Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9773431" data-attributes="member: 87792">One of the things people miss about Apocalypse World is just how good the pacing is. Vincent Baker's background is as a tabletop roleplayer - but Meguey Baker's is as a freeform roleplayer and has been (at least since Dogs in the Vineyard) his first and most important playtester when she's not his co-author. And most freeform roleplayers have a hard time adapting to tabletop (and indeed find tabletop crawls) because they need to go stop-start into the mechanics when they make skill rolls. Moves in Apocalypse World are written the way they are because they come in when freeform roleplayers would naturally hand over the narration, so they don't actually break the flow of freeform, just make the handover slightly clunkier but a lot more interesting with it.Apocalypse World is frequently played, for this reason, as freeform plus rules and dice (which, yes, is high improv). And it's this pacing element (which was inherited by many of the better PbtA games but not IME by e.g. Blades in the Dark) that means that Apocalypse World works better than even lighter trad games like Fudge or Risus for high improv games. The mechanics are well considered but not considered at the same angle you're looking at.And as an aside in actual practice a PbtA GM has, in my experience, significantly more actual practical power in the moment than a D&D GM does. Both a DM and an MC can basically do whatever they want offscreen and then bring a giant monster onto the screen. Or just say "rocks fall and everyone dies". But if they start doing things because they'd be funny or ironic every time the players turned around they'd soon lose their table although they can on every natural 1. Meanwhile the MC gets an opportunity to do this on every miss - every roll of six or less is a hard move. The normal D&D rule on a failed roll is "do diddly squat" which the DM follows; the PbtA rule is "escalate within reason however you think is appropriate for the situation and here is a list of appropriate suggestions, including splitting up the party, capturing a PC, taking away their stuff, or ironically reversing whatever they tried to do".</blockquote>

Verification