What has your experience with the PBtA system been?
What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses?
What PBtA game do you find the most enjoyable?
PBtA Discussion Thread
Angel Phillips
Other urls found in this thread:
Noah Ortiz
Strenghts:
>Oddball characters and general craziness. If other games try to be The Road or Left 4 Dead, PBTA is Mad Max and proud of it.
>"Cinematic". Like all VB games, it's made to give support to the action but never get on its way. No MUH REALISMS AND BALANCED PHYSICS here.
>Really simple to learn and play. Has just the right amount of crunch to get you going, but never gets cluttered.
Weaknesses:
>You'll have a hard time homebrewing it. PBTA works by setting rather rigid character templates (maybe not very rigid if you're used to D&D, but if you come from, say, Savage Worlds, it's very restrictive) and it's pretty hard to make new templates or a free character creation system that balances well with the rest of the rules. If you're trying to play PBTA in your setting, you'll have a really bumpy road ahead of you. At least the setting is quite vague so you can give it your own twist.
I played a couple games with it, in wich all players were members of a post-apoc biker gang, in a world where almost everything was some kinda pop culture reference. Like, we had a tribe of bikers that dressed like 19th century dragoons, carried Union Jacks and venerated Ed, the zombie god of glorious death, and the biker gang the players belonged to was one long Pink Floyd reference. Had lots os fun, would want to try Icelandic Sagas.
Logan Powell
>What has your experience with the PBtA system been?
Played about a half dozen of them. Had a blast pretty much every game. I'd easily call it my favorite system to play. I'll give about any PBtA game a shot at least once, even if I don't normally have much interest in the theme of it.
>What are its strengths?
- In a "good" PBtA game, the theme is super strong. Monster of the Week? On-point to simulate Buffy, Supernatural, X-files and any other supernatural MotW game. Monsterhearts? Sexy supernatural teen drama. etc. The games tweak the mechanics to reinforce their chosen theme and often end up making it a stellar experience.
- Easy to pick up and keep track of. Don't have to think much about numbers and can focus on story.
- Easy to adapt to a different PbtA game if you want to switch to a new theme.
>What are its weaknesses?
- Players who have trouble speaking up and contributing will flag without a GM holding their hand.
- Players who don't dig narrative games will get bored.
- Longer campaigns are more difficult to do without switching out characters or restarting a character from ground zero.
>What PBtA game do you find the most enjoyable?
For me, Monsterhearts. I love sexy, twisted character drama and "superpowers".
Jordan Powell
Nice system but it falls apart after few sessions. It really isn't made for longer stories.
Alexander Bailey
Sounds like a group problem.
Parker King
>if you try to play PbtA in your setting you'll have a bumpy road ahead
It's mostly because the kind of story you want to tell is tied tightly into the mechanics of the game. If you want to change aspects of the game narrative or setting, you need to change the relevant mechanics as well.
Sebastian Wilson
>"All it's weaknesses are really players' faults."
Charles Fisher
Not really what I meant. I just meant "different strokes for different folks". There are tons of games I wish I liked, but they're from a completely different realm of roleplaying from what I am used to or have learned to enjoy. It is what it is.
I'm sure it has proper "faults" aside from what I listed, but as I'm not the technical sort of roleplayer, I'd never notice or find myself valid in critiquing whatever I wasn't sure I liked when it comes to something like mechanics.
Mason Jones
I've not played one yet, (want to, though), but I've also been told that a well-designed PbtA game's main strength is driving play by frequently presenting the players with hard, mutualy exclusive choices.
Thoughts on that?
James Reyes
I've played a couple, but I enjoy Monsterhearts the most. It needs the right kind of group to play it, but it's basically a perfect translation of a genre into game form.
Well, it's up to the GM to follow the GM moves as appropriate. 'Put the players in a spot' is a GM move. 'Tell them the possible consequences, and ask if they're sure they want to go ahead' is another one.
Likewise, often player moves have something like:
"Fast, cheap, good. On a 10+, all three. On a 7+, pick one or two, or the GM will pick".
It's on the GM to pick appropriately.
You can do this in any game, PbtA games just strongly encourage it.
That's really the best way to sum up PbtA games - what you SHOULD be doing anyway in games, just explicitly written.
Played Dungeon World instead of one of the better games, huh?