A post-PbtA World, Sardinian Masks and Going Solo
A spicy musing about the end of an RPG era, two free Monsters from the italian folklore for your sessions, and an Ode to the Solo games.
Trigger Warning - Part 1
Unpopular opinion: the era of PbtA is over. Now, if you are reading this, I assume you know what this acronym means since, for a period of seemingly infinite length, Powered by the Apocalypse was the main topic of discussion in RPG circles. Or it was, at least in our country, where a particular slice of the local community decided that the solution to all the tribulations of the gaming world was spending most of the time explaining to others why no one but them knew how to roleplay.
Let us, however, approach the subject with some seriousness and with that touch of factionalism that used to be called “personal opinion,” shall we?
PbtA was born years ago with a clear purpose: to define best the relationship between players and GMs within the fiction of a roleplaying game. It was all thanks to the theories stemming from the discussions in The Forge (one of the fundamental experiences for reflection and evolution of RPG as a media), and still today, PbtA is a milestone that any game designer, any player, any GM should read, understand and internalize. However, a milestone has a specific purpose: to mark a part of the path, not its endpoint. Paradoxically, PbtA doesn’t always work partly because it has been loaded with too many expectations. What started as a tool to teach how to play together to find out what collective story we would tell became increasingly complicated and began to show its cracks.
Because most players (and in this context, let’s consider the GM to be a player) are not there to write a story; they want to have an adventure. Most GMs, aided by the boom of actual play, want to tell their part of the tale and play with others from a different point of view. As much as we may or may not like it, storytelling is not democratic; it has never been and never will be. However, before you scream “Tyrant Master” or start invoking how poor players are victims of various forms of psychological torture, I would ask you to stop and reflect on a fundamental point: it is not necessary to play with assholes.
A roleplaying session is a creative act, and like all creative acts, it requires a certain amount of commitment, a certain amount of mental energy, and a certain amount of concentration. Finding a table that can regularly play at the level necessary to keep up a session of pure collective storytelling can be challenging. Sometimes you’re tired, sometimes in a bad mood, out of ideas, and it’s ok. Even when everyone is in top shape, a gaming system with Moves and a solid commitment to shared storytelling will still not give you a totally horizontal experience.
This is not an opinion; this is a common problem, for example, in the design of cooperative board games. It is unsolvable because it clashes with human nature so much that it is considered a “cursed problem” in the field because very little can be done about it.
And no, let’s not tell ourselves that the beauty of RPG is total and utter improvisation at the table and that the GM of a PbtA just has to “go with the flow of the story” as if this concept has no weight and consequences. I have seen sessions demolished by egomaniacal players exploiting the Moves and their narrative authority to pressure others and take the story where they wished; I have seen GMs exhausted by yet another sudden turn in the plot just “because it’s more interesting,” and I have seen players forced to elaborate on fiction that was not in their wheelhouse because they were simply bullied under a carpet bombing of Moves. And in most cases, we are not even talking about assholes; we are merely describing a classic of the Cursed Problems: sooner or later, the one who has more skills, more resources, or more charisma will end up being the leader of the group. Or, in our case, the true GM.
Let’s be honest: PbtA, as a force of change, has run its course. The rulebook is simple and functional, with its elegance, but it tends to flatten out in the long run. The excessive production of materials by a publishing industry that tends to chase the shiny new toy, saturating an all-too-small niche, also contributed to the problem.
Even though this view may sound cynical and ill-disposed, I am very enthusiastic about PbtA. Thanks to it, we can witness a new age of modern roleplaying where even lines like City of Mists are moving away from their illustrious ancestor while a whole new plethora of games leveraging the Forged in the Dark framework, the Year Zero Engine, and other derivatives of the PbtA experience are giving us plenty of hours of fun. Even D&D learned from it, and we have a blossoming OSR movement and the birth of NSR as polite replies to the same conversation.
PbtA gave us the piece missing in game design and was among the forerunners in addressing what Antonio Rossetti and I called “The Triangle of Authority” during a panel: the relationship between GM, Players, and Handbook within storytelling.
In the second part of this article, we will talk more about how all these considerations that we started contemplating in 2016 (and were, of course, branded as heresy in Italy) later led to the development of the CopperHead System, used for Epigoni Essential, and influenced in some points the Blood Engine, used for Hellsquad, to make my point more clearly on the change from post-apocalyptic to a post-PbtA ludic world.
Toybox: Sardinian Monsters
This month, we bring you a new Toybox for Epigoni Essential, designed to give your sessions an extra dash of folk atmosphere. We created MythPop versions of Mamuthones and Issohadores, masks from the Mamoiada Carnival in Sardinia, imagining them as the enforcers of a monster-only criminal organization called “The Mobs.”
We used this opportunity to show an exciting aspect of the Epigoni engine: since NPC abilities are often triggered by in-game events and conditions, why not create two synergistic myth entities that activate their most potent abilities when the other triggers or suffers an effect?
The Mamuthones and Issohadores look like simple monsters, but together they represent a far-from-trivial challenge for a group of seasoned Epigoni.
You can download the English and Italian versions of the file from the yellow button below.
Are you still without a copy of Epigoni: Essential? Download it from itch.io or DriveThruRPG.
The importance of being Solo
In recent years, we have seen a steady growth of a mode of play within the TTRPG world that can leave one quite confused: Solo play.
At first reading, this approach to the role-playing game may sound distant from how we imagine the game we often see played. If we talk about journaling games, for example, it sometimes looks like a great exercise in creative writing.
Here, we open up an intriguing topic: what do we mean by roleplaying? We could debate this for decades without getting a satisfactory result, so for this article, I urge you to stick to the definition we use within Oddplan, or we won’t come out alive.
Roleplaying is an adult play pretending where we combine the children’s imagination with a more complex and more functional system of rules, and in doing this together, we write and discover a story all within a safe zone. In other words? Talk to any child, and they will tell you that they love playing video games because they “go on adventures,” “explore,” and “fight.” That’s the core of it all. After that, we can put superstructures of any kind to decide what we want to experience as adventures, what we want to explore, and what we want to fight, or if you prefer, we can call them framework, friction, and conflict. I am simplifying quite a bit; each of these points would require more elaboration, and indeed, the creative vision that guides Oddplan is not the absolute truth that anyone should adhere to.
May the gods save us from TTRPG gurus and influencers who have only certainties about how you should be playing make-believe for big kids.
No one should ask that we know how to do improv theater, how to do strong builds of our character, to intervene directly in the story if we have a GM, and no one demands that we play stories we don’t care about in ways we don’t like. Humans have an innate need to create narratives and live in fantasy; we need stories to take a little break from everyday life and get to know each other better. Why not? They can also be part of our path of growth and healing.
So what is Solo Mode? It's the freedom to roleplay alone, to go on adventures, explore, and face challenges with the games we enjoy, all without needing a GM or other players.
Why has it become so popular that it is requested in any comments section of a Kickstarter if not directly part of the stretch goals from the get-go?
Here, we can open a second debate that may never end, but personally, the constant need to be able to play for ourselves with what we own is also a byproduct of our age.
Our current century is a constant source of overstimulation; historically, human beings have never been so interconnected, and at the same time, it is also the century where the availability of entertainment material has exceeded any standard ever thought of before. We have so much, we have too much, and that is not always a good thing. And I don’t say this to sound like the boomer complaining about the good old days. I am an avid believer that the nostalgia saturating the Western pop world is a symptom of a malaise we will have to face sooner or later.
In roleplaying, due in part to crowdfunding, we have gone from living through the TTRPG Renaissance to a time where several people around me are talking about “mastering burnout,” where FOMO is an integral part of the way the hobby is lived, and where a portion of the “successful” products are often derivative (which in some cases is a fancy way of saying plagiarized), known brands or reissues of previous products. I can guarantee that we will see the damage of this dynamic in the market in the following years, with the climax of the never-ending consumer-pleasing chase.
Coming back to us, however, what is the merit of a Solo Mode for a game not designed for this in its initial print? You can play it.
In 2024, time has become a scarce resource we’ve long taken for granted, and maintaining human relationships is increasingly challenging because they require time and energy that we can no longer spare. Adding to this, we face an environment overflowing with new RPG projects that often last only a few months while Dungeons and Dragons practically monopolizes the scene, whether we like it or not.
So we find ourselves full of manuals that will often be left gathering dust; even if we do manage to find a table to play, we will still have to compromise on the type of experience or optimize the time we have with a simple game, known to everyone and without the need for excessive preparation. Why do you think derivatives and familiar brands have become so pervasive? Creating interactive stories and managing them amid constant input from others is also not feasible if you are tired or unmotivated.
Shared imagery is not easy to generate either, especially when the number of sources at our disposal borders insanity, and dividing into categories no longer works. Think of things like grimdark or epic fantasy, which now have so many declinations that it becomes challenging to sit around a table and assume we all have the same idea1.
And so a little bit out of necessity, a little bit for the sake of being able to experience a story without the need for compromise, for the necessity of just being able to amaze ourselves, to be awestruck, we need Solo Mode.
We had video games for that; now, that sense of wonder that they used to give us has been sacrificed for the internet obsession with dissecting and digesting everything in a matter of days, discovering everything as soon as possible, and then maybe leaving it incomplete (think of the Elden Ring case, where the DLC was not accessible to most players because only 32% had defeated a specific plot-related boss).
Sometimes, playing a game that doesn’t need an ending, a vertical plot, or even a story with a head and tail is nice. Sometimes, we want that sense of the fantastic back, the same we had when we were kids, and the world was a magical place, full of surprises and threats that we had to face on our own as little heroic explorers. Because in a world where we are too connected, where it seems that the only time to dream is when we sleep, part of the RPG revolution is to go back every once in a while to that inner cave that introverts and children know so well, and be alone for a while to play to discover a story that is only ours.
It’s also good to keep the pie to ourselves every once in a while, right?
Yeah, before we forget, we will release the next free product on September 21st, and subscribers will be the only ones able to access it for the first week.
If you want to be the first to know what it is, follow us on Instagram. It’s a cool account, trust us.
For example, how would you define Hellsquad?
PbtA wasn't "the most important evolution of RPGs" or whatever. It was a forking path that introduced a new genre on the grounds of (at that time) niche style of playing RPGs.
I know about at least one PbtA which includes not just Moves (some too limiting while some too powerful) but also interbalanced Skills (try the TTRPG "Root", and no, that wasn't a typo, there is really an another Root game than the Root boardgame). I also like the system "Built with Backbone" (BwB), I'm recommending the TTRPG "Backroads". This could be an another Milestone of TTRPGs evolution,maybe it can become something more. I'm about to make an enhanced rulebook based on it - and trust me, that I have huge know-how, plenty of interesting ideas, resources and helpers. It will be called Backstories (hihi) and it will include lore from all European horrors. From bruxas up to vampires, from cool Celtic scarry stories up to the most modern subgenre of new weird. If you're interested in it, including as a helper (please help me), feel free to contact me.
I'm an owner and leader of a generally developmental international holding with the main company of a smart school: https://DMDU.kvalitne.cz - a great company for proper development (Google translator and translatable chat UI are included). We're using TTRPGs also as tools for self-development and in psychotherapies.