I’m going to pause my 5e game for the month of July and try something else. I’m thinking about a PbtA game. I ran a few sessions of Masks years ago and it went okay. I’d never played anything that wasn’t a d20 system and I remember feeling Masks was bending my brain a bit.
Do you guys have any suggestions for a quality actual play I could watch to try to get a handle on the system? Is there anyone out there that talks about PbtA the way a thousand people on YouTube do about D&D?
I was considering Avatar or Glitterhearts if it makes a difference, but I think that anything PbtA would help me.
I’m not familiar with the entire PbtA scene, but I found the Discern Realities podcast useful for getting my head around Dungeon World. It has some actual-play content, though it’s one-on-one duet play.
https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/discern-realities-index.html
Yochai Gal’s One Shot World is a free Dungeon World hack that streamlines things a bit (not to the extreme extent of World of Dungeons) and provides some useful tools, prompts etc that the Dungeon World rulebook lacks. Stonetop is on my “to read” list though.
The last resource I’d suggest is 20 Dungeon Starters, which is a $5 PDF on DTRPG, though the product preview gives a good sense of what to expect. Essentially each dungeon starter is a double-sided A4/Letter page showing an appropriate amount of GM prep for a one-shot or beginning adventure of a campaign. A list of sensory impressions & situations, some custom moves and monsters, that sort of thing. The product page used to link to free versions of the starters, but DTRPG has helpfully stripped out the hrefs. This fandom wiki page has links to some of them, though some links are dead.