#pbta

[ghostmoor]

WE WILL RISE: OddRPG is here.

Burn the world down in We Will Rise, a roleplaying game based on the Oddworld series of video games. WWR is about causing chaos, uplifting those in need, and destroying the industrial machine.

This is a free game, available for download here on itch.io. It's still a work in progress: missing content/planned updates are listed on the itch page.

I started writing WWR in the summer of 2022, intending it to be a very short PbtA reskin, and, well.......... you can see what happened lol. I'm very pleased with how it's finally come together. Most of the art and the entire task of putting the book together has been done in the last six-ish weeks, along with a small chunk of the writing.

Feedback is appreciated! If you have comments, or if you even manage to play a game (!?) despite the current lack of character sheets and have some direct feedback about how it went, I would love to know.

#art #oddworld #ttrpg #rpg #pbta #mudokon #mudokons #slig #sligs #oddrpg

[heybiji]

#masks: a new generation #masks a new generation #masks ttrpg #pbta #original characters #truestrike #true strike #antonio salvo #tony #ruth salvo #ruth #npc #doodle #comic #sketch #smoking #cigarette #needed to get this out of my system #masks: overlook #me thinking much too hard about an npc for a masks game i'll be running sometime... soon #it was the 80s... #ruth and tony

[guillotinettrpg]

ABOLISH THE MONARCHY (in this brand new TTRPG)

Guillotine: Crown of Blood

Harness heretical magic, discover cutting-edge technology, and overthrow the crown in this Gothic fantasy TTRPG.

KICKSTARTER LINK

--------------

GUILLOTINE: CROWN OF BLOOD is a TTRPG where you can -- and should -- destroy the Crown. Use magic. Use wit. Use weird new technology, forged by your own hand. Use prayer, even if it's unorthodox. Use rhetoric to win hearts and minds. Or just beat the shit out of them. It's up to you.

Fact Sheet:

FUNDED IN JUST SIX HOURS!! Plus, we've unlocked our first stretch goal (character generation tables!)

Runs on the Powered by the Apocalypse system.

Based on games like Armour Astir, Heart: The City Beneath, Monsterhearts, and Monster of the Week.

Play as members of a Cause, against an oppressive Crown of your own making -- then play as the antagonists during a Villain Turn where you can torment each other's characters, or otherwise advance the plot.

Ten unique playbooks.

Includes weird magic, talking your way out of trouble, strange gods, and a worrying amount of blood.

Mechanics that let you become unhealthily obsessed with your friends, lovers, rivals, and political scapegoats. The more you interact, the more you understand them: for better or worse.

BONUS: Use Martyr moves to permanently remove your character from the narrative, irrevocably changing the fabric of the city, the revolution, or even the laws of physics!

All you need are some friends (or at least fellow travelers) and you're good to go! Do you have what it takes to destroy the Crown? Will you destroy yourself in the process? There's only one way to find out.

KICKSTARTER LINK

PLAYBOOK PREVIEW

ART PREVIEW

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #guillotine ttrpg #guillotine crown of blood #pbta #kickstarter #kickstarter ttrpg #dark fantasy ttrpg #gothic ttrpg

[valtharr]

Pictures that make a "the only TTRPG I know is D&D"-person spontaneously combust:

This is the entirety of the magic mechanics in the game "Interstitial: Our Hearts Intertwined"

I'm keeping this post for the next time I hear someone say they don't want to try a new game because it's too hard to learn a new system.

#d&d #dnd #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #ttrpg #tabletop rpg #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #interstitial our hearts intertwined #interstitial

[prokopetz]

Opinion on PBTA?

I have no strong opinions about the Apocalypse Engine. I just wish more people writing PTBA games actually understood how it works!

(Seriously, reading through the average PBTA game is just like: "Okay, that's not what 'fiction first' means... that's not how hard and soft moves are customarily distinguished from one another, either, and if you meant to propose an alternative definition, what you've set forth here isn't a useful one... all right, this playbook has fantastic flavour, but its central rules toy is worse in every respect than the basic move it's replacing... wait a minute, you don't think all possible results on a sum of 2d6 are equally probable, right? Right?")

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #apocalypse engine #pbta

[txttletale]

ever thought that less roleplaying games should be about loveable fantasy heroes saving the world and more of them should be about pathetic and petty aristocrats trapping each other in concentric layers of convoluted madcap scheming? well good news, my ttrpg most trusted advisors is on sale again! it's a silly pseudomedieval pastiche optimised for playing low-prep, light-hearted one-shots as a party of characters at the intersection between lord vetinari, blackadder, and the gang from it's always sunny, and it's 50% off through to the 26th of december!

#tattletxt #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #fitd #pbta

[worstgirleva]

do you like ✅mech pilots ✅magical girls ✅racing drivers ✅musicians ✅saviors ✅whatever the persona characters are

all of those are featured scenarios in burning hearts forever on sale for 50% off

#ttrpg #rpg #pbta #solo journaling #also included in the sale. not this one

[ostrichmonkey-games]

I kinda wanna know who it was that started the idea that Powered by the Apocalypse games have few mechanics, because I feel like even the more middle of the pack PbtA games are awash in mechanics.

I wonder if that's maybe the perception because the rules tend to act on less concrete elements (as in, rules that are more directly interfacing with, interacting with, and changing the narrative, which itself is such a fluid concept)?

All the PbtA games I've sunk time into (and have enjoyed!) reward a deep understanding of;

What even is PbtA (not all PbtA games have an equal understanding of this).

System mastery of the game you're playing right now.

A good PbtA sings when you play with the rules, and it feels like the game is lifting up whatever sort of scene or story you're telling.

I think PbtA (and to a similar but slightly different extent Forged in the Dark), have a false reputation of being easy to just pick up and play, when I think you really need to spend some time understanding the rules of the game, and the designer needs to spend time understanding how PbtA works.

Having been involved in some PbtA projects now, good PbtA design is hard. Worthwhile, and rewarding, but hard.

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #pbta #these are thoughts and conversations ive been having for a while tbh

[temporalhiccup]

✨

✨ A game I wish more people were talking about.

Okay SO I seriously SERIOUSLY don't know why people aren't talking about or playing GODSEND. I crash into people's conversations all the time with HELLO HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT GODSEND ITS GREAT WHAT YOURE TALKING ABOUT IS IN GODSEND LETS PLAY IT.

Godsend is cool for SO SO many reasons but here are a few bullet points:

The premise of the game is that the world is coming to an end: there are only so many ages of divinity and humanity left before the apocalypse. So as gods and avatars, you must do what you can to make things go your way, and there is nothing left to lose.

Everyone plays two characters! You play a god, but you also play the human avatar of another god PC of another player. I have seen AMAZING moments when players have acted AGAINST THEIR OWN OTHER CHARACTER because of the DRAMA and it was AMAZING EACH TIME.

But why two characters? You play as one God that sees through all the ages and will be there at the end of days. But with each new age, you play a different human avatar, one who carries out the will of another god. So TECHNICALLY YOU GET MORE THAN TWO CHARACTERS EVEN HOW AMAZING IS THAT.

In general, why aren't there more ttrpgs where you get to play more than one character? Why does the GM get all the fun, huh?

This is a PbtA game but it is DICELESS. DICELESS PBTA. DO YOU HEAR ME. The vibes are impeccable, the execution breathtaking. Basically as gods and avatars, it is not a question of if you are able to do it: you do it! You perform miracles! You defy destiny! You see the threads of destiny! But at what great and terrible and EPIC cost?

Here are examples!

A couple of BASIC moves you can do as a God:

A couple of BASIC moves you can do as an Avatar:

So your stats as an Avatar are how many narrative bonuses or penalties you get when you make a move. DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN. WHY AREN'T THERE MORE GAMES DOING THIS. I AM LOSING MY MIND.

Anyway every time I have read/played this game I have turned completely feral, and I don't know why we're not talking about Godsend. Please go check it out, you may already have it if you bought the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality three years ago.

#asks #monsterfactoryfanfic #godsend #pbta #rae going feral here #godsend makes me so fucking feral each time

[anim-ttrpgs]

Why I Dislike PbtA Games, and How Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Their Opposite

@tender-curiosities

It is no secret that I hate PbtA games.

Though due to a recent misunderstanding regarding another post, I’m going to preface this post by saying that this is going to be a very opinionated post and

I do not seriously think that PbtA games are inherently bad, though I may sometimes joke about this.

While I do often question the taste of people who make and play PbtA hacks, I do not think poorly of their moral character.

While I am going to call for PbtA to be used less as a base for games in the future, I’m not saying that the whole system and all games based on it should be destructified. It’s good for what it’s good for, but unless you’re doing that, I really think you should use something else.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what I have to say about it.

My first experiences with PbtA games were pretty rough. Monster of the Week was not the first, but it was one of the first ‘indie’ TTRPGs I played after having previously played mostly only D&D3.5e and 5e. I really appreciated that the use of 2D6 over a D20 meant that the dice results would be more predictable, and I really liked the various “classes” I was seeing. (At this time, I didn’t really understand that they weren’t really “classes” at all, though I think I can be forgiven for this because many people, even people who like PbtA games, still talk like “classes” and “playbooks” are interchangeable.)

I was very enthusiastic to play, until it came time to start actually “making” a character, and found that I couldn’t “make” a character. I wanted to make a nuanced, three-dimensional PC who was simultaneously stereotype-affirming and stereotype-defying, with a unique backstory and dynamic with the other characters—but when I went to actually fill out the character sheet for basically any “class”, I found that most of the backstory and most of the personality for my character was being set for me by the playbook. It felt like the only thing about the character I really had a say in was their name, and that two PCs of the same playbook would actually turn out to be almost identical characters. At the time, I thought this was very restrictive and very bad design.

Later, now that I understand the design intent behind it, I still think of it as very restrictive, but I think of it as very bad design for me, not inherently bad.

When I play a TTRPG, I want more freedom in who my PC is. That doesn’t mean I want less rules, in fact having more rules can often increase freedom, but that’s a different post. I want to create original, unique characters, that I won’t see anywhere else. If it’s a class-based system, I want that class to barely touch the details of my character’s backstory or personality, so that I can come up with something original and engaging for why and how this “Fighter” fights. This means that two level-1 Fighters, despite having almost the same mechanical abilities, will potentially be very different people.

PbtA games don’t let you do that. In a lot of PbtA games, you’re not playing your own original character, you’re playing someone else’s character, that every other player that has picked up the same playbook before you has played. It’s more like “character select” than “character creation.” I think I could liken it to playing Mass Effect or The Witcher. Every player may pick a few different dialogue choices in those games that change the story, but we’re still all playing Shepherd or Geralt. No one is going to experience a new never-before-seen story in Mass Effect or The Witcher, which is very much a factor of them being video games and not TTRPGs, and therefore limited to the amount of code, writing, and voice-acting that can go into them.

This anonymous asker who sent a message to @thydungeongal seems to feel pretty similarly to me about PbtA games, and @thydungeongal's response is a very good response about how people find this appealing.

I have more respect for PbtA now than I did, but I still don't like it because to me it seems to play so much against what I consider to be the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium, much like how video games like The Last of Us and David Cage games play against the strengths of the medium of video games, and I will never like it. But other people clearly do, so to each their own.

Then another reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s oversaturating the TTRPG space. I’ve referred to PbtA before as “indie D&D5e”, and i do think that’s a reasonable comparison, because in much the same way that you always hear “D&D5e is a system that can do everything”, I think a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the PbtA system is a system that can do anything. It’s kinda the système du jour for indie TTRPGs right now, and many iterations of it make it clear that many designers do not consider how PbtA differs from more traditional TTRPGs, and how it is specialized for different types of TTRPG gameplay. Just like how I feel PbtA isn’t playing to certain important strengths of TTRPGs, I think that many—maybe even most—PbtA hacks don’t play to the strengths of PbtA. But this isn’t really PbtA’s fault, that comes down to any individual indie TTRPG developer on a case-by-case basis. And the cure for that is something I’m always saying: If you are going to be a writer, you have got to read lots of books. If you are going to be a director, you have got to watch lots of movies. If you are going to be a video game developer, you have got to play lots of video games. And if you are going to be a TTRPG designer, you have got to read and play lots of TTRPGs. That and you have to understand that TTRPGs are specialized. Even "agnostic" systems like PbtA are somewhat specialized, and therefore might really not be a great fit for the game you’re trying to make.

That and, to get more subjective again, there’s like an ocean of them, and I don’t even like the ones that are actually good.

Now that I’ve talked about how I don’t like PbtA games, I’m gonna talk about a game I do like: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Obviously, I like it because I’m the lead writer for it, but I would also like it even if I wasn’t the lead writer for it, because it’s just my kinda game. Eureka is the opposite of a PbtA game. I wrote it to play to what I feel are the strengths of the TTRPG medium.

Eureka’s character creation uses personality traits as a mechanical element of the character, but it does so in a deliberately freeform way. You build your character’s personality out of a list of traits, so who your character is is very much linked to what your character can do, but we aren’t just handing you a pre-made character.

Eureka is designed to incentivize organic decision-making by the PCs, most often by the mechanics of the game mirroring the world they live in. Every mechanic aims to create situations wherein “what will the PC do next?” is a question whose answer can be predicted - it doesn’t need to be ordained by a playbook.

One of my favorite examples of this is, rather than a “Fear Check” forcing the PC to run away if they fail, or “Run Away from Danger” being a “Move” on their character sheet, Eureka opts for the Composure mechanic. The really short version is that one of the main things that lowers a PC’s Composure is encountering scary stuff, and the lower a PC’s Composure, the more likely they are to fail skill checks, and the more likely they are to fail skill checks, well, the less brave they and their player probably feel about them standing up to this scary monster. So if the PC has low Composure, they are more likely to choose to run away. The lower their Composure, the better idea that will seem.

This system really really shines when it comes to monster PCs in Eureka. Most monsters benefit a lot more from having high Composure, but have fewer ways to restore Composure than mundane PCs. Their main way to restore their Composure is by eating people. The rulebook never says “your monster PC has to eat people”, but more likely than not, they’re going to be organically steered towards that by the game and world itself. Sure, they could decide to be “one of the good ones”, and just never eat people, just like you reading this could decide to stop eating food. You technically could, but when your body starts to fail, how long would you? (This is a big part of the themes of Eureka and what it has to say about crime, disability, mental illness, and evil. People don’t just arbitrarily do bad things, it is often their circumstances that leads them down that path until they see little choice for themselves in that matter, and “harmful” people are still just as deserving of life as people who “aren’t harmful”, but that really deserves its own post.)

It has been said that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually arrives at much the same end as the PbtA game Monsterhearts, and I actually don’t disagree, but it gets there from an entirely different starting point and direction. The monster PCs in Eureka are very likely to eat people and cause drama, but it won’t be because they have “Eat People and Cause Drama” as a “Move” on their character sheet.

Monsters in Eureka have a lot of abilities, which they can use to solve (and create) problems as the emergent story emerges organically.

(Oh and Eureka is about adult investigators investigating mysteries, and sometimes those investigators are monsters, not about monster kids in high school, to be clear. The same “end” that Eureka and Monsterhearts reach is that of the monsters being prone to cause problems and drama due to the fact that they are monsters, though this isn’t the sole point of Eureka, just one element of it.)

You can pick up the free shareware version of this game from the download link on our website, or the full version for $5 from our Patreon.

And don’t forget, Eureka is fundraising on Kickstarter starting on April 10th, 2024! We need your support there most of all, to make sure we hit our goals and can afford to make the best version of Eureka we can make!

Interested in branching out but can’t get your group to play anything but D&D5e? Join us at the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, where we nominate, vote on, and play indie TTRPGs, all organized by our team with no strict schedule requirement! Here's the invite link! See you there!

We also have merchandise.

#eureka: investigative urban fantasy #ttrpg #rpg #roleplaying #eureka #tabletop #monsters #coc #allied forces #monsterhearts #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #motw #monster of the week #motw ttrpg #motw character #d&d 5e #d&d #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd5e #d&d5e #fighter #indie #indiegames #indie game #indie games #indie designer #ttrpg design #ttrpg community

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played MASKS : A New Generation ?

By Brendan Conway

Young superheroes grow into their powers and the paragons they will one day become, while grappling with villains, adult pro heroes, and the tribulations of young adult life.

A Powered by the Apocalypse game

#tabletop rpg #ttrpg #poll #poll time #usa #2010s #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #masks a new generation #masks ttrpg

[lulzyrobot]

Had another session of Sprawl a couple nights ago.

For context, Kassidy has a chip in her head that allows the corp she works for (Manticorp) to hijack her and take control of her body to make her do jobs for them. (Which is insult to injury because if they just asked and paid her she’d still do it but this about taking away her autonomy) And the chip has consequences if she spills the details to anyone.

Needless to say, the work Manticorp is forcing her to do is overlapping with the party so she sucks it up and tells the them regardless of whatever pain it was gonna cause her… the chip immediately assumed control and made her watch as she's puppetted into was attacking the party. And Kass is unfortunately one of the two in the group who is built to deal damage. She was able to take control back just before she was about to kill the hacker, stabbing the shoulder instead of his heart.

Needless to say she's having a great time.

#sprawl #ttrpg #powered by the apocalypse #PbtA #kassidy #au #my art #my ocs

[heybiji]

collections of MASKS ttrpg npc doodles because i'm always doin too much for rp things

#masks a new generation #masks rpg #masks ttrpg #pbta #npcs #antonio salvo #tony salvo #true strike #ruth blum #ruth and tony #feral #apollo #blake #brock #joey #veronica #aldebaran #oh adrian's there too #i wanna play more ttrpgs... #sketch dump #i know masks can be played out of the box but you see i need a year's worth of thought and worldbuilding............ #i'm normal she screamed #seeing so many of my messy sketches at once is a little bewildering tbh but i'm trying to be less of a perfectionist #there are so many more npcs to draw not that it's necessary and yet #oops forgot one #reactor #masks: overlook #masks: overlook city

[heyzebulon]

Nevermind about Tarot readings who wants me to pull a card from the deck of Disco Elysium skills and roll 2d6 without any further explanation?

#disco elysium #tarot #pbta #volition #electrochemistry #interfacing #visual calculus #harrier du bois #kim kitsuragi

[whereserpentswalk]

Starting my motw campaign: "Hey, it might be cool to add political intrigue to the magical underworld."

Now, over a year in: "These are the factions that control the former united states."

#motw campaign #motw ttrpg #motw rpg #motw #monster of the week #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpg community #rpg #ttrpg campaign #dnd #dnd campaign #alternate history #map #fantasy map #urban fantasy

[prokopetz]

"What's the difference between 'Powered By the Apocalypse' and 'Forged in the Dark'" well, you see, the Apocalypse Engine is what convinced indie game designers that character classes are cool again, and Blades in the Dark is what convinced indie game designers that going directly from writing diceless one-page storygames to writing something with Dungeons & Dragons level crunch with absolutely no ramp-up is a reasonable aspiration.

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #game design #indie games #blades in the dark #apocalypse world #pbta #fitd