Last week, Apocalypse World came back to crowdfunding, with the Bakers seeking funding for a Third Edition of the game. Apocalypse World was first released back in 2010 and it took the indie RPG world by storm; by the time Dungeon World was released in 2012 it was already all but certain that ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ would be a phenomenon. It’s easy to forget that there was another indie darling riding high in the hobby in the early aughts. Fate was arguably the other big indie game, and it even made its way into the ICv2 bestseller list after the success of its 2013 Kickstarter, an honor typically reserved for D&D, Pathfinder, and a few other corporate games. The ICv2 data point is particularly interesting. Fate outsold Apocalypse World; not only did the game peek into commercial sales charts as late as 2020, Fate even holds the statistically dubious honor of being one of only three games to ever outsell D&D in the ICv2 rankings (the other two being Pathfinder and FFG Star Wars). Commercially, Fate was an indie juggernaut.

Fate has clearly not maintained the degree of impact and influence it once had. Hell, the last three Kickstarter campaigns run by Evil Hat Productions, publishers of Fate, were all Powered by the Apocalypse games. The literal keepers of Fate have, thanks in no small part to John Harper and Blades in the Dark, seemingly seen the writing on the wall in terms of salability and influence of PbtA over Fate. Why is that? To start, there’s an obvious disparity to the degree in which unaffiliated designers took the respective systems and ran with them. That said, it’s fairly clear to me that this is a symptom, not a cause. While it’s hard to beat the Bakers’ approach of ‘sure, just don’t literally plagiarize us’ for licensing, Fate was licensed under the OGL and later Creative Commons, which were both used by tons of creators in other contexts. No, the difference in third party support and expansion has to do with the design of the respective games, not their shepherding by their respective creators. And I think I know specifically which design elements made the difference.

When looking at traditional RPGs, the core conceit is around conflict. It may not be literal combat (though it usually is), but the game is always driven forward by player character goals conflicting with someone or something in the world. Both Apocalypse World and Fate made design choices to structure conflict within the game, and those choices are very different. Fate took an agent-based approach; the ‘Fate Fractal’ lets you model any threat in the game, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, or fire, and model it as a character. While the system is intended to be incredibly modular and allow for the use of virtually any mechanic in a similarly metaphorical sense, the Fate Fractal is the rule that best illustrates the philosophy. What the Fate Fractal and other Fate mechanics do though is maintain a traditional, numbers-based game system underneath its fairly malleable rules. Although it tries its best to avoid this, Fate is a generic system which works best with front-loaded prep, because as flexible as the mechanics are, they still need you to write all the options and all the numbers. If you’re already a designer who excels in that sort of thought process, d20 is right there and has a much larger audience.

Apocalypse World was completely different. The entire focus of the game eschewed modeled conflict; note that I said it eschewed modeled conflict, not conflict entirely. While the game has a list of modifiers if you’re fighting something bigger than you, or more numerous than you, or otherwise more of a problem than you, there is no bestiary and at no time are there any mechanics for what an opponent actually does. All the mechanics are between the players and the MC. The players make a Move, then that Move happens according to the rules. When the rules state, the MC makes a Move. Unlike Fate, Apocalypse World was paradigm shifting, and with the world opened up, designers rushed in.

The simple brilliance of Moves and Playbooks

The limitations of Fate mirror the limitations of many RPGs. While excessively complex games aren’t rewarded in the hobby currently, those which can build and maintain a playerbase must have a baseline level of variety and decision making to keep players interested and returning. This is traditionally achieved in character options, with D&D’s race, class, and level options still the archetypal example of how much variety a typical gamer wants. Apocalypse World distilled mechanics down to one core die roll, but then maintained if not even expanded the variety baked into the system.

Organizing the mechanics of Apocalypse World into Moves served two purposes. First, by establishing that every action of dramatic import was a Move, the game was able to broadcast exactly what it was about and what actions it cared about the players engaging with (including the MC). Second, it established a simple way to state what each character was capable of doing that was not shared with the other characters, and therefore that was a capability important to that specific character. All of a sudden writing a complete and complex character archetype took maybe four to five discrete chunks of rules tech, not ten or more levels of distinct advancement, or entire subsystems unique to each archetype. And if certain mechanics are important to the game, it’s easy to write them in.

Nothing that made Apocalypse World innovative had much to do with the apocalypse or post-apocalypse, and that’s what created Powered by the Apocalypse. The frameworks were completely portable, and virtually any combination of Moves and underlying attributes could be used to build up a game. We’ve seen PbtA games with stats, without stats, with and without dice, with multiple interlinked playbooks, and even with no playbooks at all. As long as Moves are used to define how all players interact with their shared fiction, the core concept usually works and it generally works like PbtA.

A PbtA game is built around its set of Moves, and those Moves must be written by the designer; of course there are custom Moves and specific circumstantial Moves for specific campaigns, but the body of actions covered by the rules needs to be established by the rules for it to be a workable game. The key design decision that was made in Apocalypse World and carried over to PbtA, though, was the decision to make a framework by which the mechanics show players what the game is about, and then make that framework replicable. Not only did it open the door for many game designers, it also provided a framework that did not act like D&D or Vampire:the Masquerade or any other traditional system, at least unless you wanted it to. If there’s one place that PbtA really succeeded where most other indie systems failed, it was that it was exactly different enough. Games like Hillfolk and its ill-fated Dramasystem were too different, and Fate, arguably, wasn’t different enough.

Fate is still worth playing

What made me realize that I would always want a copy of Fate in my gaming shelf was, ironically enough, the collection of GURPS books that’s also in my gaming shelf. GURPS and Fate are quite similar in a lot of ways, and that’s a sentence that may not be an endorsement to many of you. It’s also not exactly surprising; Fate evolved from FUDGE, which while not a successor of GURPS was intended to emulate its design sensibilities. Still, Fate succeeds in many ways GURPS and FUDGE do not because it is built in a significantly more modular way. The Fate Fractal is the most significant but hardly the only design tech that enables this; all of the design choices Fate makes to pivot towards being concerned with story as opposed to reality also enable it to be a much more accessible system than GURPS, even with all of the books at your side.

Fate’s key liability is also a key advantage for the right sort of GM: The game has flexibility baked in, but the person running the game must make those specifications. The fact that Apocalypse World could not do that was in fact an advantage; by handing all the keys over to the designer and in turn promising that players would just need to buy in and show up, PbtA was able to explode beyond what other indie systems and even Apocalypse World itself ever did. If you are that sort of obsessive worldbuilder, though, the one who does want to tweak and tune for every campaign you run, Fate is immensely powerful, beyond what is ever really stated in Fate Core or Fate Condensed.

In a weird way, you could run a continuum of generic games from Hero System through GURPS over to Fate. It may be a bit of a u-shaped continuum: Hero is about numbers, and disclaims the set dressing of most abilities and items in its quest for balance and alignment. GURPS is about simulation, and while it’s running somewhat similar to Hero under the hood, it spends much more time organizing its abilities and items into schemas that people running games find inherently satisfying, even if it technically introduces redundancy. Fate is about interaction, and it invites you to put as much differentiating detail as you want around the objects (or characters) which are deemed important and therefore treated as important mechanically. Unless you really want to focus on physics and statistics, Fate is the easier generic system to use, though its reputation makes it seem like something much weirder than what it is.

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Apocalypse World took off in the indie space because of how succinctly it structured its game as a conversation between the MC and the players, and how well it was written to broadcast that intent. Powered by the Apocalypse took off everywhere because the underlying structure of using Moves as quanta of rules allowed designers to write a game for any conceivable narrative conflict. Fate was commercially successful because it was a smart expansion of existing RPG design principles, and in its third edition had the polish and support to attract the market’s attention. When we look at these games in 2025, though, it’s clear that one is being talked about more than the other. When D&D Fifth Edition came out in 2014, it almost immediately started rewriting the trad game landscape. Remember the ICv2 rankings I mentioned at the beginning? By the time of the pandemic the hobby had shifted so much that ‘5e material written by someone other than WotC’ got its own slot in the rankings. As much as the early 2010s were an amazing time for indie, the mid-to-late 2010s were not a good time to be writing a traditional game, or attracting design talent for your traditional game.

While Powered by the Apocalypse has a number of design hallmarks, the choice to cement all mechanical interactions as Moves was both the most impactful and most distinct of the original rules innovations to come out of Apocalypse World. It created the perspective shake-up that finally broke the design world loose of five mechanic games where everything inevitably centered around combat. At the same time, Apocalypse World was not a storytelling game, and while player-driven storytelling was invited in certain ways, the core of the game was and always will be the same parlay between a GM, players, and the dice that truly makes the experience of a roleplaying game. Fate was initially rewarded for being structurally similar to traditional roleplaying games; even a third edition probably won’t push Apocalypse World’s sales numbers beyond the lifetime figures of Fate. But the design sensibilities of Apocalypse World reverberated far beyond that first game, and the sum total of Powered by the Apocalypse games dwarfs the Fate ecosystem now. By thinking about the game as a game, where players make Moves, the Bakers unlocked a tidal wave of RPG innovation with Apocalypse World. In doing so, they also presaged future innovation in the hobby. We aren’t bound by simulation, or attributes, or statistical distributions. What we’re bound to is simply whatever lights off imagination and brings us to the world and the stories that our games put in front of us.

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