What do you think about Powered by the Apocalypse games?

[payn]

One more thing, which is kind of the original elevator pitch for Blades in the Dark.

A lot of FitD games have something that's basically a character sheet (or playbook) for the group. In Blades it's the Crew Sheet, where you mark off the territories and gambling dens and police-on-the-payroll and other elements you add to your criminal empire, as well as a separate crew XP track and crew abilities. In Scum and Villainy you have a Ship Sheet, where you pick upgrades to your ship, and your crew, etc.

But in both of those games those sheets are also where you mark down your current Heat points, and your related Wanted level.

To me, Heat (or its equivalent) is what makes FitD sing.

Kill someone during your heist? More Heat than usual. Kill a cop? Loads of Heat. At war with another crew or faction? More Heat for every score/mission you do. Need an extra die for a crucial roll? The GM might offer a Devil's Bargain, a one-time bonus that comes with a consequence, such as extra Heat (you leave evidence behind, etc.). The more Heat, the higher your Wanted level, meaning more and better authorities coming after you, and possible consequences or story beats to try to reduce Wanted/Heat.

It might sound like a super specific mechanic, but think about how many RPGs feature PCs as criminals or rebels of some kind. And it's a single rule that ripples out to touch on so many other mechanical elements of the game, but it also helps establish the consequences of being a loose cannon or pack of murder hobos, and sets up even more play loops. It's the first system I've come across where being a criminal feels criminal, and where the idea of being at war with another group has a cost (in addition to getting more Heat during a war, you make less money and have fewer activities during downtime phases--being a tough guy better be worth it).

In other words, FitD's structure and mechanics might make it seem narrower or more specific than PbtA, but what it does, it does really well.

Sounds a lot like Sons of Anarchy the board game. (Not a bad thing in my opinion)

 

[Fenris-77]

Sounds a lot like Sons of Anarchy the board game. (Not a bad thing in my opinion)

I'm pretty sure there's more than one FitD hack that does exactly that. I'll just ignore your use of the phrase 'board game'.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I had no idea that Forged in the Dark is a take of PbtA. I own Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy as well and I'm pretty sure (and excited) that Blades will be the next thing I run, but that's still a way off.

That's great. Blades is an awesome game. The best thing I've found to do when GMing Pbta or FitD games is to think of my role as GM to be more like that of the player in a traditional RPG.

What I mean is, when I sit down to GM D&D, I have to have some amount of prep ready to go. This can range from a detailed map with keyed locations and detailed monster stats and traps, to some bullet points jotted down based on what happened last session. Whatever amount there is will vary from GM to GM per preference, but there will always be some amount of prep. You go into the game with that prep available to lean on.

With PbtA and FitD, that's less true. You aren't mean to lean on prep. The players are going to dictate a lot of things, so what you need to do is be ready to go off what they say. You can lean on the setting and you can lean on past events of play, but a lot of the time, you're going to be reacting to the players rather than them reacting to you.

It'll take some getting used to and you can ease into it. Very likely for your first session you'll have to take the reins a bit more to get the ball rolling. This may even be necessary for the first couple of sessions. In my first Blades campaign (which was the first for everyone in the group) I came up with the first two scores for the group. Then for the third and fourth, I offered them two options to choose from. Then after that, they started suggesting ideas of their own based on their needs ("we need a job that will get us some cash" or "we need a job that will be relatively calm and won't raise our heat" and so on). Then they started looking at the claim map (this is like a list of properties/locations that you can take from rival gangs, like a gambling hall or a vice den and so on).

Before long the game was pretty much running itself. The crew would come up with a score, and that would lead to new events and situations, and those would suggest new scores, and so on. It may take a while to get there, and that's fine! It's new, and you guys should acknowledge. If you think you messed up in some way, say so, and chat about it with the group.

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.

The thing is to just kind of rotate through everyone at the table and ask them what they do. You do this at each point of play... whether it's downtime or in the middle of a fight or whatever else may be going on. Don't prompt the group as often as you may in D&D, instead prompt each player.

Feel free to make suggestions. It may take players a little while to realize that they need to be more proactive, and some will be more comfortable with that than others. Again, it's new so nothing wrong with people taking some time to get used to it. Don't be hard on them and don't be hard on yourself.

I think that sometimes the perception for long time gamers is something like "I've been doing this so long, I should be great at it" and I get that. But when you play a game that functions differently than you're used to, it's going to take some time to adjust. Sometimes, it's harder for people who've already been playing RPGs for a long time. The player to take to Blades the quickest in my group was the one that was the newest to RPGs. I've heard many examples of this.

So again, be easy on yourself and your group. Incorporate all the mechanics a bit at a time. If you mess up a bit, don't sweat it. If you have a player who locks up, talk them through some options. You'll all get there.

 

[Campbell]

When it comes to smaller group sizes being preferrable in Powered by the Apocalypse games there are basically two important factors at work:

1. As games most PbtA games are much more focused on individual characters, their relationships, their personal goals, and their narrative journeys than as typical of more mainstream play. Running concurrent scenes is common. So are characters having different agendas. The more players you have the more highlighting individual player characters becomes difficult to manage at the table.

2. During the course of play as a GM you are spreading around the spotlight, deciding who the next person who gets to make a decision is. The general flow of play is like this:

1. GM makes a GM move
2. GM asks a specific player what their specific character does
3. Player answers and we resolve it mechanically (if a move applies).
4. Go to #1

Each interaction has a lot of meaning, changes the state of the fiction and places the spotlight/pressure directly on a single player character. With this process you have to be very mindful of who you are passing the baton to as a GM/MC. There's also a lot of back and forth between players and the GM compared to more mainstream games where outside of combat the overall group tends to be the contact point and players will often have more direct conversations among each other about what to do next.

That being said I have seen games with as much 7 players work pretty well if the GM is quick on their feet. It's not optimal, but in my experience, it is never really all that optimal.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

While these games are not remotely GM-less (they require extremely deft, conscientious GMing at every moment of play), the requirement of players is what is most unique.

Extremely deft and contentious. At every moment of play. That feels…exaggerated. I’m pretty sure the entry level learning curve isn’t quite that steep, for most of them. Am I misunderstanding what you’re trying to say, here?

 

[Manbearcat]

Extremely deft and contentious. At every moment of play. That feels…exaggerated. I’m pretty sure the entry level learning curve isn’t quite that steep, for most of them. Am I misunderstanding what you’re trying to say, here?

Possibly?

Im assuming your phone autocorrected “conscientious” to “contentious?”

My point was two-fold:

1) There is an idea that, contrasted with say high prep Trad GMing, these games are somehow less GMing intensive rather than a different kind of intensivty. That needs correction.

2) The deftness and conscientiousness comes in the following way. At every moment of play:

• Always hew to the games agenda.
• Always constrain your GMing by the principles of the game.
• Know the rules and follow them ruthlessly.
• Know the game’s premise (in PBtA games that includes the End of Session reward relationship) and stay on top of it with each moment of framing and consequence.
• Know the players’ playbook themes, the players’ interests as the relate to that, and PC dramatic needs. At every soft move and hard move you should be engaging with the first two and putting pressure on/providing opposition to the last one…all while you’re doing all of the stuff above…and also working hard to not recycle content/tropes.
• Lead an interesting conversation which involves asking provocative questions (which you need to have a corpus of developed thought to even know what those might be), listen and absorb the answers, and incorporate them deftly.
• Create decision-points that are stimulating from a gameplay perspective and provocative from a premise/dramatic need perspective.
• Continuously update in your mind the ever-accreting setting that is, in large part, being procedurally generated in-situ. You have to stay on top of this in subsequent framing and consequences.
• Play true to your NPC/hazard/obstacles instincts/tags/moves while you do all of the above.

So yeah. Extremely deft and conscientious GMing at each moment of play. Play won’t come close to falling apart (the systems are too nimble and sufficiently resilient to average GMing…I know this because even on my off-nights GMing, the games are still quite enjoyable), but it will elevate in proportion to increased deftness and conscientiousness in GMing. When I’m “my best self” the games are dramatically better than when I’m just “meh.”

EDIT - I hope that last bit heartens @Hex08 . Even if your first foray into running one of these games feels like a forgettable performance by your standards, these games have a “high floor.” It’s almost a sure thing your “meh” effort was at or above that floor and therefore enjoyable enough (assuming you’re running the games correctly - eg doing what I’ve outlined above).

 

[Blue]

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.

The one thing that leaps out to me is differing expectations from many RPGs about who's rolling the dice.

For example, in D&D if I'm sneaking and an enemy patrol notices me, I don't have the option to "not stealth and try another approach". I tried my approach and got caught. There's no problems if the DM's dice end up with soemthing that I don't like, that's expected.

PbtA has only has the player rolling. So that roll is like both a player roll and a DM's roll in D&D. In other words, the exact smae things you would accept from a DM's roll in D&D, you need to accept from the only roll in PbtA. But because of having learned it one way first, that the player rolls things under their control only, it requires unlearning to understand and accept that the player's roll means more than that in PbtA. Any the consequences are not limited to "bad player roll" results, like a fumble - they can be anything a DM could deliver.

If everything in the world was calm and idyllic, a character rolling would always be a bad idea. But it's not - PbtA gives tghe GM rules that put tension on the players. If you don't do something, things will suck. So do something, and maybe you can make it not suck.

 

[Blue]

One final note ---

As a rule, PbtA favors smaller groups than other systems. A GM with 2-3 players is very much supported, and possibly even preferred.

4 players is do-able; 5 players would stretch the ability to account for the various character agendas. I personally wouldn't want to GM a PbtA group with more than 4 players, and the sweet spot would definitely be 3.

I found this really true. The "action economy" idea from other games doesn't come into play the same way in PbtA so the automatic scaling of power with more players isn't as extreme. And PbtA can easily run with the party split, and a lot of times that makes the most narrative sense for a scene.

What that means is that you don't need more people for the team, and with fewer you can give all of the players more attention, allowing you to have some not in scene but not feeling left out because you are giving them so much spotlight in other scenes.

 

[Blue]

My first (and only) PbtA experience so far was running Masks for a bunch of players who had also never played any PbtA.

Before I go any further, all of the posters here gushing about how good Masks is? Amateurs! It's even better than that.

I had to unlearn a lot, and I'm still doing it. Now, even with traditional games I do a lot of improv - that's not the unlearning. This game might be easier for me to run if I hadn't so many hours of traditional games because some of the base foundation is different. "Play to find out" sounds like a snappy sound bite. It's not, it's a diamond core.

And the focus is something I had to unlearn. I've played a number of superhero systems over the years, with over a decade with actively playing HERO - the most numbers forward, can model everything, super hero simulation.

Masks doesn't really care about that more than the player and the GM have a reasonably aligned idea of what your power can do under normal situations. Masks when you "build your character", you aren't picking a class or something that is about primarily the features and abilities of your character. You're pretty much picking "what type of teen superteam angst am I most interested in investigating", with a side of who you are. Are you The Janus whom juggling your secret ID and "who am I really" at the forefront? The Doomed where doom literally is coming for you, and pushing your powers will hasten it just as mucha s give you more to do good with in the meantime. The Legacy, latest in a long line of heroes to live up to - or not? The Deviant, The Transformed, The Nova, and so on.

Remember when I said what you could do under normal circumstances? Want to beat up a goon using your powers? Know what you roll? Nothing - you succeed. You're a super, he's a goon.

On the other hand, does your Nova want to push her plasma control power to suck the fire out of the burning skyscraper - without killing all the people in it? Oh yeah, now it gets interesting.

And the same for the players in terms of unlearning. Relationships are a big deal, and in a teen super team there are times you'll be yelling, arguing, and storming out if it doesn't devolve to punches and lasers. You know what, that's okay. Death isn't on the table, the consequences of this add to the fun and the narrative unlike in a mission-success-forward game like D&D. Split the party and explore two different parts fo the villian's lair to try and find the hostages - it's okay. Basically, so many things that are verboten as "worst practices" in other RPGs are fine here.

And that's because the narrative you are developing together is the measure of player success instead of player success often feeling linked to character success like in more traditional games.

Masks gives fantastic GM rules - not advice, but rather goals, principles, and rules. I've read Apocalypse World and as the granddaddy that's it's legacy - it gives fantastic guidance to the GM how how to run a very particular game incredibly thematically.

And the games are more focused. I don't know if I could see a "big tent" PbtA - and if it loses that hard focus into creating playbooks it would lose a lot of it's appeal. For as much as I like Masks, I wouldn't use if for a general supers game, it's fine tuned around finding out about who you are as a teen super, when your friends, mentors, the public and even your enemies have their own views on who you should be.

 

[Retreater]

So I have a longtime player (we started gaming together in the late 1990s) who is a big fan of OSR systems. He has taken the lessons from our PbtA to change his DMing style in his home OSR game. He's gone from "the method of DMing from Gary Gygax's 1st edition AD&D DMG is the only proper way to run a game" to "I'm going to incorporate moves, complications, etc from Dungeon World into my OSR game."
I think that there is something to learn from every game system, and it's well worth trying out what you can to see what lessons you can apply.