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This is a cool game, but definitely take note of the subtitle: “Armored by Grief.” It’s not just a cool tagline, it’s core to the experience.

This is not a game about customizing your cool powersuit to go fight crazy robots designed by Shinji Aramaki. It’s a game about a government-affiliated team of cybernetically-enhanced security officers overcoming their past trauma to unlock their suits’ most powerful abilities. It also happens to have customizable powersuits, but those are just one part of the bigger picture here.

This game should be regarded as a kit for telling a very particular type of story. It’s less of a universal tool for post-cyberpunk action storytelling, more of a “Do it yourself” kit to write and perform your own season of Heisei-era Kamen Rider at home.

Have you played Convictor Drive ?

By Sigre

Heroes that use "powered suits" similar to those in Kamen Rider or Bugglegum Crisis to maintain the peace in a futuristic city.

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Fishing enthusiasts will go to the fishing convention to make new friends and one of them will shout "Networking? Yeah, I sure hope so!" and everyone will laugh and high five him, one fisher is crying laughing slapping his knees

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reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

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why are we kissing elves in dungeons? that seems like a very bad way to go about looking for elven lovers.

It's like goth girls, right? The elves you find outside of dungeons are nice and all, but I just find myself drawn to the ones who are into underground culture, (people boo and throw weapons and vegetables at me)

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I MEAN. SURE MAN

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Merry christler

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on any given online space dedicated to 'dnd horror stories' / 'dm advice' i can solve 99% of the problems people share in one sentence

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ED WOOD (1994)

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Seeing your post about improv theatre vs. D&D culture and the amount of skill in "humility, vulnerability, and ability to share the spotlight" that improv theatre requires. And realizing that every single good ttrpg I've played over the years had a table full of people that had that skill. I have a post about it half-written, but I'm still boggling over the idea that there are so many people coming from the D&D side that have so much contempt for the other players. (And the GM is a player, from that perspective, IMO.)

It can be contempt, and certainly sometimes it is. I think most of the time it's fear. Despite what tumblr may have told you, cringe culture is not dead, and the fear of being cringe has a deep hold on a lot of players. It has a deep hold on the culture in general, just look at the profusion of bathos in mainstream movies. For whatever reason, we treat sarcasm, detachment, and cynicism as neutral, and so they create a great suit of armour against being cringe.

Improv is exposure therapy for being cringe. There's just no way to get into improv theatre without being deeply embarrassing so many times that you learn to deal with it. But TTRPGs have a lot of opportunities to hide from embarrassment. To some extent, that's why some groups are playing TTRPGs at all. The rules provide protection. They're not playing pretend, they're playing a game which is normal and socially acceptable.

So you end up with players who are constantly protecting themselves. They make a character whose personality is a one note joke or pun. They refuse to learn NPC names and give them snarky nicknames. They constantly undercut the tone of the scene with quips and jokes. They mistreat NPCs to show that they don't actually imagine them as people. Anything to signal to the table that they're not taking this seriously, that would be cringe.

This is mostly stuff I try to talk to my players about in session zero. One thing I always say when I'm GMing is that I am committed to being the most cringe person at the table. I will not be outcringed. And I do this because I am a profoundly ridiculous person, but also because it carves out space for the players to be cringe too. And once people are comfortable enough at the table, secure enough that they won't be judged, often they can learn how great it can be to roleplay with that humility and vulnerability. Other times they'll quit the table and talk to their friends about how cringe I am for my full commitment to the inner life of a sapient hedge.

Either is fine with me.

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Some people see Daggerheart and Draw Steel as each being "just another Fantasy TTRPG trying to pick up 5E's scraps" but what I see is the resumption of an evolutionary design philosophy that started in the early 2010's but got unceremoniously trampled by the rise of 5th Edition and Pathfinder.

These were games like Dungeon World, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and 13th Age, games that tried to marry the "Fantasy adventure" style that was prevalent at the time with a more narrative bent.

Before that, there was 4th Edition and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition, both with very strong opinions about what the post-3rd Edition fantasy landscape could look like. 4th Edition saw each character as having a suite of cool abilities that they weren't afraid of using, rather than just swinging a sword or saving their spell slots for the boss. Meanwhile, Warhammer imagined combat as being much more cinematic, with ups and downs that were decided mostly by the dice, rather than by being deliberately planted there by the GM.

4th Edition would get perceptually pushed to the side by Pathfinder, while the "Fail Forward" dice mechanic would evolve into the Powered by the Apocalypse system and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

(By the way, I don't know if there is intentionality behind the crossover between WFRP 3 and Apocalypse World's dice mechanics, or if that is just an example of convergent evolution.)

Then 5th Edition would come along and, thanks to the rise of Actual Play and Stranger Things, would become the dominant force that it is now. But those pre-5E games had a point, including 4th Edition. There are a lot of D&D players out there who want something beyond just swinging a sword at a goblin and hoping for a Crit, and rolling Perception checks.

For some people, those games are OSR or indie games on itch.io, and I'm not ruling those out. But those have also been well represented in the wake of 5E, while the more narrative, character-first side of the spectrum has mostly been represented by some combination of 5E and Pathfinder. That, I think, does a disservice to a genre that I've taken to calling "Character Fantasy" that really got going with games like Lancer (on the more combat-heavy side) and Fabula Ultima (on the more narrative side) as well as the upcoming Daggerheart and Draw Steel.

Anyways this is a bit of a rambling post, but I woke up with these thoughts and I knew I'd be thinking about them all day at work if I didn't get them down. The "Character Fantasy Renaissance" is something that I've been thinking about a lot, because I think it exists in the public consciousness but is having trouble being expressed. Mainly because most people think of 5E as being the dominant "Character-first Fantasy" game, which I think is actually a mistake, because it's kind of a bad one.

The games that follow the design patterns of 4E, the Fantasy Flight Narrative Dice games, and Powered by the Apocalypse are the ones that I think much more of as being part of the "Character Fantasy Renaissance" (not sold on the name yet). That's why I'm much more bullish on games like Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and others that are following in the footsteps of those early-2010s games without totally throwing out any semblance of complex conflict resolution mechanics (Read: combat systems, but not necessarily).

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While it's far from the worst cultural shift in TTRPGs, it really is a shame how much the mainstream standard for prewritten adventures has shifted from short adventure modules to massive hardcover campaigns.

Short modules are just so much better for the types of adventures that most mainstream TTRPGs are good at: you arrive at a place, it's Weird, you meet some cool people, it turns out there's a fucked up little situation going on, you get involved and blow up the situation in whatever way best suits your characters, and then The Adventure Continues. Depending on what happened in the adventure, the GM might decide to bring elements of it back in the future: NPCs you vibed with (or hated), places that you made a connection with, elements of the situation you left unresolved, whatever. Or not! No pressure, because the next adventure is going to be a new weird place with a new fucked up little situation.

Long campaigns, by contrast, constantly need to constrain the players so that they can keep the campaign relatively coherent. Even the ones that work hard not to railroad the players have to limit their ability to impact things so that the players don't somehow avert chapter 10 by doing something way back in chapter 3. And often, this results in very weak connective tissue throughout the adventure, with the character mainly doing what they are told by NPCs who are the ones with the real stake in things. After all, how can the PCs be the main characters when the adventure must be written with no idea of who they are?

And then this in turn feeds this culture where, actually, the Good GM homebrews their own campaign. That way they can actually center the PCs, and not railroad them, and throw out everything they prepped when the PCs refuse to engage with plot hooks and do completely unrelated stuff, because that is the opposite of running the big boxed adventure.

But actually, incorporating the creativity of other writers into your game is great. You can get so much mileage from taking someone else's fucked up little situation and tweaking one or two things to put it in your campaign. You can center the PCs so much when you don't need to protect future story arcs, you can just throw them in the mix and let them do main character shit. It's great.

Most importantly, though, I think more people should be able to have the brain chemistry-altering experience of not knowing what you're going to run next week, and being in the local game shop browsing shelves of dozens of fucked up little situations with some Brom-ass art on the covers and mostly terrible writing peppered with ideas that will stay in your brain forever.

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I think people who play D&D despite its combat focus is, and correct me if I heard this wrong from them, but like... the idea is that they don't like combat, so having a big, chunky combat engine is good somehow??? because the rules don't interfere??? with The Roleplay TM.

Or as my GM said it: "I prefer D&D because I don't have to worry about rules when we're Roleplaying TM and it gets combat out of the way"

I don't get it. I don't. I tried asking why the hell you'd play a game with this much Combat Time and I can't get a straight answer. Like, not having combats is somehow impossible. It's required. But also bad, annoying, and must be codified so the GM can turn brain off BUT ALSO have so many rules you are Brain On, wait 15 minutes i gotta check the book heavy.

I think it's legitimately a toxic meme (in the academic sense of the word) being spread to make people think D&D is not about dungeons but "Whatever You Want uwu" or something.

Maybe you can help because I am on the verge of having an aneurysm here.

There's a lot of stuff that plays into this all too common sentiment.

First of all, there's this idea going around in D&D circles that Combat and Roleplay are two things that are not to touch. You see this expressed quite a lot by fans of D&D, the notion that once combat begins roleplaying stops. This is of course a silly notion, because combat is also roleplay, and it's even more silly coming from the players of the game whose rules are 80% combat.

But once you've established in your mind that roleplaying and combat are two, fundamentally incompatible modes of play and the game you're playing mostly has rules for combat and very little rules for stuff outside of combat (and the rules for combat aren't, at the end of the day, all that interesting) it's easy to draw the conclusion that roleplaying and rules are themselves at odds. @prokopetz has articulated this much better than me, and to paraphrase him: in the dichotomy of combat vs. role-playing, combat actually acts as a metonym for rules-mediated play as a whole. So it's your classic role-playing vs. roll-playing dichotomy, which not only smacks of elitism but is also, frankly, idiotic.

Anyway, once a person has drawn the conclusion that rules-mediated play and roleplaying are fundamentally at odds with each other it's easy to see where a person might draw the conclusion that having any rules that touch upon the "roleplaying" side of play would either needlessly restrict the roleplaying or somehow infringe upon the purity of roleplay. Within the dichotomy of role-playing vs. roll-playing role-playing is ultimately seen as basically free play where there are no rules and procedures in play, only to be broken off by the necessary evil of procedural scenes.

Where has this toxic meme come from? Well, sadly it's as old as the hobby itself. A lot of people who are fans of D&D still think they need to inject "real roleplaying" into the dungeon game to grant it legitimacy as a roleplaying game. This is, of course, bull-honkey. D&D, even played as purely a dungeon crawling challenge game with no pretensions of trying to tell a greater story beyond "the story of what happened during the events of the game" is still roleplaying, and ultimately it owes to a lot of D&D players themselves having bought into elitist notions about roleplaying games and not actually even liking the main supported mode of play of D&D.

Because if you take a look at what D&D as a game mostly supports, it's ultimately a challenge-based dungeon game, which is great and cool actually. But if one has a reductive notion of what counts as "real roleplaying," then, well, there's gotta be something wrong with this game. So actually the roleplaying isn't what the rules say and are actually a secret third thing and also it doesn't even matter what the rules say about the game, because system doesn't matter whatsoever.

You might see why, as a person who is passionate about game design and who loves the dungeon crawling challenge game playstyle, I might find this attitude grating.

And I definitely agree that it's a toxic meme, but D&D 5e play culture at this point is mostly a circlejerk about how the game actually is fine and how game design doesn't actually matter and how in those other games the rules actually get in the way of roleplay instead of doing what they actually do: act as a participant in the game on equal footing with the players and with an actual voice as to how the narrative should look like. Even D&D's rules are loudly opinionated about what the act of gameplay should look like, but these people have convinced themselves that the style of play D&D's rules are opinionated about is bad, actually, so in fact any type of rules that are opinionated about play are actually bad rules that get in the way of roleplaying.

Anyway, as a final note, while these ideas have been around for a very long time, there has been something of a resurgence of this idea, and Brennan Lee Mulligan is partly to blame. Brennan is a wonderful comedian and clearly a great entertainer, but he has also espoused the idea that D&D is good because it gets out of the way in the scenes which he is actually interested in (social, interactive scenes) and takes the reins in scenes which he's not interested in (combat scenes, procedural action scenes). I can sort of understand where he is coming from, and in fact the game taking the weight off the pedal during social scenes is great if your players are all extremely funny comedians like you. But it's also basically a playstyle where there are procedural, rules-mediated action scenes followed by essentially improvised, free play cutscenes where the rules themselves don't have anything to say. It doesn't play into the strengths of the medium, which is that the rules of the game are an active participant with an actual voice in the fiction and not just something to be sidelined. So like with all due respect to Brennan Lee Mulligan, but this is something where he simply is incurious and frankly fundamentally disconnected from what the purpose of rules in a tabletop roleplaying game is. The rules aren't there just to handle the boring stuff for you, because in a game you actually enjoy playing there shouldn't be any boring stuff! In a good game engaging with the rules shouldn't be boring! I play older editions of D&D because I like how the rules shape the act of dungeon-crawling and wilderness exploration! I play Monsterhearts because the rules are opinionated about the teen monster melodrama and they produce extremely cool and wildly volatile drama!

All of which is to say: the idea that the rules of a game are somehow diametrically opposed to the act of roleplay is a silly, toxic meme, and one that is often espoused by D&D players who have latched onto D&D because it was the first game they became aware of and who clearly want something more out of games but they have also convinced themselves that D&D is what all RPGs are and the idea that other RPGs might actually differ from D&D in terms of rules quality, how the act of play looks, and the type of play the rules actually incentivize is completely alien to them. A lot of D&D players have nothing but sneering contempt for the playstyle incentivized by D&D because they have convinced themselves that that playstyle is beneath them and not "real roleplaying," and I think those players should stop playing D&D and instead play games that actually support the playstyles they think are befitting real role-players. Also they should shut up and give me like a hundred dollars for being forced to read their posts.

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General Player Advice For RPGs

I published this in my newsletter here a while back, and discourse reminded me I wanted to put it more public. I probably should get around to actually doing a proper blog for this kind of stuff. You can sign up to the newsletter here.

One of the things which I���ve been chewing over since getting back into RPGs is that there’s so much advice for GMs and so little advice for players. I keep thinking over why - though the whys aren’t what I’m about to write about. However, some other folk think any worthwhile advice is system/genre specific.

This got me chewing over whether I agree with that. As the list below shows, I don’t.

The first four are ones where I think I succeeded, and as principles generally guide you towards better play no matter what game you’re playing. The last three are mainly applicable to games with a significant story component (the last especially). There’s a few more I played with, but they were more about being a good at the table generally – about being a better player in any game rather than specifically about role-playing games. I also avoided ones which were more GM-and-player advice rather than just player advice (if there’s a problem in game, communicate out of game, use appropriate safety tools, etc).

I also didn’t include “Buy The GM Stuff”.

Anyway – here they are. See what you think.

GENERAL PLAYER PRINCIPLES FOR BETTER PLAY

1) Make choices that support the table’s creative goals

If you’re playing a storygame, don’t treat it like a tactical wargame. If you’re playing a tactical wargame, don’t treat it like a storygame. If it’s bleak horror, don’t make jokes. If you’re in a camp cosy romp, don’t bring in horror. It also varies from moment to moment – if someone’s scene is sincere, don’t undercut it.

2) Be A Fan of The Other Characters

This is GM advice in almost all Powered By the Apocalypse games – for the GM to be a fan of the characters. It’s a good trait for a player to cultivate. Be actively excited and interested in the other characters’ triumphs and disasters. Cheer them on. Feel for them. Players being excited for other players always makes the game better. Players turning off until it’s their turn always makes it worse.

3) Be aware of the amount of spotlight time you’re taking

This is a hard one for fellow ADHD-ers, but have an awareness of who is speaking more and who is speaking less. A standard GM skill is moving spotlight time around to players who have had less time. Really good players do this too. Pass the ball.

4) Learn what rules apply to you, to smooth the game, not derail it.

To stress, this isn’t “come to the table knowing everything” but learning the rules that are relevant to your character along the way, especially if they are marginal (looking at you, Grappling and Alchemy rules). Doing otherwise adds to the facilitator’s cognitive load and hurts the game’s flow. The flip is being aware that knowing stuff isn’t an excuse to break the game’s flow with a rules debate either – that’s an extension of the third principle.

5) Make choices which support other characters’ reality

If someone’s playing a scary bastard, treat them like a scary bastard. If they’re meant to be the leader, have your character treat them like the leader , for better or worse. A fictional reality is shared, and you construct it together.

6) Ensure The Group Understands Who Your Character Is

This is the flip of the above – having a character conception that is clear enough that everyone gets who you are, what you want to do and how you want to do it. If you don’t, the table will be incapable of supporting your choices. This links to…

7) If asked a preference in a story game, a strong choice is almost always better than a middling choice.

Don’t equivocate. If asked “You’ve met this person before. How do you feel about him?” either “I love him” or “I hate him” is better than anything middling. The exception is if it’s something you’re really not interested in pursuing.

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GMing doesn't have to be a chore and can in fact be extremely fun and rewarding but there are certain learned behaviors and attitudes that make things harder on the GM. Here are just a few tips on how to make the job easier on the GM which also may have the side effect of making the game more fun for everyone:

Everyone should make an effort to learn the rules. The rules are not there to make the game unfun and they are not a necessary evil, they are there to help carry the game so the group doesn't have to do all the work. And everyone taking part in learning the rules means the GM doesn't always have to be the one to remember how a rule works.

To that end, drop the "GM is the final word on the rules" attitude. This places the GM on a pedestal and can actually run counter to the idea of players learning the rules. If the GM has carte blanche to run over the rules it disincentivices players learning the rules because they can't actually rely on the text, and now you're right back to the GM having to carry the whole game. It is entirely okay for players to remind the GM how the rules should work and the group should agree on a method for dealing with rules disputes, and spot rulings should not rely on the GM making a unilateral decision but should rely on some kind of consensus.

Communicate your desires to the group and be willing to compromise; respect each other's prep. You may want a game that focuses on a long-form narrative but the GM wants to run an episodic series of largely unrelated singleton adventures. The GM is the one who is bringing the game, so ultimately be willing to compromise on your vision of the game and respect their prep. Ultimately, if the GM does not want to run the exact type of game you want and you can't see yourself having fun in the type of game they want to run, you will be doing everyone a favor by recusing yourself from the game.

Related to the above, communicating your desires should be an ongoing process. End each session by talking about what you want to do next and where you think the game should go. This will also make it easier for the GM to prep ahead.

This relates to learning the rules: pick a game that actually supports the type of game you want to run. Trust me, whatever time you think you will save by sticking to a game you already know you will make back by not having to fight the rules all the time and actually letting the rules take an active part in carrying the game.

You can literally just use prewritten adventures. Not every campaign or adventure needs to be custom-tailored for your specific group. Using prewritten adventures means that someone's already done a lot of the prep for you.

And finally, don't prep any more than you need to: there is this persistent myth that GMs need to have the entire campaign and world planned from the word go to begin with. While there is nothing wrong with expansive worldbuilding as such, you don't need to prep anything beyond what is strictly necessary. If you're running a wide open sandbox you can get by with a rough sketch of the world and only write things in as they become relevant. If you're running a megadungeon your players don't have to know that you've only prepared the first level for the first session, as long as you have a cohesive broad strokes plan that is perfectly fine. If you're running an episodic campaign, well, you don't need to have anything beyond the next episode prepped at a time, but of course having a rough plan can help.

Of course a lot of this is very opinionated and game specific: some games actively resist authoritative GM prep and want to involve each player equally in setting up the situation, and that's actually great, and in those types of games you should remember that the game is explicitly telling everyone to be involved in the prep. And once again, listen to what the rules have to say: they're there to tell you what the game wants you to do.

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So okay, these two things are both true:

A lot of people default to D&D as a universal game despite it only supporting a very narrow genre and playstyle

A lot of people do like the playstyle supported by D&D but might take issue with specific mechanics and the actual implementation of said mechanica

These two groups are different and when making game recommendations to these people it's good to recognize which type of person you're talking to.

If someone wants a game that supports investigation, in-depth social gameplay, or faction-level play, then you don't recommend Pathfinder. That's like someone saying "I wish I could fly but I only have a skateboard" and you saying "well a skateboard is no good, have you considered rollerblades?"

Now if they actually do say that they like the playstyle of D&D (whichever part of that they mean) then you can go ahead and recommend Pathfinder. Or Break!! Or Errant. Or any number of the other fantasy adventure games out there. I'm actually thinking of making a big post that's just all the different fantasy adventure games I can think of. But at that point you do not recommend Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts or whatever. Those games kick ass, but c'mon, when people are clearly communicating that they like a trad fantasy adventure but wished it was better than D&D in some way you don't want to scare them with stuff like "Make a move that follows" and "look through crosshairs" and "act under pressure," geeze.

And this is also why I often ask people to be specific when they ask me for game recommendations upfront or make it perfectly clear why I am recommending whichever games I am in the given context. Like recently when someone genuinely asked me for alternatives to D&D I answered from the point of view of looking for a D&D replacement. It wasn't an exhaustive list but idk I like all those games. Anygway