Alfred Rudzki posted about random encounters with PbtA folks over a disappointing game of D&D, which I started replying to. I ended up with this, a sort of personal essay about my discovery of Apocalypse World and the effect it’s had on my life. I’d be very interested to know how many other people have followed this difficult trajectory into narrative games. I grew up fascinated by role playing games but without like-minded friends. I felt a little ashamed by the nerdiness of this fascination, and was always bewildered by the arrays of mechanics and number crunching, so I never got to play a game.
I GM’d a few abortive, half-hearted attempts over the years with friends and family members, but nothing stuck, though I had a growing pile of large, hardcover RPG books in my closet, pored over at night.
Then, at university, a guy offered to take me to a Pathfinder game at our local comic shop. I was thrilled, invited a friend of mine, Tess, and counted the minutes until I’d finally get to play.
When the night came, the GM was bored, phoning it in and seemed like he had someplace better to be. Character creation was bastard-long, and one of the other players kept insisting that myself and Tess had to be his elven brother and sister. I wanted to play a human rogue and she a monk, but he assured us that elf was the better choice for our classes.
Once character creation was over, the game began, and wouldn’t you know it, we were in a tavern which was attacked by orcs.
Almost immediately an argument broke out about initiative, and books were produced. The guy who offered to bring us to the game made excuses and left. My friend and I talked quietly while people said things like “By the gods!” (really) and pointed furiously at tables and errata.
Eventually, the first debate was settled and the gnome warlock settled back on to his tiger/wolf mount (he kept forgetting what he had chosen so sort of switched back and forth at whim). The orc fight began in earnest. For whatever reason, I was just about dead last in the turn order. I listened as people positioned themselves around the bar, fighting orcs with varying degrees of success until my turn came. I was behind the bar, and on the other side the fighter was engaged with an orc who had his back to me.
I decide to vault over the bar and creep up on the orc to slit its throat. Roll athletics. Fumble. Flat on face. The GM moves on.
This was not the exciting shared narrative I had anticipated. The mechanics were not an elegant engine that powered a story, they were as stultifying and inhibiting as I had always thought they were. So much of the game was math and waiting. Waiting for a turn, waiting while people look up rules, waiting while hitpoints tick down.
This was a game of disempowerment and watching strangers argue about things I didn’t understand or care about.
I made eye contact with Tess. She nodded, and I interrupted the rules debate by holding up my phone and pretending to answer it with wild, panicked eyes. Oh, my, but we really had to go. We fled.
I gave up on role playing games. I figured they just weren’t for me. I drifted into boardgames for a while, and the random element scratched the story generation itch for me with games like Betrayal at House on the Hill. Wanting to know more, I began researching boardgames, watching Tabletop and Shut Up and Sit Down obsessively. These sources led me by degrees to indie roleplaying games, Fiasco, Dungeon World and Apocalypse World. I bought PDFs voraciously, read everything I could. I’ve since GM’d several games of tremulus, a full six-episode arc of Apocalypse World, a Saga of some Icelanders, Monsterhearts, countless DW games and others. I’ve recruited a large and able gaming group and we’ve never had a rules question at the table. People just get it. I’ve shown other GMs the system and made them converts. One of them is going to be running a private game at Burning Man.
My group are all non-gamers, but the PbtA system is so intuitive that half an hour in, they’ve all got it down, the first time they play. I am aching for the Dungeon World war supplement with a gnawing hunger, and likewise the various tremulus releases on the horizon. These are the games I’ve always wanted to play. I often wonder how many other people have had this kind of wish fulfilment through these approachable, liberating games. If you’ve managed to read this far, why don’t you tell me how you discovered PbtA?