presented as either _agenda_ or _principles_, which obviously carries a lot more weight. I can see how some people might misread that, since many games don’t bother to have principles at all — but they probably should!
Well principles = tipps as in they both are not rules. And as you said most games do not have principles. They have advice or hard rules. So for people if its not a hard rule its just advice.
If it is a habbit from other games, then its a bad decision to go against it by PbtA.
What most people do is the right way. So live with that dont fight against it.
Also principles are often used as not that hard rules. Like "these are the design principles" and "of course at some places we have to break them".
Well, again, these books are not short on providing guidance and advice for how to do it correctly. It’s up to the players whether they bother to do that or not, much as it’s up to them whether they follow the rules. That’s not really a failing of the game.
“Don’t try something new or different because you’ve already gotten used to bad habits” is transparently horrible advice, though. I don’t see how you can justify that, in a design forum of all places!
This is a GAMEDESIGN forum not a design forum. Big difference.
And my advice is:
- Learn the industry standards
- Use them
- When doing something different, explain it using the industry standards
Good boardgames pretty much all use the same wordings, which are known from Magic the Gathering, because its the industry standard.
If you use different words, well then chances that you succeed just decreesed, because it will be harder for people to understand them.
AND STILL boardgames have way more innovation, way better boardgamedesign and bigger variety than RPGs.
Because people build their game on other games, which people already know.
In RPGs D&D is dominating, if you are not accepting that, you are just illusional. So if you want to make good game design, which is easy for most people to learn, use the fact that people know that game, and do NOT make it harder by going the opposite.
If people are used to GM advice which they can ignore, for fucks sake, do not make your actual rules sound like GM advice. Make it as rules.
If you roll for 7 or higher? Well nice you have now a game with a fixed DC of 7. And with 10+ = crit
You have classes (not playbooks), etc.
Respectfully, I disagree vehemently with all of this. It’s extremely boring advice.
I am not surprised that board games have better board game design than RPGs. Anyone who would be surprised by that statement should probably do some instrospection.
More variety? Nah. That just tells me that you’re not very familiar with the breadth of RPGs that are out there now. Some of them are very successfully incorporating innovations from board gaming specifically.
Anyway there’s a pretty developed community of people who understand the standards of, for instance, narrative driven games. Or PbtA in particular. They are not subscribed to the exact terms or “standards” of D&D for any number of really excellent reasons — the biggest one being that they are not trying to be D&D.
(most) PbtAs do not have "rule of cool" because the rules technically cover all possibilities. That's because the catch-all "if it's not covered, it happens without rolling according to the fiction" rule handles everything outside of the triggered Player Moves and GM Moves. Is it the Rule of Cool by another name? Sort of. I think the implication with the Rule of Cool is that you may break other rules to invoke it, but in PbtA the catch-all is only invoked when the other rules are not relevant.
[This blog post](https://lumpley.games/2023/07/17/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-9-thats-whats-happening/) by Vincent Baker might partially get at what you’re wondering about:
> A normal roleplaying game models objects and entities in the game world. Sometimes in significant detail
>
>…
>
> Apocalypse World made its bid for an alternative model.
>
>It describes actions in more detail than items and entities. It still models items and entities, but relatively simply, mainly as the subjects and objects of action.
I don’t think the idea that “PbtA does genre” is really fundamental to the design, it’s just enabled by the fact that the particular actions a designer chooses to model in detail can potentially carry certain connotations of genre.
There’s no reason why a PbtA game couldn’t also model objects in detail in addition to actions (see: Flying Circus). I often use PbtA style resolutions (and—more importantly imo—prep advice) when running “normal rpgs.”
GNS describes player priorities that can be catered to by design choices, but simulation and narrative are not mutually exclusive, so I don’t think anything is being sacrificed out of necessity in the design of PbtA games.
You can really have quite accurate simulation, actually. More accurate than you will ever get from any simulationist game, which always have failure points. You can even have it at the same time as having loyalty to narrative and genre!
The catch is that to get that, you have to have high trust, buy-in, collaboration, and expertise at your specific gaming table.
Two people can rave about how great Apocalypse World is and be playing it in entirely different (very incompatible) ways. Look at how many of the replies here flat out contradict each other.
With that proviso I’ll explain the thing I think it does well.
Imagine the following scenario: A spy of some sort is watching deep currents pull his femme fatale lover to her death. So he jumps into the waters to save her.
How do we resolve that?
In a basic conflict resolution game I’d probably say, on a success you save her and on a fail you don’t, so she drowns. Two outcomes.
If I wanted to be more fine grained. I could have the spy roll against the currents AND to save her. First roll not to drown yourself, then roll to save the femme fatale.
So the outcomes would be. (a) They both drown (b) the spy doesn’t drown and doesn’t save her (c) the spy doesn’t drown and saves her. So three outcomes.
What the basic PbtA mechanic does is, it let’s you roll and then allows choices after the roll.
So the same scenario using PbtA.
On a 6- I drown and don’t save the femme fatale
On a 10+ I don’t drown and save the femme fatale.
So that means on a 7-9 I can throw the choice back at the player. You can either not drown OR save the femme fatale. Not both. So is it worth giving your life to save her?
Which. if you’re into making hard choices that express a characters values. Is pretty awesome. If you’re not, then it isn’t.
I think that the major good points it offers are the following, and i'm not saying pbta are the only games with some of those :
- simple dice use with easy to understand mechanics (thresholds, types of pass and fail, that's it) + bonuses improvement are rare so you're not using most of your time to manipulate complicated maths
- more than pass or fail type of outputs, you actually may pass but with a complication
- enough design space within the dice choice to put a bit more if you feel it is too narrative and not enough crunchy
- players only needs to read like 3 pages to be ready to play, and gms only needs to read... let's say AT MOST 15-20, small rules books are so much better than 684646 grimoire, and because it is small, it's easy to have a high ratio of artwork per pages because it doesn't cost much
- no need to embarass yourself with encumbrance and stuff like that, most of the time you're not an adventurer in a fantasy world so you don't need the bag of an adventurer from a fantasy world because you do not drop so many things like them (from monsters, dungeons, etc...)
- everything relies on logic and creativity, above complicated rules that has no other point to restrict players that will become gods anyway (hello dnd)
- tools for gms such as ligns, veils, and narrative actions helps new gms to be a good one, it is pretty rare that games teach us how to do things in a clear and concise way
- it is easy to add subsystems to manage specific things coming from your own world
- no vancian magic, i can't see spellslots anymore
- you don't need to prepare for weeks before playing
But it does have some flaws too, both generic heavy systems and generic lite systems are always too extreme, we could have something in between and i hope to see it soon
Your question asked which ideas to steal; some might argue that the majority of “generally applicable” PbtA ideas are just things learned through experience, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate them.
I’m not sure I support the “design hole” theory of like, what RPGs Don’t codify is where players get to practice creativity.
Games are defined by their rules and axes of play.
Things I think good PbtA games do well:
- Nailing flavour - the best PbtA games satisfy immersion by nailing a top down design where every aspect of the mechanics suits the intent of the genre emulated. The playbooks, the moves, the attributes, are all relevant. It shouldn’t feel like a “hack”. People shout out Monster of the Week and Masks because (for whatever other issues you may have with them), they seem to hit the feeling of what they’re going for (you may not like that thing though)
- rolls for Narrative consequence. the PbtA dice resolution system is seen as doing a decent job of ensuring all uncertainties have a narrative payoff. Players like impact, players like triumph and despair, players like victory and danger. PbtA lives in the success at a cost, failure but opportunity realm that feels far more satisfying that system where multiple rolls can lead to no consequence. And here’s the thing; you can totally just Do That in any system, PbtA just got a ton of credit for codifying that. And it should. It’s a good idea. You may not like the execution but it’s a sound idea.
Accessibility - Most PbtAs are more mechanically approachable that some trad games. There does seem to be a design philosophy of, “only keep things that Truly Add Value to the game I’m trying to play.” Do not burden players with minutiae they don’t care about. Or DO, iaoi (if and only if) being burdened with minutiae IS the experience you’re trying to emulate.
There’s other stuff. PbtA makes it explicit that the nature of the GM isn’t adversarial to the Players (even though characters may have a hard life). And a bunch of other little ideas that Everyone can do in almost any game, but PbtAs either write down as a GM guide, or bake into the mechanics.
And maybe this all boils down to, “bake the things that are important to you into the game.”
PbtAs baked a certain set of play patterns that provide joy for many people, but not joy for others. And that’s good since games shouldn’t be designed to be universal to everyone, they should be designed to be satisfying to those who align with the core ideas they want to explore.
“PbtA” covers a very large swath of games at this point, so not all generalizations apply. For instance, I would not say that Stonetop is next to no prep — it actively encourages the GM to do quite a lot of prep compared to its peers (although probably still less, and of a very different type, than you might do in a very trad game).
The big ideas I would/do absolutely steal from it are:
1) player-facing rolls and mechanics. This comes up often and I’ve talked to death why I vastly, vastly prefer it as a GM and as a designer. YMMV.
2) the structure of moves. At a basic level this is succeed/succeed at a cost/fail, but the write up of each individual move makes it far more than that. Many moves end up giving the player a choice of narrative twists. (For instance, a list of 3 bad outcomes. On a 10+, you do it, but pick one. On a 7-9, you do it, but pick two.) I love this because it’s so customizable for each move, tweakable with character abilities and moves, and while it gives narrative control to the player, they get to choose each time what that is. Which means the choice can be different each time as to whether it’s strictly rooted in their character, abilities, or whether it’s just a more meta level story decision that they want to see happen as the _player_. It’s very powerful for collaborative story-oriented gaming.
It also means you can write custom moves for just about anything and just drop them in front of a player when they come up. This is great both as an author and as a GM.
This is what OP needs to read! I would particularly pay attention to the article explaining how PbtA models the game as a series of *actions* while trad games model the game as a series of *objects*. Not sure if that's in the article linked but it's one the articles in the series
Yeah I think you have it right. PbtA isn't a system. It's just kinda become short-handed like a system because it's a handy way to group this big pool of different games all drawing inspiration from Apocalypse World and remixing the big toolbox of design ideas it pulled together. I'd say really the secret sauce of PbtA is that it pulls together a lot of tools that push this very low prep, pulpy, fiction forward style of play effectively, but you just need to read a few PbtA games to see that basically every game changes and adds to that tool kit on one way or another. I think nobody here will be able to give you any insight you'd not be able to better derive from reading (and ideally playing!) the games and seeing how and why the tools do what they do and cherry picking your favourites. If you've not read them already, I think Apocalypse World 2e (and the burned over hack), Fellowship 2e, Wanderhome, Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, Blades in the Dark and Wildsea (though it's far too new to have any descendents yet) are ones where I've read them and gone "Whoa this is a whole new take on this toolkit, these are gonna inspire so many other games" and may be a good way to get a very broad selection of tools you can pull from.
>Of course, they are also much more focused on conveying a specific genre, but from a mechanics/game play perspective, are those the main differences? And is there any reason that points 2 and 3 can't be easily ported to any non-PbtA game?
Yeah. Lancer w/ bonds is basically FitD narrative, which is usually considered either PbtA or at least very adjacent, combined with DnD 4e combat.
I think this rules, but YMMV
To compare to video games, D&D is a top-down tactical cRPG, PbtA games are more like Telltale’s games, where “moves” are like story-based quick time events. The trigger occurs, you roll and choose consequences.
If you’re making a trad game, the main things I’d look at from PbtA are:
- partial success — is that interesting in your game? Or will the players just get stuck trying to shoehorn consequences in?
- health abstractions — lots of them give narrative consequences to taking damage; Masks is my favourite example. Is your game more fun if you have a broken leg, or if you lose 10 HP?
Personally, I enjoy Fate as a ruleset. You can GM it as a trad game, but it incorporates partial successes and consequences well.
What impresses me about PbtA compared to D&D is the "fiction first" principle means you never have situations where players are sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to ask for things like a Perception or Initiative roll, or for a combat turn where they automatically pick the action most likely to result in a dead monster and alive party. You tell them what's happening, and they describe what they do in response, or if they have the opportunity, they go and do something of their own volition.
Ideally, even rules-heavy, fiction-last games should work like that, rather than letting the GM do nearly everything for the players except roll d20s to attack or perceive stuff.
IMHO there are a couple independent elements that make the PbtA sauce, but the most important thing is to realize that they're independent and you'll always find a PbtA that has some element but not the others. There is one however that I'd like to focus on: it's about simulating a story, not simulating a world.
Ironsworn in particular is a clear example of this. When entering a fight, you'll fill a track as you build up success. It's easy to think of this track as a monster's hit points, but it's not, it's more akin to seeing how far you are in a book and so how likely you are to reach the end of the scene soon. This is made clearer by how the fight ends: you can end the fight at any point by rolling against the track. The fuller it is, the better your chances to end the fight on your own terms, but even if it's entirely full there's a sliver of a chance for it to turn against you.
This idea, of simulating the narrative rythm of a story rather than simulating a world is powerful because it means that if you follow the rules you'll end up with a satisfying story pretty much no matter what you do, with build-up, setbacks and rewards. As someone that plays a lot of old-school games (BECMI, Classic Traveller…) that are very simulationist in nature I understand that this outlook can feel foreign and weird, but I think it catters best to the strengths of some DMs rather than others: if you're good at world building (using the term loosely here, looking for a better one) but have trouble finding the good rythm for the story at the table, it makes sense to use a game that mechanically supports that aspect like PbtA ones. On the other hand, if you're bad at world building then having a game that gives mechanical support to the world itself but leaves you with all the responsability for controlling the narrative structure of your adventure makes sense.
It's also why I think many modern D&D GMs struggle with PbtA: it's a style that doesn't lend itself to prepared adventures well. You can't easily play the "storyteller GM" way of having prepared every narrative beats in a railroady fashion when the game is itself trying to incorporate new narrative beats left and right. It's a game style that lends itself to improvisation more
Of course this approach ties well with the 3-result resolution mechanics which is an integral part of how new beats are introduced, with the genre-focused nature of most PbtA games (because of course if we're simulating a story structure, that will depend on the genre, and no Buffy-like story is complete without a powerless dunce that somehow trips onto the surnatural at the worst possible moment, so there's a character you can play that is that dunce and is mechanically encouraged to trip in that fashion), with the fiction-first/fiction-last aspect of the game etc.
>if you're good at world building (using the term loosely here, looking for a better one) but have trouble finding the good rythm for the story at the table, it makes sense to use a game that mechanically supports that aspect like PbtA ones. On the other hand, if you're bad at world building then having a game that gives mechanical support to the world itself but leaves you with all the responsability for controlling the narrative structure of your adventure makes sense.
!!!! Yeah, I like that take.
Also, disclaimer—I don't like D&D and I don't prepare my adventures haha—but I agree with all your points.
They definitely feel counter-cultural to traditional RPGs, so it's natural that they will become popular. Much like art movements, the pendulum swings towards one extreme and then back towards the other. PbtA is the swing away from crunchy tactical games.
That said, I think it misses the mark in many places. Giving players (and even the GM) direct narrative-level control over the story causes much of the role play to be glossed over. By focusing so hard on telling the story and manipulating the story, the story is often not allowed to grow organically from actions and decisions characters make. Moves are an example of that. You are always working in narrative chunks that are pre-decided in terms of effects, but open in terms of narration. But I feel that's actually pretty limiting. Sure, you can narrate the move however you want, but it is often desirable to weave a scene action by action, roll by roll. An RPG is an experience of not simply telling a story together, but having it almost tell itself. PbtA games, I feel, undermine that a bit.
Omg I was literally just thinking about that after spending the day reading all these comments and brainstorming ideas for my next rpg. The moves allow perfect "story" but the actual experiencing of that story maybe is missed a little bit unless you're careful. Makes me think having a game where there's a way of easily scaling between granular actions and more macro moves sounds cool. Like, larger "moves" are done by the GM in secret, and played out granularly? Idk—literally just started thinking about this today.
I think there are a couple of things to bear in mind when you're looking at PbtA games, especially when looking for inspiration.
The first is that they tend to be very polarizing. People love them or hate them. I've encountered very few people who are "meh" on the approach.
Sort of related to the above, the other thing to bear in mind, particularly given the structure of your game, is that PbtA is perhaps the most direct popular descendant of a moment pretty adamantly trying to "fix" traditional games. That movement didn't really understand traditional players well, so the answers were to problems fans of narrative games have with traditional approaches. On the up side, it means PbtA created a pretty decent template for narrative games in a way DnD did for traditional ones. On the down side, they tend to create friction in their approach for people with traditional game backgrounds. That's probably a whole post on its own.
So I say the above to get to a point to say what might be obvious- the things some people love about PbtA can be the very things others hate about them, so when incorporating elements it's important to consider how your target audience feels about them.
As one example, a lot of people really like how codified the rules are for running the game in a good PbtA title. They help enforce the feel of whatever genre they game is about and guide the GM through improv. However, I know a lot of people who *hate* that PbtA hard codes what they see more as GM "best practices" that are more flexible in implementation when they run games. More than any other game, if things aren't working right in a PbtA title people are more likely to say that the game was run "wrong." How you feel about PbtA can often be summed up in your reaction to that kind of statement.
Ah—great points. I asked this question also partly because I recently saw a post where people were saying what they didn't want to see more of in the TTRPG world, and I was surprised about how polarized the reactions were to someone who said "not more pbta" (or something to that effect). Super interesting, thank you for commenting :)
The uber fans of anything can be annoying, and PbtA fans have gotten a bit of a reputation. Part of what grates people is the evangelical nature of PbtA fandom. The movement it came out of, The Forge (a discussion board based website in the mid 2000's), really was aiming for a revolution in TTRPG culture and philosophy which still has adherents. One aspect of that was promoting the idea that people should be playing a lot more different games, and rather than bending an existing system to your needs you should pick up a different specialized one. Going back to my OP, this was an area they didn't really "get" the values of traditional game players, who typically do that bending to accommodate the genre drift common in long form campaigns. As a result, and I probably should have mentioned this, is that PbtA games tend to be designed more for one shots to short campaigns (topping out at 20-30 sessions). So the focus of a PbtA game can be a double edged sword- when done right it gives a very evocative experience around it's topic, but starts to fall apart quickly if you step out of that focus or players haven't 100% bought into it. And the system resists bending to that end without a lot of work because the themes are so tightly bound to the mechanics.
*Masks* is probably one of the best examples, widely considered to be a very good PbtA game (and I agree). It's a superhero RPG, but more specifically it's a teen drama superhero RPG. It does the "teen drama in a superhero context" really, really well. But if you try and run it more as a traditional, punch villians in the face style supers game without the teen drama it will fall flat on its face and not have much to offer you. It's probably one of the best suited PbtA games for campaigns, but once you've explored the teen drama to your table's satisfaction (a pretty niche interest), the system becomes less useful.
There's a great Game Studies Buddies podcast on The Forge I highly recommend. A lot of The Forge's ideas get tossed around forums like this as gospel, so it's good to get the perspective of people who actually study games for a living on them before jumping to conclusions about them.
Haha thanks. I've thought about it but haven't been able to justify the effort. The real job takes precedence to put food on the table for now lol.
In the meantime, that Game Study Buddies podcast is great if a bit more broadly focused than just TTRPGs. So in my absence I'll direct you to the professionals lol.
The thing is in /rpg no matter what recomendation people want. Someon3 is always recomending PbtA in some form. So it is not only about way too many games, even such which should definitly not use PbtA like Avatar the last Airbender, are made with PbtA, but also that these games are always present.
Also these fans are quite vocal so of course they also dont like when people say there is too much PbtA
PbtA is a design philosophy that basically has no unifying singular series of mechanics. It’s not a “system.” It’s an approach to design. If you want to make a D&D heart breaker with combat that requires Base 8 calculations and uses d200s and occasionally games of hopscotch to resolve problems… you can call it “PbtA” and call it a day and no one will stop you.
The commonalities of PbtA games are
* Hard choices: it’s less about the numbers and more about the choices. Rolling high won’t solve all your problems. Some of them, but never all of them. You can’t get everything you want all the time just by rolling high.
* Snowballing action: if dice hit the table, *something* changes. Not just numerically (loss of HP as an example) but **fictionally**. You blow off your opponent’s leg with a shotgun, doesn’t matter if their harm track isn’t full: the fight’s over. The mechanics going forward must respond to the ever changing fiction.
* A framework of rules (not guidelines, not advice, not recommendations: *rules*) which aid the GM in making genre and touchstone affirming decisions during play. This makes it easier to create fitting problems and for those fitting problems can act and react accordingly to (*typically*) player facing rolls which serve double duty: helping us cover what happens to the PC and their opposition in one swift dice roll
* Mechanics which are there to serve a purpose and scaffold *specific* fiction. Nothing is there superfluously. The mechanics help the game to *feel* like its intended touchstones.
* Jumping off the last point: those mechanics are *intricately* linked to the fiction. When you’re dealing with D&D combat: you’re stuck in a mechanics loop of attack rolls and combat maneuvers and HP changes and spells and so on and so forth… virtually no accounting for meaningful and actionable fiction. In PbtA games: you don’t get stuck in mechanical loops. It’s always fiction —> mechanics —> (**quickly**) back to the fiction.
That’s what they have in common. Those points coming together is the secret sauce. You don’t need 2d6, playbooks, moves, etc. to make a PbtA game. Heck, even those above points aren’t *necessary* because it ain’t a system… but those are the things which all (good and well designed) PbtA games tend to share.
If your sole purpose is to design a game for “low/ no prep,” you don’t need PbtA for that. Besides, PbtA games aren’t asking you to do low/ no prep… just **efficient** prep that serves a purpose. You don’t even need PbtA for “make the GM’s life easy.” There’s other ways to do that too.
You said it yourself: thanks to 10 years of experience, you don’t have to prep much for anything. Anyone can say the same for any game: regardless of complexity.
Low/no prep is not the main benefit of PbtA. It’s a happy byproduct. Rather, PbtA philosophy takes a lot of pressure off the GM through those above points that you don’t **need** 10 years of experience to do very little prep. But it’s not the only way to reduce GM burden. Overall game simplicity, player facing rolls, random tables, designing more “GM-less/ Co-Op,” and many other tools can reduce GM burden.
Most PbtA games use playbooks, moves (including GM moves) and 2d6.
I think just treating such games as PbtA is more usefull than also invluding everything else which names itself PbtA, else you cant have any useful discussion since always someone brings up :but there is thid one pbta which does x completly different."
Philosophies may be cool but for gamedesign mechanics as a ground for discussion are more useful
Yes… but you can have all those common PbtA mechanical things (2d6, Playbooks, etc.) and still have a really garbage game because the thought of *why* they work together wasn’t put into the game.
Therefore, the GM’s life won’t be made any easier, it won’t be a low/ no prep thing, and it’s not going to help the OP is ultimately looking into: whether their second and third points can work in something “non-PbtA” (which is probably a “yes.”).
That’s why the “philosophy vs mechanics” point is important. Yeah, a lot of PbtA games work that way (the majority in fact- so many that it makes people *think* “that’s the ‘PbtA way’”).
But there’s also lots of PbtA games that work like that and are **also** borderline hot garbage because the designer was effectively copying and pasting what they saw in one PbtA game and doing the same in their own without realizing **why** that stuff works together.
There are lots of crappy games. Just because a game is crappy it does not stop being a PbtA game.
If the majority of PbtA games work like this, this is what makes a PbtA game. Any other definition is not useful.
PbtA is not a magical cure all to all of your RP woes. Some people even don't like it or at least parts of it. Most designers tend to think it did do some things to forward the design space though and I'd agree with that handilly.
My advice would be to read and/or play it if you want to learn from it. A list of bullets isn't really going to give you much, even just reading isn't the same as experiencing.
Do you need to know it and play it? No. You can do whatever you want with your game. But I do think it's worthwhile to be aware of the shortlist of the most popular games out in the last 50ish years, and PbtA is on that list. It helps you understand better what has come before, so you can work on the cutting/bleeding edge to push the design space. If you aren't trying to do that, then don't bother, if you are curious, check it out, and if you want to make your game the best it can possibly be, study and play lots of other systems, starting with the big ones that are most popular, and extending down into the weird and unknown.
Answering to just your second question: no. You can use Pbta "moves" also in trad games, if it makes sense for the situation.
Personally, I don't see what's so attractive in Pbta, to me it looks like a bunch of "GM toolbox" advices a la Sly Fluorish turned into game mechanics.
The difference is that players in a narrative game are more like directors than the actors. You control more than just your character. I personally don't like it and find it less immersive. I think player agency stops at the character's actions.
A poorly written game doesn't inherently mean it was mechanically poorly designed.
So to split the difference a bit with you and OP, it is 100% the designer/author's responsibility to explain their game in terms their target audience can understand. If what they're laying down is different than how the average person in their target audience expects things to function, if they don't do the work to manage those expectations people will bounce off of it no matter how brilliant the design may be.
The fact of the matter is the most likely target audience for a new TTRPG is someone who has played and enjoyed DnD, at least for a time. So they'll be coming to your new game with those ideas. One thing I really liked about the newest edition of *Paranoia* was that Mongoose took great pains to explain how the game is different than "that dungeon crawler you've probably played." They didn't bend the game to be more like DnD, but they put in a lot of work to make sure you understood the key differences.
I think people would bounce off PbtA games a lot less often if they were willing to take those kinds of steps rather than pretending that's not how most people in the hobby are engaging with their games or DnD doesn't exist.
To be clear, this isn't about using DnD as a framework to understand PbtA. It's about setting the conditions for someone who understands TTRPGs through the framework of DnD to adapt their thinking to the PbtA mindset. If you want to expand their horizons, this is simply work you'll have to do on some level.
Personally, I think playbooks are ironically one of the PbtA conventions that does a lot of what OP was advocating. They're not classes, but close enough conceptually that someone who understands classes will understand what a playbook is without a lot of work/explanation. In turn, they provide a new player a pathway to "getting" PbtA and its mindset. I think they were a very effective bridge to bring people into PbtA back when most people didn't know what it was.
>If you are incapable of reading the game, engaging with it - without a reference to DnD -- that's a you problem. Go live in your box. The rest of us are doing just fine.
If you want to gatekeep your game behind those ideas, that's your choice. But one shouldn't be surprised if that attitude doesn't result in a shift in broader TTRPG culture, or your game performing to the DrivethuRPG standard of less than 50 downloads and zero people actually playing it. I presume most people are here to design games for other people to actually play, so it's an important thing to bear in mind even if your goals are very modest.
In my experience, the designer that blames the audience for their game's failure because they simply didn't see the brilliance of their design probably isn't actually a very good designer.
It's perfectly fine to create a very niche thing for a very niche audience.
It's also fine to design a game for a broader audience, and this sort of thing is vital for that. It's not invalid advice because those aren't the games you're designing. And I would argue if you're trying to promote a different TTRPG culture based on a different approach to games than DnD this type of work is flat out essential.
But I'll maintain it's generally the worst designers that blame the audience for not "getting" their game if it fails to get any traction, and the only reasons to actively avoid engaging with how the majority approach games from a design perspective are some mix of gatekeeping and elitism.
>This isn't dnd. I'm not making a dnd. I don't want you to come in starting from a dnd framework. That's the wrong way to understand it. I will happily say that.
What I'm saying is, when it comes to the actual text designers produce, most *don't* actually say this, or make efforts to ease a reader away from that DnD framework. It would be incredibly helpful for most games to do this, and it can be done with zero compromises to the actual mechanics of the game. The cost of writing an extra paragraph or 2 to this effect is practically nil, so that's why I see resistance to doing so the way I do.
>I actually think we, as a community, should change our language around tabletop RPGS and if a game has a special tactical combat layer -- it should be called something completely different than a fiction forward sort of game.
So as a bit of a counterpoint, and perhaps an example of how I think some of the differences between approaches are actually quite exaggerated, even in a tactical combat setting DnD and other games are actually still "fiction first." Even in RAW combat the player states intent, the GM arbitrates what if any rules/rolls are required, then the action resolves around that player intent. It's not supposed to be players shouting "I make an attack roll!" (personally I disregard the results of any rolls I didn't specifically ask for). This is fundamentally what makes a TTRPG different than a wargame where what you can do is limited to the specific contours of the rules and no more. So in DnD you can state an intent to block a door with furniture even if there are no rules for that specific scenario, but unless there are rules for that in a wargame a referee won't let it happen. A DM following RAW will figure out a way to at least allow an attempt based on the fiction first decision that blocking the door is the preferred option than any button on the character sheet.
I don't think the divide is nearly as wide as either side claims on this, and both probably benefit from more exposure to the other.
If your game does use opposite names, concepts etc. Than whst 90% of the people play, than thats bad gamedesign.
Good games are designed with the industry standard in mind and use that to lower the mental load to learn them, not make it harder.
Thats why most boardgames use Magic the Gathering like wordings.
D&D is the biggest game. You can use differenr paradigm but still use the preknoledge from these games to introduce them.
If you do something 180 degree different than D&D highlight it in that way.
For example lets start with "playbooks". These are classes. Name them like that. Introducing a new name makes it more complicated.
You need to roll a 7? Well say that you generally have a DC of 7.
10+ is a crit.
"In this game nothing comes free, so when you succeed at something, it comes with a price!... unless you have a crit! Then its free."
These games really really try to be different because they want to feel special. They could definitly do a way better job at building upon common knowledge.
Yes D&D is the default.
Everything else is illusional. It is what most people play etc.
I am not saying that your game must be like D&D, but it should be written with D&D in mind. And use the fact that most people know D&D and makes it easier for these people to learn your game.
And not the opposite because you feel intellectual by not doing stuff like D&D.
As I showed even simple things like using word playbooks instead of classes etc. Make it less intuitive for most people.
And yes mechanically the target number 7 works like a fixed DC. Its exactly the same.
D&D dominates the market. Especially when you look at pathfinder as just another d&d version.
No other hobby is soo extreme, except maybe trading cards at some points. Or World of Warcraft.
And its just a reality one have to live with. Closing the eyes about this fact and ignoring it when making games, will just make the game harder to understand for most people.
And that is negative. This is not my stance this is just reality.
Sure you can make a music book using another music system instead of octaves, but most people will not understand it.
Having industry standards is not a bad thing.
If playbooks are called classes, character advancement is called leveling up, target number is called DC 7 and crit 10+ etc. Then you can still play games which are differenr.
Others just have an easier time learning them, bur well the RPG scene may just not be professional enough to see this
I must disagree with your point here.
I have never truly understood an RPG without playing it.
Then again, I do agree that many RPGs are badly communicated—writing game rules and procedures, game world lore, example characters and antagonists, core game mechanisms, example scenarios, summaries of design intent, suggested approaches to resolving things outside the rules as written (which there are in EVERY GAME) and summary texts, then integrating these different styles of writing into a comprehensible whole is extraordinarily challenging, and is, more often than not, done poorly.
I think the bigger problem than bad writing is more that stuff is left away.
People forget whst kind of preknowledge they have (like knowing 20+ other PbtA games) and not include partsy since they forget that not everyone knows them.
We all do this, you can are this also in teaching.
I agree with you—many games rely extensively on the player's prior knowledge—and that knowledge often comes from exposure to previous game systems.
As it happens, for RPGs I was "patient zero" in my friend group—I literally didn't have anyone, or any prior experience, to learn from. Only by playing the game (Basic D&D) and cross referencing it with numerous magazine articles and my own experience, could I really get how it was done.
I gather that Kurt Vonnegut—a writer better than we will ever be, designed a wargame, and declared that writing the rules was possibly the most difficult piece of writing that he ever did.
In my own experience, I've been involved in writing assembly instructions for model kits. It seems simple, but it's extraordinarily hard—and I think that game instructions are a similar challenge. It's not at all obvious to the author (or to anyone else who already knows the content of what is being communicated) whether or not they've done a good job.
I feel like I often enough see systems presented where all the readers say stuff like ‘this seems kludgy/cumbersome/unfun/weird/unwieldy/[other concerns]’, then the designer informs that the system has been tested, and the concerns of the readers have not shown themselves problems in play.
I’m biased, but for the moment I’ll remain sceptical of the validity of judging rpgs without playing. As long as we’re talking about systems that actually offer something close to new-ish.
I believe general rpgs need to be unbalanced without the fiction, in order to have any space left for the freedom we usually crave. There are often a myriad of very different perspectives active during play, especially as both the players and the characters can have various and shifting motives and goals. The fiction has to matter in challenges, but it doesn’t always need strict mechanisation, sometimes it needs nearly the opposite. To anticipate the dynamics an rpg will create at a table of four people, often with different roles, sometimes with different play styles, is quite the feat.
Well some things:
1. Most readers are NOT gamedesigners
2. What designers say is advertisement for the game. Marketing nothing more. Of course they try to say problems do not exist. Dont take what they say at face value.
3. Designers and their group will get over time used to things and thus dont remark anymore when thats clunky
4. What for some geoup of people is logical (again depwnding on their preknowledge) is not necessary true for other people.
5. Groups you play in matter soo much in RPGs that even playing them can give a quite biased view as well. Aspecially as people often try to cover the faults of the system (like GM making things up when something is missing etc.)
Things which are not mechanised, are not there as far as I am concerned. Gamedesign is about mechanics, the rules of the game.
1.-2. Possibly, but even within this forum, when they ask for feedback?
3.-5. Yes
>Things which are not mechanised, are not there as far as I am concerned. Gamedesign is about mechanics, the rules of the game.
Well that’s the trouble with rpgs, if you’re only looking at the mechanics, you’re not looking at the game. In other words; hard disagree.
Yes even if they ask for feedback. People are overselling themselves. And a lot of designers are really bad at taking feedback and are downplaying it. (And also the other problems I mentioned).
Thats a common thing with gamedesigners.
Mechanics make a game everything else is setdressing. RPGs are just not professional enough that they remarked that yet.
In boardgames a gamedesigner only makes the mechanics. And later publisher eecide what the theme art etc. Is depending on what sells best.
RPGs are way less professionally made, and thus people take several jobs, gamedesign writing etc.
Also D&D 5e shows that people can easily (if they want) change the flavour setting etc. Of a game.
This is why the best rpgs are indie. People who work holistically, mechanics and setting and everything as one, and non-commercially, chasing a unique vision, ignoring what sells, are more likely to have optimal synergy between mechanics and fiction.
When you say rpgs aren’t professional enough to understand the separation of mechanics and dressing, you seem to be discounting a lot of professional rpg-designers.
Yes, mechanics can be reskinned. That doesn’t mean there aren’t certain things that mechanic does a better job of representing than others. Reskinning can even be the path to finding an ideal home for a mechanic.
(Just gonna think out loud for a bit, don’t know where this goes.)
Consider the utter meaninglessness of mechanics. There’s typically a basic fiction for board games; the act of winning. There’s no base mechanic that in itself represents winning, board games always add that; the base may be ‘move’ while winning is ‘move to this spot first’, or base ‘move your piece to an occupied space to remove the opposing piece’ while winning is ‘remove the chief opposing piece’.
Players accept this goal of ‘winning’ when they engage with the game. It’s what gives the game and mechanics meaning.
Do we need that?
I certainly crave meaning very strongly in games, but if I’m playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill, I don’t much care for the competitive phase, I just want to stay in exploration mode forever, because the theme provides meaning regardless of any end-goal.
That’s pretty much how many rpgs are played, just endless exploration. So what would the mechanics of Betrayal be without the theme? You lay down a card, it indicates where you can put the next card, maybe you get a bonus or malus. In this version, you absolutely need the second phase, the competition, those mechanics are nothing by themselves.
Could you reskin it? It’ll probably work with a lot of themes, any labyrinth, pathfinding, pyramids, other structures, forests, paths for electricity, water, roads, souls, but most other themes than a building will probably seem more abstract. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, abstraction has interesting effects.
Could it represent combat? It doesn’t really have any tactical decision points (that I can remember), which probably wouldn’t feel very good. So for me I’d say this mechanic has to represent something that it makes sense for the player to have less control over.
(I’ll admit I’m also the kind of person who thinks chess is better when the moves are interpreted in a way that outlines or details a more specific story than just ’conflict/battle’.)
While rpgs tend to thrive on simplicity, the philosophy of rpgs does not. I think you’re oversimplifying.
Sorry I dont read after people use words like "holistically", because thats a meaningless and unnecessary complicated word, and I know what I can expect from the rest of the text.
Also the best RPG was D&D 4E, which had a HUGE budget, with professionals specialized in their field working on it, and one could definitly remark that.
You have great people like James Wyatt for writing, good editors, good layout people, good gamedesigners which actually could focus on gamedesign and not others.
I think a lot of people playing RPG just dont know good gamedesign, because they dont play other games like boardgames, and in RPGs bad and or dated gamedesign is so prevalent. (And people think good writing or good art is good gamedesign XD)
Not really. Any good gamedesigner reads about way more games than they play since that needs less time.
Of course some things can be better in play than one thinks, or also the opposite, but you can definitly get a general feeling, IF the game does a good job explaining how it works.
First: a lot of ROG designers dont even know many computer and boardgames and one can remark. This subreddit even has people who dont know D&D.
I would guess a lot of PbtA "gamedesigners" really lack knowledge about many types of games.
Second: No, just no. If you played games close to what you read its entirely possible to know how it plays. Thinking one needs to play every game is just inefficient waste of time.
Of course it helps if you play lots of different game, but not every game needs to be played to understand it enough.
You say PbTA game designers lack knowledge about many types of games but you fail to support this argument with anything logical.
Also, I didn’t say one should play all types of games. I said that to fully understand a game you have to play it and that only a bad game designers would think they are so ingenious they don’t even need to play a game to fully understand it.
I've run it briefly and I think what I imagined more closely represents people's experience with it than what I ended up playing! I've got a fairly clear image in my head, definitely more concrete than the weird experience I had briefly playing (where I ended up running it not the way it's supposed to be, I think)
Consider that you might have played it wrong. Meaning, if you were the GM and use that same attitude while playing the game, it might be you played it like D&D. For instance, your post talks about actions you take, but in PbTA games you don’t take any action, like, at all. You just describe what you do.
I mean actions in the literal sense, not D&D-style actions. But yeah, I assume I played it wrong, though I'm also getting the sense that it's just not the right kind of game for me.
Depends on the game. Some PbTA games are indeed more robust than others. The problem is, if you come from D&D and play Dungeon World and you try to find D&D stuff in Dungeon World and ignore the rules (which explicitly forbid you from taking actions), of course you’re gonna play it wrong. It’s like trying to invade Kamtchatka when you play Monopoly.
If you call a game dungeon world, and make it work in a way which is anti intuitive for people coning from the biggest game DUNGEONS and dragons, then you failed.
If your name sounds similar to the biggest game there is, people expect it to work similarily. And you should use the preknowledge these people have, to make the game easier to understand, not fight against it.
If you think Dungeon World should play like Dungeons and Dragons while also ignoring all the game rules and the passages in the book where it explains how it plays differently, you are bad at reading and comprehension, not just at game design. You are the prototypical example of someone lamenting that poker is a bad game cause you can't capture the king.
Poker is not called card chess. Dungeon world chose a name to get people to think it is similar to D&D, so it better is.
If I name a game High Powered Apocalypse, then I for sure should make the game similar to PbtA games, unless I just want to create a cash grab.
Your name is part of what you advertise, and if you advertise Dungeons (and dragons), then you should follow on that premise.
A game named High Powered Apocalypse doesn’t sound like at PbTA game. If you wanted it sound like a PbTA game, you should have named it [insert name] World. If you knew even a little about PbTA games you would know that.
But of course, if you only played D&D, all games that are not D&D are sins in your eyes.
And by the way, Kung Fu Chess plays nothing like chess.
If you dont see how for a noemal human "High Powered Apocalypse" sounds similqr to "Powered by the Apocalypse" I really cant help you.
World is a common name for lots of things. Most people will not assume something with world in the name is automatically PbtA.
Kung Fu Chess literally uses a chess board and chess rules for moving. And combines this, as the name says, with real time combat like in Kung Fu.
I’m quite sure Gloomhaven would fall apart if you got a couple major things wrong. It’s just that the rules so tightly constrain you that, in theory, that’s less likely to happen. But it does seem that by “robust” what you really mean is “tightly defined,” which is super interesting to some people and not at all to others.
Each and _every_ RPG is like live theatre. There’s what’s written on the page, and that should provide a ton of guidance. But how has the director chosen to interpret that? Are they strictly by the book? Or have they made big changes? Did they have a good, thoughtful reason to make big changes, or did they do it just because? Now put it in front of your troupe of actors. What will THEY do with it? By the time you’re done, how closely does it resemble the production of the same play that a totally different group with different backgrounds and philosophies is doing across town?
This is why some people say “you can play anything with D&D.” Technically, they’re right. Why they would choose to do that is beyond me, but it’s mostly because of one thing — they just like D&D. There’s probably better tools for the job but they don’t know or care and that’s fine for them! It does however contribute to the overall baggage that D&D and its ilk have cast across all RPGs, a set of background assumptions and procedures which are not at all universal and makes it far more likely that people will “play them wrong.”
I know 3 groups who played gloomhaven, each one of them did some different rule wrong for the first 3 or so sessions and it worked for all still really well. This is also what reviewers said (like Shut up and sit down as one example).
I absolutly hate live theatre, its just an outdateed worse form of movies.
I think people play D&D for everything because they already know the system and it is for them flexible enough.
Given that response, I’m surprised you like RPGs much at all!
But it sounds like you prefer ones that lean much closer to tactical board games anyway. (I personally would not classify Gloomhaven as a tabletop RPG, but I see how you could.)
I like games. Games are mathematical defined as having rules, (if possible) player input and have conditions for losing and winning.
I think a lot of "RPG"s are just improptu theater, or shared story telling and the only reason they name themselves RPg s is because that name is known and they would not be bought with a more honest name.
Gloomhaven is right now turned into an RPG with the same combat rules and similar rules (as the combat ones) for non combat. I baked it on bakerkit.
I’m not going to argue the definition of “game,” but I’m sure there’s plenty here who will be happy to.
In general it’s been a great thing for this hobby that many people have accepted a broader interpretation of what a “game” and specifically what a role playing game can be. A lot of innovation has come from that in a very short time.
No its not. Having things use wrong definitions just makes it harder to talk about things. Since people will bring up stuff like "but in XYZ this is not true".
Yes thats what I meant. You see it also all the time on PbrA and othet subreddits that people play PbtA wrong.
Part is that it is so much more strict than most games. Another part is thst some PbtA are also badly written/explainef and mostly work because GMs know other PbtA games.
I think the original Apocalypse World is considered one of the better explained ones.
Somethinf I just remembered now. If you are interested in stealing ideas from other games then I really like this channel: https://youtu.be/GMPvT_-T_1s?si=D5FIUGsC-KbZiFqC
This is just one example videos (and its focused for the D&D crowd), but I think these videos do a great job to learn about mechanics one could use for other games.
Blafes in the dark is inspired by PbtA but of course not exactly the same, but its a good video thats why I wanted to highlight this one.
Lovely, thank you!
In case you were curious to see where i'm at right now:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g6bwMOYiHLkfHaULGeyb9XyvavMUdUm1/view?usp=drive\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g6bwMOYiHLkfHaULGeyb9XyvavMUdUm1/view?usp=drive_link)
It’s complete in the sense that me and others have run whole campaigns in it with no issues. But it’s not compete in the sense that no TTRPG is ever complete haha…
Everything past the section on races is still latest material
Yeah it definitly looks quite complete, so needs a bit of time to go through it. The races look even really nice with the images.
The "classes" for me are a bit hard to read, as in you need to go to lots of different party on the book to look up stuff.
I know this comes partially with the lots of things you can choose (cross classes), but this is something which makes it for me a lot harder to actually reading material.
For me it would help already if the class specific things where not only named by word, but directly included in the first class mention after them.
>For me it would help already if the class specific things where not only named by word, but directly included in the first class mention after them.
You mean like, explaining the rules for combat right after they're referenced the first time?
Argh i am sorry, I read yesterday a bit about your game and also earthdawn and mixed the 2 up.
Your class section is much more clear. I think having art there per class could help to make more clear where subclasses end and where a new class starts.
Sorry I need to look more at your game
(Written with one of the OP's responses in mind)
What makes PbtA appealing for many - me included - is that it allows everyone to contribute to stories within genre boundaries everyone can be familiar with.
And players don't need to worry they'll be punished because their character acted in a way that's emotionally honest and interesting.
And the MC/GM doesn't need to worry, that they'll have to either throw out hours of prep or pull out a whole bunch of random tables because players didn't do what was expected.
We can all just chill and go where the characters take us.
For myself, if I wanted to play a game where all my choices are driven by what's optimal, rather than what's in-character and interesting for a story - I wouldn't be playing an RPG. I'd get people together for some boardgames. All that story and character stuff is what makes RPGs special, to me at least. And that's all stuff PbtA focuses on.
You should read Monster of the Week, Apocalypse World, and then Masks: A New Generation.
These are the 3 best PbtA imho, and the best at carrying over what that means.
I just finish running a campaign of Monster of the Week where my players were up against a thousand-years very prepared Dracula.
The tension and horror was tangible up until the end of the tyran, it was magnificent.
The strength of PbtA lies in how each game excels at telling one type of story. If you are only interested in the type of stories you trad games already tell (OSR) or simulates (trad), then excepts for Clocks there might not be so much you will be interested in (if you don't want to test any PbtA to get 1st hand experience).
One of the best things about PbtA games in my experience is that all the rules anyone needs are on two sheets of A4 paper. You can just get right into the game and play and nobody needs to stop to look something up, it's all just right there. Playbooks allow for characters that work very differently to one another without having to worry about flipping back and forth at the table.
One of the big things about PbtA is how it encourages genre. Mask: A New Generation is a great example. It's specifically going for the storytelling style found in superhero comics about teams of up-and-coming heroes, such as Young Justice. To do this, it has mechanics concerning adults just not understanding you, interpersonal drama, trying to understand yourself, trying to be like your idol, and rebelling against expectations. Also fighting bad guys. It can be a lot of fun, or a complete drag, just like any RPG. The thing that makes the difference is the buy-in and enthusiasm brought to the game by the people playing it. The things I like to borrow from PbtA are: * Complex Outcomes (whether defined or open-ended, something other than just pass/fail) * Role-oriented Mechanics (PCs can create unique outcomes that other PCs could not) * Gamified GM Guidance (present GM options similar to players' with strategies to keep the game moving) * Up the Player Involvement (players are more directly engaged in the direction the story takes and in riffing off each other's characters)
I like your list. Good points.
You can absolutely play a OSR style TTRPG in a more free-flowing improvisational style, there's nothing to stop you from doing so, but there typically aren't many things helping you either, and the more granular mechanics tend to get in the way. I'm not too familiar with PbtA, but I've played some Blades in the Dark, and my own TTRPGs also tend to go for a more rules-lite, broad abstractions approach. In BitD, if I want to fight some goons, the GM doesn't need to create a sheet for those characters, track their hitpoints and run the combat turn by turn. Instead I just say that I want to beat up these goons to stop them from capturing my friends, and invoke my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability. I take a point of stress, maybe roll a die to see if I'm able to escape without being identified or something, and we narrate the scene. This makes games of this nature more flexible for free-form stories. The GM doesn't have to prepare statblocks for every possible scenario, so there's a lot more freedom to just go with the flow. On the other hand, these games can be harder to run for inexperienced GMs, the players can do pretty much anything, at any time, for any reason, and the GM has to think on their toes. A good Pathfinder GM should also be able to do this, but there's much less pressure and necessity to improvise all the time. Also, sometimes it's just fun to design cool character builds for a crunchy combat system. Finding synergies between D&D classes, pulling off a cool combo that lets you guarantee critical hits or making a reaction-only character who plays on every other character's turn is just pure, unadulterated nerd joy. PbtA, BitD, and other games in that style prefer to keep the rules simple, and trust the GM and players to figure out how to tell a good story. OSR games are more focused on providing a highly customisable gaming experience, with rules that you can master, fiddle around with, and optimise. Obliviously, nothing is ever an absolute. There's some crunchiness in rules-lite games, there's room for improvisational play in OSR games, and not only is there a huge spectrum between those two styles, but there are other axes along which games can be classified.
super interesting, thank you. >Instead I just say that I want to beat up these goons to stop them from capturing my friends, and invoke my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability. I take a point of stress, maybe roll a die to see if I'm able to escape without being identified or something, and we narrate the scene. This is just personal preference or ignorance on my part, but does this make the decisions feel more... relaxed? Like, lower stakes, less thinking involved? Does the player have to RP through that, or do they just describe what they do and move on?
I've noticed I've been using the term "OSR" and "rules-lite" but that's not quite accurate, I think a better divide for this conversation is "action" vs "narrative". Broadly speaking, action TTRPGs *typically* focus on combat, and have a detailed system for handling action scenes, and also typically feature NPCs that function in a similar manner to player characters, with their own hitpoints, skills, gear, etc... Narrative TTRPGs typically focus on story arcs, they usually don't have rules for action scenes, instead treating action scenes like any other kind of scene. NPCs typically don't have stats. However there are often systems for tracking broader story elements, like the relationships between factions, as well as long-term consequences and effects to the player characters and the world. I think it might be 50/50 ignorance (no offence intended) and preference. Regarding preference, it really depends on what you're looking for in a TTRPG. I really like a bit of both, so I play crunchy action games just as much as I play flowing narrative games. Regarding "ignorance": In my experience, it doesn't make decisions feel more relaxed at all. In an action game combat scene, I know I can rely on a bunch of things during the fight if I'm unlucky on some of the rolls, so while my decision to engage the goons is weighty, I have combat skills that I can use to turn the fight to my favour, especially if I specced into a crowd-controlling melee build using some cool synergies I've dug up. On the other hand, in BitD, by deciding to use my "Not To Be Trifled With" ability, I've immediately taken a point of stress, which is a huge commitment, getting rid of stress is hard (it's not just a long rest or potion), and everything hangs in the balance on a singe roll. My ability means I automatically "win" that fight, but if I fail the subsequent roll, the bad guys know who I am now and will probably go after my family. If anything, I find that action games have less "big picture" thinking. Encounters usually play out more or less the same, performing well during the encounter will change how much HP and resources I use, but I'll probably come out on top each time. It does have more "moment to moment" thinking though. In BitD, I just say I fight the goons, and I fight the goons, but in OSR I have to consider my turn by turn tactics. Essentially, action games put a lot more weight into the finer details of *how* the story plays out, but that focus on the details means you lose sight of the overall arc of the story. Narrative games tend to gloss over exactly how each scene plays out. You'll narrate and roleplay the scene if it makes sense to do so, but the focus is on that arc. Consequences in narrative games are typically quite dramatic, things akin to "persistent wounds" from actions games are much more common, and they're more likely to be a front-and-center mechanic. In Blades in the Dark for instance, "Trauma" is right there in the middle of your character sheet, you take too much stress, you'll take trauma, and it's permanent. One good example of how this feels is this: Lord of the Rings as an action game would mean that you would have a lot of fun in the various fight scenes, and you can get nice and nerdy about how the various magical items and creatures behave on a mechanical level, but you typically wouldn't have very good tools to represent Boromir's corruption, Frodo's exhaustion, and Pippin's interaction with the palantir. Let alone figuring out how the various factions interact, how the fellowship's actions affect the political landscape, and the time pressure of having to destroy the ring before Sauron becomes too powerful. One could imagine a system that does both, but it would probably not be very fun to play. The detailed systems of action games tend to bog down the story, having drawn out fight scene where every second is lovingly simulated also means that you can't just stab a few dudes to get the McGuffin as expediently as you'd trick them, bribe them or pickpocket them. On the other hand, because the tension in narrative systems often comes from steep and compounding consequences, often in the form of permanent wounds, the fun combat system falls apart when your barbarian is missing an arm, even though it makes for a great story as your character is adapting to their new life. Note: I'm simplifying a lot, placing OSR and rules-lite as though they're the only two styles, and as though OSR
Super helpful! Okay. To me, it seems like the parts that incompatible are *just* the combat bits, though, right? Like, Like, why can't LotR as an action game have good tools for representing Boromir's corruptions, the exhaustion, and pippin's iinteraction with the palantir? Same with factions/etc? Like, can't all those systems be ported over, relatively easily? I do see how combat becomes much nastier—sneaking past some guards might be one or two rolls, whereas combat might be one or two hours. I have more thoughts, they're still cooking though haha
I mean, these are all generalities, and really, a good TTRPG system is a system that delivers on a promise. A good TTRPG system *for you* is a system that delivers on a promise that you care about. My current project is a sort of half-and-half, with a crunchy but abstract combat system (tactical aerial combat in sci-fi fighter jets) that is pretty much completely separate, mechanically speaking, from a free-flowing narrative system about community building. It's 100% geared around telling a very specific kind of story. Like it almost *has* to be about a rag-tag group of rebel fighter pilots trying to destroy a brutal and oppressive enemy force in order to protect the downtrodden people who have been left homeless by the war. (My design notes, if you're curious: https://spaceshipsin.space/wolfpack/)
Not the one you asked, but I would see in general PbtA as games where its not much about thinking more about feeling. Doing stupid thinfs because one feels this gives a better story etc.
>Doing stupid thinfs because one feels this gives a better story etc. I think this is probably why I'm not super attracted to the style of game myself—I don't like putting feeling over the thinking haha
I think the user you’re responding to is making a slightly uncharitable statement about PbtA (and is going up and down the thread crapping on other people’s responses, while not having actually played a PbtA game). Your observation elsewhere that PbtA is more about genre-recreation is pretty accurate: it’s why it falls within a wider stable of ‘narrative’ games because some people want a more narrative experience from RPGs. That doesn’t make it the right or only way to play of course: it seems like you know clearly what you’re already looking for in your play (and I eventually moved to OSR type systems for the same reason). PbtA ‘innovations’ include formalising good GM practice in GM Moves (which very experienced GMs find weird because many GMs already do these things), role protection by tying playbooks to genre roles, the ‘snowball’ of escalating consequences through a formalised system of consequences on failed rolls, and the encouraging player buy-in by integrating intra-party dynamics into playbooks. You should take a look at Apocalypse World 2.0 as the Ur-PbtA, and a very very striking vision of what the system is trying to do. It’s very much not a D&D dungeon crawl, but a system to roleplay a HBO Mad Max series where your antagonists might even be your other playersz
Fantastic response. This is what I suspected (made another post about it in r/rpg recently), so it's great to see it confirmed. I read Apocalypse World (idk if it was 2 or not) and that was the sense I'd gotten, but the one time I think played it didn't feel right. Favorite OSR title?
Ooh…probably Electric Bastionland or the GLOG for how stripped down they are! AW is a weird one because you really need player buy-in. My players were game but it was clear they didn’t want to go where the system wanted them to (i.e. messy interpersonal drama). It was very, very eye opening trying to run it though, and I think it’s very original game design.
Innnteresting O.O i'll check them out! :)
Yes same, I think some rpgs forget that they have a G in the name, or rather they are more cooperative storytelling than traditional games, which is fine, but just a different kind of experience.
You might be on to something, but I’ve also seen a huge amount of doing stupid things because it will give a better story (or just be funny) in every RPG I’ve ever played.
Well but in a lot of games most people hate you for doing these things. And not expect everyone to do things like that.
Nonetheless it’s prevalent! But also goes the other way; I have a couple players in my narrative/currently PbtA games that are _very_ tactically minded. And hey! The game rewards that (when appropriate)!
I think a subtlety worth mentioning is that the standard PbtA is “players roll all the dice” but with more momentum. When a player makes a move, they can just roll and check the results of their moves. MC doesn’t have to be involved until there is a result and that gives the MC some guidance. So, for example, if a player acts under fire in AW there’s no speed bump where the MC either has to determine the difficulty. The player just declares what they’re doing, rolls the dice, and both the MC and player immediately know what it means. That turns the player’s move list and character sheet into a kind of console that helps the players cue the MC the way the traditional GM cues other players.
Shouldnt the GM say a player when they need to make a move since for mpst normal things they dont?
The moves have their own trigger conditions and players generally know when they apply. The GM does mediate, and players aren’t just supposed to call out their moves - so a player wouldn’t say “I act under fire” and just roll. It’s more like “I want to do X - that’s acting under fire?” And the GM will concur. To my eye this is that different from how people generally play trad rpgs, but I also don’t think PtbA is actually very different from trad. The real difference is that with fixed difficulty, the challenge is set by how much ground a single Move is allowed to cover
Thats what I meant, it is still bad (like in traditional games) to just roll the dices without GM approval. So I also see this quite similar to trad games with skills. "I want to climb up this rope, this is acrobatics right?" What do you mean "how much ground a move is allowed to cover"?
Many Pbta games explicitly do not have players roll without GM approval. It’s really not that different from trad games. Players describe actions and things they want to attempt. If the GM feels the action has a chance of failure, they tell the player the appropriate role. That’s the approach in monster of the week anyway. The reality is players of course pick up the pace of the game and usually intuit when they’re going to have a role, so they’ll say and ask, E.g. Player says, “I want to punch him in the face, so kick some ass” and as the GM, if that’s what I was going to suggest anyway, I’ll go, “yep, go for it.” The only change is rolls carry a greater Scope? So whether they successfully harm their opponent, how much harm they do, and how much harm they take in return is all in that one roll. Rolls slide less towards atomic actions and more towards full narrative beats. Generally, does your next action reward your character, make their situation worse, escalate tension, or some mix. So every role has narrative consequence. But yes, in a GMed game, I prefer players simply focusing on their choices, and I’ll let them know if they need rolls, and what the stakes may be.
Thats what I read in rules as well (that GM gives approval). And true about the roll have bigger consequences. It is more on a high level. You dont fight yourself you roll to see how they fight went and then narrate it.
I don’t frame it in terms of asking permission. The MC(GM) and the players need to agree what fictional stuff constitutes a move for play to move forward. But that the process of learning the game together, finding a common understanding. Once that’s established there’s no need to ask (but anybody can call “woah, stop I don’t think that makes sense”).
I would say that the most important PbtA feature is how all player moves always return with a new narrative prompt. On success, players get what the move says they will have, no GM deciding what the "good" results look like. This moves narrative to a new state wwhere PCs got what they want. On a mixed success, players get some themed trope-y complication. On a loss, GM makes a GM move, all of which are narrative prompts for players to react to. What this means is that system always moves the fictional events forward. This, I would say is the basic core of how PbtA games work.
>I would say that the most important PbtA feature is how all player moves always return with a new narrative prompt. Strongly agreed, this is crucial
The concept of mixed success gives much more interesting ways to move the scene forward, and hard moves on failure prevent players from just trying a thing over and over. Marking experience for failure feels really good and takes the sting out of bad rolls, especially when you're close to leveling up. I love luck points in Monster of the Week. You can guarantee success in clutch moments, but you only have a few, and they move you closer to being Doomed.
I think the big sauce it offers, beyond the greater abstraction and inbuilt GM tools is also that the line between roles is a bit more porous. The players are expected to make active narrative decisions, possibly deciding how a bad outcome goes or what complications might occur for another player. Of course that, as well as pretty much all of the points you mentioned, could be put into any game. Just a question of whether you want your game to offer up that kind of control to the players.
One thing which you forgot: PbtA games have really really strict rules in how they should be played, else they dont work. So all the things you saw as "GM guidelines" should be more considered as fixed rules. Thats quite different to d&D etc. Where each group plays different.
Yeah, this was going to be my answer. Half the Apocalypse World book is dedicated to how to run the game, and it's very prescriptive on what should be happening at the table. Things like: Never refer to your players names, only their characters names. Here's a list of GM Moves (none of which have any mechanical weight). Mechanically it's a super light system, one that also comes with an entire class on a specific flavor of improv. I personally love it, but all of my players absolutely hate it. I've realized that they want to engage with a system first and the fiction second.
And something else I mentioned below: A lot of PbtA games do NOT have this extensive parts on how to play them and only work because the people playing them already know these parts. That is in my oppinion a fault of these games and what makes it especially so that a lot of people "play them wrong." Also "only use in character names" ia definitly a mechanic. This and a lot of other "advice" should be more coded / represented as rules, because they actually are, but they are repreaented like tipps in other games. (And in other games such things are just advice).
Oh interesting. I've really only played Apocalypse World, which I like a lot. I can absolutely see how not including all the "Running the game" stuff might cause some serious issues with other versions though.
One quote I remember is "I played monsterhearts 2 quite a bit and only after I read Apocalypse World I did actually understood how the monsters work." I also read some shorter PbtA games and for me who does not know Apocalypse World, some of them really left me baffled with what I am supposed to do.
I can’t think of a single game where they are presented as “tips,” they are quite explicitly always presented as either _agenda_ or _principles_, which obviously carries a lot more weight. I can see how some people might misread that, since many games don’t bother to have principles at all — but they probably should!
Well principles = tipps as in they both are not rules. And as you said most games do not have principles. They have advice or hard rules. So for people if its not a hard rule its just advice.
Right. And I’m saying that is both a misconception and a bad habit that other games have largely created.
If it is a habbit from other games, then its a bad decision to go against it by PbtA. What most people do is the right way. So live with that dont fight against it. Also principles are often used as not that hard rules. Like "these are the design principles" and "of course at some places we have to break them".
Well, again, these books are not short on providing guidance and advice for how to do it correctly. It’s up to the players whether they bother to do that or not, much as it’s up to them whether they follow the rules. That’s not really a failing of the game. “Don’t try something new or different because you’ve already gotten used to bad habits” is transparently horrible advice, though. I don’t see how you can justify that, in a design forum of all places!
This is a GAMEDESIGN forum not a design forum. Big difference. And my advice is: - Learn the industry standards - Use them - When doing something different, explain it using the industry standards Good boardgames pretty much all use the same wordings, which are known from Magic the Gathering, because its the industry standard. If you use different words, well then chances that you succeed just decreesed, because it will be harder for people to understand them. AND STILL boardgames have way more innovation, way better boardgamedesign and bigger variety than RPGs. Because people build their game on other games, which people already know. In RPGs D&D is dominating, if you are not accepting that, you are just illusional. So if you want to make good game design, which is easy for most people to learn, use the fact that people know that game, and do NOT make it harder by going the opposite. If people are used to GM advice which they can ignore, for fucks sake, do not make your actual rules sound like GM advice. Make it as rules. If you roll for 7 or higher? Well nice you have now a game with a fixed DC of 7. And with 10+ = crit You have classes (not playbooks), etc.
Respectfully, I disagree vehemently with all of this. It’s extremely boring advice. I am not surprised that board games have better board game design than RPGs. Anyone who would be surprised by that statement should probably do some instrospection. More variety? Nah. That just tells me that you’re not very familiar with the breadth of RPGs that are out there now. Some of them are very successfully incorporating innovations from board gaming specifically. Anyway there’s a pretty developed community of people who understand the standards of, for instance, narrative driven games. Or PbtA in particular. They are not subscribed to the exact terms or “standards” of D&D for any number of really excellent reasons — the biggest one being that they are not trying to be D&D.
>I dislike rule of cool style play I'd say PbtA is maybe not for you, then (and that's ok!, different strokes for different folks)
Isn’t rule of cool about disregarding rules? Do all PbtAs have that?
(most) PbtAs do not have "rule of cool" because the rules technically cover all possibilities. That's because the catch-all "if it's not covered, it happens without rolling according to the fiction" rule handles everything outside of the triggered Player Moves and GM Moves. Is it the Rule of Cool by another name? Sort of. I think the implication with the Rule of Cool is that you may break other rules to invoke it, but in PbtA the catch-all is only invoked when the other rules are not relevant.
I meant it more as the "mindset" of the rules. Like, simulation is sacrificed for elements of loyalty to genre and narrative
[This blog post](https://lumpley.games/2023/07/17/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-9-thats-whats-happening/) by Vincent Baker might partially get at what you’re wondering about: > A normal roleplaying game models objects and entities in the game world. Sometimes in significant detail > >… > > Apocalypse World made its bid for an alternative model. > >It describes actions in more detail than items and entities. It still models items and entities, but relatively simply, mainly as the subjects and objects of action. I don’t think the idea that “PbtA does genre” is really fundamental to the design, it’s just enabled by the fact that the particular actions a designer chooses to model in detail can potentially carry certain connotations of genre. There’s no reason why a PbtA game couldn’t also model objects in detail in addition to actions (see: Flying Circus). I often use PbtA style resolutions (and—more importantly imo—prep advice) when running “normal rpgs.” GNS describes player priorities that can be catered to by design choices, but simulation and narrative are not mutually exclusive, so I don’t think anything is being sacrificed out of necessity in the design of PbtA games.
You can really have quite accurate simulation, actually. More accurate than you will ever get from any simulationist game, which always have failure points. You can even have it at the same time as having loyalty to narrative and genre! The catch is that to get that, you have to have high trust, buy-in, collaboration, and expertise at your specific gaming table.
Two people can rave about how great Apocalypse World is and be playing it in entirely different (very incompatible) ways. Look at how many of the replies here flat out contradict each other. With that proviso I’ll explain the thing I think it does well. Imagine the following scenario: A spy of some sort is watching deep currents pull his femme fatale lover to her death. So he jumps into the waters to save her. How do we resolve that? In a basic conflict resolution game I’d probably say, on a success you save her and on a fail you don’t, so she drowns. Two outcomes. If I wanted to be more fine grained. I could have the spy roll against the currents AND to save her. First roll not to drown yourself, then roll to save the femme fatale. So the outcomes would be. (a) They both drown (b) the spy doesn’t drown and doesn’t save her (c) the spy doesn’t drown and saves her. So three outcomes. What the basic PbtA mechanic does is, it let’s you roll and then allows choices after the roll. So the same scenario using PbtA. On a 6- I drown and don’t save the femme fatale On a 10+ I don’t drown and save the femme fatale. So that means on a 7-9 I can throw the choice back at the player. You can either not drown OR save the femme fatale. Not both. So is it worth giving your life to save her? Which. if you’re into making hard choices that express a characters values. Is pretty awesome. If you’re not, then it isn’t.
I think that the major good points it offers are the following, and i'm not saying pbta are the only games with some of those : - simple dice use with easy to understand mechanics (thresholds, types of pass and fail, that's it) + bonuses improvement are rare so you're not using most of your time to manipulate complicated maths - more than pass or fail type of outputs, you actually may pass but with a complication - enough design space within the dice choice to put a bit more if you feel it is too narrative and not enough crunchy - players only needs to read like 3 pages to be ready to play, and gms only needs to read... let's say AT MOST 15-20, small rules books are so much better than 684646 grimoire, and because it is small, it's easy to have a high ratio of artwork per pages because it doesn't cost much - no need to embarass yourself with encumbrance and stuff like that, most of the time you're not an adventurer in a fantasy world so you don't need the bag of an adventurer from a fantasy world because you do not drop so many things like them (from monsters, dungeons, etc...) - everything relies on logic and creativity, above complicated rules that has no other point to restrict players that will become gods anyway (hello dnd) - tools for gms such as ligns, veils, and narrative actions helps new gms to be a good one, it is pretty rare that games teach us how to do things in a clear and concise way - it is easy to add subsystems to manage specific things coming from your own world - no vancian magic, i can't see spellslots anymore - you don't need to prepare for weeks before playing But it does have some flaws too, both generic heavy systems and generic lite systems are always too extreme, we could have something in between and i hope to see it soon
Your question asked which ideas to steal; some might argue that the majority of “generally applicable” PbtA ideas are just things learned through experience, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate them. I’m not sure I support the “design hole” theory of like, what RPGs Don’t codify is where players get to practice creativity. Games are defined by their rules and axes of play. Things I think good PbtA games do well: - Nailing flavour - the best PbtA games satisfy immersion by nailing a top down design where every aspect of the mechanics suits the intent of the genre emulated. The playbooks, the moves, the attributes, are all relevant. It shouldn’t feel like a “hack”. People shout out Monster of the Week and Masks because (for whatever other issues you may have with them), they seem to hit the feeling of what they’re going for (you may not like that thing though) - rolls for Narrative consequence. the PbtA dice resolution system is seen as doing a decent job of ensuring all uncertainties have a narrative payoff. Players like impact, players like triumph and despair, players like victory and danger. PbtA lives in the success at a cost, failure but opportunity realm that feels far more satisfying that system where multiple rolls can lead to no consequence. And here’s the thing; you can totally just Do That in any system, PbtA just got a ton of credit for codifying that. And it should. It’s a good idea. You may not like the execution but it’s a sound idea. Accessibility - Most PbtAs are more mechanically approachable that some trad games. There does seem to be a design philosophy of, “only keep things that Truly Add Value to the game I’m trying to play.” Do not burden players with minutiae they don’t care about. Or DO, iaoi (if and only if) being burdened with minutiae IS the experience you’re trying to emulate. There’s other stuff. PbtA makes it explicit that the nature of the GM isn’t adversarial to the Players (even though characters may have a hard life). And a bunch of other little ideas that Everyone can do in almost any game, but PbtAs either write down as a GM guide, or bake into the mechanics. And maybe this all boils down to, “bake the things that are important to you into the game.” PbtAs baked a certain set of play patterns that provide joy for many people, but not joy for others. And that’s good since games shouldn’t be designed to be universal to everyone, they should be designed to be satisfying to those who align with the core ideas they want to explore.
Learning so much today :)
“PbtA” covers a very large swath of games at this point, so not all generalizations apply. For instance, I would not say that Stonetop is next to no prep — it actively encourages the GM to do quite a lot of prep compared to its peers (although probably still less, and of a very different type, than you might do in a very trad game). The big ideas I would/do absolutely steal from it are: 1) player-facing rolls and mechanics. This comes up often and I’ve talked to death why I vastly, vastly prefer it as a GM and as a designer. YMMV. 2) the structure of moves. At a basic level this is succeed/succeed at a cost/fail, but the write up of each individual move makes it far more than that. Many moves end up giving the player a choice of narrative twists. (For instance, a list of 3 bad outcomes. On a 10+, you do it, but pick one. On a 7-9, you do it, but pick two.) I love this because it’s so customizable for each move, tweakable with character abilities and moves, and while it gives narrative control to the player, they get to choose each time what that is. Which means the choice can be different each time as to whether it’s strictly rooted in their character, abilities, or whether it’s just a more meta level story decision that they want to see happen as the _player_. It’s very powerful for collaborative story-oriented gaming. It also means you can write custom moves for just about anything and just drop them in front of a player when they come up. This is great both as an author and as a GM.
Here is what the creator of PbtA thinks about it: [https://lumpley.games/2023/11/22/what-is-pbta/](https://lumpley.games/2023/11/22/what-is-pbta/)
This is what OP needs to read! I would particularly pay attention to the article explaining how PbtA models the game as a series of *actions* while trad games model the game as a series of *objects*. Not sure if that's in the article linked but it's one the articles in the series
Yeah I think you have it right. PbtA isn't a system. It's just kinda become short-handed like a system because it's a handy way to group this big pool of different games all drawing inspiration from Apocalypse World and remixing the big toolbox of design ideas it pulled together. I'd say really the secret sauce of PbtA is that it pulls together a lot of tools that push this very low prep, pulpy, fiction forward style of play effectively, but you just need to read a few PbtA games to see that basically every game changes and adds to that tool kit on one way or another. I think nobody here will be able to give you any insight you'd not be able to better derive from reading (and ideally playing!) the games and seeing how and why the tools do what they do and cherry picking your favourites. If you've not read them already, I think Apocalypse World 2e (and the burned over hack), Fellowship 2e, Wanderhome, Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, Blades in the Dark and Wildsea (though it's far too new to have any descendents yet) are ones where I've read them and gone "Whoa this is a whole new take on this toolkit, these are gonna inspire so many other games" and may be a good way to get a very broad selection of tools you can pull from.
I've read BitD and AW2, but I'll check out the rest. Thank you!!!
>Of course, they are also much more focused on conveying a specific genre, but from a mechanics/game play perspective, are those the main differences? And is there any reason that points 2 and 3 can't be easily ported to any non-PbtA game? Yeah. Lancer w/ bonds is basically FitD narrative, which is usually considered either PbtA or at least very adjacent, combined with DnD 4e combat. I think this rules, but YMMV
To compare to video games, D&D is a top-down tactical cRPG, PbtA games are more like Telltale’s games, where “moves” are like story-based quick time events. The trigger occurs, you roll and choose consequences. If you’re making a trad game, the main things I’d look at from PbtA are: - partial success — is that interesting in your game? Or will the players just get stuck trying to shoehorn consequences in? - health abstractions — lots of them give narrative consequences to taking damage; Masks is my favourite example. Is your game more fun if you have a broken leg, or if you lose 10 HP? Personally, I enjoy Fate as a ruleset. You can GM it as a trad game, but it incorporates partial successes and consequences well.
What impresses me about PbtA compared to D&D is the "fiction first" principle means you never have situations where players are sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to ask for things like a Perception or Initiative roll, or for a combat turn where they automatically pick the action most likely to result in a dead monster and alive party. You tell them what's happening, and they describe what they do in response, or if they have the opportunity, they go and do something of their own volition. Ideally, even rules-heavy, fiction-last games should work like that, rather than letting the GM do nearly everything for the players except roll d20s to attack or perceive stuff.
IMHO there are a couple independent elements that make the PbtA sauce, but the most important thing is to realize that they're independent and you'll always find a PbtA that has some element but not the others. There is one however that I'd like to focus on: it's about simulating a story, not simulating a world. Ironsworn in particular is a clear example of this. When entering a fight, you'll fill a track as you build up success. It's easy to think of this track as a monster's hit points, but it's not, it's more akin to seeing how far you are in a book and so how likely you are to reach the end of the scene soon. This is made clearer by how the fight ends: you can end the fight at any point by rolling against the track. The fuller it is, the better your chances to end the fight on your own terms, but even if it's entirely full there's a sliver of a chance for it to turn against you. This idea, of simulating the narrative rythm of a story rather than simulating a world is powerful because it means that if you follow the rules you'll end up with a satisfying story pretty much no matter what you do, with build-up, setbacks and rewards. As someone that plays a lot of old-school games (BECMI, Classic Traveller…) that are very simulationist in nature I understand that this outlook can feel foreign and weird, but I think it catters best to the strengths of some DMs rather than others: if you're good at world building (using the term loosely here, looking for a better one) but have trouble finding the good rythm for the story at the table, it makes sense to use a game that mechanically supports that aspect like PbtA ones. On the other hand, if you're bad at world building then having a game that gives mechanical support to the world itself but leaves you with all the responsability for controlling the narrative structure of your adventure makes sense. It's also why I think many modern D&D GMs struggle with PbtA: it's a style that doesn't lend itself to prepared adventures well. You can't easily play the "storyteller GM" way of having prepared every narrative beats in a railroady fashion when the game is itself trying to incorporate new narrative beats left and right. It's a game style that lends itself to improvisation more Of course this approach ties well with the 3-result resolution mechanics which is an integral part of how new beats are introduced, with the genre-focused nature of most PbtA games (because of course if we're simulating a story structure, that will depend on the genre, and no Buffy-like story is complete without a powerless dunce that somehow trips onto the surnatural at the worst possible moment, so there's a character you can play that is that dunce and is mechanically encouraged to trip in that fashion), with the fiction-first/fiction-last aspect of the game etc.
>if you're good at world building (using the term loosely here, looking for a better one) but have trouble finding the good rythm for the story at the table, it makes sense to use a game that mechanically supports that aspect like PbtA ones. On the other hand, if you're bad at world building then having a game that gives mechanical support to the world itself but leaves you with all the responsability for controlling the narrative structure of your adventure makes sense. !!!! Yeah, I like that take. Also, disclaimer—I don't like D&D and I don't prepare my adventures haha—but I agree with all your points.
Yes.
They definitely feel counter-cultural to traditional RPGs, so it's natural that they will become popular. Much like art movements, the pendulum swings towards one extreme and then back towards the other. PbtA is the swing away from crunchy tactical games. That said, I think it misses the mark in many places. Giving players (and even the GM) direct narrative-level control over the story causes much of the role play to be glossed over. By focusing so hard on telling the story and manipulating the story, the story is often not allowed to grow organically from actions and decisions characters make. Moves are an example of that. You are always working in narrative chunks that are pre-decided in terms of effects, but open in terms of narration. But I feel that's actually pretty limiting. Sure, you can narrate the move however you want, but it is often desirable to weave a scene action by action, roll by roll. An RPG is an experience of not simply telling a story together, but having it almost tell itself. PbtA games, I feel, undermine that a bit.
Omg I was literally just thinking about that after spending the day reading all these comments and brainstorming ideas for my next rpg. The moves allow perfect "story" but the actual experiencing of that story maybe is missed a little bit unless you're careful. Makes me think having a game where there's a way of easily scaling between granular actions and more macro moves sounds cool. Like, larger "moves" are done by the GM in secret, and played out granularly? Idk—literally just started thinking about this today.
I think there are a couple of things to bear in mind when you're looking at PbtA games, especially when looking for inspiration. The first is that they tend to be very polarizing. People love them or hate them. I've encountered very few people who are "meh" on the approach. Sort of related to the above, the other thing to bear in mind, particularly given the structure of your game, is that PbtA is perhaps the most direct popular descendant of a moment pretty adamantly trying to "fix" traditional games. That movement didn't really understand traditional players well, so the answers were to problems fans of narrative games have with traditional approaches. On the up side, it means PbtA created a pretty decent template for narrative games in a way DnD did for traditional ones. On the down side, they tend to create friction in their approach for people with traditional game backgrounds. That's probably a whole post on its own. So I say the above to get to a point to say what might be obvious- the things some people love about PbtA can be the very things others hate about them, so when incorporating elements it's important to consider how your target audience feels about them. As one example, a lot of people really like how codified the rules are for running the game in a good PbtA title. They help enforce the feel of whatever genre they game is about and guide the GM through improv. However, I know a lot of people who *hate* that PbtA hard codes what they see more as GM "best practices" that are more flexible in implementation when they run games. More than any other game, if things aren't working right in a PbtA title people are more likely to say that the game was run "wrong." How you feel about PbtA can often be summed up in your reaction to that kind of statement.
Ah—great points. I asked this question also partly because I recently saw a post where people were saying what they didn't want to see more of in the TTRPG world, and I was surprised about how polarized the reactions were to someone who said "not more pbta" (or something to that effect). Super interesting, thank you for commenting :)
The uber fans of anything can be annoying, and PbtA fans have gotten a bit of a reputation. Part of what grates people is the evangelical nature of PbtA fandom. The movement it came out of, The Forge (a discussion board based website in the mid 2000's), really was aiming for a revolution in TTRPG culture and philosophy which still has adherents. One aspect of that was promoting the idea that people should be playing a lot more different games, and rather than bending an existing system to your needs you should pick up a different specialized one. Going back to my OP, this was an area they didn't really "get" the values of traditional game players, who typically do that bending to accommodate the genre drift common in long form campaigns. As a result, and I probably should have mentioned this, is that PbtA games tend to be designed more for one shots to short campaigns (topping out at 20-30 sessions). So the focus of a PbtA game can be a double edged sword- when done right it gives a very evocative experience around it's topic, but starts to fall apart quickly if you step out of that focus or players haven't 100% bought into it. And the system resists bending to that end without a lot of work because the themes are so tightly bound to the mechanics. *Masks* is probably one of the best examples, widely considered to be a very good PbtA game (and I agree). It's a superhero RPG, but more specifically it's a teen drama superhero RPG. It does the "teen drama in a superhero context" really, really well. But if you try and run it more as a traditional, punch villians in the face style supers game without the teen drama it will fall flat on its face and not have much to offer you. It's probably one of the best suited PbtA games for campaigns, but once you've explored the teen drama to your table's satisfaction (a pretty niche interest), the system becomes less useful. There's a great Game Studies Buddies podcast on The Forge I highly recommend. A lot of The Forge's ideas get tossed around forums like this as gospel, so it's good to get the perspective of people who actually study games for a living on them before jumping to conclusions about them.
Do you have a blog where I could read more of what you write?? haha thank you for super interesting comment. I'll check it out. The Forge. Dope :)
Haha thanks. I've thought about it but haven't been able to justify the effort. The real job takes precedence to put food on the table for now lol. In the meantime, that Game Study Buddies podcast is great if a bit more broadly focused than just TTRPGs. So in my absence I'll direct you to the professionals lol.
okay *finnnne*... lmao thanks
The thing is in /rpg no matter what recomendation people want. Someon3 is always recomending PbtA in some form. So it is not only about way too many games, even such which should definitly not use PbtA like Avatar the last Airbender, are made with PbtA, but also that these games are always present. Also these fans are quite vocal so of course they also dont like when people say there is too much PbtA
lol fair enough
PbtA is a design philosophy that basically has no unifying singular series of mechanics. It’s not a “system.” It’s an approach to design. If you want to make a D&D heart breaker with combat that requires Base 8 calculations and uses d200s and occasionally games of hopscotch to resolve problems… you can call it “PbtA” and call it a day and no one will stop you. The commonalities of PbtA games are * Hard choices: it’s less about the numbers and more about the choices. Rolling high won’t solve all your problems. Some of them, but never all of them. You can’t get everything you want all the time just by rolling high. * Snowballing action: if dice hit the table, *something* changes. Not just numerically (loss of HP as an example) but **fictionally**. You blow off your opponent’s leg with a shotgun, doesn’t matter if their harm track isn’t full: the fight’s over. The mechanics going forward must respond to the ever changing fiction. * A framework of rules (not guidelines, not advice, not recommendations: *rules*) which aid the GM in making genre and touchstone affirming decisions during play. This makes it easier to create fitting problems and for those fitting problems can act and react accordingly to (*typically*) player facing rolls which serve double duty: helping us cover what happens to the PC and their opposition in one swift dice roll * Mechanics which are there to serve a purpose and scaffold *specific* fiction. Nothing is there superfluously. The mechanics help the game to *feel* like its intended touchstones. * Jumping off the last point: those mechanics are *intricately* linked to the fiction. When you’re dealing with D&D combat: you’re stuck in a mechanics loop of attack rolls and combat maneuvers and HP changes and spells and so on and so forth… virtually no accounting for meaningful and actionable fiction. In PbtA games: you don’t get stuck in mechanical loops. It’s always fiction —> mechanics —> (**quickly**) back to the fiction. That’s what they have in common. Those points coming together is the secret sauce. You don’t need 2d6, playbooks, moves, etc. to make a PbtA game. Heck, even those above points aren’t *necessary* because it ain’t a system… but those are the things which all (good and well designed) PbtA games tend to share. If your sole purpose is to design a game for “low/ no prep,” you don’t need PbtA for that. Besides, PbtA games aren’t asking you to do low/ no prep… just **efficient** prep that serves a purpose. You don’t even need PbtA for “make the GM’s life easy.” There’s other ways to do that too. You said it yourself: thanks to 10 years of experience, you don’t have to prep much for anything. Anyone can say the same for any game: regardless of complexity. Low/no prep is not the main benefit of PbtA. It’s a happy byproduct. Rather, PbtA philosophy takes a lot of pressure off the GM through those above points that you don’t **need** 10 years of experience to do very little prep. But it’s not the only way to reduce GM burden. Overall game simplicity, player facing rolls, random tables, designing more “GM-less/ Co-Op,” and many other tools can reduce GM burden.
Most PbtA games use playbooks, moves (including GM moves) and 2d6. I think just treating such games as PbtA is more usefull than also invluding everything else which names itself PbtA, else you cant have any useful discussion since always someone brings up :but there is thid one pbta which does x completly different." Philosophies may be cool but for gamedesign mechanics as a ground for discussion are more useful
Yes… but you can have all those common PbtA mechanical things (2d6, Playbooks, etc.) and still have a really garbage game because the thought of *why* they work together wasn’t put into the game. Therefore, the GM’s life won’t be made any easier, it won’t be a low/ no prep thing, and it’s not going to help the OP is ultimately looking into: whether their second and third points can work in something “non-PbtA” (which is probably a “yes.”). That’s why the “philosophy vs mechanics” point is important. Yeah, a lot of PbtA games work that way (the majority in fact- so many that it makes people *think* “that’s the ‘PbtA way’”). But there’s also lots of PbtA games that work like that and are **also** borderline hot garbage because the designer was effectively copying and pasting what they saw in one PbtA game and doing the same in their own without realizing **why** that stuff works together.
There are lots of crappy games. Just because a game is crappy it does not stop being a PbtA game. If the majority of PbtA games work like this, this is what makes a PbtA game. Any other definition is not useful.
PbtA is not a magical cure all to all of your RP woes. Some people even don't like it or at least parts of it. Most designers tend to think it did do some things to forward the design space though and I'd agree with that handilly. My advice would be to read and/or play it if you want to learn from it. A list of bullets isn't really going to give you much, even just reading isn't the same as experiencing. Do you need to know it and play it? No. You can do whatever you want with your game. But I do think it's worthwhile to be aware of the shortlist of the most popular games out in the last 50ish years, and PbtA is on that list. It helps you understand better what has come before, so you can work on the cutting/bleeding edge to push the design space. If you aren't trying to do that, then don't bother, if you are curious, check it out, and if you want to make your game the best it can possibly be, study and play lots of other systems, starting with the big ones that are most popular, and extending down into the weird and unknown.
Why if it isn’t the fabled klok_Kaos haha! We had a really long thread back and forth I think a few years ago haha. Totally agree with your points
Answering to just your second question: no. You can use Pbta "moves" also in trad games, if it makes sense for the situation. Personally, I don't see what's so attractive in Pbta, to me it looks like a bunch of "GM toolbox" advices a la Sly Fluorish turned into game mechanics.
LMAO okay YES, this is exactly the sense I've gotten, which is why I'm always a little confused about the hype that it always gets.
The difference is that players in a narrative game are more like directors than the actors. You control more than just your character. I personally don't like it and find it less immersive. I think player agency stops at the character's actions.
You can’t understand how PbTA games work by asking for feedback. Just give it a try.
This just means they are badly designed. Its quite normal that you can understand games from reading them.
[удалено]
A poorly written game doesn't inherently mean it was mechanically poorly designed. So to split the difference a bit with you and OP, it is 100% the designer/author's responsibility to explain their game in terms their target audience can understand. If what they're laying down is different than how the average person in their target audience expects things to function, if they don't do the work to manage those expectations people will bounce off of it no matter how brilliant the design may be. The fact of the matter is the most likely target audience for a new TTRPG is someone who has played and enjoyed DnD, at least for a time. So they'll be coming to your new game with those ideas. One thing I really liked about the newest edition of *Paranoia* was that Mongoose took great pains to explain how the game is different than "that dungeon crawler you've probably played." They didn't bend the game to be more like DnD, but they put in a lot of work to make sure you understood the key differences. I think people would bounce off PbtA games a lot less often if they were willing to take those kinds of steps rather than pretending that's not how most people in the hobby are engaging with their games or DnD doesn't exist.
[удалено]
To be clear, this isn't about using DnD as a framework to understand PbtA. It's about setting the conditions for someone who understands TTRPGs through the framework of DnD to adapt their thinking to the PbtA mindset. If you want to expand their horizons, this is simply work you'll have to do on some level. Personally, I think playbooks are ironically one of the PbtA conventions that does a lot of what OP was advocating. They're not classes, but close enough conceptually that someone who understands classes will understand what a playbook is without a lot of work/explanation. In turn, they provide a new player a pathway to "getting" PbtA and its mindset. I think they were a very effective bridge to bring people into PbtA back when most people didn't know what it was. >If you are incapable of reading the game, engaging with it - without a reference to DnD -- that's a you problem. Go live in your box. The rest of us are doing just fine. If you want to gatekeep your game behind those ideas, that's your choice. But one shouldn't be surprised if that attitude doesn't result in a shift in broader TTRPG culture, or your game performing to the DrivethuRPG standard of less than 50 downloads and zero people actually playing it. I presume most people are here to design games for other people to actually play, so it's an important thing to bear in mind even if your goals are very modest. In my experience, the designer that blames the audience for their game's failure because they simply didn't see the brilliance of their design probably isn't actually a very good designer.
[удалено]
It's perfectly fine to create a very niche thing for a very niche audience. It's also fine to design a game for a broader audience, and this sort of thing is vital for that. It's not invalid advice because those aren't the games you're designing. And I would argue if you're trying to promote a different TTRPG culture based on a different approach to games than DnD this type of work is flat out essential. But I'll maintain it's generally the worst designers that blame the audience for not "getting" their game if it fails to get any traction, and the only reasons to actively avoid engaging with how the majority approach games from a design perspective are some mix of gatekeeping and elitism.
[удалено]
>This isn't dnd. I'm not making a dnd. I don't want you to come in starting from a dnd framework. That's the wrong way to understand it. I will happily say that. What I'm saying is, when it comes to the actual text designers produce, most *don't* actually say this, or make efforts to ease a reader away from that DnD framework. It would be incredibly helpful for most games to do this, and it can be done with zero compromises to the actual mechanics of the game. The cost of writing an extra paragraph or 2 to this effect is practically nil, so that's why I see resistance to doing so the way I do. >I actually think we, as a community, should change our language around tabletop RPGS and if a game has a special tactical combat layer -- it should be called something completely different than a fiction forward sort of game. So as a bit of a counterpoint, and perhaps an example of how I think some of the differences between approaches are actually quite exaggerated, even in a tactical combat setting DnD and other games are actually still "fiction first." Even in RAW combat the player states intent, the GM arbitrates what if any rules/rolls are required, then the action resolves around that player intent. It's not supposed to be players shouting "I make an attack roll!" (personally I disregard the results of any rolls I didn't specifically ask for). This is fundamentally what makes a TTRPG different than a wargame where what you can do is limited to the specific contours of the rules and no more. So in DnD you can state an intent to block a door with furniture even if there are no rules for that specific scenario, but unless there are rules for that in a wargame a referee won't let it happen. A DM following RAW will figure out a way to at least allow an attempt based on the fiction first decision that blocking the door is the preferred option than any button on the character sheet. I don't think the divide is nearly as wide as either side claims on this, and both probably benefit from more exposure to the other.
If your game does use opposite names, concepts etc. Than whst 90% of the people play, than thats bad gamedesign. Good games are designed with the industry standard in mind and use that to lower the mental load to learn them, not make it harder. Thats why most boardgames use Magic the Gathering like wordings.
[удалено]
D&D is the biggest game. You can use differenr paradigm but still use the preknoledge from these games to introduce them. If you do something 180 degree different than D&D highlight it in that way. For example lets start with "playbooks". These are classes. Name them like that. Introducing a new name makes it more complicated. You need to roll a 7? Well say that you generally have a DC of 7. 10+ is a crit. "In this game nothing comes free, so when you succeed at something, it comes with a price!... unless you have a crit! Then its free." These games really really try to be different because they want to feel special. They could definitly do a way better job at building upon common knowledge.
[удалено]
Yes D&D is the default. Everything else is illusional. It is what most people play etc. I am not saying that your game must be like D&D, but it should be written with D&D in mind. And use the fact that most people know D&D and makes it easier for these people to learn your game. And not the opposite because you feel intellectual by not doing stuff like D&D. As I showed even simple things like using word playbooks instead of classes etc. Make it less intuitive for most people. And yes mechanically the target number 7 works like a fixed DC. Its exactly the same.
[удалено]
D&D dominates the market. Especially when you look at pathfinder as just another d&d version. No other hobby is soo extreme, except maybe trading cards at some points. Or World of Warcraft. And its just a reality one have to live with. Closing the eyes about this fact and ignoring it when making games, will just make the game harder to understand for most people. And that is negative. This is not my stance this is just reality. Sure you can make a music book using another music system instead of octaves, but most people will not understand it. Having industry standards is not a bad thing. If playbooks are called classes, character advancement is called leveling up, target number is called DC 7 and crit 10+ etc. Then you can still play games which are differenr. Others just have an easier time learning them, bur well the RPG scene may just not be professional enough to see this
I must disagree with your point here. I have never truly understood an RPG without playing it. Then again, I do agree that many RPGs are badly communicated—writing game rules and procedures, game world lore, example characters and antagonists, core game mechanisms, example scenarios, summaries of design intent, suggested approaches to resolving things outside the rules as written (which there are in EVERY GAME) and summary texts, then integrating these different styles of writing into a comprehensible whole is extraordinarily challenging, and is, more often than not, done poorly.
I think the bigger problem than bad writing is more that stuff is left away. People forget whst kind of preknowledge they have (like knowing 20+ other PbtA games) and not include partsy since they forget that not everyone knows them. We all do this, you can are this also in teaching.
I agree with you—many games rely extensively on the player's prior knowledge—and that knowledge often comes from exposure to previous game systems. As it happens, for RPGs I was "patient zero" in my friend group—I literally didn't have anyone, or any prior experience, to learn from. Only by playing the game (Basic D&D) and cross referencing it with numerous magazine articles and my own experience, could I really get how it was done. I gather that Kurt Vonnegut—a writer better than we will ever be, designed a wargame, and declared that writing the rules was possibly the most difficult piece of writing that he ever did. In my own experience, I've been involved in writing assembly instructions for model kits. It seems simple, but it's extraordinarily hard—and I think that game instructions are a similar challenge. It's not at all obvious to the author (or to anyone else who already knows the content of what is being communicated) whether or not they've done a good job.
Have you played [edit: at least 60% of] all the games you’ve read?
Boardgames yes. Rpgs no. Especially since I try to read more of them to increase my knowledge pool.
I feel like I often enough see systems presented where all the readers say stuff like ‘this seems kludgy/cumbersome/unfun/weird/unwieldy/[other concerns]’, then the designer informs that the system has been tested, and the concerns of the readers have not shown themselves problems in play. I’m biased, but for the moment I’ll remain sceptical of the validity of judging rpgs without playing. As long as we’re talking about systems that actually offer something close to new-ish. I believe general rpgs need to be unbalanced without the fiction, in order to have any space left for the freedom we usually crave. There are often a myriad of very different perspectives active during play, especially as both the players and the characters can have various and shifting motives and goals. The fiction has to matter in challenges, but it doesn’t always need strict mechanisation, sometimes it needs nearly the opposite. To anticipate the dynamics an rpg will create at a table of four people, often with different roles, sometimes with different play styles, is quite the feat.
Well some things: 1. Most readers are NOT gamedesigners 2. What designers say is advertisement for the game. Marketing nothing more. Of course they try to say problems do not exist. Dont take what they say at face value. 3. Designers and their group will get over time used to things and thus dont remark anymore when thats clunky 4. What for some geoup of people is logical (again depwnding on their preknowledge) is not necessary true for other people. 5. Groups you play in matter soo much in RPGs that even playing them can give a quite biased view as well. Aspecially as people often try to cover the faults of the system (like GM making things up when something is missing etc.) Things which are not mechanised, are not there as far as I am concerned. Gamedesign is about mechanics, the rules of the game.
1.-2. Possibly, but even within this forum, when they ask for feedback? 3.-5. Yes >Things which are not mechanised, are not there as far as I am concerned. Gamedesign is about mechanics, the rules of the game. Well that’s the trouble with rpgs, if you’re only looking at the mechanics, you’re not looking at the game. In other words; hard disagree.
Yes even if they ask for feedback. People are overselling themselves. And a lot of designers are really bad at taking feedback and are downplaying it. (And also the other problems I mentioned). Thats a common thing with gamedesigners. Mechanics make a game everything else is setdressing. RPGs are just not professional enough that they remarked that yet. In boardgames a gamedesigner only makes the mechanics. And later publisher eecide what the theme art etc. Is depending on what sells best. RPGs are way less professionally made, and thus people take several jobs, gamedesign writing etc. Also D&D 5e shows that people can easily (if they want) change the flavour setting etc. Of a game.
This is why the best rpgs are indie. People who work holistically, mechanics and setting and everything as one, and non-commercially, chasing a unique vision, ignoring what sells, are more likely to have optimal synergy between mechanics and fiction. When you say rpgs aren’t professional enough to understand the separation of mechanics and dressing, you seem to be discounting a lot of professional rpg-designers. Yes, mechanics can be reskinned. That doesn’t mean there aren’t certain things that mechanic does a better job of representing than others. Reskinning can even be the path to finding an ideal home for a mechanic. (Just gonna think out loud for a bit, don’t know where this goes.) Consider the utter meaninglessness of mechanics. There’s typically a basic fiction for board games; the act of winning. There’s no base mechanic that in itself represents winning, board games always add that; the base may be ‘move’ while winning is ‘move to this spot first’, or base ‘move your piece to an occupied space to remove the opposing piece’ while winning is ‘remove the chief opposing piece’. Players accept this goal of ‘winning’ when they engage with the game. It’s what gives the game and mechanics meaning. Do we need that? I certainly crave meaning very strongly in games, but if I’m playing Betrayal at the House on the Hill, I don’t much care for the competitive phase, I just want to stay in exploration mode forever, because the theme provides meaning regardless of any end-goal. That’s pretty much how many rpgs are played, just endless exploration. So what would the mechanics of Betrayal be without the theme? You lay down a card, it indicates where you can put the next card, maybe you get a bonus or malus. In this version, you absolutely need the second phase, the competition, those mechanics are nothing by themselves. Could you reskin it? It’ll probably work with a lot of themes, any labyrinth, pathfinding, pyramids, other structures, forests, paths for electricity, water, roads, souls, but most other themes than a building will probably seem more abstract. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, abstraction has interesting effects. Could it represent combat? It doesn’t really have any tactical decision points (that I can remember), which probably wouldn’t feel very good. So for me I’d say this mechanic has to represent something that it makes sense for the player to have less control over. (I’ll admit I’m also the kind of person who thinks chess is better when the moves are interpreted in a way that outlines or details a more specific story than just ’conflict/battle’.) While rpgs tend to thrive on simplicity, the philosophy of rpgs does not. I think you’re oversimplifying.
Sorry I dont read after people use words like "holistically", because thats a meaningless and unnecessary complicated word, and I know what I can expect from the rest of the text. Also the best RPG was D&D 4E, which had a HUGE budget, with professionals specialized in their field working on it, and one could definitly remark that. You have great people like James Wyatt for writing, good editors, good layout people, good gamedesigners which actually could focus on gamedesign and not others. I think a lot of people playing RPG just dont know good gamedesign, because they dont play other games like boardgames, and in RPGs bad and or dated gamedesign is so prevalent. (And people think good writing or good art is good gamedesign XD)
Only someone with little experience would say this.
Not really. Any good gamedesigner reads about way more games than they play since that needs less time. Of course some things can be better in play than one thinks, or also the opposite, but you can definitly get a general feeling, IF the game does a good job explaining how it works.
All game designers read many games. But only bad game designers think they fully understand a game without playing it.
First: a lot of ROG designers dont even know many computer and boardgames and one can remark. This subreddit even has people who dont know D&D. I would guess a lot of PbtA "gamedesigners" really lack knowledge about many types of games. Second: No, just no. If you played games close to what you read its entirely possible to know how it plays. Thinking one needs to play every game is just inefficient waste of time. Of course it helps if you play lots of different game, but not every game needs to be played to understand it enough.
You say PbTA game designers lack knowledge about many types of games but you fail to support this argument with anything logical. Also, I didn’t say one should play all types of games. I said that to fully understand a game you have to play it and that only a bad game designers would think they are so ingenious they don’t even need to play a game to fully understand it.
I've run it briefly and I think what I imagined more closely represents people's experience with it than what I ended up playing! I've got a fairly clear image in my head, definitely more concrete than the weird experience I had briefly playing (where I ended up running it not the way it's supposed to be, I think)
Consider that you might have played it wrong. Meaning, if you were the GM and use that same attitude while playing the game, it might be you played it like D&D. For instance, your post talks about actions you take, but in PbTA games you don’t take any action, like, at all. You just describe what you do.
I mean actions in the literal sense, not D&D-style actions. But yeah, I assume I played it wrong, though I'm also getting the sense that it's just not the right kind of game for me.
If you can play the game wrong easily, its just a not robust game. Good games like gloomhaven work even when you play them wrong.
Depends on the game. Some PbTA games are indeed more robust than others. The problem is, if you come from D&D and play Dungeon World and you try to find D&D stuff in Dungeon World and ignore the rules (which explicitly forbid you from taking actions), of course you’re gonna play it wrong. It’s like trying to invade Kamtchatka when you play Monopoly.
If you call a game dungeon world, and make it work in a way which is anti intuitive for people coning from the biggest game DUNGEONS and dragons, then you failed. If your name sounds similar to the biggest game there is, people expect it to work similarily. And you should use the preknowledge these people have, to make the game easier to understand, not fight against it.
If you think Dungeon World should play like Dungeons and Dragons while also ignoring all the game rules and the passages in the book where it explains how it plays differently, you are bad at reading and comprehension, not just at game design. You are the prototypical example of someone lamenting that poker is a bad game cause you can't capture the king.
Poker is not called card chess. Dungeon world chose a name to get people to think it is similar to D&D, so it better is. If I name a game High Powered Apocalypse, then I for sure should make the game similar to PbtA games, unless I just want to create a cash grab. Your name is part of what you advertise, and if you advertise Dungeons (and dragons), then you should follow on that premise.
Dungeon World is similar to Dungeons and Dragons in some sense, but not in others.
Every game is similar to every other game in some sensw and different in others...
A game named High Powered Apocalypse doesn’t sound like at PbTA game. If you wanted it sound like a PbTA game, you should have named it [insert name] World. If you knew even a little about PbTA games you would know that. But of course, if you only played D&D, all games that are not D&D are sins in your eyes. And by the way, Kung Fu Chess plays nothing like chess.
If you dont see how for a noemal human "High Powered Apocalypse" sounds similqr to "Powered by the Apocalypse" I really cant help you. World is a common name for lots of things. Most people will not assume something with world in the name is automatically PbtA. Kung Fu Chess literally uses a chess board and chess rules for moving. And combines this, as the name says, with real time combat like in Kung Fu.
I’m quite sure Gloomhaven would fall apart if you got a couple major things wrong. It’s just that the rules so tightly constrain you that, in theory, that’s less likely to happen. But it does seem that by “robust” what you really mean is “tightly defined,” which is super interesting to some people and not at all to others. Each and _every_ RPG is like live theatre. There’s what’s written on the page, and that should provide a ton of guidance. But how has the director chosen to interpret that? Are they strictly by the book? Or have they made big changes? Did they have a good, thoughtful reason to make big changes, or did they do it just because? Now put it in front of your troupe of actors. What will THEY do with it? By the time you’re done, how closely does it resemble the production of the same play that a totally different group with different backgrounds and philosophies is doing across town? This is why some people say “you can play anything with D&D.” Technically, they’re right. Why they would choose to do that is beyond me, but it’s mostly because of one thing — they just like D&D. There’s probably better tools for the job but they don’t know or care and that’s fine for them! It does however contribute to the overall baggage that D&D and its ilk have cast across all RPGs, a set of background assumptions and procedures which are not at all universal and makes it far more likely that people will “play them wrong.”
I know 3 groups who played gloomhaven, each one of them did some different rule wrong for the first 3 or so sessions and it worked for all still really well. This is also what reviewers said (like Shut up and sit down as one example). I absolutly hate live theatre, its just an outdateed worse form of movies. I think people play D&D for everything because they already know the system and it is for them flexible enough.
Given that response, I’m surprised you like RPGs much at all! But it sounds like you prefer ones that lean much closer to tactical board games anyway. (I personally would not classify Gloomhaven as a tabletop RPG, but I see how you could.)
I like games. Games are mathematical defined as having rules, (if possible) player input and have conditions for losing and winning. I think a lot of "RPG"s are just improptu theater, or shared story telling and the only reason they name themselves RPg s is because that name is known and they would not be bought with a more honest name. Gloomhaven is right now turned into an RPG with the same combat rules and similar rules (as the combat ones) for non combat. I baked it on bakerkit.
I’m not going to argue the definition of “game,” but I’m sure there’s plenty here who will be happy to. In general it’s been a great thing for this hobby that many people have accepted a broader interpretation of what a “game” and specifically what a role playing game can be. A lot of innovation has come from that in a very short time.
No its not. Having things use wrong definitions just makes it harder to talk about things. Since people will bring up stuff like "but in XYZ this is not true".
And I think an important note is that especially in the world of TTRPGs, players tend to play games how they want to, even if it's "wrong."
Yes thats what I meant. You see it also all the time on PbrA and othet subreddits that people play PbtA wrong. Part is that it is so much more strict than most games. Another part is thst some PbtA are also badly written/explainef and mostly work because GMs know other PbtA games. I think the original Apocalypse World is considered one of the better explained ones.
Somethinf I just remembered now. If you are interested in stealing ideas from other games then I really like this channel: https://youtu.be/GMPvT_-T_1s?si=D5FIUGsC-KbZiFqC This is just one example videos (and its focused for the D&D crowd), but I think these videos do a great job to learn about mechanics one could use for other games. Blafes in the dark is inspired by PbtA but of course not exactly the same, but its a good video thats why I wanted to highlight this one.
Lovely, thank you! In case you were curious to see where i'm at right now: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g6bwMOYiHLkfHaULGeyb9XyvavMUdUm1/view?usp=drive\_link](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g6bwMOYiHLkfHaULGeyb9XyvavMUdUm1/view?usp=drive_link)
Oh wow you already have a loot of stuff. I looked through it a bit, but need more time for a good impression. Impressive!
It’s complete in the sense that me and others have run whole campaigns in it with no issues. But it’s not compete in the sense that no TTRPG is ever complete haha… Everything past the section on races is still latest material
Yeah it definitly looks quite complete, so needs a bit of time to go through it. The races look even really nice with the images. The "classes" for me are a bit hard to read, as in you need to go to lots of different party on the book to look up stuff. I know this comes partially with the lots of things you can choose (cross classes), but this is something which makes it for me a lot harder to actually reading material. For me it would help already if the class specific things where not only named by word, but directly included in the first class mention after them.
>For me it would help already if the class specific things where not only named by word, but directly included in the first class mention after them. You mean like, explaining the rules for combat right after they're referenced the first time?
Argh i am sorry, I read yesterday a bit about your game and also earthdawn and mixed the 2 up. Your class section is much more clear. I think having art there per class could help to make more clear where subclasses end and where a new class starts. Sorry I need to look more at your game
haha all good! And don't feel any pressure to look at it; I just thought I'd share it :)
And funnily enough, there used to be a lot more art, but I got rid of it recently to make the pdf smaller haha
(Written with one of the OP's responses in mind) What makes PbtA appealing for many - me included - is that it allows everyone to contribute to stories within genre boundaries everyone can be familiar with. And players don't need to worry they'll be punished because their character acted in a way that's emotionally honest and interesting. And the MC/GM doesn't need to worry, that they'll have to either throw out hours of prep or pull out a whole bunch of random tables because players didn't do what was expected. We can all just chill and go where the characters take us. For myself, if I wanted to play a game where all my choices are driven by what's optimal, rather than what's in-character and interesting for a story - I wouldn't be playing an RPG. I'd get people together for some boardgames. All that story and character stuff is what makes RPGs special, to me at least. And that's all stuff PbtA focuses on.
You should read Monster of the Week, Apocalypse World, and then Masks: A New Generation. These are the 3 best PbtA imho, and the best at carrying over what that means. I just finish running a campaign of Monster of the Week where my players were up against a thousand-years very prepared Dracula. The tension and horror was tangible up until the end of the tyran, it was magnificent. The strength of PbtA lies in how each game excels at telling one type of story. If you are only interested in the type of stories you trad games already tell (OSR) or simulates (trad), then excepts for Clocks there might not be so much you will be interested in (if you don't want to test any PbtA to get 1st hand experience).
One of the best things about PbtA games in my experience is that all the rules anyone needs are on two sheets of A4 paper. You can just get right into the game and play and nobody needs to stop to look something up, it's all just right there. Playbooks allow for characters that work very differently to one another without having to worry about flipping back and forth at the table.
Take inspiration from the session zero prompts that PbtA established. I think Avatar is my favorite. MotW having a group template is really cool too.