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If you want more info on tips and tricks for running it, let me know.

Motte and Bailey released

My submission for the One-Page RPG Jam is complete and submitted. Check it out. I would appreciate a download and a comment.

Motte and Bailey is a TTRPG game where you determine your character's backstory in order to make Actions that moves the story forward. I'm not great at hyping up my own games, but the gameplay of Motte and Bailey, despite being immediately simple, has a surprising amount of depth. There are all sorts of jitsus that you can employ in order to get different desired effects. Much the game is also about making arguments, so you end up in really funny debate contests with the GM while you go back and forward about whether your set of arguments makes sense.

The key to what makes the game work is that any "Action," a claim in the present tense, has a Target of 10 in order to complete. This is on a 1d6 die-rolling system. Not only is this impossible without modifiers, it is extremely impossible. This means that, in order to complete any Actions, players really need to be clever about arranging their Virtues and cleverly using Curses to achieve a 10. If they get lucky, they'll only need 4 Claims (on a 6-roll) to complete the action. In a dire situation, they'll need 9 Claims. The result of failing an action is Defeat, and the Character can no longer complete actions. So, the stress of the game shines through without the GM having to do much at all in particular.

That's the other strength of this game. The GM does not have to proactively do anything. There is no "story." The GM basically has no mechanics. All they have to do is hear claims about Virtues and determine the Target for that Check and then make Curses if the Check fails. And they can accept input from the players at the table, so they don't even have to do this on their own. It makes the whole experience feel somewhat democratic, which I appreciate. When designing Curses, its also best to kind of just organically flip the phrasing of the Virtue. You don't have to actually, like, think of Curses that are actively annoying to the party. It's actually good to have Curses that are potentially useable (or curses that are organically esoteric) because of how Curses can be used during the game.

The fact that most every turn results in objective gains (either in in the form of generating Virtues and Curses or in completing Actions) means that rolling badly generally does not feel too bad. It's one of my gripes with PbtA games that they provide "rewards" for failure, but that reward is basically a token for next session which might not matter if you're dead. Motte and Bailey, while obviously being a very different game, literally rewards failure about equally to success. Once you internalize that, the game really picks up.

It's also great for building characters. I highly recommend that you take the basic principles of Motte and Bailey and apply them to your own setting/game that you plan to run. It's a great session 0. You just have to replace "magic" with "setting relavent elements," and the game will work for whatever you wish.

Give it a shot. It's free (you can't even tip me because I didn't feel like setting up payment on itch).

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Are they with the spectre of communism over Europe?

the ghost of the mythical "white latino" looms ever large on this website

[greyplainsttrpg]

Motte and Bailey released

My submission for the One-Page RPG Jam is complete and submitted. Check it out. I would appreciate a download and a comment.

Motte and Bailey is a TTRPG game where you determine your character's backstory in order to make Actions that moves the story forward. I'm not great at hyping up my own games, but the gameplay of Motte and Bailey, despite being immediately simple, has a surprising amount of depth. There are all sorts of jitsus that you can employ in order to get different desired effects. Much the game is also about making arguments, so you end up in really funny debate contests with the GM while you go back and forward about whether your set of arguments makes sense.

The key to what makes the game work is that any "Action," a claim in the present tense, has a Target of 10 in order to complete. This is on a 1d6 die-rolling system. Not only is this impossible without modifiers, it is extremely impossible. This means that, in order to complete any Actions, players really need to be clever about arranging their Virtues and cleverly using Curses to achieve a 10. If they get lucky, they'll only need 4 Claims (on a 6-roll) to complete the action. In a dire situation, they'll need 9 Claims. The result of failing an action is Defeat, and the Character can no longer complete actions. So, the stress of the game shines through without the GM having to do much at all in particular.

That's the other strength of this game. The GM does not have to proactively do anything. There is no "story." The GM basically has no mechanics. All they have to do is hear claims about Virtues and determine the Target for that Check and then make Curses if the Check fails. And they can accept input from the players at the table, so they don't even have to do this on their own. It makes the whole experience feel somewhat democratic, which I appreciate. When designing Curses, its also best to kind of just organically flip the phrasing of the Virtue. You don't have to actually, like, think of Curses that are actively annoying to the party. It's actually good to have Curses that are potentially useable (or curses that are organically esoteric) because of how Curses can be used during the game.

The fact that most every turn results in objective gains (either in in the form of generating Virtues and Curses or in completing Actions) means that rolling badly generally does not feel too bad. It's one of my gripes with PbtA games that they provide "rewards" for failure, but that reward is basically a token for next session which might not matter if you're dead. Motte and Bailey, while obviously being a very different game, literally rewards failure about equally to success. Once you internalize that, the game really picks up.

It's also great for building characters. I highly recommend that you take the basic principles of Motte and Bailey and apply them to your own setting/game that you plan to run. It's a great session 0. You just have to replace "magic" with "setting relavent elements," and the game will work for whatever you wish.

Give it a shot. It's free (you can't even tip me because I didn't feel like setting up payment on itch).

[greyplainsttrpg]

dont piss me off. next time you go on a trip im filling your house with galapagos finches. by the time you return, they've evolved to fill your niche. they're a better spouse to your partner. they're a better parent for your child. and? they're a better friend to me than you ever were.

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Not for good girl

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genuinely can’t stress enough if you’re in high school rn and anyone is telling you that’s the best time of your life they are lying. it gets better. hs is arguably the worst. if you can survive that you can survive anything. despite the horrors i know i’m always posting about i swear life is so much better as an adult

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I feel inclined to point out that our point of reference to bipedalism is very different from birds. Anthropogenic bipedalism is an extension of vine-swinging locomotion, and that only works with an inflexible spine.

The inflexible spine isn't an adaptation to walking. It is an adaptation to swinging, and walking is essentially reverse swinging. It's more or less an accident that we live as long as we do to experience spinal collapse, but that was never evolved as, like "the plan."

shoutouts to the human spinal column for ingeniously crushing itself under its own weight

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i’ve been told by various european friends that the most american sentence i’ve ever said is “sophomore year of college, some friends and i road-tripped thirteen hours to florida for spring break.”

and now i can confidently say this is the most guy-who-lives-in-paris sentence i’ve ever said: “today i was cycling to meet a friend at buttes-chaumont and i went over some cobblestones and my baguette got launched out of the bike basket into the middle of the roundabout”

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As a now expert on motte and bailey fallacies, I will have you know that the asshole retreats to the motte.

I agree with your point. I've just been spending the last month obsessing over this specific fallacy. Carry on, soldier.

One particular reason I dislike ‘transandrophobia discourse’ is it often follows a motte-and-bailey structure.

A person claims “transandrophobia does not exist”. The obvious interpretation of this claim is “transmasculine people do not experience oppression”.

Upon receiving pushback, the discourser retreats to the bailey: “Androphobia does not exist; men are not oppressed”.

This completely ignores the fact that the reason the word transandrophobia was chosen was to acknowledge the fact that systematic misandry is not a feature of our society, and more insidiously paints anyone responding to the motte argument as stupid, sexist, or otherwise unreasonable.

If you do not believe that transmasculine people do not face oppression, then don’t phrase your claims in a way that implies it.

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The average 5e playe sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed Critical Role

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im about to kill someone or myself i just saw someone on the dnd subreddit say "rules are for gameplay, not narrative" (which in all fairness is not a take i should be surprised by) but like THE GAMEPLAY CREATES THE FUCKING NARRATIVE THATS HOW RPGS WORK

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Can you send a link. I have a collection of 5e brain reddit posts that I curate.

im about to kill someone or myself i just saw someone on the dnd subreddit say "rules are for gameplay, not narrative" (which in all fairness is not a take i should be surprised by) but like THE GAMEPLAY CREATES THE FUCKING NARRATIVE THATS HOW RPGS WORK

[greyplainsttrpg]

This is something that I'm working on in my game. Before designing my main game (Greyplains: Code Guidebook), the only system I had run extensively were different editions of D&D. I had played many other systems by the point of writing the game, but I hadn't run more (and bothered considering that a book should provide tools for a GM). At the same time, because my most recent GMing experience was in 5e, a system that did NOT fit my style, I just assumed that I was a bad GM/DM. So the current version of the book doesn't give a lot of tools for the GM because, at the time of writing, I didn't know what tools a GM would want/need. I wasn't a good G aM (I thought at the time), so how could I possibly give advice. I wrote a game. I don't know man, the game is good, you figure it out.

That is no longer my opinion. For one, actually having the game available gave me more experience to develop GM tools and tricks that I couldn't have anticipated like 7 years ago. Additionally, I now know exactly what the game is, so I know better how to communicate what players and the GM are supposed to do with it. It's taking a lot of work, but I'm glad that I've had the time available between the initial release and the eventual official release to really grind out what does and does not work, and why, of the game.

Also, I wasn't a bad GM. I was just running an absolute shit game that did not align with the elements of gameplay that I valued.

So, Why is D&D 5e/Modern D&D So Hard to DM, Anyway?

As I'm working on my own TTRPG system (my first attempt at it!) I've been reading a lot about game design producing stories. (Shout out to @anim-ttrpgs, @imsobadatnicknames2, and @thydungeongal for some especially interesting posts on the topic!)

That all got me thinking about Dungeons & Dragons, specifically modern D&D, and how it's designed. Despite having played/run quite a bit of D&D, across multiple editions, and having played/run a pile of other systems I like a lot more than D&D, I don't often sit down and actually think about D&D's game design in detail.

It's common to talk about how D&D 5e (and, by extension, its 2024 revision) is especially hard on DMs, and it's true. It's one of the systems most prone to lead DMs to burnout and it helps to propagate the narrative that DMing (and GMing in general) is a laborious process. But why is that? What exactly about the system makes it so tough for DMs to run?

The first and most obvious is that it's a system that wants you to care about competitive game balance (both PC vs. NPC and also comparing PCs to one another), but the tools it offers to achieve that are completely broken. But everybody knows that part. And while D&D is more complex than it presents itself, I don't actually think that's the major factor in it being especially difficult to run. There are plenty of reasonably-complex or crunchy systems that are easier to run, and simpler systems that are harder to run. Complexity isn't the real culprit here, either.

Instead, I think the problem is about storytelling.

"D&D Is About Storytelling"

D&D presents itself as an engine for stories. Let's take a look at an excerpt from the introduction of the Player's Handbook for the 5th edition (I don't have the 2024 edition myself):

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination. It's about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents. . . . In the Dungeons & Dragons game, each player creates an adventurer (also called a character) and teams up with other adventurers (played by friends). Working together, the group might explore a dark dungeon, a ruined city, a haunted castle, a lost temple deep in a jungle, or a lava-filled cavern beneath a mysterious mountain. The adventurers can solve puzzles, talk with other characters, battle fantastic monsters, and discover fabulous magic items and other treasure.

Yeah, I'd say that fits the popular conception of what D&D is. It certainly fits the play culture around it. But I'd argue it doesn't actually describe the game you hold in your hand. The rules of the game don't actually support the majority of what that promises.

The rules do support the "battle fantastic monsters" part, though. If that paragraph described D&D as a game about powerful fantasy adventurers fighting monsters, I'd say that's pretty accurate. That isn't the game most people are picking up modern D&D to play. They've been promised epic adventures, treks across dangerous wilderness, deep dungeons, puzzles, and drama. D&D certainly offers rules to cover some of those, but they're threadbare.

And for others, it's all on the DM. The game presents "puzzles" as something that it's about, but you won't find puzzles, or rules to design puzzles, anywhere in the actual game. If a group wants a good dungeon crawl, sure, the Dungeon Master's Guide gives some basic instruction on drawing a map and populating the dungeon, but it has almost nothing for how to run a dungeon, how to make it into gameplay.

What that means is that it's fully incumbent on DMs to provide almost all of what the game actually promises. The system will hold up its end of the deal when a fight breaks out (sort of, see the "game balance" note above), but until then, it's all on the DM.

That's one reason why D&D groups so often skip over traveling long distances, despite that travel often being where a lot of adventure occurs in much of D&D's source material: the game just doesn't really give you good rules for travel. I can open up Mythic Bastionland and see, on just one page, a system that turns travel into play, but D&D doesn't offer that.

Similarly, D&D doesn't really give you actual structures for creating, running, or playing dungeons, despite that being the first word of its title. How many boring, tedious dungeon crawls have you sat through as a DM tries to invent dungeon crawling all on their own? How many modern D&D groups do you know that just don't bother with actual dungeons at all because of that? For many people, Dungeons & Dragons isn't about dungeons at all, not because dungeons are boring, but because the game doesn't offer any rules for playing a dungeon.

Doing It Right

By contrast, let's take a look at Delta Green. Let's see what Delta Green promises players and Handlers up front:

Delta Green is not about guns. Delta Green is not about a bug hunt. Delta Green is not about understanding. Delta Green is about the end. The end of everything. Your family, everyone you know, your country, all life on Earth. It’s about the end of everything and your place in it. Because you’ll end, too. That’s what the fear is about. That’s what the game is about. It’s not about winning and it’s not about advancement and it’s not about the best weapon or the most clever plan. Delta Green is about the end of everything—and how much of it you’ll live to see. Welcome.

Damn, heavy stuff, and some big promises. But here's the cool thing: it fulfills those promises.

Delta Green agents are presented as competent, and so the rules support that, with a skill system that allows you to skip rolling entirely on a regular basis because your character's just that good.

But at the same time, those agents are in way over their head, and we're told that their efforts to keep the unnatural from devouring their world will inevitably destroy their life, break their mind, kill them, or, more likely, all three. Wouldn't you know it, that's also what the rules do. Agents are competent, but human, with human capabilities and fragility. In the face of unnatural monsters, your agent is extremely vulnerable; even in the face of a totally natural human with a gun, your agent is extremely vulnerable. Death is always just around the corner for an agent of Delta Green. But even if you don't die, the Sanity system works together with the Bonds system to produce your agent's inevitable, yet extremely personal, downward spiral.

You want an emotional character arc in your trad game? You'll get one in Delta Green just by playing the rules as written. And if the Handler somehow runs out of great operations to run, the Handler's Guide has clear, helpful advice on creating and running your own.

D&D... doesn't do that. It promises a type of game that it's reliant on DMs to provide. Delta Green, along with many other well-designed TTRPGs, actually provides the game they say they do, and that means it's much easier for a game master to deliver on that promise.

D&D will provide the combat, and promises a story that it actually expects the DM to provide all on their own. Combine that with a general lack of quality official adventures or campaigns to run and that's how you get a play culture where the DM is part author, part game designer, part film director, part improv actor, and part tactical wargame player and referee.

Side Effects

All of this would be just trivia if D&D was just one of many popular TTRPGs, but it's by far the most popular among English-speaking players. It's so popular that it functionally defines the entire hobby for most people who engage with TTRPGs at all.

That leads to an interesting situation with critiques like the one I wrote above, which is that, to someone whose primary (or only) TTRPG experience is with modern D&D, everything I wrote above looks absurd. I know this, because that used to be me, not even that long ago. At the time, reading things about how D&D's rules don't support certain kinds of storytelling hit me sort of like, "Well, okay, but isn't that the players' and DM's job anyway? What would rules to support that even look like?" I'd think to Powered by the Apocalypse games like Dungeon World and, while I liked those, that's not what I wanted in my D&D. It seemed to me that people critiquing D&D's rules from this angle were just barking up the wrong tree.

This is one reason why TTRPG nerds like me are so insistent that people should try games other than D&D, even if you like D&D, even if you have no complaints about it. Many people in this hobby--again, speaking from personal experience having been in that very position--don't have the context to conceive of what else a TTRPG can be, and what game design can accomplish.

The more concerning side effect, to me, is the perception that all TTRPGs are difficult to learn and to run. It adds a gravitational pull to D&D: if someone like me is suggesting a different system, you would very reasonably think that other system is at least as complex as D&D, and it's going to take a lot of convincing to get you to put in all that effort again for a system you don't even know if you'll like. It leads to people who very well might adore another system sticking with D&D because D&D itself has made the concept of learning to run another system intimidating.

And no, Pathfinder doesn't fix this.

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So, Why is D&D 5e/Modern D&D So Hard to DM, Anyway?

As I'm working on my own TTRPG system (my first attempt at it!) I've been reading a lot about game design producing stories. (Shout out to @anim-ttrpgs, @imsobadatnicknames2, and @thydungeongal for some especially interesting posts on the topic!)

That all got me thinking about Dungeons & Dragons, specifically modern D&D, and how it's designed. Despite having played/run quite a bit of D&D, across multiple editions, and having played/run a pile of other systems I like a lot more than D&D, I don't often sit down and actually think about D&D's game design in detail.

It's common to talk about how D&D 5e (and, by extension, its 2024 revision) is especially hard on DMs, and it's true. It's one of the systems most prone to lead DMs to burnout and it helps to propagate the narrative that DMing (and GMing in general) is a laborious process. But why is that? What exactly about the system makes it so tough for DMs to run?

The first and most obvious is that it's a system that wants you to care about competitive game balance (both PC vs. NPC and also comparing PCs to one another), but the tools it offers to achieve that are completely broken. But everybody knows that part. And while D&D is more complex than it presents itself, I don't actually think that's the major factor in it being especially difficult to run. There are plenty of reasonably-complex or crunchy systems that are easier to run, and simpler systems that are harder to run. Complexity isn't the real culprit here, either.

Instead, I think the problem is about storytelling.

"D&D Is About Storytelling"

D&D presents itself as an engine for stories. Let's take a look at an excerpt from the introduction of the Player's Handbook for the 5th edition (I don't have the 2024 edition myself):

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination. It's about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents. . . . In the Dungeons & Dragons game, each player creates an adventurer (also called a character) and teams up with other adventurers (played by friends). Working together, the group might explore a dark dungeon, a ruined city, a haunted castle, a lost temple deep in a jungle, or a lava-filled cavern beneath a mysterious mountain. The adventurers can solve puzzles, talk with other characters, battle fantastic monsters, and discover fabulous magic items and other treasure.

Yeah, I'd say that fits the popular conception of what D&D is. It certainly fits the play culture around it. But I'd argue it doesn't actually describe the game you hold in your hand. The rules of the game don't actually support the majority of what that promises.

The rules do support the "battle fantastic monsters" part, though. If that paragraph described D&D as a game about powerful fantasy adventurers fighting monsters, I'd say that's pretty accurate. That isn't the game most people are picking up modern D&D to play. They've been promised epic adventures, treks across dangerous wilderness, deep dungeons, puzzles, and drama. D&D certainly offers rules to cover some of those, but they're threadbare.

And for others, it's all on the DM. The game presents "puzzles" as something that it's about, but you won't find puzzles, or rules to design puzzles, anywhere in the actual game. If a group wants a good dungeon crawl, sure, the Dungeon Master's Guide gives some basic instruction on drawing a map and populating the dungeon, but it has almost nothing for how to run a dungeon, how to make it into gameplay.

What that means is that it's fully incumbent on DMs to provide almost all of what the game actually promises. The system will hold up its end of the deal when a fight breaks out (sort of, see the "game balance" note above), but until then, it's all on the DM.

That's one reason why D&D groups so often skip over traveling long distances, despite that travel often being where a lot of adventure occurs in much of D&D's source material: the game just doesn't really give you good rules for travel. I can open up Mythic Bastionland and see, on just one page, a system that turns travel into play, but D&D doesn't offer that.

Similarly, D&D doesn't really give you actual structures for creating, running, or playing dungeons, despite that being the first word of its title. How many boring, tedious dungeon crawls have you sat through as a DM tries to invent dungeon crawling all on their own? How many modern D&D groups do you know that just don't bother with actual dungeons at all because of that? For many people, Dungeons & Dragons isn't about dungeons at all, not because dungeons are boring, but because the game doesn't offer any rules for playing a dungeon.

Doing It Right

By contrast, let's take a look at Delta Green. Let's see what Delta Green promises players and Handlers up front:

Delta Green is not about guns. Delta Green is not about a bug hunt. Delta Green is not about understanding. Delta Green is about the end. The end of everything. Your family, everyone you know, your country, all life on Earth. It’s about the end of everything and your place in it. Because you’ll end, too. That’s what the fear is about. That’s what the game is about. It’s not about winning and it’s not about advancement and it’s not about the best weapon or the most clever plan. Delta Green is about the end of everything—and how much of it you’ll live to see. Welcome.

Damn, heavy stuff, and some big promises. But here's the cool thing: it fulfills those promises.

Delta Green agents are presented as competent, and so the rules support that, with a skill system that allows you to skip rolling entirely on a regular basis because your character's just that good.

But at the same time, those agents are in way over their head, and we're told that their efforts to keep the unnatural from devouring their world will inevitably destroy their life, break their mind, kill them, or, more likely, all three. Wouldn't you know it, that's also what the rules do. Agents are competent, but human, with human capabilities and fragility. In the face of unnatural monsters, your agent is extremely vulnerable; even in the face of a totally natural human with a gun, your agent is extremely vulnerable. Death is always just around the corner for an agent of Delta Green. But even if you don't die, the Sanity system works together with the Bonds system to produce your agent's inevitable, yet extremely personal, downward spiral.

You want an emotional character arc in your trad game? You'll get one in Delta Green just by playing the rules as written. And if the Handler somehow runs out of great operations to run, the Handler's Guide has clear, helpful advice on creating and running your own.

D&D... doesn't do that. It promises a type of game that it's reliant on DMs to provide. Delta Green, along with many other well-designed TTRPGs, actually provides the game they say they do, and that means it's much easier for a game master to deliver on that promise.

D&D will provide the combat, and promises a story that it actually expects the DM to provide all on their own. Combine that with a general lack of quality official adventures or campaigns to run and that's how you get a play culture where the DM is part author, part game designer, part film director, part improv actor, and part tactical wargame player and referee.

Side Effects

All of this would be just trivia if D&D was just one of many popular TTRPGs, but it's by far the most popular among English-speaking players. It's so popular that it functionally defines the entire hobby for most people who engage with TTRPGs at all.

That leads to an interesting situation with critiques like the one I wrote above, which is that, to someone whose primary (or only) TTRPG experience is with modern D&D, everything I wrote above looks absurd. I know this, because that used to be me, not even that long ago. At the time, reading things about how D&D's rules don't support certain kinds of storytelling hit me sort of like, "Well, okay, but isn't that the players' and DM's job anyway? What would rules to support that even look like?" I'd think to Powered by the Apocalypse games like Dungeon World and, while I liked those, that's not what I wanted in my D&D. It seemed to me that people critiquing D&D's rules from this angle were just barking up the wrong tree.

This is one reason why TTRPG nerds like me are so insistent that people should try games other than D&D, even if you like D&D, even if you have no complaints about it. Many people in this hobby--again, speaking from personal experience having been in that very position--don't have the context to conceive of what else a TTRPG can be, and what game design can accomplish.

The more concerning side effect, to me, is the perception that all TTRPGs are difficult to learn and to run. It adds a gravitational pull to D&D: if someone like me is suggesting a different system, you would very reasonably think that other system is at least as complex as D&D, and it's going to take a lot of convincing to get you to put in all that effort again for a system you don't even know if you'll like. It leads to people who very well might adore another system sticking with D&D because D&D itself has made the concept of learning to run another system intimidating.

And no, Pathfinder doesn't fix this.

[greyplainsttrpg]

"Sir, a Thomas Jefferson has hit the second tower."

[greyplainsttrpg]

I have decided

My next RPG is:

The Towing of Deep Thought

A game about towing the "previously abonded yacht," Deep Though, from Lake Michigan.

It is a war game with two sides: Milwaukee County (the players) and Lake Michigan (the GM).

Can you do better than Jeff Pillar and All City Towing?