@JoshuaACNewman It's why I'm trying to get an idea of what's the borm and where things have been oushed. But I guess learning about hacks that failed to innovate when they were expected to would be good like if a game tried something new and it felt light.

@JoshuaACNewman Which makes me wonder.. what are PbtA games that were kinda... meh?

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman Tremulus often gets cited - it was one of the first hacks to be kickstarted, and really showed that you need to change the basic moves if you want a different feel. Cthulhu with AW's basic moves doesn't quite work IME.

@wurzel @JoshuaACNewman Ah, this brings up the importance of the basic moves and one of my design concerns for my own work. Nailing down those select few moves that define the game and lay down a foundation of play experience while still allowing room for anything to happen within the fiction is new for me. I'm used to creating mechanics that respond to actions rather than determining the actions in advance.

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman pbta is a different mindset, for sure. The upside is you only need to write mechanics for the important stuff - the downside is you need to work out what that stuff is! I find it helps to think on the basis of tropes: what sort of things do the characters in my genre do, what kind of outcomes do they experience, and what things do they do to twist outcomes in their favour?

@wurzel @WardenRPG It’s not actually that different from GURPS dis/ads or D&D feats. It’s that Moves are the heart of the process, where in the other two games, they’re unnecessary add-ons.

I remember at one point trying to figure out how to make GURPS characters out of just dis/ads, and not use stats, but it got nowhere; there are books and books of that stuff, and it’s all of tertiary importance; it all comes back to altering the bell curve, not actually having qualitative effects on play.

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman @wurzel I'll stand up for any designer's decision to use Apocalypse World's basic moves, or a close version of them.

AW's basic moves represent AW's supergenre, the thriller. Crime thriller, supernatural thriller, war thriller, suspense thriller - all within AW's basic moves' scope.

@wurzel @JoshuaACNewman @WardenRPG It's my opinion that tremulus gets cited so much only because when it was published, there was a possessive core of PbtA early-adopters, and tremulus came from outside that core, and a few of them responded to it with poorly considered territoriality.

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman @wurzel Not of course it's possible that tremulus' close use of AW's basic moves don't serve its needs as a game. I haven't played it myself, so I can't say for sure whether they do or don't.

But I will say that I don't automatically trust the conventional wisdom on this one.

@lumpley @JoshuaACNewman @WardenRPG I didn't have a great time with it but it's true there's a knee-jerk dismissal of it these days. It's a real shame its innovations - like the mystery building system - seem to have been largely forgotten.

@wurzel @JoshuaACNewman @lumpley The main component I want to create is a compounded MC move. Meaning the more characters affect their dimension/world, the harsher the MC's move will be. Starts off soft, becomes harder unless characters begin to start accepting the consequences of their actions. Will involve a running score based on PC dice rolls - the higher the roll, the greater the change, the greater the risk of provoking a hard move.

@WardenRPG @lumpley @wurzel That seems like it could make some fun!

If you want my advice, and you might not, it's this: see how soft you can make that rule. See if you can make the MC Rules stuff like, "When you want to know if a character will accept responsibility..." then use it to alter Fronts.

@JoshuaACNewman @wurzel @lumpley Yeah, learning abouts Fronts is also on the list.

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman @wurzel I don't like giving suggestions, but I do have a suggestion for you.

Thinking of them as "MC moves," bluntly like that, might hold you back. I'd suggest thinking of them as the dimension/world's moves.

To put it another way, the MC's move would be "have the world react," and the running score would determine the harshness of the world's reaction.

So this would be more like how harm-as-extablished works, than like how MC moves in general work.

@lumpley @wurzel @JoshuaACNewman So an MC move is one the MC chooses to use while a dimension move is one the dimension is forced to use?

Ooh, fuck me, that's evil. I like it!

@lumpley @wurzel @JoshuaACNewman What I'd like to do is devise a small number of basic moves that may also cover all dice-based moves (with others offering benefits rather than risking the outcome). Seen some games that have a shit tonne of moves and it feels overwhelming.

@WardenRPG @JoshuaACNewman @wurzel I think that's a sound approach!

@lumpley @wurzel @JoshuaACNewman @WardenRPG

Also most of the basic moves in most of the significant PbtA games (notable exceptions: really far-out stuff like Dream Askew, Murderous Ghosts) are based on AW.

Maybe some of us define 'close' version differently than others, but DW, Masks, Sprawl, etc all have broadly the same move categories and moves in a given category mostly work in broadly the same way across all games, etc.

So even the most successful hacks basically followed the AW lead.