In the world of tabletop role-playing games, players have lots of choices, none more popular than the nearly 50 year-old Dungeons & Dragons, now in its fifth edition. The last 10 years have seen another system occupy a significant and diverse niche in the TTRPG ecosystem: the Powered by the Apocalypse game engine that originated with D. Vincent and Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World. D&D's popularity may never be matched, but both systems are worth exploring.
D&D and PbtA games offer many genres for players. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror and many other stories can be told in either. Both include the same basic requirements: Books, People and Dice. The similarities pretty much end there, but the gameplay experience for them is quite different.
CrunchRules are the core of a game, so how a game sets up its rules establishes the kind of stories that can be told. Players like to talk about a game's "crunch," which refers to a game's rules: How many there are and how they work. The term "crunch" may come from "number crunching," or the calculations that players must make when rolling dice, but it also refers to the granularity of rules—how many facets there are for any given choice.
Most games have some level of crunch but crunch is a continuum, not a binary. The Fifth Edition of D&D, for example, is considered by many to be the least crunchy editions of the game, as Wizards of the Coast stripped out many small rules from previous editions. Pathfinder, which arose from D&D 3.5, has lots of crunch, whereas the Belonging Outside Belonging system has "no dice, no masters" for minimal crunch. D&D 5e and PbtA fall somewhere in the middle, with D&D being fairly crunchier than PbtA games.
For D&D, the rules were designed for war games. Combat, therefore, is central to the game experience. In D&D, there are pages and pages devoted to combat rules, not to mention the rules governing character class features, spells, items and vehicles. There are a lot of rules in D&D. Many like to point out that for the new DM, there are three core rulebooks: The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. That’s almost a thousand pages of rules, which doesn't even include the stories and worlds.
Of course, no one, not even the best DMs, know or need to know all the rules. The crunch makes D&D a game for those who enjoy some rolling dice and damage, who revel in counting squares of movement and combining their powers just right to do nova damage. An advantage of this standard system is that a player who has learned the 5e rules can play in any world they want: in Gotham City, Borderlands, or Baldur's Gate, all those games rely on the D20 mechanic and basically follow all the Fifth Edition rules.
In Apocalypse World, on the other hand, there are just 309 pages of rules. The most basic one is, “if you do it, you do it, so make with the dice.” Character moves are likewise less restrictive than in D&D. In Monster of the Week, instead of spell slots with specific components and specific rules, characters “Use Magic.” The move Use Magic has several restrictions, but for anything that doesn’t fit into them, there’s “Big Magic.” The only real limitations are on a player’s imagination and the conversation at the table. Combat is also simplified to “Kick Some Ass” and doesn't follow an initiative order.
Every PbtA system is different, however, and some games incorporate crunchier rules for combat than others. PbtA games tailor their crunch to the world, thus tailoring the kinds of stories that can be told in those systems. PbtA games have unique rules designed for that particular game, which means that every new game requires learning new rules.
DM or MC?What all PbtA games have in common, however, are the norms established around role-playing, including that of the Dungeon Master (DM). Apocalypse World calls that person the Master of Ceremonies (MC), but most PbtA games have different names for that role. D&D, meanwhile, is well known for the omnipotent DM. "Rule 0" isn't codified so much as accepted by all players of the game, but the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide includes this emphatic line in the introduction: "The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren’t in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game.” This is 5e's Rule 0: when in doubt, the DM decides.
Compare this to the rules in Apocalypse World: "roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth.... Like any conversation, you take turns.... Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others' ideas, monopolize and hold forth. All fine." A PbtA game is built around a group, and the story is told through conversation together, while D&D places more power in the hands of the DM. The difference isn't better or worse; rather, it creates different opportunities for players.
Stories & WorldsBecause D&D is a single comprehensive system with a powerful DM, designers create worlds to tell stories in that system. The worlds may be "canon" and printed by Wizards of the Coast as official campaign sourcebooks, or they may be third-party or homebrew supplements. Either way, the designers create the world to work with D&D's ruleset. D&D includes many official campaign settings, reams of lore written over fifty years. PbtA games, on the other hand, are created independently; there is no parent corporation unifying their design or rules. Apocalypse World has a table imagine their world together rather than imagining worlds wholesale and selling packaged stories set in them. All the players may take an equal stake in world-building.
When it comes to content, there's probably no comparing D&D to any other TTRPG. It's fifty years old, has been through five editions, and currently is enjoying a wave of popularity so large that it's buoying an entire cottage industry of third-party content. Likewise, whatever your flavor, there's a PbtA game for it, probably several. The difference is that each PbtA game is custom-built for that type of game, and the designers of PbtA games generally don't provide prewritten adventures or Big Bad Evil Guys for the party to face off against. Instead, the designers emphasize the collaborative conversation.
In the end, the differences really come down to crunch and conversation. Players looking for a sandbox or linear adventure with lots of crunchy combat will enjoy D&D in all its glorious variety. Those who want a more collaborative storytelling experience with fewer granular choices (and probably less math) should try PbtA games. There are so many of them, they are fairly inexpensive, and once you become familiar with the basic rules, they are easy to learn.
KEEP READING: Steam: Baldur's Gate 3, Ikenfell & 3 Other Titles You Should Play
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4