Alright, fuck it, here's my thread about my take on the problems with PbtA games, what designers can take from it, and what I think it's going to mean to the ttrpg industry going forwards.

For clarification, because the tag of "PbtA" is meaningless (it literally just means any game inspired by Apocalypse World), when I say PbtA, I mean Apocalypse World hacks - games like The Sprawl, Masks, Dungeon World, etc. I ain't counting Firebrands or Blades in the Dark.

To me, the strength of PbtA was always in the concepts, rather than the execution. The idea of agendas and principles, the mixed successes, the way that mechanics are treated as a supplement to the story rather than as the sole arbiter of narrative. Those are all incredible.

I don't want to talk about those core ideas, because I fucking love them and think that they are the best part of the entire thing. PbtA, in concept, set the groundwork for a lot of great ways to push the medium.

However, the design of the games themselves feels... Very designed to bridge the gap between D&D and non-D&D games. Moves in particular were created to give mechanical flags to player's actions, telling players when to transition from narrative to mechanical.

That's one of the big ways that PbtA is fiction first, you simply move to the mechanics whenever you do the right thing. And this is incredibly useful for folks who aren't used to fiction-first, because this shift in direction is subtle, but undeniably effective.

The problem with moves is that they are... Quite limiting, and not in the way that most PbtA critics say. What they often end up doing is flattening your actions down to the same few possible options. There's not a lot of room for nuance or variation or design around edge cases.

You need to catch those edge cases and nuance, so we get stuff like "Defy Danger" and "Act Under Fire" which is just... when you think about it... really nothing? Like, every action you roll for is defying danger, otherwise you wouldn't roll for it. It's kind of a copout.

The way that this is flattening is by the effects of failure. I love Masks' "Unleash your Powers," but the 7-9 effect is always "the effect is unstable or temporary," which makes it hard to tell a story about a character who *does* know how to use their powers.

Which is a double-edged sword because "knowing how to wield your powers" isn't exactly what Masks is about, so it's in-tone. But if my character goes through their Moment of Truth and learns how to use their powers, "unstable or temporary" is still the consequences.

It's like this to help bridge the gap between mechanical and narrative, and it definitely did that. But the problem is that we've... moved on.

Sparked by Resistance and Forged in the Dark games don't have moves anymore, just stats - and FitD has the *player* choose what stat they're rolling, rather than have it decided for them by the mechanics.

In a way, by not having moves, you trust the players more - trust them to keep the game in-tone without a checklist of common tropes, and trust the other tools you've given them to encourage the narrative you're searching for.

This is what I mean when I say that we've moved beyond the need for PbtA - it was designed as a paradigm shift, changing the way that we approach narrative in TTRPGs. But... we don't need it anymore. The paradigm has already shifted.

PbtA's *real* innovation was making players think more about the relationship between mechanical and narrative, flipping that relationship, and designing a bridge between them. And now we're moving on.

Agendas, principles, and GM moves were the real thing that changed the game, because they're so effective in moving the narrative, while being easily slottable into *any* game system.

And I'm not saying that we shouldn't make PbtA games anymore, because Masks is my favorite game of all time, and more recent games like Interstitial and Tendancies: Spirit and Glamour fucking rule.

But games made in this framework share the same set of problems - Defy Danger is an uninteresting copout, being weighted towards failure creates stories defined by failure, Defend moves continue to exist despite them completely working against the intended flow of the game, etc.

We don't... need moves, we don't need traditional GMs, we don't need so many of the things that PbtA took as assumed. PbtA questioned some truisms, but not all of them, and then established truisms of its own - and I'm glad that we're questioning them again.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that PbtA is a perfect transitional framework in a lot of ways - transitioning from D&D to narrative, transitioning from mechanical to fictional, etc. It's an important role, one that I'm happy exists -

- but once we're on the other side of that transition, there's a lot of interesting things that can be done to break away from the flaws of the framework.

(realized i kinda forgot my own final thesis at the end of this thread, it's fine, i'm good at writing things, always edit your work, kids)

hi please listen to Kazumi they're so much better at this whole "using words" thing than I am, because this is exactly what i'm trying to say here https://twitter.com/kazumiochin/status/1281022810769350657?s=20