r/PBtA

A friend of mine is getting ready to run Stonetop. It advertises itself as an iron age that never was. I'm clueless when it comes to the history of technology and culture. I know anachronisms are unavoidable but I'd at least like to understand what sort of things were available and what things were not.

Does anyone have articles or videos that explain the technology and perhaps other things that might be useful? I want to be a good player and come to the table well-informed. It's what I would want out of my players as a GM.

Question's in the title, I haven't had any luck in the usual online places so I wanted to come here and see if anyone had anyway to help.

Hi folks! I want to ask about PbtA games that you feel having gotten much attention. There's a handful of big titles that get suggested all the time, but then there are dozens and dozens of projects that become forgotten or never received notice.

I found a copy of May I Enter in my local game store, and the clerk suggested it for me since she knows I always pick up VtM books from them. I love this alternate take on vampires, where consent and connections are incredibly important in the narrative and mechanics. I'll also highlight this move:

>Slay or Sway

>Description: When you’re under attack, defending yourself is the only option available. Human enemies, and even supernatural foes, understand that an assault on you is justification (and implicit consent) for you to fight back; but sometimes you can choose to convince someone to desist their attempts to harm you as well.

>Effect: When you use this Move, roll with Blood if you intend to lay some harm on someone. If you’d rather use your words to belittle, demean and reduce your foe to a sobbing mess with your will alone, roll with Charm instead.

>Privileges: Terrify, Awe, Destroy

>• On a 12+ You lay down great vengeance and furious anger, dealing 2 Conditions to your foe.

>• On a 10+ You put the smack-down on your enemy, dealing 1 Condition to your target.

>• On a 7-9 You manage to put some hurt on, but take some hassle in the process. Deal 1 Condition to your target, and the Narrator grants a Complication.

>• On a 6-4 You flail wildly or sound foolish. The Narrator grants a Complication.

>• On a 3- Your failure is so legendary that vampires will mock you for centuries. You either hurt yourself, or leave yourself open for a severely fierce rebuttal. You gain 1 Condition.

I appreciate that this move encompasses both having to physically fight, but also trying to argue, and I love the description for a failure. Oof.

I also backed Guillotine: Crown of Blood but never had the time to play it, and then I never heard from the developers again. I think they had another kickstarter in the works but as far as I know it never materialized. That's too bad, because I loved the themes in Guillotine, and I've always wanted to find a group to try it out with.

I'll highlight the playbooks here. There's the Revenant Orator, "A fallen comrade or restless spirit who is able to call others from beyond the pale. Backed by their ghostly cohorts, they are respected leaders of the Cause." Another I really like is the Shadow Cavalier, "You found something in the darkness and agreed to keep and nurture it, now you aren't just at home in the shadows, it hides your footsteps and darkness is your weapon."

OKAY now you all please share! What PbtA and family games do you think deserve a second look?

I'm looking for a PBTA game where a person's social stat can take "harm" like HP in Dungeon World.

Hi! I've been thinking of running a Masks game for a little while now and one of my friends suggested running a play by post game. Besides the core rules are there any resources yall would recommend grabbing or advice I should know?

I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole of light-weight PbtA adjacent, lightweight games.

It all began for me with Cthulhu Dark, which really surprised me with how much game you can squeeze out of two pages of mechanics.

Feeling the itch of find a fantasy Cthulhu-dark-like I discovered the Trophy games (Dark and Gold), who look amazing but are quite limited in the kind of stories you can tell and also ask quite a lot of the GM if you want to adapt an existing scenario.

Then the skies opened up when I discovered Jason Tocci’s 24xx modular engine: more than enough to ran a short game in a very small package. Both 2400 Legends and the 1400 game line look pretty cool and you can literally mix and match to homebrew whatever you need depending on the scenario or setting you want to run.

I also recently discovered Joseph R. Lewis’s Dragon Age Harthbreaker, very related to 24xx but with a Sword & Sorcery heart. The rules are 10 pages long, but I’m sure you could cram them in a single sheet if you made an effort. (I wish the author would expand the game options to cover more classic fantasy, so I could easily use this system with his more recent forays into ShadowDark.)

But now I just realized there is a world of lightweight designs, all influenced by the venerable World of Dungeons, and maybe I haven’t found some obvious gems.

TL;DR What are the best lightweight PbtA, FiTD and adjacent systems? What are your favorites?

I like what I've read about it and I'm familiar with the distinguishing mechanics. It's GMless, uses tokens/lures, and is usually centered around marginalized groups trying to survive oppression/manage their own society.

But beyond that what does the actual gameplay feel like at its best?

What tips do you have for people who struggle in general with the brain juices that tabletop roleplaying demands?

That's kinda where I'm at, I've had fun with Werewolf the Apocalypse but it took me longer than many people to really get the actual game playing and I'm still very much a novice.

I've got both dyslexia and dyscalculia and other brain problems that make it harder

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Recently I’ve begun getting ready to run my first ever PbTA game, having not even known what it was until I began preparing to run it. And I’ve become aware that it seems to be a framework upon which countless different games have been made.

Given that fact, how easy would it be to pull aspects from one game and use them in another? If the exact game I’m running lacks something I think another game does really well, can I just yoink the mechanic and seamlessly place it inside like a puzzle, or do I have to fine tune on a case by case basis?

Full details at the link, but in brief: the project is being pushed back to 2027 after conversations with customers and players, with a crowdfunder for a supplement to another game Magpie puts out moving up to late October in its place. They now say Masks 2e will have a public Quickstart playtest in September of this year instead, in the hopes of gathering feedback before crowdfunding.

It's been a long time coming but we, Five Point Games, are proud to announce that the best Powered by the Apocalypse Monster Catching game is finally out for sale! You can get it at itch.io and RPG-Trader as of now with drivethruRPG coming when they approve the PDF as they are wont to do! The links are as follows

https://rpg-trader.com/products/8260/a-monster-s-tail

https://fivepointsgames.itch.io/a-monsters-tail

The book is 303 and includes the following

- A Chapter on how to run the game and how to run PbtA games in general for those new to games of that nature. Alongside this chapter is also our inspirations and aids for both players and GMs on how to get into the right narrative headspace for the game.

- Full rules on how to play the game while at the table along with optional rules to change how the monsters work. The game is designed to accommodate not just Pokemon style games but Digimon and an assortment of other fan favorite Monster Catching games like Jade Cocoon and Azure Dreams.

- The Trainer playbooks for players to choose from alongside an assortment of Backgrounds to make each player unique

- A GM chapter that not only gives further guidance on how to run the game but also on how to create your own monsters and regions.

- A bespoke Region for those who don't want to do a ton of extra work alongside 100 critters to populate the world with. All in color.

Thanks for your time and interest, and if you backed it your patience and understanding! Here's to more awesome Monster Catching content!

Hey guys!

I've been looking into Urban Shadows 2e, and I found the old kickstarter. They mentioned several playbooks that were digital only and stretch goals. I was wondering if there was any way of gdtting hold of them? Were they published anywhere else?