At Gencon a few years ago, new acquaintance Hamish Cameron and I realized we were both working on PbtA cyberpunk games: it was fantastic! We ran a playtest of each for each other, and they were radically different, despite verrrry similar inspirations, which made for some solid collaboration and conversations.

If you’re working on a thing, and it’s similar to another thing, there’s some chance of audience confusion/burnout, sure. But you’re also gaining a community of people who get it, who are dealing with the same tangled possibility space you are, people you can talk to. Hamish’s work turned into The Sprawl, mine became the Singapore Sling transmission for Technoir, but those conversations were the real winning bit for me.

And some people that played either were probably frustrated with some of their contents, wish they were more or less or different or better, and even if they didn’t have the bandwidth to make it themselves, they probably wished there was an alternative. If the thing you make is good, it’ll find its audience, and likely some of that will come from folks dissatisfied in whole or in part with adjacent games. Their frustration likely isn’t with the PbtA bit, so that makes the transition easier.

And don’t forget the Jason Corley principle: once it’s out of your hands, people are gonna do all kinds of things you didn’t expect with it. Maybe only one move will be the part they love, hack, blog about, and discard the other parts you love as dross. But you’ll still have made the thing to your own satisfaction, and added another brick to the vast edifice of This Thing of Ours, and that’s winning too.