#there has to be a ttrpg system for this out there somewhere

[carelesscuriosity]

thinking… i want a d20 sports season somehow. ik we just got wrestling but like i want a full almost sports anime-style campaign about a team of (insert sport here) players trying to make it to the championship

[thydungeongal]

I can't imagine what life must be like for you. You wake up every day shitting and pissing yourself with rage because somewhere in the world there are people playing D&D and even worse, playing it WRONG. You don't have to play it with them or even hear about them doing it but the fact that they exist and there's no way for you to stop them will cause you endless torment for the rest of their life. "

Stop homebrewing!!!!" you scream through tears, "Don't you understand that there are other games?" But they do not respond because they do understand, but they know you are mentally incapable of understanding that people who heavily homebrew their games do so because the act of homebrewing a game is the fun they are after. You are doing the equivalent of yelling at someone who plays modded Skyrim because don't they know that Pathologic exists? But they do know Pathologic exists. They do not want to play Pathologic. They want to play modded Skyrim. Because modding the game IS the fun they are having. For them, the modding is the game. And going to play a different game instead would not be the experience they are looking for.

You do not and will never understand that for the majority of the D&D playing population, it is primarily a social activity. A way for them to kick back and hang out and have fun with their friends. The idea that they would factor in the opinions of some random loser on the internet is absurd. You are going up to a group of guys who get together and shoot hoops every friday after work and screaming "NO!!! YOU'RE NOT FOLLOWING THE OFFICIAL NBA RULEBOOK! YOU'RE NOT EVEN KEEPING SCORE!!! TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY!!! AND WHY DON'T YOU PLAY HOCKEY INSTEAD!!!" But they do not care. This is a recreational activity to bond with people that they care about, and you are such an unlikable little creep that you will never know what that's like.

"I'm just trying to get them to engage with the art form!" you lie, "Only playing one game is like only reading one book or only watching one movie!" Except that the average number of ttrpgs that the average person has played is still 0, and even when you count all people who have ever played D&D, the vast majority are people who played a couple of games and then never got back to it. You're acting like this is some massive moral social disease that needs to be cured to solve the anti-intellectualism problem in society as opposed to being the niche hobby of a small portion of the population.

"I just want to show people how great other games are," you lie, because if you actually did want that you would spend your time talking about your favorite games and what makes them great instead of spending all your free time insulting D&D players for the fact that they don't already play these games. I love so many TTRPGS and there are so many others that I would love to get to play, but I can't talk to people about them because so many D&D players first exposure to other game is people like you screaming at them that "EVERYONE WHO PLAYS D&D INSTEAD OF MY GAME IS A FUCKING MORON IDIOT FASCIST WHO SHOULD BE SHOT" and it immediately turns them off from wanting to try those games.

Like maybe if more of you spend your time talking about how cool your last game was, posting session diaries online, discussing your favorite mechanical interactions, posting actual play podcasts or youtube videos, that would entice people to want to try, but in order to do that you would have to understand what having fun playing a game feels like, and you fundamentally don't.

You are the worst thing to happen to the hobby you're actively sabotaging people from wanting to try new games. Honestly Hasbro should be paying you for doing their work for them, making it look like if people leave D&D to try other systems they'll be surrounded by people who scream at and insult them nonstop.

At this point D&D is popular because it is popular. If I want to play D&D, I know I can find a group. If I dig harder, I know I can find one of the other big names (call of cthulhu, vampire the masquerade, pathfinder, MAYBE shadowrun) but finding a full table of people who are all interested in playing a more obscure game (and not even super obscure, even stuff like monster of the week or blades in the dark), and specifically who all want to play the SAME more obscure game? That's really challenging and you strike out a lot, and the fact is hat people get into this hobby because they actually want to fucking play game, not sit around imagining what it would be like to play and then argue with people on the internet.

And the funniest part of all this bullshit is that it literally does not effect you in the slightest. Those five friends hanging out after a hard week of work roleplaying about kissing elves in their basement half a world away are not going to break into your house and make you play D&D and play it their way. It shouldn't upset you but it does, because you are an unhappy person and rather than acknowledge that and deal with it you would rather put the blame for how you feel on some random people you have never met and will never meet, so you spend all your time on the internet frothing at the mouth with rage, trying as hard as you can to make everyone else as miserable as you are.

But it doesn't work, because those people aren't reading your posts. They are having fun kissing elves in the dungeon, blissfully unaware of what some miserable, unpleasant assholes on the internet think about it. They are having fun with their favorite hobby and you are not, and a hobby will never be defined by the 1% of people who spend all their time complaining that the other 99% are doing it wrong, it's defined by what the 99% of people involved are actually doing, and that's what makes you mad and that's what makes you such a fucking worthless loser.

Your mistake is assuming that when I write about RPGs, even critically, that I'm having a bad time, but I actually enjoy the intellectual exercise of thinking about the things I enjoy critically. You should try it too! :)

Also I'm very glad that you've really nailed down on my ideology of "everyone who plays D&D instead of my game is an idiot fascist who must be shot," a thing I am always saying and am in fact famous for saying.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Disabilities and Monsters in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Through a discussion with @vixensdungeon (great blog to follow for TTRPG stuff by the way) it came to our attention that some of our more jokey and memey posts and reblogs may have given some people a slightly skewed idea of what Eureka, and particularly the “urban fantasy” parts of Eureka are really about, and its tone. We like to joke around about it, and the “cute monster girl” angle really sells on tumblr.com, but actually playing these types of characters in Eureka is not exactly a power fantasy. They eat people, and often eat them alive. If you find that cute, funny, and/or sexy, well, Eureka is still probably just the game you’re looking for, but that isn’t the main thing. Eureka uses the fact that many of these characters necessarily subsist off the flesh and/or blood of other people as a loose metaphor for mental and physical disability.

Imagine you need something that everyone else has but you don’t. If you don’t have it regularly, you will literally start to waste away. The only way to obtain this thing is to take it from another human being, who also needs it, and others will deny that you need it, and abhor that you need it. It’s not uncommon for people, even “progressive” people, to say something along the lines of “they need to all be killed for the good of society,” even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re saying. You didn’t choose to be this way. This is the reality of monsters in Eureka, and many people in real life.

And then even when you have that thing you need, for now, there are many facets of society that you just can’t participate in because your condition makes them impossible for you, like if a vampire wanted to take a run on a sunny beach. Monsters in Eureka will be challenged by their supernatural weaknesses at every turn, while hiding their abhorrent needs from society and even the rest of the party, and asking why they have to be this way. Finding clever ways to get around and circumvent their weaknesses is a core part of the gameplay of monster PCs in Eureka. Imagine you and your friends want or need to go somewhere, but that somewhere is on the other side of a river. The river has a well maintained bridge. For everyone else but you, a vampire who can’t cross running water, getting across the river is the simplest task in the world, so much so that no one would even consider it a task, but for you, it’s a challenge, and for gameplay, it’s a puzzle.

It isn’t totally hopeless, as many of the jokes and fan comics show (those aren’t just memes, they’re only showing one side of the coin and not the other). Monsters who accept, or even embrace and celebrate their monsterhood, can and do exist canonically, alongside monsters who can’t bear to do what they do. In some cases, these may be the same monster on different days.

I’m going to conclude this post by posting two excerpts from the rules text itself.

Disabilities are Disabling

So why don’t disabilities grant any advantage? It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, where during character creation you can give your character “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere. Sometimes, these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.

One particular high-profile indie TTRPG takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly imply that to make any mechanic which results in permanent consequences or makes disabilities disabling is ableist. We think you can probably tell what we think of that from this sentence alone, and we don’t need to elaborate too much. 

We do think, in the abstract, “flaw” systems in character creation are not a bad idea. They allow for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.

But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better in any way - if anything, they probably made me dumber, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going, trying harder with a less efficient body, and relying more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.

A disabled person is, by definition, less able to perform important daily tasks than the average person. To deny this is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help. This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.

When a character is reduced to 1 HP (which by design can result from a single hit from many weapons) they may become incapacitated or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.

“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, haven’t you been reading this? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG. This character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?

Monsters Essay

All investigators in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy are regular people. They can also be a monster, like a blood-sucking vampire or a broom-riding witch. Importantly, this works because despite their unique nature, monsters are still regular people. You can read more about this in Chapter 8, but the setting of Eureka does not have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding supernatural people from normal society. Though they are still largely unknown to modern science, they exist within normal society - and a lot of them eat people.

The default assumption in RPGs has been that monsters are just evil by nature, doing evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.

There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this discussion of themes will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with its playable monsters in general.

Mundane investigators have to keep themselves going by eating food and sleeping (see p.XX “Composure” for more information). Well, vampires can’t operate the same way. They don’t sleep, and normal food might be tasty for them as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to keep themselves functioning is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether either of them are happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you reading this in real life don’t literally have to eat food. You do eat food if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, and vampires do drink blood or they eventually become unable to effectively do anything.

This is numerically, mechanically incentivized and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” to demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harm done to others as resulting from intrinsic evil, but people do not just wake up one day and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Their circumstances have barred them from the opportunities that would have given them other options. 

People need food; food costs money; money requires work; work requires getting hired; but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clothes, charisma, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without other options, crime becomes the only method left to meet their basic needs. Would you rather take what you need from other people, or go without what you need? There are people who don’t have the luxury of a third option. Failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.

As their basic need for blood becomes more and more difficult to ignore, a vampire is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is really no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have resources. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no, your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire just find willing participants who are turned on by vampires or being bitten is suggesting sex work. It’s one step removed from telling a girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a rich man and be a housewife that gets their needs taken care of in exchange for sex and housekeeping. Being forced into such a dynamic isn’t ethical or harmless for the vampire or for their “clients.”

“Oh well, then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people we just described above? Who gets to decide which people are “bad people?” Who gets to decide that the punishment is assault or death?

Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.

Society not being set up in a way that allows monsters to make ethical choices brings us to the next theme: monstrousness as disability, and monsters as “takers.”

Vampires have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live, and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating. No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.

This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the people around them. In the modern world, there is a tendency to feel that people must justify their right to life, that they must pay for the privilege of existing in society. This leads people to consider “takers” (people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people) as something that needs to be pruned away for the betterment of everyone else. Even many so-called “progressives,” while they claim not to agree with pruning “useless eaters,” still hold the unexamined belief that people must justify their existence. To reconcile these two incompatible ideas, they instead simply deny that disabled people take more resources than most people, and are capable of giving back less. This sentiment is perfectly illustrated by the aforementioned game’s insistence that disabilities are never a net reduction of a character’s stats.

Vampires and other playable monsters are inarguably “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right alongside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to acknowledge their inner lives and reckon with their circumstances. You have to acknowledge two things: first, that they are dangerous, that they are harmful, that they take more than they give - and second, that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist. (We also acknowledge that their potential victims have a right to do what they need to do to exist and defend themselves, but that is a separate discussion.)

One final point to touch on is mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above points can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.

It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to sometimes sporadically restore Composure (and thus their ability to function) without drinking blood. Eureka! moments and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.

When writing the rules, we came to a dilemma where we weren’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for monsters to be able to regain Composure in these ways (since it could lessen their reliance on causing harm), but ultimately we decided that yes, they can.

People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but all the information we have access to has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and control over their own lives are much less likely to enact harm, whether through physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. This is why we kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish their goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes that person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.

Vampires are especially great for demonstrating this because they’re immortal and they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” Vampires are a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem whether they like it or not. The question is how you will grapple with their inevitable presence in society and how you will treat them, not how you will get rid of them.

Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a game about harsh realities, but it is ultimately compassionate. It argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have circumstances which drive their behavior, people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, many of those people do cause harm or inconvenience to others, and all of them are still valuable. 

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but you can still check out the public beta on itch.io to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, etc.!

You can also follow updates on our Kickstarter page where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more, you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy earlier, plus extra content such as adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Tableskills: Making a Game of It

Recently I learned a bit of an unspoken truth that I'd brushed up against in my many years of being a dungeonmaster that I'd never seen put into words before: If you want to liven up whatever's going on in your adventure, figure out a way to engage the players in some kind of game. It's simultaneously the best way to provide a roadblock while making your player's victories feel earned.

This might seem redundant, since you're already playing d&d but give a moment of thought to exactly what portions of d&d are gamified. Once you learn your way around the system, it becomes apparent that D&D really only has three modes of play:

Pure roleplay/storytelling, driven by whatever feels best for the narrative. Which is not technically a game, nor should it (IMO) be gamified.

Tactical combat with a robust rules system, the most gamelike aspect.

A mostly light weight skills based system for overcoming challenges that sits between the two in terms of complexity.

The problem is that there's quite a lot of things that happen in d&d that don't fall neatly into these three systems, the best example being exploration which was supposed to be a "pillar" of gameplay but somehow got lost along the way . This is a glaring omission given how much of the core fantasy of the game (not to mention fantasy in general) is the thrill of discovery, contrasted with the rigours of travelling to/through wondrous locations. How empty is it to have your party play out the fantasy of being on a magical odyssey or delving the unknown when you end up handwaving any actual travel because base d&d doesn't provide a satisfying framework for going from A to B besides skillchecks and random encounters (shameless plug for my own exploration system and the dungeon design framework that goes with it).

The secret sauce that's made d&d and other ttrpgs so enduring is how they fuse the dramatic conventions of storytelling with the dynamics of play. The combat system gives weight and risk to those epic confrontations, and because the players can both get good at combat and are at risk of losing it lets them engage with the moment to moment action far more than pure narration or a single skill roll ever could.

I'm not saying that we need to go as in depth as combat for every gamified narrative beat (the more light weight the better IMO) but having a toolbox full of minigames we can draw upon gives us something to fall back on when we're doing our prep, or when we need to improvise. I've found having this arsenal at hand as imortant as my ability to make memorable NPCs on the fly or rework vital plothooks the party would otherwise miss.

What I'd encourage you as a DM to do is to start building a list of light weight setups/minigames for situations you often find yourself encountering: chase scenes, drinking contests, fair games, anything you think would be useful. Either make them yourself or source them from somewhere on the web, pack your DM binder full of them as needed. While not all players are utterly thrilled by combat, everyone likes having some structured game time thrown in there along with the freeform storytelling and jokes about how that one NPC's name sounds like a sex act.

A quick minigame is likewise a great way to give structure to a session when your party ends up taking a shortcut around your prepared material. Oh they didn't take that monster hunter contract in the sewers and instead want to follow up on rumours about a local caravan? The wagon hands are playing a marble game while their boss negotiates with some local mercahnts, offering to let the party play while they wait. The heroes want to sail out to the island dungeon you don't have prepped yet? Well it looks like the navigator has gone on a bit of a bender, and the party not only need to track them down but also piece together where they left the charts from their drunken remembrances as a form of a logic puzzle.

Artsource

[i-am-rano]

One of the most interesting feelings when writing a TTRPG is when you get an idea for a mechanic, and you just assume it's gonna fit into the system, but somewhere in the process you realize you can just toss it away, because that's not the kind of game you're making.

For me this happened with damage types. I initially set out to have several, with damage types like "Fire" or "Piercing" or "Holy" but, in the process of writing some spells, I realized that I really don't need that? I can just keep it in "physical damage" or "energy damage" categories and that's it, I don't need to reinvent the wheel with damage types, this is political intrigue exploration fantasy (think Disciples 2 meets Dragon Age 2), not a tactical dungeon crawl. I thought about the players for example encountering a fire elemental, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn't think of a reason as to why wouldn't it just be able to resist energy damage, the minute detail of Fire damage VS Lightning damage does not matter in a game where I want to invoke a feeling of party-bonding and fantasy pseudo-detective fiction and where the characters have moves like "I spend a limited resource to make my last stand against an overwhelming enemy force".

It has come to the point, where I want to be rid of the three-action-points-per-turn mechanic, since realistically how much of the gameplay is going to be tactical combat? Well not much to be honest 🤷‍♂️

[txttletale]

youve mentioned offhand ur issues with thirsty sword lesbians, have u talked at length abt this somewhere before and if not do u want to? i want to hear ur thoughts hehe

now before i get into this i want to clarify: i like thirsty sword lesbians, overall! i think it takes some of the best stuff from monster hearts and refines it -- i think it does great and exciting things with pbta playbooks -- i think anyone making a pbta game should check it out because it's full of valuable ideas -- and i've had a lot of fun playing it!

however, i think it's just as flawed as it is brilliant. there's a few different flaws but the biggest one for me is a catastrophic clash between two things the game is trying to be. one on hand, it wants to be a catradora rpg. there's no shame in that, i love games that wear their influences on their sleeves--TSL¹ wants to be a game about kissing your rival after you've both been disarmed, about having a fraught and complicated relationship with your girl best friend who abandoned you to serve the dark lord, about having homoerotic sword duels where your blades lock and you stare into each other's eyes for just one second too long before one of you kicks the other in the chest. i think that's an admirable goal for an RPG and one that TSL hits a lot of the notes of--the fact that the move to "Figure Someone Out" has special questions you can only ask someone when you're duelling them is incredible design. the Strings system, adapted from Monsterhearts, the ability to fluster your enemies when you use the Entice move, the constant focus on what characters desire and how their actions conflict with those desires--so much of the game is working towards that!

unfortunately, the game also wants to be about queer resistance to homophobia and capitalist/imperialist hegemony. this is clear in its sample settings, with their eyerollingly on-the-nose conflicts like defending 'queertopia' and fighting the evil sorceress 'repressia'. but much more importantly, it's clear in the game. several of the playbooks are defined by their relationship to sexual hegemony--the beast is about someone who is othered and monsterised for expressing their existence and the seeker is about someone sheltered and prejudiced moving past that and discovering themselvs and others. like, it's not subtle--

and to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, either. just as i like a lot of TSL's swashbuckling girl-romancing flirting-at-swordpoint mechanics, i really appreciated how (although the game's outlook on what these forces are is predicably liberal and its tonal approach to these things is one that i personally find teeth-grindingly insufferable) these things are actually integrated into its mechanics. playbooks like the beast and the seeker (and the rest!) imply something about the world the game is set in and its sexual politics. this game is meaningfully queer in the way something like dream askew is, in that its mechanics ask you to actually explore your character's queerness specifically. this is good, and it's something that elevates it above about 90% of ttrpg stuff that sells itself as queer.

so if both these things are good, what's the problem? well, it's that they're two great (or at least--interesting) tastes that go fucking horribly together. the fundamental problem that i have with TSL and one that i think takes a lot of work to get around in your own campaigns is that it simultaneously wants you to be fighting (on the individual level) a lot of antiheroic ultimately sympathetic hot girls you can flirt with and kiss--a lot of 'i can fix her's or 'she can make me worse's--and on the broader narrative wants you to be fighting institutional queerphobia (and often, although this is nowhere near as actually supported by mechanics, a more generalized 'imperialism' or 'capitalism' or 'bigotry'). so you end up fighting 'those stupid sexy homophobes'--people who are according to the text (not just 'lore', but the rules text, the mechanics you're playing with!) simultaneously the violent enforcers of cisheteropatriarchy and a bunch of fuckable lesbians with sympathetic backstories.

& i just think those things are fundamentally at odds. the result is a game that if you try and play it at face value works at cross purposes with itself, attempting to do two perfectly valid things without considering what happens when the streams cross.

it also has a few other flaws--like many other PBTA games, its balance falls apart if you play any long campaign (my group and i had to figure out special alternative level-up rewards!) but it comes with no inbuilt way to neatly conclude a campaign or character. its tone is something that, as i often mention, i absolutely cannot fucking stand--it has a certain sense of humour that feels profoundly dated to me and was never my cup of tea when it was in vogue. this is something i try not to hold against the game bc it is very much a personal taste-level 'cringe' reaction but the game lays it on pretty fucking thick.

more to its detriment, it is profoundly, gratingly liberal in the exact way people who deploy that tone usually are. its understanding of anything outside queerphobia specifically is just a purely aesthetic & thoughtless 'imperialism is bad!'. it manages a more nuanced understanding of homophobia, but it only manages it on the individual level--for a game about queerness and about fighting systems of cisheteronormativity, it has no systemic or material understanding of these systems and no interest in establishing one.

and finally--and this is just one paragraph but it's so fucking awful i feel the need to complain about it here because i think about it often as an example of something i never want to write:

this sucks! real bad! so deeply fucking silly to reassure people in your game that you called Thirsty Sword Lesbians that it's okay if you want to be cishet. like, it would be one thing to make a game where you can neatly extract the lesbianism and have the same game, a surface-level aesthetically queer game with no actual interest in queerness except as a marketing term. it would fucking suck but this paragraph would at least describe such a game. but TSL isn't that!!! . 'thirsty sword cishets' would be a very different and much worse game! awful and self-defeating paragraph. deeply silly concern to address and give airtime to. i didn't buy a game called 'thirsty sword lesbians' to be told 'its okay to be heterosexual i pwommy'

so yea just to reiterate: i like the game overall, i think there's a lot of good valuable stuff in there designwise despite all this. but i'm very ambivalent about it--ironically, i feel a love-hate relationship with this game about love-hate relationships. i admire it and yet i despise it! i long to put it at the tip of my sword and slowly tilt its cover up so that the pages look up at me coquettishly but with burning anger in their page numbers. if this book was a person id hatefuck it, is the joke, thats the joke im making, here, in this post. thanks

¹ i call it TSL whenever i can because the name 'Thirsty Sword Lesbians' makes me cringe out of my fucking skin. genuinely horrible name. i'm sure it's funny the first time you hear it, i got a mild chuckle the first time i heard it to, but it's such an obnoxious thing ot have to say repeatedly when seriously discussing it. should have stayed a placeholder name amiguitas

[theresattrpgforthat]

The computer game Pacific Drive has the player driving a supernatural station wagon and delving ever deeper into an abandoned exclusion zone in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, dodging anomalies, scavenging for resources, exploring, and seeking answers to what events caused the creation of the zone. The game takes heavy inspiration from the art of Simon Stålenhag, which has its on TTRPG in "Tales from the Loop", but can you recommend any other games that would recreate the experience of Pacific Drive?

THEME: Pacific Drive

Hello friend, so I looked up Pacific Drive and one thing that I found out about it was that it was inspired by media such as Annihilation and Roadside Picnic, so first I’m going to send you to my Fucked Up Settings Rec post, especially to the games titled Trespasser and The Zone.

What I’m getting from Pacific Drive is that it’s focused on travel, exploration, an interesting story, the ability to improve the one thing that you survive with, and experiencing a world that fundamentally doesn’t care about you. So let’s see if we have anything that hits any of those tangents.

The Last Caravan, by Ted Bushman.

In this cozy, melancholy post-apocalypse, the aliens came less than a year ago. The war lasted two months, but nobody won. Now, with an alien army rising from the ashes of war, you will have to make a dangerous journey across a shattered North America in search of a new home.

You are normal people finding heroism in extraordinary circumstances. You will explore transformed landscapes, search abandoned towns, discover otherworldly technology, negotiate with newly-formed factions, outrun alien pursuers, and — and all you’ve got is a car, your fellow travelers, and the road.

The Last Caravan combines the survival-horror genre with the fiction-first ethos of Blades in the Dark and No Dice No Masters. Each character has a list of prompts called triggers that reward you with a narrative resource that can open up abilities as you tell your story. The alien apocalypse has come, but the story isn’t over, as a some kind of threat shows signs of growing as you travel across a cold, frozen highway. If you’re interested in The Last Caravan, but missed the Kickstarter, you can check out the Quickstart while you wait for the final release.

24XX-D: Aftertime, by xiombarg.

As a volunteer for the  private paramilitary group Project Aftertime, your health was altered and your brain preserved so you could be revived after society collapsed. 

You awoke in an unfamiliar base filled with unfamiliar technology, with even stranger ultratech outside. 

The Event the wastelanders describe makes no sense. "The gods left us."

I feel like I’m missing something when I look through my folders because the 24XX system feels perfect for these kinds of ‘exclusion zone” games but Aftertime feels the closest to it, and it’s definitely not perfect. There’s too many people milling about, and there seems to be too much pointing towards some kind of answer about the alien event. However, I think in general, 24XX is a great system to root around in if you want to make something for yourself. A lot of these kinds of games have great roll-tables for events, locations, and missions, and inventory (which seems really important in Pacific Drive) is simple to track but absolutely necessary.

Aftertime is different from other 24XX games in that it uses a pool of resources rather than dice rolls to determine what you can or cannot do. You could stick with that, or mash this game together with some other 24XX games like PREDATORS to incorporate dice rolls, and vehicles. What I like about Aftertime is that it includes a base that you can upgrade over time, similar to how your car in Pacific Drive gets better as you find upgrades for it.

Crush Depth Apparition, by amandalee.

February 1902, somewhere on the North Atlantic. Mountainous waves blot out the horizon, and the wind and thunder roar too loud to tell one from the other. But 200 ft down there’s only still cold darkness and the submarine.  

No one has ever dived this deep before, so far from shore and safety. Maybe no one was ever meant to try. The submarine is 170 feet of dripping pipes and fogged up dials, levers rusting stuck in the damp. It was two weeks into the voyage when things started going wrong.  Little accidents, inexplicable mistakes. Someone heard a noise, like tapping, soft against the hull last night. Bright paint flakes off a torpedo and underneath there is a story scratched into the metal. The Captain turns down a hallway that can’t be there,  into pipes and steel and miles of ocean.

The one thing keeping you safe down here has turned into a labyrinth. 

Crush Depth Apparition is an eerie survival horror stand alone adventure zine for 3-5 players and a GM by Amanda Lee Franck. It  includes rules for running and repairing a state of the art (of 120 years ago) experimental submarine, a map of the ocean, an unnatural labyrinth,  ghostly encounters,  hundreds of things that can go wrong, and a crew that depends on you.

Because you are depending on your submarine for survival, much of the focus of this adventure is going to be on keeping it running. You’ll need to manage your fuel levels, the submarine’s battery, and how deep you go, all while trying to find a way home. The setting is very different from Pacific Drive, and I think the horror amps up a little bit because there are more personal details that will likely worm themselves into this game. You’re also less likely to survive the entirety of this game; but the weirdness that happens the further that you adventure may mirror some of the strangeness of Pacific Drive.

ZONE, by Iron Cutler.

ZONE is a genre-agnostic TTRPG , heavily inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, though adaptable to a wide variety of settings. It is about trespassing in a bizarre and dangerous area—the Zone—and becoming changed by what you find inside.

ZONE is a GM-less ttrpg that uses collaborative worldbuilding to design and deepen the strangeness of the world around you. Each session will contain an expedition of Trespassers, people who enter the Zone without permission, and thus destined to be permanently changed. Your Trespassers will not usually survive from one expedition to the next; this place will change them, and that is why ZONE is described as “un-winnable” by its designer.

Unlike many of the other games on this list, ZONE is very abstract because it doesn’t expect you to succeed. Your characters are destined to fail once they incur too much shock, so managing resources is not really something worth doing in this game. Character creation is also rather simple, and I think that is because the main focus of this game is on the place you are exploring, rather than the character themself. If you want a game about the horror of being changed by something alien and ultimately uncaring about you, I’d recommend ZONE.

RAD, by ¡Hipólita!

We don't know who broke the world, but we know what weapon they used.

In the year 1990, the United States of America fired a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, immediately killing millions and poisoning the land, air and water for years.

The scarce few survivors were forced into hiding. About 50,000 people fled to the relative safety of the Moscow Metro, with smaller numbers following suit in cities like Novosibirsk, Volgograd, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Samara and others.

RAD is a game full of radiation-induced body-horror and all about survival. You have four core stats, and the rest of your character sheet is all about resources and inventory, including three resources called Bedroll, Rations and Battery. The game mechanics are inspired by systems like Mausritter, which means that player creativity and smart item use will take you far. It’s all about a delicate balance of resources, so if that’s what you liked about Pacific Drive, you might want to check out RAD - as well as an adventure for it titled The Technicolor Forest.

Other Games I've Recommended Before

Nibiru, by Araukana Media.

Apocalypse Roadtrip, by Mynar Lenahan.

Roadspire, by Glempy.

[solacescastleglow]

How I'm Gamifying Daily Life

Who doesn't love a little whimsy in their life? Nobody, that's who. That's why I'm working on making the most boring things fun, it's a win win situation. I know a lot of people gamify with apps like Finch or Habitica, but that isn't really enough for me. I need something in the real world that will prompt me to start, not just a point system that I can put out of sight and out of mind.

I'm still in the process of enacting these, so the system may change, but I'm having a lot of fun with it and I wanted to write about it in case someone else gets some ideas from it.

XP and reward system

Since I don't play TTRPGs or anything like them, I really have no reason to do this other than I saw it and it seemed fun. But basically I have 'skills' (daily life task categories) that I'm earning points towards, and when I reach certain levels I get myself a little, or big, reward. Rewards are relevant to the topic and go from things like having a bath to things like buying something from a French clothing brand I like. I keep track of it in a notebook, which doesn't seem like it would work but so far it's been fine.

Skills

self care --> Character Maintenance

fitness --> Strength

socialising --> Charisma

going out on my own --> Wayfinding

studying --> Arcane Mastery

writing my book --> Lore Crafting

learning French --> Foreign Tongue

discipline/doing things I don't want to do --> Resolve

problem solving, especially technical --> Tinkering

chores --> Castle Restoration

practicing Judaism --> Divine Alignment

personal finance --> Prosperity

Whenever I hit milestones in these (for example, going somewhere outside the city on my own), I'm going to get myself a little award of some kind. I haven't decided yet if it'll be coin-like tokens, merit badges to put on an item of clothing or a blanket, or stickers to put in a special book. But definitely something like that.

Decisions --> minigames

Decision fatigue is real, and I'm easily tired, so I've made some fun ways to reduce that mental load, while also giving me a little dopamine hit to get me through the execution of the task.

Spinning a wheel in the morning to determine what kind of shower I'm going to have (quick, normal, everything).

Workout dreidels. I've assigned the letters on the dreidels to body parts (core, upper body, legs, full body) and types of workout (mobility, flexibility, strength, balance). I was gonna use D4 dice for this, but I have a bajillion dreidels so yeah.

A dartboard for where I go on my walks to. There are 12 options on 2 rings, the outer ring being free (or almost free) stuff and the inner ring being paid. I'm not very good at darts so it works out.

A dress up game to pick outfits. It's literally so fun and all I had to do was draw all my clothes on separate layers in an art program. It's not super polished or anything but it does the job and saves me having to put all my clothes back in the closet.

My adventure box

My "weekly" (though it hasn't really worked out that way) adventures are things like going rock climbing, birdspotting, or clubbing with my sibling. I put them on slips of paper, and whenever I feel like I need some adventure in my life I draw one out. It then goes on the wall facing the foot of my bed until I've finished it.

My housework sticks

A bonus to having teachers as parents is that they can bring home stuff from their jobs, like, say, a bunch of popsicle sticks that I can write all my housework tasks on and track my Castle Restoration points with. I've outsourced the decision making to my dad, who has more spare time and is a lot more vocal about the house being tidy than my mum, so all I have to do is do the things and get the points.

---

And those are all my ideas so far!! I might update with some more once things have settled in, but I think this is a good start.

[cosmotheo]

🌻

So basically, I think a lot CAN be done with the isekai genre that isn't because people are inherently misinterpreting what is interesting about the genre, especially from a horror angle. The horror of isekai doesn't come from death, or the big scary rpg monster that you fight. It comes from the fact that, in this world, the laws of nature are gameified. Depending on the system, from the moment you're born you are forced not just by society but by the very elements around you to partake in a role in society. We live in a world where the rules make sense, where everything has an inherent logical balance. But the more you turn life into a game, the more the rules must then lean towards a winner, and thus the balance is shifted. The horror of isekai is that, in a very true and real sense, the world is out to get you. And that's only if you're an NPC!

If you're a player character and you get Isekai'd, ohhh man. I actually think SAO does this the *best*, but I think it still could have been better. The idea of being trapped somewhere else while you're physically rotting back on Earth. The reality that many people didn't die from anything inside the game, but from the collision they got when they fucking collapsed and smashed their head into the floor. The horror of not being able to see your family for months, maybe even ever again, because of some minor coding error that someone else made. It goes hand in hand with the previous point, though: the acknowledgement of the unfairness of the universe in which a story like this could take place. It is a perfect setup for existential dread and cosmic horror, and it's ignored because it's inconvenient! It's not necessary information for telling the same cookie cutter power fantasy story that's been told 50 times last season alone!

And even if you WANTED to just use isekai as bullshit power fantasy wish fulfillment, there are so many more interesting ways to go about it! Solo Leveling does a terrible job at capturing my attention because nothing fucking has any stakes! You're telling me that I'm supposed to feel bad for Jinwoo because I saw him get punched by a goblin one time?? At least in Shield Hero (another one that is heavily flawed) you get to spend an entire season wallowing in this guy's misery with him. You see him get mistreated, tricked, beaten, see him lose everything for reasons that aren't his fault. The problem with THAT is that they didn't actually have good enough writers to perpetuate that misery, or to turn that misery into a quest that actually meant something.

Do you know why people like Homestuck? It's because it's a WILDLY imaginative take on the isekai genre. Is it annoying, obnoxious, lol random XD bullshit? Yeah, like 75% of the time! Is it instantly recognizable in its plot points, art style, weapon and character design, magic system, job system, and general aesthetic? FUCK YEAH! You take the top 25 isekai anime of the past 3 years, you lay all their detail points in a Venn Diagram, you're basically looking at a fucking circle. Oh, but THIS ONE'S about a teacher! Oh, but THIS ONE'S about a guy who's bad at everything! Oh, but THIS ONE'S A FUCKING PEDOPHILE (AAAAAAAAAA) Don't even get me started on the Appraise skill. Jesus fucking Christ, learn some different fucking plot points for Pete's sake!

For one, you can try basing it off a game that's not already been beaten to death! Why is it MMOs? Why is it ALWAYS MMOs? Is it because the first couple were MMOs and they saw that it sold well, so they just copied and pasted those plots with bland, pointless audience analogue MCs? (Yes.) Do something else! Try something new! Write your own fucking ttrpg and make them do that! Have them fall into fucking Worms Armageddon! Isekai where MC becomes the player in City Skylines when?

The problem with the genre isn't that we've done everything there is to do, and so now everyone's just picking at the scraps left on the plate of ideas. The problem is that it's become consumed with capitalist nonsense. Isekai is no longer art, it's a product made to sell to disenfranchised young men to make them feel special without earning it and make them feel cheated out of a life they were never promised. The same 2 ideas are passed back and forth like a ping pong ball, and people still gobble that shit up. It's embarrassing, and I say this as someone who is genuinely in love with the genre and wants to see it brought to the heights that I know it can reach.

[hopepunk-humanity]

i have to get my thoughts out to someone- i feel like the lancer ttrpg system setting has a lot of hopepunk opportunity. you are fighting against systems that built up over hundreds/thousands of years that span unfathomable distances and amounts of people. you are just one group of lancers. but wherever you are, whatever you're doing, it's still worth it, it's still important. you can't take down the intergalactic paramilitary megacorps. you can't dissolve the hegemonic barronies that essentially practice legal slavery. but you can save a planet, free a system, help someone somewhere and it matters

Hopepunk recs

[thydungeongal]

out of curiosity, do you know of any games you’d consider legitimate ‘elf-kissing games?’ you know, high fantasy games that engender drama with mechanically explicit/reinforced relationship building systems?

besides d&d, of course. /s

Sadly I haven't found a perfect example of such a game: to me Monsterhearts is the best example of a TTRPG that centers romance and it is a perfect urban fantasy teenage monster romance game, but that disqualifies it on account of it not being high fantasy. Also, Monsterhearts' mechanics are very much about melodrama and like very petty, jealous, teenage romance, so it would not be the best for it.

Anyway, high fantasy intersects a bit with chivalric romances, and for that there's nothing better than Pendragon, a game of Arthurian chivalry in a setting that resolves the ahistoricity of Arthuriana by saying "well, Arthur was such a special guy that chivalry basically was real during his reign as king of Britain." It owns. Anyway, the game has actual mechanics for measuring characters' spiritual attributes, including their Passions, which covers things like strong feelings of hatred and love, so in that sense developing romantic feelings is mechanized and rewarded. Now, while knights doing quests is an important part of the gameplay, the game basically rewards characters for simply doing chivalric things, which means that besides doing quests knights are explicitly rewarded with Glory (the game's big reward currency) for engaging in romantic trysts. But sadly it isn't quite there because it is very heavily tied to a place and time, and I feel just transplanting the game into a fantasy setting would be doing it a huge disservice.

Which leads me to Mythras or RuneQuest 6th edition: basically the same game under two different names (Mythras is RQ6 rereleased after the creators lost the RQ licence). I won't go into the details but RuneQuest basically is part of the same lineage as Pendragon. Or they're like separate branches of the same tree. Anyway, somewhere along the way the creators of RuneQuest decided to basically borrow the idea of Passions into RuneQuest, and they serve pretty much the same mechanical purpose. The main issue is that while there are mechanical incentives for increasing a character's Passions (which works the same as increasing any other skill or attribute) they don't exactly represent relationships, as much as they represent internal emotions. Basically, a character's Passion of Love (Target of their affections) can be entirely one-sided. That's not to say that the system can't be worked to represent developing romantic relationships, but it's a bit of extra work (having said that: Mythras/RQ6 already is something of a "some assembly required" toolkit game, unlike the more recent RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha which is a very specialized game using the same engine, it's a whole thing). Mythras/RQ6 is a very traditional type of fantasy RPG but notably one where character growth isn't simply through becoming better at combat, and combat is somewhat disincentivized by the game. So it actually is a game that does wonders for romantic fantasy.

There's also Burning Wheel, which is a fun and gritty game, which has a system not unlike Passions in its BITs (Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits), but like Mythras/RQ Passions they are internal.

So I have yet to find the perfect elf-kissing game for myself, but if I had to choose I would personally pick Mythras: it is a very trad type of game concerned with verisimilitude above all else, but it has just enough tools for providing some mechanical grit to romantic relationships. In fact, when I first started reading it one of the first things I realized was "I would so much rather use this to run romantic fantasy than Blue Rose" (a romantic fantasy RPG powered by the Fantasy AGE system which suffers from the Fantasy AGE issue of ultimately being a D&D ass game with some light relationship mechanics on top).

Now having said all of that: there are hundreds of games out there that center romance, which I haven't mentioned here either because I'm not familiar enough with them or because they are not specifically high fantasy. But let me just rattle off a couple of those that I would love to play at some point: Star Crossed. Court of Blades. Eyes on the Prize. Heck, looking some more at the blurb of Court of Blades, it might actually be perfect for this ask, even though it is also like a general courtly intrigue game. Anyway, hope that's something.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The skill point allocation system in Eureka is very elegant.

Is the principle of evening out to 0 something that has often been used in ttrpg design? If so, can you name other games that inspired Eureka in that regard? Or did you come up with it for Eureka?

"All skills can be -n to +n with a cumulative total of 0" seems too usefull, too elegant, as to never been utilized before the year 2024.

I came up with it independently and have literally never seen it anywhere else. I have thought the same way about the Eureka! Point mechanic, though similar things have been done before in other RPGs, just never applied to mystery investigation gameplay. Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

I feel like it must have been used somewhere else at some point in the 50 years of TTRPGs that have been made, I've just never seen it. i agree it feels like too good of an idea to not, like, practically be industry standard, but then again, TTRPGs are not a very innovative industry. It's very stagnant. Most TTRPGs that have come out in the past 50 years have just been D&D clones to some degree or another, and most "innovation" I see has just been "what if we unknowingly reinvented the wheel except this time we made it hexagonal instead of octagonal," total Tesla cybertruck style innovation.

The industry is kind of uniquely set up for that. It's one of the most monopoly-dominated industries/artforms in existence, with one game (of greatly varying quality and thoughtful design between editions) completely dominating it for all 50 years of its existence and being allowed to basically fully define what a "TTRPG" is. The biggest alternative to D&D for the past 20 years has been Pathfinder, which is just like D&D but a little better designed, and before that its biggest competitor was World of Darkness, which, if you actually read their rulebooks, are also designed pretty much like D&D except for some text at the beginning which basically says "you can ignore these extremely dungeon-crawl-y rules to focus more on narrative, don't be like those dumb dungeon crawl players," which if you have been following this blog you know is a load of crap.

Call of Cthuhlu, another big veteran contender for the industry that is still going pretty strong, has been the standard for "investigation" gameplay for nearly 50 years, but it's just a Lovecraft hack of RuneQuest, which was designed for, you guessed it, fantasy dungeon crawling. That's why even though CoC adventure modules do tend to play pretty well with Eureka, most of them are still structured as a short line of like 1 or 2 clues to follow to get the PCs into a spooky scary enclosed dungeon-like monster-filled location as quickly as possible, and you have advice like (uncharitable hyperbole) "if the PCs get stuck, make evidence fall from the sky and land at their feet."

Plus, you have big "actual play" podcasts who really really champion the whole "ignore the rules when they get in the way of your pre-planned three-act-structure plot" and the mega-monopolgy with marketing money making it a selling point that if you ignore the rules enough "D&D5e can do anything."

TTRPGs are also a relatively young artform without a ton of mainstream attention until pretty recently (which, as I mentioned, has been eaten up by D&D5e, Pathfinder, and big "actual plays"), and they are a hard one to participate in because playing a single TTRPG requires a ton of time investment compared to most other popular art forms like books, video games, music, and movies.

All this results in many, many people who play and even design TTRPGs literally never having played anything that wasn't WotC-era D&D, barely one or two degrees of separation from WotC-era D&D, or "it's not important if it's WotC-era D&D or not if you just ignore the rules!" Oh and PbtA and BitD players and designers, you're not immune to this! Those are just the "D&D5e can do anything!" of the indie scene and no they really really are not the best framework/engine for every single game ever!

For all the talent, study, effort, and respect for the artform across the A.N.I.M. team, not even we are immune to this. I haven't played nearly as many TTRPGs as I would like to have before calling myself a "learned" TTRPG designer. There might be some obscure game from 2004 I've never heard of that does some of Eureka's stuff already, that if I had read, I could have made Eureka even better by improving upon and learning from the mistakes of others rather than working in uncharted territory.

So, in conclusion, to use the film industry as an analogy, it's like if, during the past 10 years of every fucking mainstream movie being about superheroes, aspiring film makers, who have watched between 0 and 1 movies that weren't about superheroes, are having the "novel" idea of "what if.. a movie wasn't about superheroes!" and then trying to make a movie not about superheroes with no non-superhero experience or study. And Eureka: The Movie is good and innovative because A.N.I.M. Studios watched a measly 10 different non-superhero movies and studied film theory before making it.

[onslaughtsixdotcom]

Heartbreaker vs. Craphack

The difference between a heartbreaker and a craphack is, you think a heartbreaker will be finished.

I started using the word "craphack" a few months ago to talk about my in-progress fantasy d20 elfgame. (This is a separate project from CRAWL, which has entered a process of hibernation. Its no longer in active development.)

I had a lot of names for this thing. It really started when the OGL shit hit the fan and I was already seeing how affordable low-run booklet prints were. The idea of creating a booklet with a bunch of my house rules and favourite tables, and getting it printed, became a kind of cool idea. Simultaneously, WotC quickly jettisoned a bunch of the coolest ideas for 5e 2024. Initially I was like: well, let's compile those ideas and I'll make a home game out of what I liked.

I called this document 5e Killer. This stems from a phrase I said in early 2023: If you are a major TTRPG publisher and you aren't already working on your 5e Killer for release in Fall 2024, you're fucking up.

I am not a major TTRPG publisher. But why not do my own? At least for my home game.

Somewhere I got pissed at the limitations of "sticking to 5e." I also realized I was just tinkering with it. I did finish a version of this doc. We are playing my 5e game with it now. (I do not like the changes 2024 5e, or any other base ruleset, has implemented. I like this setup enough.)

But, this wasn't "done." Many core problems I had with 5e were still sort of there. Unsure of how to solve them, I backburnered it and began looking at other systems. Perhaps I would find someone else's heartbreaker and be able to modify that, or find a perfect beginning point I could launch out of.

I spent most of 2024 experimenting with other ideas and doing other projects, including converting my Dungeon23 megadungeon to OSE, writing it up, and running the Kickstarter. I spent a month and a half making an OSE house rules document and compilation in anticipation of printing that out, both for home use and convention play. While doing this I actually started to solidify some more ideas about what I liked and what I wanted out of...all of this.

While doing this, little bits and pieces have always come into focus. I now have a canonical equipment list for basically all fantasy games going forward. I have a d100 magic item list and I'm slowly working on d100 spells (although Skerples may yet beat me to the punch). And, I found Outcast Silver Raiders, a game I initially called my "forever game," about three weeks after I made my first document compiling info for the latest version of my craphack.

The craphack doesn't exist except in my head. There are like 8 versions of half formed thoughts, in Discord self-messages and Affinity Publisher projects and Google Docs. They are, if anything, a dialogue with myself, wherein I repeatedly ask: What do I want out of the game?

I like the idea of hit die as damage die; weapons shouldnt have variable damage.

I like the idea of saving throws existing separately from skill checks, existing separately from attack rolls.

I like having lots and lots of classes and ancestries. About 10 each is a sweet spot for me.

I like games where you always roll high to succeed. I am not a fan of roll under.

Likewise, I like the DM being able to set a difficulty class/target number for the player to hit, even on skill checks. Some doors are harder to open than others, some locks are harder to pick than others. (The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic exists and is brilliant, but I prefer to use it for situational bonuses: this is an objectively DC15 check but if you do a thing you can have advantage to maybe do it easier.)

I like monsters having simpler statblocks than players do, with their primary stats being hit die and number, AC, and what they can do on their combat turn. I can make them do anything I want outside of that. I'm the DM.

Somewhere I have a table of every monster "type" and their average 5e stats and I want to expand on that to create basically a monster Rosetta stone for this game, combined with established and working power sets, so that I could easily create monsters on the fly during sessions without having to prep them.

I don't mind even the most mundane classes (like fighter and thief) having a few "special abilities," like 5e Action Surge or whatever. But IMO 5e gives you far too many of these, and worse, has too many options. (For my "forever game," I don't think I want subclasses.)

I like OSR vibes for mechanics, but people played heroic games with these same systems for 15 years, and anyone who says otherwise is fucking kidding themselves.

I like and use miniatures but also sometimes use theater of the mind for some encounters, especially against solo non-boss monsters. The system should easily support both.

I like individual initiative. I think there's still some improvement on my "everyone rolls a d6, if the monster beats any players they roll first, btw lower is better" system. I also wish I could use the Initiative Clock but I think it's a little too fiddly.

We don't need bonus actions or minor actions or anything like that. Too much design. You can move and do one other thing.

I like having a defined list of spells and at least semi-Vancian magic with spell slots. I am open to not having spell slots, but spellcasters should still pick from a list of pre-defined spells. No Knave, Cairn, bastards.-style "combine these random words to make a vague spell and work with the DM to figure out what it does" nonsense.

It's REALLY easy to see where all of these ideas sort of overlap and become relevant to how I imagine playing the game and the flow state that I desire. It's rules that don't get in the way and give all players an equal amount of cool shit they can do on their turn besides attacking. It's also easy to see how many games are outright thrown out by what I am imagining: no Cairn, Knave, OSE, Shadowdark, 5e, Five Torches Deep, etc. etc. (The only one that actually does hit the mark is, appropriately, Outcast Silver Raiders.)

So, where does this all coalesce? As I move around pieces and think about this, it might never coalesce. When I was on Take Flight, Cat and I talked about the idea that you might never finish The System, and That's Okay. It can be the old car that your dad tinkers with in the garage every other weekend and says, one day I'll get it all fixed up, I swear. It's his hobby, the same way game design can be your hobby--even if you are also a professional game designer with other projects that definitely are moving forward, being published, that you're doing the work on.

But my craphack exists and I swear one day I'm definitely gonna finish it, for sure.

[sicksadgames]

Into the Blind, and Wot I Like about Space Stuff

I've been working on this for a while in between breaks updating As the Sun Forever Sets. Why is my idea of a break from writing games just writing a different game? I have dumb bitch disease. I wanted to talk about some of the inspirations for it.

Welcome to The Rim

Into the Blind is a sci fi game about a group of gig economy workers living contract to contract on the roiling, wild edge of space. It's about CRT screens, mechanical keyboards, junction boxes, pipes and wires. It's about the unknown, the stresses of capital, and horror - visceral and ephemeral. It's about working hard jobs in dangerous conditions for little pay, and the chance of a better life. 

You are a Freelancer - Salvager, Shipbreaker, Courier, Bodyguard, Assassin, First Responder, Negotiator, Investigator, Debt Collector. A Freelancer is any and all of these, depending on the contract. You'll take whatever you can get to make ends meet. 

Every job you do balances your need to pay the rent on your ship against your desire to remain alive. Grab what you can, get paid, and stay alive.

If this sounds cool to you, you can grab a free preview (with the old name) below.

Let me show you my favourite space things

Ok, time for the self indulgent ramblings.

(Potential) Spoilers for: Gravity, Interstellar, Contact, Arrival, The Expanse, the Alien series, the Thing, Annihilation, Homeworld: Cataclysm and Magnetic Rose.

Physics and Feelings at 10km/s

There are a lot of sci-fi horror TTRPGS out there. Like a lot a lot. Mothership, Death in Space, the Alien RPG, You're in Space and Everything's Fucked, the list goes on and on. Not that that matters - people should make the games they wanna make and I wanted to make a scary sci-fi game with spaceships, so eh fuck it.

Something I realised while writing stuff for Into the Blind and working on the system is that the themes and feeling of a lot of the sci-fi stuff I'm into didn't revolve around a towering monster skulking around dark spaceship. Like, sure, Into the Blind will have a nasty alien somewhere, I don't need to say that I like Alien or talk about why it's good (I do, it is, and I'm going to), but there's more to write about than monsters. Space is already intrinsically stressful and horrifying:

Neil Degrasse Tyson and Chris Hadfield can shut the fuck up, Gravity has some of the scariest, tensest scenes in a movie I've ever seen in my fucking life. After watching this you could never pay me enough to go to space. The only enemy here is inertia, the only monster are the principles of physics that cause a cloud of debris to whip through orbit at 22,000 miles an hour.

Aside from the spectacle, Gravity is a film about finding the will to go on when you have nothing to live for and everything's against you. It's heavily implied that Dr Stone went to space because she's tired of existing on earth (or at least that's my read). She wants mercy and relief from the pain of her life, and watching it you want to gift it to her so badly, but the debris field crashes into her life over and over. It's a relentless, uncaring solar tide that returns like clockwork when to fuck her up any time she gets a break.

These extreme forces also generate incredible tragedy and loss. Interstellar is kind of a dumb movie but despite the memes about this scene it always gets me. You don't know what you have until it's gone, and sometimes the distance between you knowing you've lost something and it becoming lost can (thanks to black holes and weird gravity stuff) slip by you in an age that feels like an instant.

Both Gravity and Interstellar have soft, beating hearts encased behind the layers of radiation shielding, technobabble and worn metal, and when the colossal forces that make the universe turn rip it open, they're laid bare.

That's a fucking cool thing to make a game about!

Indistinguishable from Magic

I'm not a big brain science person, when it comes to wormholes, relativity, folding space time and all that, I don't really get it. I just know that it's cool as hell and opens the door to powerful character stories about finding meaning and confronting your feelings at the edge of our understanding of reality.

Contact and Arrival are two sides of the same movie to me. Both are heavily grounded in big Theory and big Science Words, both are about powerful sciencey girlbosses who've lost something dear to them (one in the future, one in the past.) Contact leans more towards the hard science approach, but both are at their best when they're balanced on the edge of the plausible and the implausible. They're both about the incredible, incomprehensible nature of the universe. They're both about people who change the world, in ways both vast impercievable to everyone else.

They're both stories of hope and benevolence, but Contact frames this through 90's optimism and the power of nations working together towards a common goal (it's so optimistic, even the villain-coded megacorporation decides to help out, which uhhhh), Arrival frames these themes through personal tragedy - Dr Banks pays a high price to save humanity from itself.

Behind the calculations and clipboards and theories, these are stories about personal discovery, love and heartache.

These are also fucking cool things to make games about!

Magnetic Rose is probably the single biggest influence on Into the Blind - there's a full adventure heavily inspired by it in the preview. It's just so good. The visual design and animation are simultaneously grounded and real yet brilliantly beautiful and surreal. It's tragic gothic horror at the dark, gritty edge of space, and it's so good at being sad. The penultimate scenes in heart of the tomb-like space station, surrounded by rank brown water and decaying metal are heartwrenching. Heintz is tormented by visions of his past and you feel it so hard. The film doesn't care to tell you how this is all happening - are his memories ghosts? holograms? hallucinations? It only cares about the why, and it's incredible.

Breathable Air Prepayment Meters

It's been ages since I watched The Expanse, so I'm not gonna dwell on it too much, but what I remember focused heavily on how capital and government care little about those they govern and sell to.

The level that our existence is monetised and used as a cudgel against us currently can surely only expand along with our expansion into the stars. You can go there right now if you have enough money to do so, and when life beyond earth becomes feasible, the companies that financed it will need someone to clean the ducts and polish the solar arrays. The amount of things that can be sold to you can only increase out in space. You think rents are high now? Wait till you see the price of a 1 bedroom apartment in orbit around Mars. Add nice breathable mix of nitrogen and oxygen to your list of monthly outgoings. You think you'll be able to repair your C02 scrubbers without voiding the warranty? Fuck no.

The Alien movies are obviously (despite what some grognards on twitter dot com will tell you) deeply about extreme capitalism. The galaxy is ruled by companies that could not care less about you, and the bottom line is all that matters. This kinda matters less and less as the films wear on, but the first 3 are all about working class people sacrificed on the altar of the interstellar dollar.

Alien 3 in particular has a lot of problems, but the edgy teen in me is still really fond of this scene. It's doing a Big Foreshadow (Do you get it? The alien is like.. the flower he's talking about right? But the flower is bad?) But it feels like an appropriate lament for prisoners on the ass end of space. Despite what the company wants you to believe, the inmates of Fury 161 don't deserve to die, aren't expendable.

We all have flowers within us waiting to grow, out from the shadow of capital.

You might've noticed mentions of a nasty guy in those last clips.

Ok fine, also Monsters

We all love a little nasty guy, I cannot resist the pull of the weird monster that does Big Themes. Like I said, there's so much TTRPG stuff focused on them for good reason And space is ripe for the nastiest of guys.

There's really nothing more to be said about The Thing, it just fucking rules. It's a movie that cares as much about what a monster can do to peoples bodies as what it can do to their minds and relationships.

What a horrible fate for Sheppard. The idea of Annihilations mutant bear is just so sinister it makes my gut drop whenever I re-watch it. Again, not much else to be said about this movie. It rips.

Homeworld: Cataclysm is a weird game. It's a survival horror.. strategy game? Set in space? Where you never see a single person?? And somehow it's voice acting and plot is incredible???

The Beast is the nickname for the microorganism that emerges from the millenia old wreckage the mining vessel Kuun-Lan happens upon whilst scouring deep space for valuable minerals. The threat it presents is so real and visceral, it's one of those "if this hits our planet, it's so over" monsters, and it's obscenely scary and gruesome. Even the Bentusi, a race of nigh-on ageless benevolent machine beings are absolutely terrified, and try to abandon the galaxy in the face of it (they fear their biological minds will be trapped in their machine bodies if they're taken over by The Beast, locked in and forced to watch what it does to the galaxy. Damn.)

The scene where you and your fleet fight the Bentusi as they try to evacuate known space to force them to help you is intense and incredible. You're fighting gods, and all you can do is crash against their incredible technology again and again like a stiff breeze, pleading for help and humanity. You shame them into taking responsibility for helping the mortals in the galaxy against this ancient threat. That's the fear inspired by The Beast.

Thank you for coming to my Space Ted Talk

I told you it was self indulgent huh. Hopefully this goes some way to explaining what I'm going for with this game. Not only monsters, but the experiences of people trapped by incredible forces of nature, corporations and circumstance. Not only horror, but exploitation, sadness, love, longing and loss. Thanks for reading.

Again, if you want to check out Into the Blind, you can get the free preview below, and follow me on Itch to get notified for when game releases (soon? idk)

[probsnothawkeye]

hey i'm trying to get more into audio dramas but don't know quite where to start since i've seen praise for a lot of different ones, what are some you recommend? i've listened to a somewhat random mix; tma/tmagp, fawx and stallion, the department of variance of somewhere ohio, and the first season of fringes (i gotta catch up, you did fantastic work w/ the first season).

AHHH IM SORRY I DIDNT SEE THIS IN MY ASK BOX I always forget to check it

First off: thank you for listening to the Fringes! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it 😊 it's a show that means the world to me and it's always exciting when people like that.

Now onto RECOMMENDATIONS! I have so many. But I will try and keep this list controlled

Starting off with The @grottopod which is a liminal horror podcast about grief and caving. It has original songs and covers in each of the episodes and it absolutely rips my heart open. Season 2 just started so there's no better time to get caught up!

@ethicstownpod is a horror-adjacent podcast about January Johnson who is sending emergency broadcasts detailing the issues with the town of Ethics. There is something going on there with their mayor and people are dying as a consequence. Season 1 is entirely out and season 2 is coming later this year!

@souloperatorpod is another horror podcast, this time inspired by solo ttrpgs. This season follows Tessa Whitlock who has arrived in a town with no memories and no way of knowing what lies outside the town fences. It's eerie and unsettling and amazingly crafted. The first half of season 1 is out now with the second half coming later this year!

Stepping away from horror, we have @kingmakerpod which is a fantasy comedy set in an alternate history Europe in the 1900s. It's got an incredible magic system, fascinating world building, and some of the most wonderful characters around. The first 2 seasons are out now!

@woebegonepod is a mishmash of genres (affectionate) that starts out as a podcast within a podcast discussing the [fictional] online game WOE.BEGONE and developes into time travel, murder, cowboys, and the biggest horse you've ever seen. It's ongoing and there are currently 163 episodes out so you've got a lot to enjoy if you like this one!

@tellnotalespod is a story about ghosts without being a ghost story. Leo Quinn is an administrative assistant to the CEO of Better Place, a company that removes unwanted ghosts from places. But Leo is determined to give these ghosts a voice and be able to tell their story and give them the right to stay. It's wholesome and heartbreaking and amazing in every sense of the word

The last thing I'll shout out here is @audistorium which is an anthology podcast that runs the genre gambit but does have quite a good amount of horror in it. All of the stories are super well written and the soundscaping is divine

I have. So many other shows I could recommend. If you (or anyone else) want more recs, feel free to reach out again!

[roadandruingame]

RaR Musings #24: The Pillars, and Foundations

I wrote this like seven times and then a power failure killed it, so now I get to do it again! And keep it brief!

I watched a PointyHat youtube video on Why Travel Sucks in DND, where he outlines such issues as lack of creativity, excessive bookkeeping, random tables, and failing the non-combat pillars of DND, while he presents an alternative he'd worked on for two years and was quite happy with.

It sucks.

It's nothing against PointyHat, or his system, no; it's good that he has fun with it, and that it presents some better, stronger harder faster more reliable and predictable patterns to help structure campaigns that take place on the road.

It simply sucks, in that it is attempting to utilize the three 'pillars' of Dungeons and Dragons, being Combat, Roleplay, and Exploration, which has always been less of a triad, and more of a single, enormously looming single pillar that more resembles flipping the bird to the other two.

Dungeons and Dragons commits some >80% of it's rules and character-building options to combat. If you rolled a bunch of dice, to randomize combatants and equipment, initiative order, attack rolls and damage inflicted, you could still qualitatively read those numbers to determine who had won the combat, the human fighter with the axe, or the goblin with the shortsword. The "order" of the mechanics for combat allows this to occur. "Roleplay" and "Exploration", however, both cap out their rules at "roll a d20 and add your proficiency modifier, if whatever imaginary scenario we're pretending is happening calls for it, and if the number is high enough, You Win."

A system simplifying travel to "a number of events per distance" presents the same mechanics as what a hexgrid entails, just without the risk of player agency and going off-road, because, truthfully, the biggest threat to a good story is the players themselves. A DM might have spent hours, days, weeks, months, or even years curating a perfectly constructed narrative, but all it takes is for one wayward die roll or a player saying "nah, I'm not doing that", and the DM suddenly requires expect-level improv, comedy, literary novelist, and "know it all" expertise that rivals the likes of McGuiver himself to pull a satisfying narrative out of thin air. Preventing player choice from entering the matter of "what direction do we go" might lessen the load of the DM, but it puts the entire experience on rails, tourists at a fantasy-land theme park of the DM's creation, here to ride the rides, and then get out.

A system that neglects provisions and supplies renders those unusable as storytelling elements, when food, supplies, a bath, and good rest in a town are often what propels characters to those locations, on their way to a greater destination, and without them, there's no need to have towns at all. PointyHat himself uses clips from Avatar: The Last Airbender in his video, a series that spends more than half the runtime somewhere out on the road, complaining that they have no food, no money, need a bath, medicine, or some other side objective that requires them to make detours or stops along the way.

But, all of this did manage to pose an interesting question to me, even beyond "what mechanics SHOULD be used for Roleplay and Exploration":

What are the pillars of TTRPGS themselves? If a game has no combat, what replaces it? Is roleplay a universal element to ttrpgs? If PointyHat's system "recommends tying events between locations together with story", but otherwise has no mechanics for how to actually do that, then clearly that's an important element as well, but what defines Exploration? If there is combat, does defeat end in death, some other consequence, or no consequence at all, and if there are variable consequences, who decides what they are, and if there are no consequences, then what's even the point?

After thinking about it for a while, I decided that ttrpgs consist of three pillars, that I'm calling the Three R's:

RELATIONSHIPS - Rather than exclusively between people, Relationships can also be called Story; that is, anything that ties consequence and causality to the experience. Falling off a cliff, and taking damage from the fall, is a relationship, the same as failing to deliver a package and losing a merchant's trust is a relationship, or being able to translate runes, that leads you to a secret room that's filled with treasure. This element is singularly ignored by most tabletop RPGs, instead putting more work into a box of tools that you can use to Cause, or help bandage up after an Effect, but very little that actually ties one thing to another in a way that forms a story.

REALISM - Also called predictability and reliability, these are facets of the game that can be trusted to work the same way every time. Need one scrap of food per day, and travelling for seven days? That's seven pieces of food. Fire burns, water douses, grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and fighters hurt people. This reliability is the bulk of 'eurogames', and heavily prioritize player skill over randomness like 'ameritrash' does. Predictability and consistency is necessary in a fantasy world especially, in order to communicate to the players what kind of moves are even possible to do, so that the fighter doesn't think they can 1v1 a five-tonne dragon. This is also the element of resources, where a resource spent or lost consistently has predictable consequences and effects: using a bandage stops bleeding, for example.

RANDOMNESS - Also called chance, and statistical probabilities, this element ends up bearing the brunt of most dice- or card-oriented games, though the extent of the randomness gives rise to manipulation of odds, without ever fully eliminating them. This 'gamble' means players who understand the odds, who can alter them with certain variables, and who understand and covet the value of success, however slim the chances, can take a plunge, and still be surprised at an outcome. This is also the element of excitement.

What's important about these pillars, and what makes them different from DND's, is that none of them exist independently. They are each of them intermingled and entwined with the other: a story that carries no risk of failure or too much reliability is boring, and a random dice throw with no promise of lasting, cascading consequences, or resource lost or gained, becomes a game of Snakes and Ladders, randomly generating values until someone is declared the winner.

And so, if you were to boil these three pillars down again, into a singular equation for what makes a ttrpg what it is? How do players engage with the game, that makes the activity different from, say, chess, or monopoly, or a game of snakes and ladders?

"A roleplaying game is about inventing theories, that are then proven, or disproven, by dice, that have their outcomes manipulated by previously-occurring characters and events."

This is it. This is all DND is, and all any other ttrpg will ever be.

Returning again for a moment to the title of this piece, there is one other element of ttrpgs that is, generally, indisputable: the role of a Game Master.

Granted, there are other GM-less games. But in every circumstance, there is someone who took the player's potential actions in mind, and constructed a hypothetical where that player's theorized action either succeeded, or failed, and effectively hallucinated a world into being that would be affected by said attempt. In the case of "choose your own adventure" games, players are presented with predetermined choices, that then lead to predetermined outcomes, written by a writer, who takes the role of the GM in such a case.

Where there are the Three Pillars of Relations, Realism, and Randomness, there is also the foundation of what holds those pillars up: the contributions of the players themselves, the willingness to contribute, and the acceptance of the result.

Time and again, I've seen ttrpg tables collapse into juvenile bickering, as a result of one of these four elements. That the story is weak, or the characters don't matter, or that the rolls are too random, or not random enough, that the GM fudges dice, that resource-tracking is boring, or that there's not enough consequences for those resources or the player's actions. And somehow, all of this responsibility tends to fall squarely on the GM's shoulders, the sole Atlas carrying the entire production on their back. If the GM falters, or fails to appear, there simply is no game. It's over. Some players help pick up the slack, take on responsibilities to lighten the load, but the load is always and forever the GM's.

We end up in situations like PointyHat's two-year experiment with travel mechanics, and while he cleaves closely to the three pillars above, he still defaults to the three DND pillars in the end. His usage document spews dozens of great storytelling-based examples for each of the Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay event types, and mixes of the two, but in the end, it's still JUST HIM coming up with these story narratives out of whole cloth. Remove him from the scenario, and you wind up with players who are incapable of playing the game on their own.

It's part of why, now more than ever, I feel like ttrpgs need to turn toward game mechanics that, at least in part, bring the players in to the responsibilities of running the game, and that can reliably produce certain results without some kind of dice-addled soothsayer reading the knucklebones like the portents of the gods in the hopes of producing an experience that players will reliably want to actually DO, over other entertainment alternatives like a videogame or movie. Or, indeed, any other medium that doesn't require them, the consumer, to contribute whatsoever to the betterment of their own experience, content to remain lax, and demand their personal dancing monkey for the evening pick up the pace and put a little more energy into it.

I'm personally pretty proud of Road and Ruin's Story Roster system; about as proud as PointyHat is about his, at any rate. But I'm proud of it as a system that aims to completely replace some GM responsibilities altogether, not just act as a series of instructions that ultimately ends in a need for GM creativity itself. I'm a ways away from it being done, and still hesitant about whether it should include example items and prebuilt characters for every single card in the Roundtable Deck, but at the very least, I feel like I've gotten closer to the core of what a ttrpg needs to be than in other products I've seen.