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Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

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MONSTER GUTS 2e Scavenger Creation

One of the goals of MG2e is to add more "connective tissue" as @ostrichmonkey puts it, giving players more ways to connect with their characters and their Village. There are a bunch of ways that I'm layering that in throughout the game, but it starts right when you make your scavenger.

I'm stealing pick-lists from BOB and some Complication-like stuff from Gubat Banwa, cuz they both rock. Here's a couple examples:

Choose a Look

The bones of your prey; a haphazard assortment of belts and bandoliers; tightly tailored and buttoned-up; physics-defying hair; herb-stained apron and boots reeking of fertilizer; grease-blackened overalls with steel-toed boots; feathers and scales expertly knit together; weather-proof cargo shorts and tank top; fursuit exoskeleton; ghillie mantle; Kevlar vest and kilt; chainmail with nettlecloth tabard; tactical tracksuit

Choose the Origin of your First Weapon

A family heirloom inherited from _____; an old farm-tool shaped to your hand and purposes by _____; scrounged from the ruins of _____’s former home; found in the belly of a beast along with _____’s mentor; a child’s toy given to you by _____, now tweaked and twisted into deadly form; the jawbone of the monster that killed _____’s childhood love; stolen from the tomb of _____’s ancestor; traded to you by _____ for saving their life; tossed to you by _____ when you were in dire peril; a 3D-printed copy of _____’s weapon

Obviously, we're still in draft stage, but I really like how these let players quickly build up the world of MG2e, cut right to the vibes of a character, and bring different characters together. Right now, there are a few more prompts like these for characters and even more prompts to help players create their sentient animal-ish Companion (their Caterpal, Dogepal, Hootepal, or Palline). More on them later.

Want to learn more about MONSTER GUTS 2e? Click the link.

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Another good read, about the importance of using fiction as a way to immerse players into your game.

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PSA for ttrpg makers

and book writers and just other people

if you want to do some graphic design try google slides this shit is great

the ui is great and it has some shortcomings like a lack of custom guides and spacing and no page numbers and stuff like that

but most importantly though it is free, and if you have the world's most awful computer like mine which stutters playing doom 1, it's pretty neato

i'm using it to make the arena index and layout for DEMON CALIBER, my ttrpg and this has never in my life been so easy

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As dungeon geomorphs are my absolute favorite mapmaking tool for TTRPGs, I decided to dip my toes into hosting a small game jam to celebrate this dungeon-making technique.

(If you don't know what geomorphs are or how they're used, check out this post)

The goal of this jam (which will run from September 9th to September 16th) is to create a full dungeon for any tabletop roleplaying game in a week using geomorphs as a mapmaking tool.

For more details you can check out the game page, and if you decide to join i hope to see youc reate some awesome stuff :)

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D&D 5e compatible sandbox adventure that sees the player characters undertaking an epic quest to change the world for the better (convert the underlying rules of the world to Old-School Essentials)

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There's an interesting alchemy by which, for certain TTRPG fans, WotC's misbehavior makes it more moral to play D&D if you're broke.

The logic goes something like this: WotC is bad, and therefore it is good to steal from them. Indie creators are good, and therefore it is bad to steal from them. Therefore, if you don't have money to spend on games, it is moral to play D&D and immoral to play indie games.

For some reason, the fact that this unimpeachable logic only benefits WotC and only harms indie creators is not relevant.

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I find myself in the uncomfortable position of disliking the direction modern D&D is taking in terms of tone - cosy found family romps where a handful of diverse misfits goes on wholesome quests - with every fibre of my being, and wanting to play grubby dingy amoral bastards dying horribly in a scary hole while also firmly remembering the era before this (and also before things like 'safety tools' ) and how dreadful a lot of the games back then were on an out-of-character level.

It's like a rock and a hard place, but with insufferable tweeness or ooc harrassment.

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There's this idea floating around the general TTRPG space that's kind of hard to put one's finger on which I think is best articulated as "the purpose of an RPG is to produce a conventionally shaped satisfying narrative," and in this context I mean RPG as not just the game as it exists in the book but the act of play itself.

And this isn't exactly a new thing: since time immemorial people have tried to force TTRPGs to produce traditional narratives for them, often to be disappointed. I also feel this was behind a lot of the discussion that emerged from the Forge and that informed the first "narrativist" RPGs (I'm only using the word here as a shorthand: I don't think the GNS taxonomy is very useful as more than a shibboleth): that at least for some TTRPGs the creation of a story was the primary goal (heck, some of them even called themselves Storytelling games), but since those games when played as written actually ended up resisting narrative convention they were on some level dysfunctional for that purpose.

There's some truth to this but also a lot of nuance: when you get down to the roots of the hobby, the purpose of a game of D&D wasn't the production of a narrative. It was to imagine a guy and put that guy in situations, as primarily a game that challenged the player. The production of a narrative was secondary and entirely emergent.

But in the eighties you basically get the first generation of players without the background from wargames, whose impressions of RPGs aren't colored by the assumption that "it's kind of like a wargame but you only control one guy." And you start getting lots of RPGs, some of which specifically try to model specific types of stories. But because the medium is still new the tools used to achieve those stories are sometimes inelegant (even though people see the potential for telling lots of stories using the medium, they are still largely letting their designs be informed by the "wargame where you only control one guy" types of game) and players and designers alike start to realize that these systems need a bit of help to nudge the games in the direction of a satisfying narrative. Games start having lots of advice not only from the point of view of the administrative point of view of refereeing a game, but also from the point of view of treating the GM as a storyteller whose purpose is to sometimes give the rules a bit of a nudge to make the story go a certain way. What you ultimately get is Vampire: the Masquerade, which while a paradigm shift for its time is still ultimately a D&D ass game that wants to be used for the sake of telling a conventional narrative, so you get a lot of explicit advice to ignore the systems when they don't produce a satisfying story.

Anyway, the point is that in some games the production of a satisfying narrative isn't a primary design goal even when the game itself tries to portray itself as such.

But what you also get is this idea that since the production of a satisfying narrative is seen as the goal of these games (even though it isn't necessarily so), if a game (as in the act of play) doesn't produce a satisfying narrative, then the game itself must be somehow dysfunctional.

A lot of people are willing to blame this on players: the GM isn't doing enough work, a good GM can tell a good story with any system, your players aren't engaging with the game properly, your players are bad if they don't see the point in telling a greater story. When the real culprit might actually be the game system itself, or rather a misalignment between the group's desired fiction and the type of fiction that the game produces. And when players end up misidentifying what is actually an issue their group has with the system as a player issue, you end up with unhappy players fighting against the type of narrative the game itself wants to tell.

I don't think an RPG is dysfunctional even if it doesn't produce a conventionally shaped, satisfying narrative, because while I do think the act of play inevitably ends up creating an emergent narrative, that emergent narrative conforming to conventions of storytelling isn't always the primary goal of play. Conversely, a game whose systems have been built to facilitate the production of a narrative that conforms to conventions of storytelling or emulates some genre well is also hella good. But regardless, there's a lot to be said for playing games the way the games themselves present themselves as.

Your traditional challenge-based dungeon game might not produce a conventionally satisfying narrative and that's okay and it's not your or any of your players' fault. The production of a conventionally satisfying narrative as an emergent function of play was never a design goal when that challenge-based dungeon game was being made.

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man if I gotta make bad art, it should at least be easy! But it’s not! It is also hard to make this bad art

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Based on the description the Community feature for Tumblr reminds me of Circles from the good old G+ days. Which would be amazing. Does anyone know if there are any TTRPG and especially TTRPG design focused communities around?

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If your players are engaged, and you know where they're going, you can prep pretty intensively without dictating how things Must Go. It's good player courtesy to tell your DM the plan!

For my games, I really like maps. Having everyone placed in a visual space is great for keeping us all on the same page.

So wherever they're going, I try to prepare a handful of maps (usually by nabbing them from online - making them is a bit much for me) that might come up.

Or, more often, I'll draw the map in real time - using some preselected assets to keep it looking good without taking forever. This is particularly important for games where I don't necessarily know what's going to happen, like Dungeon World with Perilous Wilds.

I and another DM I know also like to bring splash images. Sometimes that's a nice picture of a valley (which I can put pins in, treating it like a map itself), but usually it's just a scene that doesn't need a tactical map, like the exterior of a massive church or the bridge of a (friendly/enemyless) ship. Sometimes I put stuff in the scene like a point-click adventure too.

So, like either of these:

The whole thing is great for online games especially - visual interest can be important when there's no faces to look at.

Now I’ve got people thinking that when I say that TTRPG campaigns shouldn’t be scripted, that I mean that they must be 100% improvised right there on the spot with zero planning or structure. I can’t fucking win.

And therefore critical role must be destroyed

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Nice argument. Unfortunately for you, I have already made an article for an online publication where I represent you as a D&D 5e character very poorly. I gave you a level of Barbarian because I know you're so mad right now.

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fellas we've never been more back

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Not an original observation but it's legitimately insane how common of a story "I don't want to run d&d 5e anymore but I'm stuck running it because it's the only thing my group will let me GM for them" is. It's fucking everywhere in any non-D&D focused ttrpg space.

Like. I think "the person who does like 90% of the work to make the game actually happen gets to pick what game we play" should be the bare minimum of courtesy towards a GM.

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I genuinely don't understand what y'all mean by "ok to kill enemies." Everytime it comes up I feel less and less confident I am following the conversation.

D&D kind of has, as part of its DNA, the idea that combat will eventually happen in the game. To that end, throughout the history of the game there have been many different types of guy that in the text of the game have been presented as like almost self-evidently okay to kill simply because. While different editions of the game have tried to move away from some of the more overtly problematic portrayals of this (basically saying that certain types of humanoids are okay to kill because they look funny and live in caves is kinda fucked up), the truth is that pretty much every attempt to look for a suitable Boogeyman that player characters can kill without any iffy ethics about it is going to end up really weird.

Anyway this is why people will often look for types of guy to present as enemies where characters can engage in no-thoughts-head-empty lethal sports with them without anyone needing to have a "wait a minute, are we the baddies?" moment. Demons and the undead are pretty easy to go for here.

My personal favorite approach is to just accept the fact that D&D kinda sucks with black-and-white morality and instead of making the conflict in the world about clear good and evil teams make it about different groups of people with different goals. Orcs can be present but they're no longer "the evil guys it's always morally okay to kill because of biotruths" but instead just some guys who might sometimes have violent disagreements with other people.

Anyway a lot of this stuff doesn't mean anything and as said not engaging with games as texts on this level isn't really necessary to enjoy them. But for me at least it can often elevate gameplay. When bandits aren't just some guys who decided to become evil criminals some day but actual people whose banditry is a response to something going on in the world and their lives, it suddenly makes the conflicts in the world a lot more real and grounded (and sometimes killing those bandits can be the right thing to do, but sometimes negotiating with them or even cooperating them can be the right thing to do. Basically, once you start thinking about all the different types of Guy that inhabit the worlds of D&D not just as game tokens that player characters can hit to make XP come out [although that is also fine and dandy as a playstyle] but as living thinking creatures with actual goals, the types of narratives the game starts to produce also expands a hundredfold.)

Anyway I'm not sure if that answers your question because I went on like a bunch of tangents. But it was also kind of a vague question.