The Future Of PbtA Games

#22

My own wishlist, PbtA or otherwise:

  • More duet games.
  • More truly “zero prep” games. Ie, games where no one actually has to read anything before sitting down to play. Murderous Ghosts is like this, and I think Dead Friend is supposed to be as well.
  • Games or scenarios meant to be played in a short period of time. 20 minutes to an hour, say.

One page games and WoDu hacks are probably my biggest interest right now. I really like the
“Turbo” format where you have a character sheet, character creation, and basic rules all on one single sided sheet (WoDu Turbo Breakers, Blades Against Darkness Turbo, and World of Mutants all use this format).

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#23

I was pulling my hair out last night trying to find Blades Against Darkness Turbo last night - but had forgotten the Turbo part!

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#24

This is one of the things I built in Crossing Worlds (aka Karma in the Dark), in a way. It seemed necessary both because it’s a game about oppression and I wanted to challenge the violence-first attitudes I see a lot in gaming.

Basically your team has a corruption tracker, and once it fills the game ends (the game also becomes harder as your tracker fills more). You earn ticks for exploiting or harming people with less power, you clear ticks by helping/supporting others with less power. As a group you also pick one other ideal which if broken will increase corruption. So you could pick peace and gain ticks for violence but clear ticks for non-violent situations, or pick common humanity and get ticks for acting hostile towards those who are different from you but clear ticks for connecting with those who are different, etc.

I’ve seen it change player behavior over time. It usually takes ~4 sessions for players to consciously realize how the mechanics don’t support the usual “treat everyone as an enemy/hurt them” model. Once they do, there’s a radical shift.

(In addition, for encouraging safety between players you have shared team goals for XP and the more traditional/explicit safety tools listed as core rules.)

It’s not a perfect mechanic yet by any means. It’s something I’m still improving and want to continue to iterate on for that game and future projects. And I’m really interested in seeing more people look at empathy and safety within the game mechanics. I feel like there’s been a move towards that in a number of games, but they’re still in early playtesting.

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#25

That corruption tracker sounds fantastic!

#26

Both of the FitD hacks I’m currently working on have campaign trackers!

Which brings me to something I’d like to see more of: rules specifically to encouraged serialized play, with mechanics for series cliffhangers, special episodes, guest characters, that sort of thing.

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#27

Ooh, serialized play games could be interesting. You could offer modules for different narrative structure types (ex. three act structure) and have a road map of where each session falls in that with goals for the session.

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#28

Right! You could have special moves specifically for the finale, or mechanics contained to the musical episode, or the crossover, etc

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#29

All of these mechanical approaches are super interesting and I love how often they shift by the game genre. To that end, I’d like to see more games that work on real problems of everyday life, specifically around politics, community building, discourse on social issues, etc.

As a dad and urban planner who is concerned about the future, I’d love to see some games that could be used as learning materials for young people. @RichRogers had a discussion with a professor in +1 Forward (can’t remember the exact details) that was using historical settings with PBtA in a classroom setting to teach history. So cool!

I feel like I spent the last 15 years of my role playing career chopping up goblins playing D&D and what I love about the PBtA games is that so many of them focus on relationships as a key part of the playbooks. So yeah, more of that.

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#30

Exactly!

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#31

@RoggenRoll I believe that’s the Ross Rifles episode. I hope that game comes out soon. Ww1 is an intresting, if utterly tragic, part of history.

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#32

More GM-full indeed! I think the King is Dead points to a possible new direction in PbtA, where moves are not just resolving uncertainty but sharing activities like scene framing and closing around the table.

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#33

Speaking of The King is Dead: I’d like to see more “mini games” in play. Discreet mechanics for specific scenes, sets, or episodes.

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#34

It (Ross Rifles) is supposed to go to kickstarter in a month or two, I believe!

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#35

9 posts were split to a new topic: Examples of Safety, Diversity, Empathy in games

#36

Some things I’d like to see (includes some repetition of ideas from earlier in the thread):

  • Designing specifically for online play
  • GMless/GMfull games
  • Games without a sharp distinction between chargen and “actual” play
  • Mechanics that are about the direction of the story more than just character success
  • Short games, both in terms of the length of the game text and the length of play (I love one-shots)

(The only prediction I’m willing to make is an uptick in wanky twitter discussions about what’s “really” a PbtA game.)

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#37

I really like the idea of more GM-full PbtA games. I’m finding it easy to slide/hack a little into that space. I played recent sessions of Masks and Dungeon World with split parties and multiple GMs. Sometime it ended up being as simple as, “My character charges into the fray. Uh, I guess I’m not controlling the enemy NPC anymore. Someone else, tell me what they do?”

Using mechanics to codify that dynamic sounds like a fun and fruitful exercise. I liked @Luiz’s posts discussing his experiment with GM-full Monsterhearts, where the 6- equivalent involved the player with the most strings on you deciding your fate.

I wonder what it would take to create a PbtA game with no GM, just lots of built-in loaded questions and collaborative scene framing, and a deck of hard moves to turn to when there’s a lull or a miss. Interpreting the hard moves would become a mini-game of sorts, but there could be a system for who gets first interpretative pass and who gets clarifying/additive questions!

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#38

@Alexi_Sarge your last paragraph now has me thinking about a hybrid of PbtA and For The Queen – the game is just a deck of cards that you draw one by one, each with a question or scene premise followed by a special move to roll on.

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#39

i’m not sure the structure of 3 tier results and conversation has to change much to suit modern/short session gaming, you can already do alot in dungeon world/monster of the week in 2 hours, way more than a trad game

i think approaches will be more common than stats, eg sneaky instead of dexterity, so more like fate accelerated, each approach is a stat and a skill - the players decide whether its natural or trained.

also love letter and ‘at the start of the session/mission’ moves will be more standard, they help get people into the party and the plot

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#40

There are absolutely a few diceless GMful pbta games; Dream Askew is one such. This is designed for one-shot play, and can be done in 2-3 hours pretty easily.

This is a game by Avery Adler that queers the apocalypse, and in which the apocalypse doesn’t happen everywhere all at once. Avery’s designs are brilliant, and I’d love to see pbta games head in a similar direction.

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#41

Welcome to The Gauntlet, @William_Nichols!

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