I’ve been advised by the wise that our new system for Soft Horizon qualifies as being “Powered by the Apocalypse” but it has enough deviation that I’m queasy about baiting and switching the very dedicated community of PbtA gamers. Since you’re them, how do you feel about it?
The Soft Horizon series, a multiverse of Heavy Metal proportions, will be a series of individual stand-alone games that can be trivially linked together. They follow the principles of success with cost, player-side-only dice, and costs. They don’t use playbooks, aren’t restricted to d6, and generally don’t pull any text from existing PbtA games that I know of.
So if you picked up a PbtA game that didn’t have those things, would you feel burned by it? I know it’s just fine as far as the Bakers’ definition goes but I’m not sure that definition overlaps significantly with the actual market’s feelings on the topic.
PbtA can just mean “drew inspiration from Apocalypse World [or other game, itself inspired by Apocalypse World].”
Acknowledging your sources of inspiration is never wrong. If you weren’t inspired by PbtA but agree that there is some overlap, would categorizing your game as PbtA help get it in the hands of people who like that sort of game?
Uncanny Echo and The Sundered Land also set a precedent. Themselves being PbtA games that are composed of shorter, serial or interlocking, PbtA games.
Marshall Miller Yeah I’m familiar with the Bakers’ definition. What I’m more concerned with is whether PbtA fans will feel cheated if there’s too much deviation from their expectations despite adhering to this (very loose) definition.
I’ve only had pushback against my pretty out-there PbtA games – as in no dice, playbooks are hands of cards, token-based resolution, hard scene framing procedures, no GM, the works. I think for Soft Horizon it’s probably fine to advertise it in PbtA spaces but I might think twice about putting the logo on the cover, if that makes sense?
Jay Iles Yeah that’s about my comfort zone with it too. Using the logo felt a lot like grifting.
The PbtA design space is pretty expansive so Soft Horizon wouldn’t stick out, all PbtA games considered.
Fans and marketing aside, would you categorize Soft Horizon as a PbtA game? If a librarian asked where to shelve Soft Horizon games, would you tell them to shelve it under PbtA?
Maybe consider putting “Powered by the Apocalypse” in the acknowledgement text if you don’t want to use the logo. That would give some flexibility to independently categorize it as PbtA or not vs market it as PbtA or not, according to context, while still acknowledging that inspiration (assuming you were so inspired).
Marshall Miller I wouldn’t call it a PtbA game but I want that market because it kind of is one anyway.
“9/10 PbtA fans agree, Soft Horizons is …also quite good!”
“It’s not PbtA, but I like [Soft Horizon] anyway.”
~Marshall Miller, PbtA fan
“Soft Horizon is so much fun, you’ll forget it’s not PbtA!”
~anonymous PbtA fan
I Can’t Believe It’s Not PbtA (TM)
Just kidding, I’ve already ordered my copy. 😉
Marshall Miller Haha, thanks Marshall. 😀 I’ll add all those testimonials to the web page now.
If both What Ho World and Blades in the Dark qualify as PbtA, go for it.