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indiepressrevolution · 7 hours

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[ID: a banner for a game. it is light tan with a crumpled paper texture, and reads "with breath & sword" in large blue font, and "a solo-journaling game that helps you fight anxiety as you fight monster" below it in smaller font. there is lineart of gauntlets lying over a sword with some flowers at the bottom. end ID]

You find yourself tied to the monsters. The scratchy feeling in your chest. The way your hands tremble. The sweat that dots your upper lip when your senses are telling you a monster is close, again, now, and it’s your job to fight it. To stand up for your ideals and stand up to the threat. Whether you tame it, or this is truly a monster that needs to be slain, only time will tell.

You know you will succeed. You always have before. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be a challenge.

Grab your gear. Put on your boots. You know how to find it. You know what to do.

First, you just need to steady yourself.

[ID: a page spread from the game. it shows "step four" on one side, which goes over the five aspects of the game's oracle. on the other side it shows the first oracle component, where something you can taste determines what your heroic core is. the page is minimally designed, with a blue border and text on a white background, tan accents, and one image of a dragon. end ID]

With Breath & Sword is a solo-journaling TTRPG to help players combat anxiety.

In the game, you play as a monster-fighter, who is being summoned once again due to the presence of a new monster. Each time a monster appears, you struggle with the emotional effects of the magic: effects that look a lot like anxiety. You must steady yourself before you go off to fight: in the game and in real life.

Over the course of WB&S, players will participate in grounding methods and breathing techniques to calm themselves from an anxiety attack. These methods also serve as the game's oracle in order to determine how the story goes.

What You'll Need:

A safe space to play

A method of writing or recording

[ID: a page spread from the game. it is the section called "the science" and goes over the psychology behind the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, the 4-7-8 breathing method, and destroying journaling. it has a few lines about narrative and play therapy, and that the creator of the game used these methods in his social work with neurodivergent teens and adults. end ID]

check out the game on itch now!!

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indiepressrevolution · 9 hours

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Hey hey, first release of my vampire hookup TTRPG, it's not perfectly balanced yet but it's getting there 😊

Thanks @codaattheend and many friends for helping me playtest it <3

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indiepressrevolution · 11 hours

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Have you played THE SITTERS ?

Les Veilleuses by Guillaume Jentey

At the heart of Mother-Forest live the Sitters. They are forest spirits connected to one another by a collective consciousness. They roam Mother-Forest, marvelling at its poetry and the beauty of the place and its inhabitants. They are charged with protecting Mother-Forest from all that threatens it: The Foulness, The Nothingness, Natural Disasters or the irrational acts of Humans. And sometimes, their curiosity leads them to stray a little off the beaten track.

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indiepressrevolution · 13 hours

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The Department

The Department Susan Cathleen Powell, 2019

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Sabrina Hawthorne is a fellow enthusiast of rare RPGs. She's the one who actually found a write-up of The Revolution by a GM for a table of players who didn't want to read the whole thing. We originally met at a mini-golf course, of all places (fuck you, windmill), and ended up chatting about mechanics in card-based games. When she told me about this one I knew it was a perfect fit for the blog and invited her to write a guest post. Here it is!

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You know the SCP wiki? You know those articles that dive super far into the deep history, where characters straight out of the Hebrew Bible use arcane orbital lasers to wage a planet-wide war on mutant flesh monsters, and bigfoot is there too?

The Department is one of those, in the form of a hack for The Quiet Year.

You play as the board of directors for the titular Department, who are the SCP foundation in all but name. Your researchers have come across an anomalous archaeological dig site, and it’s your job to guide the organization to learn as much as they can about it – and the secret world history it’s a part of - before it’s destroyed by the vague sleeping horror that you disturbed when the site broke ground.

For the most part, the game runs the same as The Quiet Year, but with spookier and more bureaucratic flavor text. There’s a phase at the end of each round called a Board Meeting that’s a bare bones hidden role board game that doesn’t really feel as scheme-y or capitalistic as it wants to, but other than that it runs smoothly.

The real life of the party is the Countdown mechanic. Whenever a player draws an Ace of any suit from the deck, the Countdown advances, causing more strange occurrences and anomalous dangers to crop up around the dig site. When the last Ace is drawn, the game ends, and players are strictly forbidden to tie up any loose ends that their improvised story left hanging. And since in this one you pull from a combined deck of 52, those aces can come randomly at any time.

There isn’t any art in The Department, which makes sense. It’s 12 pages, and it’s only that long because of a very thorough section on consent and safety tools. Nonetheless, it’s packed with exactly the kind of style that this game needs. The front and back covers look like a manila folder, and the whole thing looks like a partially declassified government document.

Susan Powell apparently sold a few of her games through her onlyfans page, alongside more of what you might expect of an onlyfans page. I got my copy from a friend though, and I haven’t been able to track Susan down anywhere on the internet.

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indiepressrevolution · 16 hours

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Thanks for all the feedback with the Overpowerd Web App. I'll implement that tomorrow.

Today was book layout! In case you were curious what the book looks like, I'm going for a vintage computer manual vibe.

@goblinmixtape inspired me with the beautiful work on Outliers!

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indiepressrevolution · 20 hours

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Rainbow Roll Fest 2024

Calling all LGBTQIA+ Actual Play artists! We are accepting applications for the third annual Rainbow Roll Fest through April 19th. We're a 3-day online AP fest that offers juried awards, and we'd love to have you join us!

Submit to the Fest here ⬇️

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indiepressrevolution · 22 hours

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Two player world building games?

THEME: Two-Player Worldbuilders

Hello there! Almost everything I found for this request required a deck of cards of some kind, so I hope you like card games!

Strata, by Vincenzo Ferriero.

A Mythopoeia Micro-RPG

Welcome fine archaeologist to your new digging ground! Strata is a tabletop role-playing game where you dig to uncover the history hidden under the many layers of rock that have formed over the millennia. Hope you brought along your Equipment!

A fairly simple one-page game, Strata mostly consists of rolling for random discoveries as you dig through each layer of rock. You’re also responsible for naming each age, usually after something you discover there. While this game looks like it could be played solo, with two people you’d be able to bounce ideas off of each-other as to what each discovery means about the age you’re digging through.

HOME, by Deep Dark Games.

HOME is a roleplaying and mapmaking game for 1 to 4 players.

You are a Mech pilot who must protect their home from Kaiju. Explore and map an alien realm as you search for the source of the Kaiju. Prepare for battle by gearing up, building bases, and uniting the world against the terrifying monster. And when the moment of truth arrives, clash against increasingly dangerous Kaiju that will destroy your home if you fail.

Important relationships keep you going in your darkest hour, veteran pilots make sacrifices for the greater good, and you must decide whether to protect important military locations or cherished cities.

This game is much more focused on action, moving your characters through a battlefield using d6’s to determine what boons and banes will help or hinder you in your battle across an alien space. While you’re going to be spending a considerable amount of time in battle, the game’s map is meant to be added to and elaborated upon as you play.

The link above is for the Kickstarter page, but the Quickstart is available now on Itch if you’re interested.

The Whimsy Collectors, by Stori_Lundi.

The Whimsy Collectors is a cooperative game for two people about exploring a fantastical universe together, finding unique items, and selling them to their special customers. You'll need a tarot deck, 2 tokens, and 2d6.

Using a tarot deck, this game uses the cards as locations where your characters can search for items and add them to their bag. You’ll also use the cards to represent customers and their wants; but be careful, your characters can only carry so much. As a result you’ll have to manage your resources carefully. You’ll tally up points according to how well your finds are suited to your customers.

The game comes with a chart to help you determine what members of the Major Arcana are like as customers, as well as a worksheet where you can record what you find where. The game also comes with two pre-generated characters with special abilities, which you can use to move strategically across the map. If you like a game that the two of you can huddle over while drawing cards, this might be your game.

This Old House, by CarrionComfort.

This Old House is a GMless game for 1 to 4 players that uses the act of building a House of Cards to tell the story of just that, a house. You will use a standard deck of playing cards, a 4-sided die, and prompts to tell the story of a home, the family and things that inhabit it, and the land it sits on.

These stories will be crafted by you, even with some friends, as a way for you to create land, give it life, and then tell the full history of a single home. From the first piece of lumber laid, through its first family celebrating new life, mourning death, and dealing with heartbreak. Then that story ends with the house being consumed by fire, lost in foreclosure, or just left vacant depending on whether the House of Cards tumbles or if a Joker is pulled.

This game looks like a good option for games that zoom in on the personal and intimate. You will focus on a house throughout its life, using playing cards as a construction material as well as a game oracle. If you want a game with an unexpected ending, this might be the game for you.

The Ground Itself, by Everest Pipkin.

The Ground Itself is a one-session storytelling game for 2-5 players, played with household materials (a coin, a six-sided die, and a deck of cards).

Focusing on place- one specific place, chosen by the group - The Ground Itself unfolds over radically disparate time periods that may range from 4 days to 18,000 years. By casting wildly into time, it considers how places both change and remember themselves. Fundamentally, The Ground Itself is about the echoes and traces we leave for others after we are gone.

This game is a reflection on a place that 2 or more people create together, using playing cards to generate questions about the location. Time may pass by as days, years, or even millennia. Players can choose when to zoom in onto what the game describes as a “focused situation”, allowing them to add an omen, a party, or some other narrative element to the story.

The game is meant to be played in a single session, so at the end you should find yourself with a location that bears the meaning of a number of events. The designer has also added a number of ways to change the game, such as using tarot cards instead of playing cards, playing places that have no inhabitants, or changing how much time passes in between each round of play.

A Traveller in the City, by Palleon Press.

A Traveller in the City is a collaborative map-drawing game in which you (& any friends you bring along) visit a CITY from your own imagination, drawing it out step-by-step! All you need is a deck of standard playing cards, a single six-sided die, & some stuff to draw with.

Work together to guide the solitary TRAVELLER thru their stroll. Picture the sights they see, the people they meet. Gradually, sketch a map– not of the place itself, but of your own memory of it. For you are not its creator, nor any kind of expert. You are a visitor. How well will you know this place, when it’s already time to leave?

This is based on the Carta system, which involves using a series of cards to represent a map that your character will explore. In this game, both players will control the same traveller, and draw on a grid to represent what this traveller discovers while exploring the city.

The game itself is rather small, and can be printed as a pocket zine for easy of transport - great for just carrying in a pocket for a spur-of-the-moment game.

Aurora, by World Champ Game Co.

Aurora is a tabletop roleplaying game for 2-6 players. This game is deliberately designed to be played comfortably while practicing social distancing or together around a communal table when the necessity for distancing has ceased. Aurora uses 3 phases or modes of play, each of which can be used or removed from the entirety of the game, depending on how the group wants to play. In the first phase, players mail blank cards to another, which will be turned into a custom deck using the zip codes and other numbers. I can see using 5d10 as another way to generate random numbers to help create your custom cards.

In the second phase, city creation begins. Regardless of the setting you decide to create, the city is going to be torn between a Darkness and a Light. Your cards will help determine both of these, as well as the map of the city and the people who live there. If you don’t use the first phase, a deck of tarot cards might work as a good substitute for the oracle.

The final phase uses the map and the cards to generate a story inside the city that you’ve just created. Each player may be responsible for their own character, or they might take ownership of a faction or a number of characters - which might be a good option if there’s just two of you.

If what you want is a lot of room for creativity, this might be for you.

You Might Also Want To Check Out...

My Map-Making Games Post

My Town-Builders Post

My Worldbuilding Post

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indiepressrevolution · 1 day

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You can still get physical copies of @ratwavegamehouse fantastic games over on our webstore! Kayla has created a wide range of TTRPGs and brings in her lived experiences and interests into every game she creates, so each one is oozing with personality.

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indiepressrevolution · 1 day

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Alright, let’s talk about what everyone’s here for: cool powers

Footfall Devlog 2

This Devlog will be covering the basics of what Footfall is and the challenges of making a game so heavily inspired by immersive sims.

So, without further ado:

What Is Footfall?

Footfall is an occult-industrial stealth-action rpg inspired by Dishonored, Mistborn, and Bloodborne. It aims to emulate the systemic ecosystem and emergent gameplay of immersive sims, particularly the fast, creative, movement-centric gameplay of Dishonored.

You play as Gifted of the Watchman, the god of stories and action. You are functional demigods, arcane in nature and forever part of a great cosmic play of chaos and change.

Some basics about how the game is played before going forward:

You get 3 Action Points at the beginning of your turn, each action point representing a period of 2 seconds.

If you do something cool, succeed on a check by 1 or less, or arrive to a dangerous Encounter fashionably late, you can get a point of Adrenaline. Adrenaline allows you to take an extra Action—even on another creature’s turn—or increase the size of the die you roll on a Check. You can only have up to 3 Adrenaline at a time.

Movement is measured in ~3 foot increments labeled "Strides." These are about the average length of a walking stride, and tend to be measured with one's arm.

There’s an interactive, yet digestible, physics engine at play. More about that can be found here.

The Question

The first question one must ask when creating a TTRPG about movement, and probably the easiest to answer, is how to make it interesting. When I say easy, I more-so mean that this is something you’re probably thinking about before you’ve even started writing anything down. This is a question you probably both asked and answered as part of the “I have a cool idea!” phase; at least, that’s what happened with me.

My answer was

Arcane Locomotion

During conceptualization, I decided a traditional class structure was right out. Instead I leaned toward a VtM-style power-centered progression system, with the various “Disciplines” (here called Gifts) covering individual forms of otherworldly movement. Because the spell system is the core of the game—something presumably every player character will be using—I decided that cost-based casting limitation (spell slots in D&D, sanity in CoC) would’ve been an exceptionally poor fit, and randomization limitation (disciplines in VtM, psychic powers in Traveller) has never sat well with me; I ultimately landed on a style of consequence-limitation using heat-management gameplay:

Entropy Quick Reference - Gained by taking the Power action. Cleared by taking an action without gaining Entropy. Once you have 3 or more, you take 2 damage and cannot use any powers for 2 rounds.

As for the powers themselves: First I’m going to provide an overview of the steps of conceptualization and implementation, then I’m going to walk you through the process of applying those steps to one of the Gifts, and finally I’ll show you the current state of each Gift (with some designer’s notes).

The process used is as follows:

Assign a unique form of supernatural movement, or an otherworldly ability that allows for unique interactions with one’s environment.

Identify the core niche of that ability, in what situations does it shine brightest? (i.e. Combat, Stealth, Support)

Create a base power (this one comes with your Xbox) that provides a type of mobility (e.g. social, hidden, group) within the established niche.

Create additional powers that support the Gift’s niche.

Playtest and identify weakpoints in powers and interesting additions to their capabilities.

Create Addendums that modify powers with those weaknesses and possible additions in mind.

Playtest again.

Design Note: A goal of this system is to create interactivity between powers—I want people to figure out cool and unique solutions to the problems they are presented, it’s a core aspect of the design ethos. That means that, during playtesting, a power doing something unexpected shouldn’t be flagged as a problem, it should be flagged as a success.

The Gift of Passage

1. Teleportation. This is gonna be our baseline power set, teleportation is what people think of when they hear “supernatural movement.”

2. Stealth. Teleportation, beyond getting people places quickly (or to places they normally can’t reach), is particularly suited for moving unnoticed.

3. Three aspects factored heavily into the design of this base power: 1.) Teleportation as a baseline. To represent this, this power resets your Momentum and Fall Height to 0. 2.) Teleportation as stealth. To represent this, not only does this power move you unseen, it actively degenerates enemy awareness. 3.) Teleportation as breaking rules. This one was pretty simple—you can teleport to a location without line of sight, so doors and walls can’t block your movement.

4. Two of the three additional powers are, at their base level of conception, just different forms of teleportation. One of them (Sharp Displace) allows you to swap places with another creature or object, and the other (Prepared Recall) is a normal teleport that reverts you back to your original position at the end of your turn. Both of these powers have stealth capabilities beyond Radio Motion’s removal of Notice, particularly Sharp Displace, which contains the following statement: “If you swap places with a conscious creature, make a Stealth check. On a success, the creature comes up with some sort of excuse as to why it isn’t where it was a second ago.” The exception to both of these rules is Flash Step, which act as a parry-and-riposte in short-teleport form (almost every Gift has one of these).

6. During preliminary playtesting, one of the playtesters asked if “swapping positions with Sharp Displace also meant swapping momentums.” I immediately said, “No, obviously not,” but we both agreed that it would be incredibly cool and fun . . . so I added an Addendum that makes it so you can do that exact thing (Momentous Swap). This was the basic process for creating many of the Addendums.

7. Further playtesting has (so far) not revealed any problems. The Gift of Passage is strong in its niche, and sets itself apart from similar power sets (e.g. Gift of Doors).

Here’s the final product:

The Gift of Reaching

Supernatural Movement: Body extension

Niche: Combat, enemy positioning.

Design Note: This was one of two Gifts that had to undergo complete overhauls after testing (the other being Tempo).

The Gift of Pushing

Supernatural Movement: Kinetic projection

Niche: Combat, crowd control.

Design Note: This Gift is the most aggressive and directly combative. It also hasn’t been revisited in a while.

The Gift of Tempo

Supernatural Movement: Time manipulation

Niche: Assault, self-buffs and enemy denial.

Design Note: This Gift is one of two to be actively designed to limit its interactivity with other Gifts (the other being Possession). Time powers are REALLY difficult to balance.

The Gift of Doors

Supernatural Movement: Portals

Niche: Support, group and object movement.

Design Note: This is the gift that most heavily engages with the physics engine, and everyone who picks it up has an ungodly amount of fun (they also tend to be STEM majors).

The Gift of Shadows

Supernatural Movement: Shadow form and manipulation

Niche: Stealth, remaining hidden while acting upon one’s environment.

Design Note: This one is inspired by an old forum RP superhero character I had. It was also kinda lacking up until the recent light update—note to all would-be shadow-ability designers, they work better with light sources.

The Gift of Possession

Supernatural Movement: Entering and manipulating living creatures

Niche: Stealth, social. Hide in plain sight.

Design Note: Up until this point, every iteration of Dancing Puppet has been too powerful in combat and too weak out of combat. Adding the “No direct harm” clause has balanced it out quite a bit, but I’m still not happy with it. Gonna ask a player in the next playtest to take it in hopes that they might inspire some innovation.

The Gift of Mirrors

Supernatural Movement: Self duplication

Niche: Support

Design Note: Matthew Mercer made my favorite 5e subclass and I shall forever live in shame. I haven’t played D&D 5e in years, and I still love Echo Knight.

Conclusion:

There are two big lessons that I want to leave you with today:

Weaponize Playtesting.

Have your cake and eat it too.

When people think of playtesting, they often see it as solely a means to find flaws within their game or to reaffirm design decisions that they’ve made. If we extrapolate that idea—expand its scope—what we come to understand is that playtesting is a means of gauging which aspects of your game that players find engaging or frustrating, and if we look at it from that perspective then we can use playtesting data to determine how to make engaging additions. Sure, players don’t always know what they want, but even if we just look at how they’re playing we can see how they’re attempting to interact with the game and thereby deduce what additions to the formula might make the game more fun for them. This process is what I mean by Weaponizing Playtesting, using playtesting data to help plan how you want your game to develop in the future.

As for having your cake and eating it too, I have a sincere preference for classless games (I never really liked PbTA style Playbooks all that much either), but I understand the appeal of class based games. Classes give you structure, they give you a basic plan to follow in terms of how your character will develop all united under a connective theme. For new and experienced players alike starting with a class then building a character around it can be incredibly helpful, perhaps even inspiring; however, classes are ultimately restrictive, they require you to play within their rules—your understanding of your character’s capabilities will always be, by necessity, grounded in the abilities of their chosen class. Ultimately, I wanted the structural inspiration that classes can provide and the freedom of choice that comes with classless play—the Gifts were my solution, and I think they’ve done a stellar job of providing both.

Self Promotion:

Hey y’all, sorry for the short hiatus. Work has been killing me recently.

If you wanna check out my other games, and get updated when the Footfall free playtest goes live, follow me on Itch.io! If you want more devlogs, and more rpg design talk, follow me here or on twitter.

Either way, I hope you have a great night and a great day.

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indiepressrevolution · 1 day

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Just finished a project I've been working on for a little bit, an OSR game that has a (semi-comprehensive) built-in world generator.

I wanted to make a second edition of an old game jam game I made, Storied Lands, because I've grown a lot as a designer and as a person since I made it and I wanted to Finish A Project For Once. So I started this and then finished it.

Haven't published it yet cause I wanna proofread it, but here's some samples from Storied Lands Second Edition.

Will update the post with a link once it's out. It'll be around 8 bucks for a two book set (PDFs only, no physical prints, sorry) + character sheets and grids.

UPDATE: It's out! 8 USD at itch.io or DriveThruRPG.

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indiepressrevolution · 1 day

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RaR Musings #17: Simulation in Games

I got into it lately on the merits of game design, and definitions of mechanical tropes like roguelike and roguelite, and whether rpg, jrpg, RP game, and roleplaying game all had different feels, and if a game like Alan Wake counts as an rpg or not. (To be clear: If a game has you play as a character, who makes decisions as a cross reference between that character's identity and the environment and challenges at hand, in a way that defines the character or changes them in some way, it's a roleplaying game. This means that just about every product people recognize as a 'game' released in the last 30 years is, likely, a roleplaying game, in some way, because it turns out, people like when you attach narratives to things.)

Roguelikes have existed for years, but really came into their own in the last decade, because the promise of an enjoyable, if difficult, gameplay loop that rewards player skill and requires significantly less brute-force design work by the developer. It means you can have a lot MORE game, with a lot more playtime, for less, relative to a game where every dungeon is hand-crafted and every enemy and item intentionally placed. But, because the game throws the entire catalogue at you from the get-go, there's an enormous learning curve, and without a sense of progression, many get bored or frustrated. Rogue-lites took the idea of the roguelike, and made it more consumer friendly, enabling progression over time, but still with major losses from death in randomly-generated environments.

Tabletop games follow these concepts as well. In a ttrpg, a host player meticulously crafts a dungeon, placing enemies and items; an enormous amount of work, and without a library of pre-built campaigns, one that leads to DM burnout sooner or later. Some games provide randomly generated tables, but having to reference tables and subtables doesn't feel very fun; that's computer work. Other games try for a mix of the two, with a host that helps ensure content is distributed smoothly, but the game is mostly running by itself, and so there's less work on the host's shoulders.

In each of these cases, there's different degrees of Simulation: a natural follow-through, where Action A, produces Result B, but that in turn, leads to Result C, and so on, but sometimes, a host is responsible for deciding what the Result is, forcing Action themselves or by presenting a scenario to another player, or stopping the Result chain for narrative or balance reasons. Often, a computer is designated the host, and it's ability to make these determinations are a simulation in itself, based on random number generation, weighted by the designers of the game. It's the main reason why a game like Baldur's Gate 3 can have up to four players, and none of them are actively causing the game to function, or even just one player, who controls multiple characters, but still doesn't cause the game to exist.

But tabletop roleplaying game enthusiasts are shy of this. They want to feel immersed, that their game and world and characters are real; they don't want to know that it's random, or that the DM just decided something arbitrarily, or made it up. They don't want to see how the sausage is made, because somehow it's less impressive if it's the result of hard work, and not effortlessly conjured to your dinner plate. It's also this distinction that spooks most players out of ever evolving into a dungeon master themselves: they worry that they need to have somehow ascended to become brain-kin with the fantasy world and master all it's mechanics and intricacies, to memorize statblocks and enemy and item locations, maps and lore and and And and. The revelation that a lot of the time it was made up on the spot disgusts them, because it threatens the immersion.

I muse about this because I'd set out to make Road and Ruin explicitly playable with no dungeon master. Host responsibility is shared around the table, either together, or passed to the next. A certain amount of simulation is required, then, to make sure the game actually functions, but the notion that each player would be responsible for taking turns coming up with what happens next disgusts and horrifies people. They want to feel immersed, not be taken out of it, and they want to guess what happens next and be proven right, not make up what happens next and then it just does. But in all the "the DM is a player too! :)" arguments I've ever seen, never have I ever heard anyone acknowledge that these benefits of immersion and not knowing what happens next extend exclusively to the adventurers, and never to the DM themselves. Sure, players can do things that the DM didn't anticipate, but that means work rather than discovery, as the DM scrambles to make up what happens next, not merely just guessing and being proven right.

Road and Ruin has been described as (read: accused of) being a game that only dungeon masters can play, because only dungeon masters are versed in the techniques being employed here. Which is a really interesting argument, because, like... why do games like DND build their entire functionality around the existence of these supposedly rare people? While it's true that not everyone is an artist or designer, or versed in fantasy or storytelling tropes, why is it the only concrete way for players like this to get to PLAY a game is to rely on a computer to take the reins from them? That a DM can be a player, but that a player can't be a DM?

If nothing else, I'd want Road and Ruin to have enough simulation elements that I, myself, could be a player in the game, WHILE being the host. That I could generate the story as I go, and be proven WRONG, make mistakes, and die, not just spend tens of hours lovingly crafting a narrative and building a world, only for everyone to trample it and litter, climbing aboard the magical mystery tour, expecting to be trucked from one narrative moment to the next. That I could show, by example, how exciting it is to come up with plans, and the twist of being proven wrong, and that other players might be emboldened by it to the point of wanting to try it for themselves. And finding, it's not actually so different from how they were playing before.

I still struggle with reducing the amount of math baked into the simulation, and make it more about player choice, but I also have to have systems where Something Happens, regardless of where the players are and if they're doing anything to provoke it. Realizing you've dropped your wallet somewhere after you've been travelling for hours, making the choice to look for it, meeting someone who found it, and getting to learn about who they are and what they're doing there, or finding a hidden cache of treasure, but it's too much for you to carry by yourself, certainly without notice, are both things I made up on the spot based on the same [GOLD] card, out of a deck of 52 cards, but with a diceroll determining the event was "Bad, but resolved", and "Good, but at a cost". If the game needs someone like me to be able to come up with those conclusions as the game master, then by all means, I'll do it, but as a player, I had no idea those events were going to occur, and I'll be just as capable of making decisions about what to do about them as everyone else at the table.

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