13 thoughts on “Gents”

  2. As a game designer, I can tell you that the worst advice I get from playtests is to change my system. My game is pbta, and I get people suggesting fate, Savage world, and Toon. I’ve been in playtests for fate games where the designer was told to use AW, or shadowrun, or gurps. It’s comical at this point, but also very frustrating.

    If you want a different system for a game, that’s cool. But please understand that the designer made the game this way for a reason. I guarantee the authors of any game being made today have considered pbta as the engine and made their choice for specific reasons. They might even be amenable to a hack for it later. But in general, campaigns demanding that the game engine be something it’s not are just frustrating for the designer, and kind of insulting.

  3. Good point. The authors are promoting their own system and also a Savage Worlds conversion. So I think that what Douglas says is only “Hey, why not an Apocalypse version too?!” No offense intended. 🙂

  5. Yeah, the thing is. What he’s suggesting is a campaign asking project creators “why not Apocalypse?” Have you ever seen an internet campaign? They tend to get out of control.

    Can I just state that after the tenth time of patiently explaining Why Not Fate, I started to kind of hate the players who were asking that? And I love Fate– it’s just not the right system for the game I’m writing.

    So, while I think it’s valuable to encourage AW hacks for games that weren’t otherwise doing them, maybe put your money behind projects that have an AW hack listed as a stretch goal…. but writing to the project and saying “make an AW version!” is more likely to backfire than not.

  6. Good point once more. 😀 ^___^ You are right. Let’s see what authors do, then 🙂 I’m backing this ’cause I like the original version, also I like PbTA games so I’m fine whatever lol :PP 

  9. If anything, we should be asking for a Polaris version of Polaris. 

    [Once upon a time, as deep as the oceans go, there lived the greatest people that this world will ever see. They are gone now, destroyed just as the world destroys all beautiful things. All that remains are these moments we call memories, moments drowning in the currents of time.]

  10. They replied

    “currently we are not planning on doing an Apocalypse Engine version, maybe in the future!”

    I believe all they need is a little encouragement, so “maybe” becomes certainty, and “in the future” becomes sooner rather than later.  

  13. Yeah, as Stephanie Bryant​ said. Also, I think it really depends on the designers, their experiences and their interests. I’ve tinkered with the AW engine long enough that I know how to create material for it. I think I might be able to put together a full working PbtA game, with time and a lot of trial and error. I wouldn’t be able to do so with Fate or Savage Worlds. Games are not all the same, and people who have the interest, skill and expertise to do good work on one system might not have them for another. I’m happy to leave the decision of which system to use to the game’s actual designer.

    It’s like, I love lasagne. If you asked me “do you feel like eating lasagne?” every day, I’d reply yes any and every time. But if I go to the burger joint that’s just down the road from my house, I know they do burgers, not lasagne, and I’ll trust them to make me an excellent burger instead of asking them to make me some lasagne that they may not know how to do.

    In the same way, I love PbtA games. I’m fairly sure that designers who know and love them are out there thinking about new PbtA games to blow my mind already. But I don’t think every tabletop rpg designer should do one, or every game should have a PbtA version. Some games just want a different system, and that’s fine. It’s what makes having so many games around so interesting!

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