RPGaDay: Move

Today I will do the obvious thing and talk about PBTA, not least because that's what I'm using for my own Matrons of Mystery game.  But first, Pathfinder 2e.

One thing I'm enjoying in PF2 is that my character has a list of skills, and then there's a list of actions you can take using those skills.  The actions mean there's more of a focus on the actual thing you're doing, not just which skill you're using to achieve it.  It's an extra level of crunch to think about, but if you're not into crunch then boy have you picked the wrong game with PF2.

The basic moves in most PBTA games seem to be more or less equivalent to actions.  They're not the only things you can do in the game, but they're the things that require interaction with the rules, usually in the form of a dice roll.  I wonder if calling them 'actions' instead would cut down on the misunderstandings about this aspect of the game?  Probably not.

The water gets muddied by other moves though, particularly the stuff that shows up on playbooks.  My Killer in The Sprawl, for example, had a move that let her use her Synth attribute instead of Meat for violence.  And that doesn't feel like a move.  The Soldier has a move that lets them pick more of the favourable outcomes when negotiating taking a job.  That doesn't feel like a move either; it's making them better at a basic move.

So while I very much like moves as a concept, I also very much dislike when they subsume a bunch of different concepts that would be called different things in most other games.  But of course, the great thing about writing your own game is that you can do it your own way.  Matrons of Mystery has a set of moves, PBTA style with different success levels, but for other aspects of the game I took inspiration from the approaches in Fate Accelerated Edition and the occupation die in Cthulhu Dark.

This wandered a bit.  I guess what I'm saying here is that while jargon is annoying and unhelpful, moves (or actions, or whatever else you choose to call them) are a useful and fun way of thinking about a game system.