How do designers avoid the trap of “what PbtA is supposed to be?”
I’ve been listening to a lot of RPG podcasts and paying attention especially to PbtA, because I’m working on a game that is PbtA. I’ve noticed what seems to me to be a great deal of cultural conservatism about how a game in this space “should” play or what people expect from it.
This concerns me. I feel like every game needs to be evaluated on its own terms, and that you ought to try to follow rules first as written. My game may be slightly different, but those slight rules differences can make a huge play difference.
So, short of shouting every now and then “this is different, it may not be like AW, beware!” etc., which would be stupid and spoil the text, how does one tackle this?
I’m interested in Paul Beakley’s thoughts, as I’ve come across a few games he has specifically said are not “normal PbtA”.
I get concerned every time someone says “In PbtA games you roll 2d6 and on a 10+ you succeed, 7-9 it’s a mixed success, and 6- you fail”. it’s not just the dice mechanic that makes these things great…
No, John, nothing specific because I’ve heard this sentiment expressed about all kinds of rules. It feels like some people go in assuming they’ll be able to use their AW or Monsterhearts tools.
I think some games succeed at avoiding this impression. I’m not sure, but I doubt anyone’s ever mistook these skills as necessarily transmissible to Gregor Vuga’s Sagas of the Icelanders. Probably because the world and tone are so specific.
(Of course, I could be wrong in my impressions overall. Maybe I’m operating out of confirmation bias.)
What do you fear is the danger in this situation? Potential customers/players being turned off before they ever try the game? I feel like if Undying and Murderous Ghosts can be widely regarded as PbtA games, there’s a lot of leeway.
For what it’s worth, though, Mutant: Year Zero strikes me as a PbtA game that doesn’t identify itself as such, so maybe that’s how they “avoid the trap.”
.
The way I handled it was to have a couple lines toward the front of the rules that pointed out some areas where my game added to or differed from the other existing PbtA games – things to look out for. I also say that there is lots of carryover from other PbtA games.
In PbtA games you have moves activated by fiction to manage mechanics in given situations. How the moves work is totally up to the game author. Tipically PbtAs focus on a given mood/tone in a specific or generic setting. Well written PbtAs have moves that propel the fiction, pushing it toward the choosen mood. I hope my English is understandable…
I think evaluating a game on its own merits is absolutely in the right, and its why I spend a lot of time poring over a new PbtA game’s MC section every time I get my hands on one. Its all very “unlearn what you have learned” to get my head in the right mindset for the what a specific game is doing. I think if you just call out in your opening remarks to your game that “Hey, if you know AW or M<3s or whatever, this game does some different stuff. Seriously, pay attention for it, or you'll be bummed" then you've done your due diligence.
I may just be out of the loop, but most of the conservatism I see in PbtA circles is less about games being ‘not normal PbtA’ or whatever and more about folks assuming all PbtA games are the same. I’ve seen more friction come from people trying to say “hey, focus on this particular game specifically, not on what you already know about PbtA.” But that might be a who I have circled thing, a what podcasts you’re listening to thing, etc so I dunno. Have you listened to +1 Forward, by any chance? Its short, PbtA only, and is all about talking about what makes every given PbtA game its own, wholly unique beast. Might be a little helpful in that respect.
Jason: It’s precisely players being turned off, or, more importantly, not enjoying play because they went in expecting one thing and wound up finding it different in play.
Federico, your English is great. And I understand that a lot of—most—PbtA games work that way. But I’m not really interested in defining what it is to be a PbtA game. I sort of want to do the opposite.
Alfred, the conservatism you describe is part of what I was trying to explain.
I’m glad to hear that about +1 Forward. One of the shows where I’ve heard some of these attitudes is its source show, The Gauntlet, which I’m not saying to slam them. I love that show. It’s a big part of why I’m doing Demihumans. But I have noticed a few instances of “this is how PbtA is done” on the show.
Honestly, I think this happens when games are sufficiently close to what the “mainstream” of PBTA design looks like (AW, DW, MH, MOTW, even though those are all pretty different, actually) but different enough that players can’t just make assumptions about how things work, so they stumble into problems shifting expectations about how a new game approaches things. If the text doesn’t help them out or if it’s vague or makes certain assumptions in some places, people can get confused, lost, or just feel disappointed because the game isn’t what they were expecting.
That said, you basically never hear these concerns about PBTA games or PBTA-inspired games that are so different that it’s hard to make these assumptions, like Murderous Ghosts, Sundered Land, Blades in the Dark, etc. Because the games set themselves up and present themselves as being fundamental different, not just “another PBTA game aimed at the existing PBTA audience.” That’s the danger of using the game system as a core point of your marketing, I think. Yes, it gets you more eyeballs and potential players, but you’re also asking (more or less) for those players to make assumptions that your game will be like other PBTA games that they’ve played, even if it might be substantially different in ways that mean… those players might not even enjoy your game! Or at least may have to learn a new way to approach mechanics that seem like ones they have a lot of experience with.
So I think the key is not pulling a bait-and-switch with your players. Don’t say “hey, a PBTA game like the other PBTA games you love!” and then give them a game that works fundamentally different in ways that they may not want or appreciate or be able to easily adapt to. But if you present it as “hey, there’s this new game that borrows some ideas from PBTA, but is really aimed at doing these different things” then I think you’re less likely to run into misconceptions and disappointment.
Federico Totti has good points here. Robert Bohl, you know how to write a roleplaying game. Write the game on its own terms, make it clear right from the start what those terms are, and don’t get bogged down in explaining how it is like or unlike any other game. Forget that. Write that game. Don’t even mention PbtA unless you want to, especially if it’s going to muddy the waters. It can still be Powered by the Apocalypse without that being the main lens.
Serious answer: I design what I want and say fuck it.
I think you’re right, J. Walton. The tricky thing for my purposes is it’s both a close hack to AW (at least so far), and it touches on areas a few other PbtA games are (Dungeon World and a few other fantasy ones), but is at its core about something different. And the PbtA engine is great in that it allows you to do genre emulation in a really satisfying way. So there’s great value in using it, even doing a light hack, apart from the marketing value.
But yeah, the game I’m working on touches on a number of things very familiar to a lot of people, so that tightrope is going to be very difficult to walk. How to clearly say “I’m not that!” when it looks so much like that, unless you look close?
But what this discussion is convincing me of is flagging expectations are important. I need to pay attention to how people’s PbtA expectations are confounded, then rub their noses in the fact that they’re going to find those things confounding early on so they know what they’re getting into.
Brennan Taylor gets all the plus ones. Seriously.
(Not that I even know that the game will confound anyone’s expectations. It’s just the rhetoric makes me nervous.)
That “fuck it” attitude is what I had when I listened to the thing that prompted me to write this post, but I thought, “I should check that, check in, see if there’s a way around it.”
There may not be, and “fuck it” is the ultimately-correct answer even if there is. So thanks, Brennan Taylor and Meguey Baker for reminding me of the fuckit spirit.
I think if you are specific and clear about your game procedure then that should be enough. But whether people follow the rules an don’t fill in their expectations is another thing…
Let’s just say this is a GM side question to narrow the scope a bit. I feel like there two big modes of operation, people bring to PBTA games unconsciously. [disclaimer about how this is all my opinion and I’m just trying to help.] You can call these practices out before the meat of the rules, so people know to dig in to find out how to actually play.
One Unconscious practice is the AW / MonsterHeart’s setting up unbalanced npc relationship triangles [where an npc may like one pc but hate another] and then apply pressure. An example would be Monsterheart’s classroom seat chart. This practice lends itself to improvisation and requires little prep. Settings around these practices tend to focus on one community or town. You could say these are micro conflicts that grow to concern the whole town.
The other unconscious practice would be the DW style fronts, dangers, and escalation. This is a more prep intensive type of GM approach that is about setting events in motion that put pressure on the PCs. They tend to visit various locals as they try to unravel the problems of the world. “Perilous Wilds” map set up is a good example of this play, where through exploration the shapes of Fronts of dangers takes shape. You could say this practice is about the players and GM playing to figure out what the macro conflicts of the world are.
I’m not sure how you feel about either of these approaches, but some text calling out these practices as useful or not could be helpful in shaking the reader out of operating on assumptions. I would place the text before the Agenda and Principles. This is just from personal experience as the first place I go to as a GM to try to see how the game is different.
Always happy to remind you of your true punk nature, Robert Bohl.
Thanks, Aaron Berger, that all sounds super-useful. At the very least, it’s good stuff to look for. And I know I’m going to be doing Fronts/Threats very differently (plot clocks, because I love plot structuring RPGs). And I’m all about clearly-structured procedures.
The rhetoric around “what PBTA should mean” or whatever (as usual) is also at least 25%+ a way of talking about things people like and don’t like. When people criticize Night Witches or Worlds in Peril or Tremulus by comparing them to AW or something else, sometimes it’s just saying “I don’t like the way this game does this thing.” And even setting expectations can’t always fix that. At that point, I think the only choice is to go the Brennan Taylor route, if you feel good about your game and know it works.
Also, a portion of your audience will hate your game no matter what, so there’s that.
There’s a real, real good chance on that with this one. Making elven polyamory canonical and making humans evil dickbags and making kender an option is going to make some people hate the game. It’ll be nice to be relevant enough to get that reaction.
Robert Bohl My intent in listing the common denominators of PbtA games was to point out how much creative freedom the system leaves to authors while staying true to his peculiarities.
Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation, Federico.
Polyamorous elves, ok. Evil humans, yeah, that makes sense. KENDER? Blocked and reported for hate speech.
(Sub.)
Just write your fucking game and ignore people that tell you that’s not how it’s supposed to be.
How the fuck would they know unless they are a Mind Flayer or something?
Recently, I wrote a short PbtA primer for some PbtA newbies for whom I was going to run Masks. There, I claimed that necessary elements without which you weren’t playing a PbtA game were: “Play to find out” and “fiction first” (whose explanation included a description of moves & triggers, “to do it, do it”, and that moves have consequences — that things always change as the result of a move.)
That still seems pretty sound to me, though I wouldn’t pick fights on the Internet about it or anything. (And, of course, I didn’t go so far as to say these elements were sufficient …)
Zed, I pretty much agree. To me, the center of AW is those two elements. What’s funny is “play to find out” is natural to me and “fiction first” is a challenge.
.
I’ve honestly only felt the “what PbtA is” thing come up as an issue insofar as some games take the PbtA engine piece-meal without incorporating it into a new thing that works. BitD, for instance, /works/. It’s PbtA-based, but whatever: it put the ingredients together in a way that is mechanically functional.
I feel like some games /don’t/ do that. They may still be mostly fun, mostly working, etc. but they tend to fall into pits where the core PbtA engine stops working (fiction -> complication -> fiction) because they didn’t pay attention to the core gameplay loop they were building, they were just borrowing “oh, this dice mechanic plays fun.” They can’t go too far off the rails, because the dice mechanic, if the moves don’t deviate too much from traditional pbta, has the gameplay loop embedded in it.
Some of these games aren’t alternative game lines. Sometimes it’s referring to specific instances of play – e.g., when someone plays DW as though it’s D20, with the outcomes being “partial miss, miss, hit,” rather than “complications”. They’re DW-shaped, but the pbta gameplay loop has been partially effaced.
At least, that’s the only context I’ve seen “not real pbta” used. And, there’s nothing really new there: games should pay attention to their core gameplay loops, and if you’re using PbtA mechanics, you should attend to how your changes interact with the base material to maintain the core gameplay loop you want to have. Whether that’s a desireable loop, or Vincent’s vision of the loop, or whatever, doesn’t matter much: it’s your game, and it will or won’t find its audience.
PbtA is such a +weird multifaceted signal. It’s a marketing thing, sure. It will categorize a game with other PbtA games in webstores and databases, e.g. RPGGeek, and so present your game in a certain context. It’s a short hand for some of the way the game works that can help set reader/player expectations (for better or worse). It’s also an acknowledgement of design influence. For me, putting it on a game is a thank you to AW’s designers. I’m sure for some it is seen as a seal of approval from AW’s designers.