Category: Powered by the Apocalypse: Discussion

How to introduce newbies to the system ?

I mentioned this in the ‘Apocalypse world – session one’ thread by Dale Jennings

Important : this is not an attack on the system.

It just hasn’t clicked for me, but at the same time I feel like there is something to it.

I think I’m not alone in this state of intermediate confusion.

As it is … the system tends to feel too mechanical.

I’m pushing buttons that do stuff. I don’t feel like I’m playing a role as a player.

And as a DM I feel like I am pushing buttons too.

Transcripts in the rulebooks read like “I do this action and I get this result”.

It’s like reading about a D&D session and see players mention what dice they roll (I roll an attack : D20 = 15) and the results (it hits for D6 = 4 damage) instead of the roleplaying itself (“I stab the orc in the knee and the GM says it screams in pain”). That’s nice and all when teaching mechanics, but it doesn’t teach how to be a player or DM in the system. It doesn’t really tell me how an adventure works. Why can’t I have a map with stuff ?

I sort of get the idea of the system, because roleplaying games should be about roleplaying instead of throwing a bunch of dice. Any system that helps both the DM and player with this is a good idea.

One thing that also kind of bothers me is that every PbtA variant feels the need to re-invent the names of core mechanics, which only creates more confusion when attempting to mix or switch settings.

In pretty much any D&D clone the stats have the same names.

Skills and classes may be slightly different, but there usually isn’t a need to rename the core classes like fighter and thief either.

To me this makes me wonder if the system isn’t keeping newbies out. Or at the very least making it tough to learn simply because it does require a paradigm shift to anyone more familliar with the ‘classic’ style of roleplaying.

Of course one could argue that this is because one system has almost half a century worth of community building and tooling. Some of it has even become embedded into our language (or at least within geeky communities) to the point we can even make jokes that everyone can understand (cf: the episodes in the big bang theory that display this hobby).

So … how do we introduce, teach and learn this system so we can ultimately grow the community and perhaps one day rival OSR.

Any links ?

Any tools ?

Any cool stories about how you learned or taught the system ?