Powered by the Apocalypse How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

Powered by the Apocalypse: How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

While many find their way into TTRPGs via Dungeons & Dragons, the unique ruleset of Powered by the Apocalypse may offer a more expansive experience.

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Powered by the Apocalypse How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

Tabletop role-playing games are enjoying a renaissance, and during the pandemic, even more have flocked to the hobby to wile away hours with friends online. Most gamers come to the hobby via Dungeons & Dragons, but an entire world of games that are “Powered by the Apocalypse” awaits new players. The game engine, created by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker, originated with their game Apocalypse World, published in 2010.

Ten years on, Powered by the Apocalypse games (PbtA) are everywhere. The Bakers designed the PbtA engine so that other game designers could “hack” it, creating games with similar mechanics, but unique worlds and rules. More than four dozen games bear the PbtA license, making Apocalypse World incredibly influential. That influence continues to be felt as games move into new territories and find new audiences.

Powered by the Apocalypse How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

The Bakers have been designing games for nearly twenty years, and together they’ve pioneered a couple dozen games, most notably the award-winning Apocalypse World, now in its second edition. As its title suggests, Apocalypse World has a post-apocalyptic setting. Instead of fighting dragons, players scavenge resources and fend off gangs. It’s more like The Walking Dead than D&D in that respect, but its impact on game design doesn’t come from the setting, rather from the mechanics.

A few key differences highlight the innovation the Bakers brought to RPGs. PbtA’s core dice mechanic is simple and offers more flexibility than D&D’s pass/fail D20 system. Players roll 2d6 and succeed on a 10+, get mixed results on 7-9, and on a 6 or less, the MC (what Apocalypse World calls the DM) decides what happens. The result is a portable, narrative-focused mechanic. The emphasis on storytelling is threaded throughout the design, as characters are built on “archetypes” rather than classes. These archetypes make characters instantly recognizable to new players and embed story elements right into character creation.

Each archetype has a “playbook” (another innovation) that establishes what the character can do, “Moves,” and how that character relates to other characters. Every D&D player knows the first session trope where characters meet for the first time in a tavern, immediately form a party and run off on adventures. In PbtA games, the playbooks instantly establish narrative links between all the characters. These links create depth for the players and provide the MC with fodder for the story.

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Powered by the Apocalypse How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

PbtA games also have the MC build the world with the players. Unlike D&D, where a DM typically either writes a story in advance or picks up a published story to play, PbtA games involve all players in that process. In Apocalypse World, for instance, players (including the MC) decide what kind of apocalypse has happened to the world and how far gone it is. The world-building goes from there, getting as detailed as the story and players require.

But the Bakers are most proud of how their work has provided access to new creators. Vincent describes their work as a “successful anarchist economic project,” writing that, “there are people…who are able to breathe a little easier” because they were able to publish their PbtA game. That’s the real “power” behind the Powered by the Apocalypse games: the support for designing your own game. Even before Apocalypse World was published, designers were hacking versions, so much so that the Bakers were racing to publish first. To this day, all any game designer must do is credit the Bakers’ work as inspiration.

On their website, the Bakers even offer to help anyone interested in designing a game, and they have been ardent supporters of new creators. Meg noted that this philosophy arises from the homebrew design inherent to all RPGs. “Everything humans have made,” she wrote, “involves…modifying prior designs.” In that sense, PbtA is the ultimate tool for designers to create their own published homebrew. In particular, Meg is proud of how PbtA games have helped raise the awareness of gender and sexuality in game design, and how PbtA has “specifically benefitted queer, trans, nonbinary, and otherwise marginalized people and helped lift their stories.”

Powered by the Apocalypse How an Indie RPG Is Still Changing the Industry

The result of that empowerment is a thriving and diverse community of PbtA games, each with its own unique flavor and design. Some games are dungeon crawlers, like Dungeon World. Others are genre stories of horror or Sci-Fi, like Monster of the Week, Uncharted Worlds, or The Sprawl. There are wrestling games, mech games, historical, fairy tales and gumshoe detective games. Basically, if there are stories about it, PbtA has a game for it.

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Some PbtA games take the idea of role-playing games into territory D&D cannot imagine. Pasión de las Pasiones takes place on the set of “the greatest telenovela ever to air,” and players become the show’s stars and create an episode for TV. Vincent, meanwhile, loves to draw people’s attention to “the weird ones.” The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze by Joshua A.C. Newman, for example, includes only two playbooks (sword and sorcerer), strips down the dice mechanic, and becomes a story about “the origins of faith and law.” Meg finds relevance today in the “hopepunk” feel of Princess World that captures an “imaginative space of confidence and possibility.” Because the PbtA mechanics are so flexible, any kind of game is possible.

The Bakers have moved on to other projects, building on what’s come before, and they see the future of gaming moving online. Now Vincent says, “we’ll see more and more games designed specifically for online play.” Meg, meanwhile, sees the spaces for games expanding radically: “Five years ago the idea of putting a game on a coffee mug was unthinkable, but now it’s a thing that can happen.” In the future, she hopes these “weirder games” will continue to diversify the industry.

These days the Bakers continue to design games, along with their children, at Lumpley Games, but they don’t expect to drastically change Apocalypse World for a third edition. Instead, they’ll continue making new, pushing the boundaries of what games are capable of and what kinds of stories they’re able to tell. As a new generation steps into the spotlight of game design, Apocalypse World will hang alongside Dungeons & Dragons and other classic games as a polestar, guiding creations for years to come.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/powered-by-the-apocalypse-indie-rpg/

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