Fixing Powered by the Apocalypse

[corneliusphi]

Does the den think that PbtA games are salvageable? I see an increasing number of games, like Monster of the Week, that look like games I really want to play, but I can't unsee the whole quantum bears aspect of the system. I ran an aborted campaign of Blades in the Dark which the players really liked, but inflicting that games version of quantum bears felt very arbitrary which sapped my enjoyment, even though from the players point of view everything seemed fine.

I have seen some games try to fix some of the worst aspects, for example Blades has tiers of enemies which affect how good your successes can be. Has anyone thought up house rules that could be used to fix these games?

I saw Beneath a Cursed Moon come through the den earlier, and read a bit of it. Do people think that approach could be imported into other PbtA games?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I think it would be less work to adapt the PbtA settings to actual rulesets than to fix PbtA.

[Foxwarrior]

Not salvageable, only embraceable. If you try to sideline the quantum bears aspect instead of getting rid of it entirely, you end up with things like Pathfinder 2's skill system, where you spend half an hour optimizing your craft check modifier and then the DM spends five seconds deciding what your chances should actually be and picks a DC to match. So if you have a quantum bears game, you should just accept that it's a quantum bears game: write mechanics that focus on making the die rolls result in interesting prompts for the DM to riff on, and get rid of the mechanics that are about optimizing power that will just be sabotaged by the DM's improvisation.

[JigokuBosatsu]

My brain keeps going to a place where I think that the Quantum Bears could be modified into something that makes sense, that's more explicit, that's consistent... but that's likely dumb. If it was that easy, the Den would have done it by now.

[Foxwarrior]

The point of Quantum Bears is to come up with a substitute for the longer and more involved process of actually simulating and thinking through what would happen in the described situation. If you truly wanted making sense and being consistent you'd use a "rules-heavy" game, that's what they're supposed to be for.

[obexpe]

Not salvageable, only embraceable. If you try to sideline the quantum bears aspect instead of getting rid of it entirely, you end up with things like Pathfinder 2's skill system, where you spend half an hour optimizing your craft check modifier and then the DM spends five seconds deciding what your chances should actually be and picks a DC to match. So if you have a quantum bears game, you should just accept that it's a quantum bears game: write mechanics that focus on making the die rolls result in interesting prompts for the DM to riff on, and get rid of the mechanics that are about optimizing power that will just be sabotaged by the DM's improvisation.

This is pretty much what most modern PBTA games claim to do, with the caveat that very few of them actually go that far. Dungeon and Apocalypse World are generally considered to be really poor games by the present-day PBTA community because of how heavily the preambles stress prompts over hard numbers, and then the playbooks themselves just...don't do that at all, and largely rely on raw stats. Moreso than many "crunch-based" games, actually.

I suspect that in the future, most PBTA games will get rid of attributes completely.

[OgreBattle]

Apocalypse seems to use dice in the way you use alcohol as an excuse to say things.

So you could use these dice instead:

[Suzerain]

Anything worth scavenging from PbtA games is already present in better games, and anything unique to PbtA is shit.

[RobbyPants]

Anything worth scavenging from PbtA games is already present in better games, and anything unique to PbtA is shit.

Which parts do you think are worth scavenging, and which games do it better?

[obexpe]

Which parts do you think are worth scavenging, and which games do it better?

Earlier PBTA games were basically to forum-based play-by-post games what modern synthpop and cloud rap is to the music of the 80s. In PBTA's desire to break the mold of RPGs, they ended up creating something that pretty much already existed in a much more effective and accessible form--but the important part, as far as marketing is concerned, was that now it was a "designed game", in the same sense that Burning Wheel was "designed game".

The 2d6 "success, success with complications, or failure" model basically took what play-by-post games were doing for years and translated it into a tabletop game. You'd say you were doing something and the mod would tell you that you either did the thing, you did the thing but also caused something else to happen, or you didn't do the thing because someone else interfered or the thing was not as it seemed. PBTA basically took this formula and gave it training wheels by adding a list of "moves"--with Apocalypse World and Dungeon World telling you that if you mentioned these dared mention a move by name you were playing wrong, and that if you weren't constantly rolling dice you were playing wrong. In other words, Dworld and Aworld are sets of training wheels (for improvised play) that create a more difficult learning experience than riding a bike normally.

Apocalypse World and Dungeon World are malformed, misguided, and honestly, quite cynical pieces of work that attempt to make improvised play "properly gameable" by adding in moves, classes and attributes. Most modern PBTA and PBTA-adjacent games have come to term with this and instead use the 2d6 mechanic to attempt something closer to proper improvised play (The Way Home, Monster of the Week, Rapscallion) or an actual narrativist game (Bluebeard's Bride).

Personally I think that TGD's cynical rhetoric for these types of games largely comes from only examining the first (and worst) of them, but honestly even at it's best PBTA is very, very difficult to recommend as something that is in any way superior to something like, Risus, which isn't even that great improv tool in the first place.

Thinking about it, it'd be kind of fun to review PBTA-style games on the den, but I don't think many here would be willing to read them with any sort of good faith.

[jt]

I'd be interested in reading good faith reviews of PBTA games, if you want to kick that off. It's a large branch of game design that I haven't really explored at all.

[DSMatticus]

Which PBTA games are supposed to be good? I'm reasonably confident that Apocalypse World and Dungeon World each see more play individually than the rest combined, so if we're tossing out those two we're left stranded deep in the fucking woods of game design. But why not, let's indulge the train of thought. What PBTA game would you say does its job well?

[MGuy]

Probably wouldn't be read in good faith by people who've already made their mind up about it but seriously no one cares if you post your thoughts. I read Blades in the Dark without a second thought about what had been said here and found some of the tid bits interesting. Like how operating in different parts of the setting nets you some different risks and rewards.

[obexpe]

Which PBTA games are supposed to be good? I'm reasonably confident that Apocalypse World and Dungeon World each see more play individually than the rest combined, so if we're tossing out those two we're left stranded deep in the fucking woods of game design. But why not, let's indulge the train of thought. What PBTA game would you say does its job well?

For my money, the best PBTA games are the ones that aren't formally PBTA games at all (Blades in the Dark, Spire, City of Mist) because they either abandon most of the bad tenants of PBTA games or merely pay them lipservice. The best PBTA game that formally declares itself to be a PBTA game is probably Undying, because it comes with actual content in it's rulebook including NPC creation guidelines and even an example of play (which is, for some reason, practically unheard of in this sphere of RPG design). It does this while getting rid of superfluous elements for an improv game like dice and attributes. I have heard good things about Monster of the Week from people who's opinions I respect, but have not played it.

I specifically mentioned the play-by-post games and Risus as a way of saying that the general style of play of the PBTA games is something that can be carried over without most of the stupid elements of Apocalypse World/Dungeon World like modifier-driven movesets and nonsensical DM guidelines. Personally, I don't think that an idea being done before matters much in terms of RPG design and I'd consider mining these games for "innovations" to be a pretty narrow way of exploring them. Even if the good aspects of certain PBTA games have been done before, they are still good things, and in this climate basically any good mechanic that isn't part of D&D's DNA is going to seem novel to most players/designers.

[Omegonthesane]

MITW was good for 5 sessions for me IRL during one semester of uni, and it's what The Adventure Zone is currently playing so it might gain some cultural penetration from that.

I played Monster Hearts once in 2015 and felt uncomfortable due to the game's themes, and while the context of "a pick up game at a queer friendly convention" made this somewhat easier to make into a laughing matter, it's probably best not to bother with unless everyone is even more on the same page than the amount people already have to be on the same page. And all that says nothing about how it manages its mechanics, all I remember was it having "bonds" and these letting you influence other players if you got enough of them.

I read through bits of Blades in the Dark on recommendation from the Cultist Simulator discord, and completely flipped my lid at the example given in this bit:
When they suffer a consequence that they don’t want to accept, they can take stress instead.
...
The GM rules that the harm is reduced by the resistance roll, but not avoided entirely. [Proceeds to give mechanics to that effect]
Literally in the very description of their "spend a limited use plot token to remove a consequence" they back away from getting what you paid for. Gah.

[MGuy]

Mine the interesting parts. Leave the rest. BitD has some ideas I hadn't thought of for a heist game. Like a downtime stress relieving mechanic I swear was stripped right out of Darkest Dungeon. It's not something I intend on running wholesale

[Dogbert]

Does the den think that PbtA games are salvageable?

Let's see, you pick misery tourism emulator, and then you want to remove the misery tourism...

What's wrong with this picture?

[Blade]

What I like to do is to give the agency back to the players. Whenever there's a "success at cost" you give the option to the player to either:
- Stop whatever he wanted to do
- Choose a way to lower his aim
- Possibly pay a cost (like stress points or something similar)

For example, the sneaking example of AW is something like:
"You try to get through the camp undetected but you are detected by a kid that you know have to kill"

I'd rather have:

"You try to sneak through the camp undetected, but there are many people there and you realize that you probably won't be able to pull that off."
"Ok, I'll find another way / I don't mind if I have to kill a few people to get in / I'll put something on fire, it'll put people in alert but it'll let me get in / If I remove my armor, I'll be less likely to draw attention / There can be bears around"

It might border on the "Mother may I" since there's no other mechanics than GM approval to decide if the cost the PC offers is acceptable, but I already like this better than having GM-enforced bears.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I suppose one of the things that could fix the "success with a cost" nonsense is what Blade says- some preestablished "approaches" that are story focused, but a more old school method would be to have tables for those instances. So the stealth failure table would have 1. Sentry confrontation 2. Equipment loss 3. General alarm 4. Trapped in area 5. MC's choice (annoying) 6 MC's choice (nasty).

Either way I think the advantage would be that players and MCs both have a reasonable expectation of what success with cost (succest? ew.) could entail. If the MC is coming up with specific scenarios they could populate the table with specific examples. "Your contact has told you that the fortress has a ton of guard dogs, and towers with spotlights, but individual guards are lazy and able to be bribed. But there are tales of infiltrators dying in strange ways that aren't like any normal boobytraps."

[Username17]

What I like to do is to give the agency back to the players. Whenever there's a "success at cost" you give the option to the player to either:
- Stop whatever he wanted to do
- Choose a way to lower his aim
- Possibly pay a cost (like stress points or something similar)


It might border on the "Mother may I" since there's no other mechanics than GM approval to decide if the cost the PC offers is acceptable, but I already like this better than having GM-enforced bears.

I also like this about infinity times better. And I think a big part of the "mother may I" can be alleviated by giving the players some kind of fate points or something that could be spent if you didn't want to go with any of the "task relevant" consequences the MC was willing to go with.

I mean, obviously there's a large space for potential favoritism, in that the MC's idea of what a task relevant reduction in effect for one character might be more bearable than for another. But I think between the fact that the player has agency over whether to accept the deal and the fact that the player can always choose to buy a success at a cost up to a regular success if the choices don't appeal would go a long way towards making the other players have relevant contributions and the game being a real game.

-Username17