With Blades in the Dark and the other Forged in the Dark games being so much more straightforward and conventional looking than Apocalypse World, I often forget how its entire internal logic is still very difficult from traditional and neo-trad game systems. While reading through Scum and Villainy again in preparation to finally taking it out for a campaign, one peculiar thing I realized only on the third or fourth pass is that getting circumstantial advantages, like optimal equipment for the task or great numerical superiority, can only improve your Effect for the Action Roll, but not affect the odds whether the roll will actually be a success or a failure.
Which coming from a traditional approach to RPGs just feels somehow wrong. Stacking the odds of success and failure in your own favor is the main objective in the gameplay loop of most games. But here it’s very important to understand that PbtA games are fundamentally different in what the action resolution mechanic is supposed to accomplish in the first place.
In classic and traditional games, an adventure consists of a number of opposing NPCs and obstacles that the GM has put between the players and their goal. The regular action is one PC facing an NPC or environmental obstacle, and making a roll whose odds are based on the PCs abilities and equipment compared against the NPCs abilities and equipment, or the obstacles static difficulty. If the roll is a success, the NPC or obstacle is either removed from the player’s path, or partial progress is made towards removing it. Sometimes it takes two or three successful rolls to drain the NPCs health to zero, but it’s the same idea.
PbtA games don’t do anything like that. In FitD games, the players initiate an adventure by deciding what they want to ultimately accomplish. And instead of the players controlling their characters to remove the obstacles in the path to their goal, the players and the GM are taking turns in taking control of a story about the characters. Apocalypse World tried to make this very explicit by calling everything that a player or GM does a Move. Unfortunately, the very peculiar presentation of the game left a lot of people very confused. Blades in the Dark tried to make the text of the rules more accessible by using more conventional language, but for me personally, that makes it much easier to forget how fundamentally different the gameplay structure of the game is.
An FitD adventure starts by the GM describing the first obstacle that the PCs encounter on their way to their goal. Then one player takes control of the story by describing how one of the PCs is removing that obstacle. If the roll is a success (one 6) or critical success (two or more 6s), then the PCs removed that obstacle. If the roll is a partial success (4-5) or a failure (1-3), then the GM takes control of the story by introducing a new obstacle. Any scene in a PbtA game consists of the players removing obstacles from the scene, and the GM adding new obstacles to the scene. This loop continues until the players have removed all the obstacles. Then they move on to the next scene, and the whole process repeats again. Like a GM in a classic dungeon crawling adventure deciding on the number of rooms and floors in a dungeon, it is up to the GM in a PbtA game to decide how many scenes the players will have to go through before they reach the goal of their adventure. This is always an arbitrary judgement call by the GM, regardless of the style of game structure, based on a personal estimate of what would make a fun adventure for the players.
And this loop of removing obstacles from a scene and adding new ones to a scene, is the reason why the PCs having advantages or disadvantages in any given situation does not affect the probability whether any given Action Roll will be a success, partial success, or failure. If the players had the ability to stack up really big dice pools for any of their rolls, they would just keep getting successes and critical successes all the time, and most scenes would be resolved in just one or two action rolls. The whole point of the PbtA games is to enjoy the wild rollercoaster of things constantly escalating into more and more chaos and panic. We want scenes to go on for a good while, but we also don’t want them to drag on forever. That’s why the ways in which dies can be added or removed from the dice pool are very limited.
But players do still have other ways to stack things in their favor by establishing and setting up situational advantages for themselves. Trading Position for Effect becomes a critical mechanic here. Somehow establishing an advantage that give the PC Great Effect, or at least going from Lesser Effect to Standard Effect for the planned action is not that hard. That’s exactly what Flashbacks are for, and I think generally most GMs are quite generous when players want to have some kind of not yet mentioned environment feature that would help them. Or you can just Push Yourself to get +1 Effect for 2 Stress. (Though then you can’t push yourself to also get +1 die to the roll.) By Trading Effect for Position, players have the option to improve the position for their action to Risky or even Controlled. And in a Controlled Position, a failed action roll can’t really do any further harm. Even on a failure, you can always just accept that it didn’t work, and no new problems are added to the scene. If things are going terrible and you are getting tired and frustrated with the scene and your character is drowning in Stress and Harm, get that increased Effect and trade it for Controlled Position. Otherwise, enjoy the wild ride.
