#rpg game systems

[legionofmyth]

Palladium Books: Are dated gameplay mechanics holding these games back?

Are Palladium Books' game mechanics stuck in the past? ⏳ In this video, we explore the debate on whether these classic RPG rules need a modern update. Join the conversation and see if it's time for Palladium Books to evolve with the times. Click to watch and weigh in! #PalladiumBooks #RPGDebate #TabletopRPG #TTRPG #RPGCommunity

Beyond the Supernatural 2E – PDF Dead Reign – [PDF]Palladium Fantasy RPG (2e) – [PDF] This video examines the game mechanics in Palladium Books that players argue are dated and in need of modernization. Ready to explore whether it’s time for Palladium Books to evolve? Dive in and watch the video! Palladium Books has been a staple in the tabletop RPG community for decades, but as the gaming world…

[fort-of-novelty]

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

[prokopetz]

don't answer that last ask I sent you actually. a) because I've since realized you rightfully don't give a shit about wizards of the coast, and would be justified in deleting the info I wanted from your brain as soon as you learned it, b) because I realized you aren't Google, and c) because I Googled it and found out myself.

on a related note, did you know wizards copyrighted the term "d20 system??" wtf. that was the last place I expected to have problems. I thought it'd be, like, "armor class" or "difficulty class" or something else similarly oppressive and cruel to copyright that would force me to change my whole rules document, and mess with my player's ability to remember which mechanics have had their name changed.

Somehow copyrighting the term "d20 system" feels even wronger than that.

Wizards of the Coast is the outfit that popularised the idea of categorising game systems according to the shape of the dice you roll in the first place. There are a few prior examples of games with similar naming conventions, including West End Games' D6 System – which is where WotC probably got the idea – but the idea of "dX systems", where X is the shape of the dice you roll, as coherent categories of games is very much a post-d20 System phenomenon.

That is, it's not that WotC trademarked (note: not "copyrighted") an existing piece of in-use terminology when they trademarked the term "d20 System"; it's that the idea of lumping all game systems which make use of twenty-sided dice together under the category of "d20 systems" was popularised by WotC's trademark.

(Indeed, if one were feeling conspiratorial, one might observe that the idea that all systems which roll the same-shaped dice are basically interchangeable with one another is a notion whose popularisation has proven very convenient for WotC's post-3E marketing strategy!)

[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:

[maspers]

Hundred Line as a TTRPG AU

Crap maybe this *is* my latest obsession. Anyway here's the AU where Hundred Line is a frankly insane tabletop game campaign being played by people who definitely had no idea what they were getting into. (Spoilers, obviously)

Takumi quite possibly had the most stressful time in the group's previous campaign, and was looking forward to something relatively more straightforward. He was also expecting to have significantly less of a role in the main plot, building a relatively simple Fighter character with a rather generic personality. He just wants to take a break, have fun with his friends, and not think too hard. Obviously this didn't pan out for him, and suddenly he's stuck dealing with being the centerpiece of the most convoluted plot known to mankind. He rolls with it, thankfully, but not without complaint.

Darumi has been begging the group to play a Danganronpa-style campaign for ages, and has finally decided to completely throw away subtlety with her character in this campaign. At first everyone is genuinely annoyed with her for doing this, but as the plot progresses and things get more complicated she starts getting more interested in what's actually happening in the game, which leads to her PC becoming more nuanced as things progress, culminating in some absolutely brilliant moments down the line that the group will remember forever.

Eito is a huge fan of playing very cliched character archetypes and injecting some personality into them to make them fun for everyone else at the table, so at first his character in this campaign seemed very on-brand for him... until suddenly All The Things happen and the rest of the group screamed at him for like twenty minutes straight. He just chuckles and comments that he's relieved none of the other players caught a glimpse of his character sheet earlier in the story and spoiled the twists ahead of time. Then he proceeds to continue playing the most unhinged character in the party. He also incidentally ends up having the most scheduling conflicts later on, but that doesn't stop him from still engaging in shenanigans every time he sits down at the table.

Tsubasa had been hoping to experiment a little in this campaign. When she learned the group had decided on aiming for a sci-fi setting, she thought designing a character around fighting in a vehicle would be interesting and unorthodox (it even required a bit of homebrew). Instead she ended up being this campaign's Only Sane Person, and all those mechanical Skills she got for the car ended up making her the only PC that can reliably do useful stuff outside of combat. She's at first a bit disgruntled about not getting more of the spotlight, but soon changes her tune when she realizes how insane this campaign is.

Nozomi actually wasn't originally part of this campaign, or part of the group at all, but she was a mutual friend of the group who'd expressed interest in playing. Plus, the group really needed a healer. So they let her join. Since she created her character after the others, she decided to give her PC a connection to the backstory of Takumi's character, just to spice things up a little. Since she's new to the game, the GM decided to help her out a bit too by sneakily telling her some of the plot twists in advance, but she ends up not needing much assistance. She takes to the game like a duck to water and soon reveals some really impressive roleplaying chops.

Shion is the campaign's Game Master, who has been working on designing this campaign for over a year and he is SO HYPED to finally show it off to his friends. He slammed the massive binder down on the table, said it was the outline for the campaign, and everyone recoiled in horror. But he'd proven himself to be a genuinely good and fair GM in the past so they were willing to give it a shot, and soon he had them all hooked. Which is good, because despite his massive collection of plans and notes somehow the group STILL manages to go off the rails and he has to improvise... which ultimately leads to him stealing plotlines from other genres.

The rest of the Hundred Line characters are NPCs, because despite them all being extremely cool having over a dozen of players in one campaign is a bit much. I considered Gaku, Kurara, Takemaru, and Yugamu as potential options for a sixth player but eh it wasn't the vibe. Yugamu might be Shion's GMPC? Perhaps most if not all of the NPCs are at least vaguely based on people Shion knows IRL. Gaku seems like the type of person who wouldn't have the time or patience to play with the group but he's still their friend or something so there's an NPC made in his honor.

They do in fact keep playing through multiple Routes. Shion asked everyone to keep backups of their starting character sheets "for reasons" which means implementing the "Special Review" mechanic isn't too difficult, and after everyone got over freaking out about the Day 100 reveals, they soon got really into the whole alternate endings gimmick. None of the group had ever played a campaign with a plot like this one before, and between Shion's extensive notes and everyone else's propensity for derailing things they can just keep coming back to this campaign over and over and over again whenever they have downtime. They all agree having the chance to explore the same group of characters from multiple angles is exciting. Even when they move on to other campaigns, the group often ends up coming back to this one to try out a new route in the form of a oneshot or twoshot game.

Other random thoughts on this idea:

When they finally did the Killing Game Route, Darumi literally shrieked so loudly from excitement that she shattered glass.

It's a running gag at the table that Takumi's character keeps getting love interests in each route. He's genuinely trying to avoid this, but he also cares too much about the game to deliberately prevent it ("It would be out of character!") and eventually he just groans every time another romance arc begins.

Honestly quite a lot of the game is the rest of the group trolling the heck out of Takumi. But he's a good sport about it, and they know not to go too far because usually the games are hosted at his place and he provides snacks.

Tsubasa didn't mean for vomiting to become a recurring character trait, it just kind of kept happening and soon she had no choice but to just kind of let it continue to be a thing. It really shouldn't be funny, but for some reason it never fails to get someone to laugh.

The entire Retsnom Route was Shion making things up on the fly ("monster" backwards? really?) and letting Darumi do whatever she wanted. It was nuts.

Shion does in fact do voices for all the characters, and he invented the entire Futuran conlang from scratch. He's very proud of it, but the players didn't really put too much effort into trying to decipher it during the first route so he just dropped it, disappointed. They didn't realize it was a full conlang until later on, and all of them apologized to him for not letting him show it off more.

The Cult of Takumi Route is this group's Noodle Incident. None of them will ever speak of it ever again.

Since this campaign was her first time playing this game, Nozomi ends up with a very skewed idea of what the game system is NORMALLY like. Now in every campaign she plays since, she's always way more paranoid about crazy plot shifts, even when it's someone else taking their turn as GM and clearly aiming for something more light-hearted.

Eito has never played a character like the one he plays in this game before or since, but because his character in this campaign was so jarring every character he's made since receives tons of side-eye and suspicion from other players. "I swear, I'm literally just playing a normal cleric this time, really! Can't you trust me on this?" "NEVER AGAIN."

Takumi has passed out on the table multiple times.

Everyone agrees Tsubasa is the MVP because of her ability to fix things and otherwise contribute to the party and plot in ways that don't involve combat or assorted shenaniganry. That, or it's because she always brings the food everyone likes, and is the one person actively trying to keep track of all the routes and points of divergences despite that having very little to do with her character.

Everyone has screamed some variation of "What even IS this?!?" at Shion at least twice. And "Are you kidding me?", as well as just exasperated screams and expletives. Shion just laughs it off.

Speaking of Shion, inviting a new player (Nozomi) was actually kind of a risk because Shion's games often have those "GM inserting their fetishes into the game for their own amusement" vibes. Shion isn't actually doing this on purpose, he's genuinely oblivious to just how Weird the Weird Stuff he puts in his games is, but while the group is used to it they're aware other people might get the wrong idea. Thankfully Nozomi's known most of the group for quite some time, so she kind of knew what to expect from Shion.

Just as how Darumi's wanted to do a Danganronpa campaign for ages, Eito has wanted to play a character wielding a scythe for ages. He's had the descriptions of Judge, Jury, and Executioner written down on a WIP Google Doc for half a decade, but in previous campaigns he either couldn't figure out how to make it work or it was just too unrealistic for the campaign setting (scythes aren't good weapons, really). But in this campaign Shion is letting the group do basically whatever they want for combat and Eito is ecstatic.

The whole "Nozomi stays by Moko's bedside for ages" thing genuinely caught Shion off guard despite most of the first route generally going to play, so he needed to make up the stuff about needing to get medicine in order to bait her away. The entire thunderstorm scene was a happy accident. Shion can't believe it worked out as well as it did.

Darumi actually made cosplay for everyone, and they all went to a local Con dressed up as their characters' combat uniforms. Quite a few people noticed and asked questions, leading the group to have to explain themselves and that their costumes were based off of their own TTRPG campaign that they'd been running for over a year and a half at that point. Someone recommended they try doing an Actual Play series. Obviously they couldn't do an Actual Play of their Hundred Line characters (since the audience wouldn't have context), but they still thought it was a neat idea, so instead their Actual Play series was Persona 2 (Darumi is GMing, Nozomi plays Tatsuya, Tsubasa plays Lisa, Eito plays Eikichi, Takumi plays Maya, and Shion plays Jun. And then when they do a second season for Eternal Punishment, Nozomi and Takumi are still Tatsuya and Maya but now Tsubasa plays Katsuya, Shion's playing Ulala, and Eito's playing Baofu).

"Shion I swear if you unfold your GM screen to reveal a laptop with a custom-programmed visual novel on it I will shove my water bottle down your throat."

Nozomi is not a violent person but over the course of the campaign she ends up slapping Eito in the face not once but twice. The second time was because he insisted on wearing sunglasses every time his character wore sunglasses, and pretending it was for the same reason.

All of the players vow to protect the Shouma NPC with their lives. Shion is baffled because Shouma's explicitly supposed to be a tank that soaks up damage and protects the players, not the other way around.

Each player has their own favorite route. Takumi's is the True Route, naturally.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Barbarian who activates their rage by checking online discourse.

[perplexingly]

one thing I wish was different in BG3 is for the stakes to be lower at least for companion quests -- I guess I can understand the appeal of having god-like powers or an atomic bomb in your chest or whatnot but the higher the scale the less interested I become 😞

[spookygibberish]

I've sort of developed a strange relationship with the concept of "realism" in the things I make.

Something I was very into as like, an eleven year old (im not implying this was immature to be into, just that it was formative for me), was speculative biology specifically for dragons, and now, specifically in the case of dragons I find a lot of attempts to make them biologically plausible fully missing the appeal of dragons at all.

Thinking specifically about the supernatural elements of JoM and where the line is drawn. The dagnyds are made from the remains of godlike entities, and are not entirely earthly animals. They have a supernatural origin. It would be fully justified in giving them magic abilities or making magic an aspect of the setting, but have absolutely zero interest in doing so. It doesn't interest me. I think about shit like healing powers or glowy energy attacks and my reaction is just "what does this even add? Why do I need this? Does this make things more interesting?" And it simply doesn't. Healing is more interesting as a prolonged process, combat is more interesting with teeth and claws and metal and blood. These are options which are more realistic, closer to real life, but the realism isn't what makes them interesting: it's physicality.

When I design a creature for this world, I am not thinking about making it biologically plausible, and yet, I try to design things which look like they could 'move under their own power'. There is a sense of heft and mechanical "soundness" which I value more than realism, but often also aligns with looking 'realistic'.

I would say that it's better to serve a narrative than strive for absolute realism, but I don't actually write stories, although I do have ideas for them occasionally. I guess a version of this which is more relevant and applicable is that i prefer to strive for a particular vibe.

[jackteagle]

I did a lot of work for Lost in Cult on Console Chronicles, and a Handheld History Vol: 2

It was a lot of fun, and I pushed the images as far as I could go in the schedule I had. Here's a peak of a Phantasy Star image I created. I'm really excited to show more on release!

[legionofmyth]

Palladium Books: Are Palladium’s rules cumbersome and how do you fix them?

Is your game getting bogged down by complex rules? 🧩 In our latest video, we dive into the Palladium Books mechanics that many players find overly cumbersome. Discover why these rules might be slowing down your gameplay and how to navigate them effectively. Don't miss out on this essential discussion! #PalladiumBooks #TabletopRPG #RPGMechanics #TTRPG #RPGCommunity

After the Bomb Heroes Unlimited 2E Rifts Ultimate Edition This video dives into the rules and mechanics of Palladium Books that many players find overly cumbersome and challenging to navigate. Are you ready to unravel the complexities and discover why some of these rules are slowing down your game? Watch now! In the vast world of tabletop RPGs, Palladium Books has always been known for its…

[silver-horse]

as much as I am enjoying Kingdom Come Deliverance, I am losing my patience with it a lil bit because of the save system. The game doesn't allow me to save whenever i want to like most RPGs, I need to gather these "saving schnapps" and there aren't many/enough so i don't want to waste them. But this means whenever I get attacked on the road and die, I lose entire hours of progress. This is bullshit tbh. Since I started this game, most quests I had to do 2-3 times... just redoing every dialogue etc. If this continues , completing this game will take a million hours. Maybe I will have to regularly quit the game and restart, just because at least it saves when we quit the game.

[oldschoolfrp]

A ride in the snow (Larry Elmore cover for Fantasy Hero 4th ed, Hero Games, 1990)

[that-1-rando]

Guys, I'm listening to the voices. I'm making my own Secret Histories TTRPG system. (I know that one already exists for "The Lady Afterwards", but I wasn't satisfied with it. It feels too "Call of Cthulu" and not Cultist Simulator or Book of Hours.)

I'm basing it somewhat on the Cypher system, because I like the use of cyphers to represent the influence of the hours, as well as the way that leveling up and ability scores work.

I will update occasionally with progress.

[psychhound]

[ID: a cover image for a game. large brown text says "bagel, lox, golem talks" and smaller text says "a for truth's sake SRD solo-journaling game". the background is a faded photo of houses in a village. there are white stars, an eye with wings, a kippah with a star of david, and a golem on the image. end ID]

Bubbie Blumenthal has a leaky roof again. The leviathan in the river keeps lying its head on the thatch to sleep. Rebbe Ezra has instructed his golem to scare the thing off, to no avail. It’s a stubborn beast, even if it does seem to have a soft spot for the schoolchildren who feed it latkes on the way back from learning Talmud.

All you know is that you’ll need a new notebook soon with how eager all the old zaydes are to chat your ear off after a little post-Shabbos wine. One glass in, and every one of them claims a dybbuk encounter that week. Well, it’s good material. You’ll figure out how true it is after it goes in your field notes!

Bagel, Lox, Golem Talks is a solo-journaling game where you travel to a magical Jewish shtetl in order to learn more about the community and write an ethnography on them. 

Pull cards to ask questions of the residents, roll dice to see how well interactions go, and get to know a host of colorful characters from young mensches, to golems, to nephilim, to the community rabbi. Unlock 12 different locations and gain levels in friendship and familiarity with the community as you document more and more in your field notes.

You'll need: A d20, d12, and d8, and a deck of playing cards

BLGT is a hack of For Truth's Sake by @hmooncreates

Get it now on itch! BLGT is free/pwyw!

[adam-trademark]

"That’ll be a pain for both of us."

(March 6, 2021)

[videogamesskies]

Did you check my icons package? As a life long fan of Zelda games, I really wanted to create something both nice and usefull.

So now, you too can customise your phone and show your appreciation of the amazing video game series “The Legend of Zelda”.

Available at my Etsy and Gumroad stores.