#2-player ttrpg

[smallredrobin13games]

Do you like 2-player games?

So recently I released a game called Horse and Rider. Horse and Rider is a 2-player game that uses a unique braiding mechanic. I also released a system reference document containing, in more detail, the mechanics of the game.

For people who want to play around with this, I am running a game jam in September 2023, that you can find here. The jam also includes a link to the itch page where you can download the SRD and the SRD logo for free.

Please check out this game jam if you like designing games, I'd love to see some different takes on the mechanics I've created.

[saul-tortellini]

[eerna]

Lies down on the floor I just wanna play some DnD man

[superdillin]

The Time We Have

A tragic sad zombie game / a conversation between brothers

When the world ended, you lost everything. You survived because you had each other. Now, one of you has been infected. In your final days together, what will you say?

My friend Elliot wrote this game and I don't think he's on Tumblr so I need to talk about it here. I've played it twice so far, once in a really intimate and vulnerable way, privately, with one of my best friends in the world.

You play this game on opposite sides of a closed door.

And that environmental element takes this game from being a tabletop RPG to a Parlor LARP for two. The cards guide your conversation from either side in a way that is reminiscent of For the Queen, but with added environmental cards that escalate the apocalypse - both the one happening around you and the one growing within the infected brother. This game is so fucking sad but in such a beautiful way. The catharsis touches on so many things, from sibling trauma to chronic illness to grief to climate change to, I'm sure so many other things.

Elliot made something very special and I really want more people to know about it.

The second time I played it, it was for my show One Shot, and I recorded it with Elliot. That one, you'll be able to hear.

The backerkit campaign launches tomorrow (10/29) so go follow it now.

I also get to write a little something for this game which makes me ridiculously proud.

[lotsadeer]

Hey yall I've published a new game! It's called "à demain (see you tomorrow)" and is a 2 player gmless ttrpg about making fleeting memories in a liminal space.

It's free, so give it a play and let me know what you think!

[im-just-echo]

The Hunter-seeker from the Transformers Animated TTRPG campaign I'm DMing for! This guy was fun to introduce and the players seemed to really like him! I'll do a non ugh... Goopy art of him soon!

[modoreadsttrpgs]

Game Reactions: Transgender Deathmatch Legend II

Link: https://ratwavegamehouse.itch.io/transgender-deathmatch-legend-ii

Bear with me, but I’m still on the motorsports idea, it will make sense soon maybe. I’m also kinda cheating as I read this in late Feb pretty much as soon as my copy arrived (ironically, on the day I was out watching The People’s Joker). I’ve gone back to it though, as I was riding the ADHD brain-train through ideas for this motorsports game, and I remembered playing Top Trumps as a kid, with a pack focused on cars of course. Of course I thought wow, what if you could base the game around a Top Trumps deck?! I have no idea how that would work, but also I looked at modern Top Trumps and they’re just about the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, and not even in a fun way. Look at this thing:

Terrible photo, cropped onto a horrible background, with nasty colours and just about the worst design for usability you could ever imagine. So this was definitely a bad idea. Anyway, it did remind me of TDLII, which uses a trick-taking card game as its core mechanic. In short, I’ve wondered whether a hack of this would work well. I’ll come back to that at the end.

The game itself is fantastic. In contrast to Top Trumps, it looks great - it’s a spiral-bound A4 book in landscape format, so it looks different to anything else I own. Most of the art is photography of Kayla Dice (the creator of the game) and Forest Jones. They’re caked in blood, holding weapons, grappling etc. It’s violent, in your face, and sets the scene perfectly.

I should probably say it’s a game about pro-wrestling, primarily designed for 2 players, one Promoter (GM) and one Face (player). There are rules for more players too though. As mentioned, the core mechanic is a trick-taking card game, which determines the outcome of each fight. The fights take place as part of a hexcrawl, and the game includes seven distinct hexcrawls as well as rules for designing your own. It’s about pro-wrestling, but it isn’t just a series of organised matches. Each hexcrawl is a scenario playing out that has you fighting in and out of the ring. A booker hasn’t paid you and you need to fight through his goons to get your cash, a trans healthcare provider is denying access and you’re going to beat some sense into them, and so on. The hexcrawls give it vibes of 90s beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage, or movies like The Warriors. Kayla in fact lists both of these, among many others, in the bibliography, as I just remembered!

Basically that’s the core of it. The framework is pretty straightforward, in that you crawl through the hexes, and play the card game when there’s a fight. Some hex variations can give you weapons (a bonus card to play at an opportune moment), story beats, or other events. The flavour all comes from the hexcrawls themselves, which are really strong individually, and come together to build a collection with both variety and a consistent theme and voice. It makes me not want to hack it for the motorsports idea because it would pale in comparison :D

Before I get back to that, one last word on the book. In addition to everything mentioned so far, there are three essays included. One about Kayla’s relationship to wrestling, one about the history of wrestling (that is only a single page but would legit be a great thing to share with anyone who knew nothing and wanted to start learning), and one about blading (or more specifically, about pain in art, contrasting pro-wrestling with stand-up comedy). All three are brilliant. The first in particular comes along on page 2, and immediately had me reeling. I don’t know how old Kayla is, but we must be vaguely similar ages. My family couldn’t afford Sky Sports, and yes I’m also autistic so I watched the shitty Sunday morning highlights show as well, and checked the WWE website (and then other websites, like Rajah was specifically my main go-to for a long time) religiously. I never got a bloody nose from taking a pedigree, but I had a bad back for a while from taking a chokeslam (onto a small rock I hadn’t seen before landing on it spine-first). I related quite a bit already, so when Kayla describes Eddie Guerrero’s passing as “the first time I became aware of death” I think I paused and had to interrupt whatever my partner was doing to animatedly point all of this out. Other than my childhood dog, Eddie was the first death I was actually sad about, and I could never process that the week before I was watching him wrestle, then he was gone. To this day I will just randomly think about Eddie sometimes, and it will still make me sad. He will forever be my favourite wrestler, not just because his untimely passing adds weight to the memories of him, but because he was genuinely the best to ever do it. I had no idea we’d lose him early when he won the title and I screamed in joy at the TV, jumping up and down. Nor when he unlaced his boot to cheat Kurt Angle out of a win and I cackled with glee. Eddie was the fucking greatest.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I will never feel bad about giving props to Eddie Guerrero. Getting back to the notion of hacking this for the motorsports idea, I really like that it has a simple card game to play out the fights. As I’ve gone through a couple of explicitly motorsports-themed games, I’ve honed in on the exact dynamics I’m aiming for. I want it to be about a driver’s career, revolving around the racing, but zoomed out enough that a race is a few minutes, not an entire play session. You should be working through a full career over a game (that could be multiple sessions), and have the opportunity to play through multiple careers. I loved the dice mechanics for the racing in Grid Beef, but there isn’t the space for something so detailed. The subject of the game is the driver’s career, not the racing itself, but equally there needs to be an element of uncertainty in the race and championship outcomes. TDLII has respawn checkpoints if you lose a fight, but I’d like to let the cards determine whether your driver wins the race, and the championship, or not, and you play through the consequences. Sometimes a really talented driver just misses out on a win, and it sends their whole career down a different path.

I’m less certain right now how the hexcrawls play out. Each could be a championship, which would be very clean, though perhaps more zoomed in than I’d expected. They could also be shorter though, and then feed into a meta-structure where the results of each championship determine what options you have as a drive in the following year. Each crawl could also be a whole career, but that could get unwieldy, or too zoomed out. It all feels like it fits very well though, so well that I’m struggling to escape the gravity of the idea, and have already written a load of notes about how to reconfigure the fighting styles, the hex types etc. I don’t think I can get my brain away from building it in this way. It’s also notably a 2 player game, when I’ve had this idea as a solo game - either I figure out how to make the card game solo-able, or I turn the idea into a 2 player one. I honestly wouldn’t mind the latter, I’d love more 2 player games in the world.

To come back to the actual game at hand though, it’s easily the best thing I’ve posted about so far. If you’re interested in wrestling, 2 player games, or just good TTRPGs, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

[thetownsendsw]

One thing I really like in the remastered Pathfinder Core books, that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about yet, is these little flavor descriptors in each caster class’s Spellcasting feature:

As a wizard, when you cast spells, your incantations likely specify exactly what forces you call on and how to shape them, and your gestures precisely shape and direct your magic while circles of arcane runes flare to life.

Look at that! Pre remaster that was just “you use material components from a pouch”. Now there’s specific role play guidance like “Throw some mustard on that spell. Go all ‘BY THE EIGHT WINDS AND THE TWELVE STARS’ on some guys.”

And there’s one for every class!

As a bard, when you cast spells, your incantations might be musical riffs or clever limericks, your gestures might incorporate dance and dramatic pantomiming, and you might accompany your spellcasting by playing a musical instrument.

As a cleric, your chants generally invoke your deity and their powerful servants by name or title, while your gestures are followed by sacred symbols or other representations of your deity

As a druid, your spellcasting incantations might be pleas to the environment around you or the invocation of ancient vows; your hands might sway like willows or curl into clawlike shapes as your gestures direct your magic.

As a witch, when you cast spells, your incantations might rhyme, your gestures might be as simple as an ominous pointing finger or a complex folk sign, and your familiar might even echo your words or movements slightly as your patron's magic surges.

Just a little nudge toward roleplay potential in a central aspect of the game and how it differs from class to class, character to character.

They even brought it back for Player Core 2! “A Sorcerer with a demonic bloodline might chant guttural fiendish phrases or make brief curt gestures to cast a spell.” “As an Oracle, when you cast spells, your incantations may spill from your lips rapidly as you speak in tongues or intone in a voice not quite your own…”

Great stuff all around.

[mythic0210]

MORE CAIN MORE CAIN MORE CAIN MORE CAIN MORE

this time we are dealing with a religious trauma lord and one of our team mates is a cultist

[heybiji]

hi!!! i just wanted to say i really love all of your MASKS stuff. i'm something of a newbie when it comes to the TTRPG community, but MASKS seems to be not very well-known and i think that's a real shame. i'm a huge fan of old-school superhero-adjacent stuff, especially the silver- and bronze-age ones!

by the way, i was wondering if you'd be willing to share some tips for a first-time GM? you don't have to if you'd rather not! i just figured i'd try asking since i was planning on GMing a MASKS campaign for some of my friends later, but despite my decade's worth of roleplaying experience i've never been in a TTRPG campaign nor a GM (or similar) role before

Thank you so much!! I was just lamenting about how I felt bad for the MASKS tag because it is now flooded with all my npc nonsense hahah so this is really nice to hear.

It's awesome you're planning on running a MASKS game for your friends!! There is an indispensable post on twitter I saw that has a LOT of great tips for running MASKS that I recommend checking out. But for my own personal tips that are just me things, here's what I got. Sorry it's gonna be extremely long-winded, it may take a few months to read through it.

(Note: I am also hugely into RP and probably put more into it than what is necessary, especially with MASKS which is meant to be able to be played out of the box. It was definitely not played out of the box in our case because I require a lot out of myself and everyone else to feel good about running something. if anyone else wants to continue seeing me as a normal human being please don't click the Keep Reading)

Since you're running it, make the world interesting to you. If the world runs around themes you're personally interested in then you'll have a much easier time coming up with answers on the fly. For me, themes I'm interested in that lend themselves well to a superhero world: money, power, family, celebrity, media, the 24 hour news cycle and the desensitization of violence. Because I'm interested in this stuff anyway, wrapping a world around them makes it much simpler for me to figure out how the world ticks and thus how the characters fit into it and how the world reacts to them, and I am DESPERATE to find out how the characters react to all the questions and expectations the world is imposing upon them.

Make sure your players have a good grasp of the tone of story so they can make characters that gel well within it. For me the tone is a lil more adult because I'm not personally into younger morality tale stories in tone, it's pretty grounded, and I think comedy and tragedy work hand in hand so I lean into them.

Talk. A lot. Talk about the characters, talk about the world. MASKS is fun because it's a LOT of talking and figuring out the narrative together. It's not a lot of crunchy mechanics, it's all around seeing how the characters react to the world narratively, all hurt and comfort and emotions which (for me) requires people to have a good grasp on their characters and the world. I like to give my players "homework" where I ask them a question involving their characters in some way like "what hero did your character look up to as a child?" so they get to come up with past heroes, or "How does your character feel about _____?" etc etc. The only fans are gonna be your table and fans love to talk so be the biggest fans of the PCs!!

Figure out your framing. I know in MASKS they suggest framing it like a comic book, and basically talking about the frames on screen. For me, because I'm more into movies and tv than comics, I frame it like that. So I have an active "camera" in play during sessions and will ask things like "would anyone like to grab the camera?" to encourage the players to put the character into a scene or "what does the audience see as the camera focuses in on your character in this emotional moment?" There is a LOT of playing up to the camera and framing the sessions as episodes of a show, so it's like, okay, you have several options but what is going to be interesting for the audience to see? I find this encourages the players to have their characters take bigger swings and feel comfortable letting us into how their character is feeling because it all looks GREAT on camera. The camera loves it. The PCs are the story after all.

Because I frame it a show, I also like to play individual ending songs over the "credits" at the end of each episode. So I asked my players to make playlists for their characters so if I feel an episode had a lot of emotional focus on one character in particular, I can play one of their songs at the end of the episode! I also made a general MASKS playlist with a bunch of songs from the era we set it in (2004) to pull from. It's a fun little addition that I really enjoy and that I hope makes it all feel more special.

The Dino Donut Effect: create landmarks in your world. (OK THIS IS GONNA BE LONG BUT WORK WITH ME HERE) They don't have to be locations, more solid landmarks of the story that the characters can refer back to and lean on to make the world feel more "real." I call it the Dino Donut Effect because in our world the thing that made everything click into place was talking out the backstory of one of the PC's figuring out they had the power negation ability. We were talking one night trying to figure it out; we wanted the character to fall out of a building and be caught by a flying superhero and accidentally turn off their powers, so they toss the kid to another flying supe whose powers also get turned off. But we were like... holy shit what is the height of a building needed that can handle this much action in the air without them hitting the ground in 3 seconds. So after a long night of talking about terminal velocity and looking at Splat Calculators we figured out the height of the building, and we needed them to crash into something that wouldn't fuckin kill them. The first suggestion was a truck full of bananas. Nah. We landed on a giant balloon that could take the impact. And the balloon became a giant T-Rex holding a donut that was the mascot of the city's beloved decades old donut shop Dino Donut. And so we decided that one of the two flying supes grabbed onto the kid and the other and flew into the giant balloon to try and keep them all alive, which destroyed the balloon, which was a city institution, and there was a crowd of children there that day that saw their friend Dino Donut die. Killed by a superhero. The balloon deflated loudly so it sounded like Dino Donut was screaming in agony. All the kids were traumatized (screaming crying throwing up), the city was furious because everyone loved Dino Donut, it was constantly in the news cycle, and it ruined the career of the supe that "killed Dino Donut." AND THEN THEY REPLACED THE DINO DONUT BALLOON WITH A LAME "UPDATED DESIGN" DINO DONUT STATUE which everyone hates and people consider to be a memorial to the old Dino Donut. ANYWAY, the Dino Donut effect is that now all the PCs have one single incident to refer back to that they all have feelings about. A couple of them were there that day and heard Dino Donut scream, one is now the protege of the disgraced superhero that killed Dino Donut so she feels uncomfortable talking about it, there's the kid that was saved that day but was sworn to secrecy by the supe so no one would find out about his power negation ability, and then there's the kid that wasn't there because she's an alien that just arrived to earth and now the kids have to explain the incident to her with all their varying opinions. Now the PCs' meeting spot is at a Dino Donut. Having this one solid incident that is both funny and kind of goes into the themes of the world has been an absolute treat. Creating "landmarks" like that in the world has done so much and now I'm like okay I'm gonna try to do this moving forward with any other thing I run.

anyway these are my extremely specific to me tips. my RP standards are kind of high which makes me a bit of a terror but also when the flowers bloom from it it feels GREAT. i'm not sure if this will help but hopefully there is something there that can be useful!

MASKS is fun and simple once you get the hang of it, though, so I'm sure whatever you do you and your players will have a lot of fun! especially if you're someone who is into RP which is the background I'm coming from too; MASKS is extremely narrative! i'll be looking in the tag for your game hehe

(The Day Dino Donut Died art by JD)

[thisfuckingdork]

Been playing with a Slasher Flick TTRPG oneshot idea. Won't have the time/energy to run it for Halloween /:

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

DM Problems:

I left my druids alone in a cavern with nothing but the roots of an ancient tree and time to kill while other party members rested. They cast Speak with Plants and had a whole-ass conversation with it. I forgot they could do that, but had set this tree up as more intelligent than most, and that spell lasts 10 minutes!

So...now there are Great Trees in the world, and they communicate across distances, but of late that communication has been disrupted - by plows, by flood, by magic, by the separation of the forests that once covered much of this land - and there are troubling rumors in the land. Deformed animals, diseased trees, things that grow wrong, or don't grow at all. Evil things (from a tree's perspective, anyway).

I made all that up, more or less, on the spot, and now I have to (get to?) incorporate it all into the world.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played HORSE AND RIDER ?

By @smallredrobin13games

A 2-player game about a bond forming between a horse and the person trying to tame it.

[lunarharp]

we're back..scrappy times..elf/rpg doodles based on halloween art shirahama did

[intertexts]

Oh wait

You like fucked up towns?

Do you perhaps have any thoughts on towns and how to make them more fucked up? :]

(^^ words of something trying to make a small town map that’s fucked up)

OH. HUH. FUN QUESTION. i feel like. i am a terrible person to ask for thoughts on things like this because the extent of my writing is like, gay ass character studies & shit. but. i do have a ton of thoughts on fucked up towns.

the most important thing, i personally think, is having your town be grounded in a real regional place and it has to be a place you love. it's so difficult to make that shit up from scratch and still carry a real weight. and the horror or strangeness or sadness of the town should come from the reality of it.

picking a few of the easiest examples: welcome to night vale, night in the woods, h.p. lovecraft's miskatonic county. the fucked-up-ness of all of them springs from the nature of the place itself. they're not interchangeable, and they all have different emotions linked with them.

night vale is, very loosely, a satire of unbothered american suburbia in the face of-- well. all the horrific shit that post-9/11 unbothered americana ignores! and the strangeness and beauty of the setting comes from the easy and pleasant and mundane way that its citizens interact with the horror. it's day-to-day, it's chill, it's normal. yeah the faceless old lady who lives in your home is running for mayor. yeah the angels who work the community garden and live with josie finally won the case for their existence we can acknowledge them now cool. (& also of course night vale is a southwestern desert town & it doesn't let u forget that!! it's hot and sunny in the day and cold at night and there's sand dunes out by the edge of town and beaches with no lakes and it is very grounded in its setting!!)

possum falls from nitw, on the other hand, is a love letter to to those old, death spiraling pennsylvania rust belt mining towns. it isn't as heavily supernatural of a setting (outside of the old god in the mines the elders are sacrificing the most vulnerable members of the community to for nothing but the continued hollow, wheezing survival of something that should be allowed to die) but it's very grounded in the reality of those places-- the omnipresent forest, the dinky grocery store, your old high school classmate sitting out on her apartment steps at sunset, the feeling of being out in the autumn cold at dusk and the empty subway station and the weathered, half-hearted historical remnants of local pride and the ghost of the closed mine over it all. the type of dead-end, black hole, potholed main street town that you know you're gonna live and die in because it's what your parents did and what their parents did and god knows how you'd even make it out.

lovecraft-- i mean, mandatory disclaimer on his insane racism of course. up to u if u wanna read of his work, a lot of his short stories r very short etc. but crucially, for what we're talking about here, lovecraft was fucking in love with new england in the way that people who r born and raised in new england r insane about it. his lovecraft country/miskatonic county/arkham county is set in massachusetts, and he's very clear about why everything's set in mass: bleak, lonely, ancient, haunted by the sea and the lingering ghosts of twisted puritan ideology. his fucked up towns are the dark hidden backwoods, the port towns, the wretched things brought by settlers who have been a parasite upon the woods and the rocks and the fields for hundreds of years, etc, the feeling that something has gone wrong and perverted here and it's far too late to fix it.

so like, tl;dr-- don't try and make somewherw generically weird. figure out what place makes YOU go crazy go stupid. pinpoint Why it specifically makes u go crazy go stupid, as opposed to everywhere else. crank that shit up to 100!!!!

[insufferablemod]

i hate picking names for characters....................... i am suffering