thehorizonmachine

[thehorizonmachine]

No, Yeah, It's Just You: A Play Tool

Do you have trouble speaking your mind when playing tabletops with your friends or random people or people you dislike? This add-on is designed to help facilitate communication and inspire attentiveness among the play group and to start and, more importantly, finish conversations.

It should be compatible with any existing system, probably.

[thehorizonmachine]

SCREAMER-KILLER 6e: CHARACTER SHEET

After years of fruitless negotiations and exhausting archival work we've finally managed to dig up the long-lost character sheet for the acclaimed SCREAMER-KILLER: Sixth Edition Core Rulebook. Finally, you can create your character for the iconic cyber-realist game of spiritual warfare the way you were always intended to:

[thehorizonmachine]

i saw people sharing most trusted advisors in the /tg/ pdf share thread today. obviously not opposed to it but i remembered you wanted to get it into the trove when you released it and thought you might find that cool

@growleaf and i just cheered out loud in call and he immediately made this. this is awesome this is what its all about babey we're in the big leagues

[thehorizonmachine]

Oh yeah I recently ran Most Trusted Advisors for a group that was mostly people who hadn't played RPGs before and they loved it! Thanks for making a great game? :)

yippee! i'm really glad to hear this -- accessibility to people with little TTRPG experience was a pretty major design goal, so it's always gratifying to hear that we hit our marks on that !

(if you want to check out MTA for youreslf, you can do it here)

[thehorizonmachine]

Just finished a four-session game of Most Trusted Advisors and it absolutely whipped. The street urchins revolted and the game ended when a fireworks-laden goat exploded the crown prince and all the PCs. Thanks for making such a funny game that actually has good mechanics

:] thanmk YOU for having fun with it and sharing. goat wins

[thehorizonmachine]

[on the phone to the board[] yeah. Yeah. i know its a shithsow. the projects getting shitcanned because its 'insensitive'. yeah were just going to have to cancel KILLPOPE: THE TTRPG WHERE YOU KILL THE POPE (FRANCIS SPECIFICALLY). yeah. no dont refund the kickstarter backers are you crazy

[thehorizonmachine]

Hey! I found some of your older work on Capes in the Dark and Most Trusted Advisors and was wondering if you were still active and working on Underside as a 2e to Capes in the Dark. I'm a big fan of Capes in the Dark and I've gotten some of my friends involved as well, so I just wanted to check :)

We are! The new one's called Underside, RQD has some free posts about it on her patreon, go read them they're good and wise and full of smartness and braintelligence and such

[thehorizonmachine]

george tries to get a slot on critical role when he realizes elaine is dating matt mercer's cousin. jerry gets caught fudging his rolls on a livestream. kramer gets into hot water with the FBI when his new dungeon module happens to have the exact same floorplan as the pentagon

ttrpg seinfeld

[thehorizonmachine]

[thehorizonmachine]

As someone who creates 5e adjacent content I have a dark secret I must confess...

I love dice-pool games.

The only reason I don't create a dice-pool game is that there's so few levers to pull for dice-pool manipulations that make any kind of meaningful distinction in the resolution mechanic to generate a mechanical-to-narrative sensation of character differentiation.

The day I solve that problem as it percolates in the back of my mind is the day we get a new dice-pool game system.

There's a few interesting tricks I've run into in dice pool systems:

Dice pool systems usually start by taking some features of a character, usually something like an ability/attribute and something like a skill, but it could be anything, and combining those into a dice pool. Now, most games don't actually do more in this step than just counting the final total of dice. But there's one axis of information that is rarely used: the type of dice.

For an example, in a hypothetical Attribute+Skill system, assume that a character assembled their dice pool from Strength (an attribute) and Athletics (a skill) and the rolled dice were color-coded depending on their source.

Now, if you want some proper oWoD jank in your game you can make it so that dice that come from attributes have a higher threshold of success than dice that come from skills, representing the importance of training over raw strength. You've now addressed the "untrained skill" penalty that is often tackled via penalties to dice pools. However: this does result in extra friction. One of the benefits of having a static threshold of success is that you can quickly eyeball how many successes you have.

Which leads to the next question: why limit the dice in your dice pool to a single type of die? Staying with the above example, let's assume that the success threshold is a 5 or above, and the average die in the pool is a d6. Now you can introduce d8s as a type of die that represents. Something. Incidentally, the switch from a d6 to a d8 in a system where the threshold of success is a 5 results in a similar change of probabilities as keeping the dice d6 but changing the threshold of success to 4.

Anyway, there's other types of neat tricks you can do. nWoD has "10 again" which means that dice that come up a 10 count as successes and are rolled again, with some abilities allowing for "9 again" or even "8 again" on specific tests, or if they represent a hindrance or penalty on the character they may even counteract "10 again" in specific circumstances.

And I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff that can be done with dice pools. Heck, I've seen games that use dice pools of Fate dice, where results of + are used to add benefits or bonuses to the action from a pick-list while results of - are used to cancel penalties or misfortunes (which are all assumed to happen by default!). So there's a lot of information you can get out of dice pools, you just need to keep looking for it!

[thehorizonmachine]

On the subject of TPKs and failure in TTRPGs, I gotta say, I love a good mechanic for losing.

I love that Fate gives you metacurrency for conceding a scene, and I love that taking extreme consequences creates a new aspect for your character.

I love that when you die in Blades of the Dark, if you're still attached to the character, you can just become a ghost.

I love that in Monster of the Week, when you need to avoid harm it costs a point of luck, which triggers a character-specific consequence and lets you see when your character's luck is literally going to run out.

I even love that in Cyberpunk they've created an omnipresent group of amoral, heavily armed paramedics, so no matter where your character gets gunned down, there's always a chance of pulling through.

Basically, any game that is set up so that losing is going to make things more interesting, not less, is a game that's going to help great stories happen at the table, and I love that.

[thehorizonmachine]

Just off the top of my head, here's some setting assumptions D&D makes thats not even universal to high fantasy, let alone dark/low fantasy, historical settings, urban fantasy, or scifi;

Magic is something anyone can access with proper education and time

There is a pantheon of very real deities who each have different purviews and distribute magic

Combat is generally slow and grindy, and your average player character or enemy can take multiple strikes from a sword and keep fighting.

Characters will get physically stronger and more martially competent as they continue to adventure, to the point of being able to fight enemies like dragons and giant demons.

Magic takes the form of a specific list of flashy and powerful effects, most of which can be performed in the span of seconds and are oriented around combat.

There is an afterlife and people can be revived

Generally speaking a character is going to have to choose between martial prowess, magical capability, and a sort of "everything else" bucket. In particular, a character specialized for combat is going to have little to do outside of it.

Some of these assumptions (leveling up, grindy combat, characters specializing in combat/magic/noncombat) are both very restrictive in the kinds of stories you can tell, and fundamental to how Dungeons and Dragons works to the point that you lose the benefit of familiarity if you try to remove it. (Good luck selling "We're playing 5e but we're not leveling up" or creating an entirely different suite of classes)

I saw someone compare D&D to Star Wars, which is more or less the most popular "scifi with magic" media; Jedi just don't fit into D&D classes; they're the biggest source of player-side magic, and their powers are a small toolkit of subtle, new-age-mysticism tricks; pretty far from wizards, clerics, and warlocks.

I know 5e-Only types will mostly not care but for the sake of my sanity I need this written down.

[thehorizonmachine]

Have you played MOST TRUSTED ADVISORS ?

By W.S. Healed & Citizen Abel / The Horizon Machine @thehorizonmachine

In Most Trusted Advisors, you’ll play as a profoundly incompetent monarch’s eponymous privy council. As lords and ladies of the realm, you’ll be tasked with keeping your liege safe from foreign agents, court conspiracies, and their most dangerous enemy: their own incompetence.

One player will take the role of your liege, responsible for telling you about the disasters your characters must deal with as well as the Misfortunes that befall them when they fail. The rest of you will pick up one of six playbooks and play scheming, petty, self-interested nobles. You’ll try desperately to keep your liege alive, stay in their good graces, and keep the story unpredictable by introducing Twists.

Together, you’ll tell a story of self-interested aristocrats getting themselves into trouble by being selfish, malevolent, incompetent, or all of the above. Play to find out if your lords and ladies can keep their liege in good health and their heads on their bodies, or if they’ll be crushed under the weight of their own schemes.

[thehorizonmachine]

"I like it when the rules get out of the way of roleplaying" well I don't. I like it when the rules get in the way of roleplaying. They have to actively impede roleplaying. If the rules are allowing for any roleplaying at all, they are bad rules.

[thehorizonmachine]

it is genuinely insane how much people focus on parents in the debate about trans rights and health care. like fundamentally trans youth are not considered human beings, they’re just proxies for their parents to either demonstrate how brave they are for not being transphobic, or to show the world how bigoted and backwards they are. like the trans youth in question are not talked about as real people, it’s always their fucking parents

[thehorizonmachine]

i've gotta be honest with you this is my least trusted advisor. really just a dogshit advisor here. i fell to slumber in the castle courtyard and instead of dropping poison in my ear i think he just jerked off next to me. he's not even bald

[thehorizonmachine]

im just fucking with you my liege