PbtA Games: Sell One Well +

[John R Davis]

Caveat. I struggle with some PBTA and I really don't like AW, BUT.

(+) I have played Cartel a couple of times. You play Mexican drug lords. For a one off Con game session it provides quite an intense and tense ride, trying to mix the unpleasant nature of your character with family ties. Plus as you are doing terrible mexican accents while playing you can feel good someone in Mexico is doing an equally terrible English accent in a Victorian themed game, so all is balanced.

 

[overgeeked]

Let's dive into Masks: A New Generation. Like most PbtA games, it is a very focused game that seeks to use mechanics to tell a singular style of story. The teenage coming-of-age tale...all the angst, loneliness, anger at all the adults telling you what to do, who you should be, what you should do...only with superpowers. Think the early days of X-Men, Spider-Man, New Mutants, New Warriors, Generation X, Gen 13, X-23, Invincible, Logan, Teen Titans, Runaways, Young Avengers, Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Smallville, on and on and on.

The playbooks in Masks are not focused on the powers, they're focused on the drama. Because it's PbtA. That's what they do. They're all fantastic, but...to me...the standout playbook is the Janus, named after the two-faced Roman god of gates, transitions, and duality. It's a perfect name because the Janus playbook focuses its story on juggling the duality of the character's normal life as a teenager and their life as a masked superhero. Think the early days of Peter Parker and Spider-Man.

All the playbooks have a hook and mechanics that drive their story. You don't have to squint to see the inspiration of the playbooks. They wear their inspiration on their sleeves. The powerless but overly enthusiastic one. The alien fish out of water with strange powers who's just trying to fit in. The second- or third-generation superhero who's trying to avoid being crushed by legacy. The one with vastly more power than control trying desperately to not destroy everything and everyone around them.

The game centers relationships in a big way. Both between the teenage PCs and the adults in their lives. Characters who have influence over you can tell you who you are and what you should do...and this changes your stats to reflect their point of view. If someone with influence over you tells you how dangerous you and your powers are...you become more dangerous.

This shifting of your stats is part of the play loop. A teacher at school tells you you're just an ordinary kid...and you become a little more ordinary. This makes you angry so you sneak out at night to crack some skulls, but you over do it and your cop friend calls you out for the over-the-top violence (and you become a little more dangerous). When you get back home you find your sickly aunt is waiting up and worried sick. She reminds you of your obligations this weekend and you have to ease her mind and get her to go to bed. When she's finally off your back you notice the stack of unpaid bills on the kitchen table and vow to help her with your next check, instead of blowing it on a new suit or gadget. When you finally get to bed, you notice your phone blew up while you were out playing superhero. Your boss texted and called all night. You missed work again and you're fired.

And every step of that is mechanically supported and reinforced. That paragraph above is the Janus in play. There are ten playbooks in the core book. And ten more scattered across three supplements. Each with a unique story to tell with mechanical reinforcement, supporting and pushing that story.

Part of advancement is to figure out who your character wants to be and, over time, solidifying your stats one-by-one. So that adults and others cannot tell you who you are anymore. You've figured that part of yourself out. When you've solidified all your stats, when you've figured out who you really are going to be as an adult...you retire your character. They level out of playing the game by figuring out who they are.

And that's not even touching on the cool superpowers and beating the snot out of supervillains.

Honestly, anyone who even kinda likes teenage superhero comics and RPGs should at the very least have a serious look at this book. It's just that good.

 

[Aldarc]

Stonetop is an in-development PbtA game that started as a Dungeon World hack, though it was the author's 4e D&D campaign before that. In the words of the author:

Stonetop is a “hearth fantasy” tabletop RPG set in an Iron Age that never was. The players portray the heroes of an isolated village near the edge of the known world. Their adventures focus on dealing with threats to the village and seizing opportunities. These aren’t rootless mercenaries seeking fortune and glory; they’re exceptional people, taking risks on behalf of their friends, family, and neighbors.

Stonetop is a more focused PbtA game. It is a fantasy adventure game centered around a particular rural, village community set in a sparsely-populated, mystical, fantasy world inspired by iron age Europe. (See the proto-Celts of Hallstatt Culture.)

The PCs in Stonetop are not vagrant murderhobos. They are adventures rooted in the people, place, and needs of their village of Stonetop. This modest village is their home, and their fellow villagers are their people, in one way or another. This is what makes Stonetop a "hearth fantasy" game. Play revolves around their home and community. The stakes of Stonetop's fantasy adventure are grounded in the needs in the community. The village's problems with a summer draught won't be solved by the PCs hacking and slashing their way across the Multiverse in an ultimate throwdown of violence with Vecna or Orcus. The villagers need water for their parched crops and throats.

The small village of Stonetop and its people can easily fall victims to the natural and supernatural forces that exist around their Old Wall. It's up to the PCs to aid the village however they can. The play loop revolves around addressing threats and seizing opporunities to ensure the continued livelihood of the village of Stonetop: e.g., natural disasters, fae, spirits, dangerous beasts, bandits, neighboring peoples, etc. The loss of a single villager to the malicious crinwin or the drying of the village's chief water supply by the peeved spirits are dangerous threats that can be keenly felt in the community. The PCs may even need to quest to attract a new blacksmith after the death of their previous one, who died of a fever during a nasty winter.

The village of Stonetop gets its own playbook, and the fortunes of the village can change with the changing of seasons and through the PCs's actions and choices. PCs may come or go across the seasons, years, or even multiple generations of play. The PCs can help upgrade the village in a number of ways. However, upgrading the village requires time, effort, and resources, which they may have in short supply. Will they need to make alliances with the neighboring village of Gordin's Delve? Will they need trade goods from Marshedge? Is there even some artifact amidst the ruins of the ancient Green Lords in the Great Wood that can help them?

The fantasy archetypes of the playbooks should feel vaguely familiar for people who have played D&D, especially in light of the game's origins. However, the playbooks represent more appropriate character options for iron age play: i.e., the combative Heavy, the animistic Blessed, the divine-invoking Lightbringer, the lawbringing Judge, the mischevious Fox, the militia-leading Marshal, the resourceful Ranger, the aspiring Would-Be-Hero, and the Seeker, who delves in arcane lore and dangerous magical artifacts. There is almost a sense that these are what some D&D archetypes may have looked like in a much earlier age. You can even see the traces of the 4e Dawn War pantheon and the real world deities who inspired them: i.e., Tor (Thor/Kord), Aratis (Athena/Erathis), Helior (Helios/Pelor), Danu (Danu/Melora). Playbooks tie the characters to the setting and its people, but also help to define and create the setting elements. The Lighbringer, for example, gets to decide what the worship of Helior looks like in Stonetop.

For Stonetop, I can't easily point to inspirational media like Young Justice for Masks or Buffy & Supernatural for Monster of the Week or Murder She Wrote & Golden Girls meets Cthulhu for Brindlewood Bay. There are also not many other tabletop games that I can think of that utilize this historical backdrop either. Maybe either The Earthsea Cycle or RuneQuest are the closest in spirit, though I would say that RuneQuest hews closer to an epic, high magic bronze age setting.

When you take all that into consideration plus its anti-murderhobo fantasy adventure tone, IMHO, Stonetop represents a pretty unique game in the TTRPG landscape.

 

[pemerton]

I've enjoyed playing Classic Traveller over the past few years, in a style inspired by Apocalypse World. (Each of the subsystems is, in effect, an AW -style move.)

 

[Aldarc]

I've enjoyed playing Classic Traveller over the past few years, in a style inspired by Apocalypse World. (Each of the subsystems is, in effect, an AW -style move.)

You really go all out selling this.

 

[pemerton]

You really go all out selling this.

I try! Classic Traveller is an awesome game!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Masks: A New Generation is, and I feel comfortable saying that this is with no hyperbole, the absolute best designed TTRPG when it comes to translating design intent to design execution. It's not the most open-ended PbtA genre in the world (teen/YA superheroes), but it's not the narrowest, and way it marries coming-of-age narratives and self-identification vs other people's expectations in a mechanically satisfying way is damn near miraculous.

Monster of the Week is a solid B+ game that can work well telling a pretty broad range of stories, but for the types of stories it's designed to tell, Masks is absolutely an A+

Well I dunno you sold me on Masks: A New Generation, which I'd previously been dismissing as "Yet Another Superhero RPG".

Personally I really loved Dungeon World, as a truly fully functional and actually-fun alternative to D&D, which you can trivially run AD&D 2E and earlier adventures with. It's hard to overstate just how joyous it was for our group, after being burdened by heavy D&D rules-sets for decades, to go to a form where the fiction really leads, and yet which functions perfectly as a version of D&D, and in a D&D-style setting. It also bizarrely made my group less silly and less farcical than any edition of D&D has been, and suddenly people were roleplaying more and more intently, because it's much more tied to the world it depicts, there's none of the disconnect D&D can sometimes have due to nigh-nonsensical dice results and the like. Plus it's really simple and easy-to-learn.

 

[Reynard]

Well I dunno you sold me on Masks: A New Generation, which I'd previously been dismissing as "Yet Another Superhero RPG".

Personally I really loved Dungeon World, as a truly fully functional and actually-fun alternative to D&D, which you can trivially run AD&D 2E and earlier adventures with. It's hard to overstate just how joyous it was for our group, after being burdened by heavy D&D rules-sets for decades, to go to a form where the fiction really leads, and yet which functions perfectly as a version of D&D, and in a D&D-style setting. It also bizarrely made my group less silly and less farcical than any edition of D&D has been, and suddenly people were roleplaying more and more intently, because it's much more tied to the world it depicts, there's none of the disconnect D&D can sometimes have due to nigh-nonsensical dice results and the like. Plus it's really simple and easy-to-learn.

It seems that DW is somewhat controversial in PbtA circles. Is there a reason for that of importance to someone looking to try it?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It seems that DW is somewhat controversial in PbtA circles. Is there a reason for that of importance to someone looking to try it?

It's wildly controversial for four reasons.

1) It's trying to be basically "compatible" with material from another game system, so makes some very intentional and considered design choices to do so, which offend some PtbA purists (HP, for example). It also encourages people to use existing D&D materials, which again, massively offends certain purists (including DW purists), who feel the entire world/setting should flow from the players and the system - which DW is quite capable of doing, but doesn't require in the same way some PtbA games do.

2) One of the systems it introduces is basically just a worse version of an extant PbtA system - Fronts are basically just PtbA clocks done in a messed-up way, and I don't think they're very helpful or worth the space the rulebook spends on them. Personally I'd suggest people playing DW just totally ignore Fronts.

3) I'm not sure how to put this perfectly kindly but it upsets the most gentle lambs of the world, a lot of whom seem to play certain other PtbA games, because it intentionally emulates D&D, which they see as inherently pro-colonizer, pro-violence (perhaps even pro-genocide), pro-raiding and so on. I'm not kidding nor overstating here, to be clear. And they are, on a level, correct. D&D has always been quite about those things - "Kill monsters and take their stuff" - and you can see this reflected in a lot of Gygax's own comments (including his "nits make lice" approving reference, or his description in the '00s of how a Paladin should operate). But for the vast majority of D&D players, that's either not an issue, or just not how they see it, which is imho also totally valid and possibly more reasonable.

I can even link (if I look hard enough) a thread from the non-controversial co-designer where he talks about what he'd change for a DW 2nd edition, and it's like, basically everything that makes it D&D-like and focuses on violent conflict.

4) One of the two co-designers got in a lot of controversy for a genuinely creepy incident from his home game and sort of did a Mike Mearls and vanished from public. Like Mearls being an eejit and friends with people who aren't great, I don't think this has any real bearing on the game but it certainly influences some attitudes about it, esp. from the sort of people who also think maybe "Killing monsters and taking their stuff" isn't cool.

TLDR - Only reason 1 really matters if you care about PtbA, and I don't think it matters a whole lot - indeed if anything I think it DW makes a more gentle introduction to PtbA. You're jumping a 5' gap instead of a 10' one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I really like Dungeon World. Some lately have voiced the opinion that it's not one of the best PbtAs but I disagree! This probably the most open-ended of all these games. You play a fantastic adventurer, progress in power from slogging the Earth to challenging mighty dragons and such. One of the greatest appeals here is in terms of finally realizing the fun of this D&D-like milieu. You dreamed of being a mighty hero in B/X, now it can come true! And you can do it as the Thief, not just as the wizard.

Yes, 4e has a distinct 'story game' flavor of its own but DW has ToTM too! I think it's agenda and standard moves are quite well calibrated to give you a wild adventure-filled ride. As with 4e, always go for it, the GM should always pick the crazy option. You won't regret it!