Subsections of Games

Powered by the Apocalypse

  • Powered by the Apocalypse, by which we mean Agency and Consent.
  • Powered by the Apocalypse, by which we mean influenced by and pays homage to Apocalypse World.
  • Not necessarily Powered by the Apocalypse, by which we mean 2d6 and playbooks and moves. However, that is a thing.

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

The Players Telling the Game

  • PbtA is about being a lazy GM.
  • 1.5h prep time per session at worst/best.
  • Most PbtA settings are about a page.
  • Don’t even set the world too much; let this build out as the game goes.
  • Most of the narrative comes from the players; the GM reacts to what they create.

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.

GM Prep

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.

Writing up a One Shot

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.

Writing up a Campaign

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.

Flow & Pacing

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.

Fronts/Clocks

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.

Rolls and Moves

  • The GM should never roll.
  • Players should only roll when there are exciting and possibly messy results to come from it.
  • If the outcome of the move doesn’t drive the story, then don’t have a move. If you don’t have a move for what the player tries to do, then let it go. Make it a yes.

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.

Consequences

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.

  • physical
  • emotional
  • material stakes
  • reputation
  • Go far, their concept, their name, anything on the character sheet.

NPCs

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.

Playing

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.

Brindlewood Bay

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.

Dungeons & Dragons 5e

Quick Rules

Specific Rules always beat general rules Always round everything down

The Roll

  1. roll d20
  2. add modifier
  3. apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties
  4. Compart against the target (DC or AC)

If there is an advantage or disadvantage roll 2d20 and take the highest or lowest depending

Three Pillars of Adventure

  1. Exploration
  2. Social Interaction
  3. Combat

Player Desires to Cater to

  • Acting
  • Exploring
  • Instigating
  • Fighting
  • Optimizing
  • Problem Solving
  • StoryTelling

Tables

Typical DC Checks

Difficulty DC
v.easy 5
easy 10
medium 15
hard 20
v.hard 25
fuuuuuck 30

Fate

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:

  1. Take risks. Get into trouble. It’s okay; you get to decide the consequences! Even if you can’t single-handedly slay the dragon, give it a go! You can get yourself out of trouble before things get terrible.
  2. Make use of the environment. When players attempt actions, aspects encourage them to consider what else in the scene can help.
  3. Let bad stuff happen to you. Embrace it. You get Fate points. I’m still not sure about this reward ratio, but there is an effort to encourage bad things.
    1. Fail forward. Tying into #3, this encourages a familiar literature arc where you advance the story early on (when you have few FP) by failing at what you set out to do, running into trouble, and then (when you have more FP) having a more dramatic success later that gets you your goal.
  4. Encourage complicated characters. Because you have a fixed number of character aspects, the game encourages you to make them dual nature and broadly interpreted, encouraging players to spend a lot of thought deciding their aspects and making them more interesting/applicable.

Aspects

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.

Compels

Event & Decision Based

Advantages

I often like to say that if you’ve got a Broken Leg…

  1. If that causes you to stumble at an inopportune time, that’s an invoke
  2. If that makes it so you can’t climb a ladder, that’s just narrative truth.
  3. If the thing you need is on a ladder, that’s a Compel
  4. If it makes it harder to get somewhere fast, that’s passive opposition.

Note that only the Invoke and Compel require a Fate Point.

Flow & Pacing Mechanisms, the 3 C’s

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.

Revised Bronze Rule, Aka Fate Fractal

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:

  1. Is this thing capable of action against other characters, or does something else take action on its behalf?
  2. Does what I’m making need an added layer of complication by making aspects, skills, stunts, or whatever?

Before applying the Bronze rule, answer three questions about whatever narrative element you’re looking at:

  • Is it capable of its own actions?
    • Then it is an actor. It can have all that good stuff — aspects, skills/approaches, stress & consequences, etc. and take action.
  • If not capable of action, is it capable of resisting action?
    • Then it is an obstacle that can have aspects, a difficulty or set of difficulties, and possibly several victories needed to overcome it as a challenge.
  • If not capable of action, is it something that can be possessed?
    • Then it is a thing that can have aspects and may convey stunts and other rules to the wielder.

GM Prep

The Fate Mentality

  • Take inspiration from movies and TV, not from video games.
  • Begin with the fantastic moments you want to create, and then establish whatever facts about the world you need to get you there.

Prepping Fate

  1. You need a story problem that is urgent and catastrophic if ignored.
  2. Look at the PCs’ aspects and the game aspects, and see what problems those imply. Make them open-ended, like “aliens are attacking.”
  3. Think about what details you need to solve the problem, like “how many aliens, who is the leader, how are they invading, where and when?”
  4. Answering each of those questions is a problem in its own right, and each scene should answer one or two of these questions.
  5. Think of who would oppose the PCs and prepare them and their minions.

Running Fate

  • Think about scenes, and montage anything that doesn’t deserve to be a scene.
  • Each scene needs a story question to answer (that’s how you know when the scene is over) and a source of opposition (that’s how you give your problem agency and urgency).

FATE Session Zero/One-Shot

  • Session Zero
  • Fate Game Creation Worksheet
  • initial dials to set for the game
    • Setting: Define setting, tone, & genre as aspects.
    • Scale: how epic or personal it is.
    • Issues: Two issues (Current &&|| Impending). Both are aspects
    • Faces & Places: Make a few Antag & Protag NPCs and locations w/ aspects/issues.
    • Skills & Stunts: Home brew it some
  • Character Creation
    • Character creation is play!
    • High Concept, Trouble, then Name, in that order.
    • Phase one: Each Character describes their first or notable adventure
    • Phase Two: Each character describes how they crossed paths with another character
    • Phase Three: Each character describes how they crossed paths with somebody else
    • Make aspects out of all three phases.
    • Skills
    • Stunts
    • Refresh
    • Update Stress & Consequences: Will & Physique

FATE Session Flow

  • Be cinematic; Open with a cold open or the opening sequence.
  • Think about scenes, and montage anything that doesn’t deserve to be a scene.
  • Each scene needs a story question to answer (that’s how you know when the scene is over) and a source of opposition (that’s how you give your problem agency and urgency).
  • When you have about an hour left in your session, work towards a dramatic moment that can serve as a climax for the session.
  • End of Session Routine

End of Session Experience

fill this out someday, I really just read from the book every time

Monster of the Week

Monster of the Week Takeaways

Book Summary of sessions

Keeper Agenda & Principles

Refresh before every game Keeper Agenda and Principles

Your Agenda is Made up of Three Elements

  • Make the world seem real.
  • Play to see what happens.
  • Make the hunters’ lives dangerous and scary.

The Keeper Principles

The twelve specific ways to apply your agenda

  • Put horror in everyday situations.
  • Address yourself to the hunters, not the players.
  • Use the Keeper moves, never use their names.
  • Be a fan of the hunters.
  • Build up a coherent mythology of the world as you play.
  • Nothing is safe. Kill bystanders and minions, burn down buildings, let monsters be slain.
  • Name everyone they meet, make them seem like normal folks.
  • Ask questions and build on the answers.
  • Sometimes give the hunters exactly what they earned, rather than everything they wanted.
  • Think about what’s happening off-screen.
  • You don’t always have to decide what happens.
  • Everything is a threat.

Six Basic Elements of Story

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:

  • A basic concept for the mystery.
  • The hook that got the hunters’ attention.
  • The Threats
  • The mystery countdown.
  • Optionally: custom moves for special aspects of the mystery.

Keeper Moves

Basic Keeper Moves

  • Separate them.
  • Reveal future badness.
  • Reveal off-screen badness.
  • Inflict harm, as established.
  • Make them investigate.
  • Make them acquire stuff.
  • Tell them the possible consequences and ask if they want to go ahead.
  • Turn their move back on them.
  • Offer an opportunity, maybe with a cost.
  • Take away some of the hunters’ stuff.
  • Put someone in trouble.
  • Make a threat move, from one of your mystery or arc threats.
  • After every move, ask what they do next.

Monster Threat Moves

  • Hint at its presence
  • Display its full might
  • Appear suddenly
  • Attack with great force and fury
  • Seize someone or something
  • Attack with stealth and calculation
  • Order underlings to do terrible acts
  • Destroy something
  • Escape, no matter how well contained it is
  • Give chase
  • Return to home ground
  • Boast and gloat, maybe revealing a secret
  • Return from seeming destruction
  • Use an unnatural power

Minion Threat Moves

  • A burst of sudden, uncontrolled violence
  • Make a coordinated attack
  • Capture someone, or steal something
  • Reveal a secret
  • Deliver someone or something to the master
  • Give chase
  • Make a threat or demand on behalf of the master
  • Run away
  • Use an unnatural power
  • Display a hint of conscience or humanity
  • Disobey the master, in some petty way

Bystander Threat Moves

  • Go off alone
  • Argue with the hunters
  • Get in the way
  • Reveal something
  • Confess their fears
  • Freak out in terror
  • Try to help the hunters
  • Try to protect people
  • Display inability or incompetence
  • Seek help or comfort

Location Threat Moves

  • Present a hazard
  • Reveal something
  • Hide something
  • Close a way
  • Open a way
  • Reshape itself
  • Trap someone
  • Offer a guide
  • Present a guardian
  • Something doesn’t work properly
  • Create a particular feeling

First Mystery

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.

MotW Session Zero

  • Session Zero
  • Explain & Guide Character setup
    • Ask if the team has a concept they want to start
    • Decide why you became a team
    • Else go right to picking playbooks
  • Create Hunters together
  • Come up with team history.
  • Break!
  • Game!

MotW Session Flow

End of Session Move

Ask the following and depending on how many completed everybody gets: 1-2 = 1 exp, 3-4 = 2 exp.

  • Did we conclude the current mystery?
  • Did we learn something new and important about one of the hunters?
  • Did we learn something new and important about the world?
  • Did we save someone from certain death (or worse)?

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.

Second Session

  • Let players swap out moves they didn’t like

Resources

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Takeaways

  • Remember, the whole game is the players telling their stories.
  • Be a huge fan of the characters.
  • Tie in all plots against the character’s backstories.
  • Let the players drive the story, don’t be attached to any antag/plotline.
  • TSL works well as an NPC-forward game where you want to make characters they’ll be smitten with.
    • Keep all the antagonists in fem/nb/player alignment.
    • Tie in all the antagonists emotionally to the character’s core concepts and backgrounds. (dated, fought, etc.)
    • Keep the antagonists flirty.
    • Make every single antagonist encounter meaningful, with no trash mobs and no drop in battles. Make anybody the players cross somebody they would cross swords with in a heated way.
  • Put players in positions where fighting is usually not the obvs answer, and encourage other moves.
  • Use the playbook challenges for GMs listed in TSL, and keep them close.
    • Refer to the character’s core problem on a down beat.
  • With “defy disaster,” ask what they risk sacrificing FIRST.
  • Keep players’ special hooks and abilities close to help encourage them.
  • Have the toxic powers be toxic powers without having to bring misogyny, racism, etc., into it.
  • Dig into conditions, make them emotional, and with a significant impact, play them up.
  • Figuring someone out is usually something that is Intuited IC, not asked out loud.
  • Having antag get strings on something for later is better than losing something abstract.

TSL Campaign Flow

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.

Game Prep

  • Set up Roll20 or print out everything
  • Get the Relationship Questions & GM Moves
  • Get the Handouts for game start and world build.

One Shot

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.

TSL Session Zero

  • Session Zero
  • Go over the TSL World Building Worksheet.
  • Explain and guide the character setup
    • Discuss each player’s playbook conflict and primary move.
    • Go over sword importance.
  • Ask for any Pre-Relationship tasks in playbooks.
  • Character relationship setting
    • Round robin through all three questions
    • Encourage but not force variety in answers.
    • Spend a bit on each question.
    • Make sure it’s two-way consensual, and have both players expand on it!
    • Let players grant any extra strings (two max)
  • Have a ten-minute break here.

TSL Session

  • Ask for any start of session moves
  • Ask for any start of scene/new area moves
  • Action flow
    • Have the characters say what they want to do
    • Decide the pick the playbook move and modifier.
    • Ask them what they are risking.
    • Describe what they are doing for it
    • Only then roll
  • When you have about an hour left in your session, work towards a dramatic moment that can serve as a climax for the session.
  • End of Session Routine

End of Session Move

At the end of every session, each player marks XP if, during the session:

  • Any PC confessed their love.
  • Any PC struck a blow against oppression or de-escalated a violent situation.
  • Any PC leaped into danger with daring and panache.
  • Any player used a safety practice such as adding to the palette or checking in.