Elsewhere, someone asked me to explain how Apocalypse World, or any game, might hinder or support certain kinds of play. This has been a question asked 1000s of times over the last 20 yrs, but by whatever grace, this time I found a way to answer with I think greater clarity:
Imagine the games of soccer and basketball. You could try to play soccer with a basketball, you might even have a fun time, but the ball is not designed for that game, it would behave differently.
Likewise, trying to play basketball with a soccer ball would be very challenging because a basketball Must Bounce and soccer balls are not built for that! Now imagine trying to play tennis with a basketball.
Games are designed to do certain things, with rules that support different conversations and choices. With sports, it is very easy to see, because there is equipment that helps shape the environment and experience.
Hockey is not so different from ping-pong if you just describe what the players are doing, hitting a small thing back & forth with wooden paddles trying to get past the other player’s guard, but in reality, they're vastly different, because they are Designed to BE different!
With ttrpgs, there is no visible equipment to communicate quickly to the player all the design that makes this game entirely different from that game. They both just look like books and you make stuff up, right?!? Wrong!
To a game designer, that’s like someone saying “oh I know how to play American football, so this cricket game can’t be much different!” They are very different and that player will miss the whole point, all the work & care put in to design the game to Do What It Is Meant To Do!
Some games support a lot of intense moment-by-moment combat. Some are designed as 1-shots. Some are built for long-term cooperative play & and PVP will break them. Some do romance nicely. Some have great mechanics for running a tavern during the Festival of Glowing Things.
If you have been thinking of all TTRPGs as "basically the same" - stop? There's 2* whole Olympics-worth of different types of sports, & there's at least that many types of ttrpg, with just as much design in the games as in the sports.
*Or 4, depending on how you look at it.
*Or 4, depending on how you look at it.
Figure out what the game is designed to do. Usually that will be right up front. Find the ones that fit what you want from a game, just like you might figure out what sports you like. Let each game, which has been designed to do a thing, Just Do It.
(And I could have maybe thrown some tags on here ever. So: #apocalypseworld #pbta #dnd #ttrpg #gamedesign)
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