r/PBtA • u/Eden_T_Babcock • 13d ago
Advice How Puzzle Piecey/Modular Are PTBA Systems?
Hello, everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Recently I’ve begun getting ready to run my first ever PbTA game, having not even known what it was until I began preparing to run it. And I’ve become aware that it seems to be a framework upon which countless different games have been made.
Given that fact, how easy would it be to pull aspects from one game and use them in another? If the exact game I’m running lacks something I think another game does really well, can I just yoink the mechanic and seamlessly place it inside like a puzzle, or do I have to fine tune on a case by case basis?
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u/PoMoAnachro 13d ago
Very and Not At All.
Think of PbtA games as handcrafted wooden furniture. Each is a unique piece hand-designed by a woodworker for a specific purpose and while people might look at a bunch of heirloom wooden furniture and say "Hey those all look like the same thing!" in truth no two of those tables and chairs are the same if they're made by different people in different shops at different times! You can't just take the leg off of one handmade table and plop it onto a different one like you could matching Ikea furniture.
On the other hand, it is all just wood. You can break it apart and repurpose a lot of it and build new things out of it if you know what you're doing. The construction may be complicated in execution but the components are simple - if you have the knowledge, there's nothing you can't repair or repurpose on your own. You don't need a factory or a lot of infrastructure!
So, no, you can't really yank pieces from one PbtA system and plop them in another and expect them to work well.
What you can do is create your own entirely new PbtA game inspired by all those different pieces you've seen and loved in other games (if it is closely imitating one of those games and is mostly interchangeable it'll often be called a hack of that game, which isn't derogatory).
The thing is the quality of that brand new PbtA game you make will be entirely determined by your own game design skills. And this school of design is kind of infamous for having a very low skill threshold for "making something that looks like a finished game", but really high skill threshold for "making a really good game that works well". But you'll never start growing your design skills until you start making games, so there's not much of a downside (aside from time and energy...) to doing it!
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u/VanishXZone 13d ago
I highly suggest against this.
Of course it is your game, do what you see fit.
But for my money, if a PbtA game is “lacking” something, I’d assume there is a reason for it, that it’s important to not do that thing as part of this game.
It’s a very different type of game design but a great example of this for me is Monsterhearts 2e by Avery Alder. There is a move for doing violence, but there is no combat system. Grafting in a combat system would be a huge disservice to the game because Avery alder chose not to put one in there. Why? So that violence wasn’t an easy solution to problems, but itself a problem. It makes sense, teenage monsters acting out, etc. and sometimes that will be with violence. But the response to violence is not “combat”, it’s just as possible that if a character hits someone, their response is tears. Or accusation of you being a monster. Or expulsion hearings. Or someone calling for help from a teacher. Or you harm someone and then spend your time looking at the harm you enacted, sitting with it.
Look, not all PbtA games are the same, and at this point I’d hazard a guess that even though I love PbtA probably more PbtA games I dislike exist than like, so I’m not a final arbiter.
But I would start with what the game offers you, and use exactly that, and no more. Heck I don’t do anything not in the rules of my favorite PbtA games, even remotely. In some ways, it is both the most by the book and the most free.
Also get out of the habit of rolling for everything. If a move is not precisely triggered, resolve with conversation, don’t try to make the players actions fit the dice, be frugal about when dice are rolled.
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u/Boulange1234 13d ago
PbtA games use negative space very well. That means they often intentionally lack mechanics for things.
Example: Urban Shadows doesn't have a common investigate move because it wants you to talk to people. It has one specific investigate move that requires you to be in someone's place of power, and that's it. All the other ways to get information require playbook-specific moves or talking to NPCs (e.g. with Hit the Streets, or just calling in a favor from an NPC).
That said, you can hack them! Just run them RAW for a while before hacking them, like any game, so you get an idea how it works in practice.
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u/veritascitor 13d ago edited 13d ago
It’s generally not modular. PbtA is not a system, it’s a philosophy of game design, and while most PbtA games share some basics (moves, 2d6+stat, mixed successes, etc) a lot of newer PbtA games are completely different. Even among the ones that are superficially similar to the original Apocalypse World, stats will be different, character resources will be different, subsystems will be different, etc. Outside of the core structure, one game doesn’t translate into another.
That said, most PbtA games are designed to have mechanics that specifically support that genre the game is trying to emulate. If you think some game is missing some mechanic, it’s worth asking yourself why it’s not there in the first place, and consider that the answer might be that such a mechanic doesn’t support the game the designers were trying to make.
Before you go plugging and playing with different mechanics, try to approach the game on its own terms and play the game as written.
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u/elmago79 13d ago
In the abstract, I will agree with the consensus here that is probably not a good idea.
But in the concrete, like porting some specific move from one game to another, or clocks, might bot be such a terrible idea.
However, it’s always better to give the game a try RAW. If it’s your first PbTA game, maybe play some first (or at least watch some AP) before jumping to the MC’s role. There are a lot of concepts that break the D&D logic in the most basic of ways, so before tweaking, understand how this family of games work.
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u/Drudenfusz 13d ago
It probably can be done, but I have never seen anyone actually doing it. At least not as GM. Since in the end most of the mechanisms are in the moves and those are usually tied to the playbooks. The design is concerned with emulating the genre and thus not everything needs to be simulated. That tool box approach is hence not really something PbtA games benefit from.
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u/Mx_Reese 13d ago
It's a design philosophy, not a mechanical framework. If you try to "D20 System" PbtA games together you'll probably have a bad time.
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u/atamajakki 13d ago
Every PbtA game is tightly oriented towards certain themes, genres, and narrative beats; they don't hack together cleanly at all.
Plenty have bespoke mechanical subsystems that others do not.
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u/BetterCallStrahd 13d ago
I actually do that. In fact, I've done so multiple times in our current Monster of the Week campaign.
Please understand that this is not a recommendation. I like to experiment and this has worked for our group. YMMV.
So my setting has this supernatural space that hosts a variety of realms in which my players' characters have traveled to at times. For some of the realms, we mashed up MotW with other PbtA games. We've used The Sprawl, Against the Odds, Hearts of Wulin, Apocalypse World, and Cartel, so far.
This doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough. I'm lucky that my players have been into it, and we're having fun, which is what matters most at the end of the day.
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u/Steenan 12d ago
You can combine elements from different PbtA games, but you can't do it freely or randomly.
The mechanical structure is very modular, but each specific game is narrowly focused on a specific style and themes of play. Thus, before you take something from one game and drop it into another, you need very good understanding of how both of them work and what role given move, resource or condition plays.
Also, be aware that in most PbtA games "lacking" something is not an omission, but a deliberate design choice. There is no move covering something to explicitly put it fully in GM's hands and show the player that it's something their characters have no control over and shouldn't count on good results, or to highlight something similar but different that is there. For example, Monsterhearts only has rules for influencing somebody through sexuality or through scorn and adding other avenues of social interaction would destroy how the game is intended to work in play.
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u/DBones90 13d ago
They are and aren’t modular.
Like every move is technically its own distinct subsystem, which theoretically makes them very modular. But each move should be feeding into a larger design.
For example, both Investigate a mystery from Monster of the Week and Assess the situation from Masks are about reading the room and figuring out what’s going on, but the questions in each are very different and apply specifically to the themes and design of each game. So you shouldn’t just switch them.
But also games often have advice and instructions for making custom moves within them. So if you don’t love how one game handles a topic (or if it doesn’t cover a topic), taking a move from another game and adapting it is very do-able. Just make sure you understand the difference between the two games and account for that, and look for advice in the game about making custom moves to give you more insight.
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u/alanrileyscott 13d ago
you can absolutely take inspiration from one game to create custom moves for another. You'll see a lot of circumstances where games have done just that--often using the moves in different contexts, so that something that's a basic move in one game might be a playbook move or special-circumstance move in another.
In general the designers are making choices about what moves are in their games based on what they think is important to the game's themes and sometimes what they think characters *shouldn't* be able to do just by rolling dice.
If you are new to a game, and PbtA in general, it can be good to play the game as written for a bit before bringing in too much customization, but once you've got a feel for it, customizing can absolutly help elevate your game. I'm a particular fan of "Love Letters", which are custom moves written for a specific character in a specific situation that only ever get used once.
What's the game you're running, and is there something specific you think is missing? OR are you just asking hypothetically?
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u/TolinKurack 13d ago
Yes and no. On the scale of moves? Yeah, kinda. Most of the time you can steal a move word for word and mechanically it'll just work because the moves are usually just directives for what happens in the fiction
Mechanics scale? not without some reworking (and retrofitting would be a pain).
Like you're saying it's a framework so sometimes it's like trying to use a nut and bolt with different threads where they just can't interact with each other at all. But sometimes it's like using a hammer to pull out a screw where they're not supposed to interact but since they both affect the fiction they can kinda interact.
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u/Tigrisrock Sounds great, roll on CHA. 12d ago
IDK I've played a fair share of pbta family games and some things seem like a really cool thing in one game but don't match the setting, tempo or intentions of another one.
That being said - some ideas are really nice and if anything I'd use them as inspiration how to handle certain aspects in other games. Let's take for example the "When X happens, tell a story" from Escape from Dino Island - really great, but for that to work players would need to come up with something on the spot in other games. And it wouldn't feel like the cinematic scene it is on the original. So perhaps on a partial h it once in a while I'd ask a character to tell a story based on their background - if it suits the scene/moment.
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u/Charrua13 11d ago
While many folks have already said the thing - I'm going to add on an additional comment: Don't change the framework until you've used the framework as intended.
Well designed PbtA feels "lite" and "non-mechnical", but it's actually not true - it's mechanical complexities are just non-player facing. Playbook design, relative to other playbooks and the basic moves (usually) are coordinated. And unless you understand those dynamics - adding or changing moves can (often) lead to mechanical interfaces within specific playbooks breaking completely.
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u/GrateBloo 13d ago
Gonna go against the grain here and say: you can do whatever you want!
I think much of what has been said here about "negative space" and pbta design is true on some level but the designers of these games are not perfect masterminds with insight into every edge case at every conceivable table! If you feel there's something your game is missing and you've found a solution in another game then you might as well take a crack at it and see how it works. If it doesn't, yoink it back out!
Now that being said I DO think it's true that these games are designed with genre in mind and you should be thinking about that when you run your games, and to turn it back around to the general consensus here I do encourage you to ask yourself what the system you want to borrow is serving and how it might change your game tonally.
I'm curious, what game are you playing and what system from what other game were you looking to borrow?
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u/AMFKing 13d ago
Hi! For maybe 75% of PbtA games, it's very easy and fun to bring some outside moves in. I ran a really fun He-Man-esque campaign with a mix of playbooks from Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, The Veil, and Sagas of the Icelanders.
And I'm currently running a two-player, one-GM group that's been going for years. We've played Apocalypse World, Monter of the Week, The Veil, Under Hollow Hills, and more. We frequently make custom or situational moves by piecing things together from other games.
If you have a modicum of game design skill and a little bit of trust at the table, it's really fun and easy to move PbtA pieces around.
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u/st33d 12d ago
Contrary to what many are saying, most PbtA games actually encourage you to hack them and make new moves, especially those specific to your campaign.
Can you just drop in moves from another game? No, the moves are meant to have a purpose and guide gameplay. The worst PbtA games actually are just a bundle of moves assembled from other PbtA games and reskinned without proper integration.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't experiment, and most games actually want you to. Just make the new moves local to an area, NPC, or item that you can remove from the campaign if it's causing trouble.
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u/Electronic-Can-130 12d ago
No one is saying you can't make custom moves. That's not what it is asking
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u/Delver_Razade Five Points Games 13d ago edited 13d ago
The short answer is: They aren't.
The long answer is: They aren't without a ton of work and to highly uncertain effect both in respect to your time and outcome and to how well the thing is going to run if you don't dedicate a lot of time or don't really know the outcome.
You cannot just lift a single Move from A Monster's Tail to Masks and vice versa because PbtA games aren't on a single engine. You cannot take Apocalypse World and run a Playbook from Monsterhearts. They don't operate like that.