I've yet to see any serious problems with it from my admittedly quite limited experience of it. The system seems to attract such derision and I want to know why.
>>97125223I imagine the people I'm ideologically opposed to playing it and that makes me mad.
>>97125223Its seemingly simple to make so it attracted a lot of low effort and bad design quickly. What ends up happening is despite it seeming simple to play or run, it requires a decent amount of thought and consideration that's usually lacking in the last decade of shovelware. There's a ton of pbta, not many good ones though. It emulates genre fiction, so while this guarantees an audience it also guarantees >writers and >genre fans who are generally insufferable after short periods of time. The ease of which it can be made attracted the usual artfuck grifters. They get in everything and isn't really avoidable but adds more things to filter through. Occasionally neat art but its an imbalanced trade. Mechanically focused on a very different goal: narrative formation, but seemingly similar method: dice game and stats. This frustrates some who are unable to differentiate. When it was first happening there were a lot of zealots trying to propose it as the solution to everything. They missed their own point and also were god damn annoying. Also started getting big when the internet started getting really political and shitty.
>>97125295So the issue is less the system itself, and more the kind of people who use it, and how do they do that? It sounds a little bit like the Unity game engine.
I'm going to assume you are not a confused pendant or a garden variety shitposter. Furthermore, I'll assume you have played PbtA games and at least two other RPG systems unrelated to the first. So, with all these wild assumptions out of the way, PbtA is perfectly fine for what it is and the games it espouses. >The GoodPbtA is extremely specific to the point that it is closer to a boardgame than most other RPG systems. However, that kind of focus is not a bad thing with the right group and mindset. Because of its laser focus on a single subject, premade character archetypes, and bare bones resolution mechanics, it attracts people who are often passengers to a storyline. These same people would do poorly in other systems that would require them to be active participants, but that is a feature rather than a bug for PbtA.>The BadThe biggest issue you will find on this New Guinea pottery sculpting forum is that PbtA has a lot of LGBT representation. This is in spite of the most well-known PbtA game called Blades in the Dark. 4chinners being prominently American cultural warriors have a knee jerk reaction to the colours blue, pink, and purple all in one place and find the idea of people with skin colours darker than Pantone White to be akin to erasure. With that important detail out of the way, the actual issues for PbtA are its narrow focus and literally having its passengers fill in boxes under the guise of progression. The focus means you can't really use any PbtA product to branch out into other styles of games and even the stories you tell are limited. The playbooks each archetype adheres too leaves little room for exploring the setting from any perspective that is not explicitly listed.>The UglyPbtA seems to be loose with its design documents and will happily collect a paycheck from anyone. This has lead to a flood of terribly designed settings with PbtA's already highly restrictive mechanics.
>>97125361Yeah I've tried Blades In the Dark, Masks and Monsterhearts. The campaigns were short but enjoyable, so I'm wondering what the deal is. Did I just have a good group or is the hatred unwarranted?
>>97125223Tried running a long-form campaign with it. Was fun initially, but the simplicity of the mechanics and the really constrained character progression means it didn’t really work long-form for my players. I ended bolting on other systems to it (which is about as easy to do with this game as I’ve ever seen, it’s very streamlined) and that extended the game’s lifetime somewhat. Felt like a very low-stakes system, so I liked it as a palette cleanser after a long, tonally serious campaign. It let the group could shitpost a bit before refocusing on the next thing. Also I found it took extremely little prep, and my job also becomes easier when the expectation is that I will also be shitposting a bit. Overall I ended up prepping more than I was compelled to run, but I have a pretty good well of original episodic oneshots to run in my back pocket now.It’s also pretty easy to design your own thing if you’re trying to go for a hyper-specific game for your group that doesn’t exist and you lack the time or design chops to make a whole system to run your idea. Maybe your group wants to play a very specific type of game, for instance, “A band of sentient household appliances attempting to escape enslavement”. Of the various PbtA systems at a glance, it seems like the best received ones are those that bolt hefty additional mechanics on to the base system. I don’t regret running the system and I do recommend it as an intro game for new players. Not for new DMs though, it demands a lot of on the fly thinking to make sure shit stays interesting without feeling like an ass pull to players. Overall I like it as being about the simplest thing on the spectrum I can run without ending up in Everyone is John territory. Be really fucking judicious about buying a PbtA system without demoing first though, a lot of them just don’t have that much going on, not worth your money or time investment.
>>97125223>>97125401I wouldn't say I hate PbtA, but as someone who tried out Blades in the Dark, I can easily see how people could have a worse experience.And my own experience wasn't great. The analogy I've often used is that playing BitD feels like sitting in a writer's room brainstorming a heist movie. Which while not the most boring thing, is also a far cry from actively playing a game about heists, which is what was pitched. And from what I've heard BitD is one of the more robust and well-designed iterations of PbtA, so if other games utilizing it are even worse, that's not a good sign.
>>97125484>Not for new DMs thoughWhat would you recommend for new GMs?
>>97125223I don't even know which PbtA games I have played considering they were con games, but it doesn't seem to have that sort of individualistic "my character" or "my build" basis lots of other games have. You're kind of dependent on the rest of the party for everything and there were lots of power-of-friendship moves you had to use if you wanted any sort of straight successes and so on. It's just very different compared to the wargamey sort like D&D
>>97125223Nothings really good about it and its fanbase acts like it's the best thing since sliced bread.
>>97125361>PbtA has a lot of LGBT representationThe irony of this being that the loudest complainers, rejects from /pol/ only complain because they are all self loathing closeted homosexuals, screeching about the evils of the gays while furiously thrashing their cocks to catboys
>>97125223It's a system that really depends on the setting to shine. Dungeon World was meant to be a replacement for D&D and failing forward in a high fantasy adventure game while also limiting character abilities doesn't fit at all. Monster of the Week, by contrast, is more open ended with all characters being able to use magic and the such with some just being better at it and the nature of failing forward in a horror type setting makes more sense thematically.
>>97126492>Gays are le good actuallyGays are neither good nor evil. They are like left-handed people. PbtA stuff tends to treat them like elfs or some other super special shit that is just bizarre.>I open the doorYou only rolled a six>I also sucked a dick this morningThat bumps it to a 10. Good job.
>>97126594>>I open the door>What action from your playbook is that? Tell me what ability you're using to open it.
>>97126658The lift portculus ability from the fighter playbook of Dungeon World.
>>97125361>it attracts people who are often passengers to a storylineThis is weirdly contrary, since the philosophy of the way PbtA games works is that the world is reactive to player character actions (and the way that the mechanics resolve from their actions). Ideally, players engaging with these systems are especially proactive. It's true that these games do have some mechanical guidelines and character archetypes are (almost always) premade, but the design of those things is not so tight that players can't find their own spins to put on things.
>>97126077Blades does involve a lot of planning and brainstorming, yeah. Then again, that kind of makes sense for the genre it's in.But you still tend to do a lot of improvising and figuring out how to leverage your abilities during the heist. So it's kind of like the game has two major phases. The thinking part and the doing part.
>>97125223Are you expecting /tg/ consensus to... make sense, anon?
>>97126594>>97126722>I open the door>You only rolled a six>What action from your playbook is that? Tell me what ability you're using to open it.Except that you just assume that the fiction works as you would normally expect, like how you typically don't make players roll to keep breathing normally in normal conditions in DnD. Sometimes a move helps give shape to what a character's abilities are (though not always, it depends on which game), but the main purpose of moves is to create opportunities for the narrative to be affected by things that you want to be relevant when your character is involved.
>>97126347NTA, but they should shrimply use prewritten short modules.
>>97127412>prewritten modules>PBTAkek
>>97125223I don't see the point of using pbta instead of freeform roleplaying
>>97127412Tried it, didn't do any better because shit always happens that isn't in the module and then you're just stumpedLike in Paper Chase one of the first things I was asked is "what was the uncle's job" and the module doesn't fucking specify so I had to come up with some bullshit that came to bite me in the ass later when it wasn't fully consistent with the shit people in the module sayAt least having to always bullshit in pbta I can make it consistent
>>97125361>Because of its laser focus on a single subject, premade character archetypes, and bare bones resolution mechanics, it attracts people who are often passengers to a storyline. These same people would do poorly in other systems that would require them to be active participants, but that is a feature rather than a bug for PbtA.What? Pbta literally doesn't work if players are passive because everything ends with "what do you do" and nothing really happens until the players do something and you are allowed to do a GM moveMy biggest struggle in pbta as a newfag GM has been players who don't take initiative
>>97126928>Blades does involve a lot of planning and brainstorming, yeah.>So it's kind of like the game has two major phases. The thinking part and the doing part.That's not what I'm referring to whatsoever. BitD doesn't have a planning phase. It arguably doesn't even have a doing phase.>But you still tend to do a lot of improvising and figuring out how to leverage your abilities during the heistExcept it wasn't the case of roleplaying a character to figure out the best way to apply one's talents to a situation. It was "okay, which character is going to spend Stress for a Flashback this time?". That's why I said it's a writer's room, not improv acting. The book even says as much with pic related in regards to planning. You're not scouting out a location or planning out the specific details. You're just picking a category and saying what the broad approach is. That's because as soon as the job stats, the Engagement roll determines how poorly things are going right away. You don't even have to declare which items you're bringing in advance, just your total load. If you need some specific tool, you'll have it. If you don't need it, you'll have something else.>Then again, that kind of makes sense for the genre it's in.And that's ultimately why I think the game wasn't very satisfying. It would make sense for you to do a lot of or brainstorming for the heist genre wouldn't it? Unfortunately BitD says to skip over that and handle everything via Flashback mechanics instead.
>>97127538Idea is more "use 10 minutes to discuss the plan" than "no discussing the plan".
>>97125223I don't care about PBTA but Mocha is mai waifu
>>97127534This. I don't necessarily think the idea of dndrones is absolutely correct, but the dndrone stereotype is EXACTLY the kind of player that will fuck up a PBTA game (and most indie games, for that matter).
>>97127560>"use 10 minutes to discuss the plan"What part of that is meant to be "a lot of planning and brainstorming"? 10 minutes of discussion is enough to do exactly what I said the game recommends. Which is choosing the broad approach to a particular job. More to the point, it's still not what I was referring to initially.
>>97125360Pretty much. Just like d20 the other system that got glutted to death, PBTA suffers heavily from the TTRPG equivalent of asset flips.
>>97125223Friendly reminder that PBTA is not a system and is a meaningless label.>"Powered by the Apocalypse" isn't the name of a category of games, a set of games' features, or the thrust of any games' design. >>"Powered by the Apocalypse" isn't the name of a kind of game, set of game elements, or even the core design thrust of a coherent movement.>>Its use in a game's trade dress signifies ONLY that the game was inspired by Apocalypse World in a way that the designer considers significantDid you read a rules-lite story-telling game about cute animals spreading love and joy in rainbow land that said PBTA in the credits and that inspired you to make a GURPS-tier crunchy hell spawn torture porn rpg, you can slap PBTA on yours.
>>97126347Imo, ideally you play before you GM. However, that isn’t always gonna be possible. Next best thing is a module, ideally one that’s reputable, has good reviews and whatnot. Run that first and then branch off into your own thing. Hell, if you’re confident partway through start modifying heavily, and you can still pull back and go back to script if the players don’t enjoy your OG content. If you’re running a system without a good premade, I find it next easiest to run something that’s like a 3-5/10 on crunch with a focus on combat. If the system is too complex you can get lost in the weeds unless you’ve got the rules autism, and that really slows down the pace if you’re already out of your element. Unless you’re really sure you can read, get familiar, memorize the core rules or find really good quick references, maybe don’t start with like Exalted 2e or Shadowrun. Really narrative systems demand constant creative embellishment to do fun stuff and keep things moving (PbtA, Fate I’m told though I’ve not tried it so take that with a grain of salt). From there, it’s just finding something with rules you can understand and tolerate. For a lot of people, this looks like DnD or Pathfinder, that’s why those are gateway systems. Many years ago my group started with Call of Cthulu, struggled with generating interesting mysteries and didn’t want to use pregen stuff, and switched to Savage Worlds which did a lot better to get us into stuff. Ultimately, being passionate about the system and your game will matter more than complexity though I think, these are just guidelines. If what turns your crank is running a capes game and you saw someone playing Mutants and Masterminds and you thought it was the coolest thing ever, then run that. Just be willing to shop for a system before you commit to making your multi year first campaign.
>>97127538>That's not what I'm referring to whatsoever. BitD doesn't have a planning phase. It arguably doesn't even have a doing phase.Not strictly no. That's why I said "it's kind of like." Playing Blades tends to be like:>We gotta figure out how to get what we want>Now we're going to do any prep and planning to make sure we can get it>Now we're going to actually go do it, and we can manipulate the narrative along the way if we need to, because if anything goes wrong we're going to have to start finding new answers to problems>Except it wasn't the case of roleplaying a character to figure out the best way to apply one's talents to a situation. It was "okay, which character is going to spend Stress for a Flashback this time?". That's why I said it's a writer's room, not improv acting.This? I get this. Though, I think you might be taking a hard line that making and being a character doesn't matter so much. It does, especially when it comes down to difficult choices you make, how you choose to go about things, and the things you actually want. But I agree that there's an undercutting sometimes by the more meta mechanics of play.I've played Blades and enjoyed it, but I can also understand why other people might not.Also take note that in your example, that doesn't say "don't plan," but that you don't have to do the nitty-gritty. I find that actually doing this stuff makes for a better experience than just throwing yourself at it, because it sets more of the situation down, and setting things up in advance means you have to make more dicey choices in the field due to the resources you already spent trying to make things go well for you.
>>97125484I would be curious to know what you thought was getting in your way so much that you thought you needed to do all that much to compensate. Which game were you playing?
>>97127591Nothing, precisely. THAT would be pretty boring, I agree 100% with the game on this.
Tangentially related, but when I played shadowrun it felt way more like a "Heist movie simulator" than any other game.80% of the session was planning and preparing, and then 20% was the execution. Most of the time something went wrong, but when we managed to get everything right it felt great, because we felt like what we did before the run started actually mattered.Bribing the right people, using our Contacts to get preliminary info, stealing keycards, stalking the security to learn of their guard shifts, hacking their server to get the floorplans, all that shit went into play and made a difference.Best sessions were when we didn't have to fire one bullet. Not because the combat system was bad, but because we executed everything well.We eventually stopped playing shadowrun, mostly because the system got really clunky once the campaign went long enough so I wouldn't reccomend it.Now this was a lot of words to say that I think the blades in the dark approach to planning is bad.
>>97127917>I've played Blades and enjoyed it, but I can also understand why other people might not.Yeah. I can see how some people might like this sort of structure, but I felt like that experience might give OP some insight on why some people dislike these sorts of systems.>Also take note that in your example, that doesn't say "don't plan," but that you don't have to do the nitty-gritty.Sure, but note the post I was replying to said "Blades does involve a lot of planning and brainstorming". My point was not that the game says never to plan ever. But that you're glossing over the details to address them later.>setting things up in advance means you have to make more dicey choices in the field due to the resources you already spent trying to make things go well for you.That's something I got the impression of during play. More specifically, that the game givers you so many resources that as long as you save them for the job itself, you won't end up in the situation where you have to make dicey choices. >>97128034>THAT would be pretty boring, I agree 100% with the game on this.Feel free to discuss it with >>97126928 instead
>>97125223I simply disagree with games that use attribute/skill math with a range less than the dice range. Couple that with endemic "success but failure" results and the whole thing is basically custom-tailored to be counter to my tastes.
>>97127574Based Ozanari Dungeon enjoyer.
>>97125361>The biggest issue you will find on this New Guinea pottery sculpting forum is that PbtA has a lot of LGBT representationIn every PbtA thread I've seen over the last several years, this is rarely, if ever, a genuine complaint for games that aren't Thirtsy Sword Lesbians. Instead, I see people complaining about the clunky trinary resolution system and the endless "just make up some consequences" that goes with every action having a high chance for failure or mixed results.The true problem that I have seen sincerely discussed is that the framework is really only works when it is emulating certain kinds of TV writing. It works well in Monster of the Week, where you are telling a somewhat formulaic story with archetypal characters, or MASKS where the interpersonal teen drama is the whole point. It doesn't really work for whatever the fuck Apocalypse World thought it was supposed to be. It's piss poor at being D&D, as Dungeon World demonstrates. Other than that, there's just so many fucking PBTA games and most of them are just reskinning other PBTA games, but changing the names of playbooks and moves to evoke the faintest whiff of the thing they are unpleasantly cramming into the PBTA mold, while not actually making moves and playbooks that properly reflect the tone or genre they are supposed to emulate.
>>97125360Its more like the system is particular enough that its difficult to use properly and the people who bought into the hype cycle are for sure not the people who understand how specifically procedural it is. It seems like light improv but its actually quite specific about what things are suppose to happen process wise for the gameplay loops. Also doesn't help the big pbta, Dungeon World, was quite bad and set the bar for >just jam a thing that isn't this into it and pretend its all good, no one will notice
I'm not too fond of Forge Group stuff......I say then when I happen to have a bunch of Root RPG PDFs... ...yet to read them, though...
>>97128691>It doesn't really work for whatever the fuck Apocalypse World thought it was supposed to be.Nah, it does work, altough I think you gotta have a clearer world-view and more forward-moving players than (even) most other PBTAs.(Also, what AW tries to do is quite simple at its core: a western town with an handful of big players, on crack)>Other than that, there's just so many fucking PBTA games and most of them are just reskinning other PBTA games, but changing the names of playbooks and moves to evoke the faintest whiff of the thing they are unpleasantly cramming into the PBTA mold, while not actually making moves and playbooks that properly reflect the tone or genre they are supposed to emulate.True. Not really different from things like the endless 5E slop, but sadder 'cause say what you want about Baker, he DOES want you to be creative and toughtful if you're game designing.
>Some people are pointing out that there are some good PbtA games among the mix, but that they tend to be specific genre fiction emulation that not everyone is looking forFuck. Honestly, if people understood this from the jump, it would probably eliminate a huge amount of the bad experiences that they have with the design.A game like Masks, Avatar Legends, Monster of the Week, etc, is perfectly good and fine if you want to play a role playing game in their specific stylings, but not if they aren't what you want to do. It would be like bitching that you didn't get to have an elaborate fantasy swords and magic fight against a Lovecraftian cult while playing Call of Cthulu.
>>97128691I think a big problem is that a lot of designers read the game and I think that the *game* is the 2d6+stat, 7+ for effect and 10+ for greater effect, when the actual game is the MC moves and player and MC agendas. VDB has a really good breakdown of how he actually sees the design of the game, and the dice resolution is almost a secondary system.Also, I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't really fucking get what he was going for with Apocalypse World. I understand what MASKS or MotW or even Monsterhearts is drawing on, but AW is unlike what I think of when I think of Post Apoc fiction. I am low key interested in the Burned Over edition that's kick-starting right now, I just know that the kind of bizarre lack of an example to point to, sex moves and kind of bad prose in the rule book would make it a hard sell, but I think the gameplay loop sounds like it would be really fun.
>>97129882*A hard sell to my particular group.
>>97128695Is that specific stuff written in the books or can I read up about it somewhere? I’ve been considering PbtA for some homebrew settings and this sounds pretty important for actually making it work (or deciding against it).
>>97125223Listen I don't PBTA but there'sa couple of issues. 1> The game doesn't work that well as an indie game. This has been an issue since the start, the system is too barebones, the systems/moves too constrained, etc. It only works with a strong GM (about to the level of ADND) and that GM is basically doing to work, not the game. 2> For the guys who uplifted game theory and stuck by 'System Matters' having their sole success be soulless hack after soulless hack of a not very good game of theirs is just aces. Last>>97125237Because of the first two points it's only really popular in certain fag groups. Most people rightfully want nothing to do with it, so banning/outcasting PBTA has the desired effect.
>>97128528>>97127574
>>97125361White people are superior and heterosexuality is the correct orientation.
>>97130306The first edition Apocalypse World outlines how to run the game, what the playbooks do, etc. There use to be a lot of forum discussion on forge, don't think that's happening much anymore. For all its faults the side book guide to Dungeon World is useful. The MC moves aren't suggestions, they're procedures. That's key. Moves follow fiction rather than being invoked by name. Its deceptively simple, especially after however long people have become used to other modes of rpg.
>>97126763you are focusing too much on the "roll to open a door" part and not enough on the "get a bonus because you sucked a cock earlier" part. the first isn't a thing in apocalypse world but the second is
>>97125237>I imagine the people I'm ideologically opposed to playing it and that makes me mad.This is honestly the biggest issue for me. I joined the Apocalypse World Discord server (yes, I know, >>discord) and not only do they have a thread to whinge about American politics, they also permeate everything they do with victimization, and tip-toeing around each other, and just general awkward-family-dinner atmosphere. How did a game about sex, blood, gritty violence, and just very primal human emotions and the breakdown of almost all social convention, cultivate a fanbase of mentally-ill hugboxers? Don't get me wrong, I get that that's the game, not real life, but you would think the edgelord of D. Vincent Baker who wrote a literal game called Kill Puppies for Satan, wouldn't be such a pearl clutcher. It sucks cause I do like the guy but he is a leftist sex ed teacher. And NONE of that would matter.... if it weren't for the fact that I cannot enjoy playing the game because of the people who play it. And I can't play this game in real life because I don't want to play a game with sex rules with IRL people. It can only be good as an online anonymous text roleplay. But playing it with those people is insufferable.
>>97131084I’ll note that down, thank you anon!
>>97131962I went to a major SF&F convention last year and the con discord was fucking unreal my man. It was this exact attitude applied to everything ad infinitum. Transport issues, issues finding local places to eat, the weather, just being a fat nerdy fuck who was tired at the end of the day, fucking COVID bullshit in 2024. Just weaving every tiny misfortune, shit 99% of people wouldn't even note about their day, into this big tapestry of victimhood and declaring it publicly. Psycho behaviour, complete performative helplessness, embracing misery as a way to beat other people down.
>>97129882I genuinely don't get Apoc World either. People latched onto the whole "moves" design philosophy, but most people don't talk about the game for good reason. Most of the playbook moves are rolling with a stat substitution, or >you can try to heal someonewhile others are like>You control an entire fucking gangAnd then there's the actual fucking moves, where some are beneficial, and others are >if you have sex nothing fucking happens or>you give them something, like a jobAnd none of that even gets into the god awful formatting and writing.
>>97133789Yeah, it seems sort of thematically all over the place. That's why I think MotW is a much better PbtA to hold up than the original game.
>>97133587Yeah I like to whine and bitch about my day, on here or on discord sometimes, but the fact that these people are serious about it, fat nerds are honestly such pussies, I am not even in good shape but I can at least hike or walk several miles, or just fucking move around, but I swear half of these people are literally borderline disabled. It's not even depressing, it's just annoying, especially if you go with some of them and halfway through the day they want to leave because muh anxiety over crowds or I'm tired or oh no it rained like holy shit I hate it all.
>>97125223The playbook system is in earnest everything people who hate on D&D say is wrong with class systems, but cranked up to 11.
>>97134873I always tought people hated classes because they shoehorned them. AW is many things but honestly it's hardly shoehoerning your options as a character.
>>97134907>it's hardly shoehoerning your options as a character.Fucking WHAT? That's specifically all the playbooks do in Apocalypse World. You pick one out of about a dozen one-note character concepts, ranging from "guy with weird brain powers" to "kinda hot and kinda good at fighting" to "you own a car"
>>97125361Yeah, this. It annoys grognards and numbercrunchers if you get a group that isn't laser-focused on the storytelling. My Monster of the Week GMs are very, VERY good at making it clear that it's meant to be collaborative and more like a co-written television series than anything.>>97125484That's another thing, too. I don't play regular campaigns with it, as much as I want to.
>>97135709I think you might be conflating having a clear archetype/role (like, the big guy with the guns and the will to use them) vs having no room to personalize it. You can totally do a psycho cult boss or a caring if manipulative figure, for example. AND make them have not-stereotypized skills.
>>97125223Discern Realities
>>97125237fpbp. /tg/ used to be about people coming together for the joy of the game. Now it is just a hive of haters literally shaking with seething anger and hatred that somewhere someone out there is having fun that they didn't approve of.
>>97138730>/tg/ used to be about people coming together for the joy of the gameNo it wasn't2hufag got shat on relentlessly for moving to 4e instead of joining the PF hivemindDrawthreads were an excuse to draw (low-quality) pornStorytimes were made-up or totally misunderstood (OMH is the story of a shitty player, not a bad GM)And 80% of threads (as opposed to today's 90%) were gaming-themed shitposts like spiders in drow vaginas or anal storage capacity
>>97138765>describes something infinitely better than what we have now.Oh man. What a tragedy.
>>97138786>/tg/ was love!>ok it wasn't but it was so much better-1000 izzat
>>97138765>Storytimes were made-up or totally misunderstood >Yet another mention of OMH unpromptedYou know, you don't HAVE to seethe about something that you hated for this long, you know. There's plenty of other storytimes that were much more memorable. Like Twodee's Shadowrun storytime.Or the All Imperial Guardsmen campaign, that was a fun one. Or Tale of an Industrious Rogue, not enough people mention that.Or you could, I dunno, tell your own stories that were actually real and worth telling. Cause everyone likes those. You know. From the very real games that you played that aren't at all fake and gay like whatever those old writefags used to tell people, which informs us why you know for a fact they're a shitty player compared to you....Or is it because you don't play games and just bitch about how /tg/ used to be so much better when you were shitting on storyfags and drawfags rather than complaining about how dead and boring this place is?
>>97138409You can play any character any way you want. Just because the game doesn't say that you can't have a certain personality or look doesn't mean it has lots of flexibility. Characters in TTRPGs are largely, but not completely, defined by what they can do, and AW has incredibly narrow and specific roles for characters to fill.
>>97139040Why do you think so? The standard moves are open to everybody. Any character can get an advancement for any character move (contrast DND, in which you'd need to multiclass and "stay on the track" of one class).What exactly you'd want to be (more) accessible to any given character.
>>97139077The standard moves are open to everyone because you couldn't do anything otherwise. Do you even understand how PBTA games work? This is like saying "every character can take the move action and make basic attacks!"
>>97138409Narrative customization for both games are about the same. The rules create a broad framework, but you can do whatever you want within it. However, mechanically, PBTA has even less customization than the OD&D cleric.
>>97139429>>97139477I frankly can't see what you two mean when you can't even give examples.
>>97140022PBTA playbooks have very limited playbook specific moves. This is by design to give the characters distinct identities and roles. In Apocalypse World, it's even worse because the roles given are, to put it plainly, fucking retarded and scattershot. Most of them only have a couple unique moves with the rest being "when you do [basic move] roll with [blank] instead of [usual stat]" and that's it.There is not really any more personalization in AW than you can find in D&D. In fact, part of switching playbooks in AW and other PBTA games often involves sacrificing and losing moves. So on top of only have a handful of gimmicks in the first place, you don't have many options to get moves from other books, and the moves you do get suck anyways. Meaning that you are very much shoehorned into a couple gimmicks, with the option to give up a gimmick for someone else's gimmick. It's a game where you can only do a few special things and most of them suck and few of them mesh well, shoehorning you into a highly specific style of play that Vincent Baker never really figured out because he's a fucking hack.
i just want to hit things, for damage.or look at something. or ask a question.not 'read a sitch' or whatever. it's not clever, it's tedious.
>>97141201Skill issue.
>>97141236Sometimes, it's fun to give abilities off-kilter names, but not when it's something you're going to be saying dozens of times per session. Made worse when the names are fucking stupid.
>>97141236>i just want to hit things, for damage.Ah so a basic move. >>97141236>or look at something. or ask a question.See above.
>>97141236>>97141304You guys know you're not suppose to say >I do The Move You're suppose to describe action and the MC decides if its a move or not.
>>97141320That whole "don't say the move name" shtick never actually works in practice. It's one of the many reasons why PBTA games are so fucking tiresome.
>>97141339>I'm bad at the game so its bad Very tiresome indeed.
>>97141354The game is badly designed and badly written, which is why people so often ignore the rules as written. Your attempts at elitism are pathetic.
>>97141387If you can't play the game as its intended its a (you) problem. Keep being loud about how retard you are. Its funny.
>>97141387>I played the game wrong, and didn't like it! Therefore it is badly designed!How is this any different from idiots complaining that d&d can't run star trek?
>>97141201In lots of PbtA games, playbook-specific moves are not really that much of a constraint. A common advancement you can take is "take a move from another playbook."Rather, the defining matter of the playbook is usually a more unique central feature.You're also being dishonest by saying:>Most of them only have a couple unique moves with the rest being "when you do [basic move] roll with [blank] instead of [usual stat]" and that's it.For every instance of a move that looks like this in Apocalypse World, there's something like twice as many moves that aren't like this.
>>97141339It works fine in my experience (though it usually takes a minute for people to adjust to which moves are in use when a campaign starts). You are supposed to approach the game fiction-first, taking moves that will interact with the kind of behavior your character is likely to engage with in the first place.
>>97141236>i just want to hit things, for damage.Totally fine. Everybody likes different things in their games.>or look at something. or ask a question.You can do this in PbtA just fine.>not 'read a sitch' or whatever. it's not clever, it's tedious.This is a silly take.
>>97141483Have you fucking looked at Apocalypse World?
>>97141416Explain how not saying the name works better than saying "I'm using [Move]"Amuse us, faggot.>>97141427It's badly designed because what the designer intended does not work in actual play, and instead of realizing that, it became a sticking point for wannabe auteur jackasses to repeat what they saw Dungeon World say, even though Adam Koebel is an even more talentless faggot than Baker is.
>>97141504Yes. I was looking at the 2e playbooks just now. In fact, I still have the PDF open.
>>97141511NTA, but>It's badly designed because what the designer intended does not work in actual playIs bullshit. Just because you didn't find it works for you or your group doesn't mean it's not working for anyone else.I agree with you that Dungeon World is one of the worse examples of a more well-known game in this style, though.
>>97141538It's not just my table. Go find any podcast running a PBTA game and I guarantee you every single one calls out the moves by name.
>>97141546>PbtA's design is bad>But I totally have been listening to podcasts of people playing games of this type, believe meYou're not doing yourself any favors for believability, unfortunately.Take note though, naming the move in discussion is not the same as calling the move out like "I'm gonna (insert move name here)."
>>97125361> The biggest issue you will find on this New Guinea pottery sculpting forum is that PbtA has a lot of LGBT representation.> knee jerk reaction to the colours blue, pink, and purple all in one place and find the idea of people with skin colours darker than Pantone WhiteYeah, that’s all I need to know to skip it. Thank you for saving my time.
>>97141609>it's different because it just is!Concession not accepted. Go out with honor, retard.
>>97141511Because the entire game is designed around creating narrative fiction. That's the whole point. many are able to successfully do this. You can't. Its a skill issue. That's okay, not your type of game. But your inability isn't a game problem.
>>97143800Don't weasel out of the question. That's not explaining how it works better. It's restating the intentions, which are so at odds with actually playing the game that most people simply ignore them and openly state or ask when they want to use a specific move.>Can I discern realities here?>I want to use Open Your Brain>I'm gonna roll Kick Some AssAnd it usually amounts to reading off the whole move anyways, because the GM isn't going to memorize things anyways, or they'll just end up reading it off for the players.This narrative fiction shit you think is so effortless doesn't actually work in practice, which you'd know if you'd ever read or played one of these games.
>>97143078It is different, because how you approach the game changes the play and flow of the game. There is an easily discernible difference between>"I use X thing I can do"and>"My character (insert descriptive actions here)">"Oh, this triggers your move, right? Go ahead and roll."The fiction activates mechanics, not the other way around.Not that you really defended your alleged just "knowing" that this the problem you insist exists either. You want to poke holes, but you also want to ignore that your own arguments are bad. Like a child that tries to sneak some moving around during freeze tag.
>>97144761Any way you try to spin it, the move gets named and the "fiction" parts ways for the mechanics when the GM or the Players name and read off the move. There's no way to get around that. The premise you insist is so natural and works so flawlessly is that everyone is so engrossed, but also has memorized all of their moves, and the GM has memorized the moves of all players at the table, that whenever they do anything, they seemlessly agree when to roll the dice and automatically know what each move does without invoking the mechanics, let alone naming them aloud.
>>97145618BRVless hands typed this post.
>>97131084>>97133974>That's why I think MotW is a much better PbtA to hold up than the original game.so which would be the most fruitful to pursue?
>>97141201>This is by design to give the characters distinct identities and roles.Roles, not identies. So far so good tough, you do seem to have at least read the game.>Most of them only have a couple unique moves with the rest being "when you do [basic move] roll with [blank] instead of [usual stat]" and that's it.Not so good, anon. Anyway you did notice that you can simply advance and take another playbook move, right?
>>97146362How is that any different from multiclassing? Your original examples were about roleplaying and now you're pretending that having one move from another book is some profound play experience change, when most of what you have to pick from for other playbook moves are stat increases, stat substitutions, or minor tweaks to basic moves. Besides, "get a move from another playbook" is an improvement you can only take twice, meaning AW actually has fewer options for customization than D&D 5e.
>>97146490NTA, but "less customization" is not a strictly worse feature of a game. In this case, limiting your ability to pull moves from other playbooks helps make sure that you stay relatively in your lane despite having some options.Think of it this way: If you were playing DnD, and two people had levels in the same class, and were using the same features, that would be kinda weird. It could affect balance, it could make it feel like they're stepping on each others' toes in terms of being able to make unique contributions to the group's efforts, etc. PbtA gets around these sorts of issues by discouraging people from taking the same playbook, and limiting your ability to branch into other playbooks' options. The exact combination of how you build out your character in the confines of your playbook is still up to you, and you still have the opportunity to branch out into other things you find suitable, but you're far less likely to be crowding your fellow players because of the limits.
>>97125401Stop taking /tg/ opinions seriously. This board if for amusement, not for actual serious discussion.
>>97146490Classes are... not really comparable to playbooks. Even less is a class level with its plethora of things and a single advancement. Especially because it's NOT a "profound play experience change": that, if anything, is more a description of class levels in DND.A class is, barring the pretty shallow archetype of a "ranger" or whatever (not to diss DND per se, but it's way less of a standardized character image nowdays), a way to fight, basically.A playbook is an archetype with some indication about the stats you're gonna use more often, more than anything less.>when most of what you have to pick from for other playbook moves are stat increases, stat substitutions, or minor tweaks to basic moves.Not really. 12 vs 58 total character moves (I'll assume you mean only unconditional substittution for a single move).>Besides, "get a move from another playbook" is an improvement you can only take twiceYes, because AW has a limit on the duration of your character waaaaaaaay quicker than DND (if we mean a character going all 20 levels), luckily enough.Still, even not considering the advanced improvements, 2 basic advancaments means 1/5 of the expectable career of your character is about opening yourself to other playbooks.
>>97126658>>97127298>>97127534>>97127576>>97141236>>97141320>>97144761New poster here. PBTA changes how you play, because it emulates narrative fiction instead of rewarding players by giving them opportunities to use the list of stuff on their character sheets. It's difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. >"MY PALADIN WILL USE HIS SMITE ABILITIY"vs. >"I strike down the evil creature with holy smite. It's a subtle difference, but you can see it in gameplay. It's the kind of thing you realize once you have done a session, that you weren't looking at your character sheet the whole time, waiting for your opportunity to use your cool ability. It's why Dungeon World is oriented around "The Fiction first", and not "my build!"
>>97146580lol
>why does /tg/ hate pbta?>read thread>pbtafags say it works great and it's awesome and perfect>it doesn't fucking work though>YEAH WELL WHATEVER YOU'RE A DUMB STUPID DUMB BABY IDIOT
>>97146693>Lots of posts talking about the good and the bad, what kinds of games it is good at and what kinds of games it is bad at, the kind of players who will enjoy it and the kind of players who will not.>EvErYoNe SaYiNg ItS pErFeCt ROFLCOPTOR!!!!!!!???!?!?!?!?!?~1There you go. You get the energy you give.
>>97146693PBTAfag, pretty sure I didn't say it's perfect. It would pretty dumb to even assume there "a PBTA way" anyway. Some games that call themselves as such do work.
>>97146580Sounds like a load of bullshit excuses. Why are you even trying to defend this point?
>>97146742You're gonna need a bigger bait, bro.
>>97146587>but you can see it in gameplaythen can you give an example, because without it those two sentences on smite can mean the same thing
>>97146734I wouldn't bother. There is no cure for 4chan brain and those afflicted don't have the nuance detection or critical thinking necessary to realize they have it. Make monkey noises at the creature and move on. Any more serious engagement will result in them rattling their cage and flinging their shit.
>>97146763Fuck you I am a serous argumenter! Do the needful and answer me.
>>97146765I know when you're reading them, they seem to say the same thing. The difference is in how you experience them at the table. If I told you we were playing Dungeon World, and you asked to play "a paladin:, I would say "you can play THE paladin" and you don't need a character sheet. In DW, you typically do need a character sheet, but as a DM, I honestly don't care about your character sheet. You have some choices to make, but they're not terribly important. You are NOT your character sheet. Many players have a problem with this. I had friends who played through a 6 session campaign, and they all have 30+ years experience. One of them had an existential crisis, and we had a long discussion about how one can do things that are not on the character sheet. He had trouble with this concept, and I found that interesting. So, imagine playing a D&D game, but ...you don't have a character sheet. You know what a paladin can do, because you are an experienced gamer, but you're not looking at your build. you're at the table with other players. You're doing the stuff a paladin can do because you're contributing to what is going on; "the fiction". And no, none of us are gay or have purple hair or special pronouns. I hate that shit.
>>97146954NTA, but that just sounds like an inferior way of handling things compared to how something like Paranoia does it.Paranoia also lacks character sheets, beyond a potential handout for a PC having a hidden agenda. But the players are explicitly forbidden to know the rules, and the DM handles everything behind the screen.It seems obvious that your friends with 30 years of experience would get confused when the game presents them with playbooks that have progression and options that they get to make choices about. If they took smite, it means that they didn't take lay on hands, so they can't just declare generic paladin abilities and let the GM sort it out.If the goal of the game is for the players to break free of character builds that require looking at their sheets, then playbooks seem completely antithetical to that goal.
>>97146954Fuck me, I even in D&D thinking outside the sheet sends some players into a conniption fit. I remember me and my friends were playing some 3.5. We were in a city and we had one of those, "You can't be in two places at once" moments where you have to choose between two objectives so I just hired another adventure party to pursue the second objective while we did the first. We are in a city. We are surrounded by other adventuring parties. We are good terms with several of them. They are a resource at our disposal. I have gold. I can subcontract if I want to.DM was a bit surprised and it certainly did push things in a direction he wasn't anticipating, but ultimately he cool with it. But the other players were all, "This is not how you play the game." I just sat there thinking, "Nah, it is apparently just not how YOU play the game."
>>97147120Well, here's a better example: During that series of adventures, I let the player's actions and decisions drive the story. I had goals and "trouble" ready for them, but it was their decisions that would cause things to happen. I wasn't walking them down a garden path. I wasn't telling the story, they were. This took ME time to wrap my head around. During one of these adventurers, they took on a creature that was menacing a town: A peryton. That's a flying creature like a gryphon, but it's got the head of a deer and antlers. These things are nasty, believe it or not. DW is played with 2d6. A 6 or less is a failure, but it gets you XP. The DM can respond with tough choices or show an approaching threat. On a 7-9 you succeed, but at a cost. You tell the DM if you want to pay that cost to succeed. The battle culminated in my buddy Dave (who always plays hardasses) fighting the peryton up close to rescue an inexperienced young ranger. She was in danger. He rolled a 7 for his final attack on the wounded peryton, and I offered him a choice. He took it. He lost an eye to the creature's antlers. The choice was "she gets the antler, or you do". This cost bothered him as a player, and he had to have a long conversation about it with another player at another time. But dude...that's the stuff that heroic stories are made of. Would depleting the peryton's Hit Points and then walking away have been better? They wouldn't even remember it.
>>97147291That seems like a completely unrelated example. You went from talking about how the game handles moves and character sheets, to pointing out that the system implements degrees of success for its rolls. >I let the player's actions and decisions drive the story. I had goals and "trouble" ready for themIs that not how most games are meant to be played? The GM describes the situation, and the players react to it. You wouldn't go into such a scenario pre-defining that the Peryton would kill the ranger regardless of what the PCs did.>Would depleting the peryton's Hit Points and then walking away have been better? They wouldn't even remember it.But if Dave rolled a 10, isn't that what would have happened? He would have killed the Peryton and the party would be on their way.
>>97147441Maybe I'm explaining it poorly. My apologies.
>>97147441NTA but I think 99% of dnd gms would not come out with a climax solution like "her life or your eye", unless by some quirk of fate the creature has something like that on the sheet. And let's be honest, it will surely not - dnd is all about a certain internal logic of tactical combat. That being said, you are right that DW per se would not assure you a difficult choice to end the big bird's life. THAT game has kinda mixed goals, to say the least.A better example here for having some choices to make would probably be AW itself, but it would depend on what exactly the PC is trying to do to the NPC (no "monsters" in that game).
>>97147441I think what I am trying to relate, is that the game experience the You + other players and the fiction you create together is something different from the character sheets and playbooks. The playbooks simply describe options for your character as he or she develops. >Is that not how most games are meant to be played?Dnddrones have a tendency (and this is not everyone, but it is kind of a tendency among players) to create a "build" and then bring your "build" to the table, where you wait for your chance to use your "build". Everything else that happens gets labeled "fluff" as though it were unimportant. "Downtime" is something dull and a time for high charisma players to get everyone in trouble. It is "prescriptive" (typical D&D game session) versus "descriptive" (PBtA)
>>97147579>NTA but I think 99% of dnd gms would not come out with a climax solution like "her life or your eye", unless by some quirk of fate the creature has something like that on the sheet. And let's be honest, it will surely not - dnd is all about a certain internal logic of tactical combat.That is why 99% of D&D combat is forgettable.If everyone is participating in the fiction, the dice do INDEED lead some very interesting and memorable places. pic relatedAnyway, that's my explanation. I recommend you try a game sometime. You'll enjoy it.
>>97147592>>97147630NTA but you sound pretentious as hell.
>>97125237What an arrow to the heart of the matter. Straight in.This shit has become so encompassing that the fucking games you play have turned to tools and weapons to wage the culture war.
>>97147668Honestly the big question is why would I care if people enjoy the shit I enjoy.
>>97147579Oh sure, I'm not about to argue that DnD would naturally stumble into that specific outcome. At least not so explicitly codified. But it's also not as if DnD is the only system out there.Just offhand, Genesys has its own system for the GM creating complications based on the results of a bad roll. I know the new Cosmere RPG also does something similar.Basically what I'm saying is that the idea of getting long-term consequences as a cost for succeeding isn't exactly a foreign concept.>>97147592>I think what I am trying to relate, is that the game experience the You + other players and the fiction you create together is something different from the character sheets and playbooks.Sure, but that just cycles around to what I said before. Which is what the playbooks are doing, if they're not meant to be important. The phrasing makes it seem like playbooks are nothing but a ball and chain, where your character can't do something in the fiction because you didn't select that option when you made your character before. You might want to heal your friend as a paladin, but you can't because you didn't pick that.So again, if the platonic ideal here is no builds and no sheets, why have sheets with options? Why not do what Paranoia does? What are the playbooks and moves adding to the game?
>>97146954im >>97146765. if i were to be charitable it seems like maybe you've played aw/pbta games so much you don't really remember what it's like to have never played them, and have never explained them to anyone else because i don't see how any of the above examples are exclusive. maybe you're saying the aw/pbta rules encourage a certain way of playing which to you isnt common in other systems? personally, so far it doesn't sound very distinct from any of my basic/2e dnd games
>>97147729All new games, tough. Remember that AW is from 2010.(also, notice that this was not simply a complication, but how to end a climax)
>>97147787>All new games, toughOkay, except the dice system Genesys uses showed up in the same form for Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games, as well as Warhammer Fantasy's 3rd edition. The latter is from 2009, so again, not exactly a new or unique concept to have complications/mixed success. But most of the reason I brought up some of those examples at all was to point out that there are games out there that have these sorts of events without being PbtA systems.
>>97147729Common complaint that most people have with pbta games is that they sometimes turn shit into a unique playbook move that is already covered by a basic move. Like Dungeon World's Bard has a move that allows you to talk to an NPC and ask them questions. A thing you could just do using Defy Danger with Charisma, or Parley, or just do normally. But the only catch is that the Barb move requires that the NPC answer honestly. They're all a pretty mixed bag because you end up choosing between concrete improvements, like more damage, more armor, the ability to heal, or ever-so-slightly improved abilities that some roleplay and rational thought will get you anyways. For example, the Thief gets a move called Heist which lets you ask a series of obvious questions, like "who will notice it's missing?" or "who will come after me?" and both answers are very likely to be "the person you stole it from, dumbass" but at least you get a +1 forward out of it
>>97148035>They're all a pretty mixed bag because you end up choosing between concrete improvements, like more damage, more armor, the ability to heal, or ever-so-slightly improved abilities that some roleplay and rational thought will get you anyways. Yeah, that's the part that's sticking out. Some of it feels like stuff that an archetype would just naturally have without needing to codify, like fundamental knowledge to their profession. But then other moves are mechanically distinct enough where players are encouraged to choose carefully when making their character and remember what their options are.Everything there sounds like it'd be closer to advertised if the player was just handed a notecard that said "Thief" or "Paladin" on it and the DM simply factored that role towards whatever the PC tried to do.
Hey, this discussion is actually interesting to read and you didn't bite the obvious bait.Good job, /tg/.
>>97150001I still don't understand what PBTA is actually for.
>>97152437It's a more narrative focused game that has very clear GM and player procedures that drive play towards emulating certain kinds of genre stories. The procedures usually allow for quite a bit of player control of the narrative (although this does vary from iteration to iteration).I think even if you don't like the style of game, they are worth reading because the design is fairly transparent (and VDB has released a lot of commentary on his design online) and the original (and some of the progeny, though, again, not all) is one of the few "modern" rpg books that actually attempts to explain to a game master how to run a game, something that is becoming rarer and rarer in the hobby.
>>97147874don't know about Genesys, but if it's the usual (I think) complication economy like 2d20 it's much lower key than PBTAs GM moves like hard choices.>>97152437Depends on the game.No, seriuosly. Generally it is more about group interdynamics + high action + characters doing their own shit generating the story (AW), but it doesn't need to. What it CERTAINLY is not about is abstract dnd-like tactical combat
>>97152755>if it's the usual (I think) complication economy like 2d202d20 adds complications if one or more of the dice shows up as a 20, so a 5% chance for any given dice there. Genesys and the precursors do it use their own custom dice. Which while annoying for other reasons, are d6s, d8s, and d12s. The negative dice have 2 sides for complications, the d8s have 5, and the d12s have 7. That is offset by some options the players have, but the symbols themselves are going to be rolled quite often, at least relative to 2d20. I think the WHFR 3e rules had a slightly different setup, with d10s instead of d12s, but overall it's the same sort of system. Possibly not as much as in PbtA, where you're facing those sorts of complications on every roll of 9 or less, but at that point we're just arguing over which exact probability of consequences is ideal, which doesn't seem very productive.Again, part of why I brought up Genesys and those related games is just to point out that this isn't exactly something unique to PbtA. I suppose I'm questioning what you're trying to bring up as a distinct positive here.
>>97153009In 2d20 (Conan, the one I'm familar with) a Complication is a 20 on the roll of 20 and it's just something like >Complications represent an inconvenient change of circumstances. A Complication could present an obstacle to further progress, requiring a new approach (like a route of escape being blocked, requiring a new path), a loss ofpersonal resources (such as using up a resource like arrows or salves), or something that hinders the character temporarily (a twisted ankle or a social faux pas).Generalizing, it's more or less a way to make the character spend time, perhaps a small resources.The MC/Threat moves (under 6 on 2d6+stat roll) are way broader and, generally when they're triggered by the dice, harder. But more than anything, they're supposed to create uh, something more than "just a complication" (as they should, they're THE way the GM interacts with the PCs). • Separate them.• Capture someone.• Put someone in a spot.• Trade harm for harm (as established).• Announce off-screen badness.• Announce future badness.• In�ict harm (as established).• Take away their stuff.• Make them buy.• Activate their stuff’s downside.• Tell them the possible consequences and ask.• Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost.• Turn their move back on them.• Make a threat move (from one of your threats).• After every move: “what do you do?”So, while a hard-ish complication in 2d20 might be "the Pict is bold enough to get you off guard, snarling and hissing like a maddened snake" (the tactical implication is that you might want to spend an action to regain guard in this combat), a mild MC move could be "not only you don't manage to distance Rolfball in the Maze, but motherfucker now stands before you at next corridor. Guns ready. With his old damn laugh".See? Whole new scene.(I'm not totally sure the 2d20 thing could be triggered just by a complication and not a Doom spend, but you get the idea)
>>97152437Some people in the thread have described it pretty accurately.Powered by the Apocalypse is a design philosophy for making narrative-first games, especially games that hone in on very specific types of genre fiction. Some examples of good games in this style are:>Monster of the Week, an action horror game about solving mysteries, and hunting down and killing monsters>Masks: A New Generation, a game about playing teenage supers going through the coming of age complications of finding their identity while also feeling the pressures to be a certain way>Avatar Legends, a game about telling stories within the setting of Avatar: the Last Airbender and its franchise, about playing young do-gooders who are torn between two principles, two sides of themselves, that they don't know how to balance.As you can see, these are all things that range from "heavily inspired by X fictional work" to "emulating X fictional work." For people who want to play games that do that sort of thing, PbtA games can be a good solution. But it does take real commitment to the bit, and to focusing on the storytelling most of all.Blades in the Dark is inspired by this philosophy, but is sort of its own spin-off build. It emulates Ocean's Eleven and other heist/crime media. Some people like the elaborate planning and them improvising as the plan hits snags, but it's as divisive as any PbtA game. You're either into what the game is doing, or you're not. Though, that's not really different from other games, in a way.
>>97153323Worth mentioning the Baker had never control over the thing, nor had he given a srd of sorts to refer to. He himself seems waaaaaaaay loose with what is a PBTA (I mean, Midsummer Woods is... not exactly similar to AW, to put it mildly).
>>97153369Sure. And that's because PbtA isn't a system, it's kind of a loose style of designing games. It more or less is a broad category of "games modeled after Apocalypse World to some extent." Some games more closely resemble it than others, borrowing mechanics, philosophy, etc, while adding or changing things to make how it works suit the kind of story they want their game to facilitate.
>>97153399Of course but the funny thing is that in the end not knowing what you HAVE to retain is why some games, particulary the first PBTAs, failed so hard. Because funnily enough they should've changed more things.For example tremulus, which IIRC had the wholeshebang of AW but... with COC as inspo. Uhrg.
>>97147120Wait shit, are you not meant to give the players the parts of the handouts with their stats on? Have I been running PARANOIA wrong this whole time?
>>97153215Pic related is how it works for WHFRP3e. I can dig up the Genesys rules as well if you prefer.But basically Banes show in multiples on a lot of dice, and Chaos Stars show up on 1 face of the d8 Challenge dice, which show up as the standard dice for basically every roll. And while the Banes cause fairly tame effects, you can see how a lot of your bullet points from PbtA also show up as Chaos Star effects. Particularly>Discover a new and unexpected hazard or enemy>advance the story to the active player's detriment>attract the attention of foes>Other ill effect (player suggestion)They fail a check and run into a new hazard or enemy, or catch the attention of someone who was already there. Or the player might dislike the GM's proposed consequence and suggest something else instead. Those stand out as the most key towards the sort of complications you're talking about, but the other stuff on that list matches out fine as well>inflict harm vs suffer a wound>take away their stuff vs drop an important item/weapon>announce future badness vs suffer severe penalties to future related tasks>turn their move back on them vs (opposite of desired effect)I'm not trying to suggest that these are exactly the same, but there's a lot of similarities and overlap. And some of those are merely standard Banes instead of needing Chaos Stars, so they show up on more die than the d8 in greater quantities.>See? Whole new scene.Even the example doesn't sound like that though. It just sounds like a natural outcome to failing in a roll to try and escape someone. Instead of escaping, you failed, and the enemy cuts off your escape. Granted, that's much better than 'you fail and the situation is the same as before', but that's why complication rules exist. 1 in 20 is seems too rare, which is why I'm not arguing on behalf of the 2d20 system.
>>97153542>Even the example doesn't sound like that though. It just sounds like a natural outcome to failing in a roll to try and escape someone. Instead of escaping, you failed, and the enemy cuts off your escape. I was going for the most immediate example, but yeah, most are a little less obvious.You could as easily offer them an opportunity ("Well, the good news is that you can distance Rolfball, actually. There is a half destroyed manhole you can probably push. Of course, the sewers are the thing your mom enjoyed scaring you with at night time"), just make the NPC capture the PC or -Threat move for the terrain- give our dearest Rolfball an vantage point with his rifle and the PC little time to think.So... not saying it's better, but it's clearly different from "make them spend a little time and resources" in 2d20. More dramatic than (low-key) tactical, really.(note that actually the move the character would've rolled for, in my head, was more decide who was the cat and who was the mouse, than "you're the mouse, try to escape the fucker")The Genesys thing is interesting. The direction is similar, they're way more generalistic than MC moves. Knowing me at least, I'd probably find them unuseful. Was that already in SWs?
>>97153477It might vary based on the edition, but at least for the one I ran, the rules explicitly states that the players knowing the rules was treason. And from what I recall, the premade characters were little more than their official role, their secret role, and a box to write down whatever items they had on them. I will confess, it has been more than a decade since I've run things there, so I may be forgetting the details, but I certainly don't remember the players asking to roll for a specific skill. It was also some of the most fun my group has had with tabletop, so at the very least I could recommend it as a houserule on the off-chance I was simply running things incorrectly.
>>97153734>The Genesys thing is interesting. The direction is similar, they're way more generalistic than MC moves. Knowing me at least, I'd probably find them unuseful. Was that already in SWs?The examples I gave were all from Warhammer Fantasy 3e, so the one from 2009. I was just dumb and forgot to post the pic properly.
In most cases its so limited and constrained in what you can play, like say Capes. It does one thing and one thing only, and even then it comes off as a half assed version of what it wants to emulate.Things like changing playbooks when you finish your current one usually things that don't happen in the genres they're trying to emulate.The best version I can think of is ROOT, where they go out of their way to open up character options.
>>97153903I see. This one is in line with 2d20.
>>97154181In that case, I don't see. Because the examples you posted from PbtA seem in line with 2d20 as well.
>>97154192Well, what can I say. To me they're as different as Axis and Allies is different from Power Grid.The only one that has any similirarity is the draw's enemy attention.
>>97153456Yeah. There are lots of bad PbtA games made by indie devs who saw an easy formula to make a game out of their ideas, but didn't have enough consideration for what was worthwhile about it or how it to implement their ideas.It's a lot like the immense swath of d20 RPGs built on the bones of DnD 3.X. Not only is there a metric fuckton of it, but a number of those games really should have been built differently instead of just copying someone else's homework thoughtlessly.
>>97154419>To me they're as different as Axis and Allies is different from Power Grid.To clarify, I've never read 2d20. It's why I've been trying to avoid relying on it as an example. When you say that the list I posted is in line with 2d20, when I already see that list as being in line with the one you posted from PbtA, then you're just telling me that A = B = C. And then acting surprised when I conclude A = C.>The only one that has any similirarity is the draw's enemy attention.There's a reason I listed specific comparisons earlier. >Well, what can I say. You could start by actually addressing what I've been posting, instead of trying to compare everything back to a game I never brought up.
>>97154605No, I meant that 2d20 and Genesys look very similar - not to AW, tough. To you, it does as well.
>>97154696>No, I meant that 2d20 and Genesys look very similarAnd because Genesys and PbtA look very similar to me, the only conclusion I can draw there is that PbtA is very similar to 2d20, because I've never read it.Hence, you are telling me A = B = C.> not to AW, tough.And then acting surprised when I conclude A = C.>To you, it does as well.To me nothing, because as I just finished saying, I've never read 2d20. I am taking you at your word that 2d20 looks very similar to PbtA.
One thing I personally struggle with as a DM in pbta-like games is the fact that while the fiction is progressing, I am not interacting mechanically with the players until they decide to act, which is odd and immersion-breaking at times.I had the situation come up of them fighting a demigod for control over the fetus of a nascent real god, and all I could really do until they decided to act was have them speak menacingly. The players can try to do things, and consequences of those things can be them being exposed to attacks from the antagonist, but the antagonist cannot change the situation by themselves until a player does something. I just don't know how to deal with that, it feels so artificial in practice.
>>97158854MC moves don't just trigger from players rolling, they trigger from the fiction, just just like player moves. If your players are just standing around blustering, you can Inflict Harm (or whatever the equivalent move is in the version you're using).
>>97159102I only mostly played Girl By Moonlight and it had no "MC move", there was no mechanical way for things to happen without player input.I remember reading through Masks and Armour Astir and not finding something like that either.
>>97159138I am mostly familiar with Monster of the Week, but if the game you're using doesn't have MC (Or keeper or GM) moves, it's basically missing a giant chunk of the system. I said it further up thread, but this is a big problem and why a lot of PBTA ends up being slop; the player and MC agendas and the MC moves are as big a part of the system, if not bigger, than the other stuff, but bad designers think the important thing is the playbooks and the dice mechanic.
>>97158854It's a specifically obtuse system where the mechanical levers the GM gets to pull on are doling out consequences for failures and mixed successes, introducing threats when they feel like it, and moving pieces behind the scenes and off screen for agendas and fronts or whatever the fuck they're called. It's not exactly intuitive and it feels stranger because there's not really any dice to roll or things for you to be doing, and by the RAW, you're not even really supposed to have your players rolling dice all that often, either. All I can really say is that PBTA games totally demand that the GM actually read the GMing section and fully understand it. Still may not gel with you, but trying to play against the way the game was designed to be played tends to be with some of the worst friction happens.
>>97159818>the mechanical levers the GM gets to pull on are doling out consequences for failures and mixed successes, introducing threats when they feel like it, and moving pieces behind the scenes and off screen for agendas and fronts or whatever the fuck they're calledthe thing is that is literally what GMing is in pretty much 99% of games. GMs don't pull mechanical levers to have threats show up, they do it whenever it feels narratively appropriate. What AW calls "MC moves" are just regular DM stuff that doesn't need to be formalized, and the book itself even tells you to not formalize it, so wha you're left with is... nothing.Everything that's novel about pbta is really a matter of tone. It encourages an informal conversationalist approach to describing events, and confuses that for an actual system so much it forgets to give mechanical levers for the conversation to feel impactful. It's why every pbta game tries to come up with new ways to make formalize consequences and harm, because everyone can feel the space vacuum left by the gaping hole in the system but the designer does not give a shit because pbta is a framework that pretends to be a system but isn't. People latch on to clocks and playbooks and resolution mechanics because they're the only actually substantial elements of the books. Everything else about AW is just a very long winded way of spelling out rule zero.
>>97158854>>97159818Going through this thread I can't tell what's meant to actually useful about PbtA.The playbooks apparently aren't what's useful, because sheets are buildfaggotry and you're not supposed to rely on that.The moves aren't what's useful, since the players aren't supposed to declare moves, and instead the GM just judges when a move would happen and then plays things out.The complications and consequences aren't what's useful, because you aren't supposed to be rolling dice all the time anyway, and so complications should be few and far between.The GM having their own narrative moves isn't useful, because they're not restricted in just having threats occur anyway and are ultimately just deciding what happens.All of this just sounds like people are doing freeform RP but acting smug about a bunch of useless rules that they ignore 99% of the time anyway.
>>97159875I disagree. The fact that is actually spells this stuff out is a novelty in a hobby where most games just give the GM a resolution mechanic and literally everything else is "lolidunno." Most of the useful implementations of PBTA do a pretty good job of explicitly spelling out when and how to use the MC moves. I think the problem is when you're looking at it from the point of view of someone who's been gming for awhile and all those things are more or less second nature, when it's being spelled out for people who don't really have as much of a handle on what they are doing. There are definitely things I don't like about AW in particular, but it goes to great pains to explain how to actually run the game, which is quite a bit more than most rpgs to come out in this century.
>>97146954Then why is there a system at all? Why do you need PBTA for this? If you're doing just pure make-believe, then do pure make-believe rather than unnecessarily bolting a mediocre system to it.TTRPG systems have a purpose. If the purpose of this TTRPG system is to not have to use it, then a TTRPG that's just blank paper and has no rules whatsoever is a more elegant way to do it.
>>97159926You're gonna get all kinds of contradictory positions about this. There are people in the thread who genuinely like PbtA games, some people who have mixed feelings, and people who dislike it. And also people who dislike it on principle, who maybe even don't understand it, and are going to misconstrue or be dishonest about it. That's true for any game system discussed on /tg/, really. PbtA is just a particularly divisive topic here.There are some pretty level-headed posts in the thread talking about what they like about it, games that are good, what it's effective for, and why it makes sense to them that people are genuinely critical of it. I get that we're 160+ posts in at this point, but you can read.
>>97160013>There are some pretty level-headed posts in the thread talking about what they like about it, games that are good, what it's effective for, and why it makes sense to them that people are genuinely critical of it. I get that we're 160+ posts in at this point, but you can read.Yeah, reading the thread, specifically the posts of people who claim to like it and explaining what it's good for, is how I got to that conclusion. Obviously I'm not listening to the people who dislike it when looking for reasons why it's good. >>97146587 >>97146954 is the one saying you shouldn't be focused on playbooks>>97141320 >>97144761 is the one saying you shouldn't be declaring moves>>97159818 is the one saying you shouldn't roll often, but the dice are what gives you the complications that >>97147291 was praising>>97125361 claims that PbtA is good for passive players who simply need to be guided along a story, but >>97127534 >>97153215 point out that every move ends in "what do you do?" from the GM, and so requires the players to be more activeThese all seem to be people who enjoy the system and want to defend it, but none of it explains how PbtA's rules are meant to help enable a narrative. Instead it's usually the opposite, pointing out specific mechanics to ignore so they don't get in the way of the story. Or just instances where people can't seem to agree what actually makes the game work.
>>97160228I'll try to help clarify the matter of why things work the way that they do. Some explanation, and also a simple example of playing out the usual mechanics.PbtA, and Apocalypse World before it, come from a sort of branch of game design philosophy that we call "narrativist." It is fiction first, and there are generally two concepts that imprint this on these games:>The fiction drives the mechanics, not the other way around>You are playing the game to tell its story and "find out what happens."So, the flow of this is that you change your focus from "my sheet has these options" to "I am going to play my character, and when something in the fiction trips one of the game's rules, we will do some mechanical things." And then also, because you are rolling dice to determine the outcome of such moves, you are literally determining narrative twists and consequences whenever they come up.As an example: When you get into an argument with someone in the story and try to convince them to see things your way and help, because that's how the scene is playing out, you might end up triggering a move. So you did your storytelling, and then you roll your dice and read the result against the possible outcomes for that move. Most commonly, this is in three tiers: fail, partial hit, full hit. For this example, we'll say you rolled a partial hit, so the GM interprets the mechanical outcome and then spins the fiction to match the consequences. They describe how the person you were arguing with buckles, and they agree to help you under a condition, which the GM then determines what that condition is, doing their best to make sure that it makes sense within the fiction. Maybe on a full hit, they would have just helped you with no other complications, and on a fail they might have not just told you that they won't help, but they might also reveal a truth you didn't know that complicates things further. Each possible result moves the narrative.
>>97160460the problem with that explanation is I other games don't tell you to limit yourself to the options on your sheet, they all have rules for improvising actions not covered in the manual, and in fact generally encourage the DM to feel comfortable bending the rules to make such "non standard" actions possible and even encouraged.The "paper button" way of play is more a mark of inexperience from players rather than a design intent in more supposedly "gamist" games.
>>97160460Pretty much.
>>97160460>>97160583It also sort of falls apart when you remember that PbtA does still have "my sheet has these options". Your playbook gives you a choice of moves and if you select one, you won't be able to do the other.So the GM has to remember which moves you selected. And the players also can't just approach things too loosely either, because they know if they selected a move that enables them to talk to ghosts or heal someone. If they didn't select that move, they're not going to attempt to trigger that move. But then the question is why the game has that. What is being added by the presence of moves and playbooks. >And then also, because you are rolling dice to determine the outcome of such moves, you are literally determining narrative twists and consequences whenever they come up.And likewise, if you're not rolling often, then the concept of complications gets really muddied. To use the example you gave, the player tries to convince someone. On a high roll they succeed. On a middling roll they succeed at an extra cost. On a low roll they fail and then something else bad happens.If you're only doing one dice roll throughout the course of the conversation, nothing about this is complex enough to need a dedicated subsystem. It almost sounds like training wheels for people who need to be told "hey, don't just have the player roll over and over until they succeed with nothing happening". Or like a bunch of extra mechanics in order to codify that you should only roll when there's meaningful stakes involved.
>>97160583I don't think many traditional RPGS go out and say "invent a new action". They do say that the GM can try a new application for a certain skill check, but it's definitely not the same.That being said: yes, you can certainly invent new moves in AW. Hell, there's a whole chapetr on that (Advanced Fuckery). If you're asking why there is not much "on the fly, the skill might be checked for something like" is because the stats are about... everything that every one PC can do, more or less. Acting Under Fire is probably what you're looking for specifically.
>>97160583I think the thing you're misunderstand is that if something isn't covered by one of the basic moves, it probably isn't something you need to roll for, and you should just adjudicate based on the fiction and the players and MC agendas. The revised version of AW has advice on making new moves, but part of that advice is the caveat that you probably don't *need* to make a bunch of bespoke moves, and if you are, you're kind of missing the point.It reminds me a of dude whose example of why the game is bad was a situation where you have a perfect sniper shot on an enemy. The options for whatever version of the attack move were made no sense in that situation, so obviously the game is broken! No, in that case, where ostensibly you've planned well and had good luck up until this point, you just shoot the enemy. You don't roll, you adjudicate based on the current fiction. The mechanical layer exists to fall back to when you need it, not so you have to roll dice for every single action the PCs attempt.
>>97160731Or at the very least, the character should be threated has having Read a Sitch successfully.Which outside of the fictional answer about the enemy, means just that he has a +1. Nothing trascendental.
>>97160710>So the GM has to remember which moves you selected. And the players also can't just approach things too loosely either, because they know if they selected a move that enables them to talk to ghosts or heal someone.The GM doesn't have to know all of the players moves, because the moves are either permissions (I can talk to ghost) or exceptions (use x when you would normally use y). All that is player facing stuff.>It almost sounds like training wheels for people who need to be toldIt is, in part. AW was, in a lot of ways, a response to the mechanics heavy "I roll negotiation to win the argument" style of games that were coming out of the 90s and early 2000s. It's an explanation of and argument for a certain kind of style of game as much as it is a game.
>>97160768>All that is player facing stuff.Yes. Which is when the player says "my sheet has these options". Again, what is being added by the presence of these playbooks and moves, when it's so contradictory to the sort of approach and gameplay you're describing?>"I roll negotiation to win the argument" But that's still what the example describes. The player tries to convince someone. The GM decides this warrants a roll, and says what sort of stat applies to the roll. The player says they've got a playbook move for "Intimidating" that lets them use brawn in place of negotiation instead, or lets them roll an extra d6 and take the best two, or whatever.All of this just sounds like standard GMing practices presented in the most obtuse way possible.
>>97161007>The GM decides this warrants a roll, and says what sort of stat applies to the roll.Actually, no.
>>97161007>But that's still what the example describes.Sort of, but also no. There's a pretty discernible difference between that example and something like>"I want to convince him to help us.">"Roll your skill check.">"You didn't hit the number threshold, so he just says no."This kind of pass/fail thing is very common in D20 games, but it's not how PbtA games tend to approach it. In the example that was given, there are degrees of outcomes, and even failing causes some sort of guaranteed consequence that does something for the fiction.
>>97161111Okay, I need you to slow down, because you jumped to something completely unrelated to what I was referring to by bringing up degrees of success. >something like>>"I want to convince him to help us.">>"Roll your skill check."These are the portions I said was the same as the example>>"You didn't hit the number threshold, so he just says no."This is the portion you're adding on to show how they're different when taken as a whole, but that doesn't do anything to address what I was actually talking about, which is that the first two portions are what is functionally the same.The whole "you failed so nothing happens" problem was what I brought up already in this post >>97160710 I'm already well aware of what you're trying to bring up as a positive. But saying that PbtA is better than somebody running a bad game of D&D is a really low bar. Repeating it over and over doesn't make it any better of a point.
>>97161261>But saying that PbtA is better than somebody running a bad game of D&D is a really low bar. NTA, but being better than bad DnD is the entire point of and reason for PbtA and you will not get anything new by repeatedly asking for more than that.It's a procedure that avoids many of the pitfalls that new DnD DMs and players fall into when trying to run the game as written with the core rulebooks in hand. That's it and that's all. If someone believes that the average roleplaying table isn't absolute arse, they will never see the point in PbtA, and if they believe that they themselves are an above average GM they will never run PbtA either.
>>97161007No, you're misunderstand what I'm saying. This is to combat the play style wherein a player rocks up to a guard and says "okay, I roll bluff to get past the guard" without any context, any narration, anything. It's mechanics first, with no narrative behind it. In PbtA, the player would narrate how they are attempting to intimidate the guard. If it makes sense in the fiction, the guard is intimidated. It it is in question, it comes to roll. The GM says "okay, it sounds like your trying to [whatever the the move is], roll + [whatever]." The player says "oh, I have [move] that says when I [make move] I can [roll with x instead of y]."I get that maybe for you this kind of thing isn't an issue, but design in the 90s and 00s was pushing towards a certain kind of play style, really exemplified by something like 4e skill challenges, where the narrative was an afterthought at best and completely absent at worst.
>>97161390I don't exactly have a particularly high opinion of the average table, but to me the average table is also just completely unwilling to even try anything that isn't DnD or at most some DnD-compatible d20 system. PbtA being the first thing that people who had a bad experience with d20 games stumbled into makes a lot more sense, because then it explains why someone would see any of this as particularly revelatory or unique.
Honestly I'm not sure what people are expecting a failure in (say) negotiating in DND to cause expect the other character saying "no".I mean, as I understand it, failure in such a situation should not bring forth anything particular, right? Unless the PC offended the NPC, the NPC has a particular reason to be hostile to the PC or this kind of approach or whatever.I would not say this DM is doing a bad job for the usual passing NPC, like the motherfucking guard. Am I wrong? This thread is making me feel like I don't know either game.
>>97161469I have no idea what question you're attempting to ask, this entire post is incredibly unclear.
>>97161436I dunno. The other major game I could think of from the early 2000s would be Exalted, and that explicitly encouraged narrating things with stunts in order to get a bonus to whatever it was you were trying to do. It's a more crunchy system to be sure, but it's not like narrative elements were somehow absent or dying off in games of that time.>really exemplified by something like 4e skill challenges, where the narrative was an afterthought at best and completely absent at worst.See, that's odd, because to me PbtA has the exact same problem that I experienced with 4e skill challenges. Namely, it's an overly clunky mechanical system to resolve what could be accomplished with just roleplay. Every roll during a skill challenge results in the DM improving some new obstacle to explain why the previous success wasn't enough to solve the problem, and then asking another player what their character was doing to help out. The issue is that the challenge itself feels nebulous and arbitrary.
>>97161436there really is no mechanical difference between the two scenarios you are describing, it's just a matter of how the playgroup approaches ityou will not find a "gamist" game that tells you that if you roll negotiation and succeed you can mind control NPCs into doing whatever you want. There is always a fiction first and foremost, and their rulebooks will always say something of the sort. They also usually say that a social role is not a substitute to a roleplay scene, but rather a tool to resolve unclear situations.
>>97161579"Just roleplay it bro"
>>971614364e skill challenges are literally just clocks, they work mechanically in the exact same wayI think 4e suffered greatly from not doubling its paragraph count with trite reminders that you should roleplay these rolls like PBTA games do, because apparently if the book doesn't explicitely tell you you should roleplay in a roleplaying game, that means the game is implictely telling you you shouldn't.
>>97161561It seemed clear enough to me. He's asking if binary pass/fail isn't how DnD is meant to function. Although if he's referring to some of my points there, I'd also mention that I never brought up DnD in specific, even though these sorts of ideas can be easily applied to it.>>97161469To which it largely is, but at the same time there's no real point in asking for a roll if the players are trying to get something from a random guard and there's no real consequence for failure. If it's something completely trivial, it's smoother for the game to just give it to them. If it's something more complex, then it's more interesting if on a failure the NPC instead asks for a bribe instead of doing it for free, or they do have a more negative reaction.It's not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with having nothing happen on a failure, but there's pretty easy ways to either bypass pointless roles or spice things up. This becomes more obvious if you're talking about something like lockpicking, where failing to pick a lock shouldn't just be 'you fail, would you like to try again?'. That's an instance where the lock should break, they take a long time and a patrol shows up, they trigger a trap, etc. If there's no penalty for failure and no reason why the PC couldn't keep trying, then there's no reason to roll. That's ultimately what I mean with this sort of idea. It's just things having stakes and consequences where it matters, and not getting bogged down with stuff that doesn't matter.
>>97161701>there's no real point in asking for a roll if the players are trying to get something from a random guard and there's no real consequence for failure. If it's something completely trivial, it's smoother for the game to just give it to themnot entirely true, a lot of players that enjoy having social / rarely used skills will often relish every opportunity to roll for it specifically because it's an aspect of their character they invested in and they see rolling as the payoff, regardless of how significant the challenge actually is. Even if it's not necessary for the game it's good DMing to just let the player roll on the skill he's excited to roll for imo.
>>97161579How is "roll 2d6, less than 7 fails, 7-9 succeeds but, 10+ succeeds completely" clunky?You seem to have two different points, one being "all systems do this anyway," and two being "PbtA is clunky." To the first point, AW put it front and center that fiction comes first. I don't think other games at the time did a great job of doing that, which is why the narrativeless style of play seemed to be propagating at the time. And to the second point, I just don't find it that clunky. The math is pretty transparent, most of the moves are either substitutions or permissions, and the gm doesn't really even have to deal with stats or crunch or anything like that. If you find it clunky, okay, it's not for you then, I can't really argue the counterfactual when I don't really understand where you're coming from.
>>97161727Except when you do that, you run the risk of them rolling a 2 and failing anyway. You can still make it clear that the reason a roll is getting bypassed is specifically because they invested in the skill. And if you know that they enjoy using that skill, then you, as the GM, can include situations that use that skill that actually matter. Why would you only include meaningless and trivial uses of a skill if you know one of your players was excited to use it?
>>97161773Because every adventure can't have a cooking contest involved
>>97161773they're more likely to regress to the mean if you make them roll often than if you make them only roll in critical situations. If a player is only rolling for these kind of skills in difficulty situations, it can have the opposite effect when they have an unlucky streak : they fail every time they are challenged, they don't feel that aspect of their character validated and are frustrated. A player doesn't mind failing a trivial roll, in fact it can lead to funny situations that wouldn't otherwise have happened and memorable moments.
>>97161701>To which it largely is, but at the same time there's no real point in asking for a roll if the players are trying to get something from a random guard and there's no real consequence for failure.I would say actually it's pretty normal. You PCs can try a lot of approaches, some will fail, no big deal. BUT:1) there can be instances of timing or "failure means the thing is not anymore possible, at least with that difficulty" (your example)2)if the PCs are really blocked, perhaps let them have an opening, I guess.Regarding the Charisma rolls, DM's Guide seems to concur on the "just rolls them". It does say that subsequent rolls might fail automatically, which is what I talked about. I don't see any mentions of "make them roll just when you have meaningful consequences for both failure and success".You choose if that's a sound gaming design choice, but that's apparently where the game is standing.
>>97161757>How is "roll 2d6, less than 7 fails, 7-9 succeeds but, 10+ succeeds completely" clunky?The same way "roll 1d20+mods, X+ succeeds" is clunky. Which is to say, it is not the dice resolution that is clunky. It's the context in which it's getting used there.>You seem to have two different points, one being "all systems do this anyway," and two being "PbtA is clunky." Sort of. The first point is less that all systems do this, and moreso that plenty of system from the time period you're talking about did include these sorts of rules. If people are praising PbtA's mechanics, I don't think it's unreasonable to bring up other systems that feature similar mechanics in order to try and ask what PbtA does differently. The second point about PbtA being clunky is with regards to what many of the people defending the system have pointed to as things that get in the way of a narrative system. Stuff like players focusing on their sheets or thinking about the options they built their character with.To which I've repeatedly asked why PbtA even has playbooks and moves, if all they do is take away from the narrative and drag players back to these problem mechanics.
>>97161864>The second point about PbtA being clunky is with regards to what many of the people defending the system have pointed to as things that get in the way of a narrative system. Stuff like players focusing on their sheets or thinking about the options they built their character with.>To which I've repeatedly asked why PbtA even has playbooks and moves, if all they do is take away from the narrative and drag players back to these problem mechanics.It's pretty simple, anon. They don't. The moves don't get in the way of the "narrative" game.(boy, how do I hate this adjective in the RPG scene)Or at the very least, if people play a given PBTA, they don't feel they do.
>>97161808>but that's apparently where the game is standing.Yeah, as I said at the start of that post, I wasn't trying to suggest that DnD specifically has this as a recommendation. But you don't need WotC's approval to have stakes in your game. The Pinkertons aren't going to show up and shoot your dog if you have a consequence more significant than "you fail and can't roll again".
>>97161864"Other systems do the same thing" isn't a knock against PbtA, if anything it points to the fact that it was something designers were thinking about at the time.And you seem to have the idea that we're somewhere on a spectrum where "mechanics" are at one end and "narrative" is at the other end and these two things are in tension with each other. They aren't, that isn't the point. The mechanics are there to inform the narrative. We're talking about one singular thing that has hung up the thread , not using the name of the move when doing the move. That just means that, when we're playing MotW, my players don't rock up to a werewolf massacre and go "okay I am going to Investigate a Mystery!" They describe that they are taking samples with their supernatural forensics kit, and that might trigger the move, and I ask for a roll. That might be something that you already do in your game, it's just formalized in these games in a way that highlights it so you don't have endless "I rock into the room and roll search!" All session.I still don't understand how this is clunky, or how you think that playbooks and moves are in tension with this.
>>97161926I mean, you don't need any approval to read The Old Man and the Sea as a Cthulhu Mythos's tale either, but that's not what the book IS, right?If we talk about a game, it's not about what we could houserule it with. It's about the game being what it is written.Maybe you are thinking that Char rules are bullshit for not having any obligatory stake (and maybe you are not even wrong), but that is inconsequential.
>>97161950>And you seem to have the idea that we're somewhere on a spectrum where "mechanics" are at one end and "narrative" is at the other end and these two things are in tension with each other.Okay, please discuss that with >>97161436 who is the one who brought up that idea.>We're talking about one singular thing that has hung up the thread , not using the name of the move when doing the moveThat sounds more like you're hung up on that specific point. I've certainly been discussing far more than just that.>how you think that playbooks and moves are in tension with this.I'm going off of what >>97146954 mentioned. Where you are playing a DnD game without a character sheet, and instead you're just declaring actions based on the vibes of what a Paladin can do. It's all about doing things that aren't on the character sheet.So assuming that he's telling the truth and these are positive aspects of PbtA, how is the sheet helping? All the sheet does is list the things you can't do because you didn't take a specific option. >"Other systems do the same thing" isn't a knock against PbtAObviously not, aside from people trying to pretend like it is some unique selling point. But that's only reason why that point was still being discussed.
>>97162097Yeah, no, you're (I think purposefully) missing the point in order to fling shit.You don't like PbtA. Cool. Don't play it then?
>>97162067That's ultimately my point. I don't consider "have things in your game matter" as a houserule.Saying that is like saying that if a game doesn't explicitly have a rule that says "Have fun!", it means that anyone who enjoys the game is houseruling it.The idea that a game needs to mechanically define Consequences (TM) or else you can't include them in the game is just a retarded premise.
>>97162134Yeah, well, then you're literally wrong anon. DND has no obligatory consequences on (failed) Char tests, that's it. Pretty normal stuff, even.
>>97162097Please explain why you think that >>97161436 has anything to do with mechanics and narrative being in tension. We're talking about framing, dude, why is this so hard for you to understand?
>>97162181>anything to do with mechanics and narrative being in tension>>combat the play style...>>...without any context, any narration, anything. >>It's mechanics first, with no narrative behind it>>where the narrative was an afterthought at best and completely absent at worst.If I misunderstood the point being made about mechanics and narrative here, then I'm not going to force you to defend somebody else's definitions. But that is the reason why I asked the question in the first place. >why is this so hard for you to understand?Because it seems like every time I ask a question, I either don't get an answer, or I get someone angry that I took somebody else's points about the system at face value.
>>97159926≥The playbooks apparently aren't what's useful, because sheets are buildfaggotry and you're not supposed to rely on that.Playbooks are useful because they tell you what your character is like and give you reasons to do X over Y. You just shouldn't be looking at them instead of the fiction. >The moves aren't what's useful, since the players aren't supposed to declare moves, and instead the GM just judges when a move would happen and then plays things out.Moves are useful because they give scope and scale to actions that will drive the action forward. The players shouldn't directly declare them but should take actions they trigger them. >The complications and consequences aren't what's useful, because you aren't supposed to be rolling dice all the time anyway, and so complications should be few and far between.This actively retarded. One of the common hooks for when to make a GM move is "when the players look to you to find out what happens next." So fuck dice, consequences and complications should happen like punctuation. >The GM having their own narrative moves isn't useful, because they're not restricted in just having threats occur anyway and are ultimately just deciding what happens.GM moves are really useful for keeping a GM on pace and tone, and for curtailing then-fashionable forms of GM misbehaviour (assuming the GM wanted to improve).
>>97162285Mechanics without any narration isn't mechanics and narrative being in tension. It's mechanics without any narration. You've created a dichotomy where there isn't one. I wasn't saying that the mechanics are somehow stopping the narration, I was saying that they are being used without narration. That's the point. It's framing. This has been explained to you several times in the thread.
>>97162570>I wasn't saying thatAnd I already said that I wasn't going to force anyone to defend that point if I misunderstood it. I'm not trying to create a dichotomy. I read someone else's point as a dichotomy when it wasn't meant to be.No need to try and continue a misunderstanding that was already cleared up.>It's framing. This has been explained to you several times in the thread.This post >>97162181 was the first one to mention framing at all.But sure, I'll accept that PbtA's appeal is simply the framing. I suppose I was expecting some hidden depth or something I was missing, but apparently it truly is that basic. I still find it odd that people need to be reminded to roleplay in their roleplaying game, but I guess the bar is just lower than I thought.
>>97163090>But sure, I'll accept that PbtA's appeal is simply the framing. I suppose I was expecting some hidden depth or something I was missing, but apparently it truly is that basic. I still find it odd that people need to be reminded to roleplay in their roleplaying game, but I guess the bar is just lower than I thought.This is a very normal problem, and it actually makes a lot of sense. TTRPGs as we know them follow the same lineage as war games. That's basically all mechanics, and even Gygax thought that it would be stupid and against what he thought these games should be if the combat mechanics were treated as basically unimportant compared to telling a story. You weren't doing deep, insightful things with your character so much back then as just playing a fantasy war game scaled all the way down to controlling a single person. The interest in roleplaying came into the hobby gradually, and to this day we still see people who are more interested in the rules than the roleplaying.Take note that this is not me being negative on people who want crunchier games with less emphasis on storytelling. I'm just acknowledging that this is where we came from, but that time has changed the landscape of the genre to include more variety and different ideas.
>>97163090>I still find it odd that people need to be reminded to roleplay in their roleplaying game, but I guess the bar is just lower than I thought.You gotta remember that the original apocalypse world came out in 2010. The biggest role playing games were 4e and Pathfinder. Mainstream gaming was tending towards crunchy character optimization and big set piece combats. Most GMing advice you would get is "this is how you create a combat of the appropriate level." A lot of the things in AW might seem common sense to you, but it wasn't to a lot of people at the time. I also think that a lot of shit that seemed fresh to people in AW has sort of filtered into the mainstream in the past 15 years.
>>97163090In addition to these posts:>>97163547>>97163640Don't forget that, when we started to really see things get rolling more in the 2000s, a lot of players were coming in with no TTRPG experience, but were familiar with playing video games, which had been gaining popularity much faster while TTRPGs remained fairly niche. When you're used to seeing your character as a series of options to solve problems with, but you're not used to having agency to tell and affect a story, that heavily affects your instinctive approach to this kind of thing. Even nowadays, you still run into people who initially think that a TTRPG should be approached similarly to a video game that they're familiar with.
>>97163547Meh, it feels like people have to lie about d&d and Gygax to praise AW. Gygax didn't think that d&d was all combat all the time, combat in d&d the way it was ran when gygax was active was the final state of a chain of events that was 99% roleplay. Gygax module famously want players to be crafty, avoid traps and solve puzzles for which there are no rules at all anywhere in the original d&d rules. That was all what AW would call "the conversation", right here at the seat of when d&d was supposedly "a wargame" lol. You were supposed to talk in details about what you did, which tile in the floor you would avoid, how much rope you had on you and how you uset it, etc etc. D&D didn't care to gamify those elements because it trusted that people understood the implicit roleplay inherent in playing a roleplaying game.>>97163640the biggest roleplaying games at any point in times are always some flavor of d&d, that has not changed. There were plenty of other popular games at the game and everyone in the hobby knew what roleplaying was and didn't need AW to spell it out for them, this is so disingenuous.
>>97125223It’s lazy. Its place as an easy reskin means that writers choose to make easy reskins instead of products which fit the setting/IP they’re writing for better. Thus it devalues the hobby
>>97165282I mean, you can deny it all you want, but the fact that both the OSR and Forge-shit came out of a particular era means that there was a reaction going on to *something* at the time, and old school gaming and PbtA are both approaching a similar problem from different directions. You can argue that that wasn't the case, but it sure seemed like the case to the people designing games at the time. The idea didn't just spring up from nowhere. Also, acting like "the biggest rpg is always some kind of d&d" without thinking about what kind of d&d that we're talking about is kind of disingenuous in itself. The design assumptions and conversation around latter 3.5 and 4e and Pathfinder was a hell of a lot different than 2e and earlier.
>>97165282This is not "people have to lie about Gygax to praise AW" in the slightest anyway, since I was using him as a historic example of the hobby just being different then than now. No part of that includes any praise for Apocalypse World.Gygax did like his puzzles and traps, but his motives tended to trend towards "this can add more challenge to the game." After all, this is the guy who invented Tomb of Horrors just to fuck over players who got too confident in how good their builds had gotten. The whole thing is designed out of spite, it's incredibly unfair, it's loaded with red herring details meant to just waste the time of players who want to be thorough in their investigations, and it's not a good example of "the conversation" at all. He does have other, fairer dungeons, but the existence of this thing, reading it in its original state, is extremely revealing about his mindset.
>>97165282>>97166963>There were plenty of other popular games at the game and everyone in the hobby knew what roleplaying wasI can safely say that not everyone knew that. I tried out Pathfinder with one group who swapped over to it at the tail end of 3.5, and it was all numbers and a wargaming attitude.This isn't something inherent to D&D or other d20 systems at the time, but them becoming more popular definitely resulted in people who didn't truly understand what the game was for.Like for frame of reference, this is what the Star Wars d20 game has to tell players about Storytelling. The GM section is also full of gems such as>When the heroes go back to Mos Eisley for Supplies, they should encounter some of the same characters they met before>Having heroes with combat ability greater than their companions can lead to unfair situations>Whole gaming sessions may pass without a single blaster being firedSomeone who read through all of this advice like this as their first exposure to a roleplaying game is going to walk away with the impression that the things that matter are game balance and numbers, and that a session going by without combat is a rare or unusual occurrence. Obviously plenty of people didn't need AW to exist in order to figure out how to run a roleplaying game. But part of why PbtA took off in the way it did is because there's clearly enough pisspoor GMs out there in order to make it a broader problem.
>>97167366>Obviously plenty of people didn't need AW to exist in order to figure out how to run a roleplaying game. But part of why PbtA took off in the way it did is because there's clearly enough pisspoor GMs out there in order to make it a broader problem.There's also the problem were game mastering sections in books have gotten worse and worse as time has went on. I think the assumption of writers in the 90s was "this game probably isn't your first rpg so we don't need to include this," but when everyone in the hobby is assuming some kind of common knowledge they can skip, you start omitting important things, and you get shit like the current dmg, which has basically nothing on how to run a game. Whether you *like* the advice or not, AW does have very specific and concrete advice on how to run AW. Greg Stolze has even said that his (and ostensibly other designers') thinking on the subject was that people just knew how to tell stories, not really accounting that he and a lot of people he knew literally went to college to get that toolkit, and that reading AW really changed how he approached the GM book for Unknown Armies 3e. And I know a lot of people dislike that system, but I think the GM guidance it has is actually pretty good.I'll never understand the critique of a book that boils down to "well, I don't need this, I already know how to do this." Okay, then that book isn't for you, but not everyone knows what you know, and it's uselessness to you doesn't render it universally useless.
>>97167458>when everyone in the hobby is assuming some kind of common knowledge they can skip, you start omitting important thingsNTA, but this is actually a huge matter. Common problem is any hobby, really. Or most skills in life. If there is one thing I have learned in life, it's that when you are trying to teach someone else about something, you can't assume anything about what they already know. I really enjoy when the book for a game comes out and it does a thorough job of explaining what play is like and how to approach playing it to new players. I've been playing TTRPGs for two decades at this point, and I not only think this is good for new players, but I think veteran players ought to at least skim over these book sections. What's written there can be useful for helping you grab onto what the game is about, and how they intended you to approach it.
>>97167458>I'll never understand the critique of a book that boils down to "well, I don't need this, I already know how to do this." Well, I'd say that's mostly because PbtA is pitched as a game (or a series of games), rather than a 3rd-party GM advice book. If it were just advice, people would judge purely based on the quality of the advice. But because it's primarily discussed as a game, people are going to compare and contrast the mechanics to other games when discussing it. People don't usually recommend games based on the quality of their GM advice. Although part of that might just be due to how accustomed they are to GM advice sections being very lackluster.
>>97167678>PbtA is pitched as a game (or a series of games)That would definitely be misunderstanding what it is, though I wouldn't blame people for erroneously conflating PbtA with being something like d20. It's a much closer comparison, in practicality.>rather than a 3rd-party GM advice book.Treating it like this wouldn't be right either.As a reminder, PbtA is merely shorthand for "this game is designed in a way that is meaningfully derivative from Apocalypse World." Which, that IS a specific game. It gets difficult to nail down the exact details of what the term means, since games that are Powered by the Apocalypse can be notably different from each other in terms of scope and execution. The most common thread tends to be at the core of the way the game is approached, which can be contrasted against popular d20 style games, for having a built-in high level of emphasis on the narrative elements and the resulting emergent elements that follow (which is why the phrase "play to find out" is so common in the PbtA sphere).
>>97167717>PbtA is merely shorthand for "this game is designed in a way that is meaningfully derivative from Apocalypse World." Yes, that's what makes it a series of games.>Treating it like this wouldn't be right either.My point is that it's ultimately both, but only presented as the former. Nobody picks up a PbtA game expecting it to contain universally applicable roleplaying advice. They pick it up expecting a game.>contrasted against popular d20 style games, for having a built-in high level of emphasis on the narrative elementsAnd the critique of "I already know how to do this" comes from people who have played non-d20 games that feature a similar sort of emphasis. Are you trying to understand the mindset behind the critique, or are you trying to debunk the critique?
I don't see anything remotely similar to AW moves in non-PBTA games, in this thread
>>97167913>that's not identical to how PbtA does things, so it doesn't count as narrative elements!Are you really this dumb or are you just pretending to be retarded?
>>97167717https://lumpley.games/2019/12/30/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-1/I found this article by Vincent Baker pretty interesting, he breaks down his intention in a pretty granular way.
>>97167678I'm not just talking about Apocalypse World, I'm speaking in general, but in this thread there are people whose response to the statement "I like Apocalypse World because it does [x,y,z]," is "Well that's stupid, other games do that." Yes, but if the first game you played that did that was Apocalypse World, or you found that AW stated these ideas in a way you better understood than those other games, then that is a reason to like it. "Other games do it," isn't the grand critique some people seem to think it is, and neither is "I was already doing that so this is useless." People level the same critique against the gumshoe system and I think it's just a weak attempt at critical analysis.
>>97167946I didnt' talk about "narrative elements" (and why should I? It's a buzzword).I'm just noting that shit like this >>97153903 is... not really similar to the MC moves. Like, at all.
>>97168105>Yes, but if the first game you played that did that was Apocalypse World, or you found that AW stated these ideas in a way you better understood than those other games, then that is a reason to like it.Sure, but that's exactly what my point is. People are mechanically comparing and contrasting Apocalypse World and other PbtA games to other games they've played. But much like how "I've seen this idea before" is weak criticism, "This was my first exposure to this idea" is weak praise. And as soon as you put aside those weaker points, it's a question of what else the system does that stands out. One could very easily argue how PbtA games are useful for someone new to tabletop to learn how to focus on roleplay properly, like a set of training wheels. But one could just as easily ask why someone new should continue using those training wheels once they've got a feel for it. Again, this is the factor of trying to hold it up both as a game and as advice. Because as soon as someone already knows the advice, all you're left with is the game.
>>97167838I'm trying to prevent "critique" that misconstrues what's going on. It's not an easy topic to hit on, and there's a lot of bad faith arguments about it, including some in this very thread.But I have a sneaking suspicion that, having joined the conversation when I did, you have mistaken me for someone whose train of thought you were previously trying to debate.
>>97168067>What do I mean when I say that PbtA isn’t a game system, it’s an approach to system design?>Choose two given PbtA games, and you shouldn’t expect them to be any more similar than two point-buy games or two Forge games.Hilarious. >>97125223Good news OP. The system doesn't attract any derision, because PbtA isn't a system at all. All of the games are just so totally different that trying to discuss them all as a whole would be impossible.
>>97168424To be fair it's people that didn't even open AW that tend to generalize the usually-defined-as-such PBTA family.
>>97168361>you have mistaken me for someoneProbably. I was mostly just addressing >>97167458 saying >I'll never understand the critiqueby trying to explain where the critique was coming from. And yes, some of that critique is born out of people not understanding what PbtA is. But it's also not too difficult to understand why those misunderstandings exist. And this is sort of backed up by >>97167717 saying >It gets difficult to nail down the exact details of what the term meansbecause if the problem is caused by people not understanding what PbtA is, and even people who praise it find it difficult to explain, then expecting the critics to have a good understanding seems rather unrealistic. And even without critique, I'll refer to PbtA as a series of games, and get told that's wrong. Do you see how that makes good faith conversation difficult?
>>97125223I found it very shallow in the long run, and it was hyped by not only it's creators, but die hard fans, as being the greatest thing since gg made adnd. It's fun for three sessions, if even that, but it gets old FAST, and I get really annoyed by people who pretend like it's reverse GURPS with the same prestige. (GURPS people are their own kind of hell, but at least their system has some MEAT on it's bones!) Also, Apocalypse World, the original game that all PbtA games draw from, is such a horribly written and boring setting that I (personally) can't get past it's lingering stench. Just miserable. >>97127795 sure, but there are PLENTY of games that literally are just apocalypse world with a different coat of paint on them. Some, I actually quite like, at least as far as their setting are concerned, but at the end of the day, they still are shallow and boring to play for more than a few sessions. >>97128691>>there's just so many fucking PBTA games and most of them are just reskinning other PBTA games, but changing the names of playbooks and moves to evoke the faintest whiff of the thing they are unpleasantly cramming into the PBTA mold, while not actually making moves and playbooks that properly reflect the tone or genre they are supposed to emulateBingo!
>>97169258>it's reverse GURPSNever even heard something approaching that.Also, isn't /tg/ w40k central? Finding AW depressing here is... weird, to say the least
>>97169281What I mean is>GURPS is so detailed and expansive, you can do aaaanything!>PbtA is so simple and flexible, you can do aaaanything!
>>97169295Yeah, actually, never heard of that either. I did hear some praise on how there is a PBTA for anything (tru-ish), meaning it's flexible (true), but it's certainly not compared to GURPS and its braindead lovers.
