Author: Joshua Hillerup

I’m listening to an older +1 Forward episode, and it’s highlighting for me something that might explain why I’ve been having trouble getting into PbtA games. For me what grabs me about a roleplaying game is the setting. I’m fine with (in fact am a big fan of) creating the local setting around the PCs at the table. But for the larger setting as a whole, especially things like metaphysics, and cultures? That’s something that really drives me to play a game. If I find something about the setting that I really enjoy I will then love the game as a whole. Collaboratively creating that at the table, especially in play means it will always be a lackluster curiosity for me, rather than something that gets me all excited.

Anyway, I thought I would share that. It makes me sad, because there are a lot of things that Apocalypse World does mechanically and have been carried on in other games that I really like, but it seems like one thing that also gets carried forward is an aversion to a rich setting.

For a long time now (ever since the D20 SRD came out in HTML actually) I’ve been wanting to run a game about a family of trolls being squeezed between a hostile human empire, and a harsh impenetrable mountain range. However, I’ve never really found the right system to do it in.

So I’m wondering, is Dungeon World the right system? If so, how should I do that? If not, what system would you recommend? The latest idea I had was using Spark, but I feel like the lack of mechanical differentiation between being a troll and just being a regular human would lose something.

Hi all. I started listening to your podcast a few weeks ago (I’m about half way through) and I thought I’d ask you guys a question.

I’m starting up a trad game (the specific game isn’t so important for this question) who’s setting I love, but whose system I’m not so in love with. It’s the type of game though where porting the setting to another system would be a lot of work, and I checked and no one else has really done it. I am however really familiar with running and playing the system/setting.

My question is, have any of you done this sort of thing before in a successful way, and what sort of strategies have you applied? Obviously my usual “system matters” approach isn’t going to work, and I’m thinking of really trying to stick to advice like “say yes or role the dice” and making sure the PCs are the star of the show, but I’m looking for other techniques and approaches that can be helpful as well.