While these notes are primarily written for me as a GM, they can help all players understand the game more and know what to expect
D&D and Fate are power fantasy games. Their mechanics often focus on if you can do something or not. Powered by the Apocalypse is not a power fantasy game; there is a lot of mess. There isn’t even a crit system.
PbtA’s moves are narrative-focused, not mechanic-focused.
PbtA’s mechanics are less focused on how you accomplish something and more about narrative control. In most PbtA games, emotional stakes are the central focus of the moves over mechanical aspects, where it is usually assumed you more or less can do anything.
PbtA is the best system so far at telling stories about being in the messy middle. You will mostly have mixed beat rolls, where a player succeeds with consequences. Monsterhearts recommends keeping the story feral, and this fits many games, letting the story’s messy, chaotic momentum guide it forward. At any given moment, focus on reacting to the other players. Allow others to foil your plans or improve upon them. Trust that a good story emerges from wildness. Play to find out what happens next. Let yourself be surprised.
Conversely, D&D (and similar games) creates the expectation that you might die if you prepare the wrong spells, don’t buy the correct item, or don’t do a perception check on the door. If you are not fully prepared and do not have a capital p Plan, you will be punished.
PbtA generally doesn’t do that; character optimization and advanced planning are less of a thing. You are not punished for lack of forethought, enabling you to explore haphazardly and messily with relative (physical) safety.
Before you play, spend a lot of time clarifying what the game is and offers and getting the player’s explicit buy-in. Some players are surprised it’s not D&D, does not offer combat as an easy/standard solution, or is not on rails.
Keep in mind there is no comprehensive way to run ALL PbtA games since the games vary so much. For instance, Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts are designed for PvP, and the role of the gm is to keep the escalation snowball going and gently guide it, but it can be much more hands-off.
Compare Apocalypse World’s guidance that NPCs are expendable with Thirsty Sword Lesbians’ safety measures helping NPCs feel like people, not playthings.
There are not a lot of moves because you want players to be more or less able to keep them in their heads. There shouldn’t be vague moves that double dip. If there isn’t a move for something, it’s not significant behavior to the system.
A lot of PbtA it’s about making a story with the players, not building a world and story around them
Always leave space for players to come up with content. Never resist; lean into whatever gets added.
The majority of disaster PbtA games come from when you prepared too much or were too attached to what ideas you had. Don’t fight the ‘yes,’ always go with them.
The maximum tier of players telling the game is when players ask you questions, tell them you don’t know, and ask them what they think.
Let the players wholly and fundamentally change the world with narrative. Be willing to change the laws of physics.
Set up stakes: not solutions, win conditions or endgames. Solutions should always come from the player.
When setting up your tabletop. Toss some evocative images in scene pages that match the story. Don’t use a map otherwise too restrictive. Keep it accessible for the narrative, or you will box yourself in.
Give them a goal that can be achieved in a one-shot, a threat, a toxic power that can be struck down. Surround them with sexy villains and a sexy ally or two.
Don’t develop a plot; come up with a situation instead. Put some pressure on the PCs so that they have to do something, but don’t even think about what that thing will be.
In one-shots, you shouldn’t aim for a satisfying finale but an exciting cliffhanger because you can find those cliffhangers more naturally. Rushing to get to the ending can easily become way too forced.
Stephanie’s Mini Campaign Setup: 4 sessions; one session zero and three games. Then take a break. Let people hop about at this point and swap out parts of the game.
Set up the scene with two to three hooks and let them run around. Let the players chew the scenery. Let them fish about and screw about as much as possible until they find something.
If only one person and the GM are in a scene, try and grab in more players and ask how they might be involved in this.
For a cinematic feel of tension and giving a player time on a pick move, cut away after a roll happens, but before you resolve it, to somebody else.
With a one-shot: Spend the first hour of gameplay setting up one big thing to chase. For the next two to three hours, let them deal with it however they see fit. The first quarter of any game is building the world with the players.
When you want to keep players moving forward, your most powerful move is a clock. Go so far as putting a clock on the screen with it filling up as time passes or players hit down beats if you want to drive a feeling of pressure, stress, or drama.
Otherwise, these can be ‘fronts’ that apply pressure by applying a series of impending threats. You can have multiple fronts/clocks with their progress towards impending actions.
For an ongoing campaign, have three or four impending actions that will happen if the characters stay in bed. Do not drive them towards specific goals but make inaction have consequences. Make them increasingly more significant levels of peril, and the antag will do worse and worse. Pre-define these to help yourself out if you need them.
Example Front
The Winter Court
In increasingly greater levels of peril, the Winter Court (Through Ventus) will attempt to:
- Persuade Dyarrys to call off the wedding
- Seduce Nevero to attempt to halt the wedding
- Disrupt the wedding day
- Curse the marriage at the reception
- Abduct Xihtero to the Winter court
Should all these come to pass, I suppose rescuing Xithero would be kind of the next step, huh?
These impending actions are GM moves you can use in a pinch.
If characters don’t engage with fronts, drop them. Set up other ones that tickle the players.
Keep in mind the trigger for any move is in the move. It tells you what happens on a mixed beat or up beat.
During an up beat the GM doesn’t need to worry; the player has all the narrative control.
Mathematically most rolls should be mixed beats. Be prepared for a lot of them. A mixed beat is a success with complications, and the game emphasizes the messy complications that happen most of the time we do things. Try to ask the players about the consequences of their mixed successes and bonus points for doing this before the roll.
On a down beat, there are no move instructions to describe what happens. This is because you grab from the GM moves/reactions.
Don’t make a downbeat a failure or a nothing happens; that stops play. Make it a mistake or a success they wish they hadn’t had. Turning the move back on them is also a common way of looking at how to handle a down beat. Practice having things fail it forward when they get a down beat.
PbtA disincentivizes combat in its DNA as a system. It is built around the concept that combat is messy and everybody involved gets hurt. Nobody comes back undamaged both physically and mentally from actual combat or in PbtA. It’s messy, extra messy.
All actions have consequences, unlike in other games. Most things will have consequences, and few moves are pure win at their base.
Ask what characters are willing to sacrifice; ask if what they want to do is worth something important if they get stuck or you want to push drama up.
Keep your eyes on what is at stake to the character.
When bringing in an NPC, jot down their core motivation, and make sure it fits against what you want to happen next in the story. Mesh it against your player’s core motivations.
Add a layer of something fascinating to everybody.
To do it, do it. Try to guide your players to embrace it and move forward, not hedge their bets.
The GM is your fan; it’s not adversarial.
From Mortaine training class on PbtA GMing
Brindlewood Bay has a two-page scenario page. Which is about twice that of a normal Powered by the Apocalypse game one.
In Brindlewood (as well as Jinkies), there is no answer to the mystery, the players come up with it. They need to come up with something that matches the clues and roll for it.
All NPCs are Suspects and all Suspects are NPCs
Void happens when meddles and rolls really well.
For the first session or two, don’t work on your void conspiracy. One-shots will not usually jump into the void
In Roll 20 Keep a central shared clue sheet, assign a single scribe to prevent chaos
There are no secret clues, the mavens share all.
Specific Rules always beat general rules Always round everything down
If there is an advantage or disadvantage roll 2d20 and take the highest or lowest depending
| Difficulty | DC |
|---|---|
| v.easy | 5 |
| easy | 10 |
| medium | 15 |
| hard | 20 |
| v.hard | 25 |
| fuuuuuck | 30 |
While FATE is a power fantasy game like D&D, it is a narrative control system like Powered by the Apocalypse. Much PbtA and less like Shadowrun and D&D, there is a lack of emphasis on system mastery; the game is about the fiction, not the rules.
Remember that even though it looks like it sometimes, the FATE system is less about simulating the cause-and-effect of actions and more about spending resources to make the narrative go the way you want.
Fate requires some things from its players as much as its GM; Proactive & Competent Characters are the system’s foundation. Alongside this comes the fact that there is a Lack of Character Optimization.
Scenes in Fate games work best as a series of possible branches. They’re not challenges to be overcome.
Fate works best when the opportunity cost is shoved in the players’ faces. That’s a question that appears repeatedly in Fate— how much do you want this, and what are you willing to give up to get it? Do you spend Fate points to buy a victory, succeed at a cost, or accept Compels?
Focus on the cost of things over failures unless you are trying to redirect players.
Fate encourages three things above all else:
keep them double-edged, say more than one thing, and keep phrasing simple
Game Aspects: Don’t forget to make the setting, tone, genre, and pivotal plot points aspects.
Event & Decision Based
I often like to say that if you’ve got a Broken Leg…
Note that only the Invoke and Compel require a Fate Point.
Conflicts, Contests, and Challenges
Use a Challenge when you don’t have active opposition over the entire Challenge.
If your opposition is active and indirect, choose a Contest. By indirect, I mean both sides aren’t engaged in mutual destruction.
If your opposition is active and direct, you use a Conflict. By direct, I mean that the goal of both parties is to get the other to back down in some way, either by getting knocked out and killed, surrendering, fleeing, etc.
It is easy to overcomplicate or create issues with the original Bronze Rule, so it was revised… twice.
In Fate, you can treat anything in the game world capable of taking action like it is a character. They can have aspects, skills/approaches, stunts, stress tracks, and consequences if needed. Everything else can have difficulty ratings, aspects, stunts, stress tracks, and consequences as needed, but only things that can take action can have skills or approaches.
When you’re applying the Bronze Rule, ask yourself two things:
Before applying the Bronze rule, answer three questions about whatever narrative element you’re looking at:
fill this out someday, I really just read from the book every time
Refresh before every game Keeper Agenda and Principles
The twelve specific ways to apply your agenda
A mystery is made up of six basic elements. You can create them in any order, but I’ll show you the order I usually use:
The first mystery is going to be everyone’s introduction to the hunters and to your game’s world. Build a straightforward hunt, to give the hunters space to talk and get a sense of how the team operates. Pick a classic monster that everyone will recognize from folklore, urban legend, or pop culture.
Once you have a monster, come up with a basic concept. Think about what the creature could want, and what bad stuff is going to happen if the hunters don’t stop it. The bad stuff might be personal, local, or apocalyptic in scale.
Ask the following and depending on how many completed everybody gets: 1-2 = 1 exp, 3-4 = 2 exp.
Ask everybody if they have plans for what to do next or ideas for later.
Think about whether the mystery gave you more ideas for your existing arcs, or suggested a new one.
Stephanie’s Mini Campaign Setup: 4 sessions, one (free) session zero and three standard sessions. Then take a break. Let people hop about at this point and swap out game parts.
Missing from the one-shot flow is going over the campaign setup document and letting people pick out the world parameters. This replaces a lot of the Game Style and Tone sessions. Let the players pick it.
Give them a goal that can be achieved in a one-shot: a threat, or a toxic power that can be struck down. Surround them with sexy villains and a sexy ally or two.
At the end of every session, each player marks XP if, during the session: