A little background: my first PbtA game was Dungeon World and I enjoy it greatly. Never used fronts though since in my decades of gaming these things have always flowed naturally and it felt unnecessary. So I wanted to see the game that started it all and picked up Apocalypse World 2nd edition. When I read the threat section I just didn’t get it. Needing charts to determine things that always came naturally during game play just seems way to convoluted to me. Am I missing something? Or is this for new gamemasters? Does anyone else feel this way or does having pie charts provide you with a helpful tool? Not being a hater here, just genuinely curious.
A little background: my first PbtA game was Dungeon World and I enjoy it greatly.
A little background: my first PbtA game was Dungeon World and I enjoy it greatly.
Listening.
In my experience the people who don’t use them generally don’t have anything in the world going on beyond the peripheral of the PCs in the fiction. I like it a lot because it helps me track of the things in motion they didn’t even interact with in a particular session.
They’re still there, they’re still doing something. Keeping that clear as well as what the PCs are choosing to interact with is helpful, imo. Especially when I make moves for these things beyond their peripheral as I think and make moves “off-screen.”
A lot of what Apocalypse World and PbtA games are about is codifying best practices in order to tell people how to play this game and do it well. Instead of just, do whatever you want, you’re probably a good GM/MC. A game manual is an instruction set to teach the game right, so saying “well, you COULD do this…” is only so valuable. Where as these games say, “do this and your fiction will reflect these best practices that I’ve explained to you previously.” After all, it’s about teaching the MC and the player how to play the game, in the end. Assuming they have developed skills from previous games isn’t a valuable way of teaching, I think?
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It’s just a tool for note taking. For threats, I think it’s important to record that they exist, if only so you don’t leave a thread hanging (also it’s fun to bring threats back in that the players forget about). Also, thinking about the stakes questions for threats gives you good prompts, especially for hard choices.
So it sounds like it’s more or less there for people who need a little extra help organizing the world. I kind of thought that but wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something important. So for those mc’s out there, do you go by the book or just organize in your head? For those that use the Pie charts, did you have an example of how it helped you?
So for me, I use the pie chart as an actual symbolic map. What threats are closer to the PCs, what are east or west, what threats are on an outward trajectory and it’s the loss or disappearance of a thing that matters, etc etc etc. It is also super handy for love letters, when time has passed and I get a chance to step back and say “oh hey, that was a really cool bit we all came up with in the 1st Session, and we only just brushed on it! What’s happening there!?!?!”
Definitely. I liked the changes to threat mapping in 2nd ed AW quite a bit!
I get how you feel mine, I’m just like that myself. You know what convinced me to try them out as tools? I read this article about the implementation of pre-flight checklists and how it reduced airplane accidents, right? It wasn’t that pilots don’t know the drill, but there’s a lot of moving parts and easy to miss one. Now I’m not saying that not using the pie chart will crash your game, that’s dumb, but at least for me tracking it that way helped me remember some things I might not have otherwise. It also helped me see some relationships and intensities that I might not keep track of in my more traditional list form or out of my head. In short I found putting it on paper that served as a source of inspiration in a different way than pure riffing on what was in my head at the moment.
Fraser Simons I’m not so sure I’d agree that “people who don’t use them generally don’t have anything in the world going on beyond the peripheral of the PCs in the fiction” in general, even if that is your experience.
I think the general idea of having Threats/Dangers/Storms/Fronts/Whatevers that complete tasks in the background when the PCs aren’t around is far older than AW. You see similar things in the Stars Without Number “Faction Turn” and the like. Ye old D&D used to result in players managing keeps and guilds and playing a “domain game” where towns muster troops and make discoveries off camera. You even see similar things in wargaming that does campaign play.
However, I think AW and other PbtA games did a phenomenal job of saying “here’s the TYPE of stuff you should use and here’s WHAT they do” rather than leaving it freeform. This really helps dial it in.
But the way each game expects you to record the thing feels more like a specific style of note taking that works for the author and may or may not work for others.
shrugs I can only speak to my own experience. And there’s more value in codifying best practices in order to actually teach someone how to play this game. I’m sure older games have their own things going on, but I haven’t experienced them and can’t speak to them.
I’ve had only very poor experiences from DnD. My experiences with DnD is people who should write a novel, not play a collaborative game. I know that’s not always the case, though. SWN came out the same year or year after Apocalypse World, I thought. 2010 ish? Probably a similar dev time with two different designers wanting to codify off-screen fiction. Tells me maybe it wasn’t discussed much, perhaps only given as advice, but again, that’s not great when trying to teach someone how to play a game and replicate a good play experience?
But I wasn’t even gaming then so, perhaps not.
Maybe Kevin Crawford can weigh in!
I feel like I often get a qualitatively different experience from different GMing approaches. Running with a fully prepared adventure module feels different from running with an open-ended adventure seed, which feels different from running with threats and fronts generated by player input.
I guess I see them as on a spectrum. On the one end, the prepared stuff has the benefit of being written and edited, but it’s relatively brittle and harder to improvise around. On the other end, threats and fronts offer more room for surprise, but demand a lot of improvisation. Threats and fronts feel like they have a life of their own, so there’s a lot more room for even me as the GM to be surprised by the game—not just HOW stuff I expect to happen will unfold, but WHAT will happen at all.
Maybe how you GM already captures that kind of story, but how I was GMing before certainly did not.
Front and threat clocks are ways to use a game mechanic to track the progression of some element of fiction, as well as to call it out as important. I found it helps to think of them as a sort of harm track, but for a particular thing in the story we care about. It’s a gamist way of thinking about fiction, and it keeps things from going off the rails too (ie: it’s also a planning and narration tool as well). Ymmv but I think they will benefit just about anyone