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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 9027088" data-attributes="member: 5142">I'm not sure if I would necessarily describe PbtA as being about characters drowning in trouble. The GM's agenda in AW is "to make the PCs' lives not boring." In DW the equivalent agenda is "to fill the PCs' lives with adventure." And in Masks, it's "to make the PCs' lives superheroic." In Avatar Legends, it's "to make the PCs' stories meaningful and important" and also make their lives exciting. This is really all to say that the PCs aren't necessarily meant to be drowning in trouble; however, their characters' lives should be filled with dramatic interest and excitement. I agree to an extent, though I do think that you are overselling the failure aspect harder than the reality of play IMHO, but I do think that this is partially the result of roleplaying expectations. There will always be a certain degree about setting expectations with the game's norms. Like I don't go into a game of CoC expecting that my character will retain their sanity. It's part of the conceit of the game that my character is likely to either suffer debilitating psychological trauma or die. But I also understand that this is not fun for some people. Likewise in some OSR games or things like DCC, my character may die a grim and grisly death early on, and I may be expected to roll up a new character. Likewise with Blades in the Dark, there is the instruction to drive your character like a stolen car in GTA. But that clearly won't be to everyone's liking. In the context of PbtA, much as I said above to Micah Sweet, I understand that the game is designed around characters whose lives are filled with dramatic interest and excitement. You are still pushing your characters to succeed and to avoid trouble when you can, but complications and dramatic consequences will arise. The game isn't pushing you to failure. It's pushing you to the game's sweet spot: the 7-9 resolution. It's a mixed success, which I know for some people still feels like failure, but I can't control what those people feel or think about that because the game says that it's a form of success and that their success should be acknowledged. Some people would view a full success where they had to pick 4 out 6 things from a Move to be a failure, if it meant that they couldn't get everything they wanted. PbtA games aren't interested in player skills nor does it want the GM to test their skills. These are the sort of games where people shouldn't be concerned with failure. If people are that concerned with failure, then maybe there are many more games that I would steer them away from before I would PbtA games, particularly games that pride themselves on skilled or tactical play like OSR games or Pathfinder 2. In that last one, those players can even get critical failures for their characters, which could potentially make those people feel critically incompetent. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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