The recent release of Baldur's Gate 3 got me thinking about the joy of playing that original Baldur's Gate, exploring open worlds filled with quests, walking around those lovely isometric maps interrupted by the silly quips of my NPC companions.

I'm willing to go ahead and say that most TTRPG gamers also play video games, and that a lot of us have a nostalgia for those late 90s-early 2000s CRPGs. What if I made a game cathering to that feeling of casual gaming and dumb grinding? Well, that's what & Venture Forth is.

So why Powered by the Apocalypse?

Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, they're all based on AD&D right? So why don't you pick up a copy of AD&D and just run it, Duamn?

Well, first of all because I'm nostalgic for Baldur's Gate, not for AD&D (a game I never played).

Secondly, because Baldur's Gate the videogame and D&D the TTRPG are completely different experiences. CRPGs are faster, less clunky, and don’t demand as much engagement as D&D does.

But most importantly, because in & Venture Forth you don't play characters exploring the world of Baldur's Gate, you play the experience of playing Baldur's Gate.

Instead of trying to ratio each swing of the sword, each waypoint click, each spell 1 to 1, I use the PbtA Moves structure and probability curve to represent the chaos of moving characters around, miss-clicking while cracking open a can of Coke, double checking the inventory window... Y'know, playing a video game.

Let me show you one of the moves:

When you grind you have to go around the table, coordinate with your friends, select which character does which action, and pretty much play that real-time-with-pause CRPG dynamic. Sometimes you press spacebar too slow and half your party gets stabbed in the face. Sometimes you get attacked while your mom is shouting dinners ready. And sometimes you time it just right, ready to rain death upon your enemies.

And that approach extends to every part of the game really, from the quick random quest generators, to the shallow, straightforward social moves:

You see, I'm of the mind that PbtA isn't an all powerful generic engine you can slap any game onto and expect it to work. PbtA focuses on a couple things, and those things it focuses on, it does amazingly well. One of those things? Explicit framing. 

The coolest thing about PbtA moves is that they bring an explicitly framed conversation to the table, giving players the chance to stop the minutae of roleplay and have an open exchange about what's going on in the fiction.

And if you create a series of moves which consistently frame the conversation towards a goal, there's where you get a flavorful gaming experience.

That's the main reason why I chose World of Dungeons (a minimalistic, solid D&D-esque PbtA game) as the base for & Venture Forth. Because if I make my moves well, I may be able to enable you to feel those late night gaming sessions in front of a cathodic screen again