#Systemless

[ursineproblemgenerator]

So update

Been using [Healing] in my second slot for a little over two years now and i JUST fucking discovered that it can out scale your mana production.

La de dah, lemme leave on my passive all the time. Why the fuck is the sky loud and people all feel like hornets who have complaints about the HOA and want to sell me an extended warranty and timeshare combo.

Oh? My mana bar keeps hitting negatives and my staminas draining despite doing fuck all so my health doesnt take the hit? Oh BECAUSE OF CAPITALIST HELLSCAPE 2.025 MY STAMINAS OUT TOO...

Fexking snaxks man.

[1-50thofabuck]

I've backed a number of Reed's projects, and these are particularly wonderful. That art is fantastic!

Deck of Old-School Encounters Set Two, OSR Fantasy RPG Cards by Philip Reed — Kickstarter

[rppr-podcast]

Game Designer Workshop: The Night Clerk Zine - System-less Scenarios with Caleb Stokes

A system-less RPG scenario is designed to be able to run in any system for a particular genre. Writing one is just as challenging as writing one for a single system. I’m launching a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit for The Night Clerk, a system-less modern horror scenario, as a zine. In this episode, Caleb Stokes, author of No Security a collection of system-less scenarios, and I talk about…

[vintagerpg]

Lost Pages loves grimoires. The Book of Gaub (2021) is their most ambitious grimoire to date. It’s an expansion of the systemless magic system initially laid out in Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons. Casters can cast one of these spells for every level they are; they can ignore the casting rules as well, as the risk of catastrophes (of which the book provides 100 horrific examples that serve as both a warning and an invitation). There is also a bunch of monsters, adventure hooks and magic items as well.

The main attraction, though, is the hand of Gaub, or, more accurately, the seven fingers of Gaub, which amount to seven different collections of seven magic spells. Gaub is not really defined, but we can intuit from the awful nature of the magic here that whatever it is, it isn’t pleasant. So we have the Finger Under the Floorboards and the Finger That is Not There and the Finger Gnawed to the Bone and so on. Each is written by a different author — I don’t recognize most of the names aside of Lost Pages’ own Paolo Greco and Charlie Ferguson-Avery (Into the Wyrd and Wild), but that’s OK since there is no clear credit for who wrote what anyway.

The result is extremely grimoire-ish. The names of spells are deeply obscure: “Deartuate,” “Filodictate,” “Visamnesium.” Most are accompanied by an evocative micro-fiction. The spell descriptions, however, cut through the foggy obfuscation with clear prose. That last spell, for instance, creates, after a week of labor, a fixed sigil within a building or structure that will erase all memory of the place and what happens there when a person sets eyes on it. That’s not super horrible, though. But “Pamphagous” is: that causes the victim to have a ceaseless hunger for the duration of the spell, and to eat anything within reach, even if it would kill them; they’ll rise as hungry undead if they die while under the spell. Now that’s nasty.

[utilitycaster]

okay watched Cloak and Dagger and here are my thoughts in brief

I don't think showing Ripley's backstory is bad. Part of why Ripley is an interesting character to me in a way that, to use my favorite punching bag, Otohan, is not, is because we had hints of what made her this way - fleeing the Empire; a list of names on Animus that included Bertrand Dwendal. Part of why I mock Otohan relentlessly is because she is a one-dimension villain, and Ripley never was that, which is why she's an interesting villain. Tragic backstory, in my opinion, enhances one's villainy, rather than reduces it: what sort of monster suffers and decides to do the same to others, rather than is driven to work to improve the lot of others? That's essentially why Caleb is in the end a heroic character and Ludinus is the culminating BBEG more so than Predathos.

Glintshore is one of my favorite battles of Campaign 1 and it also would not, in my opinion, translate well to animation. There was a great line in the Midst Messages from Xen in reference to Moonward about how in most rules-heavy TTRPGs, when you enter a big battle, time stretches out significantly, but in a systemless game like Moonward, it goes very quickly, which gives it a very different vibe and makes players make very different decisions. The emotional weight derives largely from how the party enters combat already heavily drained and never regains their footing, and how the cast is well aware and the sense of dread (and belief that Percy might be permanently dead and Taliesin will have to roll up a new character) sets in long before the battle ends. [long tangent about good parasocial vs bad parasocial in actual play put off until I have time to actually read Watch Us Roll, but this is Good Parasocial]. It's actually an interesting test of the challenge we face for the finale of the series: you are not going to get as efficient an emotional punch as Sam saying "Nine" in a show that doesn't have a concept of spell levels. I had struggled with how one might recreate the Glintshore battle and the answer is "you don't".

Ripley's speech was great no notes, love her being fucking awful and consumed with vengeance to the end. I think just as the theme of "your resentment will destroy you" is an enduring one throughout Critical Role, so is "every mortal is in theory someone who could change and become better, but if you shoot the hand that's trying to help you, well, get rekt lol"

The music over Percy's death is corny as hell. However, I am already on the record as someone who mutes It's Thursday Night for being corny as hell and who pokes fun at Matt's more purple prose and I seem to have stuck around regardless. I have made my peace with the fact that a good chunk of the cast spent their formative years just absolutely immersed in anime, and given the Extreme Anime Vibes of Percy in TLOVM I can't say I love it, but I also can't say it's not sort of fitting. Please do cut that scene with different music though, because it would be funny as shit.

I need to watch episodes 8 and 9 (going to now!) but much as I love the glintshore fight, you know what I love more? Episode 1x69 (nice). Real Tragedy Enjoyers know the proof is in the aftermath. If 8 and 9 also suck then I'll be back here in like an hour but if they're good then it's whatever.

Grog is always on some level experiencing a Sitcom B Plot and if you ever find yourself disliking a TLOVM episode, remember you're watching a sitcom where Grog is dealing with a Bird that is Very Here (metaphorical).

[midstpodcast]

Had you played ttrpgs together before starting Midst? It's such a unique podcast style and you all gel so well together I'm curious what experience you had playing together beforehand!

🎷: Tons! We've been playing TTRPGs together way longer than we've been podcasting, and most of those games have been one-of-a-kind systemless "storygames" (similar in execution to Moonward). We've played a small amount of D&D and other published systems together, but the vast majority of the games we've played as a trio have been unique systemless narrative games we've created entirely from scratch. Our background with narrative storygames is what fed into the creation of Midst, and it's the ingredient that gives our shows their game-adjacent delivery.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

There Is No Perfect System

There’s no dipping one’s toe into the solarpunk stream without noticing that although not all solarpunks are anarchists, there is a strong sense in solarpunk that we won’t be living happily, freely, and sustainably until we dismantle both capitalism and the state.

Ah, but if only it was only capitalism that is capable of social and environmental savagery. And, hey, hang on a second. It’s not as if even democracies can only be stifling and oppressive.

I will admit that for decades I too have dreamed of living in a society where we didn’t need the police, prisons, or laws because we all just voluntarily treat each other decently and all personally make sure to commit no crimes against the environment. But the older me has become skeptical that such a systemless system could ever work. Are we going to ship all the people who can’t play well with others to Mars? Look at how much trouble we’re having already, especially now that so many people (and politicians) have figured out that they can pretty much get away with murder by ignoring the social norms that keep society functioning by filling in the gaps in between the laws.

I’m 100% with you when you say that capitalism has been terrible for people and the planet. The less carefully regulated capitalism is, the more it is a race to the bottom where 15 people on Earth have all the money, the natural world has given way to soy bean fields, palm oil plantations, and toxic garbage dumps, and the rest of us are living in misery and vastly reduced life expectancy in hovels or in prison.

But—honest question—is there a better alternative?

Communism, as it was practiced in the 20th century, was also terrible for the environment. Often egregiously so. My better half grew up in East Germany and it’s tons less polluted now than it was under communist authoritarianism when, honestly, nobody cared one bit about the damage they were doing to people or nature even when they weren’t under pressure to make profit. Today, under capitalism in a still at least somewhat social democracy, there are rules and investment directed at preventing, among other things, factories and powerplants from dumping their waste or sending it unfiltered out through their chimneys.

As much as it’s easy and not far off the mark to rail against the evils of capitalism, it actually isn’t capitalism—or communism or any other -ism—that treats the environment as nothing more than a repository of resources for human use. It’s the people operating within the framework of capitalism (etc)—or at least a pretty good chunk of them. And if that is the case, why should we expect that anarchism and its lack of a state will magically delivery us from the human selfishness, laziness, shortsightedness, and greed that lies at the root of the cruelest, most unjust, most environmentally damaging, and most unsustainable aspects of capitalism?

No matter what, we will never escape ourselves. Wherever we go, there we still will be at the heart of any system we use to order ourselves and our economies.

It is as my friend Don, the now retired librarian that I talked to in Season 2, Episode 2 of the podcast, was telling me the other day. It’s comforting to think that we just need to set up the perfect system and then everything will be utopian. But there is no perfect system because systems are created and administered by people and every single one of us is flawed. We are all to some degree—although some of us to more degrees than others—clever but stupid, short–sighted but wise, fair but unfair, greedy but generous, hard working but lazy, clear thinking but delusional, and honest but mendacious.

So why are we dreaming of the day that we finally have a perfect system when instead we should be working on ourselves and how we work together to get things done?

This isn’t to say that some systems aren’t worse than others. I mean, who wants anything as lacking in counterbalancing measures as monarchies, repressive authoritarian regimes, or dictatorships?

In the name of the sensible aspects of solarpunk, let’s work with what we have on hand: the the democracies that, at least as of the time of this writing, we still have. Let’s put our dreams of anarchistic perfection on the back burner and get down to the very real, very urgently needed work of shoring up our democracies against the corrosive attacks undermining them.

I don’t know about you, but given the upcoming elections and all the hatred people seem to have for each other, for the first time in my entire life, I’m worried about what the near future will be like. And I feel like that by the time we all take to the streets to rail against the rise in authoritarianism, it may already be too late.

[thedude3445]

Ultimate Progress Mini Blog 6/28

I HAVE FINISHED REBORN ON A SYSTEMLESS EARTH... WITH A SYSTEM. ALL ~300 CHAPTERS ARE NOW COMPLETE.

Finally...

Finally I'm done with this story. I might actually cry

[headlightsforever]

I believe in the spiritual, but being a lyric poet trumps both philosophy and religion for me as a source of meaning. Being a lyric poet is like being given your own giant scroll. You unroll it and discover that it’s blank, but it has the potential to be a star chart. As a poet, you put the stars on it yourself. Each time you write a poem you’re making a meaning, placing a point of light on this blank chart, dotting it over time with your own meanings, your own stars. You’re making an image of a night sky on the scroll. Most people, I hope, are given their charts with a few stable stars already in place—the North Star, Orion, and so forth. But mine was blank. Any early stars were just wiped out with those early deaths.

Stars in the night sky have a kind of wonder and beauty, but they’re a systemless system. You feel awe and wonder at them, but they don’t all hold together. Religion, philosophy—those seem to me to be systems that try to become internally coherent, arrange themselves into one huge constellation, but what I love about lyric poetry is that, like the stars, it’s just an array. It’s an open system that’s mysteriously radiant with significance.

Gregory Orr

[stonegearstudios]

Well, managed to release my second rpg supplement today, a systemless micro adventure about a misplaced crate of guns!

It's a two page (or one double sided) thing with several random roll table to help you generate a space station, a interesting piece of loot, and a minor antagonist to dog your PCs!

Get it here https://mb11.itch.io/a-crate-misplaced or on DTRPG in a few days when it clears

Little bit of art by WeirdBlueYonder

[nexusofdomains]

A few months ago I participated in an informal (systemless) roleplay campaign over email/video call with various members of my primary writing group. This campaign, "Stranger's Quest" (it's on hiatus) is so rudimentary that there's no health system. The only player character deaths were planned between myself and the game master*. One of these two deaths was of Aira, an anthropomorphic Arctic wolf from my setting, Nexus. She died a warrior's death, slaying a bear-like monster before succumbing to her wounds. The other death was of a villain PC in the same session.

I had my doubts, but Aira’s death was all well and good until last week, when I began the development of a short story featuring an organization Aira helped found.

Please reblog for sample size

*The gm of "Stranger's Quest" is a neat dude my writing group has nicknamed "Sir Ben" because of his interest in chivalry. He and I are both weapon and armor nerds.

[mishahandman]

Bundle of Bundles Sale!

Or: Things you never want an appliance installer to say: "There's no water shutoff for your dishwasher."

So, we got a new dishwasher this month. This is good! The old one was dying fast, and the new one is much better. Except that, as you may have guessed from the subtitle, we had a few... unexpected plumbing costs attached to it.

But every problem is an opportunity, and in the spirit of getting rid of older things, I've decided to put up a bundle of all of my older RPG works on Itch for sale this week to try to make up a chunk of the extra costs. If you've grabbed one or two of my works and liked them, or if you're just curious, this is a great chance to get fifteen games of varying quality and scope, including:

All I Do Is Win

The Federation of Birds (A Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast adventure)

The Gig Economy

God of Chores

Help! We All Died and Were Reincarnated Into An Early-Access Isekai World!

J'Accuse!

Lambs to the Slaughter

My Identical Cousin

Our Doomed Hometown

Our Old Curiousity Shop

Phantom Agencies

The Real Treasure Was The Friends We Made Along The Way

The Realm of Reason (A Systemless Setting)

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies

The Squintches Steal Christmas

Some of these games are highly exclusive, by which I mean that I'm pretty sure no one has ever actually played them. Some of them are, in my totally unbiased opinion, adorable. Run a Christmas heist from those nasty Whoms! Deal with low-level bureaucracy while you try to hunt ghosts for demanding clients! Play the NPCs of a small village trying desperately to become important enough to the hero's narrative that you will survive the inevitable destruction of your village! There are so many options!

So go and take a look, and if you like what you see, it's the perfect time for a purchase.

[missbaphomet]

My friends and I read the sample given of that systemless book or whatever and I have thoughts

Needs Beta Readers. Badly.

The fake southern accent is doing "life point" damage to me (a real life bona fide southerner)

None of the "stats" are explained. What's LP? Idk. Just enjoy your tropes and shut up

The protagonist doesn't know what angels, multiverses, or robots are.

We unanimously decided "The Goddess" is Robot Dolly Parton (even if she doesn't deserve the honor of comparison)

The afterlife has google image search

Robot Dolly Parton is incompetent and almost kills the protagonist by pressing the wrong button. Oopsie daisy ig

"????" Is actual dialogue, as in it is shown to be said by the protagonist. How? Idk. Fuck you.

Protagonist with pink hair is confused by hair dye

The Author forgot how homestuck characters look and described a troll cosplayer as having "aquamarine hair"

The homestuck cosplayer gets mad at the protagonist for being a "roleplayer". Lmfao

Somehow this is the most believable part because as someone who has never been to the West Coast, I'm fairly sure that's just how it is over there

Someone shouts "Wombo Combo"

This:

(Context is he saw a guy with pink hair and thought he was from his same world)

The "system" it refers to seems to be a cross between TCGs, MMOs, and Gatcha. There's a direct Yu-Gi-Oh reference. (Note: I don't get TCGs and ive never seen cartoon adaptations of them)

People keep turning him away for being a roleplayer

He did finally explain what LP is (Life Points) which was my guess but since everything uses LP the entire thing runs on what is basically blood magic. But you can gain 1000 blood magic at the cost of 0 blood magic. I guess we found that advertised "abusable system" angle. As far as I saw there's not any kind of cooldown or AP system (granted I'm relying on screenshots provided by @nalver as I'm currently sitting in a hospital while my dad has a procedure done so I can't directly access the text. You can get the sample text yourself on Amazon but I frankly wouldnt recommend it)

He vows to slay "many, many cosplays" because he spawned in generic brand Comic Con I guess

I'm actually gonna just leave this here because my dad should have been done with his procedure a while ago and time got away from me. Hoping nothing's wrong but now my mom is anxious

[deramin2]

It's called "The Glide" and it's a synergizer midi controller that effectively lets you play 2 accelerometers + note control button combinations (much like the trombone). They're hand-assembled in house and cost $250.

"The Glide was conceived, designed, and coded by Keith Groover, a musician, music educator, and inventor living in South Carolina.

The circuit board designer and electronic engineer is Darius Mostowfi, who also designed the hardware for Mission Engineering's Expressionator and Roger Linn's Linnstrument."

Another musician who plays it is Xen of Third Person, who makes the Midst Cosmos Podcasts. Wildly original semi-improvised sci-fi fantasy stories where Xen plays the music live as they narrate it. The Glide is one of the instruments they use.

Xen talks about it on the Weird Kids x Third Person Crossover visual podcast episode starting at 0:35:20. They explain how to play it and the podcast hosts whoever never even heard of such a thing before get to briefly play around with it. (The full episode is a fascinating show and tell of unusual things that made and make them delightfully weird people.) You can watch them use it live during the 3-part pure improve systemless roleplaying game Moonward.

—

On a different note, holy shit rapping Dr. Seuss books is so brilliant. He's spitting fire! I never realized precisely how rhythmic the writing is because everyone I've heard uses a completely different white storybook tone for them. So cool!

Top left clockwise: Keith groover, Jordan Simons, Bret Crow, Harry Hansen

[unintentionaloracle]

*seeing the recap clip from three weeks ago at the time this aired (I'll probably pop back there trust my systemless system)* Drew McIntyre's Greatest Enemy: The Nefarious Roll Up