G. asks:
I’ve run a couple Powered by the Apocalypse games and I don’t get the hype. What are the strengths of PBTA games supposed to be compared to games like Call of Cthulhu, Vampire the Masquerade, or Savage Worlds?
Let’s start with a quick orientation for people not familiar with Powered by the Apocalypse:
- Vincent and Meguey Baker released Apocalypse World in 2010.
- The Bakers put the game under a free license.
- As a result, the novel system has been adapted and used in hundreds of RPGs. These games are referred to as Powered by the Apocalypse (PBTA).
- The system also notably influenced John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, which has also inspired countless RPGs published as Forged in the Dark.
In actual practice, Powered by the Apocalypse is barely a dice mechanic loosely paired to the concept of Moves. And on of Baker’s own PBTA games doesn’t include the dice or the moves. So there’s a huge range in what “PBTA games” do and how they do it.
But let’s break down each feature that seems to be closely identified with Powered by the Apocalypse.
CORE MECHANIC
PBTA uses a generally three-tier outcome for all action resolution: Success, Partial Success/Success with Consequences, Failure.
It’s pretty typical for RPG mechanics, particularly pre-PBTA, to default to binary outcomes. Even conventional RPGs featuring something like margins of success or critical hits will still usually define success as “the PC achieves exactly what they want” and then maybe they get something extra if they roll or a critical or their margin of success is high enough. PBTA, on the other hand, tends to define typical success as “the PC gets SOME of what they or they pay a price for it” with “achieve exactly what you want without cost” being treated as the exceptional result.
Similarly, conventional RPGs tend to have the Failure state default to “you didn’t do it.” PBTA instead defaults to having consequences for your failure: You didn’t just “miss” the ogre; you rushed the ogre and the ogre punched you in the face. This approach also means that PBTA games tend to embrace failing forward, while leaning towards not just player-facing mechanics, but a specific flavor of player-facing mechanics featuring fortune-in-the-middle decisions.
PC MOVES
Beyond three-tier resolution, PBTA almost always package their resolution mechanics into Moves. The distinction here can get pretty fuzzy (due to the breadth of both conventional RPG and PBTA design), but the result in what I consider better PBTA games is a throwback mechanic that evokes true old school design: In the ‘80s, RPG design shifted almost entirely to the “generic universal mechanic” as their core design. (Usually, but not necessarily, some variation of ability score + skill + dice vs. difficulty.)
The distinction here can be confusing to some, because quite a few OSR retro-clones have retrofitted the games they’re emulating to be built around a generic universal mechanic. But the older of old school games were built around, “You want to do something? Let’s build a custom mechanic for it!”
PBTA isn’t strictly old school, though, because it’s less, “Here’s a collection of stuff we made ad hoc at the table to address situations that came up” and instead “here’s a carefully curated selection of tools which will deliberately shape the focus and direction of play.”
Let’s think of this as neo-old school design.
(And, again, this applies to the, in my opinion, better PBTA games. There are quite a few PBTA games that turn their Moves into generic, unfocused mush because their designers are defaulted back to “generic universal mechanic” as their design model.)
PLAYBOOKS
A character creation and advancement system featuring distinct Playbooks for different types of characters is also a common feature of PBTA games.
In practice, though, this is just class-based or archetype-based character creation, which is quite common in conventional RPGs. (I’ve seen any number of efforts to explain how, “No, no! It’s totally different!” But it really isn’t, although the class abilities can have a unique feel to them because of how they tie into the Moves methodology.)
GM MOVES
This is another neo-old school design element.
To explain what I mean by that, consider the original 1974 edition of D&D: It included a hyper-specific procedure for running a dungeon. If you strictly follow that procedure, you get a very specific style of play and type of adventure.
GM Moves in Apocalypse World are designed to do that the same thing, providing a very specific structure of prep coupled to a very specific procedure of play that creates a very specific outcome at the table.
This is, it should be noted, another place where a lot of PBTA games turn into generic mush by designing their GM Moves as “the generic stuff that GMs do.” (Often accompanied by weakening or removing the provision that GM Moves are the ONLY thing a GM is allowed to do.) In some cases, these chapters degrade entirely into generic GM advice.
An interesting lens that can help understand this distinction is Blades in the Dark, which, as noted above, is heavily influenced by PBTA, but distinct from it. John Harper, the designer, notably replaced GM Moves with a chapter called GM Actions, which is the “generic GM advice” approach to GM Moves. But, notably, this is because Harper has moved all the hyper-specific procedure stuff into The Score and Downtime chapters. (And, in fact, made it even more hyper-specific, in a style very similar to the 1974 D&D dungeon procedures.)
FRONTS/THREATS
The last thing that I, personally, consider a core identity for Apocalypse World was the concept of Fronts: A collection of threats and agendas, motivated by a Fundamental Scarcity, defined with specialty Moves, and tracked with Countdown Clocks. Fronts were a specific structure for prepping situations, and the GM was instructed to create their campaign by simply setting up Fronts and then playing to find out what happened as those situations evolved dynamically in concert with the PCs’ actions and agendas.
But then Apocalypse World 2nd Edition eliminated the entire concept of Fronts and replaced it with a heavily revised system for managing Threats. I haven’t run a game using the revised system, so I can’t comment too much on the details, but although the methodology was significantly altered, the core intention and approach remained the same: Stock the world with dynamic situations. Use them to pressure the PCs and, when the PCs respond, play to find out by following your procedures (Moves, Clocks, etc.).
The basic concepts of Fronts and Threats have been adapted in myriad ways by other PBTA games.
WHITHER THE APOCALYPSE?
Circling back to the original question, if PBTA games really are “special” or different from other RPGs, why might someone playing them not understand what the big deal is?
Well, depending on what non-PBTA games you’ve been playing and also how you’ve been playing them, PBTA games may not, in fact, be a radically different experience for you. Situation- and procedure-based play have, as I noted above, go all the way back to Arneson and Gygax. It’s really, fundamentally, what the RPG medium was designed to do. I’ve personally been preaching about how you can do situation-based play in any RPG for a couple of decades now, and a wide variety of old-school and OSR games are designed around these principles, too. (And even more now than when Apocalypse World first came out.)
On the other hand, as I mentioned, there are a number of PBTA games that turn these core features of Apocalypse World into mush: Moves just become generic “you do stuff.” Fronts become disconnected from procedure. Sometimes whole chapters of How to Prep Plots are attached. Even the core mechanic often gets defaulted back towards something much closer to traditional binary outcomes. So it’s quite possible to play a PBTA game that pretty thoroughly disguises or eliminates the most distinctive features of PBTA games.
Similarly, there are a lot of GMs running PBTA games — including Apocalypse World — that aren’t actually running those games. This is actually a surprisingly frequent phenomenon with RPGs: No matter what the rulebooks actually say, for these GMs every game just defaults to a core resolution mechanic that they arbitrarily invoke. (In many cases, you’ll see this degrade even further, with resolution mechanics that amount to little more than “high roll on the dice = good, low roll = bad” regardless of skill modifiers, difficulty classes, or anything else.)
Some GMs have also been so thoroughly conditioned in prepping and running adventures in one specific way (often, but not always, a linear railroad), that they similarly default to habit no matter what structures a game may be designed for. Sadly, some of these GMs, when running Apocalypse World, will even go so far as to prep a bunch of Fronts and/or Threats as the rulebook instructs… only to do nothing with them. At best, the Fronts serve as a kind of idea board for them. Often they’re just laid aside entirely, and the GM will be left scratching their head and wondering why they wasted all that “pointless” effort.
Combine both of these — railroad adventure prep and “all systems are a die roll and a vibe” — in a single GM (which is far from uncommon), and you pretty much eradicate everything that makes Apocalypse World and PBTA games special and unique.
With all that being said, even if you’ve been running or playing the full-fledged PBTA experience, it’s quite possible that it’s just not your jam. Not every game is made for every person.
But if you’ve played a PBTA game and it didn’t feel different from, say, a D&D dungeoncrawler… well, that probably means something got mushy somewhere. Might’ve been the game design. Might’ve been the GM. Either way, it’s probably worth giving PBTA another chance and finding out what happens when you really embrace the structure of the game.
This post answers a question that comes up all the time online, it will be a joy to link to it.
I’m curious to know which games (or at least a few of them) have struck you as “mushy”.
There’s an interesting intersection here between situational and procedural gaming. I really like the descriptor here, as I had a more complex version in my head that was unnecessary. That said, I’ve played a bunch of PTBA Dungeon World, and I think the main caveat to the game agreement is that PTBA games give guidelines to “what happens on success or failure” as a situational game, vs. procedural games like 5e, most of the OSR variants, etc. The procedurals just say “you rolled poorly…you fail. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.”
Situational games give guidelines in the rules on how the GM should narrate/describe the event/fiction/narrative of a given challenge or attack or whatever. It also makes that description a new part of the facts/story/narrative.
In a Procedural game , a GM can CHOOSE to describe missing an action/attack/save any way they wish, but the written material doesn’t actually describe that option, or how to do it. There are no guides to what you DO at the table. It’s just the binary thing. And missing by 10 is no worse than missing by 1 in most d20esque systems. There’s no degree of success or failure baked in, RAW.
I think that’s the feature gamers might be attracted to in the Situational-focused games/mindset. It’s not better or worse IMO, it’s just about table fit and what fancies your tickle.
Another failure case that’s come up several of the times I’ve played PBTA is that the GM clearly conveys that they can only do GM Moves in response to player Moves, so the players try to avoid doing anything that requires a roll in dangerous situations because they’ve determined that’s the only way the GM can do anything that can hurt their PCs. My understanding is that this isn’t how it’s *supposed* to work, but a casual reading seems to give that impression often enough that I’ve had multiple GMs do it that way.
I’ve run a decent number of PBTA games (and played in a Monsterhearts 2 campaign).
The decision in a PBTA game of what constitutes a move and what playbooks exist creates an incredibly strong tonal and genre palette. (ie. in Monsterhearts, turning someone on is a move, and part of it is meant to emulate the fact that these young monsters don’t actually know or have full control over what they are/are not turned on by)
There is also rarely anything akin to “GM attacks with NPCs”. For instance, in Root when you attach, in many cases you “trade harm”, and this is how NPCs will do damage. So it is player-initiated, and with a 10+ they have options to either reduce incoming harm to them or increase their damage to their opponent, etc. The GM often is never rolling anything.
@Stephen: Yeah, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. In Apocalypse World (at least the original version, I haven’t kept up with the newer editions) the GM is instructed to make a GM move when a player fails a roll *or* when the players look to the GM to see what happens next. There’s some stuff about hard vs. soft GM moves that was somewhat fuzzy in the original AW and later games tried to clarify that may be the cause of this confusion, but even there the trigger for a hard GM move is either a player failing a roll, or ignoring an established threat in the fiction. And since the player moves are set up to be the most effective ways the players have to deal with threats, avoiding making them shouldn’t usually be a way to avoid the PCs being hurt.
From my limited experience, one downside of PBTA is that, when the system of the rules is a bigger part of the game, inconsistencies between the system and the imagined reality become more likely and more difficult to overrule.
For instance, in combat in Root RPG, you can deal Morale Damage with some actions, Harm with other attacks. It can feel weird that my March Hare roaring and threatening the enemy deals serious Morale damage, while the Badger ripping two of them in half doesn’t faze the Morale of the rest. And, if the GM made those deaths impact Morale, even just narratively, it would make actions which damage Morale innately pointless.
Having clear rules for the effects of Morale in Combat, something I initially applauded, ended up almost entirely sidelining/removing morale from what happened in the narrative – it would be very difficult for us to defeat the enemy Morale before defeating them another way, half the PCs couldn’t even effect Morale, all of us could deal Harm.
I should be clear, I have played 6 or so sessions of a Root RPG campaign, I enjoyed the campaign (and the hanging with friends) and loved some of the systems (armour, weapons, several really compelling Playbooks / character archetypes), and I’d really appreciate a reply from someone who has played more PBTA with their thoughts / responses.
Replying to Glenn B specifically, I think the procedural fail state is more like either “you fail to achieve this thing that way, and will have to come up with a cunning plan or a plan with a consequence/risk, or explore further” or, in combat “you fail to kill the Grue, and ratchet one step closer to being killed by it instead”.
I would say that plans with negative consequences or risks that the players knowingly, reluctantly can lead to some of the greatest fun at the table.
My biggest issue with PBTA is that the game devolves into improv theater rather than roleplaying. Both the GM and players have moves that force the game world into their own reality if they succeed. Hell, several examples have the DM (or MC or whatever) punishing the players for succeeding on rolls. Reality shifts everytime anyone rolls anything and god help you if you roll 7-9.
Speaking of 7-9 ,the “partial success” in some situations doesn’t really apply. Sometimes, the roll literally should be binary but PBTA doesn’t allow this. I’m trying to sneak in an enemy camp so they either detect me or they don’t. “Oh! But a partial success means you might drop an object and have to go back for it or a guard moves to your position to take a leak!” except the rules state that you have to give a “worst outcome, a hard bargain or an Ugly choice”. It can’t be something as simple as a dropped item.
The literal example in the book is “You try to sneak into an enemy base, but you roll an 8 so the hard choice is a teenage sentry spots you and you have to kill him right now”
I try to sneak but the “partial success” is that I literally fail at sneaking? I’m spotted? That’s not partial success at all.
The ironic thing is that the text right before this example is: “However,
remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer
should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure”
What DOES really happen when you really embrace the structure of the game?
I think an important element the post misses, (but is described by BP, though in negative terms. And also might be what Glenn means by procedural gaming) is that often, moves are not just actions a character/player can do, they are results. You don’t just roll to attack, you can have a move like “assassinate crime boss”, and if you roll a success, the mafia boss is assassinated. You dictate not just the action, but the impact. You can enter a room and roll “find treasure” (if that specific game that has such a move), and if your roll succeeds you find treasure (whether the room was “supposed” to contain treasure or not), and you decide what the treasure is. You might use the move “find hidden knowledge” and decide that the villain was your long lost brother, etc.
This is a very specific paradigm of play.
A lot of people don’t like that paradigm. Some people even say that it’s inherently bad or “not really a roleplaying game”. And are wrong, because different paradigms are allowed to exist, and different people prefer different things at different time.
I did see the opinion, which seems correct to me, that this paradigm is not very compatible specifically with OSR-style dungeon/wilderness exploration, where the players explore a specific defined world and react to it, and that doesn’t work if facts about the world are generated during the game. Which doesn’t negate the fact a lot of other stories/styles are compatible with it.
> Similarly, conventional RPGs tend to have the Failure state default to “you didn’t do it.”
It’s a such a pity that people saw these TTRPGs as working like that rather than how they actually worked. The default failure state is TIME PASSES. Which means things happen, monster patrols approach, torches burn, etc. People didn’t run their games like this because they were lazy. They saw vital rules as optional then wondered why the game didn’t seem to work good.
One thing that has really stuck out to me about the PBtA games I’ve seen is how the most common result being a mixed one tuned to keep drama high leaves one feeling like Moves aren’t the things your character is *good* at, but things they’re not so good at that they’re trying to do anyway. That works pretty well if you’re trying to do misery porn or a comedy of errors, but if you’re hoping to play competent characters with some control over their own destinies (as I generally am), it can be a turnoff.
Another thing is that, while this isn’t inherent to the system, playbooks in many PBtA games tend to try to define not merely a set of capabilities, but a personality archetype more specific than classes or similar mechanics in most other games tend to present, and push that personality archetype more strongly in the playbook’s mechanics than most systems do. One gets the sense that many PBtA designers believe players need handholding to understand their game’s genre, tropes, and themes, and don’t trust those players to subvert tropes effectively. Have they been burned by one too many games where two-thirds of the party were moody loners?
Mind you, on one hand subverting a trope without doing damage to themes and/or genre *is* a skill… but on the other, I’ve seen how deep the ruts can get when people are *too* afraid of letting people ignore the paint-by-numbers instructions.
@Puzzlesecretary It sounds like it would also work for younger characters growing into themselves, such as Masks where you are specifically playing as teen superheroes who are still trying to figure themselves out. That same game also focuses on personality in the various playbooks like you mentioned, but because the mechanics are very much tied more around the growth mindset this is a strength that lets players pick the kinds of personal challenges they want to face. I can definitely see it being annoying though if the individual game with a different theme tries to insist that, say, the rogue is always a brooding loner or the cleric is always kind.
Legendsmith, you are partially correct about people ignoring rules because they are lazy. Partially it’s because there are a lot of rules, and it wasn’t actually clear which rules are vital or why, often because it wasn’t explained (or was explained together with claiming 5 other irrelevant things are vital. I’m looking at you, Gygax).
And ALSO, when Alexander says “conventional RPGs”, he means a different category of games than the one you are probably thinking about.
I find that the more I learn to trust my GMing skills, the less safety-net of rules I want to have around to constrain me, and the more I’m willing to trust my players with options that (just for instance) let them make the bad guy reveal secrets just by rolling well. If they can blow up my plans with an inspired/crazy move, that makes the high-wire act of GMing more exciting for me. And anyway, PBtA games generally have way less safety net/straitjacket rules than 5e or Pathfinder or the like. I find I just can’t play those games any more — they immediately feel stifling.
Just FYI, Apocalypse World was not “put … under a free license.” and you still need to seek permission from the creators if you want to use their words, just like any other copyrighted work. Here’s a relatively early explanation: http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/policy and the current policy is here: https://lumpley.games/2023/11/22/what-is-pbta/
However, just like any other copyrighted work, you can use their concepts and mechanics to build your own game. And if you want, you can talk to the Bakers about it and they might give you permission to use their logo.
But it’s not a “Free license” and you can’t republish Apocalypse World or something.
@Mike P.: It’s a free license in the sense that no one needs to pay them. You are correct that it’s not an open license.