thoughts on Apocalypse World?

[Ovinomancer]

Because you misunderstand/mis-equate OSR to one specific subset


See, right there? That's the fundamental disconnect. You're equating OSR=Dungeon Crawl. And that's a false equivalence.

While many people play dungeons with old rulesets, that's a subset. The staunchest OSR advocates are using D&D in the same way Pemerton is using Classic Traveller, and in ways similar to how AW is intended to be used: anything not covered by the rules is "Say yes"... In OSR-D&D, that's mostly combat and exploration in rules, but many OSR GM's aren't doing dungeons at all, and may or may not even be using wandering monsters in the wilderness.

One of the fundamental problems with the OSR label is that it applies to a lot of different things that are only related in "Let's grab (Moldvay-Cook/Homes/Original) and modify it for ___"... It's not a unified whole. The largest trend is sandbox GMing. And AW as written is pretty close to sandbox.

It's also worth noting that Pemerton's approach to CT is a not uncommon Old School Renaissance Traveller GM approach. But it's not the approach of ANY Traveller GM I've played with (Invalidly small sample of about 4), and is a rare approach on COTI. In part because those special cases are inconsistent mechanically. Pemerton's quite right that Traveller implies only rolling for exceptional cases... but makes a bunch of procedural rolls, too. THinking about it, tho', those are pretty abnormal situations for most players. EG: Few traveller players will be cargo brokers nor pursers, for example, but those procedures are included to create troubles.

Um, I think you took two separate thoughts there, mashed them together, and unfairly tarred MBC. I don't get anything OSR from DW, and, separately, I don't see it strongly tilted towards dungeon crawling, either. Neither statement relies on the other, for me at least. I dunno, maybe @Manbearcat means it exactly as you read him, but that's not at all what I got from him.

 

[pemerton]

There's A LOT of white space. The publisher didn't do itself any favors with, in my opinion, lackluster art and layout. Blades in the Dark is so much more compelling as a physical artifact, once again in my opinion.

John Harper to the rescue? Agon 2nd ed is a thing of beauty. And not 410 pages - it can be read in an afternoon.

 

[darkbard]

John Harper to the rescue? Agon 2nd ed is a thing of beauty. And not 410 pages - it can be read in an afternoon.

I mean, the guy is a super talented graphic artist as well as a world-class game designer. No doubt, the aesthetic appeal of the artifact affects my initial reaction to a game, for better or worse. Luckily, both DW and BitD are amazing games, despite the discrepancy in physical presentation.

 

[Aldarc]

I do think that Dungeon World has an OSR vibe to it. I don't think that it plays like OSR, but it clearly was designed with OSR in mind. OSR was in full swing at the time of its making. Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel definitely dabbled in the OSR space to various degrees. I believe that Adam Koebel has even said that some design decisions (e.g., race restrictions in playbooks) was written to evoke these older, pre-WotC editions of D&D. So it may be more accurate, at least from my perspective, to say that DW was inspired by old school nostalgia.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

This one, it turns out...

People Are Good, Actually

In fact, a lot of the studies that people point to that say people are bad, actually, have debunked. Stanford Prison was rigged, the actors in the electric shock experiment were not actually very good, Robber's Cave was a do-over, and many of these older experiments just aren't showing the same results when replicated using modern practices, such as actually representative and diverse samples.

Turns out, Rousseau was right after all

I truly don't understand this urge to prove humanity's inherent goodness through isolated experiments using incredibly small groups of subjects, when history and current events offer exponentially more and better evidence of what people actually do when things get bad...or even when they simply pretend or imagine that things are getting bad. Those kinds of experiments don't account for different cultures, unexpected events that serve as flashpoints, or the general messiness of humans.

I'm not saying those experiments shouldn't be done, but I'm fully saying that they aren't done in order to provide cherry-picked evidence that, Um, Actually, things will be better than the naysayers think, or other expressions of optimism that sound (to me) suspiciously like contrarianism for the sake of being contrarian, in proud defiance of the historical record. Try telling people in countries around the world that, see, those warlords might be robbing you and committing genocide and other atrocities, with no one stopping or even slowing them down, but at some point everyone will realize that's just terribly irrational and people will band together and start doing the smart thing. Even better, once that veil of reason descends upon the land, there'll never be further spasms of irrational mayhem that decimate whole communities, because humans always act in their long-term best interests and never give into disordered and self-destructive urges.

I'm not arguing that when things fall apart everyone becomes either the marauder or the victim. I am arguing that carnage meted out by the idiotic and the powerful (usually the same thing) is not inherently and heroically resisted by the social contract, and doesn't care about anyone's sense of progress through community. When society falls apart the jerks sweep through like locusts. If someone was telling a story set 1000 years after an apocalypse, sure, there might be a new social order in place and communities that are thriving. But I think most post-apocalyptic stories are set when chaos still reigns, and when dismissing the notion of raiders and warlords with a knowing academic chuckle ignores all the times in our own history when selfish, brutish might has made right, and no one, no matter how smart or forward-looking, can stop it.

EDIT: I had meant to add that being tired of Road Warrior tropes is completely understandable. Gaming and geek culture in general is full of corny old tropes that many of us would rather abandon or reinvent. But I don't think it's necessary to comb through pop science writing to justify feeling like most post-apocalyptic settings are played out.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Apparently someone should write Kumbaya World!

 

[Fenris-77]

Apparently someone should write Kumbaya World!

Nope. There's no inherent conflict there! I'll show myself out...

 

[Gradine]

There is a difference between interpersonal and inter- and intratribal conflict and the King of Kentucky with his motorcycle cavalry and slaves and what have you. Humans are pro-social but not necessarily conflict averse.

You can tell interesting stories in post-apocalypses born out of realistic stress-born human social structures, and stories demand conflict, which can very easily come from without or within.

Also, consider that what I'm describing as a sort ideal pro-social structure is born from (and potentiality only possible through) an apocalypse that has entirely dismantled the systems and structures of power responsible for the vast majority of human suffering and environmental degradation in the world. Consider that this makes me more pessimistic than you might think.

 

[niklinna]

I truly don't understand this urge to prove humanity's inherent goodness through isolated experiments using incredibly small groups of subjects, when history and current events offer exponentially more and better evidence of what people actually do when things get bad...or even when they simply pretend or imagine that things are getting bad. Those kinds of experiments don't account for different cultures, unexpected events that serve as flashpoints, or the general messiness of humans.

It's an example of casting something in context- and time-free absolutes. People are more likely to behave certain ways under certain conditions, and more likely to behave in other ways under other conditions, and more likey to behave in yet other ways under certain changing conditions.

 

[Aldarc]

I do think that Dungeon World has an OSR vibe to it. I don't think that it plays like OSR, but it clearly was designed with OSR in mind. OSR was in full swing at the time of its making. Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel definitely dabbled in the OSR space to various degrees. I believe that Adam Koebel has even said that some design decisions (e.g., race restrictions in playbooks) was written to evoke these older, pre-WotC editions of D&D. So it may be more accurate, at least from my perspective, to say that DW was inspired by old school nostalgia.

Now that I have a bit more time, as a bit of an addendum to my post here as well as picking up something that @Malmuria was asking in regards to comparing 4e to DW:

While DW does have a bit of an "OSR vibe," there has also been something quite appealing about DW for 4e fans. I don't exactly think it's some grand coincidence that DW (to one extent or another) has been picked up by a fair number of 4e enthusiasts on the forums: e.g., @EzekielRaiden, @AbdulAlhazred, @Manbearcat, myself, and others. I also don't think that it's a coincidence that some of the creators and modders for Dungeon World - A Sundered World* by Awful Good Games and Stonetop** by Jeremy Strandberg - also came out of 4e.

* A Sundered World essentially imagines if the gods lost the Dawn War.
** The Marshall playbook is a reskinned Warlord. The deities of Stonetop hybridize real world gods with Dawn War gods: e.g., Tor (Thor + Kord), Helior (Helios + Pelor), Danu (Danu + Melora), and Aratis (Athena + Erathis).

I would personally love a fantasy PbtA or FitD game that leaned heavily into the themes of 4e, the Dawn War, and the World Axis mythos (with the serial numbers filed off, of course).

Is there a good YouTube PtbA channel I could watch to see it in action?

Reading back through this, I'm not sure if anyone answered you.

Your question is a bit like asking whether there was a good channel for seeing OSR in action. The Gauntlet talks a lot about PbtA, and they do podcasts for their plays, but I'm not sure if you can "see it in action" on their channel.

It would probably help if you pick a game that interests you. It will make it easier to narrow down the range of possible channels or streams. Avatar Legends (Avatar the Last Airbender), Masks (teen superhero), Stonetop (a Dungeon World hack for iron age "hearth fantasy" where the village gets a playbook), Monster of the Week (supernatural monster-hunting), Urban Shadows (PbtA's Vampire the Masquerade sorta) are all pretty good games to look for on YouTube for getting a grasp on PbtA.