I’m going to pause my 5e game for the month of July and try something else. I’m thinking about a PbtA game. I ran a few sessions of Masks years ago and it went okay. I’d never played anything that wasn’t a d20 system and I remember feeling Masks was bending my brain a bit.
Do you guys have any suggestions for a quality actual play I could watch to try to get a handle on the system? Is there anyone out there that talks about PbtA the way a thousand people on YouTube do about D&D?
I was considering Avatar or Glitterhearts if it makes a difference, but I think that anything PbtA would help me.
I have two Let’s Play recommendations for you, however neither is for your preferred systems. They do however showcase well how fiction and mechanics interact.
First recommendation is one of the many solo plays of Ironsworn, or some other solo RPG. Since there is only the player and the game they have to rely on mechanics much more than if it was played in a group. Also since there is just one player, who also GMs, we tend to get insight into how they work with the rules. The Let’s Play I’m going to recommend is one from Me, Myself and Die. It is also one of the more recommended ones with good production values. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLDvunq75UfH_Z92nrYPUsTO_fTHnLTNaT
Second is for the Dungeon World gack Stonetop. At this point calling it a hack is making it a disservice as it have evolved into its own thing. The DW ancestry is clear though. This Let’s Play is from the creator of the system with his core playtester group. What makes it stand out it that it is really well edited cutting out plenty of non-play filler. In addition to that the editor have annotated the videos with comments about the mechanical choices the GM makes. Good for following along. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDdTGJVXI31C08Kem-oLzXqRgImtLzXKC
Hopefully this will be of some help.
*Edit: Updated second link. *
For the second link I guess you meant Stonetop - Annotated Actual Play ?
Yes. Definitely.
This is great, thank you. I especially like the thought of a GM’s commentary on the game as it runs. That reminds me of the session summaries Matt Colville used to do for his games. Those were very helpful to me when I first started running a game and I’d imagine seeing it alongside the actual session would be more-so.