Over the last few years of working on PbtA games, I’m struck by how limited some of the core mechanics really are. I have this whole thing in Cartel about money and trying to save it and deal with it as a motivator for PC stuff… but it just never worked. It was like a whole resource management minigame that no one ever cared about.

I’m struck in these posts about Legacy that the game is absolutely trying to do something different from Apocalypse World itself, i.e. think about what building a better future might look like in a way that rescues the conversation from the fruitful void. But it also seems to run up against those limitations: we want to take action, make moves, identify the link between the fiction and the dice.

Ironically, this is the thing that’s pushing Brendan Conway, Marissa, and myself away from PbtA design. We love it, and it’s always going to be something we do… but we also have these hungers for different kinds of fiction (like Blades or Burning Wheel) that serve the larger, more abstract narrative.