Grade the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) System

[Eyes of Nine]

What I see is a lot of expensive words that only serve to cloud what is meant.

If they can't or won't rephrase in plain language, it speaks to a refusal to actually communicate.

Case in point, it actually took nearly a minute for ChatGPT to parse the post and spit out that all it actually said is that these games don't have any structure in them that overrides the rules.

Which, of course, is baloney (the very presence of a GM disproves that notion) and doesn't actually dispute the writers room description to begin with; that description has nothing to do with overriding rules and its another bizarre strawman being pulled out of the aether to suggest it is.

I will say your arguing/discussion style uses a lot of hanging pronouns/antecedents which for me makes it hard to track your points. No doubt that's a me thing

To what I think your point is - specifically about the language used - I disagree (as noted in my previous post) and not really interested in engaging more on the topic tbh

Manbearcat can defend themselves quite ably I'm sure, if they choose to

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can pull dozens of threads all over the internet describing these games in the exact same way. This is the only time anyone anywhere on the internet has ever tried to argue against those definitions and I can only understand this to be because I used them as negatives rather than positives, like it is most elsewhere.

(emphasis mine) Yeah, sure.... Do you REALLY want to go down this path? I mean REALLY REALLY??? Cause it ain't going to end well. Let me just suggest you should probably read a wider diversity of posters from now on. I mean there are LARGE and highly active PbtA groups crawling all over the Internet these days. I don't doubt that you can find people (probably not that hard) who agree with you either, but, well lets just avoid hyperbole.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Then you would be an outlier. These games are very reliant on its partial success design to keep the story going, so unless a table is either deliberately slowing character advancement or injecting what would effectively be homebrew story hooks, the game is going to push the overall story to a conclusion. The only other way I see, both in my own experience and in those of others, for these games to last very long is if you're not actually accomplishing all that much session to session, which also goes beyond the system.

Most likely, your tables had one of these or some mix.

Nope! Standard DW is a 1-10 level game, and it requires level+7 hit points PER LEVEL to advance, so 70+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 125 XP, where a session is unlikely to net you more than about 5 XP IME. So, AT LEAST 20 sessions, probably closer to 30. And our play was never slow plodding anything, it was fast hard in your face action with only limited downtimes that usually got wrapped at the start/end of a session in a few minutes.

You can ask other posters here that were in our BitD campaign that lasted about a year. There was nothing softball, slow, nothing like that about it at all. We were going balls-to-the-wall all the way, from tier 1 to tier 5 with multiple threat clocks running every single week, usually 2 parallel scores. Heck we had, for most of the campaign, two wars going on against us at one time. It was pretty crazy. So a TON of stuff happened, and the game showed no sign of being 'short term' at all.

I mean, I would agree, you can't sustain a BitD campaign with the same PCs for longer than we did. Once you hit tier 5 the crew needs to reach some sort of climax because you're kind of maxing out the system, but we could have EASILY done any number of spin offs. My character alone had a whole band of blind child beggar/spies that worked for him. There was a little mystic girl too, and we had TWO different subsidiary crews that worked for us. Any of that could have easily spun off into the next 'season' of play, complete with some significant world events we brought down at the end.

Honestly, when you say this stuff, mostly you simply come across like you're play has been VERY limited and maybe not even typical. In fact I would venture that there is little point to a PbtA (or FItD, they're pretty similar in this respect) that doesn't last at least a dozen sessions. The times I've had games break up early just felt highly incomplete and like there was a ton more to do.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The book indicates the Unscene as an ultimate example of this dynamic, but applies the writers room and cinematic gameplay dynamic to the whole game.

Personally, I dont really have an opinion about whether the writers room concept applies, except that it’s clearly a concept that at least some pbta creators take a liking to.

There’s something adjacent in BitD in the Keeping the meta channel open principle

Honestly, I don't think the "lets talk about the direction of the fiction" thing is very limited to one game or type of game. We were doing it WAY back in the late '70s in our proto-1e campaigns. We did it a LOT in our Traveller campaigns from what I can remember. Heck, I think in one game the players even made up some of the planets, or at least said "if there's a planet like X, then Y could happen!" (and it was made so). I think games like BitD, where you have a kind of more abstract 'down time' that comes up after each score, invites some of that and it might be more common in that game. 4e almost TELLS you to do it (and I consider it a narrative game) and talks about things like players authoring quests (and most of those are party quests, so...) or creating wishlists of items to find in play, etc. In my own game it is a pretty natural concept as well due to the way advancement works.

 

[Emberashh]

(emphasis mine) Yeah, sure.... Do you REALLY want to go down this path? I mean REALLY REALLY??? Cause it ain't going to end well. Let me just suggest you should probably read a wider diversity of posters from now on. I mean there are LARGE and highly active PbtA groups crawling all over the Internet these days. I don't doubt that you can find people (probably not that hard) who agree with you either, but, well lets just avoid hyperbole.

What were you saying about being emotionally invested? Calm down.

Nope! Standard DW is a 1-10 level game, and it requires level+7 hit points PER LEVEL to advance, so 70+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 125 XP, where a session is unlikely to net you more than about 5 XP IME. So, AT LEAST 20 sessions, probably closer to 30. And our play was never slow plodding anything, it was fast hard in your face action with only limited downtimes that usually got wrapped at the start/end of a session in a few minutes.

Outlier

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As an aside, I'd say his "line" is still very much closer to what people traditionally call Writer's Room - at least it is nowadays. In Blades in the Dark, there is no guidance for the GM to bring up troubles with the PCs' Vices/Trauma. It really needed better writing around this but watching his Actual Plays and This Video - he describes the role of the Player as being a GM of their characters, saying he was going to write that into the text. But even what is actually written in the book has the players playing the PCs as stolen cars, which is definitely not an Actor Stance. But this goes into how "The Line" is VERY subjective. I think everyone is fine with metagaming (not being in the Actor Stance) to make sure their character sticks with the party (assuming the game is about that) and they don't cross people's Lines & Veils (or you end up in an rpg horror story probably). I found some think Masks' Conditions cross the Line, but for me, its perfectly okay. But for me, FitD games definitely cross the line when its up to the Player to basically come up with the trouble of their PC.

Its really the other reason I found Forged in the Dark (after the loss of Basic and GM Moves) to be a much worse experience at my tables than PbtA. It just so happens that the theme and genre of BitD and especially Scum & Villainy hit on my absolute favorite - love me some Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. So S&V remains my favorite game even though I am disappointed by the execution - not traditional GM Role, lots of creative burden to basically do game design on the spot creating moves for every Action Roll. But plenty to love in its design - clocks remain my go-to tool.

Unfortunately, no traditional PbtA really replicated these well enough. I found too many try to be "The Sci Fi" game that can handle any type of crew from Mass Effect to Firefly to Star Trek. Which is just plain silly and means your Basic Moves are generic and not fitting any of these genres.

I can see what you mean about traumas in BitD, clearly you would mostly want to not dig into that unless you can make it do something for you. I tried to RP mine, but it can be hard. Making them into something closer to a FATE compel might be an option, though it would obviously require the GM to be mindful of not death spiraling the crew with them. Overall I thought they were maybe not the strongest aspect of the game.

I think any PbtA which is trying to be a generic broad context RPG is going to fail. I could maybe see a game that was pretty open in terms of the overall milieu where it then had some focused sets of playbooks and environments that are almost like little mini-games, but I guess then the question is why bother? BitD does have something similar, like where you can play the Bluecoats (the cops). Haven't tried it, but it could definitely work in that game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

On "writer's room" (and why I've pushed back against it historically). The below is not happening in any of these games:

There is no coalitional, clarifying process of "how exactly we all would like the game to go so lets make that happen" sort of (some kind of) collective railroading that is happening in these games.

Even in something like The Unscene in The Between, this is just a layer of color and coinciding motif/metaphor that rests atop the consequential components of The Night phase of play. The system still has all of the same say that it does in all of the other phases. No one gets to override it. Its just that "of the constellation of situations and subset of consequences you would typically select from (which follow from the fiction, the procedures of play, and are informed and constrained by everything else the game is typically informed and constrained by), those are winnowed down to ones that are feral, punchy, and hewing to the coinciding motif/metpaphor of The Unscene."

That is it. There is no coalitional thinking, no clarifying process of overriding the entirety of the (extremely weighty and play-directing) system inputs that aims toward and then fulfills a system-overriding, collective railroading prerogative.

Right, like when we were playing BitD, we did talk about what was going on and what the story would be, quite a lot, but it was NEVER some sort of hatching plots to make a certain thing happen, or particularly trying to figure out how to 'beat the game' or anything like that. I mean, we DID have discussions when leveling up the PCs or the crew about what new cool stuff to pick and "yeah, that would really be powerful" or something, but that was what you DO, and happens in all games. When we'd talk about what such-and-such a faction would do next, that was just "here's some fun color for play." You were going to come and put the screws to us every week, didn't mater if it was The Hive (I remember suggesting they might get involved at one point) or those Mercs, or whatever.

 

[Campbell]

The style of play I am the most experienced in on both sides of the screen is character centered trad play using games like Vampire, Werewolf, Scion, Exalted, Deadlands, Dark Heresy, Legend of the 5 Rings, et al. Sprawling games that tend to focus mostly on social conflicts, feature PCs with varying personal goals, often with huge casts of NPCs (50+ over a 6-month long campaign is not unusual). Coordinating and weaving together vastly different personal priorities along with scenario elements introduced by the GM in these sorts of games absolutely feels like a writer's room to me (in a mostly good way). Balancing out character priorities, knowing when to shine a spotlight on other characters, finding reasons to take an active interest in the scenario hooks provided by the GM all requires a very collaborative storytelling mindset with a lot of out of game conversations about where things are going.

In comparison when playing Apocalypse World, I do not focus on any of that stuff. I get to just focus on authentically playing that Gunlugger or Battle Babe because the game handles the stuff that we have to coordinate in our trad games. We let go and just let things flow without fear that things will stagnate.

I love both sorts of play. Very different sorts of payoffs, but the first is definitely a lot more curated and a lot more storytelling centered (from all participants).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I see is a lot of expensive words that only serve to cloud what is meant.

If they can't or won't rephrase in plain language, it speaks to a refusal to actually communicate.

Case in point, it actually took nearly a minute for ChatGPT to parse the post and spit out that all it actually said is that these games don't have any structure in them that overrides the rules.

Which, of course, is baloney (the very presence of a GM disproves that notion) and doesn't actually dispute the writers room description to begin with; that description has nothing to do with overriding rules and its another bizarre strawman being pulled out of the aether to suggest it is.

Actually I agree with ChatGPT! PbtA (especially games like AW/DW, maybe less so some others perhaps) has a core loop process of play that is fully described in the rules and NEVER OVERRIDDEN. Likewise the agenda and principles always apply, and there is no situation where the GM techniques are not applicable and to be applied. Maybe we can argue about 'when is a move triggered', it certainly can be a judgement call, but I wouldn't call that 'a structure which overrides the rules'.

In fact I find AW and DW remarkable in the degree to which they have this trait amongst TTRPGs, and find it to be a virtue of these systems. No matter what comes up in play I know exactly how to GM it. The players also know exactly what is what, its both purely transparent and infinitely applicable. Its game design genius to put it bluntly. If I ever aspired to real talent as a game designer Vince Baker crushed all my hopes with DW when I read it! lol.

 

[andreszarta]

Hi! I'm late to the party.

I offer this post and, in particular call out my response in it, to provide a different view on the writer's room perceived feature that these games often get lumped with.

Historically, there have been mentions of PbtA games resembling writer's rooms. While I'm hesitant to delve into the reasons behind such comparisons (were they based on informed or uninformed views? It's hard to say now!), I believe that this perception was likely fleeting and is largely outdated today. In our current times, there's ample evidence of successful narrativist play within these games, where the concept of a "writer's room" style is entirely absent. People can cling on to that idea, but it is not reflective of our current understanding of the range of play that these games can provide.

Clearly, several posters in this thread ardently support the framework and truly enjoy these games. When they share their direct experiences, emphasizing that their gameplay doesn't mirror the "writer's room" approach, it's disheartening to witness their insights being doubted. Such skepticism further underscores the possible biases and the absence of sincere dialogue some may be introducing to this discussion.