I’ve been porting a DCC-style corruption table into Apocalypse World for my home game. Basic idea: when weird stuff goes wrong you pick up a permanent mark. Mutations, creepy tells, whatever. They stack up over a campaign and never heal.

The question is the trigger. My first instinct was just: miss on a weird roll (open your brain especially), roll on the table. Players know exactly what they’re risking before they touch the dice.

But my friend’s argument is that this steals the miss from the MC. A 6- is the MC’s cue to make as hard a move as she likes. So by that logic corruption should just be another hard move on her list (“inflict a corruption mark”), picked when the fiction actually points there.

I keep flip-flopping. Her version feels more correct to me, more in the spirit of the game. But some players have said pretty directly that knowing the exact stakes is the only reason they’re brave enough to open their brain at all.

Is there an actual principle here for when a hack gets to hard-code a consequence onto a miss vs. routing everything through MC choice? AW itself has “on a miss…” text on some moves, so there’s precedent both ways. Examples from published hacks that handle this well would be really helpful.

I've run a few sessions of Curseborne for one of my groups. It's been fun. They're doing an investigation and tracking down the bad guy. Last session I left them mid-scene as a cliffhanger.

Cut to last Friday when one of the players couldn't make it. Hard to start up the session missing one of the characters who is pivotal to the scene. So, I grab the Roll Big or Go Home 2 Humble Bundle and see Urban Shadows 2e in it. I start reading it, and it has the urban fantasy vibe Curseborne has. So I run a one-shot of that for the other 3 players in my group.

It was really, really fun to run. It scratched the urban fantasy itch I've been having, and it's a lot easier for me to run, since I prefer no-prep, and Curseborne requires a bit of prep if you're going to learn your antagonists before running them. The only downside I see is it's going to be hard to convert the whole Curseborne crew over since there are two Primals in it, both of which would probably fall under The Wolf playbook.

I'm asking the group if they want to change over to Urban Shadows going forward. How much friction will it cause to have two The Wolfs? One would be cat-themed, and one would be spider-themed if that matters.

I'm looking for the most creative PbtA games out there.

Hello everyone! Our little gaming group is excited to share a new game we made. Here's our big Thank You to the PBtA community.

What's The Game?

Venturtale is lightweight PbtA-style game that uses colorful dice, and simple "Yes" and "No" results. A fun, improv-centric system, it takes no time to make a character and get playing.

Where Can I Download It?

You can get our game off itch.io right here, totally free:

https://insufferablegoblinstudio.itch.io/venturetale

I just finished my first experience with PbtA (Avatar) as the GM no less. All the players have years of TTRPG experience, but the other side of the coin (D20 systems, D6 skill-based). We had one player chaffing so bad she quit after one session, and her and I hashed out how this isn't suitable for murder hobos. That is fine.

But what about art?

Battle maps?

In a "play to find out" mode, dumping a lot of time into art seems perfectly useless. But they really want battle maps. They want to see what we are describing. I want to just say "use your imagination" and take another stab and environmental storytelling (which I am rather good at).

How do you all feel about such approaches?
EDIT:
yes, this is a virtual game on a VTT (roll20). I made a blank map with a maroon background and slapped on some rectangles. The players had their virtual pens out too. And each of my NPCs had a token, so it was easy enough to show bad-guys, and the players dragged out their tokens. It was just ugly and hard to understand (it was a bird's eye view of different levels of a castle (upper court, its parapet; lower court with its parapet; and then inside the castle . It was a mess.)

Hi all, this might be painfully elementary but thought this might be an appropriate place to ask. I'm pretty new to rpgs in general, but I've wanted to break into them for a long time. I'm super interested in them, love reading them, but I've struggled to break into actually playing them for a long time. (I'm sure I'm probably not alone in that?)

Embarrassingly, while I'm very drawn to this kind of play, in practice I think my core issue is that I'm intimidated by the actual act of roleplay. I know I'm not hopeless but it's just not really a skill I have yet. It's new to me!

When I've tried joining a game run by someone else, the moment it's my turn to think in character, say something as my character, I lock up and draw blanks. Needless to say, trying to teach myself GMing while also trying to introduce new players, has been daunting. The couple times I've tried it actually had fun for a couple sessions but I get overwhelmed quickly and feel like I've lost a handle on the campaign and don't know how to proceed after two sessions. With my PCs, NPCs, the environment, whatever, there's a lot of vagueness, talking around and describing conversations rather than actually doing dialogue, and I just don't feel able to get specific or think through the characters.

I understand it's an extremely broad question, but anybody have advice on getting more comfortable with roleplaying and starting to build that muscle?

(Edit: I posted here because these games are the ballpark of rpgs that interest me and I thought I might get advice that aligned with me here. If this is the wrong place to ask let me know and I'll take my question elsewhere. Thanks!)

Edit again: Thank you all for the avalanche of fantastic advice. I'm inspired to renew my efforts and relax a little :)

Hello! I’m wanting to run my first ever game of Escape from Dino Island and I have some questions that I’m not finding answers for.

In the different hero types, it states that the hero can do what [blank] generally can do. Ex.: An engineer is able to do what an engineer can generally do.

What does that mean though? I understand that an engineer can build things but the use of the word “generally” and the fact that Jury-Rig is the special move that they still have to roll for makes it confusing to me.

I may just be thinking too hard about it but if anyone can just tell it me like I’m 5, that would be awesome.

Thank you in advance 🖤

Just curious what PBtA systems offer a mix of magic and steampunk-esque things like airships, automatons etc? I made a world that’s a mix of political intrigue and cosmic horror and was looking for a system that would fit that and the mix of magic and tech.

In a fight, if you Deliver a Beat down and don't choose "You avoid any counter-attack," can you still roll Take a Hit or Get Outta the Way to avoid the damage, or is the counter-attack damage automatic?

I would assume you can roll to avoid the damage, but none of the examples show characters doing that.

Recently, I have come back to the origins and GMed some Space Knights (instead of Super Space Knights) for some fans in Discord. And it works well: after so many expansions, I had forgotten how compact the original game was. There’s space for a lot of hacking and house rules, but just with the 12 pages of the original document you have for many hours of campaigning ruthlessly against the enemies of the Dominion.

Back in the day, I wrote a series of posts about the possibility of using other factions in Super Space Knights, specifically, renegade knights, the result of accumulating too many damnation points. Pbta games can be very specific, and their rulesets are tailored to simulate a very concrete game experience. I have been fiddling with the rules to create other armies for players, but the truth is, you have to change A LOT of things even with the tiniest innovation. Take the Plutonic Church (here) for example: they seem very similar to regular space knight companies but they serve an organisation that might be in conflict with others, they work different and, in general, they are no space knights, therefore, all the SM agenda, written for the space knights, have to be rewritten, usually in a deeper level than just changing “space knight” for “regular trooper”. The moves mention the order, the companies and a number of things that are exclusive of the space knights: you can’t just expect a clone regiment consulting the Code of the Space Knights: it’s just not their thing. At the very least, the agendas and the basic moves have to be modified before including new armies in the game. Using factions from outside the Dominion gets even more complex because the rules are written, keeping in mind that players are going to defend it. Glory and Damnation, for example, are constructs that rely on the Dominion’s society (the way people see you for good or for bad) and are quite different for some dark soul renegades. That is a step further beyond new agendas and moves.

So, I started from the bottom and I am now writing a ruleset for renegade knights using the Space Knights rules as a base and adding all the material I created back in the day (that needs a lot of work and adjustments but, hey, I am now five years more experienced). The type of units player can control will have mini-moves very similar to those from Space Knights, and instead of the classic companies, players will be on charge of sorcerers, fallen knights, techno-maniacs (those who rely too much on technology and cross a dangerous line), hordes of cultists and the like. Tags will be familiar ones, but Taints of Darkness will be much more present from the beginning. Instead of an order of pious space knights, the players will be part of a Horde that ravages the worlds of the Dominion.

An interesting part of the agenda is going to be focused on the fact that the renegades are on their own with no homeworld to rest, no loyal factories that resupply them, and finite amounts of weapon They search for the ultimate power, but they are not particularly well equipped for their quest. This makes the games something else than just carnage and burning cities but a desperate fight for survival in a galaxy where nobody likes you. Life in the Dominion can be miserable but even the lowest workers get some nutritious paste (even if just a little) and have a dirty blanket to rest sometimes: renegades said no to all that and turns out that the void is not particularly welcoming either. But not everything is against you as the Darkness is a generous mother that rewards its followers with gifts beyond imagination on its road for the final victory.

And that will be it for now. I will keep you updated.