Narrative & Story Games (incl. Powered by the Apocalypse)

What it is

Narrative roleplaying games — also called story games or, loosely, indie RPGs — are designed around the idea that a game's rules should produce a particular kind of story. Instead of simulating a world as neutrally as possible and letting stories emerge, they point every mechanic at a theme: moral judgment, desperate survival, a crew's slow corruption, a doomed romance. Many share authority that traditional games reserve for the Game Master: players may invent facts about the world, frame their own scenes, or take turns running the game, and some games have no GM at all.

The largest family within the movement is Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA), games inspired by Vincent and Meguey Baker's Apocalypse World (2010). They share "moves" triggered by what characters do in the fiction, 2d6 rolls with full success, partial success ("success at a cost") and misses that push the story forward, and "playbooks" in place of classes.

Origins

Story-focused design has deep roots. Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon (1985) gave knights personality traits and passions that could override the player. Ars Magica (1987), by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein·Hagen, introduced "troupe-style" play with rotating game masters. Rein·Hagen's Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) sold itself as a "Storyteller" game of personal horror, and Tweet's Everway (1995) used cards and images to spark narrative.

The movement proper came from the internet. On Usenet in the late 1990s players debated what people wanted from roleplaying, and in July 1999 Ron Edwards posted "System Does Matter," arguing that rules shape play and dividing player priorities into Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism — GNS theory. Edwards co-founded a website for creator-owned games in December 1999; it relaunched as The Forge in April 2001 and became the hub of a design movement until it closed in 2012. His own occult game Sorcerer, released in hardcover in 2001, showed designers they could publish and own their work.

Evolution

The Forge era produced a burst of compact, pointed games: Paul Czege's My Life with Master (2003); Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (2004), in which young faith-enforcers judge sins in a frontier town; Jason Morningstar's GM-less Fiasco (2009). Then came Apocalypse World (2010), a post-apocalyptic game whose clear "moves" and invitation to "hack" it proved hugely generative. Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel's Dungeon World (2012) applied the engine to classic D&D-style fantasy; Avery Alder's Monsterhearts used it for queer teen horror; by 2023 itch.io listed more than 800 PbtA products. John Harper's Blades in the Dark (2017) evolved the model into "Forged in the Dark," with heists, flashbacks and faction clocks.

The movement also changed how people play. Crowdfunding (see Crowdfunding & the Kickstarter Era) and itch.io gave small designers a market; indie games became a home for LGBTQ stories; and Safety tools such as the X-card spread from this community into mainstream play. April Kit Walsh's PbtA-descended Thirsty Sword Lesbians (2021) became the first tabletop game to win a Nebula Award.

Offshoots kept branching. Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum's Belonging Outside Belonging system dispensed with dice entirely, and the Bakers' own Firebrands framework carried their experiments in a new direction.

How to tell it apart

• Narrative vs. traditional Tabletop Roleplaying Games: in a traditional game the GM owns the world and the players own their characters; narrative games redistribute that authority and aim their rules at a theme. D&D is designed to support any campaign; Dogs in the Vineyard is designed for one kind of moral story.
• vs. Old-School Renaissance (OSR): the two are siblings in rebellion, facing opposite ways. OSR play trusts an impartial referee and emergent events; narrative play builds dramatic structure into the rules. Neither tolerates Railroading.
• vs. Universal & Generic RPG Systems: GNS theory was partly a critique of generic systems; narrative games usually do one thing on purpose. (Fate, a narrative-leaning generic system, is the exception that bridges the two.)
• vs. Live-Action Roleplay (LARP) and Solo & Journaling RPGs: Nordic LARP and journaling games share the story-game emphasis on theme and emotional experience, but move it off the table or into solitary writing.

Where to start

• Apocalypse World — the source of the PbtA engine.
• Dungeon World — PbtA for D&D players.
• Blades in the Dark — a crew of scoundrels in a haunted industrial city.
• Dogs in the Vineyard (Vincent Baker, 2004) — the Forge era's moral-judgment classic.
• Fiasco (Jason Morningstar, 2009) — a GM-less caper that goes horribly wrong.