I had a riot running Escape From Dino Island at my weekly game this week. It was a welcome return to a classic PbtA game after what must be years away from the form. Dino Island does an excellent job getting a solid group of characters in a tight spot and with plenty of open questions to chew on all in like 15 minutes of setup. It’s also built effectively for very short term play, 1-3 sessions, while still packing action and character in. I could do a whole episode of the podcast on the move Tell A Story if The Hard Move hadn’t done so years ago.
But the experience clarified for me a problem I’ve long had with PbtA games: as a GM, the number of principles and moves I’m expected to remember at any time is completely overwhelming, and it makes running these games intimidating.
When running Dino Island in particular, I was struck by how often I looked at my GM sheet to remember what I was supposed to be doing, saw some incredibly practical principle, put it into practice, and was immediately rewarded with a better story. “Always target a specific character,” “give every dinosaur a gimmick,” and “force the heroes to choose between saving themselves and helping others” are all in particular fabulous and useable principles.
But I was also struck by how often I’d find the game dragging a little and realize I’d skipped a principle 5 minutes ago and now was paying the price.
So... the principles are good! Forgetting them is bad! But I think this is a constant problem in PbtA games, first because principles are so often mistaken for good advice rather than rules to be followed. It doesn’t help that so many of the classics (be a fan of the characters; ask questions and build on the answers) have ascended to generic good advice passed around the hobby even outside of the PbtA games they were popularized in. Players should remember that these things are rules in these games, and if they’re broken, they should be broken knowingly and with intention. It’s far too often I think people break them accidentally.
But second, forgetting principles is a constant problem in PbtA games because there’s just so goddamn many of them.
Looking back on the game tonight, I was reminded of Miller’s Law, the psychological principle that people can hold at most 7 +/- 2 things in their head at any given time. More than that and something falls out to make room. Of course people are breaking these rules accidentally all the time - who can remember them all?
A typical PbtA game has three GM agendas, 8-10 principles, and a dozen or more moves. Let’s set aside trying to track individual PC wants and goals, NPCs and other antagonistic forces, the real human beings at the table, and staying hydrated: Miller’s Law, and practical experience, tells me that there’s no fucking way I’m going to remember all of that. In Dino Island, even just making an GM move involves trying to fit 14 potential moves into your head at once before choosing the best one. No wonder the principles and agendas fall away with regularity.
I’m not sure what to do about this. I don’t know what agendas or principles I’d cut from any of these games, because they are by and large all excellent. (At the very least, there do exist games in which they’re all excellent.) I wish more games would have principles and agendas because I think they’re excellent tech - I love just telling players exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and thinking about. Maybe GMs, and designers, just need to accept that some principles are going to fall away, and that each GM will remember the few that feel most relevant to their tastes. Maybe that’s completely fine!
But I wish these games understood that a little better, or maybe just more explicitly. They always talk such a big game about remembering the principles and agendas that I feel like I’m letting them down when I very naturally forget them.
Dino Island is a game that knows so strongly what PbtA is and how it functions, and it condenses and polishes so much of it in the tight, easy structure of its setup, obstacles, and extinction event systems. I wish it brought that same understanding of where to carve away game for a slimmer, faster, more essential experience to its principles and moves.