(joining this necro due to x-post from another thread)
You know, the thing about PbtA is that it feels "easy" to create a PbtA game (hint: it's not) because the structure feels really apparent: Playbooks, Moves that include 6-, 7-9, 10+ results, Agendas, Principles and boom - you've got yourself a PbtA game. And at the same time creating all that stuff REQUIRES you to integrate setting into the rules. If you take a look at the playbook names between Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, The Veil, Urban Shadows, Monsterhearts ad infinitum you immediately can tell what the game is based on just the names of the playbooks. Because that was required, it also required the creator to have a strong vision of their setting that they could communicate via the rules. This in turn gave readers (GMs and Players both) a strong sense of the vision - and therefore made play more easily replicate the cultural touchstones that gave birth to the setting in the first place.
I think that's why PbtA took off so strong in the first 3/4s of the 10's. That said, just about every possible cultural touchstone that resonates with the RPG nerdiverse has been mined - so the game is played out.
I feel like whatever comes next is going to also very strongly encourage setting melded with rules as well as provide a sense of simplicity (whether illusionary as in PbtA or real as in Descended from the Queen). Honestly, my expectation is that the next wave of games are going to be more along the lines of For the Queen rather than more traditional games like Y0E or BRP/Pendragon or Gumshoe.
I also curious to see what 2020's forcing function for 99% of us to move to online gaming how that will impact game design going forward. Based on what I've seen said on this forum and others is that a good proportion of folks won't be going back to f2f games, or those will be a rarity.
Well.... I think it is fair to say that PbtA games are very tightly defined in terms of the genre, tone, and general milieu, but they need not be literally SETTING specific. That is, Dungeon World for example really is not more setting specific than D&D. Each one has a pretty tightly defined genre, but you can set DW games in a wide variety of worlds, probably anything that would work for D&D. So, I don't see that the design is less flexible than that of earlier RPGs.
Nor were most earlier RPGs mostly exceptionally broad in their genre/tone. If you think of just TSR games, you had Boot Hill (very very niche game), MA/GW is also quite niche, 007, Indiana Jones, MSH, and even Star Frontiers. This is typical of games originating in the late 70's and early 80's. Certain companies tried to build "general systems", but I question how successful that was. GURPS enjoyed some success, for a while, but it was always kind of a second choice in any given genre to some more niche game. BRP-derived games have been a bit more successful, but nowadays seem fairly dated, though a couple of them are still reasonably popular. In any case, no specific game in either line does more than one specific thing well.
So, yes, PbtA games CAN be pretty narrow, like AW itself, or really niche games like Monster Hearts, but they can also be as general as pretty much any other RPG, such as D&D is.
Also, while I think making any really good RPG is a pretty significant piece of work that requires a lot of expertise these days, I'm not sure the PbtA 'road map' is any harder to implement than any other. I mean, if you look at games like BitD, Ironsworn, Strike!, more recent vintages of FATE and Burning Wheel, I don't think they were easier to design, and all probably have equally heavily crafted and finally tuned core structure. There is nothing simple about designing a good RPG. This is probably why, these days, people generally choose to start with an existing game, abstract away just the essence of it, and reapply it again and again to new niches. In this sense PbtA seems really successful and would seem to represent the easiest path...
