What do you think about Powered by the Apocalypse games?

[dragoner]

I really, really want to like PbtA, and I've played maybe a dozen variants in home games and at cons. But it often feels like I'm along for the ride; there's no need to think or plan or worry about what my character would actually do, because a complication will come up and I'll just be reacting to GM intrusions.

I'm kind of at here too, I have run it (Scum and Villainy is right here in front of me), played more, and while I would play if one of the other GM's in my group wanted to run it, I wouldn't choose to run it again. It is too tightly focused, and I prefer a looser more easy going, open play style. I think it really benefits the more extroverted player, and my natural introvert tendencies make me not the ideal candidate.

 

[payn]

I'm kind of at here too, I have run it (Scum and Villainy is right here in front of me), played more, and while I would play if one of the other GM's in my group wanted to run it, I wouldn't choose to run it again. It is too tightly focused, and I prefer a looser more easy going, open play style. I think it really benefits the more extroverted player, and my natural introvert tendencies make me not the ideal candidate.

Ok, the intro/extrovert angle is interesting and gives me more food for thought on this.

 

[Hex08]

I'm kind of at here too, I have run it (Scum and Villainy is right here in front of me), played more, and while I would play if one of the other GM's in my group wanted to run it, I wouldn't choose to run it again. It is too tightly focused, and I prefer a looser more easy going, open play style. I think it really benefits the more extroverted player, and my natural introvert tendencies make me not the ideal candidate.

A couple of my players are more introverted, at least when gaming, so I am developing concerns if these games will be ideal for them. Since they tend to go along with whatever game I want to run a short game to feel everyone out may be in order.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I know very little, really next to nothing. I think I have a basic understanding of what a move is from reading posts here and that there is supposed to be minimal prep time for the games but beyond that I'm a blank slate. It also seems like the player does as much, if not more than, the GM to drive the story. I'm really looking for something new, it's one of the reasons I'm curious about the games, and I tend not to judge new concepts until I've tried them or seen them in action.

My only concern is the people I play with. All of my players are willing to try anything but I worry about a couple of them being able to drive their own stories, which seems like it might be a big deal with this style of gaming.

Once you've really gotten the hang of a given PbtA or FitD game, I think it's true that it's very minimal prep. But I also think making the transition from running more traditional games to running PbtA/FitD can be surprisingly difficult and time consuming. @John R Davis said upthread that you can play those games "wrong." I think you can absolutely run them wrong, too. There's so much you really need to reconfigure, about how a session might be paced (nearly always much, much faster than a trad game), how many NPCs you should be ready to provide names and info for, but maybe the biggest change you have to be prepared for is how much improvising you'll have to do, specifically to come up consequence after consequence.

To me, that was the most nerve-wracking part. If the average roll is a success with a consequence, how the hell do I constantly come up with interesting ways for a character to essentially fail while succeeding? But I had it wrong, because I was still thinking about consequences like critical failures (or similar) in other games. Like maybe you shoot the guy but the gun jams? Ok, but does that mean when the next PC also rolls a 7 to 9, they also jam, or they drop their gun, or something else that cumulatively makes the entire group seem like a bunch of clumsy dweebs?

It only made sense to me once I had read a ton of different games and listened to a bunch of podcasts (and peppered folks on here with questions), that consequences do not, and often should not, have to be PC fumbles. They can be something totally unrelated that increases the danger or stakes. They can mean you hear police sirens or a friendly NPC is hurt (not by a stray shot of yours, btw) or that, miles away, some enemy's plan is set in motion. Consequences just keep the whole engine moving--they're prompts for all sorts of improvised changes to the scene. And sure, sometimes they mean your gun jams or you hit a bystander, just not always.

So the prep, to me, is about reading lots of examples of consequences that other GMs have used, and sort of greasing your mental wheels, getting yourself ready to improvise the hell out of situation after situation, including by really familiarizing yourself with the setting and tone and related tropes. But once you have that front-loaded, overall prep done (and it's fun, imo, to reboot your brain to really do it) the individual sessions are definitely little-to-no prep.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

A couple of my players are more introverted, at least when gaming, so I am developing concerns if these games will be ideal for them. Since they tend to go along with whatever game I want to run a short game to feel everyone out may be in order.

That seems like the right approach. But that's another nice thing about PbtA/FitD--in four sessions you might get through the amount of narrative that might take 16 in another game. So even if you never try it again, it's potentially way more satisfying than sort of ramping up a bit with a traditional game and then dropping it before it gets good.

 

[innerdude]

And I guess this is why it doesn't work for me. It says that the focus is "see what your characters do" but in practice, because much of the time any action results in success with a complication, it seems more like the focus is "see what the world does to your character". When I play Fate, if I fail to interrogate a suspect, I can choose simply to fail and then try something else, or I might decide to use one of my character aspects, or I might succeed with a complication -- but the focus is on my character and what they do. When I play a PbtA game, that has not been the case. Very often my dice roll results not in a choice over what I do (accept failure, put in more effort, accept a consequence) but in the world taking over focus and doing something.

As an example, from AW p137 "Act Under Fire" the suggestion is that if you roll 7-9 on dragging a friend to cover, you offer the player a choice between one of the two of you getting shot. That sort of thing I found frustrating. There's no option to say "this is important to my character, I'm willing to burn something just to make it work", there's no option to say "I'd prefer to simply fail and try a different approach". There isn't even the suggestion that a player could choose a complication (although I'm guessing most GMs would allow that).

This is made more noticeable because when your character does something well, it's over fast -- you did it, you narrate it, next player. When you are in that intermediate state, there's a pause while the GM explains what's going on and your alternatives, and then you might have a question (like, how badly is my character going to be shot? Will my friend potentially die?) The focus has switched from your action to the complication. And because it takes so much more time, I found that when I played PbtA games, most of the time was not spent on seeing what my character did, but instead on understanding and reacting to what the world did when I didn't succeed completely.

I really, really want to like PbtA, and I've played maybe a dozen variants in home games and at cons. But it often feels like I'm along for the ride; there's no need to think or plan or worry about what my character would actually do, because a complication will come up and I'll just be reacting to GM intrusions.

So I'm sympathetic to this view, as it's not entirely unfounded on an observational level.

I think what's missing from the perspective, though, is that the perception of an "intrusion" is actually something of a shortcut for more "procedural" play.

If you think about it in D&D terms, when a character fails at an action -- particularly in combat -- there's an entire GM management sequence that follows.

• The GM looks at the NPCs on the table.
• Decides if one of them acts.
• Decides if that action is directed against a specific PC.
• Rolls a check.
• Applies damage / reduces PC resources / modifies fictional circumstances to apply penalties, etc.
• Rolls any ongoing effects.
• Rolls any random encounter variables.

etc., etc.

PbtA tries to dramatically shorten that feedback loop to get the spotlight back on the characters, so we can play to find out what happens. It's trying to quickly move forward to the next set of action frames / PC action declarations.

It's really just approaching the same GM processing loop from a different, streamlined standpoint.

 

[Campbell]

As a fairly introverted person I find the way the GM passes the spotlight onto individual characters in a PbtA or Forged in the Dark game gives me a lot more of a chance to have my moments than in games where "What do you do?" is addressed to the group rather than individual player characters. On the other hand, it does place pressure to like make decisions that not everyone wants.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

And I guess this is why it doesn't work for me. It says that the focus is "see what your characters do" but in practice, because much of the time any action results in success with a complication, it seems more like the focus is "see what the world does to your character". When I play Fate, if I fail to interrogate a suspect, I can choose simply to fail and then try something else, or I might decide to use one of my character aspects, or I might succeed with a complication -- but the focus is on my character and what they do. When I play a PbtA game, that has not been the case. Very often my dice roll results not in a choice over what I do (accept failure, put in more effort, accept a consequence) but in the world taking over focus and doing something.

This, exactly, is why while I have taken some lessons from PBTA style games, Quest for Chevar is definitely not such a game.

There is a success ladder, and most checks will result in some sort of mix of success and failure, but the focus is always on what the characters do by way of asking the player what, of a couple options, the character does. While those choices are siloed by the dice results, they are almost always "do you do this, this, or this", and there is very little "The price you pay is that your dad was getting groceries at the all-night market across the street, and as you land in the middle of the seemingly empty street, your opponent defeated, you look up and see your Dad staring at you, in shock."

Is that juicy and dramatic? sure. But what is more interesting to me is asking the player, "Do you push through to success and hurt yourself in process, push and endanger an ally or bystander and thus yourself, or push and complicate a relationship?"

I find that if you challenge players to fall into character and feel what the character feels and do what feels right for the character regardless of whether it's a good idea or optimal play, players will mostly rise to that challenge, and the gameplay that results is fantastic.

 

[innerdude]

I know very little, really next to nothing. I think I have a basic understanding of what a move is from reading posts here and that there is supposed to be minimal prep time for the games but beyond that I'm a blank slate. It also seems like the player does as much, if not more than, the GM to drive the story. I'm really looking for something new, it's one of the reasons I'm curious about the games, and I tend not to judge new concepts until I've tried them or seen them in action.

My only concern is the people I play with. All of my players are willing to try anything but I worry about a couple of them being able to drive their own stories, which seems like it might be a big deal with this style of gaming.

The real "Ah hah!", lightbulb moment for me with Ironsworn was the realization that I had to radically revise how much of each scene/scenario, in the moment of play, had to remain open-ended.

You have to stay in the moment, while allowing yourself the ability/freedom to revise certain details that you believed were previously established, but only make sense now based on what's in front of you.

It's a delicate balance. It's very much okay to assert that certain things exist in the fiction (people, places, objects). But you have to be careful about asserting what those things have done or will do outside of what's happening now. You can do it sometimes, but sometimes it's far better to let the unknowns remain unknown until the exact moment that it matters, right here and now.

It's a tricky line to walk sometimes, but when it finally clicked for me with Ironsworn, I was blown away, and it became tremendously exciting and compelling to play.

 

[dragoner]

Ok, the intro/extrovert angle is interesting and gives me more food for thought on this.

A couple of my players are more introverted, at least when gaming, so I am developing concerns if these games will be ideal for them. Since they tend to go along with whatever game I want to run a short game to feel everyone out may be in order.

It is not a bad system for what it does, great for what it does, esp one shots. I know I put the individual spotlight on players in regular games as well due to having players that don't usually take initiative. In fact I usually ask those players first, and then the most out spoken ones last, just to curate the game. It can also make the GM be tested on their improv skills also, so for me, it was not much of a problem, because I usually have copious amounts of notes. People will also play towards their moves, so that brings the focus more on point.