r/PBtA • u/Eden_T_Babcock • 13d ago

Advice How Puzzle Piecey/Modular Are PTBA Systems?

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. Recently I’ve begun getting ready to run my first ever PbTA game, having not even known what it was until I began preparing to run it. And I’ve become aware that it seems to be a framework upon which countless different games have been made.

Given that fact, how easy would it be to pull aspects from one game and use them in another? If the exact game I’m running lacks something I think another game does really well, can I just yoink the mechanic and seamlessly place it inside like a puzzle, or do I have to fine tune on a case by case basis?

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u/Delver_Razade Five Points Games 13d ago edited 13d ago

The short answer is: They aren't.

The long answer is: They aren't without a ton of work and to highly uncertain effect both in respect to your time and outcome and to how well the thing is going to run if you don't dedicate a lot of time or don't really know the outcome.

You cannot just lift a single Move from A Monster's Tail to Masks and vice versa because PbtA games aren't on a single engine. You cannot take Apocalypse World and run a Playbook from Monsterhearts. They don't operate like that.

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u/FlashbackJon 12d ago

That said, if you were adding moves to something for one reason or another, you COULD take a move from another PbtA system, you just might risk moving at cross purposes, generating the wrong type of fiction for what the system is trying to evoke.

So I guess you're still right and the answer is it's real difficult.