Okay, so I’ve been pulling together publication information for the various PbtA games and you can see a rough first draft below. Games are sorted by publication year and then by start date, rather than strictly chronologically, so that it’s easier to see the range of development times. On average, it takes 2.5 years to bring a PbtA game to market (although it’s more like 1 year for ashcan editions). On average, PbtA Kickstarter campaigns have 2 years development behind them. I’ve also broken them into waves based on which existing games they draw inspiration from. If you’ve published a PbtA game and it’s not on there, it’s an oversight and not a judgement.
Questions, comments, and curse words are all welcome forms of feedback.
Wanted: exact publication dates
Publication years are pulled from the RPGGeek database and I’ve treated them all as though they came out mid-year so that games that started that same year still show up. I also made one or two best guesses where I didn’t hear back from the designer.
First wave games credit AW as a source of inspiration in their text or according to the designer. Second wave games [mostly] credit at least 1 first wave game. Third wave games [mostly] credit at least one second wave game. You can see that second and third wave games get intermixed as there are more games from which to draw inspiration and folk are working from different experience-bases and with more variable development duration. I propose that fourth wave games will be inspired by either 3rd wave games or 2nd editions.
ashcan edition?
That’s really neat but it’s a little hard to line up the name with the bar near the 1/2 to 2/3 points on the list.
Very nice! To add some more precise data Legacy was first released as a Pay-What-You-Want playtest version (which I guess counts as ashcan?) on November 07, 2013. The full, final version was published July 13, 2015. I’d place it closer to the first wave, myself; quoting from the introduction, “The system is heavily inspired by Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, as well as offshoots like Dungeon World and Monsterhearts” – though obviously, you know your classification system best!
William Nichols A cheap or free, unfinished but publically released version of the game.
Delightful
James Iles The 1st wave of games were direct offshoots of AW. The second wave games were influenced by AW and other PbtA games.
I see now that I’m missing The Sundered Land and The Hood. I should probably list The Regiment too as it was influential.
Ahh right – that makes a lot of sense then.
Its really good to see this, as knowing that, say, Urban Shadows took years to develop makes me feel a lot better about the state of my own hacks.
I can’t quite see it, but is there a correlation between generation and development time?
William Nichols r = 0.114, p > 0.05, so no, probably not. I think the average duration reflects the time necessary to design, develop and produce/print games in general. I’d argue that deciding to design a PbtA game doesn’t give you much of a head start and isn’t “cheating” as most hacks take as long to create as AW itself did.
Thanks for the datacrunching. I love those kinds of chart. Always very interesting 🙂
Somebody who can interpret a p-value!
It would be interesting to do a visualization like an ER diagram with games and connections to their listed acknowledgements/inspirations.
Many games are inspired by multiple prior games and the number of overlapping arrows is visually unfortunate. A wiki or twine or other branching menu system might be the best way to explore any one game’s predecessors. A table was the best I could do.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MarshallMiller/posts/Xg3apwctTnG
This makes me feel a little better about the time it took me to put Sagas out.
Monster of the Week, Night Witches, Soth, and I think maybe Threadbare all had lives before PbtA so their overall development would have been longer. I’ve shortened it to just the PbtA part of the development for comparison.
Does a year and a half of discussing a project and possible mechanics without actually putting anything on paper count as development?
Matthew Gwinn Sure.
Does taking a game to Dreamation count as an ashcan version?
William Nichols When I think of ashcans, I’m thinking of Dungeon World Basic, Epyllion, Cartel, Velvet Glove, etc. (if I recall correctly) — small, perfect bound books with just the basics and an intent to expand into a larger work. Small, direct to PDF games like Wolfspell, Ghost Lines, Bootleggers, or Dream Askew also have shorter development times.
Absolutely love it.
In that case, next time around you can add Regrets of the River King to the list. The concept has been rolling around in my head since D&D 3.0 came out, but I could never really figure out how to make the idea work until PBtA showed up. I first seriously proposed the game at Gencon in 2015
Is there a link to the spreadsheet? The image is coming up very low res on my phone…
Oli Jeffery Yeah, the number of games makes it a challenge to display them all. I’ll see if I can link to better images when I get a chance…
Great work, thanks for doing it! Although Blades In The Dark is not really PbtA, in my opinion, even if there is some of it’s DNA in it.
Jordan Raymond I think the original version was far more traditionally pbta than what was eventually released.
What’s the difference between 2nd wave & 3rd wave?
Rob Whitaker More thoughts on waves. 1st wave games are built off of AW. 2nd wave games reference AW and at least one other PbtA game. There’s a good chance that 2nd wave designers were familiar with all of the 1st wave games even if they didn’t cite them directly. 3rd wave games reference games that reference games that reference Apocalypse World (so they reference at least one 2nd wave game). Most 3rd wave designers probably haven’t read/played all of the second wave games – there is probably large overlap but there so many! 4th wave games will come out of experience with the 2nd editions of 1st wave PbtA games, and their designers will each have played a different subset of PbtA games, potentially with little overlap.
Important take away: If you’ve got an idea for a PbtA game, don’t feel like you have to read/play all the other PbtA games — just start putting words on paper!
You should add Willow Palecek’s “Powered By the Apocalypse World” game to the list. I played it at Forge Midwest and it has potential.
Marshall Miller If you get a chance to add it for future editions, my game Rituals, about living with OCD and falling into the short form, pdf section, will be published in next month’s Codex zine. It started development at the end of last year.
Oli Jeffery What other games influenced it?
In case you’d like to add it onto the list, I’ve just published another PbtA game – What Ho, World!, based on Jeeves and Wooster stories, is a diceless, GM-less and designed for one-shots, so it’s pretty far afield! It was mainly inspired by Dream Askew, with elements from Fiasco. I started development on it sometime in 2014, and it was published on April 6th 2017.
Marshall Miller Monsterhearts and Velvet Glove most specifically.
The Watch borrows most from Urban Shadows and Night Witches. Would that make it third wave? Also, I could get you development dates if you want to add it, although I get that it’s technically published yet. 🙂
Anna Kreider Totally cool, I expected to fill forward as people responded to the rough draft. When did you start work on The Watch?
Also, would you be interested in some data about other than English-speaking hacks?
Tiburce Guyard Yes!
December 2015, roughly.
Interesting! 😀
In the last few months I started working on a hack mainly based on AW2 and DW … this would make it a 4th wave? (if it ever sees the light of publishing 😛 )
I’d say so!