While considered disparate in the world of game design, there seems to be a lot of parallels between Old School and the much more recent Apocalypse Engine stuff. Both tend to be less crunchy with more basic mechanics. Both tend to be, "fiction forward" emphasizing the narrative rather than trying to be an analogue CRPG. Imagination and personal investment are prioritized over it being, "just a game." Less emphasis on combat and more on overarching management of personnel/resources. It's weird that Powered by the Apocalypse is treated as some sort of left-wing Trojan Horse while on the other side you've got people who accuse Old School Renaissance of being reactionary. In reality it seems like either approach can be what you make of it. I don't doubt that there are bad faith actors trying to treat the hobby as some sort of Catalonian playground or other place to enforce ingroup grievances but at the end of the day I think most involved just want to have fun. I may run a Masks game in the future, although I'm mostly familiar with Weaverdice.
Have you ever player an osr game?
I've run largely OSR-type games for the past two decades, although most of my experience is with more generational scope systems like Pendragon.
Pbta games are clearly made with the purpose of creating linear but shared narrative structures, while osr games, though capable of creating a narrative structure of sorts, is more focused on the exploration oriented gameplay and immersion, by using random tables of events as a way of providing conflicts for the players to solve.
They may be similar in the premise that they arent combat-only systems, but their end goal is completely different, and the activities undertaken in game are generally different as well.
>by using random tables of events as a way of providing conflicts for the players to solve.
Always make me laugh when people tout random tables are somehow being a vital characteristic of the OSR.
Procedural generation (including random tables) is a vital characteristic of the OSR
They really aren't.
Yeah, wandering monster tables and shit is VERY much a big part of OSR.
>he's never picked up the AD&D DMG
>Or the Little Brown Books
This is going to be a fucking shit show if it doesn't just slide right off the board.
The answer your question, op, the biggest difference is that in a pbta game the players are actively engaging with their characters as characters. You're supposed to be playing a character truthfully, but you're also keeping an eye towards creating an interesting story. You're engaging on an immersed level and on a meta level.
In osr, as I understand it, you should just be engaging on an immersion level. You should be engaging with the game *as* your character, and not with your character on a meta level.
The role of the dm vs. The MC is quite a bit different too. You could argue that both are shooting for emergent narratives, but they are going about it in very different ways.
So basically in PbtA there's a textual divide between player and character, with the expectation that the character has a role in a larger narrative while in OSR it's mainly just thinking for your character in whatever situation they're in? That makes sense considering what I know about both. Thank you. Still, it doesn't sound too dissimilar from older RPGs (not OSR mind you, but beloved classics) where there are, say, Virtues/Vices, Passions, etc. Pendragon has you playing chivalric romance characters, so while it's a much more traditional and high culture kind of genre there's still a fundamental melodrama. I still think I could like PbtA although I could always be wrong.
One is like dnd and the other is garbage
While the OSR and Forgeshit like PbtA have a number of similar goals and values, the mechanical ways they going about achieving them are diametrically opposed.
No, absolutely fucking no.
PbtA games are narrativist leaning games where the players can alter narrative and setting in particular instances, OSR games are simulationist leaning games where players can just interact with the world using only the character as vehicle.
PbtA has snippeted action sequences ("moves") specified on the character sheet while OSR only has special abilities unque of classes that don't generate context but are context based.
These are VASTLY different game design, PbtA is a derivate of the Forge philosophy about narratove prioritization over emulation (story now, not story later).
Tl:dr. you're either a naive youngling fellow, an assumptive retard or a plain baiting mong.
Fair enough, I accept the epithet of retarded homosexual.
>Both tend to be less crunchy with more basic mechanics.
Nah, man. Have you ever looked at a saving throw table? An attack matrix? A spell progression table? Old D&D and by extension the OSR is hardly "less crunchy".
Both PBtA and the OSR have a "say what you want to do and the GM tells you which dice to roll, if any" approach, but the actual rolling of the dice is way more complex in the OSR.
>Less emphasis on combat and more on overarching management of personnel/resources.
Is that true of Apocalypse, though? I can't claim I'm an expert, I mut have played less that 10 hours of PBtA in total, but from the rulebooks I did read, resources seem too abstracted in PBtA for there to be any heavy resource management like in the OSR.
>In reality it seems like either approach can be what you make of it.
Eh, it's your game, at your table, but each ruleset is designed for their own approach. You can try to run PBtA in an OSR style or OSR in a PBtA style, but not without some effort and frustration.
>at the end of the day I think most involved just want to have fun
I hope so, OP. As long as they're having the right fun.
Pbta is based on the dnd reaction roll, for a start
What is considered more or less pure PbtA is incompatible with what is considered as TRVE OSR. One is highly structured "narrative" game, the other is highly structured "game" game (closer to a board game).
PbtA fans shit on Dungeon World, but this game shows that there is a way to make something useful out of the two different game principles. A relatively different take on fantasy adventure game. The caveat is you have to steer far from pure PbtA stuff like having too much narrative-focused moves to avoid filling up GM's improv queue with garbage like
>bard rolled 10+ on some lore move while looking at a pillar, now I have to make up a serpentfolk empire on the spot
But the moves and fronts would help greatly you with stuff like OSR's misconception of monster reaction table used as an oracle to determine what the fuck monsters are doing in a dungeon. Or with emulating faction politics and creating a living evolving world. You would still have to keep player skill as very important in problem solving part of the game, but you don't really need the whole tired saving throw or combat routine. As a matter of fact, combat in PbtA could be far more dangerous and engaging than in OSR.
There is a big difference in theory, but groups tend to be good at separating what works from the rest, so at the table they mostly play the same
But the internet is a place of rage, so of course they will focus on the differences, no matter how esoteric
>Rolling Dice
Pbta is a shared storytelling hugbox.
OSR when the referee is detached from storytelling is a death spiral waiting to happen.
Death spirals are fun at least.
OSR is mechanics-first and expects roleplaying to organically emerge as a natural consequence via interaction with the world
PbtA is narrative-first and slaps training wheels on players in the form of a pseudo-scripted narrative that forces you into a specific narrative role
They are in fact completely opposite approaches.
>It's weird that Powered by the Apocalypse is treated as some sort of left-wing Trojan Horse
Trojan Horse? No idea where you're getting that. They were treated like garbage, because most of the PbtA games that were made during that particular fad were utterly garbage games that had no redeeming features, but hid behind the flimsy pretense that PbtA game weren't meant to be held to the same standard as other games where they could be judged for their intentional design decisions.
The low barrier to entry and the habit of copy-pasting content from other PbtA games and giving the moves funny names led to an excessive amount of trash, even moreso than the era of OGL 3.5 derivatives and fantasy heartbreakers. Even the best known example, Dungeon World, is pretty half-baked and fails to fully accomplish what it claims it's doing, while wasting a lot of pages on rules that literally no one who has ever played DW has ever used.
>rules that literally no one who has ever played DW has ever used.
Such as?
Either way you'll end up surrounded by homosexuals.
>Rolling dice
PbtA games are pretty difficult to outright fail a task at. You most succeed at cost, what the cost is varies by whatever the hell the GM demands. As such, PbtA stuff is pretty much impossible to outright derail from a story standpoint because the players will succeed in whatever task you hit them with. UNLESS you play them like I do where my character walks into obvious traps and open gunfire and other shit wanting a roll to see if I can just go to the other side unimpeded by sheer chance, because the GM for PbtA games are usually too pussy to stop me by just killing my character.
OSR is roll down the line for a reason. Your character is a weak piece of shit that will die if a mouse farts on him. Avoid combat, pray you ACTUALLY disarmed that trap, and accept you are probably gonna get eaten, raped, and killed by goblins (in that order). IF you DO make it to higher levels, congratulations on feeling like a god. You earned it.
>an analogue CRPG
I appreciate your use of CRPG especially on a forum intended for real rpg not poor vidya facsimiles
One significant thing they have in common is "play to find out what happens." i.e. Don't prep a story ahead of time.
I don't care for PbtA games but I keep that one principle in mind in everything I make for my S&W campaign.
What draws you to S&W? It seems like its in kind of an odd place as the maximalist odnd clone.
Some of the ideas PbtA games propose are pretty good. "Draw maps, but leave blanks" is good advise. You don't need to define everything. You don't need to have an answer. It doesn't have to be up to the GM to name everyone and establish thousands of years of history for every inch of the world. If they weren't associated with so many bad games, I'm sure more of /tg/ would be receptive to them, but it's sort of like the concept of session zero, where the association with whiny "safety tools" homosexuals has soured people on it, even though it's a thing they do anyways.
OSR and PbtA have audiences that are largely anathema to the other.
The left does not need a Trojan Horse to infiltrate the TTRPG industry, they already dominate it. It's just a gay retarded system.