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anim-ttrpgs · 26 days

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Why I Dislike PbtA Games, and How Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Their Opposite

@tender-curiosities

It is no secret that I hate PbtA games.

Though due to a recent misunderstanding regarding another post, I’m going to preface this post by saying that this is going to be a very opinionated post and

I do not seriously think that PbtA games are inherently bad, though I may sometimes joke about this.

While I do often question the taste of people who make and play PbtA hacks, I do not think poorly of their moral character.

While I am going to call for PbtA to be used less as a base for games in the future, I’m not saying that the whole system and all games based on it should be destructified. It’s good for what it’s good for, but unless you’re doing that, I really think you should use something else.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what I have to say about it.

My first experiences with PbtA games were pretty rough. Monster of the Week was not the first, but it was one of the first ‘indie’ TTRPGs I played after having previously played mostly only D&D3.5e and 5e. I really appreciated that the use of 2D6 over a D20 meant that the dice results would be more predictable, and I really liked the various “classes” I was seeing. (At this time, I didn’t really understand that they weren’t really “classes” at all, though I think I can be forgiven for this because many people, even people who like PbtA games, still talk like “classes” and “playbooks” are interchangeable.)

I was very enthusiastic to play, until it came time to start actually “making” a character, and found that I couldn’t “make” a character. I wanted to make a nuanced, three-dimensional PC who was simultaneously stereotype-affirming and stereotype-defying, with a unique backstory and dynamic with the other characters—but when I went to actually fill out the character sheet for basically any “class”, I found that most of the backstory and most of the personality for my character was being set for me by the playbook. It felt like the only thing about the character I really had a say in was their name, and that two PCs of the same playbook would actually turn out to be almost identical characters. At the time, I thought this was very restrictive and very bad design.

Later, now that I understand the design intent behind it, I still think of it as very restrictive, but I think of it as very bad design for me, not inherently bad.

When I play a TTRPG, I want more freedom in who my PC is. That doesn’t mean I want less rules, in fact having more rules can often increase freedom, but that’s a different post. I want to create original, unique characters, that I won’t see anywhere else. If it’s a class-based system, I want that class to barely touch the details of my character’s backstory or personality, so that I can come up with something original and engaging for why and how this “Fighter” fights. This means that two level-1 Fighters, despite having almost the same mechanical abilities, will potentially be very different people.

PbtA games don’t let you do that. In a lot of PbtA games, you’re not playing your own original character, you’re playing someone else’s character, that every other player that has picked up the same playbook before you has played. It’s more like “character select” than “character creation.” I think I could liken it to playing Mass Effect or The Witcher. Every player may pick a few different dialogue choices in those games that change the story, but we’re still all playing Shepherd or Geralt. No one is going to experience a new never-before-seen story in Mass Effect or The Witcher, which is very much a factor of them being video games and not TTRPGs, and therefore limited to the amount of code, writing, and voice-acting that can go into them.

This anonymous asker who sent a message to @thydungeongal seems to feel pretty similarly to me about PbtA games, and @thydungeongal's response is a very good response about how people find this appealing.

I have more respect for PbtA now than I did, but I still don't like it because to me it seems to play so much against what I consider to be the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium, much like how video games like The Last of Us and David Cage games play against the strengths of the medium of video games, and I will never like it. But other people clearly do, so to each their own.

Then another reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s oversaturating the TTRPG space. I’ve referred to PbtA before as “indie D&D5e”, and i do think that’s a reasonable comparison, because in much the same way that you always hear “D&D5e is a system that can do everything”, I think a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the PbtA system is a system that can do anything. It’s kinda the système du jour for indie TTRPGs right now, and many iterations of it make it clear that many designers do not consider how PbtA differs from more traditional TTRPGs, and how it is specialized for different types of TTRPG gameplay. Just like how I feel PbtA isn’t playing to certain important strengths of TTRPGs, I think that many—maybe even most—PbtA hacks don’t play to the strengths of PbtA. But this isn’t really PbtA’s fault, that comes down to any individual indie TTRPG developer on a case-by-case basis. And the cure for that is something I’m always saying: If you are going to be a writer, you have got to read lots of books. If you are going to be a director, you have got to watch lots of movies. If you are going to be a video game developer, you have got to play lots of video games. And if you are going to be a TTRPG designer, you have got to read and play lots of TTRPGs. That and you have to understand that TTRPGs are specialized. Even "agnostic" systems like PbtA are somewhat specialized, and therefore might really not be a great fit for the game you’re trying to make.

That and, to get more subjective again, there’s like an ocean of them, and I don’t even like the ones that are actually good.

Now that I’ve talked about how I don’t like PbtA games, I’m gonna talk about a game I do like: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Obviously, I like it because I’m the lead writer for it, but I would also like it even if I wasn’t the lead writer for it, because it’s just my kinda game. Eureka is the opposite of a PbtA game. I wrote it to play to what I feel are the strengths of the TTRPG medium.

Eureka’s character creation uses personality traits as a mechanical element of the character, but it does so in a deliberately freeform way. You build your character’s personality out of a list of traits, so who your character is is very much linked to what your character can do, but we aren’t just handing you a pre-made character.

Eureka is designed to incentivize organic decision-making by the PCs, most often by the mechanics of the game mirroring the world they live in. Every mechanic aims to create situations wherein “what will the PC do next?” is a question whose answer can be predicted - it doesn’t need to be ordained by a playbook.

One of my favorite examples of this is, rather than a “Fear Check” forcing the PC to run away if they fail, or “Run Away from Danger” being a “Move” on their character sheet, Eureka opts for the Composure mechanic. The really short version is that one of the main things that lowers a PC’s Composure is encountering scary stuff, and the lower a PC’s Composure, the more likely they are to fail skill checks, and the more likely they are to fail skill checks, well, the less brave they and their player probably feel about them standing up to this scary monster. So if the PC has low Composure, they are more likely to choose to run away. The lower their Composure, the better idea that will seem.

This system really really shines when it comes to monster PCs in Eureka. Most monsters benefit a lot more from having high Composure, but have fewer ways to restore Composure than mundane PCs. Their main way to restore their Composure is by eating people. The rulebook never says “your monster PC has to eat people”, but more likely than not, they’re going to be organically steered towards that by the game and world itself. Sure, they could decide to be “one of the good ones”, and just never eat people, just like you reading this could decide to stop eating food. You technically could, but when your body starts to fail, how long would you? (This is a big part of the themes of Eureka and what it has to say about crime, disability, mental illness, and evil. People don’t just arbitrarily do bad things, it is often their circumstances that leads them down that path until they see little choice for themselves in that matter, and “harmful” people are still just as deserving of life as people who “aren’t harmful”, but that really deserves its own post.)

It has been said that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually arrives at much the same end as the PbtA game Monsterhearts, and I actually don’t disagree, but it gets there from an entirely different starting point and direction. The monster PCs in Eureka are very likely to eat people and cause drama, but it won’t be because they have “Eat People and Cause Drama” as a “Move” on their character sheet.

Monsters in Eureka have a lot of abilities, which they can use to solve (and create) problems as the emergent story emerges organically.

(Oh and Eureka is about adult investigators investigating mysteries, and sometimes those investigators are monsters, not about monster kids in high school, to be clear. The same “end” that Eureka and Monsterhearts reach is that of the monsters being prone to cause problems and drama due to the fact that they are monsters, though this isn’t the sole point of Eureka, just one element of it.)

You can pick up the free shareware version of this game from the download link on our website, or the full version for $5 from our Patreon.

And don’t forget, Eureka is fundraising on Kickstarter starting on April 10th, 2024! We need your support there most of all, to make sure we hit our goals and can afford to make the best version of Eureka we can make!

Interested in branching out but can’t get your group to play anything but D&D5e? Join us at the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, where we nominate, vote on, and play indie TTRPGs, all organized by our team with no strict schedule requirement! Here's the invite link! See you there!

We also have merchandise.

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whereserpentswalk · 7 months

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Starting my motw campaign: "Hey, it might be cool to add political intrigue to the magical underworld."

Now, over a year in: "These are the factions that control the former united states."

#motw campaign #motw ttrpg #motw rpg #motw #monster of the week #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpg community #rpg #ttrpg campaign #dnd #dnd campaign #alternate history #map #fantasy map #urban fantasy

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seahagart · 16 days

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They call him ‘Boss’ cause he’s the big man at camp… literally.

He’s a sasquatch working as a ‘human’ camp counselor. He wants to be a human, and the cryptid enthusiast campers think he’s just a guy that loves cosplay so he looks forward to working there every year. 7 feet tall, using a regular skateboard as a penny board, he is originally from Cali, but he makes his way through the country every year for his hiking passion.

He’s my character for a motw game 🤙🌲🛹

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pandapear-art · 6 months

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girl hours~

#art #artists on tumblr #doodle #ttrpg art #motw #motw art #motw ttrpg #body counts ttrpg

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bitemarx · 6 months

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ttrpg character doodles

#my babygirlsssss #cassius #nex #dnd #dnd character #dnd oc art #dnd art #tiefling #monster of the week #motw #motw ttrpg #ttrpg #ttrpg character #doodles #digital art

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midevilmidwestofficial · 1 month

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Hey you! Do you like Mid-Evil Midwest? Do you wanna know what music the PCs listen to/embody?

Check out the official playlists from Wyn James, Jade Knight, Malachi Knight, and William Fletcher!

#mid evil midwest #mid-evil midwest #eowyn james #malachi knight #william fletcher #jade knight #wyn james #monster of the week #midevil midwest #encounter co #motw ttrpg #memw #Spotify

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harbingercr0w · 20 days

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my character for an upcoming monster of the week campaign!! his name is indy, his playbook is the monstrous, but he is a Totally Normal Human Person

#monster of the week #motw #motw ttrpg #motw character #artists on tumblr #ocs #harbinger art

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pansyman · 3 months

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My recent feelings around @midevilmidwestofficial

Followed by the others, but Jade above all else yk?

#motw ttrpg #motw campaign #ttrpg #malachi knight #jade knight #wyn James #william fletcher #monster of the week #mid evil midwest podcast #mid evil midwest #midevil midwest

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thebathtubkeeper · 7 months

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Sometimes as a keeper(dm/gm/whatevas) you know your players are monsterfuckers, so you intentionally create one of them monsters that is just like an animal but oooh fucked up.

No one is gonna fuck the horse, so I have at least avoided having to figure out how they’d romance my monsters because this one is just a fucking weird ass horse

#ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg stuff #monster of the week #motw ttrpg #i want to make ttrpg pals real bad!#motw rpg #my stuff #lol #monster fucker #don’t worry future monsters will be hot???#just the first one they can’t fuck #can’t fuck your way out of this one folks

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count-von-kit · 3 months

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I'm never really sure how to sell myself, or rather garner interest to a fandom that has yet to really be established. But it's a small and wholesome group that I adore regardless. And I hope one day it will grow, because these goons have been the serotonin ride that's gotten me out of many tough spots time and time again. I'm finally in the position to slowly migrate my stuff from KoFi onto Ao3, and the reason I'm doing so is because KoFi outside of just being tipped doesn't really assist much for writers. I've lost many one-shot series because their blogging system does not allow to track posts by calendar dates like other spaces. But that's a personal rant for another time. That said, while I migrate my works to another site I still struggle to garner interest for some things I worked hard to write, even with having created a fandom tag for my very own family. And I know some things take time, but on the same token it still feels discouraging to a lesser degree. Namely because I'm not really sure just how to get people interested? If you're looking for wholesome and queer to read, I would be happy to present the following:

"Happy Birthday, Rose!" is a piece dedicated to Camp Boolieve's very own plant-loving gremlin. It's short, and to the point. More or less a birthday present I wrote for Rose's player. Some minor revisions were done to this when migrating it from my KoFi page, seeing as this was written before the series concluded. Now it holds a bit more accuracy. I would recommend this one specifically if you've listened to our playthrough, as there is a reference to a very specific episode.

"Hoodie" is a canonical piece written for the sake of gay fluff. It was written either right as Camp Boolieve was ending or immediately after? Or like right before our last episode? I can't quite remember exactly, but I wanted to write an important bit of how Abel likes to take Willy's hoodies. I did have to edit some things as I was nowhere near where I was when this got written. And while it's not perfect, it's still cute enough to sate those looking for fluff. Because we do love fluff.

A more spicy tale. "Merry Christmas, I Could Care Less [Unless]" is the Christmas piece I was posting about back in November/December. My group finally helped me deliver this live back in January. They also convinced me to put it up on Ao3. So with that, I added in some spicier bits that we could not deliver on Twitch. :) This canonical piece does have some trigger warnings to it, but I'm really happy with it. It was not fun to format when transferring it over there, but it's still something I'm proud of. And it's only part one! The rest of the tale will not be delivered until later this year. I had to split it into two parts as there was no way we'd be able to read the whole thing otherwise.

So if you're looking for a longer piece with a little bit of spice, then I would gladly suggest this one. Also if you're able to count all the FOB references in this one, then I will virtually give you a cookie. If you want a slightly less spicier version, you can listen to the stream on our VOD channel below [I am sorry in advance for the audio quality...]. But I am uh... trying to cater to getting those hits on my Ao3 stuff...

youtube

And heck. If you like the series that much and want to check out where it all began, then boy howdy do I have a Playlist for you!

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read through this. Likes and reblogs are always appreciated. I'm always so nervous to share my stuff with people outside of my comfort zone, but at the same time I'm also very eager to share it and always hope folks like what they read. So if you do take the time to read through pieces I've invested so much of myself into, I want you to know that I super appreciate you and the time you've given me. Thank you, and I love you.

-Alexander

#lgbtqia #transgender #transmasc #countvonkit #ttrpg #ttrpg community #motw ttrpg #trans writers #writers of tumblr #writers on tumblr #writers #am writing #ao3 writer #camp boolieve #alex writing hours #writer #oops maybe I let too much of myself out #Youtube

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punkaduck · 8 months

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So this really neat show, @midevilmidwestofficial , is one that I’m on and it happens to infect my brain so here are some MEMES

#midevil midwest #mid evil midwest #mid-evil Midwest #eowyn james #malachi knight #jade knight #william fletcher #wyn james #monster of the week #motw ttrpg #the encounter table #encounter co

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anim-ttrpgs · 7 months

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Investigator Traits in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

As anyone who has been following this blog knows, with Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, we really wanted roleplay and rules/mechanics to be strongly intertwined. In any good RPG, the rules/mechanics should facilitate the story, not hinder it, and the actions and behaviors of the characters essentially are the story. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy allows for and encourages a great many different types of people to be made as PCs, and we never want the players to have to fight the rules to play their character—if you have to do this, you’re probably playing the wrong RPG for the kind of story you’re trying to have, but that’s a different topic entirely—so instead of trying to squeeze a character concept into or out of a “class” or “playbook”, we designed the Traits system in Eureka so that the unique personality of the PC becomes their own unique mechanical gameplay.

This post is talking about Traits, but Truth is another example of this, and we gave that its own post here.

Traits are, well, traits of the PC. Every PC gets 3 of them by default, and they can be mixed and matched in just about any way. Traits can wildly affect the way that a PC plays, because each one changes the way that the PC interacts with certain mechanics in the game. Sometimes they’re personality traits, sometimes they’re physical traits, and sometimes rarely they’re even narrative traits(but they are not backstory traits; knowing a guy is not a trait, owning a car is not a trait, etc.)

Some traits have small mechanical benefits, others have big mechanical benefits that are very situational, and still others have big mechanical benefits balanced out with big mechanical downsides.

Let’s take a look at a few Traits right now.

Bumbling Detective || When this character rolls to investigate using Knowledge skills, always subtract -2 from the roll, but they gain an additional +2 Investigation Points.

This trait is meant to evoke the comedic ‘detective work’ of Inspector Jacques Clouseau, causing the PC to have a significantly higher chance of failing any investigation rolls related to inspecting the scene of an event or crime. However, as their fail, their investigation points stack up real fast, gaining them easy Eureka!s. Here is a post explaining investigation points and Eureka!s in greater detail, but the short version for this post is that they can be used to retroactively reveal clues or increase the PC’s odds in a climactic action roll, like Inspector Jacques Clouseau, they will appear to completely botch the investigation in the front half, but then they will be able to use their huge stock of Eureka!s to serendipitously save the day in the climax, revealing them to actually be an unassuming genius, or just an even bigger idiot than everyone already thought they were, but still not without merit as a detective.

Just One More Thing… || When this character rolls to investigate using Intrapersonal skills, always subtract -2 from the roll, but they gain an additional +2 Investigation Points.

This Trait is meant to evoke the particular investigation style of the recently tumblr-famous Columbo. Like the Bumbling Detective Trait, except for Interpersonal investigation rolls that deal with talking to NPCs, this character will frequently “fail” when asking questions and trying to get information out of people, but in doing so will quickly rack up lots of investigation points. Later on, with the Eureka!s they’ve gathered, they can reveal how they needled and provoked the suspect into revealing just what they needed him to.

We have a lot of other traits based on famous TV detectives, but I don’t want to go over all of them in one post, so here’s one more based on Sherlock Holmes.

Elementary! || This character has a keen eye for detail and can deduce a lot about a person just by looking at them, or at least they think they can. When meeting a new person for the first time, this character may choose to have the Narrator make a hidden Social Cues roll for you. Full Success = This character is able to guess two correct facts about this person just by looking at them. Partial Success = This character is able to guess one correct fact and one incorrect fact about this person. Failure = This character is able to guess two incorrect facts about this person. The Narrator will tell the character these facts, but will not tell them if they are true or false, and will not tell them what the result of the hidden roll was. This roll does not grant investigation points.

(couldn't find any .gifs that weren't of BBC Sherlock)

With this Trait, a PC can instantly sus out small details about an NPC just at the slightest glance, though they better hope their analysis is right on the money, or they might end up looking a total fool! This trait is a favorite among certain playtesters.

Hardened Hearts || This character will not have to make any composure rolls for witnessing blood/gore, corpses, or death. Subtract -2 from all Comfort rolls made by this character. If an NPC, apply this to Morale.

Maybe this character has seen plenty of dead bodies, or maybe they just don’t much care about them, either way, they are immune to losing composure points from particularly gruesome scenes that might send others running for a place to throw up. On the flip side, however, this indifference acts as a barrier between themselves and other, more squeamish people, and this can make it difficult to approach them on their level and provide a calming effect when they need to.

That isn’t to say that in real life there can’t be people who are unaffected by seeing corpses but aren’t bad at comforting others—there’s plenty of morticians who see gruesome scenes every day, but and are also very experienced at speaking to grieving families without worsening their already fragile emotional state. For a character like this, the Hardened Hearts Trait isn’t the right fit, instead you’d want to make Corpses a +3 on that character’s Tiers of Fear, which is a mechanic we haven’t really talked about on this blog yet I don’t think, but basically there is a list of Fears in the rulebook and you write them into a chart on the character sheet, ranking them by how much they would distress the character, with +3 being the least distress and -3 being the most distress. This determines the modifier when making a Composure Roll, the result of which determines how much Composure the character loses when faced with particularly harrowing events. (And it is not a measure of “sanity”)

For one last one, let’s look at one of my personal favorite Traits.

Final Girl: When this character is alone against any sort of supernatural threat, add +1 to all rolls made with Physical Skills. Additionally, when this character is alone against any sort of supernatural threat, they may spend one or more Eureka! points on one of the supernatural threat’s skill rolls, adding an extra D6 for each point. The supernatural threat must drop the highest dice.

This Trait allows the character to emulate the narrative trope of the “final girl” in horror movies, particularly “slashers” or “creature-features”. It gives them the little boost they may need to get out alive or fight the creature off, but only when they’re the last one left or otherwise all alone. It also allows them to spend a Eureka! in just the right moment: the slasher’s knife miraculously misses their throat, the creature gets snared up while lunging through the foliage, whatever it is that makes them lucky enough to survive what was certain death for the rest of the main characters long enough to mount an effective defense or make a daring escape.

As you can see, there’s a lot to work with with these traits, 31 of them at the time of writing this, and they can vastly alter the way that a character interacts with the rules/mechanics of the game, all based on their personality and, well, their *traits*. This encourages and rewards characters acting in their own unique way, rather than simply being a “class”, “playbook”, or “archetype”, or just a collection of different skills, while actually supporting this unique gameplay and roleplay with the rules of the game.

We also include guidelines in the rulebook for how to create your own homebrew Traits as well.

You can also pick up a pre-release PDF copy of this game(in a fully playable state) for $5 through our Patreon.

#eureka: investigative urban fantasy #eureka #rpg #roleplaying #coc #call of cthulhu #dnd #indie rpg #motw ttrpg #motw rpg #motw #monster of the week #tabletop #ttrpg #halloween

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