Regarding the whole moving the story forward approach, I don't think it's really about "moving the Correct Story forward." I've always understood it as "avoiding dead ends." Too often, a failed roll is interpreted as "That didn't work. Nothing changed." You failed to find the clue or pick the lock or whatever it is that gets us to the next interesting bit. So with a narrative approach, something always changes with a dice roll. Failing to pick that lock doesn't mean that you can simply try again until you get it. It means that something bad happened, that you were interrupted or you sprung the trap or you snapped a pick. Anything but "nothing changed."
In GameMaster centered games, situations where a roll does nothing at all is a sign of an unskilled GM. D20 rolls should never be called for if the result of the action would be a guaranteed success or failure or if no change would occur even on a success or a failure. The GM should avoid putting players in situations where they will choose to make pointless actions. In my experience, games which include the players in the GMing process are games which encourage lazy, less skilled, or time crunched GMs. That's not a bad thing. Crunchier games demand significantly more from their GMs than fluffier games, which means a higher failure rate. But the highs oh man the highs. Then again, the game which led to members of our group generating art about the campaign for literal years after the fact was a Savage world Persona game.
Logan Lavoice I think both approaches do the same thing in different ways. In a D&D you might use some kind of system for tracking time and rolling for encounters and so on, so that failure can always mean wasted time. In PbtA you don’t have a separate system simulating the passing of time, you have consequences for failure built into the act of making a move. You fail, something bad happens, because the rules say so. Whether it’s because of wasting time or being too noisy or breaking something, is left to the GM to determine.
Every PbtA game I have ever played has a moves that covers running away from a threat. Urban Shadows actually had an escape move, but most of them use the generic dangerous situation move usually defy danger or keep you cool. Which is more than many games have like say D&d
Really nice nuanced thoughts, thank you. As a big PbtA fan who is also not so comfortable with the whole “writers’ room” approach that forces the group to think consciously about what kind of story they want, I’ll say I have found a way to run PbtA games that doesn’t rely on that. I treat the dice as the strict arbiters of who has narrative control, so if a player rolls a 10+ they get to tell me what happens, but I don’t do the thing of asking constant questions about what threats they are facing etc (except in session 0 where we might do world-building together). It works fine this way - but ultimately yes, everyone needs a shared understanding of what kind of genre you’re working with, as the dice never tell you *exactly* what happens next.
I'm looking at PBTA because I had to give up GMing due to work. I'm a writer for a living, so world building, scenario creation, conflict generation and resolution are all part of my job. I found that prepping to run, say, Call of Cthulhu, or any other more complex system was essentially taking up the same headspace (for free) that my work was and I just didn't have the bandwidth for it. Running prebuilt modules never worked for me because all I did was see how limiting they were and I always rewrote them, bringing us to the same problem as before. But now it's been ten years since I last GMed a game and I miss doing it, so I'm looking at systems that can create the richest experience without a lot of prep. I don't know PBTA is that, but I'm investigating it. If anyone has other suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I've been away from RPGs for a long time, but I was a generation zero pencil and paper gamer in my youth.
I know this is an older post. I'm in a similar spot, where I played rpgs decades ago, but I don't have the time or the energy to spend countless hours prepping for a session. I did find a PbtA game called 'Ironsworn' that may possibly fit what you are looking for. 1) There is almost no prep work. 2) It offers a rich experience. 3) It can be played with a GM, without a GM, or solo. 4) The author gives it away for free as a digital download. It's worth looking into. www.ironswornrpg.com
I don't think prep work is necessarily system dependent. I'm currently at month 12 of a planned 2 year dnd game. The prep work is very simple. Once a month I spend 1 hour coming up with about 6 interesting situations that are difficult to resolve. Then for the 4 sessions that month (or even more), players work through them. Repeat. Prep is extremely quick and easy.
@@TheCharlesFr That works. But it's a lot easier to tie those events into a cohesive and complex story when there are some restrictions. I've played that way, and it's just so much easier with Burning Wheel than D&D, because there's a focus to the game mechanics which pushes you to make improvise things naturally. Likewise Apocalypse World's threat map and timers have always made for shockingly complex webs of intrigue which explode more climactically than I've ever seen in a wholly scripted or improvized campaign. Never bloody mind the mess of improvising D&D combat scenarios.
I can’t remember if it was him or John Harper, but one of them has also argued against the practice of asking players “what kind of threat are you up against here”. I don’t have a link but the idea is that players can have authority over some things but should never be the authors of their own adversity.
I don't know if you are talking about something I wrote yesterday in the comments, I didn't mean to say that failure isn't interesting and that's it. I mean to say that failure in d&d often doesn't move the story forward, and when it doesn't move the story forward is not interesting. For example, in d&d when a thief tries to open a lock and fails, he just fails. In Dungeon World when a thief fails at opening a lock he makes noise and draws unwanted attention, or breaks the thieves tools or something of this kind. In other words, Dungeon World forces the GM to introduce meaningful consequences and not just "no, you fail". I'm aware that you can house rule d&d to introduce this rule, but this doesn't mean that d&d includes this rule - in fact, most of the people just say "no, you fail" and move on. Maybe you are an enlightened GM that always introduces consequences, but the game definitely doesn't incentive you to do so.
Right, I see what you’re saying. Baker didn’t invent those game master tools, but what he did was to formalize them. Even if somebody finds that these games are not to their liking, the procedure instructions offer a lot of useful game master advice, or best practices. I don’t think that PBTA actually incentivizes using those, but it gives you instructions and a procedure that this is what you’re supposed to do.
ivanmike1968 what I find cumbersome in DW is the amount of moves. For a player this is never a problem, but for the GM is a pain, because you have to always check if something triggers a move so you're always in the judgeful mindset which is heavy to substain in the long run. Also, most moves are vague and difficult to judge. Finally, moves always force you to roll even if it's not interesting, which in my opinion creates other sort of problems. For all these reason IMHO the best PBtA game is World of Dungeons, which came out together with Dungeon World as a PBtA version of OD&D. That's SUPER COOL! It has only one move: Make something risky. There are four classes and all the manual is contained in two pages. You can also find tons of expansion books online for free. Link to World of Dungeons: www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj1yYqerIzYAhUBchQKHVvkDGEQFghdMAc&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquestingblog.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F02%2Fworld_of_dungeons_1979_bw.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0C8SlQgDPsmpoAzpvMrFcN
Yes, the more moves that one of these games has, the more cumbersome it seems to be. So far, one of my favorite games is uncharted worlds. It uses a catchall move called face adversity. It has other moves as well, but a tremendous amount of situations can be caught by this first move. I am eager to play test it with a small group, but I can see how the primary and secondary layer of moves in this game would free up the game master tremendously. I understand why each game tailor makes the movies in the results to support the fiction or theme, but unfortunately part of the effect is to force the game master into that analytical or judge mental mindset as you are attempting to figure out if I move just got triggered, and if so which one. You can watch the session one of the veil play test to see the three of us looking around to find the correct move or procedure. Over time I’m sure that disappears, but not all of these games are intended for long-term play either.
Did you run a more simulationist version of these games? How did it go. I'm working my way through the Fate Core book and would like to do what you are talking about here. I can see the possibilities that Fate has... to do "anything" but the narrativist approach of the game is really off-putting. Your "single point of authority" really hits it on the head... thanks,
I did to a certain extent with mixed results. It is interesting to note that apocalypse world and even the influential monster hearts don’t really call for a tremendous amount of player authority over game world reality. As my friends and I discovered these games are much more in line with a gamist Design that they are with narrative or drama.
@@ivanmike1968 Have you found anything that you like in the light/universal/simulationist rpg that works for you? As I said above, I'm going through Fate core book at the moment but it seems like not what I'm looking for. I like the idea that you can just "speak it into being", but I'm not really putting a handle on the system so far. I think that it could be really slick once I figure out how to work it... But with your "single point of authority". The player input idea just ruins it for me. If I'm the player I want to be in character. don't ask me what color the sky is. If I am the GM I already know what color the sky is. and where you can find the magic ring... if you are sharing a narrative you better be Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett otherwise you end up with mud.
if you like the 2d6 mechanik but more a osr feel, take a look at Vagabonds of Dyfed RPG! very interesting video! i'm not entirely certain i agree with your stance on ptba having one "correct" narrative to be pushed foreward, but i cant quite put it into words (yet).
I found pbta useful when trying to get my players to play in a modern urban fantasy setting where they were all highlanders. If the players are highlanders, criminals or vampires such as in vtm, the game is less about party cohesion and more about everyone's drama and small side subplots banging against each other in a pressure cooker. That gets very hard to manage for me. I've seen and heard of people managing that type of play by creating relationship charts that look like giant yarn boards. I can't do that. What liberated me from that was pbta. My players didn't have to invest in the setting or prep much with the lore. We all made a lot of it up together, then it stuck and I took over narratively completely and just made things snowball. The threats were inherently in the character designs and the things they had to take care of. It was like roleplaying through an episode of highlander. Worked beautifully.
I think I am confused by what you're interpreting is simulationsitic vs narrativist or even if it matters. This could be how different we may interpret these or the kinds of games that have game mechanisms that support these ideas. To me, I find most PbtA games highly simulationsitic in that these games have very specific game mechanisms that support the games themes, focus, and genre to an extent that players can simulate playing characters that emulate what living in those specific worlds would be like. I could just be weird like this.
Yep, that's what I thought. Thanks for reminding me of all the reasons why I have no use for 'narrativist' games. They're fine for folks who like that sort of thing, of course.
Only pre-existent instances can be found out or discovered. Shared storytelling and improvising can be fun, but you are making up, not finding out anything. You know the plot wasn’t there. And stories improvised by 5 brains simultaneously are prone to fail.
Have you played PBTA games? Because they, er...don't fail. It takes nothing but having experienced them to know that much. The stories are unpredictable and absolutely stuffed with events the players never saw coming, with most of that being stuff the gm hadn't planned ahead of time. Yet it's all cohesive and realistic, too. Honestly, just try playing some dumb GMless game like Goblin Quest. It's really just a storytelling game, but maybe it'll help you understand that, yes, even if you're improvising, you will "find out" a whole lot, even when it came from your own head.
@@kitsunin4690 honestly is not what I’ve seen in my games(not many) and in thousands of streams.... People pretend to be in a Shakespeare play (acting) and/or being Stephen King (creating).....and it is not the case most of the times...
By the way, I play rpgs to “LIVE” in a virtual environment and interact with a virtual world, and not to “create/TELL” a story. Interesting stories spring from that eventually, as when you go fishing or riding a bike with friends
