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.