Action Economy in the Apocalypse Engine

I think the description that is given in the PbtA of how action economy works is simply lacking.  Yes, fiction...right.  But a lot of games deal with something called balance and a lot of players want to know when and if their characters are in danger.  My thinking here is not to go against the basic way that PbtA games work but to at least suggest, for people who are trying to get a hold of this, what action sort of looks like in a PbtA game and how that translates into the action economy described in other games.

So, lets begin.  I'm going to say that the basic structure of the PbtA move system comes in the form of problem/solution: here's the problem, what do you do; the player comes up with a move that solves the problem, rolls, and if successful (10+ for all the 2d6 games), the problem is solved.

Great, but there's a lot of variation here.  For instance, there's a problem, the character comes up with an action that doesn't solve the problem, and rolls a 10+... the original problem remains.  A problem that remains generally "goes off."  Whatever action the characters were supposed to prevent, they didn't...and so the action now happens.

Example:  

DM: The dragon is about to breathe fire on you, what do you do?

Player: I rummage through my pack for the sunglasses.

DM:  You get hit by the fire.

I want to expand on the "going off" bit, but first I'd like to suggest what happens when the player rolls the intermediate success, because what that typically means is that either the original problem is solved and a new problem takes its place, or the old problem goes off but to a lesser extent.  

In the first case, you're trading one problem for another, but you're still in need of the solution, all you've really done is delayed the "going off" of something.  If the bad thing goes off, even a little bit, that generally means that there is now one less problem to deal with.

The alternative is, of course, the 2-6 failure, in which you don't solve the current problem, which means it may "go off," AND you get a new problem.

So, your chance of getting rid of the problem is 1 in 6.  

The chance of pushing one bad for another is about 2 in 5.

The chance of not solving anything and gaining another problem is about 2 in 5

So, when is it that you have gathered enough problems that you simply cannot succeed?  That's one difficulty for players in PbtA system, but it's an important one.  If the characters are 5 or 6 problems deep in a scene, what are the chances that they're going to pull loose from all that and solve the original issue.  The dragon is about to breathe fire, you fall and break your armor, you try to get up and the shards of armor go into your skin.  Meanwhile, the dragon's friends show up, goblins, and they start attacking, unable to defend him or herself, a goblin injects the characcter with delirium poison, the characters mind blows up in the face of total insanity while bathed in dragon fire.  

Seriously, at what point do you not just run away?  And that's fine, that's PbtA, but if the players don't understand what failure means in this game, it can get this bad.  I've seen something like this in one of my games where players literally rolled under 6 about 5 times in a row.  At that point, I said to them, "it might be really hard to succeed."

Generally, people think in terms of action economy.  I get an action, the enemy gets an action, but PbtA has something closer to problem economy, I get an action, I might add a situation to the scenario that gets an action.

Consider, for instance, that some problems are ongoing.  So, if the GM says, you knock over a torch and the building catches fire, and the characters don't deal with that the next "round," it doesn't mean that they'll take damage and that will be that.  The GM might make it that until the characters do something to get out of the fire, they're going to take damage, or, and this is what I'd do, any time the characters roll a 6 or less, they'll take damage from the fire in addition to whatever else they run up against.  One action, and a failure, has resulted in multiple reactions.  It is not a 1:1 relationship.  In fact, it has a chance of getting larger, not smaller, as time goes on... the opposite of most other role playing games where you start with X number of problems and you reduce them to zero over the course of the scene.  In PbtA, you generally start with 1 or 2 problems and gain more as you start failing.

What does this ultimately mean?  It means that failures stacks up faster than successes.  But that's not really the point.  The point is that players really need to understand what happens in the world of successes and failures in PbtA because it's different than what happens in other games.  Even the idea of Action Economy, so basic to most RPGs, is more complicated than it is, otherwise, in most other games.  Understanding the piling up of successes and failures that results from action helps to understand the question of when it becomes necessary to run, or why characters should be using an Aid move rather than taking a full-blown move of their own.  It is easier to achieve failure than success, so players should know that getting +1 Forward or Ongoing matters, and if their actions are doomed to failure (they have a -1 or -2...or worse), players should know to avoid such chances because it likely just means introducing more problems and making success impossible.