#rpg stuff

[anim-ttrpgs]

I and my friends are making a ttrpg for fun, and have come to an impasse. We disagree about the inclusion of an attribute, that dictates the PCs bravery. Therefore I wonder what a gamedev plugged into the TTRPG scene, thinks about mechanics that make PCs act brave/cowardly.

Well if you ask me specifically, I’m going to tell you don’t include anything that can take control of a player’s character away from them, but that does not mean that you can't have any kind of mechanic/stat that governs a PCs fear or stress level.

I personally can’t stand that mechanics that dictate that PCs run away, or dictate that they do anything at all like by falling under mind control, not because I think of the character as myself or some shit like that, I just consider myself to be the person most qualified to know what he or she would do in any given situation, so I’ve never been a fans of passing or failing saving throws or whatever determining if my character takes a certain action or not.

This is not to be confused with, like, regular dice rolls. Rolls to determine if my character can do a certain action well enough to succeed are totally fine, in fact I often want more of those.

This is one of the reasons why the Composure and Tiers of Fear systems in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy work the way they do.

We definitely wanted fear to be something that could affect the PCs and cause them to run away in a realistic fashion, these aren’t supposed to be fearless action-heroes, but I didn’t want it to be just a dice roll and then the GM tells you that your PC has to run away now. So, instead, Composure acts as a “cap” to the PC’s Skill modifiers. Base Skills cannot be higher than the PC’s current Composure level, making them worse and worse at succeeding skill checks the more frazzled and fatigued they are.

This never forces a situation where a player is told “your PC is going to run away no matter what,” but it means that the lower and lower that Composure gets, the more running away or surrender seems like a better and better idea.

That isn’t to say that mechanics that force certain character actions have absolutely no place in RPGs, hell Eureka even has one instance of this with wolfman rampages, but that’s only for one single character type, not a main mechanic which affects all PCs.

It’s well known that I really love AD&D2e, which has tons of that, though I also think that that may be one of the reasons why such a mechanic is so prevalent in TTRPGs in general. I’ve found that for a lot of TTRPGs, if you pick any random mechanic and ask “why is this in the game,” the answer is often some variation of “because D&D did it,” with little thought as to whether it needs to be in this RPG that isn’t D&D, or as to whether it was even a good idea when D&D did it.

Ultimately, study lots of RPGs, and know that there is more than one option besides just "do it the way D&D does it" and "don't do it at all."

[rpg-fluff]

I finished Avowed and like it! Say hello to my Envoy!

[unlawfulgames]

Gourmet Street: Dungeon Meshi meets God of Cookery

With Dungeon Meshi being in public eye again with the Netflix series, I thought it would be a good time to shoutout again about Gourmet Street, my free (tips appreciated) Street Food Fantasy zine! Big thanks to our wonderful artist and layout man @feralindiecharlie

 A New Setting! - Gourmet Street, a collection of scattered and bizarrely connected alleyways, it seems to pop up in any settlement large enough to begin thinking of itself as a city. Stacked high in wood carts, laid out on intricate rugs, swimming in a myriad of sauces, food is the name of the game on Gourmet Street.

 ONE MILLION Food Vendors and Menus! - Never eat the same thing twice! Generate from 8,000 possible unique food vendors and LITERALLY ONE MILLION possible dishes; ranging from Soft-shelled Crabman Sandwiches with Tzatziki sauce and Egg Coffee, to Myconid Zapiekanka in Pesto with a shot of Absinthe! 

 Food Factions! - From the hyper-radical (and slightly deranged) Neuvo Gastro-Alchemists, to the fanatical and militant Vinegar Knights, the food factions each come with their own wants, goals, and boons, IF you choose to serve them...

 A One-Page Adventure: ESCAPE FROM GOURMET STREET! Help a pair (or trio) of star-crossed lovers escape from Gourmet Street in a Snake-and-Ladders inspired chase! Fend off rival lovers, food cart brawls and escaped dishes as you dash through the alleys of Gourmet Street!

 And More! Monsters, magic items, and cookbooks for both Players and GMs to use and abuse!

[troythecatfish]

[whereserpentswalk]

Ttrpg safety tools and the dog test

A quick rundown of what safety tools are: tools for setting boundaries in ttrpgs. Can be useful to some people, but often used really wrongly, and often seem overly gamey to me personally. It's like therapy speak for rpgs. And is similary used by the people it was meant to be used against.

One of the most common examples of these is the X card. The X card is a card with the letter X written on it. It sounds like a good idea if you've never interacted with people before. The X card is a boundary where one of the rules is you can't talk about the boundary. It's very useful for anyone who want to weaponize it, and not very useful for asserting actual boundaries.

There is also a type of chud who dislikes the the idea of safety tools because they think they're "woke". The only way to have a productive conversation around safety tools is to ignore them. Bad faith questions don't deserve good faith answers.

Now, a lot of people would think that its easier for a player to step out then deleate a scene. But a lot the culture around safety tools is based on this toxic highschool mindset around ttrpgs where someone feels like they both have a right, and a duty to be at every single momment of every session, and everyone else does to. So every single safety tool you'll see will assume the of lack the option of leaving the table at all. Being able to leave at any time is the ultimate boundary in ttrpgs and many other safety tools are attempting the impossible task of establishing boundaries without it. People compare them to safe words in bdsm. But it's like trying to create a safe word system but you have to cum and can't take breaks.

See part of the problem is 4chan and reddit have cultures of rpg horror stories. Which are useally lies. I'm not going to say fiction because that implies a relationship with the audience that they don't have. And these lies almost always have queer people, ND people, leftists, and anyone you'd see called a degenerate or weirdo as villains. While the type of nerd that Scott Pilgrim was the first book makes himself out to be a hero. And reddit also happens to be where the concept of safety tools was popularized.

It's this problem where people aren't trying to deal with actual triggers, they're trying to police content they morally condemn. R/rpg horror stories is the home of people who consider themselves outcasts for liking star wars and then have a deep fear of a marginalized person or someone from a slightly less mainstream subculture showing up at their table. And when they're the ones defining what a boundary conflict in rpg space looks like it's useally pretty bad. When a lot of safety tools go bad it's the case of weapons made to catch monsters being bad at dealing with humans.

And beyond all that. Beyond the specifics of rpg horror stories and it's influence. The way people talk about safety tools is mostly about removing content they deem objectionable from ttrpgs. When people talk about the X card and things like it, they're useally afraid someone will talk about something taboo and the table, and want a way to stop them, with the assumption that the rest of the party agrees. The extreme nature of how much someone has the power to censor, is brought with the assumption that what will be censored won't just violate their personal boundaries, but a community sense of morals.

They don't just want their triggers removed, they want things they deem immoral to be removed (not everyone who uses safety tools of course, but the hoard of bearded cishet white men who play 5e who dominate the conversation on them). That's just what a lot of the conversation around safety tools always comes down to. When somebody says they want safety tools to remove torture scenes or sex scenes from their table, it's not their personal triggers, its that they don't believe these things belong in the medium at all. They don't imagine what it would be like to be the only person in the room with their trigger, because the narrative they've created with problem players and safety tools, has made it so they assume the majority of the room shares their boundaries. Safety tools as they exist and are talked about are not built for a minority of players to be able to assert boundaries agaisnt the majority of players.

The dog test: so basically, while safety tools in ttrpgs have good reasons to exist, a lot of the time they're weapons players use to remove content they deem immoral. So often every discussion around things like the X card comes with a lot of moral condemnation, and assumptions about what content can ever be triggering vs what is ok. And this culture of moral condemnations can make safety tools especially dangerous for queer people and ND people, or just members of certain subcultures.

So I've developed the dog test. The dog test, is an example used to test if a safety tool (or more commonly someone talking about them) wants boundaries or wants moral policing. The dog test is simply to see how the safety tool is viewed if it's used to remove dogs from a game. Basically taking the commonly used examples like blood, or sex, and replacing them with the existence of dogs. Perhaps to add to it let's say the only case this hypothetical person will be ok with dogs is if they're killable enemies. This isn't unrealistic, a lot of people have trauma from dog bites, it's probably more likely to be a good faith trauma than a lot of the examples.

If they person is as willing to work with the needs of a player who has trauma around dogs as they are more sympathetic triggers than they've passed the dog test.

Disclaimer. A lot of these thoughts were developed in a discord conversation with @dragonpurrs and a lot of these words were originally things I said to it.

[igorlevchenko-blog]

I'll have you know that ever since adopting the classic Tercio pike-and-shot formation I've been plowing through fantasy RPGs like a knife through butter. Sure is interesting to watch a magical, medieval world succumb so decisively to its own Modernity. Something to that effect actually happened to the English at the Battle of Castillon in 1453, where, in short, the men-at-arms were ripped apart by canon fire of the French. You ever need a date to put on tombstone of the Middle Ages — that was it. So the world turned. In hundred years Giorgio Vasari wrote his famous "Lives..". Point is: I've put those lily-bellied elves through a truly cataclysmic transformation:

— B..b..but je suis un elf wizard - je cast des spells magiques!

— Oi! None of that fairy talk, y'hear! Better rip the pages off that grimoire of yours for paper cartridges. Here's your arquebus and there's the enemy. Let this epoch die to the sound of volley fire.

P.S: The elf doesn't speak English because, frequently roleplaying as a foreigner, I like to have a language barrier between myself and NPCs. Makes questing that much more engaging.

[wobblyprinny]

Just Another Random Post

So, in my need to tell stories and, at least attempt to make that happen, I've been busy working on a series of smaller practice projects that will double as prologues for the larger, main project I plan to dump most of what I'll learn into.

It's been a pretty interesting experience trying to figure this out, but those I have shared the ideas with have been pretty supportive of it, so I'm happy I'm on the right track.

I love RPGs and harems though, so I kinda had to... As for the subject matter involved? Well, obviously it'll be an incest harem romance.

As for other stuff?

Just reading, writing, and LOTS of tutorials. Honestly, the more I try to do and focus on one thing, the more I get random flashes inspiration to do other things.... so yeah, I... am all kinds of random right now.

Anyway, that's it for now.

[impossiblepackage]

Amidst the constant "stop trying to make dnd do things it's not supposed to do" discourse, my dream goes unheard

I unironically want to run a game where every player is using an entirely different RPG system. Pathfinder2e swashbuckler, DnD5e wizard, a Werewolf the Apocalypse werewolf, Just Some Guy from Call of Cthulhu, somebody playing an abstract concept in universe like some of those asymmetric indie RPGs out there. You get the idea.

It could only work if all the players are people who GM the game they built their character with. How each character interacts with the world is pretty straightforward: use the rules from their game. It's when they have to interact with each other or, say, are trying to fight the same thing that it starts to get funky. It would be workable, provided everyone at the table was on the same page and had some experience with their chosen system.

Would it be something I'd call good? Absolutely not. Would it be clunky and a bit tedious? Yes, probably. Would it be tons of fun? Hell yeah it would

[jestershark]

finally got to reveal the murderer in my train murder mystery: the train

[kruk-art]

I finally managed to order keychains with our merry gang from VTM! They didn't make it in time for St. Nicholas Day, so they will be for Christmas :D

If you are from Poland I recommended stickers.tattooo!

[rpg-fluff]

[unlawfulgames]

HEY! Do you like mushrooms? Do you like mushroom people? Do you like hundreds of mushroom people? Do you like hundreds of mushroom people and supporting indies?! DO YOU LIKE HUNDREDS OF MUSHROOM PEOPLE AND SUPPORTING INDIES AND SUPPORTING GENDER CONFIRMING SURGERIES?!

https://theunlawfulneutral.itch.io/mushfolks-a-d100-mushroom-person-generator

[troythecatfish]

[bam-monsterhospital]

every now and then i ponder how it'd be to play a dnd bogwitch character who was a swarm ranger / spore druid dual-class 🤔

[igorlevchenko-blog]

A word on Gothic, the game.

I had a brief exchange with @feletida on whether tw*tter could accommodate such literary genre as "giant schizo post" on merits of Gothic as an RPG. So here it goes…

Of course no discussion of the game would be scholarly without first addressing the elephant in the room: the Big Bad of the series is not some malignant deity, nor dragons, not even orcs—it's narcotic swamp-weed. For now, take it as you will.

Ok, what then, of the game's villains?

By the word's etymology, a villain is but a low-born rustic. Not an evil-doer per se, being inherently devoid of chivalry he's corralled into systematic moral failings by his own vices (which he himself cannot quite put the lid on).

By this definition, our five main heroes (PC, Diego, Gorn, Lester, Milten) are too—villains, for each has an unbridled vice salient within him.

Lester is slothful. He prefers never to take an active role in whatever happens to and around him. He spends most of the second game sitting by the fire roasting weenies, before settling into a routine of complaining about his migraines, caused most likely by excessive smoking. Of course he presents this as being forced into the habit by evil pull of hidden. At the start of Gothic 3 he's relegated to guarding the ship—a task he spectacularly fails at by letting it be stolen by pirate-vagabonds. A spell-speaker like Lester (supposedly is) shouldn't have had problems with dispersing a low-level rabble of mooks and yet.

Milton is excessively deferential towards authority and thus often finds himself stringed along into some disaster of altogether not his doing.

Diego's vice is pride, believe it or not. He may pose himself as a man with plans and shrewd ambition, but when Diego finally comes into good fortunes—he finds no gratification and readily discards it all in favour of adventure. The wealth and prestige have never mattered much to him, I reckon—it's been a pretext all along to ply his guile. This is the essence of self-adoration—to feel obliged to give regular libations to one's virtues.

Gorn alone resolves to reign in his vice (gluttony) for the sake of others. For a time at least—specifically when they all go on a sea voyage at the end of second game. All the while the others just continue wallowing in their vices.

Indeed Milten gets to have an authority above him, Lester—to further shirk all responsibility, Diego—to exercise his skills.

As for the PC: do I even have to list everything that's wrong with this beastly character. After all, you—being the player—have the perfect recollection of yourself running around beating friendlies unconscious to steal their weapons, ore and whatnot. The second game has a whole spell-scroll infrastructure to support that kind of play, made canon by Night of The Raven expansion's stringent allocation of learning points.