#ttrpg design

[20clawzstudios]

Okay maybe serpent eating man was a bad example, but you get it :P Ambition in Shattered Neon grants characters Luck when they have made what they feel is progress towards making their ambition true and complete. Many ambitions (ie, I want a world where no one is taken advantage of) are not feasible to actually ever be completed. Progress towards making a "better" world and actually accomplishing that are two different things, and that distinction is noted within the game's rules. As an aside, Luck itself is a transformative resource, letting players reroll both their own rolls/dice AND the dice/rolls of other characters. It's effectively narrative power, as one can use it to possibly force their own character's success or the downfall of another. It ties into the themes around luck and how sticking to one's own morality is rewarded by the magic of the universe, not simply accepting the world as it is. Ambition as effectively a "win-state" (to borrow a term from video games) is an interesting concept. I've always been a fan of games, be they ttrpgs or video games, allowing for multiple win states. I think it adds a wonderful layer of mechanical and narrative complexity surrounding what it actually means to succeed.

One of the most recent issues I've realized in ttrpg design I'm seeing when I look into new systems is the idea of Goals. This isn't to say games like Mouse Guard and Shattered Neon aren't good, but moreso that they have a glaring issue with Goals: people do NOT know how to write a goal to save their life. And like, I can't blame anyone for that. We live in a world its hard to think of what you'll eat tomorrow, much less what Leo the Serpenteater is wanting to do.

I'm not sure what solution to this is best. OSR stuff and AD&D tend to map goals to character levels so players know roughly what their character should want to do at any one time, ie "At level 9 a fighter can expect to try to make their own castle or barony". Mouse Guard notes very specifically that Goals are things that you could complete in one session. In Shattered Neon I did the opposite. Goals are instead Ambitions. Things your character strives towards but knows they may never actually achieve.

I don't think any of these approaches are perfect, but it is interesting to see how each approaches "how do you set a goal?" question people will have differently. Yet another example of why you need to play or read multiple games to make a good ttrpg.

[basilisika]

dull scythe, a panic engine magical girl rpg currently being chewed on between other ongoing projects by me and snow

[quinnydoll]

being a GM is really fun because sometimes you can make your players go through some really traumatic Evangelion bullshit, but other times you can force them to go bowling for no reason

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

life goals

[theinstagrahame]

Also help raise money to fight for trans people, and get some rad games in the process!

[alphaori]

Being into indie ttrpgs on Tumblr is a very funny experience because while you're ambiently considering designing a little game about idk, gremlins growing cabbages or whatever there are people who built this hobby from the ground up with 15 award winning published games and three podcasts and a knighthood from a small European monarchy just doing their thing on the same platform. Imagine this was the case for any other hobby. You go to shoot some hoops behind your house and LeBron James is just there

[anim-ttrpgs]

GM advice videos and threads are like What To Do if Your Players Can’t See in the Dark: Dip your hands in gasoline and light them on fire and wave them around.

And you would THINK that it would be really easy to sell a light-bulb to these people or at least a candle but they don’t believe there can be a better way.

[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.

[zhjake]

The Yawn, big space fish dipping in and out of blinkspace, as big as a moon and mostly ambivalent to the goings on of humanity, largely vibes-based lifeform From our Lancer module: A Wake Writ in Void

[sprintingowl]

Deadball

Deadball Second Edition is a platinum bestseller on DrivethruRPG. This means it's in the top 2% of all products on the site. Its back cover has an endorsement from Sports Illustrated Kids.

It's also not an rpg I'd heard about until I discovered all of these facts one after another.

I was raised in a profoundly anti-sports household. My father would say stuff like "sports is for people who can't think" and "there's no point in exercising, everything in your body goes away eventually." So I didn't learn really any of the rules of the more popular American sports until I was in my mid twenties, and I've been to two ballgames in my life. I appreciate the enthusiasm that people have for sports, but it's in the same way that I appreciate anyone talking about their specific fandom.

One of the things that struck me reading Deadball was its sense of reverence for the sport. Its language isn't flowery. It's plain and technical and smart. But its love for baseball radiates off of the pages. Not like a blind adoration. But like when a dog sits with you on the porch.

For folks familiar with indie rpgs, there's a tone throughout the book that feels OSR. Deadball doesn't claim to be a precise simulation or a baseball wargame or anything like that---instead it lays out a bunch of rules and then encourages you to treat them like a recipe, adjusting to your taste. And it does this *while* being a detailed simulation that skirts the line of wargaming, which is an extremely OSR thing to do.

For folks not familiar with baseball, Deadball starts off assuming you know nothing and it explains the core rules of the sport before trying to pin dice and mechanics onto anything. It also explains baseball notation (which I was not able to decipher) and it uses this notation to track a play-by-play report of each game. Following this is an example of play and---in a move I think more rpgs should steal from---it has you play out a few rounds of this example of play. Again, this is all before it's really had a section explaining its rules.

In terms of characters and stats, Deadball is a detailed game. You can play modern or early 1900s baseball, and players can be of any gender on the same team, so there's a sort of alt history flavor to the whole experience, but there's also an intricate dice roll for every at bat and a full list of complex baseball feats that any character can have alongside their normal baseball stats. Plus there's a full table for oddities (things not normally covered by the rules of baseball, such as a raccoon straying onto the field and attacking a pitcher,) and a whole fatigue system for pitchers that contributes a strong sense of momentum to the game.

Deadball is also as much about franchises as it is about individual games, and you can also scout players, trade players, track injuries, track aging, appoint managers of different temperaments, rest pitchers in between games, etc.

For fans of specific athletes, Deadball includes rules for creating players, for playing in different eras, for adapting historical greats into one massively achronological superteam, and for playing through two different campaigns---one in a 2020s that wasn't and one in the 1910s.

There's also thankfully a simplified single roll you can use to abstract an entire game, allowing you to speed through seasons and potentially take a franchise far into the future. Finances and concession sales and things like that aren't tracked, but Deadball has already had a few expansions and a second edition, so this might be its next frontier.

Overall, my takeaway from Deadball is that it's a heck of a game. It's a remarkably detailed single or multiplayer simulation that I think might work really well for play-by-post (you could get a few friends to form a league and have a whole discord about it,) and it could certainly be used to generate some Blaseball if you start tweaking the rules as you play and never stop.

It's also an interesting read from a purely rpg design perspective. Deadball recognizes that its rules have the potential to be a little overbearing and so it puts in lots of little checks against that. It also keeps its more complex systems from sprawling out of control by trying to pack as much information as possible into a single dice roll.

For someone like me who has zero background in baseball, I don't think I'd properly play Deadball unless I had a bunch of friends who were into it and I could ride along with that enthusiasm. However as a designer I like the book a lot, and I'm putting it on my shelf of rpgs that have been formative for me, alongside Into The Odd, Monsterhearts, Mausritter, and Transit.

[chaospyromancy]

A Squad of Drow is now available!

Many of you are already familiar with @anim-ttrpgs's Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG but if you're not, it's about playing a beautiful woman who has something wrong with her. Well, there's other stuff in there like dark comedy, caves, and clever social commentary, but the insane women bit is what I care about. I made character design zine for it using the manual's tables to generate many women who have something wrong with them, and it's available on itchi.io at the beautiful price of whatever you want. Check it out!!

[faeriedaez]

Introducing: Urethra! Bad Traits for Bad Investigators

Available now on Itch, I have created a Pay-If-You-Must collection of 14 new traits for the HIT independently developed, critically acclaimed, urban fantasy noir mystery solving tabletop roleplaying game known only as Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. The traits held within range from actively hindering, laughably specific, and even decently powerful (albeit with humorous presentation.) If you're a fan of Eureka, please help yourself to my little supplement, I guarantee it will at least bring you a chuckle. If you AREN'T already a fan of Eureka and you're seeing this post I BEG you, click the underlined link above or even right here. Believe me when I tell you Eureka is the TTRPG scene's next indie darling. Alright. PEACE.

[ostrichmonkey-games]

As a GM, I really like game procedures that create "fruitful voids". Something that does a lot of heavy lifting at laying the foundation of cool ideas with a relatively small amount of work. Traveller subsector creation (at least CT, which is what I know best), is a great example of that. Sooooooooooo many cool ideas sprouting from a bunch of randomly generated values that look like this: A600100A.

I should post more about Traveller subsector generation sometime because it's really good, but the point of this post is to say: creating those procedures that create a good fruitful void is -

A big goal for Ex Materia. I want missions and the GM side to be full of those sorts of tools. A series of quick rolls that do the initial hard work for the GM and provide a lot of potential and inspiration.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard 😩

[brandonwritesgames]

Why Play Dieselpunk 1921? Character Options

Inspired by @anim-ttrpgs, I thought I'd make a lil' series about why you should play Dieselpunk 1921!

Dieselpunk 1921 has no classes, which means you aren't locked into a specific play style that you might not like in the end. Professionals are given a choice from a wide variety of Occupations, all of which provide some sort of bonus to your skills, and Backgrounds, which give you bonus tools and faction interactions.

The options range wildly, from Great War Veteran Spies infiltrating the highest ranks of the burgeoning Criminal Underworld, to Long Term Convicts turned Union Organizers leading their fellow workers against Mine Owners and Private Detectives in the United States. The options are (nearly) endless, but my favourite character that I've made is Wessel Hörst van Wieren, a Noble Scion/Great War Veteran turned criminal after deserting from the Austrian army.

Whether you want to run a tense noir game in the shadowy streets of New York, a Daring heist in the busy city of Tokyo, or a tale of love and loss in Brasilia, Dieselpunk 1921 gives you the tools and options you need to make whatever character you want!

Check out Dieselpunk 1921 here!

[continuityand]

Despair Dilemma launches in just a Week!

In only a few days, our next project inspired "Despair Dilemma: A Death Game Mastermind TTRPG" Launches on Backerkit!

If you or someone you know are a fan of Death Games like Danganronpa, Squid Game, and Zero Escape - or if you're just a fan of unique TTRPGs, then I'd really love if you gave our game a look!

Everyone who Signs Up to be notified when we launch will get access to our Free Demo, and everyone who Backs in the First 48 hours will add +1 Community Copy to be made available to TTRPG players in need!

Check it out here, and I hope you'll support us once we launch: https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/900da2c7-32c0-454d-96dc-55168f3c2b7c/landing