#dicepool

[pencilbrony]

Updated the DicePool ruleset

[xronium]

SBuRP

hi, gonna pop in here to advertise a server i made for roleplaying sburb/sgrub game sessions

it's a layout with a bunch of different channels utilising discord's thread system and can have many sessions running at once! it's rules are based around the sburb dicepools ruleset with tweaks made for roleplaying purposes.

if you're interested, please join the link here!

if you have any questions message me or ask on the blog!

[flameshadowconjuring]

I did not have high expectations (mechanically) for the Stormlight/Cosmere rpg, same as with any IP tie-in game, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read the beta rules. From what I have read, I would rather run or play in the Cosmere rpg than the three rpgs that I have played extensively (DnD 5e, FFG Star Wars, Pathfinder 2e). I am going to be comparing the Cosmere rpg to these three frames of reference of mine, and explain what I like about it. This is all theory for now, though I will run the Bridge 9 one-shot in a couple of weeks for my playgroup. And yes, I know that most of the Cosmere rpg ain't novel. Beyond borrowing from 2-3 of my three frames of reference, the initiative is basically the one from 'Shadow of the Demon Lord', etc.

I have mixed feelings about the plot die. I don't actually like narrative mechanics in the first place. That being said, no system I've played was devoid of mechanics I dislike, and the plot die is (almost) the least objectionable a core narrative mechanic could be for me, beyond nonexistence. The obvious point of comparison for me is obviously the Star Wars system. The plot die's opportunity and complication are basically analogous to SW's triumph/advantage and despair/threat. In addition to that, the lead designer of the Cosmere rpg, Andrew Fischer, also worked on the SW system.

I think that the plot die is better than the Star Wars dicepool mechanic in every possible way. First of all, the plot die is an opt-in kind of deal. Barring a few player abilities (the existence of which is my only criticism of the plot die), the GM decides whether it gets rolled or not, with the rules advising the GM to use it roughly 30% of the time, specifically in exciting moments. In Star Wars, every roll produces these narrative effects. Yes, technically, 1s and 20s also produce complications and opportunities in the Cosmere rpg, but the designers added them because people played like that was already the case because of how they are used to crits from other games. A tenth chance of one of these is much lower than almost 100% like in SW. Anyway, the point is that when we played the Star Wars system, having to come up with narrative stuff on every roll was a chore, rather than fun and exciting. Sometimes I would get a triumph on a roll for a routine check, and rather than that being exciting, it was more like 'uhh, what does this even mean?'. Sure, there are mechanical ways in Star Wars to spend advantages and threats and so on. What tended to happen in combat though was that unless you used advantages to crit someone or auto-fire, you just used it to give someone else a bonus die. And the most likely result from a bonus die beyond a blank was getting an advantage. The same principle happened out of combat, where we often took strain for threats and regained for advantages. A lot of abstract resources were pushed around, with a negligible net effect. Certainly not something worth that giant hassle. Also, sometimes you would get a triumph effect and three threats. That was always hard to interpret.

Secondly, the plot die is way simpler, which has a whole host of benefits. In SW, there are six different narrative dice with specialized symbols. You have to buy a lot of overpriced plastic to even play the game. The plot die of the Cosmere is a single d6. Sure, its nicer to use the custom one you can buy from Brotherwise, but the beta rules advise on how to use a normal d6 for the plot die. 1,2 are complications, with a bonus to your roll equal to twice what you rolled (+2 or +4), 3,4 are blanks, and 5,6 are opportunities. That is easy to remember, since higher numbers=better narrative result. While you could technically do the same with SW, the fact that there are six of them, including d12s, makes it completely impractical. Also, the dice in SW have either only all positive effects or only all negative effects. If you are gonna do this entire narrative crap, at least do interesting stuff with it, like higher chance of success but with negative narrative effect. Those make for better stories and better game design. And oh look, that is exactly what the plot die does. So, yeah. In case you couldn't tell, I hate the action resolution dicepool mechanic of SW.

I really like the progression system of the Cosmere rpg, with the exception of using milestone advancement (though its inclusion's suckery is mitigated by the goal/reward thing). It is actually conceptually very simple, but very flexible, meaning there is a lot of meaningful choice without overwhelming a new player. Every level, you get (in addition to a couple other things) one talent from one of your skill trees, called paths. I am currently a player in a Pf2e campaign, and leveling up is a chore rather than fun. Different levels give you different kinds of feats, so it is not very straight forward. It also takes a long time to read all the feats I qualify for, most of which don't even interest me. Also, it is very easy in Pathfinder to screw up if you don't plan out your characters progression in advance. When I started, I took the ranger's crossbow feat. Turns out that was a trap: no other feats actually help crossbows, and most of the good ranger feats require you to attack multiple times or in melee, neither of which a crossbow is made for. In a skill tree system like Cosmere, it is very easy to identify what talents I can take, and I can immediately see whether a talent is something I can build on by seeing how many talents are further down from it.

Star Wars also uses skill trees, but you basically get one big tree with a lot of filler talents you have to take to progress, but which you aren't actually interested in. The Cosmere rpg has a stronger focus on mixing and matching from different trees, with trees going less deep, having less filler. That looks more fun to me. This in-built multipathing is really cool. Multiclassing in DnD 5e was an afterthought, and is either very suboptimal or very broken, with barely anything in-between. I like how the Cosmere rpg is like 'hey, most characters fit multiple archetypes, lets reflect that in the game by not only supporting multiclassing from the ground up, but also actively encourage it'. Also the one talent per level thing makes leveling very manageable from a complexity standpoint.

Moving on to the magic, I really like that PCs don't start out magical. You earn your cool powers through play. Also, they said that they balanced the heroic (non-magical) and invested (magical) paths against each other, so that it is perfectly valid to only take talents from heroic paths and those who take invested path talents will often alternate between those and heroic ones. If true, that sounds awesome. And of course, the magic is Sanderson magic, so its really good. The best way to encourage creativity in players is to give them a smallish list of options, but have these options be very flexible. That is exactly how the Stormlight magic system works, with characters being closer to superheroes than DnD spellcasters. I think that is way more interesting. One of the frustrating things with DnD 5e is that the magic is never explained in a way that the GM can intuit how it works. Instead, they just spell out exactly what any given spell does, making them very rigid. Spellcasters have too many options, each of which is super rigid. Worst of both worlds. With the Cosmere, though I am not an arcanist superfan, I do understand the magic well enough that I am confident in adjudicating creative uses of powers (which the system explicitly supports!). Investiture, which is basically mp, is also just so much cleaner than spellslots, a vestigial leftover from vancian magic that the DnD designers were too cowardly to kill completely.

Finally, combat. I dislike armor class, so I am a big fan of armor just reducing damage, like the soak value in SW or DR in Gurps. The initiative system has me most excited to be honest. I think it will really speed up combat in multiple ways. For one, there is no die rolling and writing down initiative values and ordering them. Players basically just say when they want to do their turn. This also should make them more attentive, since they can't just wait for the GM to call their name. It also means that players can guarantee to go after each other, so that should encourage cooperation and teamwork. The distinction between fast two-action turns and slow three-action turns looks like it will force players to make a meaningful choice every turn. Overall, looks like a simple, clean and fast initiative system. The two-three actions remind me of Pf2e, though notably the reaction is much more relevant in the Cosmere rpg.

The graze rule, where a character on a miss can still spend 1 focus to deal their weapon's damage dice to their target, is very interesting. My initial instinct was to think that it is really OP. It would probably be a really OP rule if armor did not reduce damage, but given that it has gone through extensive playtesting, I assume that it is actually balanced. Assuming it is balanced, I think its pretty cool, since it means that you still managed to do something, even if you missed your one attack of the round. Makes it less frustrating.

So yeah, those were my main thoughts on the Cosmere rpg. It is not my most anticipated rpg, but I do intend to back and run it and am also really looking forward to the world guide as a fan of the books.

[universalthaumaturge]

for the tarot ask game -

Fortitude — What are your tricks for staying motivated in the middle of a project? OR Are you interested in making game design a career?

The Star — Talk about a game you’re working on and what excites you about it.

thanks for the questions!!! :D

Fortitude — What are your tricks for staying motivated in the middle of a project?

i start spitballing! writing down mechanics i won't use, futzing with something here or there and undoing the changes later, writing bad lore prose, working on a different game… or, sometimes, i just reread other systems!

The Star — Talk about a game you’re working on and what excites you about it.

When Time Was Young (working title), the game where i decided to just go apeshit and do what I like!!! the basic idea is that time was born ~50 years ago at most (hard to measure exactly), and the world is still… let's say malleable?; mutually exclusive things happen at the same time, maps are more suggestions than rules, causality hasn't been invented yet, the substrate of all is-ness bleeds into the world, all that fun stuff! but what excites me the most about it is how metaphysic-y and pretentious i get to be >:3c like, it uses FATE approaches instead of "traditional" attributes because the world itself runs on narrative logic! and there are beings from before Time was born, who use different approaches- it's fun to write about a guy who literally cannot act "Subtle", but who has 6 dice in "Being a Prick"! it also has no set "core mechanic"- it's a d6 dicepool, but how you read the dice depends from roll to roll! you might take the highest die to beat a 1-6 difficulty, check a pre-made table, count how many dice hit a target number, or whatever works! if reality itself isn't rigid, why would the core rules be?

also the classes have abilities that i think are fun to write- Occultists can do pretty much anything so long as they can justify it with real-world occultism; Thaumaturges can make swords out of sunlight and poems, and awaken inanimate objects to life; Harlequins get XP for trolling people and have tons of retroactive narrative declaration stuff; Swordbearers can cut spacetime and choose whether to deal narrative or mechanical damage... i like giving characters weird shit they can do!

[thefiresontheheight]

Outside us Nothing

“Alright, ethernauts,” you say to your little coterie of peregrine Freetravelers, “we’ve got some tough choices facing us right now. What are we gonna do here? What’s our move?”

Your crew mates look at one another, a criminal, a wizard, an insect, a bird, tentacles hanging down from the ceiling, a robot. It would be difficult to imagine a group with less in common. And still here you all are being asked to work together, fill your spaceship’s empty fuel stores, and all of your empty bellies. To make this decision as you always have to. Together.

“We can’t afford to not take this contract,” the robot gun-witch says, putting their heels on the table.

“But bounty hunting now?” the giant, tentacled monstrosity in the walls says, fretfully playing his hands together. “We never had to do something that brutal when I was working for the company.”

“Listen, I’m not crazy about it either, newbie,” the bawalang says, her carapace glistening with viral phage strains, “but what are we gonna do about it? We need to eat. And gas ain’t cheap. No one’s offering us smuggling work, and absolutely nothing honest.”

You take a breath, look out the porthole at the all black everything. Space. The void. There are other ships out there, kerama points, space-stations, warcraft, worlds, suns, corporations, monasteries, cults, gods, monsters. Everything. But none of that will help you all stay alive. For all intents and purposes outside you and your ship there is nothing else in the universe.

“Listen,” you begin, “I think I have a plan…”

INTRODUCING! Outside us Nothing, a new-weird flavored, science fantasy ttrpg inspired by the illustrious likes of Cowboy Bebop, Space Sweepers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and even Star Wars itself. A game of survival, consensus, and making a home in a vast and bizarre and uncaring and beautiful universe. I.E. I’m currently writing my own rules-light, dicepool-using ttrpg taking design cues from Belonging Outside Belonging and Powered by the Apocalypse. And I wanted to have a big fancy announcement to build hype and hopefully get people interested in play testing. I’m going to be using these tags to talk about some of the design and processes soon, so watch this space, and keep flying.

[samueldays]

Shared Universe Blunders 5: Abstraction Interaction

Shadowrun is a cyberpunk game set in the near-future twenty-seventies, featuring mages and dragons along with the hackers and guns. It has rules for hacking into people's computers. This is easiest if you are physically at the target computer. Remote hacking attempts over a network may be penalized by a trait called Noise.

Noise is local to an area and its current circumstances. The Noise value is subtracted from the hacker's dicepool. Areas may have a Noise trait for many different reasons: If you're at a packed stadium concert and your connection is lagging because everyone nearby is streaming future smartphone video on the same overloaded grid, that's Noise. If you're in the middle of nowhere and it's hard to get a signal, that's Noise. If you're in the basement of an arcology and your wireless keeps bouncing off pipes and plating, that's Noise. If an enemy has placed a signal jammer, that's also Noise.

So far, so good. Simple abstraction for player convenience, the GM assigns a Noise rating to the location, the hacker takes that much penalty. The book contains a list of example Noise values, and a couple of specific items for countering Noise, like a satellite uplink for use in remote areas.

Then one of the splatbooks (Street Grimoire, 5th edition) has a magic spell called "Decrease Noise" which does exactly what it says. Your connection magically gets better, and I mean magically in a derogatory sense. The spell does not describe how it causes this effect, nor is it limited in what sources of Noise it can affect. It simply decreases the Noise number in the nearby area.

This is bad.

Most of the rest of the game mechanics interact with the game world in some way that is represented by an abstraction. Decrease Noise interacts directly with the abstraction. This makes it hard to reason about. How does it work? Does it interact with other mechanics? Are bystanders likely to notice? Unknown!

Games that are generally abstract can work fine, but having one or a few elements much more abstract than the rest makes those stand out as bizarre out-of-character elements. The rulebook pokes into the world.

Pick an abstraction level and stick to it.

(Similar criticism also applies to that one subsystem which is far more gritty and detailed than the rest of a game.)

In Shadowrun's case, this spell feels extra dumb because it violates niche protection. The fluff says that magic is tied to living things, particularly living minds, and the "gaiasphere" of the planet. The mechanics back this up in several ways: getting cyberlimbs installed reduces one's magical potential, magic doesn't work in outer space, mana-based illusions do not show up on cameras, and many spells can be resisted with "Object Resistance", a trait that scales with the complexity and processing of an object: 3 dice for carved wood, 9 dice for a camera, 15 dice for a car. This encourages characters to pick a niche and stick to it: magic or machine?

The existence of a spell that magically improves the internet connections of everyone nearby is mages treading into hacker territory, threatening to obsolete a bunch of hacker gear. D&D had a severe problem with this back in the day, leading to the joke of "the wizard casts Solve Problem".

It seems to me that this is probably linked to the abstraction mistake: instead of considering what sort of things magic does in the world, the developer wrote a spell to do something in the rulebook.

[oliviridian]

i started work on an update for the TTRPG I wrote a while back and I think it's looking like a nice set of little changes. I really wanna do a large scale rework of one major subsystem and I do need to think of some fun mechanical levers to pull on in a d6 dicepool

[sahonithereadwolf]

Ahhhh, the dice system in my new game is so fuckin' cool. I want to show all of you soon but can't yet. I'm not allowed. But I think I made something excellent, fresh, and new. Told some friends about it in private and at least one of them got excited over the idea, so you know What I can tell you about it is it's a d12 dicepool system . I make those 2 extra sides matter, and I have divorced it from a binary of pass/fail, and crits look extremely different than what you're use to in other games. My friend described what I'm making as a "yes, and..." sort of game

[drabble-roll-repeat]

.NULL_SECTOR::

I was inspired to create a single page TTRPG. It uses a very simple d6 dicepool system. I hope that people find it interesting. I'd love to keep working on it.

[malevolententity]

hey just a headsup if i end up liking this campaign i will be hardcore liveblogging it for its entire run so please blacklist -> the suckening liveblog <- if you dont want to hear me yelling

with that out of the way OHHHHHHH MY GOD ITS IN V20 OHHHHHHHH I CANT WAIT. GOD BLESS CHARLIE ADMITTING THAT VTM IS EASIER THAN DND BECAUSE IT IS. IT SO FUCKING IS. ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF A DICEPOOL ITS SO MUCH FUCKIN EASIER OHHHH MY GOD I LOVE VTM PLEASE GOD JRWI FANS I HOPE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH MY SILLY SYSTEM AND USE IT FOR THINGS OTHER THAN BEING A VAMPIRE. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ITS MY FAVORITE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD

[kiinngazau]

Since I made a couple posts ranting about how excited I am about it, here’s a post explaining some of the basic mechanics of the TTRPG me and my boyfriend are making, Hemlock. This is purely a passion project for funsies, and I don’t plan to ever sell it, but I may release it for free eventually. So the game uses D6s, also known as 6 sided dice. Whenever you do something that you could reasonably fail at, you make a roll, rolling a dicepool typically equal to the ability you’re using for that roll(your basic stats) plus the skill you’re using for that roll(your more specific stats). All abilities and skills start at 1, and when you create your character, you choose +1 to three of your abilities, and gain the first mark in three of your skills. A mark causes that skill to gain +2, but you can only have up to three of them in a single skill. So there’s basic rolling mechanics done. I’ll rant about the classes and stuff later, which I think people will be more interested in.

[pencilbrony]

DicePool

[martianmuckraker]

Cogent Playtest

As mentioned earlier on this blog Shadiversity and Jazza have released an Open Game RPG Framework called Cogent. I recently was able to playtest it out with some friends. I also got to try out Owlbear Rodeo. Thoughts on Owlbear Overall, Owlbear is great . . . but not for dicepool systems. At least in its current state. It’s getting a overhaul in June though that I suspect will fix. Currently,…

[jcdenoche]

Sagrada is one of my favorite intro games to non-gamers since the concept is pretty straight forward and also very colorful. #sagradaboardgame #dicepool #stainedglasswindow #bggcommunity #tabletopgames #beardednerd #gaymer (at Orlando, Florida) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDTuHirhC0s/?igshid=1ngeo879e3m8g

[gwinnetts]

zetta reynolds | sole survivor | info | tag | aesthetics | repost | @gwinnetts

wrath: you are angry. be mad. be livid. be righteous. they will tell you that you are too loud, too aggressive, too upsetting; ignore their words. become the voice you’ve always needed to hear. that anger gives you the voice of change. do not tread lightly; change the world. wrath is not sinful, it is a call to make tides to change this state of being.

[gwinnetts-archive]

// i haven’t done a new heights headcanon post and that’s a sin

elle — 5′0″ zetta — 5′2″ riley — 6′2″ bellamy — 5′3″ maccready — 5′5″

xavier — 5′11″ x6-88 — 5′10″ shaun — 5′11″  edward deegan — 6′4″ jack cabot — 5′7″ emogene cabot — 5′10″

link (age 10) — 4′2″ link (age 17-19) — 5′6″ braska — 5′7″ isa / saïx — 6′2″ xion — 5′2″ will — 5′11″