PbtA games are kinda like the Apple of the indie RPG world, in one sense: they’re accessible and different-feeling. For an RPG world that only knows D&D (and, sometimes, GURPS/World of Darkness), they’re a culture shock in a good way: “Wait, you can do that with RPGs?”

I think you’d probably feel less ambivalent if they didn’t sometimes feel like the only game in town! But at the end of the day, PbtA games have also kinda become like “Save the Cat”.

Explanation time. If you’re not familiar with it, “Save the Cat” is a screenwriting book pitched as “the last screenwriting book you’ll ever need”. It breaks the plot of a movie down into modular components of formula, so that you could basically mix-and-match and create your own movie plot just by following the formula. The book took off like wildfire in Hollywood, because when your industry is focused on producing a large quantity of watchable movies, a plot-generator is a massive boon.

In light of that, it’s probably unsurprisingly why so many Hollywood movies feel like copies of one another: they’re all drawing on the same formulae. This is probably starting to sound familiar now, in light of your PbtA post.

(The distinction, naturally, is that Vincent didn’t promote Apocalypse World as “the last roleplaying game engine you’ll ever need”. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot of PbtA fans who do! Which might be where some of this comes from.)

I think that PbtA has a lot of aspects which make it easy to build a game. All the components are out in the open. It lends itself really well to obvious design, which is another thing you hit on: whether a PbtA game relies on obvious design or not is a mark of its quality. It’s not obvious to take a game about female Russian bomber pilots and make it into an intimately personal game. It’s not obvious to take a game about teenage monster drama and make it into a game fundamentally about messy sexuality and becoming a better person. It’s not obvious to take a game about supernatural politics and make it into a game about racial and cultural and class tensions/imbalances.

The obvious PbtA games are the popcorn of RPG design, the flashy, fun, forgettable entertainment. The others are the ones that try to dig deeper.