Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. I kind of fancy looking at death and death moves today, perhaps because I’ve been listening to a lot of depressive […]
Let’s Design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG pt6: Expanding and dealing with threats
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. Okay, I think I’m feeling more confident making moves for this now that I know where we are in terms of […]
Let’s Design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG Pt 5: Areas of Conflict
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. Content Warning: Brief mention of suicide. So, in my last blog, I tried and failed to create any truly interesting basic […]
Let’s Design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG pt 4: I try and fail to design basic moves.
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. Okay, so now we’re onto defining the basic moves and stats, and possibly the playbook moves for our characters. In Vincent’s […]
Let’s design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG pt 3: Characters
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. So now that we have our genre and we’ve stretched it out a little bit so that we have room to […]
Let’s design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG pt 2: Genre
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. Powered by the Apocalypse games are particularly good at simularing genre, unlike say D20 or BRP, which model physics or some […]
Let’s design a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG pt 1: Why PbtA?
Throughout this series we’ll be using Vincent Baker’s blog series Powered by the Apocalypse and Brandon Leon-Gamebtta’s twitter thread of various PbtA move shapes. The view from the shoulders of giants is pretty good. A lot of the writing I’ve done on the blog so far has been little snippets from two of my in […]
GM moves as permission
I talked in the last posted about how GM or MC moves as they’re presented in Apocalypse World and its descendants emulate genre by making sure that the GM’s response is always in genre. This is why, in my opinion, the closer your game clings to the original Apocalypse World MC moves, probably the weaker […]
Escalating horror
Historically, a lot of the burden of genre emulation in roleplaying games has fallen on the adventures or scenarios written for them, rather than from the games themselves. Dungeons and Dragons is basically an absurd physics engine with some tactical combat thrown in; there’s nothing in there mechanically to ensure you go on some rip-roaring […]
If it bleeds…
There’s a line in Predator, “if it bleeds, we can kill it”. The equivalent in RPGs is “if it has stats, we can kill it”. I came up on Rifts back in the 90s (after a long incubation in Fighting Fantasy in the 80s), and one of the first sourcebooks I purchased was Pantheons of […]