If you came here for answers, sorry, this is one of those posts where the author is trying to figure it out himself. Aren't we all? I've been playing a lot of RPGs these days, mostly as a DM / Game Master, and I'm really trying to find a style of play that I like. This post is an exploration of that.

The title refers to a series of role playing games that are inspired by the game Apocalypse World. In the past few weeks, I have been contrasting "PbtA" with "D&D", stating that I want more of Powered by the Apocalypse elements in my games, and less of the Dungeons & Dragons mindset. But what do I mean with that? I wrote this blog post to organise my thoughts around it.

Before we begin I also want to make clear: I do think there are many styles to play Dungeons & Dragons and other games. I'm using the terms as shorthand for a style of thinking about games, but I don't want to imply everyone playing D&D thinks about the game in this way. I just needed names for the positions.

A little backstory

When I started D&D, I was a player in a campaign of a former coworker. I had a simple tabaxi ranger (meaning: a cat with a bow) with some light backstory, but it never really came into play. We just showed up and whatever the DM had planned happened, and we would kill some monsters and go home. I always felt guilty that I should also prepare more, think more deeply about my character, write more backstory.

Now I run a weekly open table – people I know and total strangers buy tickets for my session and just show up. Every week I run a one-shot, a story that is completed in a single evening, and I hand out pre-made character sheets to new players, completely void of backstory. And now I feel guilty when players do show up with a self-made character with a backstory that just cannot become relevant, because I planned an adventure that has totally different vibes from their characters.

As a solution, I started to run other game systems (Pirate Borg, Mothership, Kids on Brooms, to name a few). These systems are either very light on backstory – you roll a new character within five minutes and you can die easily – or very collaborative – in Kids on Brooms you collectively invent a magical school a la Harry Potter, and I was kinda sad when after three hours of answering prompts about the school we actually had to "start playing".

I think this is what spawned my search. How do I tell stories that are relevant for the characters that are in them?

Hush, the DM is telling a story

In Dungeons & Dragons, the roles are clearly marked: every player has a character with a class, species, background and stats; the Dungeon Master is in charge of the rest of the world and every other character in it, and if you're not careful they are also in charge of knowing all the rules, session planning, hosting the thing, getting the snacks, solve interpersonal conflicts between players, etc.

Again, I'm not saying everyone plays D&D like this, but I do say that D&D has the tendency to put a lot of work on the DM. I do not want to be a DM who starts a story that is to be followed by the players, but most published adventures do come with a set of scenes that follow in succession. They often include words like "if the PCs did X, then Y", but the choices feel very limited compared to the open worlds that were promised to me when I started playing.

The jargon for this is "railroading versus sandbox", and it's generally accepted that railroading is bad, but solutions for it can be as shallow as adding those "if this than that" kind of sentences in the adventures, or even the advice to just fake it: provide the players with the illusion of choice, but let every one of the three doors you give them lead to the same troll battle.

Recently, I was a player in a very open game where we could literally do anything. The GM presented us with four quests which I knew from out-of-game context would all lead to improvised play on their part. It was a cool session, but I still felt I missed something – even though I regard the GM very highly! Apparently just sandboxing the thing is also not the solution.

Between all the players

I like to think of RPGs as collaborative story telling. In the aforementioned sandbox session, the players – myself included – fell into the trap of wanting to be entertained. We looked at the GM, hoping they would tell us a story. We were doing what I feel like also happens in a lot of the sessions that I run: it's a conversation between two parties – the party of the players on one side and the GM on the other.

What often happens to me in these sessions, is that I as the GM set up a bit of world and story. I then look up to the players at the table and find someone who responds to me. I tell the story a bit further and they contribute too. But as the party speaks, it's always a single member speaking for the party. If they move to a new location, they move as one group. Every decision feels like a group decision. It's them against me.

To finally mention Apocalypse World: in this game, part of character creation is actually your relation to other player's characters. Your relation to every other character has a number, that can be relevant in the dice-rolls you make when you are in conflict. And that conflict comes from questions you answer during character creation too. Conflict does not mean battle, but it does mean that some characters want different things than others. In that tension, a story emerges, and this part of the story does not need a GM.

I think that's my first take-away so far: D&D is not promoting these individual differences as much (see also: "never split the party!"), but it's certainly possible to add more of this to it. I think seeing all characters as individuals with their own choices would make my games better.

Simulation versus game versus narrative

Another characteristic of D&D is that it somewhat tries to mimic the real world. There's a lot of numbers and rules that determine how things can move or interact with each other. There is this feeling that if a dice has not been rolled, it didn't really happen.

I came across some RPG theory called "The Big Model" and "GNS Theory", that divides this up into three pieces: simulationism, gamism and narrativism. I guess that the idea that you should always roll for something is gamism (is it still a game if we don't roll for it?), and that always trying to capture something in a rule with some associated math is simulationism. Both interest me, but as a former writer and literary student, I think I'm more fan of narrativism.

When playing out a D&D battle with mini's on the table, we've very much moved away from narrative and paused to play a game. To be totally honest with you: after two rounds I'm often totally bored out of my mind. I am sometimes subtracting more HP from monsters than I should, just because I want them to be dead already. I really don't like this part of the game.

I don't think Apocalypse World is only narrative and not a game nor simulation, but it's certainly more on the narrative + game end of things than D&D, which I would place more on simulation + game. Apocalypse World has the concept of Moves, which are just little sentences describing what you can do. Some of them have associated dice rolls, but on the GM's side, many aren't much more than prompts for you to come up with interesting narrative twists.

Let's make that a second take-away: I can prepare prompt moves for D&D, to explicitly give myself permission to improvise. I guess battles in D&D will always be very much a game, but even there: I can make a list of prompts to look at for when someone misses an attack (e.g. when 'nothing happens' mechanically, but I can still make narrative progress).

Boundaries of world and character

So, the DM is in charge of the world, and the players in charge of their character. It's therefore only natural that the DM is talking a lot: there is just so much more world than there are characters! How else would the story move forwards?

I still see some room, however – a character is always a part of the world. It's very normal for a DM to ask a character for a Perception check, followed by an explanation of what the character saw, heard or smelled in the world. This is on the very edge of the DM telling something about the character. Many DMs are also pretty comfortable with asking for a History check, followed by an explanation of facts that the character already knew about the world. This is the DM filling in even more for the character.

In that same way, could you not flip that around? Instead of explaining the history of this city, why not ask the player what the character knows about this city? Or what the character smelled when they entered the weapon store? Or describe what the bartender looks like?

It feels scary. If players can make shit up, why wouldn't they just say they see a +3 magical sword for sale, for only 5 gold? But hey, you are making shit up as well! I think this player would easily agree that this was a way too good of a deal, and that it's obvious they are now cursed by the sword, or being followed by it's former owner, or both.

So my third take-away would be: let the players tell a bit about the world too, from now and then, because they probably have better input than the numbers 1 to 20 can ever give you.

Final thoughts

So, most of these are tastes, not truths. Your mileage may vary, I'm just exploring mine. But I guess I did find three things I can use in my own games. I like to think of them as elements I took from Apocalypse World, but I don't think it's limited to that. It's also mostly a mindset: be okay with improvising. If anything: prepare less concrete things, so that story can flow in the ways it wants to. Let's see where it goes.

A month ago I wrote that I was now a "Game Master", as I finished the book and ran some sessions. I'm still going strong with that, although I have had the pleasure to be a player to some new GMs as well in the past few weeks.

My shared universe

Most of the sessions I run, I run within a spin-off of the Boardgayming Amsterdam community. At the moment of writing this is a Whatsapp-group with around 50 people, where the habit is to just post a poll, proposing a time, with the options "Player", "Host", "DM" and sometimes "Yes but not this date". People can then vote for the role they want to take in the session and create a new group with only those interested to actually plan the thing. The sessions are always in-person and mostly at someone's house.

The group started playing at first level because D. joined a "normal" Boardgayming event and proposed to DM some D&D games. I missed those first sessions, but later on when J. took over the role of "most active DM of the group" I joined a few sessions. And well, as I was interested and found the book, this was the easiest way for me to just try to DM myself, and that happened.

As a structure, D. invented a central hub to our adventures, which is the magical Hadini's Hotel, an infinite hotel created by a wizard, which has entrance doors in many many cities. When it was first described to me by J., what I saw was an endless tavern (in my minds eye one infinite room with tavern furniture, but with a ceiling), and Hadini was wearing a top hat. This turned out to be a bit like the whisper game: D. later described Hadini's Hotel as a hotel in art deco style ("like The Movies in Amsterdam") and Hadini as wearing a fez. The structure still worked though.

Formalizing Hadini

Thursday I read this post by P. from the RPG Night in Utrecht, a third one in his series on distributed campaigns. In his series, he talks about a few prerequisites: have a number of truths about the world, divide the campaign world into regions and give each GM complete authority over their region, and finally create some non-trivial but traversable boundary between those regions. Read the series for more.

Quite coincidentally, or maybe influenced by the earlier posts, I actually did some work to get this working for Hadini's Hotel this week. I had the idea for a while, but since we're kind of moving out of the summer break, I proposed to the other DMs to call this a new season and to create some structure. To be fair: the main problem I was trying to solve was character progression, as the whole group had been level 4 since March, as non of the active DMs (me included) felt like they had the authority to level up the PCs.

In coming up with some form of structure for leveling up, I also created a page that contained some truths about Hadini's Hotel. This was the moment I found out about the fez. The whole document can since Wednesday be found on the on-purpose old-fashionedly styled page over at Hadini.nl.

But is it really decentralized now?

The main purpose of Hadini's Hotel is to have a shared narrative starting point. Since the Hotel has doors in infinite other places and realms, we can use it to plug in any adventure to PCs who already know each other, or have never met at all. This is also it's biggest downfall though: getting the party outside of the Hotel can be a bit of an exercise.

Several players have reported their character to be "trapped" in the Hotel. Which makes no sense: they leave it for an adventure and two weeks later "oh no", we're in the Hotel again. Comparing this to P.'s notes, where he uses regions: PCs only move to another region if the player is switching to another GM. This means the player has a reason to give the character a reason to change to the other region. This also means that characters are never magically transported back to start (and thus also never against their own will).

The other thing is that there are very little shared truths. Only this week I've canonized a few important (or minor?) details about the Hotel and it's staff, keeping stuff intentionally vague in order to give new DMs stuff to play with, while still giving them some frame of reference to play off of. But the details that are agreed on now seldom influence the actual adventure.

So no, I don't think we're a decentralized campaign now. We're still a series of one-shots with returning characters.

Does it have to be?

Hadini's Hotel doesn't have to be anything, of course. But I notice I am longing for a bit of consistency between sessions, both as a DM and as a player. Running completely unrelated one-shots every time is just a lot of work, as very little work you do for that one session can be carried over to the next one. And players get the feeling they are stuck within the Hotel, especially if they keep being the same level for months.

With the level issue solved, I think Hadini's Hotel can be enough of a structure for me. I am thinking of creating a world on my own, and just use the Hotel as a bridge, but still keeping the principles of the distributed campaign in mind. This will give me some factions and world events to build on in between sessions, and it could be a starting point if someone else also wants to DM in the same world.

New players could also just create a character in this new world and never be at the Hotel. I'll just inform them that it's an option to also be native to some other world if they want to be, as the Hotel can take them here, and they would still have access to the one-shots provided by other DMs using the old structure. If I do accept PCs native to my world, it does mean I would not always start the adventure in the Hotel itself, but just resort to some hand-wavy "you have been hired" kind of thing.

The last thing I want to start playing with is the idea that at the end of the session, the goal for the next session is determined. This is an idea from P.'s post about his open table for Mausritter, and I think it could work for me too. I have ran a "proactive" one-shot that is turning into a two-shot for another group of friends, and I really like the preparation style of just updating the state of the world based on what happened at the table, and keeping track of actual character goals and coming up with twists and backstory for them. I want that in Hadiniverse too.

The first session of this new "season" is next Friday, and I guess I will keep you posted.