Niche protection among PCs.
How important is it to the PbtA engine? Vital? Integral? Dependent on the genre and type of fiction you want to create?
Looking at the core material and the most widely respected hacks, you can’t help but notice that niche protection is a factor. I’m curious about this from two perspectives:
1. Designers. How conscious are you of niche protection when you’re working on a hack?
2. Players. How important is it for your character to have a clearly defined role and/or set of abilities where you exceed the other characters?
I did away with niche protection. Actually, I did away with niches.
Niche protection isn’t important to Apocalypse World proper. Where there seems to be niche protection, it’s just an accident of the design.
Ok, now that’s interesting Marshall Miller. The hack I’m working on doesn’t really focus much on niches either, but I can’t help but notice how prominent they are in excellent games like Dungeon World, not to mention the core material we’re hacking.
What was your reason for dropping them and how have players reacted?
I don’t tend to think of niche protection as giving each character something that they do the best, but I definitely take pains to give each playbook a sense of uniqueness. I like each playbook to narrow down on exactly the thematic elements that I’m exploring for it, and once I figure out what they are, I make sure that none of the other playbooks crowd in on this thematic area.
I don’t really think this is an essential component to PbtA games, though. It more depends on whether the areas that your game explores ask for strong individuality between the characters.
Jared Hunt In Nanoworld, PCs are clones who are mechanically identical. How similar or dissimilar they are, in the fiction, is something to play to find out about.
Ah, ok. Thanks Vincent Baker. I was wondering if that was the case. It didn’t seem very Apocalypse to build in systems that ensure each character is a special snowflake.
I am fascinated to see the responses about niche protection being either unimportant or accidental. Especially from Vincent Baker . I’m not saying that I expected niche protection, or that people are wrong for not designing niche protection into their games. It just that the playbooks for Apocalypse World are so distinct and different from each other that I assumed it was designed that way. I’m blown away to be told that was purely accidental.
I’ve not designed a full hack yet, but I have made a few Skins for Monsterhearts. In doing so, I’d say that nich protection is fairly important. If the thing you are doing with this new playbook can be done by another existing playbook, then why bother? And I’m not talking individual Moves here. I’m talking about the playbook as a whole.
But maybe that’s design space rather than PC niche.
Christopher Stone-Bush In Apocalypse World, the characters start out canalized, yes, but basically as soon as play starts they can start cutting in on each others’ niches. Sooner, some of them, if you count taking stat substitution moves during character creation. Protecting your character’s niche isn’t part of the game’s design.
Even the “no duplicate playbooks at initial character creation” rule isn’t FOR niche protection, that’s an accidental effect. The real purpose of that rule is so that when I’m prepping for session 1, I only have to print one of each playbook.
Huh. Again, I am rather surprised to find that out. I don’t know it this is intentional, but the fact a character’s niche ins’t protected seems very much like it’s part of the “there is no status quo in Apocalypse World” mentality. Just because Thing A makes you special, doesn’t mean other people can’t also do Thing A, too.
I wonder, in settings that expect the PC group to work as a unified team (like Dungeon World), is niche protection more of an issue.
Adam Koebel, any chance you might weigh in on this from a DW perspective?
DW has niche protection to start because we weigh archetypal roles pretty heavily. It bleeds out as characters grow out of being just “the fighter”.
In my own World, the niches aren’t niches — they are genre conventions. And just like other Worlds you can start melding them as you play. This is totally appropriate to the genre (fairytales), where characters wear many hats and I want the players to question who they really are (prince, hero, villain, magician, etc.).
Vincent Baker since niche protection is largely accidental, does that mean you could play with multiple of the same playbook? a game of hardholders seems like it would be a fun world-building exercise
Patrick Henry Downs It’s against the rules as written, but of course you could. Personally I’m not sure I’m with you on “fun,” but give it a try, maybe you’re right.
(I assume you’re talking about multiples at initial character creation. Playing with multiples as a result of ungiven future advances isn’t against the rules at all.)
Vincent Baker Yes, I meant at character creation. The first time I read the Quarantine I thought it would be a fun game to have everybody be Quarantines and they have to debate what their facility is and what resources they all share. Getting out of the facility and exploring the world would then be a shared experience.
p.s. – “fun” is interchangeable with “interesting”
Language tip for Patrick Henry Downs. The Japanese word 面白い (oh-moe-shee-roy-ee) means both “fun/funny” and “interesting”. It usually drives me insane (pick one meaning, please!) but it seems appropriate here. ;^)