Earlier this week I put out a post about Miller’s Law and principles in classic PbtA games. The thesis was basically “there’s too goddamn many of these things to remember and someone (me) should say something about it.” I’m pleased to report that after hitting send on that thing at 2:30AM and then immediately falling asleep, I awoke to a day packed with discussion of the thing, and I learned a bunch. Thanks Dice Exploder discord, Gem Room Games discord, and Bluesky! I thought it’d be fun today to go through how my thinking has evolved since.
This is going to be kind of scattershot, but who cares.
I’m also going to use Apocalypse World as my main example today because it’s big enough it can take the criticism. (I love Apocalypse World.)
1. There are actually two kinds of principles, and we shouldn’t call them both principles.
Here’s two great principles from Apocalypse World:
Be a fan of the player characters
Barf forth apocalyptica
These are both expanded on at length in the text, and they’re both great pieces of advice for running the game. Also, as far as I’m concerned, they’re completely different in kind.
“Be a fan of the player characters” is good advice, if you take the time to explain it, but it’s advice about the attitude you should carry to the table. It may inform every decision you make, but it is not in itself a specific thing to do. There is always going to be some mediating action between being a fan of the player characters and actually affecting the game world. You will not “be a fan of the player characters” alone.
Meanwhile, “barf forth apocalyptica” is something you can just do. You can just start describing fucked up end of the world shit, and this principle says you should do that. Done.
I think these are distinct things, and if you’re going to do the agenda/principles thing, you should separate these two things out into different labels.
Actually, maybe the thing I think is that there are a bunch of “principles” in these games that are better thought of as additional agendas. “Be a fan of the player characters” feels like an agenda to me.
2. Get your big picture advice off my reference sheet
When I’m actually at the table, feeling overwhelmed by what to do, and I look at my reference sheet for help, I actually don’t give a crap that my agenda is to “make Apocalypse World feel real.” That does not help me. I want to know that when I’m prepping, when I’m reading the book, but it’s useless to me in the moment.
Everything like this, all this good advice that nevertheless is not a practical thought I can implement at the table, shouldn’t be on my reference sheet.
3. I don’t actually want these games to have fewer moves. I want my moves chunked into groups.
Soft and hard moves is one way to do it. Downtime and score moves would do it. But really whatever splitting up you can do so that I can only pay attention to 5-6 options at once is going to super help me actually make a decision.
Apocalypse World actually does some chunking with threat moves: each threat type has a few moves unique to it. The problem is that these are all then mixed in with the regular MC moves, so you’re going from like 60 potential moves but chunking down to 20 at a time. Chunk further.
Here’s a great implementation from the beta version of Exiles (rest in peace):
This even has me make two moves every time I’m dishing out a consequence, but it makes it easy to pick. Plus the mixing and matching allows for a ton of customization in how it’s all going to feel. Great stuff.
I want to emphasize how much graphic design and layout plays into this. Even just chunking the moves out visually into loosely related groups gives my brain somewhere to start in my choosing of a move. Crowding 14 options into a tiny font single spaced list does not do that.
Another thought that came up: having a go-to move that you can always throw out there as a consequence is super helpful. As an MC, if you don’t want to take the time to go through the list of moves and pick the exact right one, it’s nice to be able to just tick a clock and move on or whatever. This isn’t chunking exactly, but it feels worth noting.
4. You can play more slowly.
Running Dino Island this week, I felt the need to pack the whole game into a single 2 hour session before our regular DM returns next week. I was rushed, hurried, and wanted help barrelling along. That’s not ideal. In a normal PbtA game, you can just take your time. Take 30 seconds and look at your moves list and pick a cool move. It’s fine. That helps with all this.
5. Do we need agendas, principles, and moves in the first place?
Lots of people think no. Or at least, we don’t need to call them out explicitly. Agendas can just be advice, moves can be embedded in other mechanics, and maybe we’re just left with principles. Or maybe the principles get embedded in the mechanics as design philosophy and we’re left with just moves. Who needs “give every dinosaur a gimmick” when the MC move is called “introduce a dinosaur and its gimmick”? Who needs “look through crosshairs” when you’ve got the MC move “destroy something they love”?
There’s clearly a million ways to design a game, and that’s basically all I’m saying here. But I think even if you’re staying pretty close to the agendas/principles/moves framework, you can find ways to consolidate.
6. People approach all this super differently.
Duh.
I talked with people who have none of the problems I have here because they consider all this guidance and don’t stick to it strictly. I talked with people who do the same thing because they’d never read a PbtA game closely enough to know principles and moves are supposed to be rules and not just vague advice. I talked with people who simply remember all the options because their brains are much bigger than mine.
Sick. Love it. All this is great. And also, as a designer, terrifying. What happens after you read this blogpost and start thinking this Sam D guy knows what he’s talking about and design to my tastes but alienate a bunch of other people in the process? Being an artist is hard.
I do think there was a running theme in the people I talked to that no one actually does internalize all the principles and moves and agendas of a game, at least not until they’ve been running it for months or years. There is just so much to remember. Whether you think that’s a problem is up to you as a designer, but I think my observation that there’s more principles, agendas, and moves than one person can keep in their head at once is by and large true. People just care about that different amounts and have different ways they deal with it.
Putting it into practice
In working on my upcoming game Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, I’ve been thinking about all this for months without really realizing it, and I’ve made a bunch of choices I think it’d be interesting to go over. So hopefully soon I’m gonna come back to agendas, principles, and moves, put my money where my mouth is, and talk about how I’ve approached these things in a design of my own. As I always like to say on Dice Exploder, nothing like specific examples to really show what you mean.