Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8410339" data-attributes="member: 7028554">I agree with you here in the sense that AW very clearly lays out how to play AW, which, as you mentioned in a later post in this thread, is often pretty rare. So I should be more specific--the flourishes in the writing are, to me, just terrible and cringe inducing and even corny. If the goal is to get across the brutal, abrasive tone of the setting, the writing is doing too much telling and not enough showing. I get why that's happening, since it can't rely on setting details the way other games might. Pulling off that sort of tone carries a very high degree of difficulty, and, for me, in that respect, AW falls on its face. I hate reading it. Just hate to do it.Here I don't agree at all. I think PbtA is a seismic shift. The GM not rolling, the complete pivot away from simulating the world that the PCs inhabit and instead making everything a reflection of their actions, and the way it makes success with consequence/cost the default roll result...that stuff is remarkably hard for trad players to wrap their heads around, requiring a major cognitive reboot for many folks. And it speeds and recenters play in huge ways, codifying a low- or no-prep approach that other games just kinda mention as an option, but then punish in practice.However, I've read and loved your posts on this forum and you're a damn TTRPG scholar--including when it comes to PbtA--so I suspect you have some great arguments to support your position. Not trolling here at all when I ask if you can elaborate a little. For example, I've played Classic Traveler a bunch and I don't get the connection you're making. Do you mean that old-school Traveler didn't have a ton of skills, so a lot of actions were purely within the fiction?But also, I think the fact that combat in AW doesn't shift into that traditional wargame mode is exactly why it's so novel. It's not a separate set of subsystems (or, as in a lot of games, the core system, with all non-combat as subsystems), which ditches that sense that the stuff before and after combat is sort of suspense/filler/etc., because it's initiative and damage and all those fiddly rules and numbers that settle the narrative questions. Flattening combat and non-combat is where PbtA is still at its greatest and most divisive, I think, and setting aside diceless stuff like Amber, I don't recall anyone doing that before AW in a useful or influential way.</blockquote>

Verification