Hah! I probably should have realized that. Embarrassing!
Is there room for a Less opinionated PbtA / FitD?
Wow, this is a really interesting way to look at PbtA games. One of the things I like about PbtA games is that it codifies tropes of the given genre/setting your playing in. I’ve never thought of this as a restriction since (a) you can always create new moves and (b) the moves are designed to give the feel/effect of the setting.
It might be interesting to make a PbtA hack where the whole system is that every character have just one move and it is “Codify what I just did into a move” and all it does is create moves. Could be a “character archetypes creation” sort of game for session 0.
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I found the link to my closest attempt at something like this. There is also some discussion, and notes on application.
I am still not 100% sure that this is a good idea, but I really like the implementation I came up with.
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O_O
How did I not know this before? this Roll for Shoes is brilliant!
Yeah!
All systems, and all art, are an expression of a perspective. Or what you’d call “opinionated”. It would be difficult to provide any kind of truly neutral framework. Do you want dice rolls and successes to be bold and world changing, or mild and everyday? Are we facing off against a dark and corrupting evil, a menacing and unseen threat, or hordes of violent invaders?
Perspective adds interest.
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I can see that. But I’m definitely going for something that has more of a sparse, undemanding feel.
Think like… after the end. Or before the beginning. Stories that turn on a few personal choices made by the very few people who are alive and recognizably human.
I think you can get more and less opinionated versions of PBTA. Apocalypse World, for example, seems relatively unopinionated, as long as you accept it’s pretty much an action game. Or World of Dungeons, with the same caveat.
But for me the strength of PBTA is that it allows you to build focused moves that deliver a specific play experience. Without that what have you got - just the 2d6 strong/weak hit/miss mechanic? And we’ve already got Fate, BRP, Cortex and so on for more neutral takes, if that’s what you want. Still, no harm if that’s the direction you want to go in.
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I mentioned in another thread that one of the things I encountered when trying to hack various non-trad games (Cortex Plus/Prime, PbtA, and FitD in my case) for settings from trad games is that I had to figure out what the original game was about and/or what part of them I wanted to focus on. My experience is that these games want to be opinionated (in the sense used in this thread); they want to say something beyond representing the physical world they take place in. (This is of course wildly generalizing and I’m sure there are non-trad games that go agains this, but this is my general impression.)
This is in clear opposition to the mainstream of the trad games where being a physics simulator in the broad sense of simulating the natural laws of the world (which may go beyond mechanical physics, such as with the sanity mechanics in CoC) is the point of the game and it’s up to the table to create any guidance or meaning beyond this.
This is not to say that either approach is superior or that preferring one or the other is bad, but I think it’s something to be aware of.
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