A couple of weeks ago I wrote a 4,500-word email on this topic. That was obviously far too long. So long indeed that not even I would read it. I have been trying to boil it down to an aphorism in one sentence, but that is difficult. So far I have
A set of RPG “rules” should help the GM and character-players to play make-believe, not substitute for or distract from playing make-believe.
When I ask the rules a question, it is because I don’t know, can’t decide, or don’t want to decide what ought to happen. Determining that I have to decide what happens anyway is fatuous: if I could and would I wouldn’t need rules.
Ideally I’d like an RPG to have rules support for those areas where simply talking isn’t always enough: I can roleplay haggling with a trader, interrogating a witness, persuading a henchman to change sides… Proving that I can knock out the guard with a solid right hook is less socially acceptable.
Too many games such as Apocalypse World, DramaSystem and Gumshoe take the roleplaying part of roleplaying games away from the players, which is hugely frustrating and always leaves me wondering why we’re bothering to play at all. For my tastes the rules should be there to assist the referee in providing a believable, consistent ruling when purely roleplaying isn’t quite enough, not as a straitjacket and source of arguments.
Likewise Gumshoe, where the entire system was built to address the issue of players missing a vital clue and thus bringing the adventure to a screeching halt. That’s bad scenario design, not a mechanical or roleplaying issue, and all you need to do is to offer positive examples in published scenarios and a line or two about it in the rulebook section on writing your own. It’s not something you do more than once.
Sort of. I own and have read a whole bunch of PbtA books. Night Witches was the first I bought. I’ll admit to being very confused about how the hell they were supposed to run. Not least for that first one, it was because they keep banging on about stuff that was on the character sheet and there were no character sheets in the book! Not even a fekking example one. They assumed you knew you had to find them on the internet. I suspect they also assumed you knew how PbtA works, because my overall impression was: I like this setting but I want to play some PbtA to find out how the hell it works before I even think of running this because I don’t get it.
Reading a few more PbtA books did not change that view. The books said “PbtA is a foreign country: they do things differently there” but didn’t quite explain how in a way I could grok. I did, however, like the idea that the GM could do minimal prep on a game, even if I didn’t grok how/why.
Sooooo… I played a game of Masks and of Blades in the Dark (son of PbtA) at an in-person con back in the Before Times. Both with the same GM, who was awesome. Blades I enjoyed. Masks less so, possibly because it was superhero genre and suffered from what I dislike about superhero games, particularly one-shots: the PCs bimble about achieving nothing concrete until the big boss fight at the end. But there was nothing weird in the mechanics.
I tried running Hack the Planet (FitD cyberpunk version of Blades), first as a one-shot run several times for different groups, then as a campaign for my regular Tuesday group.
This taught me several things:
There are folk with play styles which just does not mesh with the ‘PCs do NOT plan in detail’ ethos of Blades. They want to plan. They want to plan about their planning! They want to plan with info gather, not use it after they’ve picked an approach/plan (assault, sneaky, social, etc)! They want concrete answers to questions, when in reality the answer is “The GM doesn’t know yet, because this is a no prep game and they’ll decide AFTER you’ve told them what your fekking plan is!”
Even for the regular group, who 2 of the 3 players were not into planning, I had to come up in advance with 6 separate approaches to each mission, because I had no idea what they were going to pick. This is NOT less prep! Apparently my GM skills of making-it-up-on-the-fly relies on me knowing what the bad guys are up to and then figuring out how they will react, not inventing it out of thin air with a micro-second’s notice.
The above was what killed the Hack the Planet campaign. The mechanics were driving the players away from the RP sections of gaming, particularly joint RP. On the missions it is all bang, bang, bang - charging thru them at breakneck speed, with the GM desperately trying to think of sane/interesting complications to introduce (bloody hell but that’s exhausting when things are fast paced - that includes Cortex and Dr Who). You can describe how you do an awesome double back flip before you shoot the leader of the biker gang, but the RP in the missions seemed… cramped?
In downtime, the PCs all split up and go off to have lonely fun. So there was a bit of RP, but it got a bit repetitive because of the game mechanics. Like the PC who went to the illegal restaurant to eat endangered species. There is only so many times you can RP a waiter saying “Would sir like the okapi or the wombat today?”
What was missing was all the group RP where all 3 characters are haggling with the waiter or trying to avoid their landlord, or planning a huge birthday party for their favourite NPC. That stuff was only happening in “free play”, which felt rather squeezed out. Because if the friends of the biker you killed crash the party with sledgehammers, you are out of free play and into game mechanics.
Therefore I decided maybe it was Blades/FitD, not PbtA which we weren’t getting, so I needed to play some more PbtA. I signed up to go to online Relevation 2021. I played:
CBR+PNK another cyberpunk FitD game.
Cybertruckers (PbtA in spaaaaace)
Apocalypse World Burned Over - a wild west hack of this
Enjoyed all the games. Was startled that the two PbtA games just felt like regular games mechanic-wise. We could have been playing any system for most of it, with us just doing the equivalent of a persuasion roll, sneak roll, pick pockets roll, etc.
However, especially in the wild west game (we were more constrained in the Cybertruckers game) the PCs all have connections with different NPCs, so again we scattered to the 4 winds and were all off doing our own thing for a large chunk of the game. Plenty of RP, but I didn’t feel I got to know the other characters the way you usually do in a con game.
I have Last Fleet and Bite Marks (both evolved from PbtA) and desperately want to play those, but no-one I know owns them. I might try running Last Fleet for the Tuesday group, but it may founder like Hack the Planet did if it encourages Lonely Fun rather than group RP.
On your first point, it largely stems from how the game designer constrains the design space for the GMs and players.
Take PF1e, it’s goal is to be a sandbox for any type of high fantasy adventure you want to play. However to do that it require a large bulk of rules that enable you to know how to handle any situation that comes up. Contrast this with Masks, where the goal is an identity-based game where self-discovery is the goal for the characters.
You can play that style of game with a bigger, more traditional ruleset but in my experience, because of the greater complexity of the rules, the more players & GMs get pushed towards a standardised solution to a problem. The character sheet becomes a list of buttons they can press to handle a situation. Locked door well it is going to be the disable device skill or a strength check. By trying to do everything, which is great for rules portability it falls down for fitting the specific goal of the campaign.
PBTA works well adjusts how you view the mechanics. By constraining you to focus on a specific character arc, it is a lot easier for you to get deeper as there is less to distract you. Paradoxically you manage to feel freer because you are constrained. While you can ultimately do that in any system but I’ve found it is much easier to get into the right mindset with PBTA/FitD games.
So an example from my current Masks game, I’m playing a scion, the son of a supervillain who is trying to be a superhero despite expectations all around him. Because his character arc is based on proving everyone wrong, having moves that allow him to tap into his family resources allows the fiction to remain interesting as sometimes he is pretending to be a bad guy to get information to help hero side while also causing conflict with older superheroes which disagree with that behaviour.
For the second point, why does the GM need to roll? Deciding to use a GM move is nothing more than having mechanics for deciding that there is a goblin raid in the middle of the night? Or in something like Dread, where you decide that the threat is doing something. The GM typically holds ultimate narrative control, so adding probability to what they are doing isn’t really necessary.
On the last point, I was referring to DrBob’s point 7. Some RPGs with specific sub-systems are highly prescriptive with what actions people can take, which was what I was trying to convey. Arguably that is more an issue with that specific system rather than a benefit of ptba.
Having not played Apocalypse world, could you expand a bit more about how it takes the RP part away from the players? For both Offworlders and Masks, that’s been the opposite in my experience so I am really curious. Is it a matter of there not being a move which had the right trigger or something else?
Yeah this is definitely a flaw of some pbta rulebooks. Should definitely make it clearer where to find the playbook pdf. Took me a while to navigate Hunters Entertainment’s website to get the Teens in Space sheet (technically not PBTA but in a similar vein)
Some of the later Masks supplements did a better job of having the playbooks in the main book as well as having a separate PDF.
The whole prep thing is a weird one. It’s not so much minimal prep but that, all drama and conflict is player-driven. The playbooks they choose and people with influence over them define the kinds of stories being told. It is very difficult to run a big overarching campaign like a AP. So yeah I do see where you’re coming from. I think the Masks corebook is well and truly the best-written thing on pbta.
What about a situation where a player wants to play a character that has soft skills far more advanced then the player themselves? That’s where the soft-skill rules grit helps out players and refs alike; I know from personal experience that I’ve played characters and ran NPCs that were far more charming than myself – it was nice to be able to lean on some mechanisms in the system to accomplish what I, as a person, cannot.
I am sensitive to the difference between the social skills of the player and the character. I cannot fight, but the rules let me play someone who can fight. I can’t haggle, but if I want to play someone who can, I need the game mechanics to fall back on. Similarly, if “haggle” is a defined skill within the game, a player should not get it for free just because they possess it themselves.
I feel this can be fairly easily solved by expressing what you want your character to get across, roleplaying as much as you can, but pointing out ‘obviously my character has Charisma 18’ or ‘I know I’m laughing now but my character has ‘no sense of humour’’ and so on. The GM can adjust the NPCs reaction appropriately; I’ve never the felt need to use any other mechanics. Your GM should no more ignore your superhuman sex-appeal than they should ignore your super-speed. Perhaps I’ve been lucky but this has always worked for me.
I do recall in my distant youth rules such as ‘if you say it, your character said it/ did it/ inserted themselves into it’ but I don’t play with such groups any more.
I think the core of this is that you as a player decide on the angle or the direction your character is taking. The rules/mechanics then allow you to determine exactly what happens.
I’m conscious of how easily this can spiral and veer away from the thread topic, but here goes…
Personally—and this is very much my own personal experience and opinion, not a reflection on anyone else’s preferred style of play—I found that the existence of specified moves and actions was itself the problem, often causing players to struggle to fit what was on the character sheet to what was happening in the game. Something similar often happens in games like fifth edition D&D too, where some players find themselves trawling through all of the spells and feats to see what they can do, rather than considering the situation and how their character might approach it.
A character in an RPG should surely be more than just the character sheet; it’s what makes the games so compelling and so very different to most other types of game. Having a list of what you can do, then trying to fit what you want to do to that list, is a limitation and obstacle to engaging with the world and the characters. In a solo game those limitations are fine, but when you’re able to deal with other players and a referee I’d rather play a game that allows trust and imagination.
I’ve tried PbtA games but they don’t seem to be a good match for the way I do things.
My role-playing history starts from “you can do more than just what the game allows” (which is why I’ve never had much interest in computerised or boardgamed dungeon-bashes), and I suspect Jon’s point is true for me as well: it’s very core to me to be able to say “but what if I try [this unlikely thing which the game designer didn’t think of]?” even if I don’t often actually do it. PbtA has felt as if I have a choice between button A and button B, or getting the GM to improvise something.
While some of the PbtA games have quite flexible-seeming abilities they always seem to channel the results down to a few options, particularly in the consequences lists. Maybe we were playing it wrong.
That’s the thing. Use the game system that works for you. I like minimalist traditional games. I can easily describe what my character tries to do and translate that into an appropriate stat or skill check.
Many PtbA mechanics can be reduced to, “make a stat check, get a partial or full success” but dressed in abstract language that may match the narrative reality of the story, but is dissonant with the character’s reality in the game world. When I play, I try to stay in the head of the character, rather than the head of a story writer (nothing wrong with that, it’s just not my jam), so the “simulationist stance” is much more natural to me than the “narrative stance.”
If the game designer did not explicitly define the move that allowed him to tap into his family resources, would you, the player, have thought it was something he could have done?
If an NPC acts against another NPC, I may not want to narrate it. I want to use the same rules that the PCs use. When an NPC acts against a PC, if the mechanics are inverted from how a PC attacks an NPC, it doesn’t always feel right or work well. I have read some PtbA games where I cannot figure out how a PC is supposed to avoid an attack. Maybe I’m stuck in the “roll to hit, then roll damage” way of working, but I find that approach more natural and easier to play.
I believe there is value is not constraining PCs to set list of actions they can do. TTRPGs are about freedom of action, creativity, and cleverness.
I believe there is value in having a list of actions that PCs could do. Sometimes players are at loss for ideas and/or may not have thought of a particularly creative or clever thing they could try.
I believe there is value in adhering to genre conventions. Fictional reality often doesn’t match real reality and we want to play games that allow the kinds of things that our favorite stories allow their protagonists to do; however, not everyone knows what these conventions are or what is possible.
I believe there is value in subverting genre conventions. There is fun to be had in these waters, especially when players are being creative and clever and provided that everyone is onboard, but when done poorly or too often, the results can be terrible.
In summary, game design is a balancing act. Not every game is for everyone. Not every play style is compatible. While game analysis and play style categorization can be useful, it can also be limiting by putting games and gamers into boxes that may not fit or may not even exist.
Yeah that’s fair. I just want to be clear, I thought given what DrBob said, PTBA seemed to have an answer for the issues they were experiencing not that it was the ultimate way to play. PF1e is still the main system that I play in and my go to for high fantasy.
Probably, but having the move made it easier for the GM and me to work out exactly how things should play out the three times I used it in one combat.
The first cause of a limited success, while I got the information from a teenaged supervillain for how to stop the spirits from destroying the warehouse, I had to free her supervillain dad we had just captured.
Then the second was persuading the supervillain father I mentioned just now to leave without a fight. Cause I failed, ended up having to deal with the security of the warehouse thinking I was on the wrong side while I was preventing everything from blowing up.
The third in exchange for offering a super-spirit I accidentally made a job in my father’s army, he didn’t wipe the floor with me (since the rest of the team were fighting the original threat in the warehouse)
Sure diplomacy checks in any system could have done the trick, by having the move written out adds more to the fiction. It gives more defined consequences for any action which works since Masks is less about superpowers and more about how they affect how the characters view themselves in the world. It’s a coming of age story with superpowers basically.
On that, the teenage supervillain he worked with, ended up becoming his girlfriend. That’s where I think PBTA works well, the mechanics support you quickly working on the fly to tell a specific type of story.
Yeah, that’s a fair point since it really depends on the PBTA game on how it handles combat. Masks has a take a powerful blow move that inflicts conditions based on how you roll and decide on what happens. Offworlder has a more standard HP pool and dice for combat.
Just cause I’m not sure, when do roll dice for NPC on NPC stuff? trying to think and can’t think of any notable times when I’ve done it. NPC on PC comes up a ton and goes as the system calls for it, but for NPC on NPC stuff Ive always gone with what would create the more interesting drama for the players to deal with.
I have 3 PCs in my Savage Worlds fantasy game. For one mission, they had an NPC cleric join them. The mission was in service of her temple and they needed the healing support. When the skeleton’s attacked, she had to help by joining the melee. Simply narrating her actions without invoking the game rules and dice rolls would not have been appropriate.
This is the balancing act. Using PF1e feats as an example, they can be a great inspiration for the cool stuff you can have characters do, but it increases the size and complexity of the rules.
Blergh, I have no idea how that obvious use case slipped me. A sign I need the Christmas break.
Mulling over it, I guess in pbta since there isn’t an initiative order but instead a shifting spotlight, I guess it the answer is more that it doesn’t matter. The camera in effect doesn’t focus on it, and the players find out about it if the GM wants to use it as a story beat (NPC ally is in danger or about to break an ideal) or when combat ends.
This actually raises an interesting line of thought that I never really considered. In effect, moves are just feats. Some of them are universal to all the players and some are playbook specific. I need to mull over this more actually.
