Games like Fate, Apocalypse World...

Games like Fate, Apocalypse World, and other storygames seem like they are more interesting to read about than actually play.

What's the appeal? Do they actually play well?

Fate and Apocalypse World are almost complete opposites, so seeing them both referred to as "storygames" is pretty weird to me.

I can't talk about Fate, because I am really not a fan of generic systems and Fate is as generic as it gets, but AW's appeal is that it's a pretty damn great post-apocalyptic RPG
The GM section makes running a sandbox game quite easy, even for complete newbies. The mechanics are easy to learn and to explain. They let the players shape the game to their expectations directly and indirectly. They excel at driving conflict between characters. They are fine-tuned to support and embody the intended setting.

Never played AW, but I've had a ton of fun playing FATE.

Apocalypse World plays great at the table. My group also had a fantastic year-long run with Dungeon World too, but don't tell the autists.

The games work when you have players who are willing to take the ball and add details. Players who need to be spoon fed details and quests will not have a good time with these games.

That said, I had a fantastic time with World Wide Wrestling, Urban Shadows, and Dungeon World. Though the last one was ruined by a player who's idea of playing a barbarian whose idea of backstory was "My tribe plays whack-a-mole at festivals and I was bullied in Barbarian school and left since I was wayyy smarter than everyone else".

Another player took a LONG time to understand that he was in charge of narration as much as I since he was busy trying to figure out how to game the system and purposefully took his casting stat as a low one for more xp.

So in short, great fun, but you really need the right group for it.

>Another player took a LONG time to understand that he was in charge of narration as much as I since he was busy trying to figure out how to game the system and purposefully took his casting stat as a low one for more xp.
That's why the *World hacks that make it so that making a good story is how to game the system are the best made ones. It prompts better play from everyone, especially the powergamers.

I've been running a Monsterhearts campaign for quite some time now, it has become the longest running game my group has ever maintained interest in precisely because the system is very fun to play.

PbtA games aren't really a system though, it's a particular design philosophy as opposed to a specific set of mechanics.

Oh yeah for sure! Which is why I'm loving Urban Shadows. I had a brief game of Monsterhearts that was sadly forgettable.

Anyone play Spirit of 77?

Dungeon World is a pretty bad AW hack, so...

Funnily enough, the Barbarian I played in Dungeon World also left his tribe because he was the weakest and smartest of them. With 16 STR and 8 INT. But I didn't ruin the game.

The player in question was just a lame player all around. One of those barely pays attention, complains about combat, but only engages in shootbangs. But yeah, I didn't get why DW was a bad hack until I read the other games.

Wrestling is amazing, but a hard sell in my playgroup (same player as above was like "Do we only wrestle?"), and I'm looking forward to the Urban Shadows game I'm running Saturday.

How do you guys feel about Monster of the Week?

>What's the appeal?
Some people just want to tell the story and not "play the game". And need just light mechanics that support the claim of what their characters are, by providing them some stats, and as element of chance, suspense and unpredictability over a pure GM fiat.

I'm personally not really into "gaming" part of RPG so I like the basic concept, though it's often botched in execution through at example excesive meta.

That's why I rather stick to games that may not be labeled as "narrative" or "storytelling", usually mildly simulationist or somewhere balanced games that have mechanics that maybe don't obnoxiously try to "support" RP with mechanics, but rather flow besides it, not interfering.

>Because I shacked up with a cripple, we get a mechanical bonus to moving a piano

Don't know for *W, but I GMed Fate for a while and come to dislike it. It isn't crunchy and simulationist enough for me.

what the hell are you talking about?

>Because I stole this bag of gold, I can take twice as many stabbings before I die than I could yesterday
Every rule sounds retarded if you twist it out of context hard enough.

I remember someone writing
>if I hear "I feint the road" one more time I'm killing myself
about mouse guard

mouse guard is such a unicorn, i absolutely can't imagine it working in practice. I want to try, mind you

That's gamist RPGs, not narrative RPGs.

Yeah, he's literally describing GURPS advantage/disadvantage point buy stuff.

No - he's literally describing the rampant abuse of this game system.

Of GURPS?

can you explain in a bit more detail what he means then

>>if I hear "I feint the road" one more time I'm killing myself

Well, the person was playing the game completely wrong then. Feint is used in the conflict resolution mechanic, which only comes into play when you're actively in conflict with other characters, be it a social or physical conflict.

Overcoming obstacles is dealt in a different manner.

...

...

sure! like every other game, apoc games can be abused - he was providing examples of people 'gaming' the system for advantage. you get points for conflicts, so the shitters will go out of their way to artificially create false 'conflicts' from which to derive their rewards.
No system is perfect - no system is fool- or asshole-proof. Every system can be abused.

>you get points for conflicts
which exact system and mechanic are you referring to because I can't think of a PbtA game where this would work

As per usual on Veeky Forums, he has no clue what he's talking about.

...

Thank you for the terrible macro! In return, here's a totally accurate portrayal of an average Monsterhearts game.

This, faggot. Pure lolsorandom wankery at its finest. And not even GOOD lolsorandom wank; just weak, cringey twelve-year-old edgelord wank.
Do you kids not respect yourselves enough to demand quality products? To demand products that do more than take advantage of your naivete and prejudices?

except that sort of shit is entirely the fault of the group in question, I've been in plenty of Monsterhearts games all of which went fine. Not to mention the fact that that wasn't even his original criticism, and I'm still asking for an exact rule.

I haven't played a whole lot of Fate, but what little I've played ran very well. The aspects system is an excellent mechanic for making world details actually matter to the system; it works pretty damn well for getting players to make their character traits or the local environment relevant.

That image macro is mocking common Veeky Forums beliefs about PbtA games, and sex moves especially. Yes, I know the game doesn't work that way.

There are two types of players.

1) The min-maxer metagaming edgelord who dump all non-combat related stats, bends every interpretation of the rules to gain advantages, threatens to kill your character for for the +3 super sword, and just wants to murderhobo his way through any social situation.

2) A player who wants to invest in the gameworld, plays to both his characters strengths AND weaknesses, and gains satisfaction in both forming memories with other players and enriching a shared storyline.

The second play Apoc World.

Sounds like a lie, user-chan.

B-but, if I don't create ridiculous strawmen of everyone who disagrees with me, how am I supposed to pretend my opinions are objectively superior?

you couldn't really play the first kind of character in Apocalypse World, the mechanics don't allow for that much min-maxing, PvP conflict is actually encouraged and murderhoboing through social situations is an options with its own difficulties and consequences versus talking things out. So all their traits are either impossible or not a problem

You are the kind of guy who looks up monster statblocks on your phone to decide how much to power attack.

The rules allow and encourage that shit - there is no rule against it save the unwritten group dynamics of your group. You don't allow it in YOUR game; but it's a feature of the game that others use. Don't deny just because YOU choose to play differently/correctly. This idiot seems to believe that the game attracts a superior gamer and just doesn't allow such things; but it does! It totally does! We're not memeing here. People play apoc games just like that - for lolsorandumb fun. Not everyone is so super-serious as you when they play games.
And the apoc games are JUST as broken as every other game if taken at face value.

>People play apoc games just like that - for lolsorandumb fun
people play any roleplay game for lolsorandumb fun. So at worst they're equal to every other roleplay game in this regard

>The rules allow and encourage that shit
once again, show me the exact rule which encourages players to do that

>there is no rule against it

That image macro contains several violations of the rules. For one thing, some rules let you put a string on someone, but that is not a "condition" and you don't get to declare what shape it takes.

Can you show where, in the book, this is stated?

found the shadowrun player LUL

They make really great propaganda machines because the people making the game don't have to math, balance, or fun.

Yeah that's kind of a flaw of AW. I thought Hx only applied to actions involving both of you though?

Top kek though.

Have you even played the game, senpai?

I like Apocalypse World a lot, but you are full of shit.

THIS

yes, I've been running a 6 month campaign of the game

if they require no skill to make then why is there a clear difference between well made and badly made AW hacks?

And you allow yourself to lie like that?

Because opinions.

I ran a Fate game for a couple of months last year. Did a session zero where we made the world and characters together so there was high initial investment. It was really easy to run, since the rules can apply to absolutely everything. We did duels, murder mystery, fief management, mass combat, interrogations all quickly and easily with most of it ad-lib'd by me. It petered out in the end because it shifted to a more 'traditional' RPG dynamics of me the GM creating content and the players going through it. Since Fate can be so fast paced it meant I got burnt out. Another issue was the fact the mechanics felt too 'samey', it ultimately wasn't satisfying to have the big resolution scenes be resolved in exactly the same way as everything else had been.

Started running another Fate game, homebrewed a ton of stuff to iron out what I considered problems, but really were just rules that didn't mesh with our group's playstyle. Made sure the players are putting as much into the world as I am, more even, I just connect the dots of the worldbuilding ideas they put out there. We're just bouncing off each other's ideas, and our FateHomebrew's mechanics mean we can quickly and easily have ~anything~ get resolved quickly and satisfyingly before moving on to the next story point.

Best RPG I've played yet.

So, mind sharing your homebrew?

Seconded

>pavel
>it wasn't a banepost

Severely disappointed, but the accurate portrayal of Monster Heart sexy mechanics made up for it.

You could replace Apocalypse World and all its adaptions with just the core "you get it, you get it but it sucks, you dont get it and it sucks" roll mechanic. Everything else exists as a way to justify what super powers your forum rp character has so nobody can accuse you of godmodding since it says you can do that on your playbook.

"Storygames" is a broad label that you're applying to two very different games, as noted here I have found that Apocalypse World runs very well. I like that the game has very explicit language, that every move that you do has specific situations in which it's applied. For instance, let's look at this move the Driver has:
>Eye on the door: name your escape route and roll+cool. On a 10+, you’re gone. On
>a 7–9, you can go or stay, but if you go it costs you: leave something behind or take
>something with you, the MC will tell you what. On a miss, you’re caught vulnerable, half
>in and half out.

This move applies when your character is trying to get out of a situation. What situation? Doesn't matter. Could be a fight, could be a charged situation, a raucous party, someone coming on to you real creepy like. But if you enter such a situation, you make the move, you roll the dice, and what happens, happens. Any time the condition is met, the move can be used. Any time the condition is not met, the move cannot be used.

What's difficult for Apocalypse World is that people are used to thinking in the framework of other RPGs. They're used to looking for a victory condition, or planning for their character's future, or waiting their turn until they are prompted. AW is a game about scarcity, it forces players to act and react. If there's a guiding principle to the game, it can be stated as "A player must choose to act. Should they abstain, the world will act upon them." There aren't "turns" in a fight, it's simply a dice roll a person makes. You can't just sit and wait for the DM to tell you it's your turn and you can take your attack action. When presented with a situation, you as a player must decide what you wish to do, and should that course of action fall under one of the defined moves, you roll those bones. If you do not take the initiative and act, action will be done upon you. In the case of a fight, you sit there and get shot.

How does AW, etc. handle initiative/turns/who goes first?

It doesn't. You act when you want to. Keep in mind, though, that the DM rolls no dice. All consequences for actions, positive and negative, are rolled into the player's dice rolls.

Lemme give you an example. Let's say your character is confronted by a pair of raiders, armed with some improvised pipe firearms. They motion threateningly and demand you hand over your food and valuables. At this point, you're free to do whatever you want. If you want to fight them, and you have no special moves that apply, you'd use the move to "do single combat with someone". In this case, the GM might treat the two guys as separate, or as one small unit, it really doesn't matter, there's very little to NPC statistics.
When you use this move, it represents an indeterminate amount of time. You might describe all the things that you do in the fight, the kicking and shooting and stabbing and biting. In the case of "entering single combat", you each exchange harm, which means that both sides will always take damage. However, depending on the result of your dice, you can alter the damage that sides take. Here's the text of the move:
"When you do single combat with someone, no quarters, exchange harm, but first
roll+hard. On a 10+, both. On a 7–9, choose 1. On a miss, your opponent chooses
1 against you:
• You inflict terrible harm (+1harm).
• You suffer little harm (-1harm).
After you exchange harm, do you prefer to end the fight now, or fight on? If both
of you prefer to end the fight now, it ends. If both of you prefer to fight on, it
continues, and you must make the move again. If one of you prefers to end the
fight, though, and the other prefers to fight on, then the former must choose: fiee,
submit to the latter‘s mercy, or fight on after all."

It basically doesn't. Sure hope you're assertive.

Now, you might say "but that means that I can just keep attacking and win, right?"
Except as noted, you take damage every time you do this. When you roll dice, it's both "your turn" and "the enemy turn", and the dice determine who gains advantage in the contest.

Now, when you've got multiple PCs, you might have to figure out a way of taking turns, but the game assumes that you can be an adult about it (it makes this assumption very often), and that you'll get to people as the narrative dictates or as how you feel is fair. Most GMs I've seen will just go around to each player in a situation and ask them what they're doing, and have them roll dice if there's an associated move. But really, there's no hard system for it.

Yeah, I am. It's a detriment in a lot of games.

Thanks!

You could replace D&D and all its adaptions with just the core "roll d20 + situational modifiers against a target number" roll mechanic. Everything else exists as a way to justify what super powers your forum rp character has so nobody can accuse you of godmodding since it says you can do that on your class.

Yeah if you wanted to make D&D more like AW sure. Maybe throw on the attribute bonuses. Nothing else though.

You could call it like... Dragon World or something.

I tried it. My recommendation: don't.

It's one of those games where there's a lot of stuff that sounds cool and interesting when you read it, but doesn't really work out in play. Nice illustrations, though.

And this is coming from someone who runs a decent amount of pbta games.

Would the apocalypse engine be a good place to crib social rules from?

that's more or less what the designers of DW did, and why it's not a good game

Monsterhearts tends to be good at social games, maybe have a look at how it manages things

>Do they actually play well?
That is entirely dependent on the group. They require a certain type of player to work properly, players who are creative, narrative driven, who are more interested in the the story as a whole than in their own personal achievements, who understand the structures and elements of storytelling, things like character arcs and act structures, who understand that success has to be balanced by and earned through failure and hardship, that narrative gratification cannot be instant or continuous to have meaning, and that a story can end successfully even if it is not a "happy" or "victorious" ending.

Narrative systems are designed to run games that emulate actual storytelling. Think about something like American Horror Story. The story shifts focus between different characters at different times. There are plot lines that emerge and are resolved, while others emerge and sustain themselves, resisting resolution until they have played themselves out. Some characters end up achieving their goals, but with significant consequences, while others fail, suffer, and die, achieving little or nothing.

To run a game like that, the players have to, first of all, understand the value of it, which not all people do. Secondly, be able to set aside their own sense of connection to their character and their own desire for self satisfaction in order to accept the potential for marginalization or defeat in purpose of the narrative, which few can handle. And third, they have to be creative enough to help shape an actual story through their actions and ideas, not just follow a trail of breadcrumb trails and watch the GM's narrative unfold.

The majority of players don't have the desire or capacity to do all that, so it's hard to get a whole group of them together at once. And if you can't, the purpose of the system is largely missed. If you can get a group like that together, narrative systems can be very rewarding. But it's difficult to do.

That goddamn image, man. Thank you.

It's for hardish scifi. But you can ignore the worldgen, spaceship and gear stuff.

The changes to how Stress and Consequences work, and the Edge/Effort system for skills is what is most interesting, imo. It brings the powerlevel of Fate down A LOT. This campaign has had a lot of characters barely scraping by.

>you get it, you get it but it sucks, you dont get it and it sucks

This is the one thing in PbtA worth porting into every game, desu. It usually piss easy to, as most non-archiac systems already have degrees of success.

Most archaic systems already have that as well, but most people can't be bothered to read books anymore.

AD&D actually suggests the use of failing forward as a standard gimmick. But no one ever mentions it because then it might actually mean that Gygax was smarter and more savvy than they like him to be.

Only if things sucking is appropriate to whatever you're cramming it into. If it's a dirty, grubby, psycho apocalypse sure why not. Most of the time degrees of success should measure how much you succeed, not how much it's going to cost you.

Having it as a GM technique and codifying it into the dice mechanics is a bit different. Certainly you can do it in any RPG, but ones with more nuance than binary failure or success are easier to do it with.

If you didn't succeed fully did your non-optimal roll cost you some of your success?

You are right though, the fluff of the failure should be tailored to the genre of the game. Fate has good advice on narrating failure while keeping the PCs in a heroic light: it's not that the character screwed up, it's that the opposition/environment was unexpectedly difficult.

This is why asking what the players' intentions behind their characters' actions is so important. If you know what they were trying to do but they didn't roll well enough to "get it" you know what to change up such that there's a hiccup that's appropriate to how much they "didn't"

Easy to play, easy to drop in and out, easy to hack, easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to play online.

I like systems with stats, skills, and maybe a trait (advantage/disadvantage or attribute/defect...) system, and I'm pretty much hermetic to those new "narrative" systems - though, I'd love to give TechNoir a try as player and with a competent DM.

Anyone playing Masks: A New Generation? It's basically Teen Superheroes Have Feelings: The Game, and feels like such a better fit for PBTA than the only other one I've played, DW.

so it's Young Justice: the rpg?

Exactly. The lists of characters for inspiration for each archetype is basically full of Young Justice, Teen Titans, and Runaways.

A lot of my favorite characters of all time have been in *World games, and I have enjoyed every single character. But Monster Hearts does have potential to be cringey. Pic related, this character quote is fucking embarrassing. But I didn't choose to play it that way, instead my character was a (closeted gay) Fonzie wannabe who had been lynched in the 60s because he wouldn't shut up about the 50s. Now he's in denial about being dead and will lose his mind and become pretty scary when attacked by multiple people

Now, my feeling about Fate is that it's way too freeform and that your characters are barely different mechanically. Three times a day you have a chance to get a bonus to a roll that relates to your backstory... I'll admit that I only played a single session, but I'm not a fan

>Pic related, this character quote is fucking embarrassing
the character quotes were picked to be as melodramatic as possible, it's not very serious, but it is genre appropriate

But it's not just melodramatic. It's also nonsensical

It's literally something you'd see/hear in a trashy supernatural/romance tv show.

So you're saying it's actually on point, then. Yeah, I can see it.

So what makes DW a bad hack?

It does D&D in PbtA. That's pretty much the basic thrust of every argument I've heard on the subject. Usually they complain about the six "3-18" stats (which save you from having a lookup table for bonuses on level up) or that there are too many rolls expected, which is kind of true, but the math has been balanced for that so whatever. It usually feels like personal preference dressed up as a system critique.

(I'd consider DW a decent PbtA hack. Not as brilliant as something like Monsterhearts, but way above most of the dreck that's been put out. But memes are contagious, I guess)

Samefag

Essentially good PbtA games use the GM moves and principals as well as the basic moves as a chance to really enforce genre, in Monsterhearts for instance there is no action a player can take that does not cause/perpetuate drama, so the mechanics reinforce the subject of the game. Dungeon World largely just feels like generic fantasy adventure, so it's not taking full advantage of the mechanics it has available to it.

I see. I've personally enjoyed it, but maybe I was just looking for D&D with a fresh coat of paint. I enjoy the hacks people have done of DW, though, like Perilous Journeys.

I actually thought Perilous Wilds was great, even though I don't like DW I use some of Perilous Wild's ideas in other PbtA games

AW is built on three pillars: Stats, Moves and Experience.

Stats in AW each represent a different approach to any given situation and are each tied to specific and very distinct Moves.
Stats in DW represent fuck all. Every stat gets Defy Danger and STR is pretty much the same as DEX.

Moves in AW provide consequences to actions. Whenever you roll for a Move, it significantly changes the situation that led to it. And you never get everything you want, even on a 10+.
Moves in DW provide too many perfect and boring outcomes, with three of the Basic Moves doing numbers instead of consequences.

Experience in AW lets the players create incentives for other players to act in a certain way by picking the two stats - and therefore approaches - that yield Experience each session.
Experience in DW incentivizes failure. Nothing more, nothing less.

In short, DW fucked up all three core aspects - approaches, consequences and incentives - of the game it is based on.

>Fate and Apocalypse World are almost complete opposites,
Not really. World-building during character generation, for example, is a common element.

...of a narrativist mechanic, you faggot.
>inb4 mechanics are never narrativist

>2) A player who wants to invest in the gameworld, plays to both his characters strengths AND weaknesses, and gains satisfaction in both forming memories with other players and enriching a shared storyline.
>The second play Apoc World.
lol, no.

That's why I said almost.
Also, the extent, focus and timing of world building is completely different in both.

>To run a game like that, the players have to, first of all, understand the value of it, which not all people do.
>The majority of players don't have the desire or capacity to do all that
Translation: people who don't like what I like are dumb.

I feel like, contrary to its design goals, Fate seems to suck the drama out of most characters and situations. I also think Aspects, while a neat idea, tend to swallow up the finer details into bold caricatures of narrative "fact". Additionally, the characters always feel somewhat flat and "not like believable people".

If there is someone who either agrees or disagrees with me here I would love to hear it.

Continued: This is kinda hyperbolic but for me, Fate feels like the McDonald's of RPGs. It feels all about immediate gratification, "get to the point already", not built for sustainable long term play... like, I know it's supposed to emulate dramatic fiction but part of enjoying dramatic fiction comes from suspending your sense disbelief, which Fate seems very poor at facilitating. It's all very "reward", with very little work or sweat or ebbing interludes involved in getting there... which I guess is part of the point. I dunno. All very subjective points, but I think Fate is inherently bad at encouraging real drama; it feels like it instead chooses the cheaper beer & pretzels, Michael Bay path.

Which is fine. I guess. Just not my thing.

YMMV.

Actually, they don't like it because they're dumb. It's pretty self explanatory, high brow stuff is enjoyed by far fewer people than low brow stuff because it's harder to get into and requires more from the person.