A Tale of 2 PbtA Games
(but mostly a Root review)

This weekend I played 2 unreleased games essentially back to back: Root and Thousand Arrows. The experience highlighted what makes PbtA games really work, and just as importantly what doesn’t. Lets dig in.

First, disclaimers. Neither game is complete. Details may very well change before publication(although TA is mostly complete). I played both, but other than a brief survey of the Root quickstart I can’t really comment on the GM facing tech.

Second. I had fun playing both! @Bee_Zelda ran Root, @brennanrtaylor ran Thousand Arrows, and both were excellent. Great GMs and players make for great games. This thread is less about the play experience than about mechanics.

Third. I’ve probably played more PbtA in the last 2 years than the previous decade. This is something of a culmination of thoughts and feels about PbtA from that time but Im hardly an expert. So I suppose grain of salt going in. All that out of the way, lets get going.

Thousand Arrows takes place in the warring states period of Japanese history. Its about great loves, loyalty and betrayals. Leading giant armies and giving epic speeches and fighting duels. Its epic, and it nicely switches between a tight personal perspective and looking at maps.

I played Mochizuki Choyome, 57, retired spymistress back in action for one last job. I had a disguise, 12 spies working for me, and the rest I’ll skip because an iconic move really says all you need to know.

Shadow Warrior: You have a kagemusha, a body double who can take your place in case of unthinkable danger. Once per game session, you may declare that your body double has been replacing you in a scene, and that you in fact are somewhere else doing something else

I rolled poorly while fleeing the enemy fleet and suddenly it made sense. I wasn’t doing poorly, it was simply my body double doing the best she could while I was actually sneaking into the castle. Laughs round, a couple cheers and everyone knew exactly who my character was.

Moves to me serve 2 purposes. Traditional games use flexible stats widely for problem solving. PbtA uses specific iconic moves to reinforce genre emulation. You can read that move without the preface and know something about the game.

The second is spotlighting. Characters have very different moves for the same reason theres stat distribution and classes in d&d. Specialization allows for differentiation, which allows for characters to all have their special moment in play.

In Root you play animals, Vagabonds travelling through Glades causing chaos for the major factions. The art is fantastic, and immediately inspiring. Adorable with an impish sense of humor.

I played Scratch the scoundrel, a cat arsonist. I mean that literally by the way. The ability is under basic moves. Its also the name of my nature, the ability that refreshes exhaustion. Whats exhaustion? Lets step back and look at whats going on with Root characters.

In Root you have a set of 8 basic moves(kind of) and 3 weapon moves(not really) in addition to your playbook moves.

You have a reputation track with the different factions which adds or subtracts up to 3 to your interactions. You aso have 4 types of harm to track. Injury is your HP. Depletion is your access to resources. Wear is tracked individually for equipment.

Exhaustion is what it sounds like, but its also something you’ll be marking regularly to power certain moves.

Beyond that you have a nature(refresh trigger for exhaustion), 2 drives for advances, connections(strings/bonds etc), and finally Roguish Feats and Weapon Skills.

You also have a maximum carry limit. If we just stop here, what you might have is a tightly managed resource game akin to Torchbearer hidden behind that cute art.

You’re managing resource Depletion and weapon Wear and avoiding Injury while manipulating Exhaustion and watching for refreshes. Its rather like an osr game in some sense. This may not bother you at all, but it gave me a bit of whiplash.

I talked earlier about how I view PbtA vs trad games functionally. Theres exception to every rule obviously, but by and large when you focus on resource management you care about your ability to solve problems or deal with threats.

This isnt inherently a problem by the way. Muddying the waters is that dnd is at this point a genre, and if dnd is a genre then including resource management may very well be reinforcing genre tropes. Interesting territory to be exploring. Bit of an ouroboros.

Dungeon World had some of this, but Dungeon World was explicitly trying to be an off ramp to dnd players. It kept quite a few dnd-isms to maximize familiarity.

That all may very well be a matter of taste, so I want to leave that bit there. What I think are much bigger issues are 2 of the bigger problems you can run into in PbtA games: stat substitution moves and stat increases.

I started this whole thing talking about how iconic the Shadow Warrior move is. Stat substitution moves are in many ways the opposite. They remove differentiation.

When combined with stat increases it makes you drastically more likely to succeed at what everyone in the game is doing. Lets take a look back at Scratch. 2 of my moves let me use luck instead of the base stats.

The only actual move, “Create to Destroy” is effectively a larger scale version of the basic move “Wreck Something”. Wreck a building rather than a clock or chair. In our game I blew up a giant tree house.

2 of the starting playbooks had +3 stats. What this meant was we succeeded most of the night. At everything. I can’t remember a failed roll(although there may have been 1 or 2), and very few rolls had complications. Some of it was luck. But a lot was having +2 or 3 on every roll.

The magic of PbtA is your most likely result on most rolls is success with a complication. Failures and successes exist, but most of the time you do what you want to do but some new problem spurs the story forward. Fixtion triggering mechanics triggering further fiction.

We just didn’t have all that many mechanically derived problems. We had a phenomenal GM who made it work. But it was a weird feeling. Now, this may be quickstart specific. I dont know the full moves list. But the quickstart builds seemed to encourage 10+ results.

(The irony to my fellow players seeing me complain about too many successes isnt lost on me. I will guaranteed eat these words in an upcoming game as my friends quote me relentlessly )

I had a whole spiel about modifying weapon moves (tldr weapons have special moves, I think it would be more elegant if they added options to 3 core weapon moves instead of adding more stuff) but frankly I think this thread is getting long enough.

I want to emphasize. I had a fun time playing Root. But I felt like the GM was generating the fun in places where the mechanics could have introduced fun if the mechanics were tweaked or slightly changed.

And I played beta rules, so changes very well could have already been implemented. The danger of seeing an inlet and guessing at the ocean. But to me there is a tighter experience in there, and if anyone can make that happen I know these game designers can.

Urban Shadows 2e is an incredibly refined experience, Id argue easily that Zombie World ranks among the best designed PbtA games out there. I hope Root gets the tightening it needs.

Slight addition. As @wordymelt rightfully points out, high stats may be a counterbalance for faction penalties. We didnt have that in a one shot, but its something worth keeping in mind if I play a campaign in the future.

In either case, I already bought Root, so I’m looking forward to revisiting it once the final book drops. It’ll be interesting to see whats going on with GM tools(Ive heard its a highlight) and see what types of changes have been made between now and then.

For Thousand Arrows(I didn’t forget about it!) I’ll simply say that while I missed the kickstarter I plan on buying fancy things when the backerkit opens up. I was impressed.

This was a long one. If youve played either game Id love to hear about your experiences. If you think im wrong(or right!) about pbta, please let me know. I know you all have strong opinions on everything and I wouldnt have it any other way. Thanks for reading everyone!!!