How much World do you like in your AW hacks?
Apocalypse World and Dungeon World are genre emulators, rather than trad setting and rules RPGs. The settlement creation rules in DW especially support that.
So, if I’m planning an AW hack that emulates a different genre, would you want a similar level of broadness, or do you prefer something that ties emulation to a specific setting, e.g. Blades in the Dark?
That’s a really tough but really important question. Personally, it’s more about how well the author follows through on their intention than choice A or B. Not sure how much that helps or how clear it is.
It’s a difficult question to answer without context. Given a good rule implementation of the hack, a generic genre emulation appeals to people liking the genre, while a very specialized hack could potentially give a better “experience”, but appeal for a lower number of people.
That is, a generic hack to emulate shonen (teen) manga would be interesting to me, one emulating giant robots or Saint Seiya would be better, but one emulating sport stories would leave me uninterested.
But a shonen baseball giant robot hack would be right up my alley. 😉
I think the scope question can be asked when making brand new RPGs as well. The Design Games podcast did an episode on universality recently that went into detail about pros and cons. In the end it’s taste. Broad systems do well with certain people looking for that, but there is a obvi a market for small scope games that are about very specific situations or events.
I’m kind of getting into situation instead of setting though. I’ve personally enjoyed broader approaches to settings since I think it’s the part the GM has the most desire to create themselves. I’m trying to detailed specific setting games currently and not sold on them yet, but my players enjoy them.
Reading Julien Legault I just realized that, since the common moves and the principles define the PbtA world, it would be in principle possible to write a “generic” genre hack, to be specialized with extra moves and principles (and playbooks, also) to give it the desired feel.
Implicitly, Grim World and Inverse World do that with Dungeon World, but I am not aware of a PbtA designed specifically to do that.
It’s like Apocalypse World itself is that generic genre hack. I think things like Dungeon World and Grim World owe their success to remaining as genre hacks and that the engine runs really well when players and GMs want to be more creative at the table. I can’t think of many narrow and specific hacks that are crazy successful, but I would still try one. It’s like do you keep with the status quo or take the risk with something less sure?
I don’t feel Apocalypse World was designed to be generic, it has a very specific adult themed and brutal fiction in mind. Very narrow hacks (I haven’t played them yet, but they have a strong following) are Night Witches by Jason Morningstar and Sagas of the Icelanders by Gregor Vuga.
Oh nice I’ll check those out.
There’s Simple World as well, which is meant to be the “any genre” hack, but apparently isn’t all that successful because there no underlying fiction.
With a very specific setting I feel it’s still good to give the GM and players a bit of room to add their own spin to things, some blanks to fill in. It can help get them invested in the setting when they’ve made part of it.
There’ll probably be slightly different audience for each, but I think it comes down more to implementation and how well the design reflects your intent and the themes.
Jonathan Semple Yeah – the potential issue with specific settings is that there’s not enough of that. What appeals to me about DW is the collaborative world building. But I think that’s the gm in me.
I think that part of the reason collaborative world building works so well in DW is that everyone has at least some idea of of what a fantasy setting looks like. Genres that don’t have that luxury will probably need more setting baked into the game to help players along.
Oli Jeffery I tought you were talking of the “moves space”, the actions that are codified in the moves and define the ” fundamental laws” of the game, but your last answers seem focused on the fiction.
Paride Papadia
I assume it’s both. In PbtA games, moves and fiction can be very intertwined. If you’re going to go specific with the setting, I would say get specific with some of the moves. Let the moves reflect the fiction, and let the fiction come from the moves, if that makes sense.
Jonathan Semple it does, but there’s actually no obligation to have moves that focus on a specific fiction. If the game has a generic “fight somebody” move, you can use it for many different types of fictions, while a “rip their arms off” move is less prone to interpretation.
Paride Papadia
True. I guess I’m thinking more, if you want to make a super hero hack specifically about being part of a league (like the Justice League), go ahead and make some moves about dealing with the league (for example). Not that you have to, but you can expand the setting through the moves that way. But anyways, am probably getting into random ramblings territory now.
Paride Papadia Jonathan Semple Yeah, I’m kind of thinking along the same lines as Johnathan. The moves are the fiction. That’s why AW isn’t generic but its system can fit so many other genres – you don’t lose the frame by completely changing the moves.
Oli Jeffery my suggestion if you are undecided on the level of “specialization .” of the hack: choose the 8-12 basic moves that are integral to the genre, write them in a basic, fiction-flexible, way and when you’re done start specializing toward more genre appropriate fiction. Moves with take 3/take 1 are quite easy to “specialize”, for instance.
Chris Stone-Bush one way to keep people on the same page for genres not as widely understood as fantasy (apart from the inspirations list), is to have a guided question list at the beginning, with a statement degining one facet of the world and a series of 2-6 questions on the subject to the players. I used it as an in-game pitch of the setting for DW many times, and it worked quite well, giving a consistent feeling to the game world.