fictional-calculations

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really enjoying this series

[fictional-calculations]

I'd definitely be interested! I'm erisianphoenix on Discord if you want to reach me off Tumblr

Concept: one-shot oriented tabletop RPG which borrows Land of OG's gimmick whereby each player is only allowed to use a specific, randomly determined list of words when communicating with other players (i.e., all communication not involving these words must be carried out via grunts and gestures), except instead of dumb cave men fucking around it's about a group of dungeon-crawling adventurers ascending the Tower of Babel, or some other suitable framing device, and each player's list of permitted words is re-randomised each time the party ascends to a new floor. Certain types of "damage" might involve modifying the affected player's word list, and one of the game's principal advancement mechanisms would entail "locking in" specific words, rendering them immune to loss or randomisation.

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GM Advice

Assigning difficulty:

I like to assign difficulty based on multiples of 3. It gives the players a bit of an edge, since now an "equal" challenge to them is only a DC 9 instead of 10. It also means that even a low roll might score a marginal success.

Some tasks will be a simple binary check: either you hit with your gun, or you didn't.

Other tasks might have multiple possible DCs: investigating a crime scene, it might be a DC 3 to notice that the window was smashed from the inside, because the glass is mostly outside. But a roll that beats a DC 9 might also notice that the impact was probably from a small object, like a rock or a shoe, and beating a DC 15 might also catch that the lack of any blood means the vandal was standing far away from the window.

DC 3: A trivial threat, like a civilian (have a cool failure state in mind when calling for a DC 3 roll, otherwise just let the PC succeed)

DC 6: A mook or underling (even with disadvantage, the PCs have a ~50% chance of success)

DC 9: A standard check of equal opposition (this biases towards the players a bit, with a 60% chance of success, similar to Fate's bellcurve)

DC 12: A foe with some advantage over the PCs, whether it be skill or simply a clever ambush (this tips the odds slightly against the PCs, with "only" a 45% chance)

DC 15: A powerful and dangerous foe, distinctly above the PCs in power level (even with advantage, the PCs will succeed a bit less than 50%)

DC 18: An exceptionally powerful foe, one the PCs probably can't defeat (PCs should know before rolling when the difficulty is this high) (at DC 18, it would take four PCs, all with advantage, to get a 50% chance of victory)

I generally give Mooks 1 HP, regular foes 3 HP, bossses 5 HP, and season bosses 10 HP. Note that more powerful foes will probably consider retreat if the PCs appear to have the upper hand. In particular, any DC 15-18 foe is probably well served by retreat when low on HP.

Fiction First

As a minimalist RPG, this game is of course leaning fairly heavily on the "Fiction First" principle. You're going to need to cooperate a lot on interpreting aspects, and the GM is heavily encouraged to favor the player's interpretation.

Aspects can easily be somewhat open-ended like "I have a Masters Degree in Psychology" - while this obviously grants advantage on psychology-related checks, keep in mind that it also probably helps bond with other academics, college students, etc.. It also includes six years of college classes, thus providing a basic foundation for plenty of other skills like Writing, Math, etc..

Minimum Viable Destiny (v0.4)

The index-card sized version:

Character creation: Each character has 5 aspects, things they're good at. When one of them would help on a roll, you get advantage: roll twice and take the better result.

Conflict resolution: Roll a d20 to resolve tasks. The players always roll - either to act, or to resist an NPC action. If the situation is stacked against the PC, roll at disadvantage. Advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out.

Combat: Characters have 5 HP and each successful attack deals 1 damage. 0 HP just means you wake up in the hospital.

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The Detailed Version

Character Creation:

Pick 5 "aspects" for your character - these might be free form, or answers to questions the GM set in advance. Aspects can vary from a short sentence to a short paragraph, depending on both the question and the player.

One of these aspects willl be the "core concept" of the character, something that most people can't even attempt to do. This might be picked from a list of character classes, with wizards able to cast spells and fighters being masters of combat. This might be a super power, like controlling lightning or invulnerability.

The other mandatory aspect is your character's education: whether they went to college, joined the military, or taught themselves how to code. This gives a broad sense of what sort of skills your character is good at, rather than having a specific Skill List. (I tended towards letting the player decide if their education really covered this situation, with only the very occasional veto when they got a bit too wild.)

The other three aspects can be free-form, or campaign specific (see below for my Super Villain Campaign)

Task Resolution:

Any time a dice roll comes up, roll a d20 against a DC assigned by the GM. If one or more of your aspects would help out, you get advantage: roll twice and take the best result. If an aspect or situational factor would get in the way, or you're trying something at the limits of your abilities, you get disadvantage (roll twice and take the worse result)

Luck Points:

Whenever a character does something particularly fitting for the game, they gain a Luck Point. These can be spent to re-roll the dice. They are used after the GM announces success/failure, but before knowing the exact results.

Combat:

Each character has 5 HP. If you run out of HP, you're knocked unconscious and wake up in the hospital (or possibly imprisoned, depending on the situation). Occasionally, a player might decide that a dramatic death is more appropriate, but it's their choice to make.

Attacks generally deal 1 damage. An exception is made for heavy weaponry (2 damage), and major vehicular attacks like a tank (3 damage). The tradeoff is that higher damage weapons are basically impossible to use without drawing a lot of attention, and you're very unlikely to sneak in with them.

When initiative matters, the group that initiated the situation goes first; have the players roll initiative if it's unclear. One group acts, then the next, until everyone has acted. Then go to the next round of actions.

Minimum Viable Destiny (v0.4)

The index-card sized version:

Character creation: Each character has 5 aspects, things they're good at. When one of them would help on a roll, you get advantage: roll twice and take the better result.

Conflict resolution: Roll a d20 to resolve tasks. The players always roll - either to act, or to resist an NPC action. If the situation is stacked against the PC, roll at disadvantage. Advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out.

Combat: Characters have 5 HP and each successful attack deals 1 damage. 0 HP just means you wake up in the hospital.

[fictional-calculations]

Minimum Viable Destiny (v0.4)

The index-card sized version:

Character creation: Each character has 5 aspects, things they're good at. When one of them would help on a roll, you get advantage: roll twice and take the better result.

Conflict resolution: Roll a d20 to resolve tasks. The players always roll - either to act, or to resist an NPC action. If the situation is stacked against the PC, roll at disadvantage. Advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out.

Combat: Characters have 5 HP and each successful attack deals 1 damage. 0 HP just means you wake up in the hospital.

[fictional-calculations]

Any progress on this? It sounds really interesting :)

Concept: one-shot oriented tabletop RPG which borrows Land of OG's gimmick whereby each player is only allowed to use a specific, randomly determined list of words when communicating with other players (i.e., all communication not involving these words must be carried out via grunts and gestures), except instead of dumb cave men fucking around it's about a group of dungeon-crawling adventurers ascending the Tower of Babel, or some other suitable framing device, and each player's list of permitted words is re-randomised each time the party ascends to a new floor. Certain types of "damage" might involve modifying the affected player's word list, and one of the game's principal advancement mechanisms would entail "locking in" specific words, rendering them immune to loss or randomisation.

[fictional-calculations]

I'm always criticizing eurocentric fantasy worldbuilding, but one thing I think it's underused are city-states and trade republics and leagues. Not that they don't exist, but they're often in the background, the fantasy genre is so focused on monarchies and dynasties and noble drama, while those systems have so much room for intrigue and stuff without getting into "who's the TRUE heir of the super magical monarch" (yes, I know they had aristocratic families that ruled almost as monarchs, but trust me, Medici drama is another beast from regular feudal stuff)

Venice with its stupidly complex election system and their eternal rivals in Genoa, Florence home of the Rennaissance, the Hanseatic League, and lesser known examples like Novgorod, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Taifa of Córdoba, the Consolat de Mar (technically not a republic but kind of an Iberian Hansa) and if we go farther back, the leagues of city states of antiquity... you know what, I'm bored of feudalism. Next time I do a fantasy setting, it will all be city states and republics. Fuck feudalism.

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How to Get a Chronological Dash as a New Blog

I've been working on a Tumblr Roleplaying 101 guide, and in doing so wound up making a brand new Tumblr account for some screenshots. And this process made me realize how weirdly complicated Tumblr has made it for new accounts to get a chronological dash. So if you just want to see posts from people you follow, in the order that they made them, this what you have to do.

First, go to your settings, go under Dashboard, and scroll down to Preferences. Toggle off Best Stuff First. This switches your dash from an algorithm feed to a chronological one.

If you have an older blog, that's all you have to do. But if your blog was created more recently, you have an extra step.

The Tumblr dashboard has different tabs, which you can see across the top of your feed. Most older users have completed tuned these out, because we don't care about anything other than the basic feed. There is a Following tab, which shows posts from users you follow, and a For you tab, which shows recommend posts Tumblr thinks you'll like.

On blogs created before May 8, 2023, the Following tab is the default view. However, blogs created after this date have the For you tab as the default view. (This is an intentional change by Tumblr.)

This means if you are a newer blog and want to see posts from people you follow, you'll need to manually switch to the Following tab every time you open the dashboard.

If you do not like this change, consider contacting Tumblr staff. Submit a form under the Feedback category and explain that you'd like the option to make the Following tab the default for new blogs. And please, be polite! There is a person on the other side of the screen who likely had no say in this change, and even if they did, they don't deserve to be yelled at.

[fictional-calculations]

a beautiful little figurine from Iruvia made of crystallised sugar and porcelain; there is a sense of stagnation about it. use it swiftly, before you think better of it.

It's this generator's turn to receive an update! As you may remember, this one is very old and a bit janky; I have not fixed this, but I have added to the arrays and put a whole new sentence in.

[fictional-calculations]

Fate: Genre Aspects

I was recently re-reading the section on Aspects in the Fate RPG, and realized I had never done anything interesting with the idea of "Game Aspects": aspects that exist throughout the world, and can be invoked by anyone.

Initially I hit a mental block, until I started thinking of them instead as Genre Aspects: a description of what sort of stuff the system wants to reward and encourage.

For instance, an action game might have the aspect "but explosions are cool" to emphasize the way things tend to explode spectacularly. Or you could just cut straight to the chase and make "rule of cool" into a genre aspect.

Conversely, "somehow, that succeeded" can go in a different direction, and allow actions to succeed despite the protagonist's failures - it turns out that weak punch was really all it took to knock out the guard. Or maybe you missed, hit the wall, and then a moment later a lose chunk of ceiling falls and takes out the guard.

You could also use these to create mechanical biases like "the best defense is a good offense" - easy to invoke on attacks, much harder to invoke on defense. You could even use it to establish power tiers, by saying "dragons are just better than you".

A clear factor here is that the more aspects you can bring to bear on a situation, the more Fate Points you can spend. A single generic aspect like "rule of cool" makes it easy to spend at least one Fate Point. Numerous Genre Aspects ups the drama level and lets you reliably save up for epic moments where 3 aspects converge on a very expensive +6 to a critical roll.