#indie ttrpg design

[goblincow]

Been thinking about this & putting it into practice when writing The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick for a while: thanks to the ever excellent @babblegumsam (who you are probably already following and if not now is your chance to rectify that) for the final straw that made me write this up today. I truly believe if you have any interest in TTRPGs, play, or design you'll get something out of it, it's a further 5.4 mins read from here on out.

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Play is interaction.

Reading is interaction.

Below I will argue the necessity & usefulness of thinking the relationship between reading & play in TTRPGs as (almost) the exact same thing to unlock a wide & deep potential as reader/player/designer.

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Reading & play don't have to be the same thing. But you can't play without reading (in the sense of reading representations, images, ideas, concepts, interactions, etc, not just written text), because then there could be no interaction.

Reading and play can both accurately describe a given act or process. For instance: I read a table or piece of prose in a TTRPG book.

I say this because this is an idea that people struggle with, and while I encourage debate around the concept, we first have to agree on some basic building blocks that I hope I'm able to communicate here. For instance, there exists a potential reality in which tabletop roleplaying games are called tabletop reading games and nothing else about them changes (except for the consequential ability to think of reading in ttrpgs as play, and the potential this tool unlocks), because the prerequisite role for all other roles being played in a role-playing game is that of the reader.

This is true for much more than TTRPGs, but if we simply focus on acknowledging that reading & play in ttrpgs can and often are the same thing, then we are able to make informed design choices on this basis that we otherwise lack the agency to make – and which are nonetheless choices that are being made while we miss the opportunity to observe, read & ultimately interact and/or change and/or play with them.

To not think of the relationship between reading & play in TTRPGs in this way is to limit your agency as a designer, reader, player, and ultimately to cause yourself to be unable to synthesise these roles which are deeply inter-related, perhaps more so than they are disparate.

However you define it, Good Design necessitates the application of the right tool for the job. This requires making, maintaining & improving the tools that you have access to. The reader/player relationship is not only one of these, but an integral one that precedes a great many (if not all) of the other tools that you can & do employ as designer/player/reader.

If you allow this tool to remain blunt and imprecise (and especially if you don't acknowledge that it exists and that you use it in every choice you make), what you are doing is making a choice to blunt all of your other tools, even if you aren't aware of it.

This is poor design, poor play, and poor reading,* and I believe that this is true regardless of how you define each of those terms.

*though of course we could - and I think should - argue over the semantics & limitations of my imprecise use of the word "poor" there and the further ideas it smuggles in unacknowledged, but I trust that you will be able to infer what I'm trying to communicate in my use of it and I further hope that by leaving this imprecise application of a tool here in the way that I have used it, it might serve as a good example of the consequences, limitations & potential dangers of applying tools/terms/ideas that might be best described as "too blunt for the job", which is the very thing I'm attempting to highlight & address here.

It would not seem very sensible to choose to limit yourself in this way unless it allowed you access to new tools, which is a choice that you could only make once you are familiar with the central idea I'm presenting here – in other words, if you break the rules without understanding them you are very unlikely to be taking a step forward and much more likely to just be shuffling in place or even stepping backwards.

I hope that this short interaction has unlocked or reinforced your access to a useful tool that will allow you to sharpen your understanding of the play/reading relationship in TTRPGs and in turn refine & maintain your existing tools and your ability to synthesise new ones.

I look forward to discovering with you what new agencies this allows us to unlock, and I hope you take what you have read here and play with it to design new realities that you & I have yet to imagine.

[dinoberrypress]

One of my favorite things about the demo for You’re In Space And Everything’s Fucked is the selection of generated monsters we put in there. Each one was made with some friends in a group call, and we had a BLAST rolling on the monster table to put them together~

This is my fav:

Check out the demo to see the rest of the monstrosities we made!

And sign up for the Kickstarter to get notified when we launch!

[table-cat-games]

Street Wolves, the ttrpg setting I've been working on for two (plus) years is finally out! It's been a passion project of mine and I hope you dig it. It's for Savage Worlds, which is a great platform for the type of adventures that you can play in Street Wolves. Street Wolves is a synthwave and neo-noir inspired, retro-future setting. The players fight the rot just under the surface of a neon lit late 1980s. There's new edges, hinderances, a Drive system for agents on the edge, tables to flavor chases, thematic powers, mission generators, an included adventure, a free Player's guide and TONs more. It's available on:

The Table Cat Games store

Itch.io

Coming soon to Drive Thru RPG

If you'd like to save some cash, then join the mailing list for a 20% off discount. Discount ends 2/14. Mail list link

[chaosmeistergames]

Just posted the playtest edition of my d12 Fantasy Game on Itch. Any Feedback is highly appreciated! :-D Compared to my usual 1 pagers this is going to be a banger.  

[eliotbaum]

The Performer 🎭🎶 A character class for The Hidden Isle.

You can preorder the TTRPG here

[probablyday]

millennial nerd bertie wooster for some reason

[drakeanddice]

Haunted by a fantasy world where "adventurer" is handled in the same way as "assassin" in John Wick. An ifykyk secondary economy running on gold coins where everyone knows each other but no one acknowledges the elephant in the room because we have manners about our weird-ass line of deadly desperate dangerous work.

Rolling into town, looking immaculate. Checking into the Inn. Not an inn, or the coaching house, or the traveler's hostel. The Inn. The one that takes my ridiculous oversized coin and says that my room is ready, and will I need to visit the Smith today? Perhaps a meeting with the Vintner? Shall I send up the Gourmand?

"Good afternoon, Master Whicke," the Smith says, putting aside the barrel scraper he's been working on to flip a switch beside the forge. Racks of tenpenny nails and trowels and hammers fold back to reveal the glittering points and edges of a score of swords and axes and spearpoints lit with the flicker of finely-tuned enchantments. "Shall we tour what's new?"

"What sort of occasion are we hosting, Master Whicke?" The Vintner asks, pocketing the coin with a sigh. "A funeral," you say.

"Ah, well perhaps something light to start, then," she says selecting a straight-walled flask that glitters with contained starlight, proof against the touch of the undead. " And something for remembrance," she plucks a small crock of something evil-smelling and phosphorescent. "And then something to really bring down the house." She gingerly selects a double ampoule of energetic looking jellies.

The Gourmand carefully runs his knife through the salted flank of a cockatrice with a pursing of the lips. "So many neglect trail rations, Master Whicke, and it is their shame. Paired with goldenwheat pancakes and carrion honey, a mouthful of cockatrice--properly seasoned of course--will keep the mummy rot at bay, even post-exposure. I have been given to indicate by the Management that your current escapade may make such information useful to you. I will of course wrap your purchases exceedingly carefully. Rot will be your constant companion in the Black Pyramid."

There's something here.

[sahonithereadwolf]

I ended up ripping out my entire health system the other day to make a whole new one. This is the most last minute major system change completely on gut instinct but it was absolutely the right move.

So, the system I was using was very much taking it's cues from a lot of games that where descendants of FATE. But the health was still very much split into mental/physical. Take 4 boxes of damage, get an injury tag that gives you negatives until you're ko'ed.

But… Instead I tied them to the playbooks my game function off of. Each character is made tags made from themed open ended questions you pick to answer.

You have minor injuries still as those bars fill up. But when all the bars in a playbook are, you get a major injury that in some way gets in the way of using your playbook. You no longer get access to all your positive tags as long as it's an issue.

Sure you have a magic sword, but it's hard to use if you have a broken arm or lost confidence in your skill to protect others.

If you get three major injuries, meaning you can't use any of your playbooks, you become "in distress". You are no longer a main character who takes initiative, the daring pulp adventurer, but the "damsel in distress". You're a passive supporting character who can't drive things forward, but react

You might still help, but the spotlight and heroics are for others

Anyways, this was a roundabout way of explaining this screenshot from my notes

[ostrichmonkey-games]

Was talking about sandbox design in a ttrpg server, and though this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, I think these really are good things to consider when you approach sandbox design in a ttrpg (and elsewhere!)

[sprintingowl]

This Discord Has Ghosts In It

It doesn't get talked about enough, but This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a rad example of how you can adapt game design to your surroundings.

Basically, This Discord Has Ghosts In It is a digital larp. It's Phasmophobia played by chat. Your group creates a discord server to function as a haunted house, then you all explore it, building new 'rooms' out of channels as you go.

Some players take the roles of ghosts, and are muted but can affect the environment in the haunted house.

Other players take the roles of explorers, and can talk, but the ghosts are all listening.

Discord wasn't built to be gamified this way, but that doesn't matter.

As long as you can guarantee consistent behavior from a thing, you can build mechanics off of it.

Anything in your environment can be turned into a game.

And in this particular case, it's a really good one!

The mechanics lend themselves well to the kinds of pacing, limited communication, and untrustworthy setting that any good ghost story needs.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The Kickstarter for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Live!!

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our team’s debut TTRPG, over three years in the making! The campaign will run from April 10th to May 10th!

How far would you go to learn the truth?

Play amateur detectives caught up in things they barely understand, and explore how the lives of your characters unravel as they push themselves to dig deeper into the unknown!

Tense investigations!

Delve into an investigation-focused mystery and horror system that lets players take initiative and use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues and deduce conclusions themselves. A few bad rolls won’t get the party hopelessly stuck, but at the same time Eureka respects their intellect and lets them take charge of solving the mystery!

Character-driven gameplay!

Stats and abilities are based on who your character is as a person. Freeform character creation allows you to build a totally unique little guy, and have a totally unique gameplay experience with him! This is supported by the backbone of the Composure mechanic. Stress, fear, fatigue, and hunger will wear your investigators down as they trudge deeper into the unknown. Food, sleep, and connections with their fellow investigators are the only way to keep them going!

Secrets inside and out! 

Any investigator could be a monster, helping their friends while trying not to reveal their true natures. The party will learn to trust and rely on each other, or explode into a tangled net of drama!

Intense, tactical combat! 

Hits are devastating, and misses are unpredictable–firing a gun will always change the situation somehow, for better or for worse!

Now in Technicolor!

Evocative artwork from talented femme-fatales @chaospyromancy and @qsycomplainsalot and the mysterious @theblackwarden paint a gorgeously-realized portrait of a world with shadows lurking in every corner.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. We are almost at the end, we just need some financial support to put the finishing touches on it and make the final push to get it ready for official release!

With every stretch goal we meet, the game gets better and better. Tons of beautiful new artwork, new options for gameplay, and even two entirely new playable Monsters could be added to the book, so visit the Kickstarter and secure your copy today!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[theinstagrahame]

Announcing: Restful Actions

(It's here. You can go get it now!)

Restful Actions is a collection of 10 minigames for downtime periods in any TTRPG. They're designed to help players resolve character conflicts, complete goals, heal or explore, and take much shorter shopping trips. (You can, in fact, download the shopping trip minigame as a demo!)

For GMs, the goal is to give you a break, so you can start preparing the next Big Event. The minigames invite players to fill in some details of the world, creating shops, landmarks, even creatures.

You can pick up your copy here:

I've talked about this thing in more detail here:

[dinoberrypress]

You’re In Space And Everything’s Fucked is a terrifying #ttrpg tribute to all things sci-fi horror. This is one you won't wanna miss!

Check out the Demo and sign up for the Kickstarter today!

https://bytes.rip/spacefucked

[table-cat-games]

Also finished the color version of page 1 for the Street Wolves character sheets today. I'm literally exhausted. My fingers and wrist hurts. Tomorrow I have one last page to do the color treatment to, then I gotta put in the form fillable pdf form and I can call this part of the project done!

[chaosmeistergames]

Open Gaming Jam has started

The Jam has just started on Itch! I would love to see some of you fine creative folks participate and share your open-license games. Don’t know what a Jam is? Essentially various creators come together to make something for a specific theme/topic/system and share it on Itch.io. Can be free, can be sold. However you like. They usually run for a month so you need to get cracking. However, there is no need for the game to be finished by the end of the Jam. Many participants in other Jams developed their submissions further, even into Kickstarters. https://itch.io/jam/open-gaming-jam 

[eliotbaum]

The Hunter / The Prowler / The Occultist / The Champion

4 character classes from The Hidden Isle.

Kickstarter ends in less than two weeks!