A Brief History of PbtA

The other day, I looked into the history of published RPGs using the Apocalypse World system — so-called Powered by the Apocalypse, or PbtA, although I’m sure that anyone interested enough to actually read this essay already knew that. This started out as a brief detour from another subject entirely but turned up some interesting notes, so I thought I’d write them up in case other people find them interesting too.

Who The Hell Are You?

Do I have some sort of degree in PbtA? No.

Do I have any sort of qualification in history or the study thereof? No.

Am I Vincent Baker, related to Vincent Baker, friends with Vincent Baker, or otherwise able to claim special authority? No, no, no, and also no.

I’m just a halfway-decent game designer who has been around a long (long) time in RPG terms and I had both the time and the inclination to research this and write it all down.

Yes, I have designed a PbtA game of my own. No, I’m not going to talk about it here. It’s not really relevant to what I was looking at anyway.

A Note On Methodology

When looking up the history of PbtA games, I went to DrivethruRPG and looked up everything that claimed to use the “Apocalypse World System”. Then I skimmed back through the 508 products looking for things which were either big deal tentpole kind of games from a historical point of view (Dungeon World, Masks) or which pushed the envelope with the mechanics (Bluebeard’s Bride, Flying Circus) or both (Monsterhearts). Then I did the same thing for itch, sifting through everything tagged ‘pbta’.

Then I added a few from memory that didn’t come up, or have deviated far enough from core PbtA that they’re not listed as such on that site.

Then I looked up publication dates for all of them. This was not as easy as you’d think, and I’ve almost certainly made some mistakes. My definition of ‘publication date’ was ‘when the game was widely available to the public’, which is often a different date to the official pub date. For example, Blades in the Dark was playable to all backers during the Kickstarter for it in March 2015, even though the final book wasn’t shipped out until 2017.

(Yes, I think Blades is a PbtA branch. Please argue in the comments, where I will ignore you.)

I did it this way because I’m interested in tracking innovation on the basic framework, and as far as I’m concerned that innovation happens at the point when the new hotness is distributed to the world at large rather than the official publication date.

One big shortcoming of this method is that I’m only tracking officially published games. Hacks that are sitting on a Google Drive somewhere, or which released without fanfare only on itch.io and consequently sank without trace, aren’t featured. Since I’m looking at tentpoles and big design innovations I don’t think this shortcoming is going to affect my main thesis here too much, but it does bother me that there could be some works of transcendent genius out there that I just don’t know about.

So, as I said, I’ve probably made some mistakes. I’ll correct them if I find them. You may well also disagree with the games I’ve selected as worth paying attention to — especially as we get past 2018 into the modern era, where I sort of stopped paying attention to PbtA games. To which I say “Okay, but I’m writing this and you aren’t, so we’re doing it my way.”

The Timeline

This took hours.

The full-size one can be seen at https://i.imgur.com/qsUWLW2.png

So What?

I’m seeing three broad ‘eras’ of PbtA design here, which makes technocrat me very excited.

The First Wave is mostly contained in 2012, shading into 2013 with games like Sagas of the Icelanders, where people first started making PbtA hacks and seeing what they could do with the form. I feel like most of these didn’t deviate too far from the standard laid out by Apocalypse World, but also we got Monsterhearts right out the gate, so between that and Simple World I guess Avery Alder was just a decade or so ahead of the curve. Which honestly doesn’t surprise me at all.

Then you’ve got a quiet couple of years, and then The Boom in 2015–2016, trailing off into 2017 and maybe even 2018. This is where you start to see the first games that take PbtA design and really run off with it to do their own thing — some with more success than others. But although I’ve pulled out some of the big name games released in this period on the timeline I want you to understand that there were so many PbtA games crowdfunded around this time (including mine) and most of them made only minor tweaks to the basic PbtA formula (including mine).

So. Many.

It was so popular that I remember people likening it to the d20 glut in the 00s. On top of that we also got the second edition of Apocalypse World in 2016 and the second edition of Monsterhearts in 2017. There was a lot going on.

And then as that’s tailing off in 2018 you get into The Innovation Era, where people are starting to really take hold of the PbtA framework and twist it in new and interesting ways. Quite apart from the games listed on the timeline we’ve had Voidheart Symphony and Under Hollow Hills in the past couple of years, and more and more games in the broader RPG scene taking inspiration from fragmentary bits and pieces that PbtA popularised: moves, principles, ‘the conversation’, and similar.

Don’t ask me what’s coming next. If I knew I’d design it.

What Do You Want Me To Do With This Knowledge?

Nothing. I just thought it might be interesting.

I’ve Read The Whole Thing And I Vehemently Disagree

Please argue in the comments, where I will ignore you.

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Update, 17 August 2024: Someone over on Cohost has charted out the family tree for Blades in the Dark, and if you liked this little poke at history you’ll probably like that one too.