maximumzombiecreator

[maximumzombiecreator]

[maximumzombiecreator]

AFTER NEARLY 2 YEARS OF MY LIFE IT'S DONE!

GUTGUN IS OUT NOW!

THEY TRIED TO SACRIFICE YOU TO THEIR GOD. THEY FAILED, AND NOW, BLESSED BY A RIVAL GOD WITH THE POWER OF THE GUTGUN, YOU WILL TEAR THEM DOWN.

YOUR GUT IS YOUR GUN. YOUR GUN IS YOUR GUT.

GUTGUN is a solo TTRPG that translates the blood-pumping fun of a classic PC shooter to tabletop. You are a lone force of nature tearing through whatever gets in your way.

[maximumzombiecreator]

Love meaningful downtime. I also really love long-term recovery mechanics, I think it adds so much weight to getting hurt when it means a character is going to be out of commission for a while. Especially when time is a factor for other reasons.

Having a character already wounded deciding whether to risk another fight, knowing that even if they survive, they might be injured long enough to miss an upcoming expedition or be unable to help defend a looming siege is just delightful tension.

Thinking of a megadungeon-like underworld crawl, a whole campaign framework that takes place inside a dungeon (but with special safe zones to punctuate the exploration), and I just hit upon a funny idea. What if character options are very basic to begin with (maybe literally basic: the seven classes from Basic/Expert D&D) and as characters explore the underworld players unlock more character options should they need to create spare characters or hirelings. Like when the party discovers Goblintown now goblins become a playable character type, the Fungus Farm unlocks funguys, etc.

[maximumzombiecreator]

I've done the unlockable classes and character types in a hexcrawl before, and players really responded to it. My only warning would be they responded to it so strongly that it made them want to shelve their original characters, so I would probably lean into troupe-style play. Shelving Morningwood the Elf feels less bad if that's not your one and only character, I feel like.

Thinking of a megadungeon-like underworld crawl, a whole campaign framework that takes place inside a dungeon (but with special safe zones to punctuate the exploration), and I just hit upon a funny idea. What if character options are very basic to begin with (maybe literally basic: the seven classes from Basic/Expert D&D) and as characters explore the underworld players unlock more character options should they need to create spare characters or hirelings. Like when the party discovers Goblintown now goblins become a playable character type, the Fungus Farm unlocks funguys, etc.

[maximumzombiecreator]

bring back tumblr ask culture let me. bother you with questions and statements

[maximumzombiecreator]

I don't know if there's a phrase that more perfectly communicates what's wrong with some people's understanding of dungeon crawling than "the next room."

The next room implies that there is a single correct room to be encountered in a single correct order. The party will explore this room, then the next room, then the next room as prescribed by the dungeon master.

In a good dungeon, there is no "the next room." There's just rooms. Some of them will be explored, some won't. There will be a variety of ways to navigate the dungeon, meaning that the order things are encountered depends entirely on how the party chooses to engage with the dungeon. There may be an implicit critical path, but character abilities can often disrupt that, and that's fine, because dungeons are inherently a situation-type scenario design that is great at accommodating these kind of sequence breaks.

Like, the idea that a fiction-based exploration of the space is problematic because you could miss "the next room" is starting from a wrong premise. The problem is that you have a "the next room" to begin with.

I mean that approach to dungeon crawling is all fun and games until the adventure grinds to a halt because everyone failed to read the DM's mind to find the secret door to the next room.

Leaving aside that I still think "reading the DM's mind" is an incredibly bad faith way to describe it. If there's something that makes your adventure completely dysfunctional if the players fail to find it, why are you making it secret in the first place????

Like by virtue of making something hidden or secret, you're introducing the possibility that the players will fail to find it. So the first thing you should ask yourself before you put a secret in is "am I okay with my players not finding this? does the adventure still work if they don't find it?" and then if the answer is "no" then you. just don't make it secret. Easy as that.

Like personally I think if at any point your dungeon has only one available way for the party to make progress you probably already fucked up a little bit. But if you decide to make their one way to move forward *secret* you're kinda just actively shooting yourself in the foot, regardless of whether you're using perception mechanics or not. Because with perception mechanics the same situation can just as easily turn into "the adventure grinds to a halt because everyone failed their Mother May I Use My Fucking Eyes To See What's In Front Of Me check to find the secret door"

[maximumzombiecreator]

Happy May Day, my woodland critters. Dungeon Masters of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bad players.

[maximumzombiecreator]

Silk & Dagger & Disability

So, obviously, the main thing Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is about is capitalism and slavery through indirect means, but people really resonate with the disability readings of my work, so here’s this.

So, unlike Eureka, Silk & Dagger is technically a class-based RPG, but it only has two classes, Mistress and Servant, which is the joke. (It’s literally their socio-economic classes.)

It also has two races, elf and man, A.K.A. humans.

“Race” is not normally something I default to when writing RPGs, but in this case it’s a matter of the inspiration and source material that Silk & Dagger is parodying. The thing is, though, that still isn’t really what Silk & Dagger is about. It’s about class and forced labor, and the way that these two “races” map onto that is not really applicable to how that works in the real world. That’s one of the reasons that Silk & Dagger doesn’t have a whole roster of “races,” it would make people even more likely to try and read it as a racism allegory when it’s not.

So, there’s the dark elves that live in the underground caves. Dark elves can see in the dark, have sensitive ears that move and that ear movement is part of their language, and they don’t sleep, among other things.

You, reading this, are probably a human so you know that humans can’t see in the dark, can’t really move their ears, and do need to sleep regularly.

While dark elves are actually still not particularly well-suited for life in these caves, nor the society they live in, their innate abilities make them much more suited to it than humans.

The people in charge of division of labor in this society pretty much all happen to be dark elves, who have obviously never been humans and never will be, and have an interest in their underlings working as much and as hard as possible. So when they get servants who can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t communicate as well as a normal person, and these servants try to say they also need to take more time off than a normal person, you can probably see where I’m going here. The response is that humans are dumb, lazy, ungrateful, parasitic, worthless, etc.. Many Drow don��t even think “sleep” is real, they think it’s something humans are making up to get out of work.

These humans are people who would be able to thrive somewhere else, in some other situation, but they’re not in that situation, they’re in another situation that the Drow forced them to be in. They have no choice but to do a job their body is not good at, do it worse than everybody else because of this, and be considered dumb, lazy, and a liar the whole time.

I’m sure many of you reading this will find this situation familiar.

Oh and also the little candles that humans need to see in pitch black caves are constantly blamed for the buildup of carbon dioxide in the enclosed cave systems by Drow who burn coal to heat their bathtubs.

[maximumzombiecreator]

You're so right. I think the example of this that most annoys me is how they'll confidently assert that something isn't possible when not only is it possible, it is.

Like, you'll be talking to a USAmerican about high speed rail, and they'll nod and say that tragically it could never work in a country as big as theirs. And you'll tell them that, actually, you're currently typing this message while on the high speed rail from Shanghai to Beijing, and China is basically the same size as the US. And then they'll shake their head and sigh like you just told them you still believe in Santa.

And this is basically what it's like trying to convince 5e players that you can have good mechanics for, like, social interaction or mysteries.

D&D players are the USAmericans of TTRPG players <- a statement that makes perfect sense if you have the eyes to see

[maximumzombiecreator]

Regarding that post going around about people pitching indie RPGs to people as a way to improve their 5e games:

Please understand if you ever see me doing that, I'm doing it like a lesbian mentor in a trashy smut novel. Like, sure, baby, this is just practice for your 5e game. No, it won't ruin you for that game, of course not. Now be a good girl and pick your character traits for me, okay?

[maximumzombiecreator]

[maximumzombiecreator]

trad wives need to die so i can dress like im going to die of dysentery without people getting ideas about me

[maximumzombiecreator]

5e suck so much to GM that it's like GMing with anime style training weights on. But not the way it works in anime, the way it would work in real life, where it just strains your joints in super unhealthy ways and when you finally take the weights off, mostly you need to do some physio rehab to fix your weird muscle imbalances and learn to do things in a way that doesn't destroy your body.

people often talk about how d&d 5e is a horrible starting point that makes players struggle with other systems and that's true but it also does this for GMs. so many people i know had their first exposure to ttrpgs through d&d 5e and so view any GM or facilitator role with absolute dread assuming that it is an unpaid game design role that requires not only hours of prep every session but also to carefully micromanage every aspect of the game to singlehandedly balance it for the specific outcome of 'the party wins, but, like, it feels difficult' while simultaneously remembering everyone's rules for them & being treated like a substitute teacher

[maximumzombiecreator]

Peppa Pig is extremely popular in China. I mean if you look it up online, apparently she's "banned" but I have no idea what that means, because she was everywhere. The place I used to order food from the most often there just had Peppa all over their packaging, bootleg branded merch was ubiquitous, and I have never received as many compliments in my life as I did for the Peppa Pig badge holder I used for work.

Obviously the IP owners for Peppa didn't see a cent for any of this, which is in fact extremely good and based. If every salad I buy could infringe copyright, that would be ideal.

I love the phenomenon of a character from a foreign piece of media becoming hugely popular abroad to the point where they effectively overshadow some more popular characters. While Donald Duck isn't exactly an unknown in the US in general he isn't that big a deal there, meanwhile in Finland he is basically a national hero, we adopted him because he was unloved in his country of origin, also we hate Mickey Mouse that rat fuck

[maximumzombiecreator]

we do have to consider that the trans woman im currently calling out for something i know she didn't do might do something bad in the future

[maximumzombiecreator]

When will it be my turn

Every so often my following page feels oddly sparse for a bit, and I start wondering if they changed how posts are displayed or something. But then every single time it turns out they just banned more of the trans women I follow.

[maximumzombiecreator]

Feeling invalidated by my un-terminated tumblr account.

Every so often my following page feels oddly sparse for a bit, and I start wondering if they changed how posts are displayed or something. But then every single time it turns out they just banned more of the trans women I follow.