#monsterhearts

The Golden Age of Indie RPGs

My End of Year video is on the "Golden Age of Indie RPGs," from roughly 2010 to 2025. I start with Apocalypse World's release, work through the Google+ Era, and follow design lineages and historical events that have impacted the tabletop RPG hobby up through 2025.

It's easily the most I've worked on a video. 16k words, 9 interviews, 96 minutes. I hope it does the brilliant people in this scene justice.

The last time I made a post about why I don't like PbtA games it was cited in two callout posts, but lets see if I can beat that record with the exact same points and gripes as last time but with a bigger following.

I, personally, the one member if the A.N.I.M. team who writes these posts, hate PbtA games.

Some PbtA games I respect, because the designers understand what they’re doing and have chosen the PbtA formula to play to its specific strengths and realize their idea for a game, but I still just don't/wouldn't enjoy playing them. To non-comprehensively name a couple off the top of my head, Monsterhearts and Dungeon Bitches. And of course the original Apocalypse World.

Articulating exactly why I don’t like PbtA games is not easy though, because “PbtA” is a pretty loose framework, but for the sake of this post being not too long I'm going to assume that people reading this generally know what features and elements they usually involve.

I find that most people who like PbtA games can’t articulate it well either, at least without citing features that almost all TTRPGs have or demonstrating a misunderstanding of the design goals of non-PbtA RPGs.

Character Creation and Character Abilities

Not literally all self-described PbtA games use “playbooks,” (FIST doesn’t) but most of them do. A “playbook” serves a similar role to a character class from the challenge-based TTRPGs i tend to enjoy more, like (old school) D&D, but there’s some big differences. Playbooks from my experience tend to be much more restrictive where I want them to be permissive. Sometimes you get to swap around a few abilities, but playbooks often have personalities built into them, they often even have character arcs built into them. I don’t like this. It feels like picking a character, not picking a class for a character. I want to have full control over who my character is. For this, games like AD&D which have very limited mechanical character customization, feel less restrictive because it feels like they tell me “provide a character who fits into one of these four categories” instead of “here’s your character.”

In AD&D, your character’s personality has little direct mechanical effect (unless you count the fact that, if playing in the third-person verbiage similar to “author stance” like Eureka asks you to, and how I play every TTRPG that doesn’t bar that), characters with different personalities will probably come up with different solutions to problems, and be able to talk or not talk their way out or different interpersonal situations than other characters even with the exact same abilities. (Which is something you should probably take into consideration especially in something like AD&D which subtly encourages a lot more talking than fighting when possible even though its fighting rules have more depth, and where the game expects you yo have multiple characters which you may even be playing all at the same time.)

I have a bunch of Fighters in my own group’s on-and-off AD&D “troupe campaign” about a large band of mercenaries. Not counting some differences in skills and base stats, these guys all have basically the same abilities because they are all AD&D Fighters. But only Corvus, complaint-heavy peasant fisherman turned unwilling levy turned deserter turned reluctant highwayman turned reluctant mercenary(is there a difference?) would have thought to walk straight up to one of the slavers raiding the village the party rode out to save and say “Oi, where are we going after this?!” The slaver, thinking Corvus was with his group, told him the plan.

Sly but dignified Sir Ferdinand the Fox could’ve never passed for a lowlife slaver so readily.

Eureka does mechanicize your PC’s personally, but it’s a personality you build yourself through character creation by picking Traits and Truths.

Dice Bend Reality

Another thing I don’t like about PbtA games is that dice rolls bend reality rather than determining how well your character executes a particular action.

In the games I like, when a character is about to do something risky or difficult, you roll the dice. This combined with some aspect of their character sheet determines how well they execute this action.

PbtA games tend to give the dice a very different perview of control. They don’t necessarily determine the character’s execution of the ability, they determine the reality of the situation itself.

In AD&D or Eureka, well I’ll just show this screenshot.

In a PbtA game though, I’ll give FIST as an example (it isn't a great example but I had the rulebook on-hand.)

I don’t like this.

In the “challenge game” style TTRPGs I like, the GM says “here is a challenging environment that your character may not overcome.” My job to look at my character’s character sheet and say “my character will overcome it like this.” The game says “prove that your character is capable of overcoming the challenge that way” and i demonstrate by adding dice to character stats and showing that they are above or below a certain threshold of “character executes this action well.” And it not only has to be a well-executed action, it has to be the correct action. (This is actually super important to not just, like, the intended gameplay experience of Eureka for example, but super super important to its themes.)

I don’t like it when the rules or dice or GM of a game bend and alter the established fiction (such as making 3 more guys appear that would not have existed on different dice results) to make things go well or poorly for my character. This is a very very bad GMing practice in challenge game style TTRPGs, and it’s something that is built into PbtA. Which does NOT make it a bad practice in PbtA games, it’s something that (well-made) PbtA games do with intent and are built around doing. I just personally hate it.

People Keep Confusing Eureka for PbtA

This is the weakest point on the list. It’s just annoying. Eureka uses 2D6 with three degrees of success similar to PbtA games (though how the results are applied to the situation are very different), but it is actually an extremely “trad”* challenge game. We have to semi-frequently point this out and tell people not to try and play it with PbtA-like conventions such as dice rolls altering reality and stuff. Having to say “there’s different types of games which require different play styles or else they won’t work” to PbtA players actually brings me to my strongest point, one that isn't just personal taste.

*“Trad” as in the branch of TTRPG evolution which shares much of its DNA with games like AD&D and Call of Cthulhu, not “trad” as in Republican.

Indie D&D5e

It’s indie D&D5e. This is through no direct fault of Apocalypse World, or any other particularly well-made PbtA game. In fact most of the blame still lies on D&D5e and WotC for basing their marketing around the idea that TTRPGs rules don't matter, but the reality is that PbtA occupies the same role and causes much of the same problems - albeit at a much smaller scale - in indie and small press TTRPG spaces as D&D5e does in TTRPG spaces as a whole. That is, players and designers see it as The TTRPG Framework That Can Do Any Genre, Setting, or Concept, when in reality it has strengths and weaknesses, things it is and isn’t suited for, like any other engine. But everybody just keeps plugging every concept into it anyway with no rhyme or reason whether it works or not - and it often doesn’t - but they do it because they don’t know any better, or because they cynically know they PbtA sells the same way that D&D5e sells: PbtA players who won’t buy anything that isn’t PbtA because “I already know D&D5- I mean PbtA, why should I bother trying to learn a different game?”

Finally got all of my character sheets done for the Ego’s End group for Artfight!!

Ya'll mind if I try something new? I can? Cool.

I (Kendo) am officially a GM for StartPlaying!

It's something I've been wanting to get into for a while (partially just as an excuse to play more games) and I've finally pulled the trigger. With everything going on in the world, I could use the extra income to help fund the podcast and keep our editors paid.

Even more than that, I'm excited to meet more people and help spread my love of indie TTRPGs with them. From weird horror to tense political intrigue to intimate coming of age dramas, we are going to tell some amazing stories together.