Pretty good rules for GM's wanting to push players into being proactive, as the GM's sole job is to make their lives worse (or at least exciting). The genre is full of theater kids though.
It's full of theatre kids because of how it defines itself. It defines itself, and RPGs as a conversation.
It might be a conversation, BITD which is derived from it seems to be as well, but that's not what RPGs are.
>thoughts
About the trash you posted or about how you needed to slide a thread off the board just to probe analytics that don't matter?
I could go both ways, much like how you could easily go both ways for taking wiener either in your ass or mouth.
i like the resolution mechanic. don't like the focus on fricking the other players. it requires a group that can actually tell a story so it's kind of nightmare to set up
every game written by vincent baker works great. as long as you have vincent baker to gm it for you. otherwise it's missing a bunch of important pieces.
other than dogs in the vineyard. Dogs works fine, as long as you have the optional updated town creation rules and read a dozen Forge threads on how the dice mechanics actually work.
Classic game, dated feel. Mechanics work for generating drama and friction. It's about genre simulation rather than physics simulation.
Sex mechanics are weird but fit within the context of adult television in the United States. They feel weird because we're prudes and the last time games tried to cover sex mechanically it involved shit like anal circumference.
Nowadays there are better games. I like Legacy far better for post-apocalyptic fiction.
It's really good for what's made for. Nothing else.
>I'm not sure why exactly /tg/ has a hate boner for pbtas.
Same reason we hate every current edition of DnD. Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Star Wars and whatever else is popular. People try to reskin for everything.
The Apocalypse Engine is not nor intended to be used as a universal genetic role play system. It was made very for a very specific setting and gameplay in mind and should not be "hack" into whatever is flavour of month.
Oh there definitely is but Power by the Apocalypse is a lot like the d20 system was in the late 90s early 2000s. It was built for a very specific game and playstyle that's suitable to be used as a generic universal system and yet people keep trying. "Have you tried not playing DnD?" is a meme here for reason.
If you wanted to make tabletop fallout your best bet would be GURPS. Not just because it is a generic universal system and a good imao but it's very system the PC game originally built to use. PBTA despite Apocalypse World literally taking place in a post apocalypse world is not. Okay maybe Fallout 4.
But there isn't much of a common system in pbta. Only the most generic concepts carry over, but in good pbta the system is very much specialized for the specific genre/whatever it's trying to be. And I think that's great.
>But there isn't much of a common system in pbta. Only the most generic concepts carry over,
So why even use the PBTA engine then? It's like Bethesda using the Gamebryo Engine for Fallout 3. Yes mods will fix it. But why find something that's scratch build ground up?
9 months ago
Anonymous
Are you asking me why play PBTA games? Because (the good ones) are fun and elegantly designed and actually make me inspired and want to play, as opposed to feel like I'm studying for an exam. Mind you, I normally really like reading rulebooks, but TTRPG ones are pretty dogshit for the most part.
But your game engine comparison is completely beyond me and I feel like that's not what you were trying to say. What here is analogous to mods, what is analogous to game engines?
9 months ago
Anonymous
Gamebryo is a weird comparison because I’d compare something like Skyrim and Skyrim mods to 5e and its offshoots.
The system was made for High Fantasy specifically and it does that well enough, but people try to jam other settings onto it to the point it doesn’t work anymore. There’s a video somewhere of Skyrim modded to hell to the point that it’s like a Resi remake style zombie game set in modern day Japan or something and the only recognizable thing is the UI. That’s bizarre and unfitting for the system because ut’s not what it was made for. Square peg, round hole.
PbtA is a full engine like Unreal 5 or Unity. It gives tools to make a full system. Some people will just use premade or stolen assets and slap a price tag on it, others will spend time crafting a delicate piece of art from it. With PbtA that would be like, City of Mist (a favorite of mine) or BitD which have enough variance that the engine itself is still there, but there’s clearly been something made out of it that it’s something else. (Funnily enough both CoM and BitD have their own spin-off games that use them as a basis too.)
I dunno. It’s like 6 AM here and I had a long day.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I honestly wouldn't describe it as an engine. It's more like an example of game design concepts that can be loosely replicated than a concrete set of mechanics to build on top of.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>PbtA is a full engine
there's not really a "Powered by the Apocalypse" book that the other games are based on. he eventually released "Simple World" years after people were shitting out PbtA games. it is supposedly the core, but almost every PbtA game ignores or rewrites massive portions of Simple World
it's really a series of trends like 2d6 bad-mixed-good rolls and playbooks and simple modifiers, and even some of those are left out of pbta games or not even from apocalypse world originally
It's not as bad as people here make out but there's some bad things about as some have pointed out.
It's almost a puzzle trying to figure out how it's run because of how it's written which is probably half the reason people make bad game from it. If you understand the GM is supposed to strictly follow the game's procedures like an OSR game then it flows really well.
The sex stuff is very cringe and kinda brings the game down a bit into magical realms, it's better off without it.
There's a good system there but it is buried a bit by shit stuff and isn't the rules lite actor game I thought it was. I haven't looked around but I bet there's probably a good PBTA game that cleans off the shit and actually is a good game.
My favourite type of games are the one where players are free to do whatever,I consider any system that helps me to gm such games really good. AW is a system like that, also is a stepping stone for rpgs' game design
Indifference.
Pretty good rules for GM's wanting to push players into being proactive, as the GM's sole job is to make their lives worse (or at least exciting). The genre is full of theater kids though.
It's full of theatre kids because of how it defines itself. It defines itself, and RPGs as a conversation.
It might be a conversation, BITD which is derived from it seems to be as well, but that's not what RPGs are.
Failed actors make a system for art students.
>Failed actors make a system for failed art students.
ftfy.
>thoughts
About the trash you posted or about how you needed to slide a thread off the board just to probe analytics that don't matter?
I could go both ways, much like how you could easily go both ways for taking wiener either in your ass or mouth.
Never before breakfast.
The game itself is fine, but I cannot STAND the way the book is written. The authors seem like the biggest twats ever.
This. A thousand times this. Pretty much any adaptation written by people who aren't twats is infinitely better for it
Traveller system for morons
None
bad
I guess we are slowly reaching the point of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra with communication
Anon, his posts observant
I wish it hadn't been latched onto as the lazy tumblr RPG engine. I almost want to go back to FATE being the lazy tumblr RPG.
i like the resolution mechanic. don't like the focus on fricking the other players. it requires a group that can actually tell a story so it's kind of nightmare to set up
every game written by vincent baker works great. as long as you have vincent baker to gm it for you. otherwise it's missing a bunch of important pieces.
other than dogs in the vineyard. Dogs works fine, as long as you have the optional updated town creation rules and read a dozen Forge threads on how the dice mechanics actually work.
tldr nice cargo cult
So just like od&d then
We use Dogs rules for our star wars games and it works great.
It gave us the best air pirate RPG, so it's alright in my book.
Sex moves are cringe, though.
Nothing.
Classic game, dated feel. Mechanics work for generating drama and friction. It's about genre simulation rather than physics simulation.
Sex mechanics are weird but fit within the context of adult television in the United States. They feel weird because we're prudes and the last time games tried to cover sex mechanically it involved shit like anal circumference.
Nowadays there are better games. I like Legacy far better for post-apocalyptic fiction.
I really like it in principle, it actually got me excited about roleplaying in a way that traditional systems never managed to do.
I'm not sure why exactly /tg/ has a hate boner for pbtas.
It's really good for what's made for. Nothing else.
>I'm not sure why exactly /tg/ has a hate boner for pbtas.
Same reason we hate every current edition of DnD. Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Star Wars and whatever else is popular. People try to reskin for everything.
The Apocalypse Engine is not nor intended to be used as a universal genetic role play system. It was made very for a very specific setting and gameplay in mind and should not be "hack" into whatever is flavour of month.
There are good and bad pbtas though. I don't disagree that many are quite shit, but the good ones are really really good imo.
Oh there definitely is but Power by the Apocalypse is a lot like the d20 system was in the late 90s early 2000s. It was built for a very specific game and playstyle that's suitable to be used as a generic universal system and yet people keep trying. "Have you tried not playing DnD?" is a meme here for reason.
If you wanted to make tabletop fallout your best bet would be GURPS. Not just because it is a generic universal system and a good imao but it's very system the PC game originally built to use. PBTA despite Apocalypse World literally taking place in a post apocalypse world is not. Okay maybe Fallout 4.
But there isn't much of a common system in pbta. Only the most generic concepts carry over, but in good pbta the system is very much specialized for the specific genre/whatever it's trying to be. And I think that's great.
>But there isn't much of a common system in pbta. Only the most generic concepts carry over,
So why even use the PBTA engine then? It's like Bethesda using the Gamebryo Engine for Fallout 3. Yes mods will fix it. But why find something that's scratch build ground up?
Are you asking me why play PBTA games? Because (the good ones) are fun and elegantly designed and actually make me inspired and want to play, as opposed to feel like I'm studying for an exam. Mind you, I normally really like reading rulebooks, but TTRPG ones are pretty dogshit for the most part.
But your game engine comparison is completely beyond me and I feel like that's not what you were trying to say. What here is analogous to mods, what is analogous to game engines?
Gamebryo is a weird comparison because I’d compare something like Skyrim and Skyrim mods to 5e and its offshoots.
The system was made for High Fantasy specifically and it does that well enough, but people try to jam other settings onto it to the point it doesn’t work anymore. There’s a video somewhere of Skyrim modded to hell to the point that it’s like a Resi remake style zombie game set in modern day Japan or something and the only recognizable thing is the UI. That’s bizarre and unfitting for the system because ut’s not what it was made for. Square peg, round hole.
PbtA is a full engine like Unreal 5 or Unity. It gives tools to make a full system. Some people will just use premade or stolen assets and slap a price tag on it, others will spend time crafting a delicate piece of art from it. With PbtA that would be like, City of Mist (a favorite of mine) or BitD which have enough variance that the engine itself is still there, but there’s clearly been something made out of it that it’s something else. (Funnily enough both CoM and BitD have their own spin-off games that use them as a basis too.)
I dunno. It’s like 6 AM here and I had a long day.
I honestly wouldn't describe it as an engine. It's more like an example of game design concepts that can be loosely replicated than a concrete set of mechanics to build on top of.
>PbtA is a full engine
there's not really a "Powered by the Apocalypse" book that the other games are based on. he eventually released "Simple World" years after people were shitting out PbtA games. it is supposedly the core, but almost every PbtA game ignores or rewrites massive portions of Simple World
it's really a series of trends like 2d6 bad-mixed-good rolls and playbooks and simple modifiers, and even some of those are left out of pbta games or not even from apocalypse world originally
It's not as bad as people here make out but there's some bad things about as some have pointed out.
It's almost a puzzle trying to figure out how it's run because of how it's written which is probably half the reason people make bad game from it. If you understand the GM is supposed to strictly follow the game's procedures like an OSR game then it flows really well.
The sex stuff is very cringe and kinda brings the game down a bit into magical realms, it's better off without it.
There's a good system there but it is buried a bit by shit stuff and isn't the rules lite actor game I thought it was. I haven't looked around but I bet there's probably a good PBTA game that cleans off the shit and actually is a good game.
A lengthy blog post on how vincent baker runs games disguised as a system.
My favourite type of games are the one where players are free to do whatever,I consider any system that helps me to gm such games really good. AW is a system like that, also is a stepping stone for rpgs' game design
>apocalypse setting number 9999999