#Troupe ttrpg

[ostermad-blog]

📖, 💡?

Two excellent questions. We'll take 'em in order!

📖 My favorite class or playbook from a game.

It's funny, this question. I'm someone who prefers to run games rather than play in them, so I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about classes/playbooks unless I'm designing a game (my current project has had me doing a lot of reading over different playbooks for inspiration). So I'm going to cheat and give you two answers.

The first answer is the Ghelf from TheOriginalCockatrice's game Troupe. The Gelf is a preening pissant, someone petty and small and full of self-importance with a flair for the dramatic. They are hard and bitter but believe themselves to be loving and sweet. They are in so much agonizing denial that my heart hurts to think about it. I think TheOriginalCockatrice did a phenomenal job expressing the ghelf's wretchedness, their vulnerability, and their allure.

The real answer is the one I am embarrassed about, the one I knew was my answer as soon as I read the question, the one class that has stuck with me since I read it as a middle schooler in the Complete Warrior book for dnd 3.5. I feel like an indie ttrpg poser that my favorite class is one from dnd, but let me talk to you about the Warshaper and maybe you'll see why it has been in my bones since I was 13.

The Warshaper is a prestige class, something that doesn't exist in dnd 5e (thank goodness). Prestige classes had to be built into, you had to multiclass in just the right way, do the right in-game things to qualify, take the right character customization options. And some of them were utter garbage and some of them were incredibly powerful. Like many things in 3.x, there was a kernel of a good idea somewhere in there, but the implementation was horrible.

The Warshaper's most onerous requirement was that you had to be able to change your shape, to transform from one body to another. A wizard's polymorph would do, as would a druid's wildshape. As would being a werecreature, as well. And the central premise of the Warshaper class was: what if you could change your body better? Now, this was dnd, so the implementation was all about combat - you can grow more natural weapons, they do more damage, you can rearrange your organs and muscles to make you immune to critical hits, your limbs can extend up to 10ft away from you. But the idea behind the class was immediately compelling, and as a deeply, deeply closeted trans teenager, as soon as I read this class I knew I wanted to be it, in a powerful and personal way. I also, being a deeply, deeply closeted trans teenager, never attempted to build a character that could take the class. I thought about dnd a lot more than I played it, and I made dozens of characters. And I was never brave enough to make someone who could transcend their body-of-birth and take this class, at least not until many years later, in college, when I played my first female character. Playing her was probably the closest I came to realizing I was trans until my egg actually did crack.

So, yeah, the answer I like to that question is the Ghelf. My real answer is the Warshaper.

💡 A game that inspired my own design or creative practice

Here I have many equally true answers. Honorable mention to dnd 3.5 for being so poorly designed that I had to start designing for it to patch up the gaps and salvage something good from it.

The actual answer, well, one of them, is Kazumi Chin's Rogue 2e, which is a love letter to the OSR and storygame ttrpg genres. Rogue 2e is an elegant game. It uses as few rules and mechanics as possible to communicate worlds of potential. Chin's game really opened my eyes to indie ttrpgs more broadly and proved that the adventuring ttrpg experiences I had grown up on could be built in so many more ways than I had thought possible.

Another answer, and the last I'll give for now, is Alexis Smolensk's D&D. Smolensk is a phenomenal writer and his blog (tao-dnd.blogspot.com) is an invaluable resource to anyone looking to run, play in, or design adventure ttrpgs. He has been building his world and expanding his rules for decades with the care and artistry of an expert craftsman. He showed me what adventure games could be, that the skills involved in running them could be deeper than I had ever imagined. I will spend the rest of my life trying to meet his skill level, and I hope that one day people playing in my setting can have half the fun I had playing in his.

[azoosepted]

so i decided to make a sheet for jou just for fun and to show what his hypothetical build would be and i might’ve decided to be a little shit

the fault lies with you, manya

[storyhoardpod]

Friends or foes? With the Heretics Troupe it’s hard to tell.

[art by @night-margie ]

[hopitty-hop-hop]

“I just had to steal away a moment of your time before everyone has to leave.”

“You have it. The question now is what you’ll do with the time you've received.”

“...Steal one last thing from you, a hopefully sweet parting gift as thanks for taking the time to turn these terrible events into something I now look forward to.” He plants a warm, chaste kiss on her lips.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Coming this Spring from The Dregs of the Well:  Tables and Troupes, the TTRPG where you roleplay as TTRPG players!  Will your character overcome the DM's Significant Other's wiles?  Did you forget the snacks again?  Can you even get your group together to play?  Find out together, playing Tables and Troupes!

[sigridstumb]

Get out of my own way

There's a phrase that is new-ish to therapy models, one that I look at entirely askance because what is now termed "pathological demand avoidance" is what I have spent my life knowing as "self-sabotaging dumbass." In most of my life, I manage to avoid being a self-sabotaging dumbass. But in one area, that of cultural trends, it sometimes sets in. Usually to my loss and detriment.

It's just that, when I am barraged with a whole bunch of people all loving a thing at the same time (Tumblr amplifies this a LOT) it *irritates* me. This is asinine, and it makes ME the asshole were I to voice it, because oh my god, Sigrid, people love what they love! Do not squash joy in this parlous existence! But internally I resolve to never watch or read or listen to the thing in question.

Why? I dunno, because sometimes I am a self-sabotaging dumbass!

At any rate, after months of being vaguely irritated with the INTENSE love people have for Dimension 20 (it's not you! It's me! I have a problem! You go on and keep loving the shit out of what you love!) I finally saw a TikTok clip of the show Game Changer. And Brennan Lee Mulligan was hilarious and brilliant.

So, I sought out the show, Game Changer. Spouse and I both really enjoy it, and agree that Brennan is our favorite. I figure out that to watch more episodes, I should subscribe to Dropout.tv. I do, and suddenly realize that Brennan Lee Mulligan is that guy from Dimension 20 that everyone loses their goddamn minds over.

Oh. Oh!

I, with a sense of letting down some internal moral code and a pervasive feeling that I am doing something shameful, watch the first episode of Dimension 20: Fantasy High. It is, as literally everyone (not literally, obviously) already knows, very very good.

I am hooked! I have become One Of Those People! And, Sigrid, the only thing keeping you from enjoying this all along was your own self-sabotaging dumbassery!! Argh!!

ANYWAY.

For those of you who do not know, you are one of Today's Lucky 10,000.

Firstly, Dropout.tv is a comedy troupe formed out of the wreckage of College Humor when it imploded. There is a core group of, I'm not sure, 12-20 people, and they invite guests. The group does a variety of different web tv shows, some of them game shows, some skit comedy, and a great deal of table-top role playing game based improvisational theater. The members are actors, impressionists, writers, voice actors, musicians, and very skilled improv comedians.

Dimension 20 is the umbrella name for the 30-ish different TTRPG campaigns they have filmed. They play in different genres, there are a handful of GMs (though Brennan does a LOT of them,) and the player group composition shifts around a lot. In later seasons, there are nerd celebrity guests.

We, the viewer, are watching people play AD&D 5th edition. That's it, that's the show.

Except it is not at all the show! Here are some points I was not expecting:

- The production values are great. The props, the miniatures, the sound effects, the models of the combat areas, it's all great. It's the dream TTRPG set-up of my teenage years. - The people are voice actors. They are fantastic. They inhabit their characters, and it is fantastic to watch. Also, Brennan Lee Mulligan as GM does all the non-player characters. He does voices for ALL of them. - These people are all IMPROV COMEDIANS. Whatever the others say, they roll with it. Unexpected things happen constantly, both because of the dice rolls and also just because players are unpredictable, and everyone picks up the event and carries on. - They are actually playing a game, so much of what happens in controlled by rolls of dice. And everyone is pretty damn good about this. They make it work, they make the plot continue, using whatever the dice has given them to work with. They are SO much better at it than any of the gaming groups I was in! - The episodes I have seen so far are all good-natured in vibe. The people playing want everyone to have fun. They want the GM to have fun, the players to have fun, and the audience to have fun. There's no sniping except in the most friendly way, there's no sulking about bad rolls, there's no vibe-kills that I have seen.

Anyway, if you like improv comedy, if you like voice actors performing SF/F plays live, if you like other people's TTRPGs, Dimension 20 might also be for you.

[dukerin0]

I am the author and illustrator of a Tabletop Roleplaying Game called The Devil City & Its 77 Vicious Princes. It's free!

The game is mostly finished. I play it once or twice a week and think about it constantly. The complete text as well as a number of tools to help you play and run the game are located here: https://devilcity.carrd.co/

DC77VP is a troupe system about running a Princely Conspiracy; each player is several PCs at once, portraying one of the 77 Noble Houses of Zarkany. It is a game about:

Being a hot gay villain and plotting hot evil schemes

Hosting and attending sinister balls & whispering behind frilly fans

Bargaining with Boschean devils (or burning them as fuel)

Drawing too much power from Hell's infernal magic and exploding

I wrote this game because my favorite part of TTRPGs is tense conversations with weird, ambitious bastards. I'll probably be posting about it a lot.

[revuestarlight-pbta]

Revue Starlight PbtA Playbooks

Hello, everyone! I've moved stuff from the Revue TTRPG onto its own blog, to keep everything neat and orderly.

You might guess from all of the updates I've been writing that I've been really excited to work and think about this RPG. I hope that everyone can look forward to it, and that I can create a system that can allow everyone to create their own Revue Starlight stories with friends, whether with existing or original characters.

The TTRPG will be a Powered by the Apocalypse system, following a long and storied legacy of narratively-focused RPGs that enable robust collaborative storytelling. To help facilitate the portrayal of unique characters, it utilizes what are called Playbooks. (You might consider them an analogue of "classes" from other RPGs, whether on the tabletop or on a video game.) However, these Playbooks don't represent how you look on the outside, or what your weapons of choice might be. Instead, they define a character archetype, highlighting your character's core emotional conflict. For this TTRPG, the question they ask is: "Why did your character become a Stage Girl?"

Playbooks can shift between sessions as your character advances, signifying your character's growth and how a new core emotional conflict may come into focus for them. Stage Girls are too varied and complex to be defined by any one thing, after all.

Here's some examples of some Playbooks I've written up so far! (Everything subject to change.)

The Challenger

The path to becoming a Stage Girl wasn’t handed down to you in your youth. Maybe you discovered it later in life, or your family expected you to tread a different path. You seek to defy those forces who seek to dictate your life’s path for you so that you can take hold of the reins of fate yourself.

You might have a variety of different opinions on the world of theater you’ve found yourself in based on your unique outsider’s perspective. Maybe you aspire to be just like the greats, hoping to, one day, fit in with all of the people you looked up to when you started this journey. On the other hand, you might see the flaws in the restrictive, antiquated system, and aim to prove by example that it can be changed for the better.

Examples of Challengers are: Aijo Karen, Hoshimi Junna

The Exile

You’re running away from something. You were already smitten with theater back then, too, but you were in a different troupe, or maybe even a different country. However, one day, something changed: perhaps tragedy struck, or you failed at the moment when it mattered most. Whatever may have happened, you’ve spirited yourself away somewhere else where no one remembers your greatest shame.

You’re still working to pursue your goals no matter what, but your past haunts you. You’ve found new friends and family, but the fact that the people you left behind are still living their own lives scares you. You might hope to one day reconcile with the people in your past, or perhaps prove once and for all that you don’t need them to live your life.

Examples of Exiles are: Takachiho Stella, Yumeoji Fumi

The Guardian

Though it is you who stands upon the stage, you know that there are better reasons to act than just your own self-interest. You have taken on a Charge, which consists of the people or things you’ve sworn to protect—perhaps the members of your class, a childhood friend, or a memory that’s on the verge of fading away.

If your Charge consists of people, you may sometimes stand behind them to support them. Other times, you may stand by their side to work alongside them. Other times still, you may stand against them—because no one else will help them realize the errors of their ways.

If your Charge is a thing or idea, you’re likely one of its last bastions. It needs protecting—otherwise, you wouldn’t be a Guardian, after all. It’s your reason to be a Stage Girl, and you won’t hesitate to sacrifice yourself to protect it… or, perhaps, others.

Examples of Guardians are: Daiba Nana, Ogami Shiro, Tomoe Tamao

The Trailblazer

Forget what anyone else says about being a Stage Girl—you’ve become one just because it’s fun! Others train day in and day out to be at the top of their field, but compared to them, you live more in the moment. What’s wrong with that? Those stuffy girls with all of their high standards never catch a break, while you spend your time expressing yourself and having fun with the people you love most. It’s certainly more exciting than whatever you were doing before!

However, being a Stage Girl isn’t always fun and games. When hardships arise, you might find yourself questioning why you chose this life without much of a strong external force to tie you to it, relying on only your fickle whim and motivation to drive you forward. You may be searching for such a reason to stay—or, rather, pushing back against those who try to tell you that you need a better one. At times, however, you might ask yourself the most difficult question: is your personality the true you, or just a glib facade?

Examples of Trailblazers are: Otsuki Aruru, Otonashi Ichie

[prokopetz]

I would like to access your ttrpg knowledge. Do you know of a system where the players can freely swap between a collection of characters? I'm looking to run a Monty Python and the holy grail one-shot, so I want the players to be able to move between whichever knights are relevant at the time (and make gameplay continue smoothly as they die off). This can either be from each player having a set squad, or by having a "shared inventory" that each player pulls from as needed. Bonus points if it's easy enough for inebriated players to get a hold of.

There have been a number of published games that use the variant of troupe play that you're describing (i.e., a fixed pool of player characters, but no particular player character is associated with any particular player); the now out-of-print Marvel Heroic Roleplaying springs to mind, in which play consists of a series of set-piece scenes with pre-defined rosters of heroes, and each player chooses which hero to play on a scene-by-scene basis; e.g., you might start out playing as Spider-Man, then when a hero you like better enters play, you switch to playing as them instead, while Spider-Man is either taken up by another player, or else becomes an NPC.

However, I feel like for your particular purpose, that would be barking up the wrong tree. Certainly, for ongoing troupe play, this sort of formal spotlight management is practically mandatory. For a one-shot game, though, it's a lot of game-mechanical overhead for very little benefit, because the spotlighting issues that it's designed to address simply won't have time to develop. Plus, it's not a great idea to introduce novel scene-framing practices to slightly drunk players – that's the sort of thing you really want to be learning stone sober!

My recommendation for a drunk-friendly troupe play oneshot is to go with something light, ideally with descriptive traits so you don't need to know the mechanics to understand what the character you've just been handed is good at, bring a dozen or so pre-generated knights, and let the (ideally sober) GM manage the spotlight on an ad hoc basis. To that end, have you considered S John Ross's Risus? Character sheets basically read like TV Tropes articles, and it's well-suited to Arthurian parody in the Welsh tradition (i.e., the kind where each knight has weird and faintly impractical supernatural powers), which feels like a good way of meshing that Monty Python and the Holy Grail spirit with more conventional tabletop expectations.

(I can also speak from experience when I say that it's feasible to play while completely hammered.)

[sprintingowl]

A Small Noncomprehensive List Of RPGs I Have Written About Romance

Given the posts that have been circulating through my orbit, I think there might currently be a gremlinish interest in this.

What If We Kissed... is a core system that restructures how roleplaying games work. Players set goals for scenes ("I want to be kissed", "I want to doubt myself") and the GM helps them work towards these goals. Players can award the GM points called Honey when they do a thing the player likes, and the GM's role is to use these cues to tell a story that that player enjoys.

My Liege is a hack that modifies any other roleplaying game, changing the core dice mechanic instead to asking the GM for a truth or dare.

It's Getting Hot In Here is a strip ttrpg about exploring the Antarctic when suddenly the boat you arrived on Experiences Technical Difficulties. Mechanics involve taking clothes off and also putting clothes on other people. It also is the only strip ttrpg that I know of.

The Bone Zone is exactly what it sounds like---a ttrpg about 1800s dinosaur necromancy. Also at the end you decide whether to leave yourself vulnerable to the rival you've been sabotaging and antagonizing throughout the whole game.

Tall Lady Castle Game is part of a trilogy about miscommunication and monsters. One of you is a monster living in an old gothic castle, and the other is the handsome intruder who has bumbled into your lair. The sequel games are about being a hot intruder in an old gothic castle and *trying* to be caught by its resident monster, and about systematically failing to notice when you are being flirted with.

Date! That! Mothman! is part of an increasingly incoherent pentology about a world where mothmen suddenly arrived and the US government couldn't destroy them, so it instituted mandatory moth-dating.

Lastly, The Villainess Is Dispossessed is a troupe game where you all play as members of the harem of the titular princess. She has recently been disinherited, but will be allowed to reinherit if she marries well. You could theoretically have more than one person play as the princess, but it's still a system designed to have one player at the absolute center of attention.

[ostermad-blog]

Bxllet Clip - Strangers from the Fiefdoms

Let's talk about Gxnne, TheOriginalCockatrice's supplemnent written for Bxllet Clip. In Gxnne, TOC transports the classes and monsters from her excellent game Troupe into the Wastes of [Bxllet>.

Gxnne is full of the tiny details that gives Troupe its signature charm. The Jester's gun is a snub-nosed pistol that pops out a little flag that says "Bang." The Witch gains random spells when acquiring bullets and loses random spells when firing them. Gnashlings, those small, porcelain creatures who are full of teeth, might just be encountered shoved into a jar and being thrown at the players by someone with a gun and a bullet or three.

Indeed, several of the monsters included in Gxnne are just begging to have whole sessions devoted to their discovery and routing. They work beautifully with one of Rathayibacter's Aftermarkets, optional rules to enhance your Bxllet experience. One such Aftermarket is all about Beasts, giving them different states to flow between based upon the players' actions. This Aftermarket opens up whole new horizons of play when interacting with Beasts, and can also be easily adapted to any other game system with wandering monsters, of which, I'm told, there are more than a few.

You can pick up your copy of Bxllet Clip, along with a copy of [Bxllet> with no extra charge here! Bxllet Clip: The Pinxp Issue by Wheels Within Wheels Publishing (itch.io)

Happy hunting!

[starfallpod]

Today, I was planning to tease that at $1000, I would announce what our first stretch goal is…

But we just went ahead and hit that overnight! So -

If our campaign hits $3200, the Starfall cast will record and share a D&D session set in my homebrew world!

Our cast has no shortage of people who play TTRPGs, and I’ve been excited to plunk people into my setting for a while!

Plus, $3200 is the minimum to pay our cast for the season, so it seems like fair trade!

So donate and help us hit that goal today!

[aromanticwhore]

Just realized I never posted my new dnd character hold on a second

Her name is Dorisse "Calypso" Acquerello, she's for a pokemon ttrpg campaign. She's a choreographer/coach for a pokemon dance troupe :)

[lizzorasaurus]

a favourite running gag in ttrpg groups I've been in is saying shit like "The Great Bard Fantasy (musician name here) once said (song lyric)" or "Once, a travelling bardic troup told a tale of (decribes the plot of a movie)" its good ok

[thydungeongal]

hello hello! i have two very specific itches i want to scratch with TTRPGs… firstly, do you know of any systems where magic users are like. terrifying? like “oh this group of level 1 bandits has a wizard with them, we need to call in the army” kinda stuff? i think a lot of systems have magic overwhelmingly common in-universe to facilitate player choice but if someone i’m fighting can shoot fire out of their hands i’m running the hell away! secondly do you know of any games where telekinesis is it’s own skill/ability? it’s so cool to me but i feel like it sometimes gets ignored for flashier abilities. i don’t know much beyond D&D/pathfinder/dungeon world so trying to branch out - thanks!!

Sorry for taking a while to answer, I've been having a bit of a rough time as of late.

I think you're right in saying that most fantasy RPGs that feature Wizards do tone them down just to make them a viable part of an adventuring party. I do know of a couple of exceptions but they all come with their own caveats:

Ars Magica. Ars Magica makes wizards seriously powerful. However, I don't think it quite fits what you're looking for, because Ars Magica assumes that players will be playing wizards. The difference in power scale becomes most pronounced in AM due to its reliance on troupe play: players will have multiple characters they control so even when they're wizard characters are out there in they towers doing wizard shit they're mortal minions might be out there having adventures. So even though wizards operate on a complety different power level from most mortals, they're still assumed to be playable.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and its clones. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is interesting in the sense that while the world of Warhammer is actually pretty high fantasy, WFRP zooms in so low to the ground level that the average adventurers aren't the great heroes that lead armies on battlefields in the miniatures game, but basically outcasts and vagabonds in a grimdark fantasy setting. Wizards are playable in WFRP but as a player character you will start as an apprentice wizard who can maybe cast a magic dart if you roll high enough. If the bandits have a Chaos Sorcerer with them then you know you're in trouble. This same power scaling applies to Zweihänder and Warlock!, both of which are basically WFRP clones but with completely different philosophies: Zweihänder is truer to the system of WFRP, utilizing a 1d100 roll under system but with no established setting, and it's also much more human-centric by default than WFRP, whereas Warlock! is very much a hybrid of WFRP with the old Fighting Fantasy game books. As such, it's much simpler than WFRP, utilizing a purely skill-based d20 roll under system on top of just two stats. All of the mentioned games are great (although my only experience with WFRP is with 2e). There might be free quickstarts of WFRP and Zweihänder available to my knowledge?

As for your second question, the only games that I know that consistently deal with telekinesis are superhero RPGs, unsurprisingly. If you like a heavy crunch approach then Champions (the superhero version of Hero) would be worth looking at, but be warned that Hero System is like notoriously complex. It's got lots of moving parts. But dang if those moving parts don't rule. You can use the telekinesis rules to figure out the exact weight of objects you can throw and how much they hurt when you throw them at someone. It's really goddamn involved.

For a simpler approach to telekinesis which is also based on a familiar d20 core, there's Mutants & Masterminds. It's also a rather heavy system although nowhere near as complex as Champions, and while a lot more abstract than Champions it still manages to scratch the itch of getting to build your own weird array of powers. The telekinesis rules are simple enough: each rank of telekinesis you have allows you to apply one point of Strength at range (note: in M&M terms one point of Strength is equivalent to a +1 Strength bonus in D&D terms, instead of being a Strength score of 1). You can then apply this virtual Strength as you could your normal Strength for lifting, throwing, etc. You can even add modifiers to it to allow for direct attacks with your telekinesis (telekinetic thrusts and constricting etc.) and so on.

There's also a comprehensive online system reference document containing all the open gaming content from Mutants & Masterminds, which includes most of the rules of the game. I think it's very much worth checking out!

[dice-wizard]

I am for my self writing a design document for a Troupe style TTRPG. I was wondering what systems you think would be good for something like that.

What are you looking for in your troupe style game, and where do you want your mechanical focus?

Example: are we talking about a group of soldiers and war? Or are we talking about generations of wizards? Is it a game about leading a pirate crew?

I have lots of suggestions but I'd like some more info!