Root: the RPG

[whswhs]

C and I just looked into a local game store, and she pointed this out to me. Can anyone describe it? From a little looking around I gather it's a PbtA game, more or less . . .

[Anaraxes]

Here's a brief review I found that talks a little bit about the play. But only a little.

The RPG is set in the world of the boardgame. The PCs are all Vagabonds.

It does cite PbtA by name as at least an inspiration. The review didn't have enough mechanical detail for me to tell whether it uses that system, or just used that same design / play philosophy. (That is, play to find out what happens, rather than prep, with dice deciding exactly how a desired event occurs, rather than if it happens or not.)

[Mark Skarr]

It certainly looks like it's PbtA--The game talks about playbooks, which is a PbtA thing. And according to DTRPG, it is PbtA.

Doing a quick skim of the quick-start stuff--yeah, it's PbtA.

[whswhs]

Okay, but I had never heard of the boardgame and know nothing about it. What kind of world are we talking about?

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Okay, but I had never heard of the boardgame and know nothing about it. What kind of world are we talking about?

The quick-start version of the game, which has a summary of the game, is free on DTRPG.

However, basically, you're a small anthropomorphic animal hobo. I don't know if murdering is involved, but, you're definitely a hobo:

Originally Posted by Root Quickstart, pg 4

Most of the time, the life of a vagabond is focused on survival. They take what jobs they can when they visit clearings—most often the least desirable or most difficult jobs around—to get enough food and supplies to survive.

[Anaraxes]

The boardgame involves a set of woodland creatures (intelligent birds, cats, otters, etc) that struggle to accomplish their goals in different ways. Root is famous for being an asymmetric game, in that each of the creatures has different goals and somewhat different rules. It's a good game. I wouldn't have thought of it as having a lot of deep lore for an RPG setting. But it's fun, and if you like the game, you might want to run an RPG there.

The map is a woodland, with paths between villages, deep woods to hide in, and rivers winding through the forest lands.

The four original species:

• The Marquise de Cat, ruler of the cats, tried to take over all of the woodland villages. They build workshops and do crafting.
• The Eyrie are birds, looking for a leader. Different leaders have different styles, and they all have some agenda that they have to keep following, or else their rule collapses and the eagles go back to squabbling until they get another leader. They're trying to expand and build many roosts, interrupted by their cycles of chaos.
• The Woodland Alliance is a collection of many small animals, represented by rabbits. They're the populist rebels, building up support, gaining sympathy whenever they get attacked, and turning that sympathy into more support and power.
• The Vagabond isn't even an entire group, but a single character. They can be friends with everyone, moving among all their clearings, crafting items, trading, and exploring sites (dungeons, basically). Unlike any other group, they can retire in to the deep woods where no one can catch them, and use that as a shortcut between villages. They can also be powerful in combat when they have enough of the right items, so a timely betrayal or switch to militarism for the last few victory points can be effective.

The game is popular enough that it's had four expansions, adding new factions and expanding the older ones. New types of Vagabond, new leaders for the Eyrie, and so on. There's a Riverfolk Company faction, otters that succeed by trading; an underworld with the Corvid Conspiracy and an underground duchy of moles; the Lord of the Hundreds, basically oppressive barbarians happy to destroy villages rather than lose control of them, and an exiled order of armored racoon knights.

So, lots of color, and you'd have NPCs in the form of the individual Vagabonds (named by style, rather than individual personal names) or the leaders of the factions where those are important.

There's several maps for the game, to give the gamers variety, but they're just sets of a dozen clearings for villages in a forest, or caves underground. It's not a Tolkien-esque fantasy map with a world full of nations and cities and so on.

I imagine the GM would have a fair amount of work to create a story and characters to populate that world. The original game isn't really focused on RPG setting material. But then, GMs generally do have a lot of work even in detailed RPG worlds unless they're just running the line of published adventures for that setting.


https://ledergames.com/products/root...ight-and-right

[whswhs]

Thanks to everyone for the information. You've helped me confirm that this isn't going to be a priority for me, mostly because I don't see the "Powered by the Apocalypse" system as a roleplaying game in the sense I'm accustomed to. I'm glad to be able to make the decision on an informed basis . . .

Best wishes!

[seaweedbrain]

here's an interview Why Magpie Games’ Root: The Roleplaying Game chose to be Powered by the Apocalypse

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by seaweedbrain

here's an interview Why Magpie Games’ Root: The Roleplaying Game chose to be Powered by the Apocalypse

Thanks for the link. That's more or less what I expected.

I fundamentally reject the PbtA paradigm: first, because it doesn't give me freedom to design a character to fit my own concept, even less than old school games did; but second, and more important, because its playbooks limit me to a small number of moves. In effect, it's a language with just a handful of nouns and a handful of verbs. A system like Basic Roleplaying, or GURPS, or Tri-Stat gives me a lot more of both; in fact the number of possible characters is extremely large. I stipulate that PbtA may be perfectly playable as its own sort of thing, but it seems to me to depart from D&D in the opposite of the direction I prefer.

And I do find it ironic that the article suggests that the only alternative to d20 is PbtA. Having played in a lot of other systems, and written a lot of books for GURPS, I'm very aware of other alternatives.