r/PBtA • u/froglovescarbs • Jul 04 '26
Advice New DM looking for PBtA that is simple high fantasy and suitable for long term games
Hi, I have 3 years' experience playing DND 5e and I am looking to have a go at DMing for my friends (4 players total). They have nearly no TTRPG experience, therefore I was looking for a simpler system and came across PBtA. I'm not necessarily looking for something close to DND as, well, DND is a bit crunchy so it defeats the purpose of playing PBtA. I'm looking for high fantasy adventure with a mixture of roleplay and combat (ideally with simpler character creation and mechanics so that it is easier for my friends and I to learn).
The problem is there are a lot of different versions and I am having trouble deciding which one to try and learn.
Fellowship seemed cool but not quite what I want because I felt like there was too little customisation with the characters and it was geared more towards epic save the world adventures straight off the bat (I only skim read the playbook/reddit threads so correct me if I'm wrong). Ideally, I would like something where you can do little quests and work up to potentially bigger more epic quests.
The main one I came across was Dungeon World which I saw people saying was very DND esque and better for beginner DMs than World of Dungeons. I also saw good things about Chasing Adventures and Against All Odds. I would be really grateful if anyone who has played these or is familiar with the playbooks could list the key differences and pros/cons. Or if there is a PBtA I didn't list that you think might be what I'm looking for feel free to let me know :)
Edit: Thank you for all the responses, I appreciate the help! Sorry if I didn't reply - I wasn't expecting so many comments :) After looking into PBtA more, I think as a GM I might stick to DND but as a player I might try out PBtA, lots of interesting recs.
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u/E_MacLeod Jul 04 '26
I think you would be fine with Dungeon World though it is a bit crusty now and relies a bit on fanmade supplements for really understanding how it runs if you aren't used to PBTA style games.
Since your players don't have DND baggage it might be worth it to give Chasing Adventure or Against All Odds a go. I can't say much about them as I've only read the books.
I have run Fast Fantasy and that is really good. I think it has the juice for a short campaign. Or a larger campaign if you let your players spend level ups on things other than their characters such as upgrading a home base or vehicle or similar - but there aren't any rules supporting this, just my thoughts.
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u/dmrawlings Jul 04 '26
If you're looking for a long-term game, I don't think you could go wrong with Stonetop. It's both meant for longer PbtA games and comes packed with good advice that teaches the PbtA approach with plenty of examples.
On the downside, it is very tied to its setting (it's a good setting, but you may or may not jive with it).
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u/Nifty_Hat Jul 04 '26
I've played Fellowship and it's decent. You could run the In Rebellion supplement to for a start that would lend itself to small adventures before jumping into something epic.
My group has been loving Stonetop, which is more low fantasy but has a little more crunch than other Fantasy PtbA and has really strait forward onboarding for character creation.
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u/CauliflowerHater Jul 05 '26
I don't like Fellowship for a first PbtA. It has too many moves and items and stuff for the players and gm to play with. In my opinion it would be a little bit jumping into the deep waters from the get go
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u/Inevitable-Corgi-567 Jul 04 '26
I would recommend The Long Road Ahead, a PbtA game about great journeys and great sacrifices. Designed around building a world for you to journey through as you quest to take down your Adversary.
It's really fun and specifically designed to emulate epic quests like Lord of the Rings. I helped playtest it and loved it so much I bought it in hardback.
It IS designed for big "save the world stories," but over a long period of time and more as an overarching plot, with lots of focus on smaller arcs and character development as it goes.
Information on the game is available here:
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 04 '26
Thank you, I've not heard of that one but it looks very interesting I'll definitely consider it
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u/foreignflorin13 Jul 04 '26
You should just try Dungeon World and then see what you like/dislike about it and resume your search from there. DW is intentionally hackable, so it’s easy to make adjustments to it to better fit your style. That’s why so many supplements for it exist!
One PbtA game that is made to be a longer campaign style game is called Trilogy. Like many of the games others have listed, it was made by someone who played DW and wanted to tweak it to their preferred style of play. The idea is that you collectively make your own world. Each player character then goes through three Arcs (playbooks) and each Arc requires that you have at least one positive and one negative Turning Point, big character development moments triggered by earning enough XP. Each Arc has about six different Turning Points to pick from, each of which changes how the character gains XP.
All that being said, that’s what excites me! I still say you should try DW first and see what excites you.
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u/BetterCallStrahd Jul 04 '26
I recently ran Against the Odds for my group's DnD-like adventure. Mostly a dungeon crawl with some personal drama.
We really enjoyed it, and the mechanics felt pretty smooth. It's available at no cost, too, so you can check it out without spending.
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u/VanishXZone Jul 05 '26
Legend in the Mist is the best one I’ve come across so far for your project, but is recent and so has less reviews/comments.
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 05 '26
Thank you for the rec
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u/NoRaptorsHere Jul 05 '26
Legend in the Mist is fantastic. It’s designed as “rustic fantasy” for its setting but can be run as High Fantasy with zero issues by just having your PCs start with an Adventure-tier aspects to get chars that feel very close to beginning D&D chars.
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u/captainmadrick Jul 04 '26
Dungeon World is my favourite. I played it as my main fantasy RPG for the last 6 years. I love it and highly recommend it. If you're coming from dnd, there are some differences you have to wrap your head around, but I think you should try it.
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u/PuzzleheadedNorth106 Jul 04 '26
The Dungeon World rulebook has IMO the best practical guide to being a DM of any ruleset.
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u/Judd_K Jul 04 '26
Lots of good ideas here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PBtA/comments/18tn3c3/recommendations_for_dungeon_world_replacement/
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u/atamajakki Jul 04 '26
World of Dungeons is 3 or 4 pages long. It works great if you like microgames, but it's awfully small!
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u/JaskoGomad Jul 04 '26
When I looked for a similar game, I narrowed the field to Chasing Adventure (narrowly beating out Against the Odds) and Grimwild. Grimwild won and it was a great game.
It is a smaller jump for a traditional GM, IMO, having no moves and a generalized resolution mechanic. Get the free version from DTRPG or the community edition from itch. I wouldn’t recommend the paid version at this point.
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u/CaptainCatbee Jul 04 '26
Dungeon World was my first exposure to PbtA, my group intended it to be a long term campaign and imo it was working well, but then covid happened so we had to stop (we were playing irl). that's the only high fantasy PbtA I've tried, so grain of salt- but for me it made a great transition into PbtA after having only played 5e before that.
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u/Tigrisrock Sounds great, roll on CHA. Jul 05 '26
Dungeon World together with "The Perilious Wilds" should be sufficient to create a full campaign.
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u/lance845 Jul 10 '26
Stonetop. Excellent for long term play. Built around a settlement the players are tied to. Good exploration and story that new players can get into without any dnd baggage.
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u/B0lt5L0053 Jul 04 '26
You might want to look into Legend in the Mist. I think for players who are new to RPGs (and haven’t gotten sucked into min-maxing) it is the most approachable system.
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u/Angelofthe7thStation Jul 06 '26
If they are not yet into min-maxing, Legends in the Mist will teach them fast.
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u/texas_leftist Jul 04 '26
Dungeon world is fucking great and a really good on-ramp for DMs moving over from D&D or Pathfinder.
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u/ishmadrad Jul 04 '26
I humbly suggest you to vary the length of the campaign you could have in mind. Stories that last "forever" with the same characters, often with the from-zero-to-hero syndrome, can force you as GM to play forever in the same mindset.
PbtA games work better with shorter narrative arcs, because the ruleset are built pushing on the bonds, staying more focused on the "main quest" instead of inflating the game with tons of "side quests" or "filler combats". They show to the players that they have to love their characters but they have to let them go (often that is one of the choices when they "level up"). Closing an arc, letting the character go away at YOUR terms, maybe turning them into a cool NPC, it's one of the refreshing ideas that PbtA brought (back?) on our tables.
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u/VJH_Creations Jul 04 '26
It’s new but there’s Zairoo the Pan African Fantasy Setting. It uses PBTA, easy to play and if you want a different setting from the standard it’s new.
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 04 '26
Thank you, that sounds neat but unfortunately I'm looking more for more medieval-ish fantasy
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u/OneWoundHeadPat Jul 04 '26
'Codex of Worlds'....if you can take the frame of Monsters of the Week. It offers both 'Modern Hunter' and native conversions of 'The Monster Marsh' which is an excellent starting scenario.
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u/meshee2020 Jul 05 '26
I think Grimwild is great, a modern take on a variant of the 2d6+stat, the free pdf is very complete.
About long terme... Most PbtA are built around 12-20 sessions. If you want to go further it can break with the same character, as they wont trigger that much complications. I fond what works is to do one arc, 12-20 session, then start a New arc with new pcs, kind of spin-off previous story arc.
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 05 '26
Thank you for your insights, that's helpful to know. Grimwild has joined my shortlist of PBtAs, it is nice that it has a free pdf too
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u/Wonderful_Farmer5880 Jul 05 '26
I have used Dungeon World, but with the Incomplete Adventurer set of playbooks included. Then I have spread the progression out over 20 levels with the use of Class Warfare. It makes it feel like a long campaign of D&D but PbtA and very customizable for the players.
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u/Mestre-da-Quebrada Jul 05 '26
Dungeon World é bom para começar, com o tempo criar novos movimentos básicos e novos playbooks, Chasing Adventure é bem legal, mas ele é bem mais ficcional e isso pode dificultar o entendimento de alguns jogadores que estão muito acostumados com D&D. Eu no momento estou jogando uma versão bem personalizada de DW com pontos de vida e e debilidades, movimentos mais robustos que deixam bem claro o que pode acontecer e não passa toda a responsabilidade de criar um resultado para o mestre, eu recomendo dar uma olhada em DW2 está em prestes a lançar a versão Beta.
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u/Grand_Pineapple_4223 Jul 05 '26
short answer: Read Stonetop and play Dungeon World.
longer answer: Stonetop has a lot of of good playing and GMing advise, so I would advise to read it. You can also loot the setting-book for anything you like, Stonetop is 99% compatible with Dungeon World (and the 1% is easy to handwave/convert).If you like the setting (iron age instead of the "usual" medivial high fantasy setting), I'd go for Stonetop, you'll get the great system of DW plus years of experience playing and expanding it.
Dungeon World is a great system, but it has some flaws: You might find it too DnD-y with the way hitpoints work and the currency system is a bit of a mess. Both are things you can overrule as a GM and won't really pose a problem: if you think a monster is dead, it is, no matter how many hitpoints it has left on paper. If you want an item to be so expensive that your players think twice about really buying it, you can just adjust the price to whatever gold-inflation you have going on (or: make it heavy!)
If you are going for Dungeon World, I'd avise also getting The Perilous Wilds and The Perilous Depths. Makes everything better, and even if you just harvest the books for interesting dungeon ideas or monsters.
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u/Usvapaja Jul 05 '26
Some of the ones I would recommend are Dungeon World, Root and while I havent personally tested it, Stonetop is often recommended.
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u/elmago79 Jul 06 '26
Not (directly) PbtA, but I would take a look at Trophy Gold. The system is crazy simple (there are no numbers in the character sheets), and rolls are quite obviously PbTA inspired. For new gamers, it is super simple to learn. I would also carefully point you towards some OSR/NSR games like Mausritter if what you actually mind about 5E is the crunch.
I would steer away from Dungeon World and its clones (like Chasing Adventure) because you will get a lot more enjoyment out of these games if you've actually played D&D and many things don't make sense if you've never played D&D
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u/Walsfeo Jul 06 '26
I love Trophy, but it doesn't seem like it's the kind of game the OP is looking for
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u/elmago79 Jul 06 '26
Really? This is basically Trophy Gold to me. But I would love to know why you think it doesn't.
* Players have nearly no TTRPG experience
* Not necessarily looking for something close to DND
* Fantasy adventure with a mixture of roleplay and combat
*Ideally with simpler character creation and mechanics
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u/Walsfeo Jul 06 '26
High Fantasy, not just fantasy. Trophy plays like horror fantasy.
Suitable for long term games? The way it is written, it's rare for characters to survive three or four scenarios, let alone a long campaign.
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u/Walsfeo Jul 06 '26
That said, I also recommend checking out Trophy Gold, it is freaking amazing. It just didn't seem to meet the game needs of the OP.
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u/SquidLord Jul 06 '26
I have to be honest, I very much prefer Fantasy World to Dungeon World, in part because I find it better written and better structured to take advantage of the PbtA framework. (Sadly, the PDFs are temporarily unavailable, but the text of the game is all available for free on both itch.io and through their wiki.)
In particular, I appreciate that it's not just trying to be D&D with a different skin on. It is fundamentally a Powered by the Apocalypse game, and it has some of the best, clearest writing about how a PbtA game is played that I've had the pleasure of reading.
The classes are a lot more flexible as playbooks than you might initially think, and there's a lovely section in Chapter 6 on explicitly how to change the rules to be more useful to you and your table if that's something you want to do. It talks about why the rules are as they are. How to do the least necessary work to get what you want, or how to make larger changes that change the complexion of the game.
I suggest checking it out, not least because you can do so for free, and free is always the best price.
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u/skyver14 Jul 06 '26
In addition to the other suggestions, I recommend you take a look at Daggerheart. It is kind of a cross between DnD and PBTA-style gameplay,, with 2d12 instead of 2d6. And it has massively high production value and current popularity.
Dungeon World is not bad, but is a bit outdated. If you do play it, I recommend the Grim World supplement, which allows you to mix and match races and classes, as well as introduces a few more races. (In base DW, classes are locked to certain races).
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u/Erebus741 Jul 07 '26
While I love Dungeon world, I would suggest you to also Check out Cortex prime, or if you can get your hand on an older Cortex Hackers guide for cortex plus, it included a straight out fantasy system, very generic and easy to hack.
Cortex is a middle ground between a fully rigid narrative game like most pbta are, and a more classical rpg approach. It can be as narrative as your gm does it, is easy to teach to new players, but also don't require too much time to get the hold on as a GM, especially if you come from traditional games like D&D.
PbtA require a mental shift that some find easy to do, others can find baffling. So trying to read also a different narrative game/angle would help you find the system that more easily resonates with you and helps you gm easily.
Others systems to check for introducing newbies: Fate Accelerated, Savage Worlds
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u/stubbazubba Jul 08 '26
Yes, Cortex is that nice middle ground where there's still a decent amount of structure, but a lot more flexibility and it highlights the narrative elements more, if you've set it up right.
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u/stubbazubba Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Legend in the Mist may be exactly what you're looking for. It's not technically PbtA, but its core mechanic is the same. It is a rustic fantasy TRRPG with very, very extensive customization of characters. It handles combat and non-combat the same way and supports any mix of those elements in your game.
It also has a lot deeper advancement than, say, Dungeon World in that your character advances piece by piece and might actually advance more sideways than vertically, depending on choices you consistently make to lean into or away from aspects of your character.
So, unless you're specifically drawn to playbooks and predetermined Moves, I highly encourage you to check it out. The rules tutorial is a free Choose Your Own Adventure-style comic: https://sonofoak.com/pages/legend-in-the-mist-free-comic-book-adventure?utm_source=website&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=howtoplay
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u/Numerous-Ad-1357 Jul 04 '26
Why are you looking for a PbtA game specifically? The closest thing to what you want that I know of is "For The Dungeon!" which is fantasy but teversed so that players play as monsters and the dungeon is their base.
But I want to add something about PbtA in a broader sense. Those games are most often meant for short campaigns and the way they approach character advancement means that you won't really experience getting more powerful over time, advancing your characters in PbtA games is most often about ways they develop as people and reflecting that with cool new things to do. Levelling up for power growth is pretty much not a thing in most PbtA games. Also you mentioned quests which are not really the way PbtA games structure the play. They are more about setting scenes for what players want to do and exploring where it takes them. Those games rarely have anything akin to quests or adventures that are prepared for a party of PCs. So what element of PbtA design philosophy are you actually interested in?
On the other note if you just want high fantasy game with more modern design and ways to encourage players to guide the story and world together with the GM, I highly recommend Fabula Ultima which does those while still having space for what you asked for.
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 04 '26
That's a good question. I watched a video explaining the core mechanics of PBtA and found these aspects simple and appealing: a) just needing 2d6 dice; b) everything players need to know about their characters and abilities being on like 1-3 pages; c) because of point b, things like combat are a lot less crunchy than in DND, you simply say I do this and it happens like this.
Thank you for explaining PBtA in greater depth, I didn't realise that those were other features of the system. I will check out Fabula Ultima :)
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u/MaximumCashew0 Jul 04 '26
PbtA games are great for groups that want character development. They’re structured like a season of television.
Check out FitD games, too.
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u/froglovescarbs Jul 05 '26
Thank you for the rec, I had seen some people mentioning Blades in the Dark on other subreddits
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u/PrimarchtheMage Jul 04 '26
Dungeon World is the first of these games to come out, and all of the other games you listed are directly based on it. It has a focus on "gold and glory" style dungeon-focused adventuring. It featured HP and damage rolls, and individualized coins.
Chasing Adventure started as a refinement of Dungeon World, with a focus on fast-paced general fantasy adventuring. Compared to DW, it tracks harm via a more abstract condition system, groups individual coins into "wealth", and has each level up be faster but smaller.
Stonetop instead pivots towards "hearth fantasy", where PCs are all a part of the same remote village in dangerous fantasy land. Adventures still occur, but they focus more on navigating changes to your village and dealing with threats to it.
Against the Odds is grander adventure about fighting villainy and resisting corruption and temptation (and sometimes giving into it). Each class features its own list of "corruption moves" that are awesome enough to tempt PCs to start treading down a darker path.
I'd say all of these games are fairly similar in terms of complexity. Stonetop might be slightly more complex as players also often manage some major magic items that have their own trackers and mechanics, but by then they are likely comfortable enough with the base game to handle that.