#11: System Matters?
#11: System Matters?
a reader asks a question and I don't answer it
Hello, everyone! The newsletter hit 350 subscribers last week! I’m quite happy about that. Hope you had a nice thing happen to you this week too.
I. PbtA and the Purpose of Systems
Really interesting comment from reader, John Wilson, this week:
It seems that PbtA can do anything. Any thoughts on what sorts of genres, stories or play DON'T fit well into the PbtA framework, and what types of systems would serve those better?
I love this question. But I’ve also had one of those weeks that kicked my ass. And will probably have only those kind of weeks till the end of the year so this is a compromised version of the grand article that this could’ve been. Another disclaimer: I’m actually not experienced enough with PbtA games to really analyze them with any confidence. If you’d like to hear someone who can do that, check out the Hard Move podcast. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I love this question but I can’t answer it. I can answer a completely different question though. Sorry, John. I’m just not that smart.
A few weeks (days? months? years? what is time) ago, I asked a question on reddit and it resulted in a long conversation about PbtA games. My partner-in-conversation, at some point during the exchange, wrote this:
I've played a lot of PbtA games, and most of them are not very good! Even a lot of the really big-name ones! A lot of them misunderstand why design elements they borrowed were set up the way they were. A lot of them would be better games if they weren't PbtA!
Ouch. Their basic point (which they elaborated generously) was that designers saw Apocalypse World and copied all the superficial elements of the game and ignored the core of what made the game good. While I disagree with almost everything they said, the thing I disagree with the most is the idea that someone can comment on the game design process without thinking about the conditions in which the game designer lived and worked. It’s like talking about a science experiment and forgetting that a scientist had to actually conduct it. Or thinking about software and forgetting that a programmer actually had to write it. These are human processes and will be absolutely suffer from the flaws of humans. If humans can be sexist, then science and software can be sexist. That’s just how it goes. If humans are underpaid and overworked, the science and the software they work on is going to reflect that. So when you think about the science and the software, are you criticizing the abstract concept? Or are you criticizing some material aspect of how it was made?
What does this have to do with games? Sorry, bear with me. Vincent Baker, designer of Apocalypse World, wrote a series of articles for PbtA designers. In the series, he talked about how a lot of what we associate with PbtA games - moves, playbooks, 2d6 - are all “accidents of the system”.
His exact words:
These are all features of Apocalypse World, but it’s only that historical accident that makes them prominent in PbtA. When we created Apocalypse World, we made a million design decision that were specific to Apocalypse World, that served Apocalypse World’s very particular cinematic-post-apocalyptic-narrativist needs. None of these are important to PbtA at large. When you’re working on your own PbtA game, you can and should reconsider each one of them, and only keep the ones – if any! – that serve your game.
In the series, Vincent outlines his process and what he thinks is the core of the PbtA system. But it’s more than that: It’s actually how to design a game from scratch. It’s a conceptual walkthrough of his process. And it’s awesome! But I can’t help but feel it’s also not how most designers made their own games.
You know what I think most designers did? “Hey, moves are cool. They’re like these hackable genre-emulation machines. Let’s use them to make new games. And then rely on Meg and Vincent’s existing system to make sure the rest of the game works.” Is this bad? No! Did it result in games that ‘would’ve been better if they weren’t PbtA’? Maybe. But that’s fine?! And the word “better” is doing a lot of work there. How much better? That’s the rub. If a game works as PbtA for a table, that’s good enough, right? If it doesn’t, does it need optimization? Or an overhaul?
In his article on Shattered City, Paul Beakley of the Indie Game Reading Club wrote:
A good friend snarked that UFO Press designs trad games dressed up like PbtA, and I’m not sure that’s totally wrong.
I know exactly what Paul means. These games strike me as games that probably could’ve been better in their own system. I probably will not play them. But hey, Paul is still going to play them and he’ll probably have a good time. And so can you, maybe!
Okay, deep breath, sorry, John, you had a question about what kind of games are a good fit for PbtA. Alright, so I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good answer. I know the answer for Forged in the Dark. In their panel on FitD games, Stras Acimovic and John LeBoeuf-Little describe how the system works best for “action-driven narratives” with larger-than-life characters that bend the story to their will. These games are rarely about “Will they succeed?” but rather “How?” and “What will it cost?”. This is a combination of action ratings being cinematic verbs (Sneak, Skirmish, Sway) and the Resistance/Stress mechanic.
And what are FitD games not good at? They’re not very good at games about thinking or feeling specific emotions. They don’t usually help you to tell slow burn, meditative stories.
So as John asked, what is PbtA not good at? Does someone have a good answer? Let him and me know here!
II. Listen of the Week
On the Yes Indie’d podcast, Paul Czege talks about “My Life With Master, The Clay That Woke, and his new game Traverser about women ex-soldiers in a solarpunk future.”
Paul Czege says something really interesting and provocative about tabletop RPGs in this lovely interview. He says something along the lines of how while he was designing Traverser, he realized how all TTRPGs so far have been about ‘disagreement’. He means that the players disagree about what should happen next and the mechanics sort of assert who is in control at every point. Traverser is about agreement. I really like the sound of that.
III. Links of the Week
The second in Tor.com’s series: Game the System: Tabletop Games for Your Favorite Science Fiction Book
“Weave is a 21st century role-playing game, designed digitally from the ground up.”
33 Tips for Running Online RPGs, published on the Gauntlet blog. Lots of good advice here!
A review of the 2nd edition of AGON by John Harper and Sean Nittner.
Nibiru, a hard science fiction game of lost memories, has a free quickstart now! For a review of the full game, check out this cool video.
StorySynth “allows game designers to playtest simple storytelling games by putting their game content in a Google Spreadsheet.”
You know about the rpgcasts podcast directory, right?
V. Small Ads
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As usual, this newsletter was written by me, @chaibypost. I’m a person.
Thanks for subscribing and take care out there.
Hi Thomas. This is a fun question, and I think it's weird how people struggle to answer it.
Systems obviously matter. If they didn't, nobody would use systems. If any ruleset was equally valid, no one would spend hours reading hundreds of pages of rules or $30+ for a rulebook. We'd all be using a free 1-page PDF ultra-lite system by now, because the barrier to entry would be the lowest for it.
So the first question is really, WHY do systems matter? There are several reasons for this, because systems are more like game engines than games. D&D and PBtA are more like Unity vs Unreal than they are like WoW vs Dark Souls. Different game engines are better at different types of games. Their rulesets are like the physics engine in a game engine. The Frostbite engine is very, very good at making First Person Shooters and not nearly as good at other games. You CAN make a third person RPG in it but it's a lot more work than otherwise, and it won't run as well as an FPS would.
Also like the videogame world, it's much more efficient to use an existing engine than make your own from scratch each time. People warping a PBtA game into a new genre for their home game are doing the equivalent of modding Skyrim. They make a few new moves, some new enemies, change the names and images for some existing ones, etc. PBtA is extremely fluid and expressive, it's easy to make stuff for it. It's a user-friendly system.
However, different TTRPG systems create wildly different experiences. I make a new system for nearly every RPG campaign I run because I have very specific design goals and I want to focus on different elements of the experience. This isn't an efficient use of time, but I enjoy the design process and I also enjoy the feeling of running a system perfectly set up for the experience. It's fluid and beautiful.
A good example of this is my current TTRPG campaign, which is best described as "Breath of the Wild meets Diablo". Players are rediscovering a post-post apocalyptic world and hunting for treasure. I wanted the system to accomplish several specific goals:
- Emphasize treasure hunting as the core of everything
- Learn all the rules + make a character in less than 15 minutes if someone's helping you
- Deep min/maxing opportunities for theorycrafters (without overwhelming newbies)
To fit these goals, I decided to focus on the "loot" part of the system. Instead of players gaining the vast majority of their power from a single class, players would rely on the loot they got each session to build their characters. If you have a cool suit of armor, you can just put it on and start tanking. If you have a cool wizard's robe, you can put it on and gain bonus spell slots. You don't gain a Fireball spell automatically from levelling up, you've got to find a scroll in a dungeon and you're the only one in the party that is going to know Fireball (unless someone else finds another scroll of the exact same spell, which is very unlikely). You can't cleave unless you have an axe that says "you can Cleave with this axe". It's more like how weapons in dark souls determine your moveset.
This would let me solve all three of my main goals. Loot mattered a huge amount, because it determined your build options. New players weren't overwhelmed because they'd explore different builds as they gained loot, they didn't need to commit to any large 'package' of powers at level one. Min/Maxers players had tons of unique build options every time they played because the loot distribution would never be the same. They could put together temporarily OP builds that would get levelled out in a few sessions and it was highly rewarding.
This also pushed me into a focus on fast-paced tactical combat, because I needed enough design space to make each item feel unique and special. I also knew players would want a lot of opportunities to use their cool new toys, so tactical combat had to be a major focus of the system. This further adjusted the design. The game was focused on exploring ruins, getting loot, and fighting monsters with that loot. I even created a new dice pool attack system (at least I haven't seen it used before) in order to make weapons feel more distinct from one another while minimizing the 'mathiness' of combat.
When I first set the game up, I focused on this element of innovation and ported mechanics from other TTRPGs over for the rest, like the 13th age background system and the 5e death system. However, as the game evolved over hundreds of sessions of testing, these mechanics started getting replaced with custom-crafted mechanics that fit better with they system's unique goals. Each change usually had dozens of sessions of playtesting between them. The improvements were obvious and noticeable, because they were changes to the system.
And system matters.
Hello Thomas, thanks for considering my question! You say you didn't answer it, but I didn't expect you to pull an answer fully-formed from your head. You researched it and presented a few different views on the subject, and how could I ask for more.
I've been meaning to read Vincent's articles which you quoted. I should do that now ;-)
My question was inspired by something that Mark Diaz Truman of Magpie Games said recently. He mentioned (without elaboration) that PbtA is not suitable for all genres; and he gave one example: the military genre, for example Star Trek. He explained it this way: shows like Star Trek are strongly episodic, meaning each episode tells a tight story in a set amount of time (say, one gaming session). This requires some tight scripting or story steering, whereas PbtA gives a lot of control to the players over the direction (and length) of the story. The other hitch is that military stories tend to involve people following orders and set procedures in aid of a common goal, but again PbtA tends to encourage players to break the rules and follow their own agenda. So that was one example, and it got me wondering: what genres is PbtA particularly suited for, not suited for, and where are the boundaries?
Thanks for your interesting newsletter. Looking forward to more. All the best,
-John W.