Review: World Wide Wrestling by Nathan Paoletta

If you've been following my social media, are in my real-life gaming group, or subscribe to the monthly roundup of the blog, you already know that my newest campaign that I'm running is not D&D or any other high fantasy system. Instead, despite knowing nothing about professional wrestling beyond vibes and what I learned from the tragically-cancelled TV show GLOW, I'm running a game all about professional wrestling. I'm even setting it in my standard world, which means no in-universe cameras and no in-universe microphones.

The system I'm using for that is World Wide Wrestling, 2nd edition, by Nathan Paoletta of NDP Design. You can pick up the game on DriveThruRPG using this link. Your purchase will not only help out the blog if you use my link, but you'll be supporting a really great independent game designer.

Mechanics Overview

World Wide Wrestling is a Powered by the Apocalypse system. For those of you familiar with RPGs, that tells you a lot about how the game plays. For those of you less familiar with the world of RPGs beyond D&D, I'll explain briefly.

Powered by the Apocalypse games (or PbtA) are built for genre emulation--in this case, professional wrestling. I have bounced off every past PbtA game that I've ever played, so I was really worried going into this system that I was going to have a bad time. And admittedly, the system suffers from flaws that I think are baked into PbtA. To facilitate this genre emulation, PbtA games give you a set of pre-scripted "moves" that you can do that align with the genre. For example, in World Wide Wrestling, you can "Cut a Promo," where you do something camera-worthy that can help you build hype. You roll 2d6, add a relevant modifier from your attributes, and compare it to set difficulties in the move: 1-6, you fail or "botch," which doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't work, but that it has some sort of negative consequence. On a 7-9, you succeed, but only partially (something this means picking one effect from a list, or getting a positive and a negative effect). On a 10+, you succeed greatly, either getting to pick multiple positive effects, or getting a positive with no negative.

What you can do is very determined by those moves, which is a big part of why I've bounced off of PbtA games in the past. Even though those games tend to encourage "following the fiction" before caring about the rules, it always felt very limiting to me in a way that the D&D or Pathfinder character sheet--with some specific moves like spells, but also more open things like "skills"--did not.

In World Wide Wrestling, for example, a decent chunk of the session is everyone rolling the "Wrestling" move over and over and over again. While the game has a decent flow, with shifting narrative control and a fun cycle of building momentum with your moves, turning that into heat (basically crowd appeal) with your opponent, and finally turning heat into audience (which basically helps you "level up"--building Audience is the goal of the game), the non-PbtA part of my brain still wants something more for my players to be doing during the part of session where they are in the ring.

But that is just on me! This is by far the most enjoyable experience that I've had with a PbtA game, and I think that is because for something as genre-heavy as "professional wrestling," a genre-emulator of a system is what you want. But I don't personally love PbtA as a style of system. If you like other PbtA games and you like pro wrestling, you'll love World Wide Wrestling. You hate PbtA games and you like pro wrestling, World Wide Wrestling is worth a shot--I'm still having fun even if I have my qualms--but be warned that the issues you might have with other PbtA systems will likely rear their head in World Wide Wrestling.

Balance and Difficulty

As befits a game about pro wrestling, World Wide Wrestling isn't exactly "hard." There's no lethality, though you can get fired if you gain too many injuries or your audience gets too low. In fact, injuries are a real threat: one of my PCs is coming close to a forced retirement, unless he can avoid another injury for enough weeks to heal back down to safety.

PbtA systems also have a very simple balance to them. Rolls feel difficult and rewarding when you get that 10+, and neither botches nor 10+ rolls are so common as to be routine. There's an ease to the system that comes from everything being right in front of you and unchanging: no DM changing DCs.

The gameplay cycle of momentum -> heat -> audience also works well, both for pacing and for "balance." Most of my players gain an audience most sessions but not every session, which is right about what the book recommends and what feels reasonable.

Atmosphere and Vibes

This game is fun! It is light-hearted, and certainly focuses on fewer ethical quandaries than I tend to put in my games. But it is pretty easy to run for a GM, and it creates a fun, silly, wrestling environment. The system, like a lot of PbtA games, is pretty light on fiddly rules, so it is easy to pick up. All the information you need is right in front of you, which also helps with the fun and not-too-serious vibes.

That said, I wish the game did more to help you learn wrestling. There's a really helpful chart of example wrestling sequences, but it is buried in a secondary file rather than the main rulebook, meaning that I could not find it to give to my players for the whole first session. None of my players have much of a wrestling background--we don't watch WWE (I've tried and get bored of it mid-episode)--which meant a lot of silliness and a lot less of the sort of well-paced wrestling match that I think helps keep the action moving for everyone. Even once I shared that file of wrestling moves, some of my players still expressed that they felt "bad at describing the wrestling moves" part of the game, which I do think is a real challenge. It is a very description-heavy game, fitting the PbtA "fiction first" approach, but if you don't know anything about wrestling going in, it can be hard to visualize the fiction appropriately.

Gripes

I've already touched on all of my gripes, and the fact that there are relatively few is a good sign for the game. I wish that there was more guidance for the types of wrestling moves and how to practically execute all of the pacing and energy descriptions that Nathan describes in the book. He does a great job describing the feel of wrestling and how a match is paced, but I wish that there was more guidance in the practice of "heels slow down the momentum of the match" for someone who doesn't know enough about wrestling.

My second gripe is that I don't like Powered by the Apocalypse games – they feel very limited and repetitive to me. This is the most fun I've ever had with a PbtA game, and so if you do enjoy that framework for systems, I totally endorse this game. But PbtA grinds my personal gears, and that does carry through to this game.

Conclusion

That all said, World Wide Wrestling is a fun, light-hearted game that is easy to prepare for as GM, or "Creative" as the role is called in the system. Between a bunch of real world obligations, the stress of the real world right now politically, etc, this is a really fun, escapist game. I'm having a blast. Is it the most deep roleplaying experience I've ever had? No. The best story I've ever created as part of a TTRPG? Definitely not. But that doesn't mean that it's not a great game to get together with friends and play, without too much narrative expectation. It works for the genre that it is operating in, and when I had the idea for this campaign, this was far and away the best system to handle pro wrestling with.

So if you have a background familiarity with wrestling and you enjoy PbtA? This game is a true no-brainer to pick up and try for yourself. If you're missing one of those elements, I still think it is worth the money to try, but know that you might face some growing pains. If you're missing both, like me? I'm still having fun with the system, and I am still happily running "Season 1" of the campaign for the next few weeks and planning, players willing, to run many more months with a second season. But know that you will need to both learn something about wrestling, preferably fast, and you'll have to learn to work within the PbtA framework even if you don't really want to. The constraints of PbtA shine in this system because it is such a genre piece, but those constraints are certainly still present.

Still, all told, I'm having a blast with the system, and it is great to be back in the GM chair. I've run a "mini-campaign" and some one shots and played a bunch of solo RPGs, but this is the first campaign longer than 3 sessions that I've run since my Wild West campaign ended over a year ago... which is crazy. That's the longest hiatus I've been on for running games in years. World Wide Wresting is a fun system that I have time to prep even as real life gets hectic and busy, and for that, I cannot recommend it more highly.

You can pick up World Wide Wrestling on DriveThruRPG by using my link to help support the blog and a very cool indie game dev.