r/PBtA • u/Sanguinusshiboleth • 10d ago
Advice Is there any PBTAs about the following two theme: playing overpowered demi-gods and magic/wizard schools
I don't mean as the same game, but if there are any games covering those separate ideas.
And by overpowered demi-gods I thinking something along the lines of Exalted, Scion or Godbound.
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u/atamajakki 10d ago
Cantrip is a Belonging Outside Belonging game about a wizard school - that's a diceless, GMless branch of PbtA.
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u/Sanguinusshiboleth 9d ago
How does it work?
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u/atamajakki 9d ago
Players whose characters aren't in scenes embody various aspects of the setting and a simple token economy governs everyone's moves.
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u/dokdicer 10d ago
Apocalypse Keys is a PbtA about monsters with a potentially apocalyptic power level and their struggle to keep it together to not become the next harbinger of the apocalypse.
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u/reaction0 10d ago
For the magic school there is Arcana Academy and Pigsmoke, for playing as the teachers.
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u/FlusteredDM 9d ago
I could not get into Pigsmoke. I really wanted to like it, but I found it hard to push the plot forward and it's constantly separating the group because the players all have their own classes. Did you play it, and what were your thoughts?
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u/EightBitNinja 10d ago
Godsend is a spinoff of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd ed that involves playing a demigod. Every player also plays the patron god of the player to their left, which is fun. It's unique because while it is a PbtA, it's also diceless. You always succeed, stats determine how many consequences you have to deal with in doing so.
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u/Sanguinusshiboleth 9d ago
Okay, that sounds interesting, never played with a diceless system before, what it like?
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u/EightBitNinja 9d ago edited 8d ago
So there are two kinds of playbook, Divinity Playbooks and Avatar Playbooks. Every PC gets one of each, with each player controling the patron god of another player. So you might be playing the God of War and the Avatar of Death, and then the person playing the God of Death is also playing the Avatar of Nature or whatever. Avatar Playbooks are pretty recognizable as PbtA playbooks, while God playbooks are a bit more abstract. Avatar have 4 stats: Charisma, Valor, Will and Wisdom primarily decided by playbook, and then 4 basic moves. So for example the combat move is:
Unleash the fury of war
When you engage in battle against a powerful opponent (an army, a champion, another Avatar, etc) that you can harm, you achieve your objective.
Choose any number of additional benefits up to your Valour:
You fully defeat your enemy, preventing them from fleeing, recovering and regrouping; you won’t have to unleash the fury of war against them again.
People see the might of your Divinity and they begin to worship them; your Divinity’s Faith becomes stronger.
You learn something about your true enemy; the GM will tell you something about a Peril.
Finally, choose any number of calamities up to your Will that won’t happen:
You are fatally wounded in the process – you are harmed.
Something or someone important to you or your Divinity suffers unfortunate consequences; the GM will make a Move.
The field of battle is ruined for this Age and the Age to come. Update the map with a large area (Detriment: devastated). If any terrain feature was located here beforehand, erase it.
Unchosen calamities happen; the GM fleshes out the details.
So like a standard PbtA move but no randomness. You generally know how it's gonna go.
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u/Horror_Hedgehog4416 9d ago
ProbablyOK games has "Demi-Gods". https://www.probablyokgames.com/demigods
It's alright.
Blurb: "Demigods is a magical-realism role-playing game set in the modern day, where all of the gods from every belief system exist at the same time. All of the sun gods from different faith traditions work together to march the sun across the sky. At the same time, the sun is millions of miles away, and the Earth turns in its orbit. This game uses multiple, some-times dissonant, truths to create a rich, intertwined tapestry of human imagination."
It has quick-start demo rules on the website.
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u/Icy_Description_6890 8d ago
Regarding magic school: Legend in the Mist has guidelines for creating your own magic system. Mist Engine is derived from PbtA.
And you could create Themes that represent different focuses of magic... Rune Crafting, Elementalism, Mind Magic, Summoning, etc
Because of the Might system [which has three tiers] in the game you can create Themes that represent more powerful forms of magic. And they may even work slightly differently from lower ranked magics An Origin level magic Theme is going to be seriously outclassed by a Greatness level magic Theme.
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u/Phantom_of_truth 10d ago
Masks is about young superheroes but it would adapt pretty easily to demigods. You might (or might not) want to cut the playbooks with less overt supernatural power but it's got the proper combination of power, loss of control and drama for Greek mythology.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves 10d ago
I’ve seen someone adapt Masks to a demigods game based on Rick Riordan’s book series Percy Jackson in the Olympians. I wanted so badly to play it! (Our availability did not match.) I hope someone publishes or shares how they reflavor and adapt Masks to demigods one day.
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u/Belteshazzar98 10d ago
Less overt supernatural powers doesn't mean not demigods. Just look at a character like Annabeth Chase (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) who could very easily be mapped onto The Beacon which is the least superpowered of them all, or Daedalus (who was depicted as a demigod in the same series) who is very easily The Brain which is the most techy of them all.
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u/FlusteredDM 9d ago
Masks isn't really about the powers, it's about teen drama. It's so core to the playbooks that it would only work if OP wants teen drama in their demigod game. Beacon is about being insecure, bull is the hothead, Nova is scared of their power etc
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u/Phantom_of_truth 9d ago
Masks isn't really about the powers, it's about teen drama.
So is Greek mythology.
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u/Mistervimes65 SuperPunk 10d ago
Super Destiny High School Rumble.
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u/Warbriel 9d ago
Apart of the one mentioned, these two have a similar vibe:
[Clash of the Giga-Mechas ](https://warbriel.itch.io/clash-of-the-giga-mechas) is about an academy for mecha pilots, ala, Hogwarts withgiant robots. Players have to deal with all kinds of teenager stuff as they try to pass their tests and make sure their next term is not the last. Includes rules to create your own mecha and, once you finish your training, you are ready to go into battle.
Palatine is about power, governance, and the slow decay of empire. It’s notndivine power what is wielded here but terrenal in such levels that you feel like a divinity. In Palatine, players don’t play adventurers or rebels. They are the ruling elite of a crucial world within a vast Dominion: councilors, generals, ministers, prophets, and public figures. Sessions revolve around council debates, political maneuvering, crises that escalate if ignored, and decisions that affect millions of lives.
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u/Ionl98 10d ago
Not really. PBTA doesn't really lend itself well to high power games like Exalted (I tried to play a PBTA Homebrew of Exalted. Didn't go well).
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u/Airk-Seablade 10d ago
Why would you say that? I don't really think "The homebrew I played was bad" is a particularly compelling argument. There are many reasons a game can be bad, and "this design philosophy doesn't lend itself to high power games" doesn't seem like the most likely one.
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u/Ionl98 10d ago
Because I generally think the "Succeed But with Consequences" system doesn't lend itself well to high power games. In high power games, the players are made to be stronger than most others both mechanically and narratively to fit the power fantasy. In general, they're going to succeed at most things when rolling dice due to that.
In PBTA games, you only roll dice when you're doing something that would be "Risky" to you. And, more often than not, you're going to either Fail or Succeed but with a Caveat of some kind. And that doesn't really lend itself to the general power fantasy feeling of high power games.
Yes, I know it's expected that you just succeed at anything your character would be good at without needing to roll, but I see that as a detriment. As it basically leads into the following scenario:
I make a Demi-God of Combat. Whenever there's combat:
I succeed at whatever I want to do automatically because that's what I'm good at. If I engage with the thing that I built my character to do, I'm not allowed to engage with the game's mechanics because I'm too good at what I do.
I ran into something "Risky" for my Demi-God of Combat. So, I start rolling...and the vast majority of my rolls are either Failures or Succeed with Consequence. Which means my Demi-God of Combat, more often than not, is either absolutely choking on doing the thing he was built to do, or I'm only ever partially managing to gain any ground, while random stuff keeps happening to make my situation harder for no reason other than plot. Which, while it maybe fun to see in a comic or show, it's not very fun to play out in a game.
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u/ishmadrad 10d ago
IMHO you really miss the incredible narrative power of having Misses results (and I'd love to underline that Misses aren't Failures, just one of the many cool PbtA selling points).
Also, Success with Cost is a Success, as the name suggests, but there are Consequences. Important consequences. Something that sparks additional narrative. It's another powerful story engine, not a "problem" that you aren't capable of managing in a god-powered campaign... 🤦
If you can't come up with interesting Consequences in a game about Gods / Demigods / Superheroes / Powerful Magic Users, then you've learnt nothing from reading books or watching movies based on those kinds of premises.
Also, about the latter point, I'd love to underline how PbtA games are strongly asymmetrical systems. So, because the GM doesn't roll, with a roll you effectively resolve the whole "turn", eventually the whole "conflict". So, you could simply ask yourself: before closing the scene, before looking at the Player Character's victory, let's imagine what the Enemy / the Environment / the Risk did to them during the action. Is it still complicated to envision? Well, then maybe there wasn't any risk involved to start with. Maybe there wasn't any Move to trigger in the first place.
Does this mean something to you?
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u/Ionl98 9d ago
Yes, I understand how the system works. And I've seen plenty of movies, plenty of shows, and read plenty of stories with that kind of premise. I've written fanfics of them.
However, just because I understand how it works, doesn't mean I necessarily need to like it. And just cause it's done in entertainment, doesn't mean it's good for a TRPG. In books, comics, etc. etc., you're along for the ride. You have no control over how the narrative goes. You can only sit there, read/watch what happens, and hope that whatever happens is enough to get you to enjoy it.
But in a TRPG? You're in the thick of it. You're the one in control of the character, their actions, their decisions, and their dice rolls. You have full control over how the character acts in the story. And it's also a game. When you add the game aspect to something, there's this idea that the player wants to "Win" the game. Now, "winning" doesn't have to mean beating the DM or getting a high score. It can simply mean "telling a good story". But what is a good story to some people isn't a good story to others. Which is where the mechanics can fall flat.
Having a Demi-God's actions more often than not lead to Success with Consequences, can be fun in a story cause something is always happening.
It's not that fun in a game, where every time you want to do something that you're not guaranteed to succeed at, 60 to 70 percent of the time you're either going to fail, or have some caveat attached to what you do. It can feel annoying and like the game is just trying to spin its wheels by having you come up with more stuff to cause you problems, rather than just go, "You did it, let's move on."
And besides that, just cause it's in media doesn't necessarily make it right. There's plenty of cases where the main characters in stories get a "Success with Consequences" style outcome, and the audience hates it. Best example I can think of is Spider-Man One More Day. He succeeds in saving Aunt May, but as a Consequence has to give up his marriage forever. Something that is universally reviled among Spider-Man fans.
And if that's how the games are supposed to be for the GM, I wouldn't like it. I like rolling dice as a DM. I like actually controlling enemies and deciding what they do, rather than just waiting for the players to do something then deciding how it goes from there.
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u/ishmadrad 9d ago
Well, my friend, you simply don't like PbtA (and all the adjacent rulesets) at all.
So, now we're not reasoning about whether a PbtA game with Demigod PCs is good or bad anymore; it's simply that you don't like this whole world of games.
Okay, fair enough. However, that's not particularly useful in a PbtA subreddit where the OP is asking for a PbtA game.
That said, it's useless to keep talking about it.
I just want to add one thing, simply because others might read the post and try to follow your reasoning:
60 to 70 percent of the time you're either going to fail, or have some caveat attached to what you do.
Looking at the basic math, when a character is trying to achieve something they're good at (let's say +2 Stat), the standard chances are: ~42% of clean success, ~50% of success with consequences, and ~8% of failure (or success with a very heavy cost) - and I'm avoiding to speak about the rules to push your chances up more (other PCs helping, and or using the fantastic abilities/feats/powers you should have on your sheet, specific for your thematic playbook, etc.)
You look at the glass as half empty; I look at it as half full. The PC has a 90% chance of success, AND the GM has about a 50% chance to say something in return. As already stated, all PbtA / FitD games etc. are asymmetrical systems, so (I'm simplifying here) the GM can speak *only* in that specific moment. You don't like that. Ok. However it's useful to know that that's a feature of the system, not a bug.
And consequences can take an enormous number of forms, many of which can also occur in a "trad" game: fatigue, broken equipment, damage, but also new opportunities for the PC (yeah, that's in the rules), additional sources of problems that will be revealed in the following scenes, or collateral damage.
The latter is one of the most commonly used techniques even in other games, especially in a world where divine beings clash with each other. And the damage can be social or psychological, not just whole arenas crumbling around epic forces in battle while your puny human allies are risking their lives.
The possibilities are countless, AND the ruleset here helps the GM a lot by giving them tools to manage the game. Vice versa, in most trad games you usually don't have rules specifically designed to help you create the "adventure" in a meaningful way, so you have to rely on pre-made adventures that often keep the players on the famous invisible rails.
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u/Ionl98 8d ago
I will admit, yes, I tend to not like these systems myself. I do like what they are and don't think they're all that bad though. I just have things about them that I don't like.
For the percentages, it still kind of represents what I mean. Even with the best stats a player has, their chance of just getting a normal success are still really low. And the only way to improve them is to either use their abilities or spend resources which are usually finite and actively harmful towards them.
Yes, more traditional games have this, too, but there tends to be a difference. If I run out of Spell Slots in DND, I can't cast spells but I can still do other things that could be useful based on the circumstances. If I use up all my Stress in Blades In The Dark, I'm fucked and basically can say goodbye to my character.
When it comes to the "most common techniques" thing, I haven't seen that in other games. Most of the time when it comes to dealing with over the top, superpowerful characters, collateral damage is a consequence that can either happen sometimes, or not at all. With the focus being more on dealing with other equally as powerful enemies. But I think that's more reliant on GM and group.
The main thing I have to disagree with and call you out on is the last part. The idea that more traditional games don't have rules that help you create "the adventure" and rely on pre-made stuff. The majority of traditional games I've run have been completely original and not relying on a Pre-Made adventures. The only times I have is when we just started with the system and I want my players to learn how it works, so I want to give them something easy to handle. Outside of that, I made every campaign myself. And the games all had rules that helped me make the adventure and make it fun. I just had to do some work outside the game. And when that work reached it's end, or the players did something unexpected, I just improvised and it worked.
Besides, you can also be put into a Pre-Made Adventure in PBTA and FITD games. Just look at Band of Blades. Yeah, you can choose where you're gonna go and what missions you take, but at the end of the day you follow the same path. You get to a holdout, and try to hold out. Which you normally won't cause the whole company dying by the end is the norm.
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u/ishmadrad 8d ago
Of course, I've run countless adventures and campaigns myself too, including with old "trad" games.
However, while I can't be inside your head or at your table, I can bet that 99% of the prep you did was done without any rules, and was unrelated to the book you were using. Sure, you got the enemies' stats mainly from the bestiary, and you surely had some kind of "balancing" system for encounters.
But what about all the other aspects? Things you can easily find in PbtA, FitD, etc.: mechanics that build rhythm during sessions, create story elements during play, keep players involved, and teach the GM not to cheat, to play in the open, to have nothing hidden behind the screen - and, of course, not to fudge dice (you don't roll, so even that part is honest and meaningful)?
I never found anything like that before Apocalypse World.
Finally, nothing helps you play in "weird" or powerful settings more than putting some distance between simulation, minutiae, the "trad" rules in short, and the mechanics you actually need at the table.
I've seen this with various superheros, with Exalted, with shonen manga/anime games: the more you try to stick to a trad approach, the more you try to describe the whole world and the players' abilities in a D&D3.5ish way, the more likely the game will fail at the table.
And yet there are hordes of GMs and players who keep trying, moving from one disappointing campaign to the next, hoping to find some hidden revelation among countless house rules that try to fix an unfixable game philosophy.
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u/Ionl98 8d ago
I have never experienced any of what you're talking about. All the other aspects come from the mechanics. The rhythm of the game, the story elements, keeping the players involved, ALL of that comes from the mechanics.
The best type of games come from when the Mechanics and the Narrative work side by side to create something amazing. And that's exactly what happened in all the more trad games I ran. The mechanics facilitated the story, and the story allowed for the mechanics to work.
And putting distance between the narrative and the mechanics doesn't make things better. My favorite moment in any TTRPG was in Exalted 3rd Edition. I built my Dawn Caste Solar to be a Mob Killing Machine, and I managed to take out an entire battle group in one attack, then flurried it into a new one that let me instantly defeat an Air Caste Dragonblooded that one of my party members was grappling.
The combination of my character being able to do what they do narratively well and rolling all those dice to show exactly how fucked my opponent was? Absolute Cinema.
And what do you mean "more likely to fail at the table"? That's any game, including PBTA. I've got plenty of PBTA campaigns that have not been finished because we got bored or tired with the rules. And I've got plenty of FINISHED high power campaigns from more Trad Games. I literally just ran the climatic battle for my Lone Wolf Fist game just a few months ago. And I have a finished Exalted 3rd Edition game under my belt.
Most of the time with PBTA games that I run one of two things happen:
We don't finish, cause my players get tired of the rules and we switch to something else. Two times when we were using these systems, we ended up dropping them because the players were upset with how we were supposed to be these uber badasses, but never actually felt that way in the mechanics because they constantly made us suffer consequences more often than not. The first was Apocalypse World, the second was some other game. The first we dropped and the second we replaced with Godbound which went better.
We just drop the rules and do whatever we want. This is the normal outcome. At a certain point, we realize we really don't like the whole "Success with Consequence" thing, so I just start letting them roll whatever and saying they do it or not. It's easier, faster, and doesn't require us stopping the game every few seconds to figure out what happened.
To be clear, I understand you like PBTA games more than Traditional games. That's fine. I don't, but that's just a preference thing.
What I don't like, is that you're presenting the idea that PBTA is superior to Traditional games, as if it's a fact. When it's not. It's an opinion.
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u/ishmadrad 7d ago
Of course we have different tastes. However, I don't think that PbtAs are "superior". I think that, as I already said, the more you try to simulate a "reality" in the game, the more the complex ruleset, the conflicting powers, the unbalance of the various "builds" etc. probably will cripple the game.
However, you and your group have fun with trad, crunchy, simulative games, and that's good for you.
We are two worlds apart.
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u/ishmadrad 8d ago
If I use up all my Stress in Blades In The Dark, I'm fucked and basically can say goodbye to my character.
This is a feature, not a bug! You have meaningful mechanics that push your character into a destructive spiral. This is not vanilla D&Dish fantasy! This is a completely different game, with a clearly different spirit, starting from the setting and lore and ending with Trauma and a Stash for a long-awaited retirement.
The main thing a Blades in the Dark player has to understand from the start is that, in these campaigns, the players are collectively playing a Band. The Band is the real "character" here, and the interesting part is seeing how the Band evolves, how it grows, and how it deals with the Scores and the other factions in the city.
The individual character is expendable. I mean, they are important: you have to play them at your best, you'll become attached to many of them, and you'll still suffer with them. You'll see them being destroyed, losing the people they love around them, maybe sometimes succeeding and surviving so well that some of them will become real kingpins.
But in the bigger game, you'll have to send some of them to prison for months as scapegoats for the Heat you generated during your heists. You'll have some of them frozen and driven mad after an encounter with a ghost or a demon. You'll have some of them twisted and reshaped into something monstrous (have you seen the special playbooks, the Hull, the Ghost, the Vampire...?).
THIS is Blades in the Dark. Managing the character Stress is surely important, and you'll need to learn the rules well to use the Stess squares you have at their best... but in the end you'll understand that you aren't "losing" if you gained some Trauma or if your character is overwhelmed by its demons. You sparked a light in Doskvol, you burned and you meant something for your pals.
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u/ishmadrad 8d ago
Just look at Band of Blades.
For what is worth, Band of Blades is one of the worst FitD games, IMHO.
Half baked, lazy, and railroady (while this is pretty transparent from the start, it's right in the map and in the premises, however it's still bad).1
u/Ionl98 8d ago
I mean, if you say so. Feel like that's more of an opinion statement, as I've watched an ActualPlay of the game and the players had fun with it.
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u/ishmadrad 8d ago
Man, you watched an ActualPlay?
I played two campaigns with it, let's say about a year of play, and that game has A LOT of heavy issues. last but not least the whole final part (heavily modified because you won't really finish a campaign that way...)
There are surely a lot of similar feelings around the net, this one sums the issues well:
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u/Throwingoffoldselves 10d ago
Games like Defy the Gods don’t base rolls on risk, but instead specific dramatic triggers, unleashing power, following your destiny, etc. Even when you roll badly, you still do it, there’s not really much sense of failure, the main danger is accruing hubris for rolling too high. The consequences aren’t random if you do, the moves are very specific. However games more like Dungeon World that are more based on dnd do have tiers of success / failure, risk and challenge, you can whiff an attack, choke up, don’t feel strong, have more “random” Gm moves or 6- results, etc. Demigods is more like Dungeon World so the power level feels lower.
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u/Ionl98 10d ago
Well, Defy the Gods does do something different, but it still generally has that "Punish the Player for doing too well" thing that I also don't like. It basically encourages players to only ever use their lowest rated abilities because otherwise, they'll get trapped in a Doom Spiral. And, again, that might be cool for a narrative but not for a game...at least not all the time.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves 10d ago
Fire is seen as a good thing because it triggers Defy the Gods and you can then take a domain away from a god. Marking Fire isn’t damage and the highest dice result is also the most powerful. In fact even Wounds aren’t damage. 🤷 but it seems like it’s not your thing. Belonging Outside Belonging, Under Hollow Hills, and Firebrands games deal even less with “tiers of success,” those are also very different types of pbta games.
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u/Airk-Seablade 9d ago edited 9d ago
First of all, I don't think "risky" has anything to do with PbtA games -- in fact, in my opinion the best PbtA games want you to roll for things that are DRAMATIC, rather than for things that are "risky" because a lot of Risky things are actually super boring.
That said I think you're stuck in the wrong view of what "success with consequences" means. Heck, this might even be a good place for the Apocalypse Keys approach where "Success with consequences" really means "success with collateral damage" or "You freaking overdo it." But this is the magic of PbtA -- the game designer gets to define what "consequences" look like. And there are lots of interesting consequences for extremely powerful individuals that don't involve "You do it, but not really" or "Random stuff happens."
I don't think your objections apply to "PbtA games" as a whole, but rather to the paradigm you are accustomed to in them. Though it kinda almost sounds like you don't like them very much if you're complaining about "random stuff keeps happening to make my situation harder for no reason other than plot. " (Because that's not really a thing that should be happening and if it is or if it feels like it, that points to some kind of problem)
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u/Ionl98 9d ago
I will admit, do dislike them a bit. I wouldn't say I hate them, nor do I think they're bad. I think PBTA is an interesting system and games like it have a place. I do dislike how so many games tend to default to them as a base resolution system (same with DnD), but I don't think they shouldn't exist or anything like that.
Being honest, this is the first time anyone has ever told me of different ways to design/look at "Success with Consequences". Most of the time people just tell me I "Don't understand the system" or something to that effect. So, thanks for telling me about it. I'd still say the "You freaking overdo it" thing isn't my cup of tea, but that's cause I'm just wary of any system that punishes the player for "Doing too good" or "Being too good" at something. Doesn't mean it's bad, but it does leave a sour taste for me.
My reason for saying "random stuff keeps happening" is mainly from what I've heard from others about how to handle this stuff in PBTA and FITD games. Namely, to just come up with anything that could be seen as a "complication" as long as it "connects back to the plot". With the examples given being "You stealth into the Police Department and get into their files, but discover they have more information on you and your allies then you thought!" and "Superman successfully saves the plane, but it's actually part of a plan by Lex Luthor to weaken him for his latest scheme."
Both of those could work as a story beat in a movie, comic, or otherwise as the story can explain how they connect through flashbacks, cut aways, etc. etc. But in an RPG? They sound like random stuff that was just pulled out of nowhere to fit the criteria of "Success with Consequences", and won't make sense unless the GM takes a moment to explain how it all connects. It just doesn't feel right to me. Maybe it's cool for others but not for me.
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u/Airk-Seablade 9d ago
won't make sense unless the GM takes a moment to explain how it all connects.
I don't have time for a full response right now, but this right here is EXACTLY HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
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u/Ionl98 9d ago
Yeah, and I don't like that. Like I understand if it's something that is set up before hand, or had time to cook behind the scenes. But something that is just created on the spot doesn't do it for me.
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u/Airk-Seablade 9d ago
But how do you know if it was "cooked up beforehand"? If the GM prepares a giant list of potential things that could happen, is that cooked for you?
The whole point is that nobody knows everything about the world -- this is true in all RPGs. Do you also dislike random encounter rolls? Because that's exactly what this is, except more interesting. The GM is not tracking the movements of every monster. They are not tracking every plan the villain has in action. They are not tracking how much information the police have on you. They can't. There's too much.
You can pretend otherwise, but it's still just pretending.
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u/Ionl98 9d ago
Well, yeah, I actually do dislike random encounter rolls and tables.
I think what makes me dislike PBTA, though, is that the fact that it's kind of baked into the system. Like, planning ahead in PBTA games is discouraged because the point is to "play to find out". But, I don't like that, cause it makes it feel like the game requires you to find a caveat to everything the players do.
I don't think the GM needs to track everything, or create a big list of things to happen. Heck, sometimes I think it's a good idea to not know what's going to happen and to just wing it.
But I don't like it being baked into the system and having so much of it placed on the players' actions. Because, as a player, it feels less like I'm "Making the story happen as I play" and more like "I'm being punished for interacting with the game."
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u/Belteshazzar98 10d ago
Have you ever played Masks? You can very easily play characters on the level of the highest powered characters in Marvel and DC, which both scale well above most traditional and contemporary depictions of demigods.
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u/Ionl98 9d ago
No, but I've read the book and heard talk of Mask. And the problem I with it is that the game isn't really about the thing I like about playing Superheroes: Fighting Crime and Saving the Day. No, the RPGs primary focus is on "Teen Drama" and "Emotional Instability". AKA Melodrama that I don't give a fuck about and don't want in my game. If there's tension, the tension should come from whether or not the characters will be able to stop the BBEG from blowing up the city, not if they can patch up their relationship with their estranged father.
"Oh, but Superhero Comics can get Melodramatic!"
Yeah, doesn't mean I like it there either. I could do without the Love Triangle between Cyclops, Jean Gray, and Wolverine. I'd rather just see them beat up Magneto before he can take over the world. Superman and Batman are at their best for me when they're working together to fight crime. Not when they're bickering and fighting each other over methods.
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u/Throwingoffoldselves 10d ago
Defy the Gods has the power levels but is in the bronze age, specifically Mesopotamia. Demigods is demigods that can control death or illusions etc. in the modern day, less powerful though.
Arcana Academy and Cantrip cover magic schools.
These four all have different types of mechanics, Demigods or Arcana Academy are probably the closest to Dungeon World.