blogofroleplaying

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Have you played paKtbound ?

By Ostrichmonkey Games

A Lumen-based game inspired by the Dishonored games, where players act as agents of the strangers, committing heists and assassinations on a corrupt city using powerful abilities which may lead to unwanted attention or even death, raising chaos around the city.

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My take on fantasy RPG dungeons is that if I pick two rooms at random on your map and there is only one path to get from the one to the other you shouldn't be allowed to call that thang a "dungeon".

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Have you played MECHANICAL DREAM ?

By Francis Larose & Benjamin Paquette

One of the best and most creative settings I've ever seen. A world of titanic size, mile high trees, beasts with cities on their back. Players are normal sized. The world is lit by the pendulum which travels east to west and disappears behind a wall of shadow that encircles the world, and then travels west to east and repeats. While the pendulum is overhead, reality holds sway, while it is gone, the dream holds sway. Industrial fantasy where factory equipment has emergency destruction points because sometimes they come alive. Physical and mental stats echoed, mind walking and memory alteration as a core mechanic. Awakening into classes because of an information ecology that cycles memories through the trees and creatures like solar energy or the carbon cycle.

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Actually like - you know how Athena and Ares are both associated with war, but Athena is (at least ime) portrayed as the goddess of captains and generals, strategy and tactics as intellectual, perfectable crafts, warfare as the architecture of victory?

The goddess who views warfare as a fascinating exercise in abstract problem-solving, a chance for strategists to display their genius or cunning, whose followers are always seeking the opportunity to offer up another Cannae as sacrifice to her? To whom war is figures being moved across maps in generals tents, and the fact that actual people suffer and die in it is just irrelevant?

Very underrated, like, fantasy-villain patron archtype, imo.

[blogofroleplaying]

Have you played OVER ARMS ?

By Rookie Jet

In this world, certain people could manifest a powerful spirit that’s the embodiment of the user’s psyche called an Anima. Anima come in all shapes and forms but each is capable of strange, bizarre powers that can be activate by the user. You have awakened your own Anima and have found others like you. Soon after, you discovered The Mirage, a separate realm from ours full of not just treasure and secrets, but Animas with no users who could attack you and your friends. All the while you try to live an ordinary life in your town with your friends while Animas and The Mirage lurk in dark. Inspired by the likes of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Shin Megami Tensei Persona games, this is a rules lite TTRPG where you design your own “fighting spirit” and explore a different reality full of monsters. The system is very versatile and calls for whatever setting you like. From Highschoolers solving a murder mystery in a small town while attending school, to an adventure across the world fighting other Anima users, any story could be told.

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Alright, let’s start with discourse, shall we?

Gatekeeping Combat

Three days ago, the Gorgon Bones blog made this post about fighters in TTRPGs (particularly the OSR): https://gorgonbones.blogspot.com/2024/02/choosing-fighter-means-choosing-violence.html?m=1

I recommend reading the post, it’s fun (and the comments are hilarious). But, for those who don’t have the time or attention span (trust me, I’m lacking in spoons right now too), this is a relatively short joke that suggests protecting the Fighter class’ niche by making it the only class able to participate in combat. This, on its face, seems like an inherently silly idea—because it is—but people have been interacting with it as a serious suggestion. This comedic concept has spawned a legitimately interesting design discussion. So, let’s engage with it as a thought experiment. How would one make this function in a fun and reasonable way? The simple answer is that you have to start with conflict.

Conflict in RPGs, particularly in Dragon Game derivatives (such as the OSR), is often violent in nature. This presents the first hurdle: How do we centralize combat to 1 class when it’s a major source of conflict, conflict that people inherently want to engage in? As I see it, there are two approaches:

Decentralize Combat.

Redefine “Engaging in Combat.”

Decentralizing combat is kinda just what it says on the tin; make combat a less important source of conflict and means of resolving it. The two biggest examples of this—to me—are Investigative Horror Games and Stealth Games, both of which rely on central conceits that CAN involve violence but don’t necessarily rely upon it. A non-OSR example would be John Harper’s Blades in The Dark, in which combat is resolved the exact same way as every other conflict: through a series of dice rolls that result in ticking and unticking a clock (with possible complications).

Redefining what it means to “engage” requires a bit more definition than the prior approach. “Redefining” can be subcategorized into two somewhat disparate techniques: Redefining goals and redefining interactions.

In any TTRPG combat, the party tends to have a list of goals that exist in a hierarchy of priority. For example, in a traditional D&D or Lancer combat the hierarchy of party goals might look like this:

The Contest (express martial superiority, wipe out the opposition, or otherwise win the combat)

The End State (survive the combat and prevent as much harm to yourself or other party members as possible)

The Barrier (achieve the exploration or narrative goal that’s being hindered or prevented by the combat)

“Redefining” these goals is more accurately described as a re-ordering of their hierarchy based upon whether you are or aren’t the Fighter, usually through gameplay incentives. An incredible example exists in the form of Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020, in which the Solo role (through virtue of acting first and being generally able to specialize heavily into combat) can almost singlehandedly decide the outcome of any fight in which they are present. If there is one Solo on the field, their side is probably going to receive a swift victory; your job, as the non-Solo, is simply to not die and accomplish what you actually came here to do. If there are two Solos on opposing sides of the combat, their goals change to winning their private fight; your job, as the non-Solo, is to survive the surrounding combat until the Solo is free again (or to run if they lose). In almost every combat, the Solo will prioritize the Contest while the rest of the party will prioritize either the End State or the Barrier, something aided by Cyberpunk’s lethality and its nature as a heist game.

“Redefining combat interaction” is . . . actually found everywhere. This is your basic class differentiation taken to a greater extreme than you may find in most tactical RPGs. For example, let’s look at the Combat relevant difference between the Thief/Rogue/Mercenary and the Fighter in a majority of games that use such classes:

The Fighter - Deals a lot of damage with consistently accurate attacks (sometimes also makes multiple attacks on their turn). Has high health.

The Thief - Deals a lot of damage with one really powerful attack made from stealth, sneaky (sometimes good at dodging). Has low health.

The differentiation is there, but it’s not really significant (for the purposes of this thought experiment). Both classes focus on damage output, but one makes multiple attacks and one makes a strong attack that requires setup. Let’s try to take this difference and expand it (with a little help from our dear friend Tolkien), particularly by focusing on what makes the Thief unique in comparison to the Fighter:

The Fighter - Deals a lot of damage with consistently accurate attacks (sometimes also makes multiple attacks on their turn). Has high health.

The Thief - Subverts direct combat through the use of trickery and cunning, plays support for the Fighter (sometimes good at dodging). Has low health.

“Subversion,” in this context, simply means fighting dirty. The Thief shouldn’t be engaging in a head-on fight, they’re a Thief. Their interaction with hostile entities should always be tinged by deceit, their goal should always be to throw their enemy off balance, to create openings for others and themselves to use. If your Thief isn’t constantly throwing pocket sand and disarming opponents and knocking chandeliers on top of them and pulling cloaks over their eyes and poisoning them and . . . are they really living out the Thief fantasy? By strengthening the Thief’s core identity, leaning fully into the trickster aspect, we have redefined how both classes interact with Combat in such a way that has made direct, head-on-head violence the apparent specialty of the Fighter.

Conclusion

As much as the original Gorgon Bones blog post is a joke, Jenx does point out a real issue that’s plagued class-based games for a while: a weak niche makes a weak class. Not necessarily mechanically weak (although that can also happen, looking at you CP2020 Cop), but weak in the sense of fundamental design. Strong niches, even if every class has the ability to participate in combat, are born of purposefully and carefully built interactions with the conflicts presented by a game’s rules and environment. If combat is too great of a focus, everyone is going to want to be able to play the guy who’s good at combat; if winning combat is the sole goal of any given encounter, everyone’s going to play the guy that’s good at winning combats; if every class gets good tools for dealing damage . . . well, I don’t really have to spell that one out, do I?

If you’re designing a tactical, class based game: don’t make the Fighter the only class able to engage in combats. It’s lazy, it’s silly, and it won’t be fun for very long. You may notice that, while the two games mentioned here have classes that EXCEL at direct combat, neither of them fully limit it. Instead, the proper lesson of this thought experiment is a far more common one in our field: keep in mind the incentives you’re building into both your game and your classes, and be aware of how all these moving parts interact with and affect each other. After all, the Solo wouldn’t be nearly as good if Cyberpunk wasn’t so lethal, and the Cutter would be far more ubiquitous if Blades in The Dark had a dedicated combat chapter.

Self Promo

Hey! Thanks for reading. Sorry to leave ya with Baby’s First Game Design Lesson, but I hope ya enjoyed the journey there. If you’d like to see my recent attempt at a class based fantasy game, you can click here to check out Hollow Halls. Otherwise, I hope y’all have a great night and a great day!

[blogofroleplaying]

There was a fun video i saw about how to run character death, especially in a death heavy campaign. My favorite thing for it is having character creation unlocks be a possible reward from adventuring. Both because i can limit initial creation and that adding homebrew options is fun.

Free some duergar from a mind flayer? Next time your party asks for auditions a duergar trained psionic armsman applies. Or perhaps the noble they did a favor sends a knight that had special training and comes a better stat generation. Maybe it's a town guard they saved who comes with a bonus feat

Also the party having the option to specifically adventure or make a deal for a specific new member rather than "oh we put out word we were looking for a new member" can provide rewards as well - perhaps freeing a slave or prisoner makes the new character get something in exchange for the solidified backstory.

Good to remember to make new race options more interesting / possibly stronger than they'd otherwise be. Phb dwarf isn't as exciting as dwarf that can treat one arm as two handing whatever it holds, or perhaps a dwarf that can extend buffs applied to him due to the clan he's from

Oh I do kind of like this! Now that I think about it this may have been a fun way to handle things in my current OSE open table, where I basically gave my players carte blanche to use all official classes they could find. It may have been more interesting to just start with the basic OSE classes and then later introduce stuff like Barbarians, Gnomes, Mutoids, etc. via story triggers.

This actually gives me vibes of how many organized play campaigns handle it! It's quite cool!

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I wish more people used Magic the Gathering's Color Pie instead of D&D's alignment all of the time.

Like, saying a character embodies the selfishness and impulsivenes of Red Black offers more depth than Chaotic Evil

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I keep thinking of the double-edged sword of partial success.

On one hand, they do help move the story forward. On the other hand, coming up with complications every time can be taxing.

That got me thinking: what if we reversed the way we look at partial success?

See, a partial success is usually seen as taking away from a full success. It is a ‘success, but…’.

You start with the assumption that you did the thing, but then you take a step back and inject a cost, a complication, or a choice.

I love it, but it can be overwhelming.After the 6th partial success in a row, you're like: “You convince the prince, but… I don’t know, you twist your ankle or something, I don’t care. Let’s move on.”

I've tackled this problem in different ways. Mechanizing it, hand-waving it, offering prompts and tables… They work, but I kept exploring. And that led me to the idea of looking at partial success from the other end.

What if we did the opposite? What if we started from a failure, and built up towards success with costs? Would it help with narrating partial success if we could pick and choose a few costs to work our way towards success?

So in my current project, I adopted this.

You roll 2d6 and need to get a 10+ (which is hard). If you don't, you can buy your success by spending different resources.

Let's see an example:

With a determined yell, I lunge forward, my blade slicing through the air towards the guard. I roll a 7, not enough for a successful strike. I spend one Vigor, representing the sharp sting of the guard's counterattack grazing my side. I also spend one Gear, as my sword hums with a magical energy. Lastly, I spend 1 Resolve. The guard's strength has caught me off guard, a flicker of fear igniting in my chest. With vigor, gear, and resolve combined, I reach the threshold, turning my near miss into a solid hit.

You see what I see?

It feels like you conquered a hit, instead of having your success tainted by costs, although it is technically the same thing.

Is it just me?

Looking at my resources and spending them as a little puzzle to get to my success threshold made the act of incorporating these costs into the narrative more natural to me.

Perhaps the feeling that you are investing into a success is a more powerful incentive to do so?

Anyway, I thought it was pretty exciting to explore this concept. So much so that it ended up being the core of a new game. And I’m itchfunding it right now!

If you want to see this mechanic (and some of its cool variations) in action, check it out!

[blogofroleplaying]

Roommate asked "you reviewed a game that 'fixes' 5e, and you Hate 5e, but you really liked this game?"

"Oh no," I replied, "I'm still morally against the kind of game 5e tries to be, I just think this fix was very good on its own merit."

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Any RPGs (/settings / supplements) that you know of that have a set of mechanics based on harvesting parts of slain monsters for various effects? I just think that would be a neat system to throw into an OSR type game :)

THEME: Monster Recycling

Hello friend! I had a lot of fun putting together game recommendations for this, I've seen a few games inspired by Monster Hunter and I definitely see the appeal!

Monster Guts, by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing.

Welcome to MONSTER GUTS, a tabletop roleplaying game, Illuminated by LUMEN, that draws from your favorite monster-hunting video games.

This book has rules to build your scavenger, pick a starting weapon and friendly companion critter, and then go out hunting giant monsters!

Set in a post-capitalism world where monsters bio-engineered to extract resources have destroyed much of the world, you must hunt these creatures to sustain your village, one of the few settlements in the Pacific Northwest to have survived. You'll also harvest tags that you can slot into your weapons and garb to power up your scavenger.

Monster Guts is LUMEN, so expect cinematic action with effective moves that feel more and more powerful as you level up. It’s made a bit of a splash on Itch.io due to its ability to replicate the feeling of the Monster Hunter video game. Your character classes take the form of weapons, with different stats and special abilities. There are also tags that can be added on to them as you slay monsters for their parts. When it comes to the backstory, the lore focuses on a small village, trying to survive in a world of monsters that they once created. Once again, the enemy is capitalism.

Butchers & Beasties, by Kerobuki.

A Monster Hunter-like TTRPG hacked from a mixture of Emiel Boven's DURF  and the creator’s own projects.

Butchers & Beasties is a bare-bones, rules-only draft of a monster-hunting game. It uses dice pools of d6’s and staggered successes for basic conflict resolution. Inventory is important in this game - you have limited inventory slots and you also have to choose where you’re going to store your equipment - will you keep your lantern in your pack, and have to dig it out every time you use it, or will you store it on your belt for easy access? You also choose a role for your character, which grants you with base items. There’s rules for traps. weapons, ailments and elements, which gives the play group a broad set of possible combinations to factor in when hunting beasts. Overall, if you’re looking for an OSR-friendly game this is probably a great place to start, as everything in here looks like a tool set that you’ll need to pick up with an play around with a bit to see just how much it can do.

After the Great Beast, by Harper Jay.

You are a Hunter, and great beasts are threatening your village. Gather your weapon and your friends, and defend your home. Along the way, you will gather materials, craft traps and potions, and maintain your weapon, all while following the great beast's tracks.

After The Great Beast is a Breathless game inspired by the Monster Hunter franchise. 

I am so so excited about this game. After the Great Beast is Breathless, which means that it provides you with a limited number of resources, which deplete as you play. You can stop to refresh your resources, but in the process you let time get away from you - and that means your problems get bigger. I think it has a lot of potential for a satisfying loop of play, and I’m impressed at the size of this game. A lot of the Breathless games I’ve looked at in the past are under 10 pages, but After The Great Beast is over 20! This is because of the extra tools differentiating weapons, special effects, world details and beast rules. There’s even a little bestiary and advice on how to set up an adventure for this kind of game. If you want lots of different pieces to play with and a setting that’s already laid out for you a little bit, then I’d recommend checking out After The Great Beast.

Wilderfeast, by Horrible Guild.

Wilderfeast is an RPG about becoming part of the natural world by making it part of you.

Players assume the role of “wilders”: monster hunters/chefs who wield gargantuan kitchen implements and gain powerful mutations from each monster they eat. Using those powers, they seek harmony between humanity and the wild.

All creatures, be they humans or monsters, obey the One Law of the One Land…

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.

Wilderfeast is a game about hunting and cooking monsters, with tactical game mechanics for the hunting portion of the game, and narrative prompts for the cooking portions. This is a game in which an eldritch virus has made kaiju-like monsters frenzied and dangerous. Your characters have discovered that killing and feeding on these monsters gives them interesting mutations. I think this game has a lot of promise, because it gives you both the chance to puzzle through combat and feel competent when you fight, while also giving you tools that give the in-between scenes narrative weight - you even partake in a ritual before eating that allows you to thank the monster for its gift!

If you want to take a deeper look at Wilderfeast, you can check out their Quickstart for free, and listen to Dave Thaumvore’s review.

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Ironsworn is a fascinating game to me, because while it isn't what I would call a pure story game it is definitely a game built around principles like fiction first and the rules being very clearly opinionated about the sorts of stories the game should produce, but then instead of having rules whose pure mechanical text without commentary fits into like half a dozen or so pages Ironsworn is like "nah this game has tons of Stuff."

And like it's literally free so if you're looking for a fiction first game with almost D&D levels of crunch that is very clearly built around producing certain types of narratives, you would do well to check it out. You can expand it with the absolutely massive supplement Ironsworn: Delve (which I have yet to read but which looks fantastic) to add dungeon gameplay into it for just $12.50.

[blogofroleplaying]

Started drafting The Palace of Eyes expansion for GRIM, my Quake inspired TTRPG, and holy moly y'all aren't ready omgggg

I can't wait to get started on it fully again tomorrow. So many ideas swirling in my lil brainnnnn

Inter-dimensional combat, Easter eggs, and interesting lore to boot!!!

Expect the release of the expansion this winter season!

You can get GRIM below to treat yourself to an action-packed, horror-filled, and expansive world within this game today!

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here comes the sun

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here, there, be monsters!

An explicitly queer, antifascist and anti-capitalist game about the monstrous and the weird, in any flavor you want, not as something to be feared, but to be cherished and protected.

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Forgot to post it here but I want to get the word out everywhere.

If you haven't already heard, mecha ttrpg Lancer is going to be back in print soon AND you can get a special version with cover art by yours truly. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I've given everything I am as a mecha fan to this one, I hope you all dig it as much as I do.

I'm not up to date on the specifics but check in with Lancer's official accounts to get more info on when you can get your hands on it.

[blogofroleplaying]

GRIM: A Retro FPS-Styled TTRPG inspired by Quake, is out NOW!

Help me, an economically disadvantaged indie game dev, achieve our next goal of $600 dollars on itch.io!

ITCH.IO

DRIVETHRURPG

In a time far beyond Earth’s exodus, explorers have unearthed relics and ancient architecture that are said to be older than the cosmos itself, shattering all theories of the creation of the universe and its age. You and your allies, assigned by the Martyrs of Free Olympia or the Elysian Coalition, are tasked to investigate ruins on the planet Gamma Rho Iota Mu, simply referred to as GRIM, to find any traces of life that are rumored to lay beneath the only structure on the planet: a towering obelisk.

Countless explorers sent to GRIM have delved into these ruins, but none have returned. Many denizens of Free Olympia and beyond have feared that their planet will be next to succumb to GRIM's grasp, and some have fallen to their knees to worship this fated harbinger of doom.  All seemed hopeless and lost...

Inspired by prolific FPS games like the Quake series, GRIM's mechanics are quick, brutal, and easy to understand without sacrificing its immense depth.Using either the flip of a coin or a six-sided die (d6), use Combat Skills to speed around combat maps and frag enemies, or use Roleplaying Skills either in or out of combat to navigate the dark and oppressive world beyond the Whispering Gate.

This game is meant to be played with a Watcher (GM / DM), and 1-6 other players.

If this game reaches certain goals within 30 days, more content will be added to both the handbook and beyond!

$300: This game is fully funded! Thank you so much! GOAL ACHIEVED!

$600: 5 new Pre-Made Battlemaps for combat encounters will be added to the handbook!

$800: GRIM, The Palace of Eyes,  a setting expansion for GRIM, will be released! Explore a realm tucked between dimensions, and fight eldritch horrors while navigating expansive castles and dungeons. Will include more unique enemies, weapons, powerups, and settings!

$1,500: A printed run of GRIM will be made and released!

$3,000: Beyond the main theme already released, an entire soundtrack for GRIM will be created! Enjoy intense combat music and horrifying ambient tracks that will immerse you even further into the world of GRIM!

$3,000+: ??? (more goals will be released! I'll immediately jump for joy, however.)

Also, if you wanna listen to some music, GRIM has its own Main Theme as well as two unofficial soundtracks! Check them out below!

MAIN THEME

AMBIENT PLAYLIST

COMBAT PLAYLIST