Also, and here’s a thing about PbtA that Andy Hauge got me thinking about in a way it is possible I can express:

I like game mechanics, and like incentives — be they direct or perverse. But, notably when I answered the question from two days back (or whatever it was) about “your favorite incentive” it was “a character with strong and clear motivations and a way to pursue them.”

Which was obviously me trolling, but was also equally totally true. One of the reasons I play so heavily in the ven-diagram overlap space of larp/freeform/tabletop/theatre-game is because character and motivation are one of my key avenues of exploration, motivation, and structuration.

Because of that, my design work (both as a “designer” icky, and as a GM, and sometimes even as a player when I’m looking to understand and structure my input into a game), tends to focus heavily on character, character interaction, and character intentionality.

And because of that, I can sometimes come off a bit mechanics agnostic. Like, where I’m going to push buttons and force things off the rail is going to be in the combination of “this person, in this place, facing this stress.” So the exact mechanical system (when I’m doing table top) I use to deliver that is… well, it often matters a bit less that it does if the mechanical system’s levers are your primary tool for driving.

And because of that, many turtles deep, when I don’t just go freeform, I’m likely to look at PbtA games first because I know many folks — including pretty much everyone I play with regularly even the near-total larp heads — know the basics of PbtA. I will not have to invest time into mechanics, on their end, and have a lot of pre-set material and knowledge of systemic interaction on my end to use to get to what is, in my goals, the point.