#tiny rpg

[cursed-yoyo]

Keep your mind on the distance When the devil turns around

Abracadabra

ft. Las brujas de Hollowbrook

@atimeodyssey

[imordemors]

Mucho ruido visual para decirte: qué alegría compartir esto contigo ♡

Felicísimo cumple, @dustydispatch

@atimeodyssey

[emotionalsoundscapes]

Muy feliz cumpleaños @acidwashbibs!! Espero que la pases muy bonito, disfruta tu día. Aquí te dejo un pequeño collage en honor al bello Pop y a las aventuras de spa y mercadillo por Underground. 🥒💆🍫

@atimeodyssey

[moonylunasstuff]

Tonight I'm gonna have myself a real good time I feel alive And the world I'll turn it inside out, yeah I'm floating around in ecstasy So, don't stop me now

Gráfico de Navidad porque sale un muérdago para @atimeodyssey

[imordemors]

qué cosa más PRECIOSA

feliz cumpleaños, tauro girl <3 @imordemors

@atimeodyssey

[anim-ttrpgs]

If any of y'all had tips for aspiring TTRPG creators, what would they be? I'm hosting a "How to Make your own TTRPG" panel at a con this weekend, and anything to show folks from a fellow indie studio would be great!

Yeah a bunch. Each one of these could basically be its own post, but here are the condensed versions.

Social Media

You need social media. No one will ever hear of your game without a strong social media presence. And as much as it sucks, your best bet is probably tumblr. It’s the only populated social media site that allows your posts to be widely circulated without you having to pay, and also long form enough to actually include information. I dedicate one day a week entirely to social media and that’s just about the only reason we make any money at all.

Also, when using tumblr, the first five tags you put on a post are the most important, those are the tags that make it show up on people’s dashboards. The first twenty tags are the ones that make it show up in search results. Don’t put the name of your game in the first five tags generally, because if no one has heard of it yet, no one is following those tags.

Don’t Paywall Your Game

You deserve to be paid for your work if you indeed did any work at all (we’ll get to that), but that just isn’t the world we live in. Unless you have an advertising budget to essentially trick people into buying a game that might end up being crap, you need something to prove that your game is worth spending money on. Without an advertising budget, that proof has to be your game. Setting your game to pay-what-you-want, or providing “community copies,” lets people try your game before they buy. Plenty of people will buy up-front when given the option, and others who can’t afford it at that moment will download it for free then come back and pay later. Some people will never pay, but what that means for you is that they either never experience your game, or they pirate it. People experiencing your game, showing it to their friends, and talking about it is one of the most valuable pieces of advertisement you can ever have. It will ultimately lead to more people who are willing and able to pay learning about your game.

Start Small but Not Too Small

Do not make a one-page game for your first game. Do not be like us and make a 700-page game for your first game. Try to aim for something between 20 and 200 pages, especially if you’re one person or a small team.

Play and Read a lot of RPGs or Your Game Will Suck

Would you watch a movie by a director who had only ever watched one movie? Would you read a book by an author who had only ever read one book? Hell no, those would suck.

Read many rpg rulebooks, from many different genres and decades, play as many of them as you can (by the rules) to understand how the rules work and why they’re there. This will give you the creative tools you need to make something that isn’t just a weaker version of the last RPG you played. No, listening to "actual plays" does not count.

Most actual plays stray significantly from presenting a regular gameplay experience in favor of an experience that is entertaining for an audience. If you want to learn martial arts, you should be watching martial arts tournaments, not WWE.

If you want an actual play podcast that has my “actually mostly presents a real gameplay experience” approval, try Tiny Table.

If you say you don’t have time to read rulebooks, then you don’t have time to design a good game. Studying is part of the process of creating. If you don't, you won't even know about gleeblor.

This will let you know whether your "innovation" is more like "Cars don't need to run on gasoline!" or "Cars don't need crumple zones and airbags!"

The Rules Matter, So Design with Intent

The rules matter the rules fucking matter holy shit what you actually write down on the page matters I can’t believe this is actually the seemingly most needed piece of advice on this list. The. rules. matter.

Design your game to be played in the way you designed it. The rules affect the tone and genre of your game, they affect the type of people PCs can be and the kind of stories that will result from gameplay. Bonuses encourage PC behaviors, penalties discourage PC behaviors.

Do not fall for the trap of “oh well people will just play it their own way based on vibes anyway so it doesn’t matter what I write the rules to be.” Write that you wrote this game to be played by the rules and that significant changes to the rules mean that players are no-longer playing the game you made. Write like you deserve for your art to be acknowledged by its audience. If you don’t, then there is no point in anyone playing the game you made, because if the person who wrote it doesn’t even care what the rules say, why should anyone? The people whose “playing” of TTRPGs consists of never opening the rulebook and improving based on “vibes” will still do that no matter what, but the people who would have actually tried to engage with your game will find that it sucks if you don’t even care what the rules are yourself.

Playtest

You need to playtest your game if you want it to work as intended. You need multiple sets of eyes on it. If you don’t have the opportunity personally to do so, just release your game anyway with the acknowledgement that it’s unfinished. Call it an alpha or a beta version, and ask for people that do play it to give feedback, then update and fix the game based on that feedback.

Ignore Feedback

Most people do not have any game design credibility, perhaps least of all TTRPG players. You do not, in fact, have to listen to everything people say about your game. Once you ask for feedback, people will come to you with the most deranged, asinine, bad-faith “feedback” you can imagine, and then get really mad at you when you don’t fall to your knees and kiss their feet about it. You do not need to take this feedback at face value, instead you need to learn to read between the lines and find out which parts of the rules text are being misinterpreted by players, and which incorrect assumptions players are making about your game. Then, you update and improve the game by clearing those up. Only like 30% of “feedback” you receive will actually be a directly helpful suggestion in its own right at face value.

You can’t please everyone, and shouldn’t, so appeal to the people who actually like your game for being what it is, not the people who don’t.

Read Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Yeah this one sounds self-serving but hear me out. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is as much a treatise on TTRPG game design as it is a game itself. When it presents mechanics and rules, it tells you what they are, why they are, how they are, and what you’re intended to do with them. This makes it an excellent example to read for anyone wanting to get serious about game design and learn how TTRPGs tick under the hood, and an excellent example of a TTRPG that expects players to play it the way it was written to be played, and why that is a good thing. Also you can download it for free.

[cursed-yoyo]

Adjectives That Start With M.A.C

@atimeodyssey

[imordemors]

TAN bonitos todos

@atimeodyssey  ᵕ̈

[imordemors]

FELIZ NAVIDAD @icarusis-flying ♡♡♡

(gracias por darnos personajes tan maravillosos)

@atimeodyssey

[emotionalsoundscapes]

En una misión a Washington, 2053, Alvin Bennett, Noah Graham, Thomas Belew y Sagan Dorial se enfrentaron a un apagón a nivel estatal. A los cuatro días, una vez encontraron el núcleo, un par de drones los encontraron a ellos. En mitad de la batalla a oscuras, iluminada apenas por los fuegos artificiales del 4 de Julio, un proyectil enemigo provocó una explosión que ni Noah ni Thomas pudieron evitar. Tanto Noah como Thomas salieron gravemente heridos, pero la única muerte fue la de Alvin. Misión exitosa para la estabilidad de la línea del tiempo, pero una fallida para ellos.

@atimeodyssey

[livemedown]

OKAY. WHATEVER.

Because I really want to relive the horrors of LISA on the bus to work man, really wanna set the mood for the day. How the hell are you supposed to do combos on mobile? Falling off cliffs has never been easier! This is stupid and yet I am very amused. Imagine doing the Marty boss fight on your fucking android. Wow.

[imordemors]

QUÉ BELLEZA

I'll be right beside you when you rest your broken bones.

@atimeodyssey

[prokopetz]

I suppose if I never manage to think of a better title for Space Gerbils, it would at least form a thematic pair with Tiny Frog Wizards. Heck, maybe when I finally get around to crowdfunding the physical editions I should do a single combined crowdfunding campaign – Space Gerbils and Tiny Frog Wizards has a certain ring to it.

[anim-ttrpgs]

"When we were doing that interview with the Eureka developers and they made this allusion to the idea that the best system to run Call of Cthuhlu adventures in is Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, uh, I agree with them now! And that's a bad sign when comparing a game which is seven editions deep into its design versus a game that is still in its public beta. Really, I think the core failure here is Call of Cthuhlu is a game that wants its adventures to be investigations into the supernatural and there is no systemic support for investigating." -@tinytablepodcast

[post-it-notes7]

shaped like a frog(?)

[imordemors]

Qué cucada por favor

Créditos al viajero secreto de RENATA MASINA.