32 thoughts on “Random question.”

  7. You can’t even properly do game of thrones with AW or DW without some serious custom move work.

    This is of course part of the game but if we add this then every hack also counts. So just with DW or AW you can’t really do a proper Song of Ice and Fire campaign.

  9. Tim Franzke wait Tim I’m talking about an hack of the system. You can absolutely do a proper SoIF game with a little work on custom moves. I was asking what kind of thing is totally against the spirit of the apocalypse

  14. It feels to me like you’re kinda stretching the potential of the Apocalypse system. You know, you can translate World of Darkness to the d20 system, but we all know how well it went. I mean, I know everything’s possibly translated to Apocalypse, but that wasn’t what I asked. I asked if you thought that some kind of setting (and probably mood too) are less than ideal on Apocalypse 🙂

  15. Anything that isn’t specifically Joss Whedon’s Mad Max (Apocalypse World) or D&D dungeon-crawling (Dungeon World).

    That’s the whole point of PbtA: each game is tailor-made to a specific setting/feel. You can put a new coat of paint on them (“it’s a space colony instead of the post-apocalypse” or “everyone has LASER SWORDS and FORCEFIELD ARMOUR and explores ALIEN RUINS”) but fundamentally, you can’t go too far outside of the intended fiction without modifying the system.

    If you’re asking what fiction doesn’t work with PbtA, that’s a different question entirely: anything where failed rolls creating interesting new circumstances wouldn’t work (I can’t think of anything where that’s the case off the top of my head), and probably anything where the protagonists aren’t allowed to have an impact on the world (I would question your sanity if you wanted to make a PbtA game where everyone is an entry-level office drone).

    For systems that wouldn’t work with PbtA, you wouldn’t be able to reproduce the kind of modularity/option overload that certain games have (as mentioned above, Exalted and EP are some of those games), but you wouldn’t want to anyway. The whole point of converting something to PbtA is to have a game where the fiction comes first and there aren’t 300 pages of mechanics.

    If you feel those 300 pages of mechanics are so integral to the experience of playing [whatever] that the game somehow couldn’t be played with a more limited set of options, then yes, you probably don’t want to do a PbtA hack that emulates [whatever]; but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t translate everything that matters from e.g. Exalted or EP to PbtA, and I can’t think of system (bar generic systems) that you couldn’t similarly distil.

  18. Yeah, exactly. You can make a PbtA hack out of anything that has a strongly flavourful fiction, but that’s different from trying to shoehorn DW into doing e.g. Lord-of-the-Rings-style “journey far and fast to accomplish an urgent mission” fantasy (this doesn’t really work, because the characters will ignore most interesting hooks you spawn out of their failures).

    edit: even generic genres don’t always work – for example, it’s very hard to do a generic superhero PbtA game that will cover everything from Golden Age antics to Modern Age angst-filled breakdowns. Doing one or the other is totally possible, but doing both in the same hack is going to be near-impossible because the two fictions are so different, and you need to tailor your base moves to a specific fiction.

  19. Now you’re getting what I was thinking about (maybe I wasn’t that clear, English’s not my main language 🙁 )!

    I was trying to nail down what kind of fiction (I wrongly used setting earlier) wouldn’t work well.

  22. If we are talking fiction, as comments now suggest, I would say pbta wouldn’t do so well with a fiction that is incredibly crunchy, and highly detailed. Pbta excels at broad swaths of interesting information with a few rolls. So while it would be a great way to quickly discover what interesting things happen in, say, a battle between two armies, it would not be a great way to detail, in chess-like precision, each tactical decision made by the leaders of the battle.

    And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As in the fiction implied by chess, lot of what happens is really uninteresting. Pbta is good at skipping the uninteresting parts of the fiction and getting right to the interesting highlights.

  23. I did a little thing called Woodland Creatures which did Winnie-the-Pooh style stories. I also mashed up AW and d6 which allows you to get into all kinds of modularity.

  26. AWE games trend to open up through play. I think the system wouldn’t work as well for a game where there was a predefined plot or where the GM had a story they wanted to tell.  Doing something like Memento would be hard because each scene would need to end a specific way.

  31. A lot of these replies seem to me to be treating the issue as if the contents or style of the fiction is the issue. It’s not, in my opinion. You could mod the AW engine to any style of fiction, so long as you accept that the style of game is one where we play fiction-first, we play to find out what happens, where we care about the story consequences of actions.

    If you want to play a game where you are playing to find out who is better at tactically using combat options to defeat opponents, if you’re playing through a series of set piece scenes in a defined storyline for example you might find the AW engine frustrating for your purposes.

    Basically I’m saying the PbtA powers a certain type of game experience, not a certain type of fiction.

  32. I think you could do any setting, but you can’t do any system.

    You could do devoted gunslingers in an old west, but you couldn’t do Dogs in the Vineyard. You could do boy scouts in wartime Warsaw, but you couldn’t do Grey Ranks. Both have game systems designed for a particular effect (escalating a crisis to provoke a moral stand, deepening character desparation for emotional response) that I cant see being translatable into PbtA.

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