#Other games do those things for the good of Players AND GMs

[ifightformyfriends]

Good instincts! These are great prompts to get you thinking about your character as a person and how that person plays into the Class that they are. They’re really common in other TTRPGs.

Pathfinder takes a more Examples approach than Questions, providing examples of what a Class can be, and is often assumed to be, in various situations. They have similar information for Ancestries, with “You Might” and “Others probably” for each of those and also every Versatile Heritage (Things like Tiefling that you can slap onto any Ancestry for tons of combinations).

Beacon does go the question route, with 4 questions for each Class. Same for Ancestries here, too, along with an example Worldbuilding for them because there is a lot of worldbuilding you can do in the system. Also worth noting that Beacon has 12 level progression but each Class is only 3 levels, so it’s always worth thinking about the questions for why you take your next Class which keeps them always relevant.

And then there’s Fabula Ultima, which again offers 4 questions Per Class. Nothing for Ancestries since those aren’t mechanically relevant in Fabula Ultima, but there is a TON of group focused collaborative worldbuilding to help get everyone on the same page about the game being played, but that’s a bit out of scope for this. Fabula Ultima is a Tabletop JRPG, and as such you start at level 5 and you HAVE to Multiclass with 2 or 3 Classes for those initial 5. And the levels go up to 50! Though you can only have 3 Classes under level 10 at a time so at most...7 Classes over 50 levels.

They’re a very useful tool, especially for newer players, and their absence from 5e helps to highlight that 5e isn’t actually meant to be easy for new players, it’s meant to be approachable, and those are very different design goals.

So you're playing a D&D class

(had these thoughts while thinking about CR character builds, but relevant to D&D in general).

Here's just a brief list of three questions per class that are intended to be helpful if you're playing that class and are working on fleshing out that aspect of your character. Note that I'm only covering officially published classes for 5e. If you're a blood hunter I am just going to assume you know what you're about, and if you're a mystic then you are beyond help or hope. Also, obviously, there's way more to a character than their class! But understanding why the character is that class is pretty crucial to overall character build.

Artificer:

Did the magic come first or did the tinkering come first?

Did you apprentice or where you self-taught?

What do you dream of creating - or if you don't, what outside goal drives your creations?

Barbarian:

Is rage a cultural or family trait, or is this unique to you?

What do you feel like when you rage?

What do you feel your purpose is, outside of combat? Do you have one or are you not sure? (note - feel free to ask this about other martially focused classes, but barbarians skew especially hard towards combat skills above all others)

Bard:

What led you to be able to tap into the echoes of creation (not guaranteed for all artists!)

What is your medium, and how did you come to it/learn it?

You have a ton of skills - how did you acquire them?

Cleric:

What is your relationship with the deity/entity/concept that grants you your powers?

Since many sources have multiple domains, why this domain specifically?

What does your worship look like?

Druid:

Is your relationship to nature cultural, or personal?

What drew you to your circle?

How do you feel about wildshape? Is it a tool available to you, or an enjoyable experience?

Fighter:

Who trained you or how did you pick up your skills?

What led you to focus on fighting? Is there something you wished to attack or to protect?

Fighter is REALLY modular/subclass dependent, so dig into your subclass; if you're a champion, the 'what is your purpose outside combat' from Barbarian may apply, but if you're say, an eldritch knight or rune knight, you may have had two teachers and should dig into that.

Monk:

Who trained you?

What does Ki feel like for you?

Not a question, but: with the caveat that I know very little about martial arts, I do think that having a concept of the martial art style your monk uses is a huge help in bringing the character to life.

Paladin:

What drew you to this oath?

What continues to motivate you?

You're in a very versatile role; which part speaks to you the most- do you see yourself more as a protector? a healer? is the versatility itself what matters?

Ranger:

How did you learn your nature skills?

What is your relationship to your magic?

Why are your favored terrain and enemy what they are?

Rogue:

How did you learn to pick locks?

Did your thievery/stealth come as a necessity for survival, or was it a choice?

As with bard - what specifically led you to develop the skills you have?

Sorcerer:

When did your powers first manifest? If it was not when you were very young, what were you doing beforehand?

Are you interested in where your powers came from? How far would you go to learn about them? Or do you already know?

What would you do if your powers disappeared?

Warlock:

What led you to make the pact - even if it was accidental or a trick?

How do you feel about your patron generally?

Because warlock is truly very modular - that is, extremely reliant on the boon and evocations for flavor, analyze the choice of evocations and boon. If you picked agonizing blast, why specifically did your warlock want to make eldritch blast stronger? What drew your character to the blade vs. chain vs. tome?

Wizard:

What role do wizards play in your society?

How were you trained?

What do you most desire to learn or achieve?

[thydungeongal]

Re: D&D being the only game where rules knowledge is looked down upon... I honestly think there are a lot of things that are accepted, if not expected in D&D culture that would quickly get you labeled an asshole in any other hobby.

Like, a while ago, I found a thread on r/rpg about the all-too-common problem of players actively refusing to engage with the story, ignoring plot hooks, etc. A shocking number of replies boiled down to "it's the GM's job to make sure the story is interesting" and eventually I made a post saying "imagine signing up for soccer practice, going to soccer practice, putting on your soccer jersey, and then sitting down at the edge of the field and playing on your phone, and when the coach tells you to get up and play, you just tell them that it's their job to motivate you to play. like, by signing up and coming to practice, you kind of implicitly said that you're motivated."

Or imagine going to a Friday Night Magic event, telling people you're new to the game, and every time someone wants to explain the rules to you, explain what your cards do, or displays knowledge about what *their* cards do, you tell them to stop being a gatekeeping rules lawyer.

Imagine playing an MMO for months on end, and still constantly asking your guild leader what YOUR character can even do.

Imagine joining a community theater, and complaining that the props, sets, and effects aren't on par with Broadway productions.

Imagine genuinely using sentences like "I need to keep my friends on a short leash" or "I can't trust my friends to make good decisions" or "I need to be an asshole to my friend because they need to be taken down a peg" in literally any context.

Seriously, I agree with all of this. And to that last point, the fact that those phrases are treated as haha funny memes in TTRPG spaces is grating. We should just play fun games with people we respect and not conspire to make things bad for them!!!

[ladytabletop]

Lady Tabletop's Primer for Getting into Tabletop Roleplaying Game Design Philosophy

Sam Dunnewold over at the Dice Exploder podcast has posed a fun question to his discord server: where would you tell people to start if they wanted to know more about TTRPGs and design?

First and foremost, I'd tell people to start with @jdragsky's article about Systems of Relation.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can now understand that the games we played on the playground were identical in nature to the tabletop RPGs I would grow up to play and help design.

Next, check out Thomas Manuel's analysis of the Axes of Game Design over on the Indie RPG Newsletter.

So the basic exercise is trying to figure out the standard axes or spectrums on which every game can fit. The idea is for these axes to be as descriptive and objective as possible.

Thirdly (and lastly for the purposes of this blog - it's entry-level, not comprehensive), check out this reddit thread about lonely fun.

The Lonely Fun is all of the stuff you do as a part of your hobby away from the table, in any way you might engage. For D&D 5e players, this is usually building complicated and elaborate characters on the page, pouring over the books for new races and subclasses, figuring out fun new combinations, and carefully crafting characters.

Read those? Now check out BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home by @temporalhiccup

Will we be able to outrun our Masters and those who hunt us down? Can we use our magic to bring about the rebirth of the city and all Elementals? ill this be our RECKONING or our HOMECOMING? That’s what we play to find out.

Why I make these particular recommendations below the cut.

All of these recommendations are hopefully all entry-level. I tried to stay away from any essays, blogs, or articles that reference game movements you may not have heard of or that require tons of reading before you can even read my recommendations. Some do have links to other stuff, and if you're enjoying the writing, definitely go down those rabbit holes! These are a tiny, tiny portion of my "TTRPG Homework" folder where I save essays, podcasts, etc that have helped me in my own game design journey. I'm always happy to share more, just ask!

The essay on Systems of Relation put into words something I had been thinking about the more I got into indie games/design: I've been playing my whole life, and ttrpgs are just another piece of that. I think it's crucial to break out of the framework of people trying to define play and games into neat little categories. Will I ever write a game as good as the ones I played in the backyard with my siblings? Probably not, but I'd like to find out.

Now that I've told you to stop trying to categorize games, we have an article about trying to categorize games. But I do like Thomas's assessment and examples of using game design axes. I think as designers it's important to figure out the things the game is trying to do and communicate, so that we can make sure it does those things well.

Lastly, I know 5e gets a bad rap (and it's gotten it from me, too!). But the concept of lonely fun has stuck in my craw since I first saw this thread. It's why some people prefer to GM (and therefore why GM-less games might not work for some people). Not all games are going to have lonely fun, but the ones that do are still going to appeal to people! This thread was key for me in terms of considering that no game is for everyone, and it shouldn't try to be, and also helped contextualize the enjoyment I get from the occasional high-prep game.

Balikbayan as a recommendation was a no-brainer for me. I'm not going to say it's the most elegant or tight of Rae's work, but it's the one with the most heart for me. The story this game wants you to tell is so clear, and as an introduction to "Belonging Outside Belonging" as a system/concept/design philosophy. This game really sings in its character concepts and emotional play.

If you've read this far, congratulations! I've been enjoying the DE podcast (even when I don't agree with some of the takes) and the discord has been a cool (if at times intimidating) place to hang out. I've had a hell of a game design journey this year and I'm so excited to keep learning, and to see what media other folks participating in this blog carnival recommend!

To sign off: my best advice to designers, especially those starting out can be boiled down to three things:

When in doubt, simplify or make it silly

The two cakes theory is your best friend - game design is not a competition

Not everything has to be finished. Not every part of the creative process is fun. Find the balance between these two truths (you're going to have to do that every day).

Best,

LT

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

O Derin, author of cool works, producer of red herrings, master of games: how do you run a tabletop game while making it fun for the players without getting overwhelmed? I've considered trying to be a GM for my friends, but I had a bad time trying to follow a DND 5th e module (especially the combat), so now I'm worried about being able to keep on top of things and narrate well. And also combat with more than like three types of enemies to keep track of makes me feel like I'm taking way too long to remember what they all do.

I ask you specifically because you write good and create cool settings and characters, and run at least one game that people seemed to like. I like to think I'm decent at coming up with stuff, but not having the ability to go back in a tabletop game and edit to make it better is daunting, and tabletop roleplay is different from writing anyway, so how applicable are those skills, really?

I give Diesel a parasocial hello, and also the chickens, and hope you're having a good [time of day] 👍

Don't run DnD then. If the system is too crunchy, use a different system.

I like FATE, personally, as a flexible and fairly light system. If that's too crunchy, you could go lighter with Kids on Bikes, or even something very bare like Lasers & Feelings. If you want something in the crunch range of DnD but more focused so you don't get overwhelmed with extras and edge cases, something like Vampire: The Masquerade (or Requiem, whichever you prefer) might work. If it's the concept of combat that's overwhelming you, run something that's not focused on combat. If you're lucky and have a party that likes roleplaying, they'll roleplay with each other and do a lot of the work for you.

If this is your first time, the concept of shopping around for an rpg itself is probably overwhelming (since you won't have the context to know what's good or bad for you yet), so my recommendation would be starting with FATE or with Lasers & Feelings and running a very short game, between 1 and 5 sessions long. This game does not have to be an epic masterpiece of art. It is for you and your players to feel out how you play and what you like. Once you're done, run a longer one; same system, new system, short or long, whatever you're feeling. There's no need to be overwhelmed because there's no need to go big or complicated.

[theresattrpgforthat]

So, I went to a game store, and I asked if there were any good beginner games for someone who tried the DnD Essentials Kit and found it too complicated, and you'll never guess what one singular game they suggested!

THEME: Simpler Games than DND.

My friend, I’m not a very good guesser, but I hope that I am able to present you with some games that will give you what you’re looking for.

24XX: Chaos Unit, by polyhedralmice

Deep under the busy streets of Sapien City is the headquarters of the Vermin Squad, the espionage wing of a secret organization of urban animals known as the CHAOS Unit. They capitalize on the fact that vermin are virtually invisible human inhabitants of the city and use they use their street smarts to run vital missions for the unit. Raccoons, opossums, pigeons and squirrels each play specific roles and together form teams that take on the most vital of missions. From intercepting life-saving pizza orders to rescuing their colleagues from the dastardly Animal Control, there is no task too daunting for the brave animals of the Vermin Squad. Every night teams are sent out on their missions, and this is the story of one of those teams. Nothing will stop these brave agents from successfully completing their tasks (except maybe a humane trap baited with peanut butter). 

CHAOS Unit is a spy themed hack based on Jason Tocci’s 24XX.

24XX games are great for groups that love different-sided dice. In general, you only have a few skills for your character that are outside the normal parameters (upgraded to d8 - d12), and the success threshold is the same for pretty much every roll. The challenges and situations of any given scenario are typically presented as roll tables, allowing the GM to come up with an adventure just by rolling a few dice.

CHAOS Unit has just a few character options, some simple gear options, and a comparatively light-hearted premise. It’s a great introduction to the system, and learning how to play one 24XX game makes every other 24XX game a piece of cake to learn, even if they include new rules.

Loot, by Gila RPGs.

LOOT is a fantasy TTRPG by Gila RPGs that combines looter shooter mechanics with west marches vibes. When a rebellion toppled a lich overlord and torn down his city, the people were left with a lot of loot, and a lot of problems. That's where you come in.

Get some friends together, fight some monsters, deck your characters out in cool loot. Do it all over again.

Even though LUMEN uses grid-based combat, your character’s stats are simplified, reduced to a few things: health, armour, and three action types: force, flow & focus. Your stats themselves come from the items that your carry - your loot.

Your loot is organized through slots on your character sheet: you can only carry so much, so you’ll have to think carefully about what kind of stat bonuses and abilities you want. I find that a visual inventory can make it easier to keep track of everything you have, and can help some players learn how to think strategically. If you like the fantasy and strategy that exists in D&D but don’t want to do nearly as much math, you might be interested in LOOT - although the lack of dice is certainly a big change.

Slugblaster, by Wilkie’s Candy Lab.

In the small town of Hillview, teenage hoverboarders sneak into other dimensions to explore, film tricks, go viral, and get away from the problems at home. It’s dangerous. It’s stupid. It’s got parent groups in a panic. And it’s the coolest thing ever.

This is Slugblaster. A table-top rpg about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool.

Forged in the Dark games can be tricky to introduce to a new table, but Slugblaster is one of a few that I think can do the job. It’s a streamlined version of the system, that takes away a lot of the crunch that comes from Stats, Position, and Effect, and boils it all down to Kick and Boost. It also streamlines harm into 2 levels of slams, and keeps stress and downtime to a procedure that you can follow step-by-step when you finish a run. Finally character creation is very easy: you only make few choices in terms of abilities, and many of these choices are descriptive, rather than mechanical.

One thing I’ve noticed about games with “simpler” rules systems is that they typically do require a bunch of improv, which can be scary for new GMs. Slugblaster isn’t that different in this regard, but it does have a few things you as a GM can prepare beforehand if you want to make things easier for yourself. For example, you can set up your map of the different dimensions beforehand, including the doorways that the teens can get through. If you know that the teens get back to your home dimension without going through Operablum, then you can prepare a few location - specific threats to confound the teens as they try to get back in time for dinner.

Another strength of these games is that typically, if a player wants to do something, they just have to be able to describe how they’d do it - you can then work backwards using the gear & resources on your sheet to give you some dice to roll, as well as the logic of the game world, to figure out what happens next.

Lady Blackbird, by John Harper

Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover: the pirate king Uriah Flint.

Lady Blackbird is the first game I ever played, and it’s a game I fell for - hard. It involves rolling pools of dice that you pull from descriptive collections of tags assigned to pre-generated characters. It simplifies game-play by taking away the step of character creation, and gives the group a pretty solid story to pick up and follow wherever your heart may lead.

While the rules of the game are fairly simple, I think that as a GM, you’re going to need to be comfortable with a fair bit of improv to make this work. The game has some excellent pieces of advice on how to come up with scenes for the characters, and even includes some example complications to throw at the party. I’m really glad this was my first game because from the beginning, it affirmed that roleplaying games are a communal experience, and even if the characters and the starting scenario are already written for the group, the players have a lot of freedom to decide who their characters are, and what they’re going to value.

Liminal Horror, by Goblin Archives.

There’s a strange comfort to ambiguity. To stand at the threshold between states of what was and what’s next, to inhabit the places of transition. But you’re never truly alone here. There are things that hunger within the dark places. Strange creatures and mysteries lie in wait and tumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time may put you on the path towards doom.

Grab your flashlights and blood splattered jackets as you try to make it through the night. Beware, snapping bone and rending flesh are often the simplest outcome. While there may be great power within these places… not all mysteries can be solved and not everyone can be saved. Above all, there are fates far worse than death.

LIMINAL HORROR is a rules-lite, adaptable Survival-Horror roleplaying game about normal characters and their struggles against the things that go bump in the night. The game focuses on surviving the weird and Investigating horrors while blending simple, old-school inspired rules with modern, narrative first principles. Survival is not guaranteed and those that do make it through the night are often forever changed.

In Liminal Horror, character creation is rather quick, often easily generated using a few dice rolls. For most tasks, your characters will roll a d20 and try to get a number lower than one of their three stats, so when you get started, teaching the game should be pretty simple. Of course, since it’s a horror game, there’s more than just trying to roll under a stat: characters will find themselves subject to the consequences of being exposed to horrors that are far beyond the limits of human experience. As a result, characters will find themselves dealing with two different kinds of harm: stress & fallout. These two harm systems will make the stakes feel real, and they’ll also inflict changes on your characters as you play.

Liminal Horror has a few things going for it. The basic rules are fairly straightforward, but they’re also free. The game is meant to be paired with pre-written adventures, which often include place descriptions, NPCs, and adventure-specific consequences to torture the characters with. A lot of the adventures available come with a price tag, but if you want to try out the system, there’s a couple of free ones out there - I recommend Messenger National Park, by capacityforwonder.

For the Ship And Its Crew, by Adeline Fowl Games.

We've crewed this Ship for years together. We've seen wondrous sights, gotten ourselves into seemingly insurmountable trouble, and have owed our fair share of creds to the wrong people. And yet, still, we fly. But after all these years, our past may be catching up with us. As the missiles tear across starlit space, we'll be forced to ask ourselves: What will we do, for the Ship and its Crew?

This is a hack of For the Queen, which mostly involves answering prompts, using something like a card deck, or in this case, a digital hosting service. Your group is telling a story by taking turns answering questions, which makes the game fairly easy to teach, even to people who don’t have a lot of roleplaying experience.

These kinds of games can also be played very quickly, which might also make it easier to introduce to folks who aren’t used to sitting around a grid and calculating resources for 2+ hours.

Other Recommendation Posts To Check Out…

Easy To Teach Recommendation Post

First Time GMs Recommendation Post

Little Reading or Writing Required Recommendation Post

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eureka seems like it could be a cool game to drop players into with some hooks and let them do what they want. Will there be a pre-made setting or something along those lines in Eureka when it's complete?

Sorta but it’ll work a little differently from what you might be used to if you’re used to epic fantasy campaign games like D&D5e and Pathfinder.

Eureka won’t exactly have big setting books the same way that something like D&D does, it just has the one setting as described in the rulebook itself, which is primarily 21st century but can span all the way back to the late 1800s. I can dig up a post about that to link here

As for hooks, we recommend you use adventure modules. Eureka supports a LOT of things, it’s a “toolbox game,” which means that if there’s a situation that can come up during the adventure, the rulebook probably has some advice for what to roll (That’s also why it’s such a long rulebook.) - however, all of these situational considerations are in service to the one main thing: Investigation. Eureka does mystery Investigation really well, which means it does it pretty differently compared to most other games, and the way it does it means that the GM will run into trouble if they try to make everything up on the fly based on whatever random hook the PCs decide to follow up on. They’re going to investigate and find evidence, and if the GM isn’t prepared with cohesive information to give them based on that evidence, then it won’t all come together in the end.

This is not to say that Eureka adventures need to be pre-plotted or railroaded, far from it. What it means is that that hook has to have a whole line attached to it.

A good “campaign” for Eureka will probably last 2-10 sessions at most, and have one or multiple hooks, all of which are related to the same event.

That event will be something the GM has written out in detail and set in stone, which has already happened (or in more advanced cases, is actively happening). Lady Violet killed Colonel Mustard in the study with the candle stick. With that set in stone, you can start sprinkling clues around that they can find that either point to Lady Violet, or help rule out other suspects. You gotta stick with that no matter what crackpot theories about aliens or ex wives the players or PCs might come up with, because if you change it on a whim based on what the players want to be the truth, then previous clues will quickly stop making sense.

To this end, we recommend using prewritten adventure modules, because we know from experience that it’s a lot of work for a GM to make up an event to be investigated that has enough detail for every eventuality. (That’s why they pay people to write adventure modules after all, it’s work, even if it can be fun work.)

Our team plans to support Eureka for as long as is feasibly possible with continual releases of new adventure modules, and we already have four in the works to release with the full game. The beta version of one of them (Horror Harry’s Haunted House) comes free with the name-your-price beta of Eureka on itchio, and two more (The Eye of Neptune and FORIVA: The Angel Game) are available on our patreon.

You can also listen to an Actual Play playthrough of FORIVA: The Angel Game on @tinytablerpg's podcast!

And finally, Eureka is compatible with most other already-existing adventure modules about mystery Investigation, which we have a post about right here

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 17 - Complex Dice Tests

We lied! Today was going to be about the meta-campaign mechanics, but we did a really cool system overhaul instead and we simply have to tell you about it.

Basically, we overhauled a part of our dice system in a pretty major way. It’s involved some fairly dramatic changes to how rolls are done, though all the other systems we’ve created plug pretty seamlessly into it (and as we’ve integrated it, it’s actually let us effectively cut systems now that they’re covered automatically by the new system). It’s one of the deftest bits of game design we’ve ever done and we gotta brag about it.

Development of the Previous System

One of the things that has been a problem for Torchship for a long while is that it wanted to be a dice pool system (roll X dice, looking for Y amount of Z+ results), which doesn’t just have binary pass-failure outcomes. We wanted players to feel competent in their fields, but we also needed there to be interesting difficulties and complications so that stories aren’t just a stateful progression of experts effortlessly performing the tasks they’re experts in.

This is surprisingly difficult!

Nailing down exactly how it would work has gone through about a half-a-dozen iterations, all of which always felt like hacky temporary solutions. The version we came up with before this, which the game has been using for about a year, involved two thresholds on each roll; a “Difficulty” to do the thing, and a “Complexity” tacked onto it that you had to reach to do it without any extra problems.

This served the purpose, but its various incarnations slowed the game down a lot more than it should have, and put too much stress on the GM to work out what these two targets would be and how complications would emerge from it. It was a clunky solution which required a lot of experience to use properly, functioning just well enough to build systems around without ever being stellar on its own.

It Must be Tuesday

While working on Must be Tuesday: Revived Edition, which uses a similar dice pool system, my wonderful editor Lexie came up with a really clever system while we were working out the dice odds. In that game, you have a “Skill” target from 6+ to 3+ with a variable dice pool and a number of Successes needed. 

Our partial successes there comes from a concept of ‘Scrapes’; dice which are 4+, but don’t meet your Skill target. If you reach the number of Successes you need when you add your Scrapes to your rolls meeting your Skill, you get a partial success! Brilliant, isn’t it? That means everyone has a chance to get by on even hard checks using their worst skills, but it’s never easy.

When we poked at Torchship stuff after testing that system out, we found ourselves wondering if something similar wouldn’t fit here as well. It wouldn’t translate 1-1; Must be Tuesday is about teenagers fighting monsters in a horror/comedy setup, where nobody is doing anything really complicated, and even the people who are the best at things are still only as good at it as, you know, teenagers. It’s not a good tone fit, but it inspired the system we used.

Complexity Certs & Complications

The solution we came up with, which we are so proud of we bumped a whole dev diary for it, is the idea of Complexity Certs.

Basically, we’ve ditched the previous Complexity target from before. Your dice Test just has a single, easily determined Difficulty. In ideal circumstances, you roll a number of dice determined by the tool you’re using, needing to get results over your Cert target. Get as many of those as the Difficulty, you succeed, otherwise you fail. Simple binary outcome to a simple problem.

But you’re playing cosmonauts. You know, you boldly go places you probably shouldn’t. You don’t face simple problems.

When the GM calls for a roll, they can tack on Complexity Certs in accordance to the situation you’re facing. Essentially, they’re saying this roll is a test not just of the ‘Primary Cert’ that determines if you pass or fail, but it’s also a test of some extra skills that have come up because of the number of moving parts involved in the situation.

So while you still only have one Difficulty, you need to meet that difficulty using multiple dice targets to succeed without qualifiers. If you just meet the difficulty on your Primary Cert, but not the Complexity Certs, then the GM can hit you with a Complication that can emerge naturally from the Cert in question. Conversely, you could end up in a situation where you have a better value on your Complexity Cert than the primary, so you could fail, but avert other disasters.

Or you could fail at both, and now you have two problems!

This system elegantly compresses a bunch of things the system needed to do into one quick judgement call by the GM in the moment. We don’t need to have specific penalties for working remotely through a robot, working in a spacesuit, or doing things in low gravity; the GM can just add the Drone Operator, EVA, or Cosmonaut Certs to the Test as Complexity Certs. There’s no limit to the number of Complexity Certs that can get added either, so you can sum up really complex situations with a single roll.

It also made the game’s group test mechanics much simpler and more impactful. Helping can be a complex game design challenge; you want people to be able to give each other a hand, but you need to make sure people can’t simply do it on every single roll to avoid slowdown and the trivialization of gameplay challenges. The way Help works now is allowing you to lend a friend one of your Certs to take on a Complexity Cert, basically monitoring a potential problem for them while they focus on the main task. 

As you get XP for Helping or being Helped on Checks where somebody is rolling with a higher Cert than you, you might want to point out potential problems with people’s plans that relate to your expertise as they come up so you can be the one to solve them. It also means that the presence of a Complexity Cert acts as a prompt for characters to step in and help one another out, and rewards a properly multi-disciplinary crew working together to tackle complex problems. 

You know. Like… like a Star Trek.

Examples

The example we use in the game rules is as follows.

Let’s say you are at a shooting range with your laser pistol, and you want to shoot a target. That’s a straightforward Sharpshooter Cert test. You either hit the target or you don’t. Easy!

But let’s say you’re doing the same thing but in a combat situation where you might get hit in return. The GM can (and is encouraged to) add the Soldier Cert as a Complexity Cert to the roll; Soldier is the Cert that covers tactics, movements, and the use of cover, so if your dice meet the difficulty using your Sharpshooter target, but don’t from your Soldier target, then you probably hit the target but exposed yourself to danger in the process.

Suddenly, we can see the difference between an Olympic target shooter and an infantryman.

Or let’s say you’re a guard posted in a reactor room; if you are doing some shooting there, the GM could throw in Damage Controller as a Complexity Cert to represent the chances of you breaking something vital in the antimatter reactor by throwing lasers everywhere. Suddenly, you have a really good reason to cross-train your guards in engineering skills, at least enough that they know not to shoot the matter/antimatter exchangers.

Or maybe you’re trying to incapacitate an unfamiliar alien creature without killing it; the GM could add Life Scientist. What if you’re doing it in a spacesuit? Add EVA. Knocking out a piece of machinery? Add Technician. Aiming a remote turret instead of doing it yourself? Drone Operator.

Which means you could, conceivably, be in a spacesuit operating a tablet controlling a gun drone non-lethally shooting a strange device on a strange alien in a combat situation inside an engine room… and it all happens with one roll and no need for infinitely stacking penalties.

Knock-On Changes

The biggest knock-on change this has caused is a need for finer gradation between Certs so that the differences come up more often and are less severe. For that reason, we moved the game to d10 pools from d6s; yes, this was an enormously annoying change to make through our draft, and we’re still working out how to rebalance advancement through it. It also means we have to do yet another pass through the Traits, which we were midway through… oh well! 

(We have a cool new lever that’s come out of, actually; we can have Traits just make Complexity Certs just not count in appropriate circumstances. Freefaller characters get to ignore 0g penalties, for example, which includes adding Cosmonaut as a Complexity Cert to a lot of rolls). 

I’ve submitted Torchship to Metatopia again this year, and I’m really looking forward to running it on the other side of a year of rewrites and de-heartbreakerification. I’m confident it’ll go much better this time around. 

Anyway, next Dev Diary will be about the Zinovians, and then we’ll do the meta-campaign mechanics. Unless something even cooler comes up.

[wylanzahn]

New-ish post, kinda posting this on different platforms and getting a general vibe check for some ideas I have. But basically this Halloween I want to actually do something for the TTRPG and Actualplay world (oh yeah I’m into those kinds of things). I want to try and get both players, GMs, and casual viewers alike something fun to look forward to this especially spooky season. I’ll probably talk a little more when we get closer to the actual season of scare-giving but just know that if you’re interested I’m still looking for people to join in!!

As my team and I’d first debut we’re going to try and do a two to four session actual play, which will probably be released in the weeks leading up to Halloween. We’ve had a couple good friend way in on the matter of “setting” but now I come to you fine folk. Mind you this is a horror campaign/arc so if…

Isn’t your thing, keep on a moving.

But without further ado here are a couple of the possible settings for our players, and myself, this coming espookee season…

1.) Somewhere off the coast of Florida, 1926 end of the first major housing boom in the state, a small island which calls back to the Spanish Empire, is Isla Boñyela, a small port made tourist location during the boom of disposable wealth in 1920s America. A small group of friends from the northeast tag along down for the perfect paradise vacation. Only to discover the island is much much older than anyone could have ever assumed. Whilst dealing with upstart gangsters, unnerving US soldiers, and the terrified locals they find something older than even undead conquistadors.

While I don’t have a working title, this is an old project in the running which I’ve had a few attempts at revamping over time. Its previous title was “perfect paradise vacation,” and runs on the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition game. Anywho it’s a blast of fun with Caribbean lore, tone of anti-imperialism, and something dark lurking beneath the waves.

2.) 1950’s America, the nonexistent state of Mid-Atlantia (DMV coded) in a small suburban neighborhood where nothing goes wrong… it’s almost “All-Hallows-Eve” and little Johnny and Susie want nothing more than to trick or treat this year with all the big kids, Dad’s finally getting the big promotion at work, and Mom just got a new waffle iron! Sure everything is neat here in America. Heck you just got new neighbors! Newlyweds in fact from somewhere big and fancy, they sure aren’t like any of us in our simple town. But… and you can’t say exactly why but things are different. Or perhaps they’re all too the same? Everyday a repeat of ever other bland day that followed you over and over and over and over… and you could swear, while no one may listen to you there’s someone out there. Stalking you from outside your own home- or- perhaps, he’s just your friendly new neighbor welcoming you… to the end.

Ahhhhhh! I’ve also been working on this one for a sec and god writing it out does excite me. This is also a Call of Cthulhu game but modified/homebrewed to have a uniquely 1950s horror feel. This is definitely one of the more unique games I’ve written and am truly interested in seeing where it goes (even if we don’t choose it). This is for those who feel like isolation, fear of the unknown, fear from within, and liminal space horror comes best into play! So whadya say neighbor?

3.) The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend, or How I Learned to Love Strahd, okay so this one is a lot less horror-y and falls much more under the comedic spooky category, just so yall know. Deep in the middle of Barovia, the ancient kingdom of Vampires, meets a council of Count Strahd von Zarovich's greatest commanders and lieutenants to hunt down Strahd's greatest enemy Rudolph van Richten and his party of heroes known as "The Grape-Smashers." Strahd's lieutenants have been gifted powers greater than any mere mortals, but are these gifts enough to stop Van Richten, or even enough to stop the personal ambitions of each other? Come find out in "How I Learned to Love Strahd."

Okay, as much as this may seem like a joke suggestion it cracks me up and I feel like it would be ill-advised of me to not at least mention it. In an era where "The Curse of Strahd," is well-overdone at this point, it's worth a take from an all evil "revenge story." Obviously this will be in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, which, in my opinion, is really hard to use for horror, but this is a nice go-around. Come for the evil PCs, maybe a PvP battle or two, and a game of intrigue in the shadows of Barovia! All that and a buff Van Richten.

4.) Before Annapolis was ever called such it was known as Providence, a settlement of exiled Puritans in the Province of Maryland, but these early days were no easy set-up for the far-flung protestants... in the mid 1600s the English Civil War spilled out into their holdings across the waves as brother turned on brother, clan erasing clan, and something from the shores of the Old World would arrive in the New. When around every corner could be someone you've known your whole life, what's stopping them from hunting you in the depths of winter. All matters made worse when rumors of a witch begins circulating your small home.

Think "The VVitch" (2015) meets "A Field in England" (2013) meets Atun Shei's recent film "The Sudsbury Devil" (2023). It is the unexplored wilderness of early colonial Maryland, but the hateful warmongering that slowly builds that makes the horror and tension so clear. Unsure of what system we'll be using, but maybe the new Regency Cthulhu system.

5.) The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 destroyed some 140 Acres of Baltimore proper... and in it's rubble awakened something far worse. But you and your fellow survivors are just trying to get by in the aftermath of the fire... only for something to call out, whether some strange magicks or perhaps just a sickness... but sickness doesn't even linger like this... it doesn't call to you...

Some more local history, aspiring from the actual Fire of 1904 things quickly devolve from there as rumors of a cult begin to spread along the streets of Rosland Park... a mysterious illness leaving even more dead... and the death of an eclectic professor. Definitely using the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition for this one.

Aaaaaaaand that's it! Let me know what y'all think!

[ttrpgcafe]

HOLY SHIT INVISIBLE SUN IS COMING BACK AND IT'S MY FAVORITE RPG OF ALL TIME PLEASE BACK IT SO I (or we, I guess) CAN GET THE WELLSPRING:

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/monte-cook-games/invisible-sun-return-of-the-black-cube#top

For those of you unfamiliar with Invisible Sun, it's an rpg where every single player is a spell caster of some variety, each with their own unique way of interacting with magic.

The Vances are the most traditional spellcasters, but they eschew spell lists in favor of literally filling a grid with spell cards, representing their limited cognitive space being taken up by spells. They get more space, and literally bigger spells as you progress.

Weavers take two concepts and combine them to produce an effect, very much like Ars Magica or Mage: The Ascension, if you're familiar with those. They get the ability to combine more concepts together, and to have mastery over more concepts as they progress.

Makers are this game's artificer, and they have a robust system for making quirky magic items that have fun, interesting, unique side effects or downsides every time you use them. Their progression is the most straight forward by the numbers "the things you make are more powerful and you're better at making them" of the bunch, but the system lets you, for instance, make a gun out of the body of a dead(?) god, so I'll give this a pass.

Lastly, there are the Goetics, who summon and bind otherworldly creatures to their wills. This takes the form of a conversation and negotiation with your GM over what you have to do for your bound creature, and what exactly they do for you in exchange. If you've ever played a warlock and felt like patrons weren't a big enough deal, this is an entire "class" that lets those relationships (yes, plural) take center stage.

The entire system feels very much like Cypher system 2.0, with a d10 dice pool system with a straight forward level of difficulty to hit, very much like the levels of difficulty in base cypher system, just made easier to manage. It even uses the "I'm an Adjective Noun who Verbs" character structure from Cypher system, here made much more interesting by the addition of a funky little xp system.

Invisible Sun has one of the most interesting advancement systems I've ever seen: aside from normal, average, "you do a thing, you get xp" system, here called "Acumen" (used to increase your stats and skills) there is a separate xp system related to good and bad things happening to your character, called "Joy" and "Despair" respectively. You combine one Joy with one Despair to get a "Crux" which is the xp currency you need to advance your class and focus abilities. This incentivizes players to not only let bad things happen to them, but to SEEK THEM OUT, which is huge! Players often think they want to win all the time, but they don't actually want that, it makes for a boring narrative. This is one of the very few systems I've seen incentivize this story structure, and I'm absolutely in love with it.

Lastly, because the game focuses so heavily on Magic, it has the only system for simulating the ebbs and flows of magic I've seen done well! This involves "The Path of Suns" and the "Sooth deck" which is the in game name for a specific pattern of laying out what amounts to tarot cards that make magic dynamic, interesting, and unpredictable in a way I've never seen before, and rarely since. (Pathfinder's Secrets of Magic is the only other supplement I can think of, and that was almost 5 years after this game came out)

Anyway, I can't recommend this game enough, the systems are unique, the vibes are immaculate, and it's so fuckin WEIRD in the best way.

[level2janitor]

how to run an OSR game

a while back i made this post to help people who were interested in OSR games but didn't know where to start, explaining the general design philosophy and going over a bunch of different OSR rulesets you can run a game with. so this is a follow-up post about how to actually run these (especially bc not all of them have much actual GM guidance)

note this is a highly opinionated post and some people from the more meatgrinder-y end of the OSR might take issue with this. but this is advice that works extremely well for my games.

how to prep situations and not plots

this is good advice for most games but OSR especially because OSR gameplay is so driven by player scheming: don't ever include "and then the players will..." in your prep, because you do not know what the players will do.

if your prepped scenario hinges on the players taking a specific action or the whole thing falls apart, you're digging your own grave as the GM. trying to account for every action the players can take is a trap, because players are creative and clever and their options are only limited by their ideas. that's the game.

so "prep situations, not plots" has become popular advice in TTRPG communities, especially OSR circles. but how do you actually do that

the most important elements of prep you want to figure out are:

what do all the NPCs involved in this scenario want? what social levers (wants, fears, habits, allegiances, guilty pleasures, relationships) do they have that the players can pull?

what will happen if the PCs never interfere? what conflicts and schemes are brewing in the background?

what locations are there to explore? who and what is inside them, what dangers and treasures are inside?

the best prep is stuff you can't improvise, or stuff that's unsatisfying when improvised. you should probably know monster stats ahead of time, know the layout of dungeons, that sort of thing. elements relevant to challenging the players are important to prep.

stop rolling for everything

coming from nearly any other TTRPG to an OSR game, your instinct when a player says "i want to do X" is "okay, make an X roll" through a skill system or a pbta move or something.

if you do this in an OSR game, you run into problems.

player characters aren't very strong. they have single-digit hit points, few if any class abilities, and whether they're carrying a crowbar, a grappling hook, a lantern, etc. is as impactful as their choice of class.

this is because the game is about using your head more than using your character sheet - the sheet just lists tools to apply your creative thinking to. scheming and managing your resources is the game.

and this means if a player has a clever idea, you should almost never reward them with a die roll to see if they succeed. a skill check is just a random chance of failure. instead most actions should succeed or fail automatically.

here's a good checklist to determine whether something succeeds:

is it something a normal, untrained person could do? if yes, you succeed.

could a normal person do it with the right tools, training and/or time to work? if yes, you succeed if you have any of those things.

if you don't have any of those, you can't. find another approach or get ahold of those conditions for success.

die rolls are for resolving uncertainty and risk. picture a version of 5e where there are no ability checks, only saving throws - dice you roll when something's gone wrong and you're in danger.

which leads into the next point...

communicating information

one of the worst sins of roll-based task resolution is when it's used to determine perception. players making informed decisions is the heart of the game, and they can't do that without information.

give information freely. if your character could know it, they probably do. try to do this too much. never gate information behind a die roll, especially the PC's surroundings.

part of this is always informing the player what is at stake. if a player's in a dangerous enough situation that success comes down to a die roll, you must let them know that before they opt into making that roll, and what the consequences for failure are.

OSR games are about risk management, so tell your players what is at risk when they make those decisions.

entering combat

combat is one of the most dangerous things in an OSR game - it's unpredictable, lethal, and entering it is always a big decision.

if you're coming from a game like 5e, often your first instinct when an encounter occurs is, "roll initiative!" but this is a mistake. you always, even when combat is about to start, ask players for their approach. do they fight? flee? negotiate? surrender?

because combat is so risky, forcing players into it unprompted fundamentally changes the dynamic of your campaign. keep in mind, once combat starts, you don't get any input between rolling initiative and taking your turn. your fate is up to the dice - your tactics matter, sure, but they can't save you from losing initiative, being crit, and dying from bad luck.

if players willingly choose combat as their approach, they should know the risks and what they're getting into. sometimes combat is the best way to achieve your goals, so it'll still happen.

[sergeifyodorov]

I know 4 nations is still a couple of months away but if you specifically were the gm choosing the roster right now, what would your team Canada look like? (I am also curious about the other teams but don’t want to overwhelm you) I always love hearing your hockey thoughts!

ooh sarahhhh LOVE this q... also lowkey thank u for only asking about Canada b/c i have not thought about the other rosters at all. to be honest

ok lets get into it

(13 F, 7 D, 3 G)

Forwards:

Already named to the roster: Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Brad Marchand, Connor McDavid, Brayden Point

I'm not entirely sure if I had complete control I would pick Marchand, who is both a) pretty far past his prime (even if he is one of those guys who doesn't really age like other players do) and b), not entirely That guy, but I digress. Eight more forwards to name.

Mitch Marner: Easily the best Canadian player not on this list. Since there's no salary cap for the roster and you can go wild by just picking Everyone Good, the most important note of roster construction in my mind is special teams; on any given team you should have ~2 units each of PP and PK, so eight-ish PP forwards and four-ish PK forwards. Some guys don't really do either, so it's always an extra asset to find a guy who is good at both. Mitch Marner is good at both. (And also good at basically everything else.)

Sam Reinhart: I don't like saying it, but I will

Mark Schiefele: I also don't like saying it

Dylan Strome: Here's where it gets interesting. No, I promise this is not a purely narrative choice, although I understand why one might think that. I shrimply love me a smart playmaking centre (yes his points totals are probably inflated by the Caps' really high oish% for him, but he is firmly Very Good and, even as a 4C, should be firmly considered for the 4N.)

Travis Konecny: Legitimately one of the best penalty killers in the league, and also just an all-around threat. Also also a lot of the guys who tend to be picked for 4N are natural centres (e.g. Sidney, NateMac, CMD, Pointer, Reinhart, Schiefele, and Strome are all centres) so it's nice to not have to worry in his case about if he's going to have to move to wing or not.

Connor Bedard: Oh my god I want to see what this kid can do with offensive deployment on wing and actual good teammates

John Tavares: Departing from my usual "don't pick players who are floating into their mid-thirties if you can possibly avoid it" to say that Guys. Johnnifer is still Good. Like, still really good. Chugging along at a point a game and very, very good in the faceoff dot (58%) type of good.

Seth Jarvis: Also firmly underrated IMHO; just because he is a little guy and a bit of a dork doesn't mean we shouldn't, like, remember that He's Good. Because he is.

Reserves: Steven Stamkos (always a power-play threat), Mat Barzal (competent teammates question part 2), Claude Giroux (we all know what his deal is)

Defencemen:

Already named to the roster: Cale Makar

Oh, boy, are we not great at this whole "developing defencemen" thing. Let's see who we can put together.

Josh Morrissey: Basically Morgan Rielly but a little better, I think? Solid shooter, Of-D, etc etc.

Thomas Chabot: Severely undernoticed considering that the Sens have been shit and ass the entire time he's played there. Not his fault, though. Also there's no other Francophones on this list I feel so we should really fix that. What IS Quebec Doing?

Brandt Clarke: Okay, we can have a little "developing defencemen." As a treat.

Evan Bouchard: Why are you booing me? I'm right.

Chris Tanev: Chris Tanev

Brandon Montour: There are probably one or two better options but I like him more TO BE HONEST. Picking the forwards is like a careful examination of PK ability and faceoff percentages and primary points per minute. Picking defencemen has been entirely vibes. I'm very, very sure the L and R balance is just Not There.

Reserves: Maveric Lamoureux (queb AND developing. dual threat), Devon Toews (considering literally everyone will beg for the makar-toews pairing), Shea Theodore (I guess)

Goaltenders:

Lol and Lmao, even

Logan Thompson: The man is the Capitals' starter, helped win Vegas a Cup, and is also lowkey hot sexy and hot and sexy. Starter!

Joey Daccord: Swiss, Canadian, and American, so I'm sure we could convince him to come to the dark side. (Especially since the USA has holy-fuck level goalie depth. Jake Oettinger is a third-stringer.)

Marc-Andre Fleury: Look, this forward core is good enough that it can win us a game 7-6 if we really need it to. I just think he's fun.

[utilitycaster]

It's a very small thing, but from a sometimes DM's perspective, Chetney asking for the list of Novos's items is just...one of those things that separates the best D&D players from the rest of the pack. The DM creates the world, and often has a general storyline in mind, but the players are, ideally, driving the action. Railroading is a bit like murderhoboing, in that while you can have people who do it in bad faith, a lot of the time it happens because the players aren't invested enough in the world (or are too tied to a single outcome that cannot be guaranteed in a game of improv and chance), and so having players who are always looking for ways to expand the world and seek out the hooks themselves and connect with NPCs is truly what every GM wishes for.

Anyway, Travis is incredibly good at opening up these little optional avenues that he, other cast members, or Matt can pick up later and use in-game to guide the story. Maybe Bells Hells will decide they've got other priorities and the list will only serve to give us a tiny glimpse into who Novos once was, but that's still a small piece of the world we wouldn't otherwise have! Maybe it will be a fun moment of Bells Hells coming across an item down the road and make space for another interaction with the crew of the Crimson Abyss; maybe it will allow Matt to guide them towards some other important things they need to know for the Solstice plot. But because he asked for this silly list in earnest, those doors are all open in a way that feels organic and player driven.

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Hardwired Island

90s nostalgia isn't cool anymore, its all about that early aughts nostalgia, so I propose we have transparent plastic prosthetic limbs, like those bootleg PS2/Wii controllers Touchstones: Bubblegum Crisis, 90s Cyberpunk Anime in general

Genre: Cyberpunk What is this game?: Hardwired Island is a cyberpunk game about being broke citizens in the first space station city on earth 

How's the gameplay?: Hardwired Island uses a 2d6+Bonus system, inspired by PBTA, but the game itself isn't exactly that. Hardwired's character creation is one of its big draws, being fairly simple but allowing many different character concepts, maybe you're an android street fighter, wanting to enter the big leagues, or an ex-military drone operator, wanting to atone for your crimes, character creation works by picking a background, Occupation, and 2 traits, which lets you get really flexible with your character! Backgrounds have misc abilities and determine your character's skills (which you get to create yourself, so if you want your character to be really good at niche internet drama, you can!), Occupations give you powerful abilities that make you really good at things that other people can do worse, and traits are just random abilities and events in your character's history. The Big Thing about Hardwired is its financial shock system, whenever your character makes a big purchase, such as for example a prosthetic, they might get more financial stress, which can end up leading them into a crisis, where they might need to reach out to a friend to get a place to stay, or move back with their parents, or make shady deals with the mafia, and so on. Hardwired's mechanics are Narrative-first, meaning they exist to create interesting drama for characters, and that makes it a very fun system for just making cool stories

What's the setting (If any) like?: Hardwired takes place in the far future of 2020, on a giant space station city, where the rich prosper and the poor toil. Hardwired is really keen on the "boring dystopia" aspect, there's definitely interesting stuff! but players are assumed to be common laymen trying their best to get by, of course this doesn't mean their ADVENTURES have to be boring! a package delivery gig could end with dealing with the strange Dreamers, bizarre AI with weird powers, or an investigation on an anonymous street artist could end in inciting a riot against a local bank, and so on!

What's the tone?: Hardwired will try to crush your players, it is not a pleasant world, there's kindness everywhere, and good people to be found, but the world is overwhelmingly against you

Session length: 1-2 hours is realistic enough

Number of Players: 4-6 is the recommended amount by me!

Malleability: Hardwired's mechanics are kinda rooted in its setting, but a crafty GM could likely do something interesting with them, I've been working on a hack for my own cyberpunk setting, for example!

Resources: a Google Sheet is available, and that's honestly kinda all you need, its not a very complex system. There's two or so expansions, one of them includes a playable cat occupation!

So I hesitated a lil on posting this game because i know people have Opinions on this game, but this game's great and im tired of pretending its not. It's a definite must play for any cyberpunk fan, in my opinion

[ultraflavour]

Tackling the Toxic Culture of Play around "Epic" length campaigns in Fantasy TTRPGs

Definitely watch this video, but I'm also going to be touching on 4 major topics:

How I fucked myself big-time by over-committing to running a long-term game of Fabula Ultima;

Why the expectation of "Epic" length campaigns causes unnecessary stress on GMs;

How Lancer solves this problem by imposing structure and enforcing strict end-points;

How classic D&D and the "West Marches" concept applies these principles through a shared set of assumptions, and how we could apply those same assumptions to our own games.

Fabula Ultim-Oh No

A little while ago, I shared my experience running Fabula Ultima, specifically the Shared World-building portion of the game.

At the end of the article, I listed one of my 4 mistakes as being "Over-committing." That part was only tangentially related to the problem of Shared World-building, but it was related.

The group I was running for wanted to create a massive world. I gave them 3 maps to choose one of that's we'd fill out. They chose two, each representing a separate hemisphere.

I didn't know enough to say no, so I agreed. What was the worst thing that could happen? Our shared world would be too awesome?? Well.

What ended up happening was that all of the elements that the players had created during the world-building session were so far spread apart that in order to incorporate even a fraction of what we had created, this game had to be long.

So in order to live up to the expectation that I had believed to be there, I made an insane commitment that I should never have done: I promised the group that the game would go for at least 4 months, then I'd try to wrap things up in another two months, for a total of 6 months. Then, I'd leave the decision about whether to keep playing to the group: If they wanted to continue their adventures in our shared Fabula Ultima universe, we could do that.

Fast Forward Two Months

Two months into the game, and I am not vibing with the game. At all.

Fabula Ultima is a game that requires a lot more input from the players than other games do. Because at any time, a player can introduce a story element, that basically means that the GM can't really prep much of anything. The game expects the game to emerge as a constant conversation between the players and the GM.

But for whatever reason, the conversation just isn't really happening. I'm constantly feeling the pressure to provide the story to the players. And when they try to introduce story elements, I inadvertently have to shut them down because they interfere with something that I've prepped.

Suffice to say, I'm not having a good time. And because I'm not having a good time, I think my players are also not having a good time. It becomes a spiral. I start calling sessions earlier than I need to. I cancel. I don't do any extra prep, because I'm wrapped up in knots before the session.

Flame-Out Ultima

It's now the 3 month mark and I know I'm not going to make it. I'm throwing a lot of energy into my job, for reasons I won't go into here, and I don't have the energy leftover to commit to the game in the evenings. It's a Thursday evening game, and Thursdays are one of my mandatory in-office days at work, so I've fucked myself harder than I possibly could have.

So I inform the group that it's time to wrap up the game. I feel terrible. I promised them that I'd try to run the game longer, and now I'm a liar.

This guilt turns to anxiety. It begins to interfere with my work and my sleep. I'm now frustrated with myself even more, because I'm allowing this stupid tabletop game, which was just supposed to be a silly fun time (I literally nicknamed the campaign "Vibes Ultima") has gone wrong in possibly the worst way it could have.

I know that the reality is that I truly have nothing to feel guilty about. I put more effort into making that game work than anyone had any right to expect of me, and part of the reason why it failed was that the energy just wasn't there. But I'll let Rona tell you what reality means to people with social anxiety:

WHY, THOUGH?

I began to wrestle with the question of why: Why did I feel so compelled to make that stupid promise of running the game for 4 months to half a year? What was the reason for that arbitrary length of time?

I narrowed it down to three reasons:

The group had just come off of a very long-term 5E campaign, all set in a homebrew setting. The GM of that game was a player in my game, so I wanted to reciprocate the gesture of the long campaign by at least attempting something long-term.

My previous attempt at running a TTRPG campaign was Lancer, and I had made it about 6 months in that game, so I figured that was my time limit. This will be important later.

The group was excited about Fabula Ultima, but our previous attempt at running it flamed out early as the GM was unable to commit to the game due to their parenting duties. This GM had previously run epic-length campaigns for our group in the past, so I feel a sense of obligation to this player as well to try to give them a nice long character arc.

All of these factors led to the decision to set the minimum length of the campaign to 4 months, as if that arbitrary length of time was some magic number that meant literally anything.

And truly, what was the downside of only promising a short-term game? One of the players remarked during the character building session that they "weren't interested in going to the trouble of creating a character just for a short-term game." This... frustrated me deeply, but I didn't say anything at the time.

This decision ended up being not good for anyone. I had set the parameters of the adventure at the start of the game as the party needing to retrieve an object from a thief. It was a flimsy premise that should have only taken 4-6 weeks, not months, to complete. But I wasn't sure what to do after that initial adventure, so I stretched the game out over a long segment of travel (which I also felt compelled to do so that the players could experience the world they had had a hand in creating).

Truthfully, what would have been the downside of running an introductory adventure, completing something, and then calling it quits? Well, Fabula Ultima is a little bit of the problem here. Fabula doesn't really have the concept of an adventure, it's very much a "just show up, have some laughs, and get some XP at the end of the session" kind of game. You're supposed to get the feeling of having accomplished something every session, because the players are always able to stimulate the story with Fabula Points.

And I was even in the perfect situation to hand off the game to someone else, because the world was 100% shared. Everyone in the game had an equal stake in creating the game world, so any one of them could have picked up my slack. And if nobody wanted to? Then I was right to think that the group was not engaged at the same level as I was, and I was totally justified to cut things off early.

So what was the way that I should have gone about things? Well, as with many things, the answer lies with Lancer.

Lancer Loves You and Wants You to be Happy

You bet your ass I'm gonna find an excuse to talk about Lancer in every article I write.

I had previously had the most success of my entire TTRPG career running Lancer. I managed to make it to the 6 month mark, running a totally homebrew setting, and I was able to cap it off in a satisfying way that tied together all of the setting elements I'd established prior to the final mission. I set up a big bad, and the campaign ended with the players sending it straight to hell.

It's to date the only TTRPG campaign I've ever run that I've felt proud of. I didn't really know what it was about Lancer that made it actually work as well as it did for me. It wasn't a perfect game by any stretch, but I actually felt good enough about it that I felt like I could run another game of it later on down the road, and it would be even better.

In retrospect, I now understand a big part of why I was able to make it work, and that was the Mission Structure. It goes a little something like this:

Planning: The players and the GM collaborate to choose a mission to undertake, either in or out of character.

Preparation: The group collects information from the base, or puts boots on the ground in the mission area, to increase their odds in the coming mission.

The Mission: Play proceeds as the players and their Mechs enter the combat area. Importantly, the mission assumes that there will be 3-4 fights before requiring the players to take a Full Repair (Lancer's equivalent of a "Long Rest"). Also importantly, the mission ends prematurely if the players take a Full Repair.

Downtime: After the mission parameters have been achieved, or the party can no longer continue in their mechs, the team returns to their base, gains a level, and engages in downtime activities (Get a drink, gather information, etc.)

That's basically it. The loop repeats 12 times, and that's a campaign. Though it might seem needlessly restrictive, this imposition of structure prevents a lot of problem behaviours from both players and GM alike.

For the GM:

By forcing collaboration with the players during the Planning step, the GM can never plot too far ahead, because they can't make any assumptions about which direction the players are going to choose to go;

The 3-4 fight guideline prevents the mission from stretching out overly long. The mechs are usually falling apart after 3 fights, and the party can't artificially prolong the mission by taking a premature Full Repair (ie. they can't "take a Long Rest in the dungeon");

The mandated Downtime means that the GM can't put a ticking clock over the party's heads, preventing maladaptive signposting behaviours.

For the Players:

The planning phase allows players a chance to impact the narrative by providing guidance to the GM about what they want to do and where they want to go;

Being able to predict how many fights there are in the mission means the players can plan how aggressively they are able to play, as well as how many resources they can spend per fight;

Downtime gives the players time to roleplay and further their personal agendas without being under the gun of a ticking mission timer.

All of these bullet points were problems that I'd encountered in other games. Most recently in a game of 5E, I tried to suggest that the group adopt the "No Long Rests in the Dungeon" policy, or at least try to do the "Adventuring Day" thing of getting 4-6 combats under our belt before resting. My character was a martial character who was increasingly irrelevant to the game as the spellcasters in the party were always easily able to recharge their spell slots through long rests.

If, by contrast, we were operating under the assumption that we would not be able to take a long rest mid-adventure, we would have had to be much more judicious about our spell slots. But because we never really felt that pressure on our resources (because the GM was too unwilling to say no to us), the spellcasters were basically always topped up, so there was no real need for a martial who wasn't as affected by attrition.

GM Fanfic Syndrome: It Could Happen to You

But much more importantly, forcing those "end points" every 4 fights and requiring player collaboration meant that I couldn't engage in the extremely destructive behaviour of over-planning a plot. Once the adventure was set, then I could prep to my heart's content. I could even create adventure sites beforehand, but as long as I didn't attach any time-sensitive story beats to them, the players could tackle them in any order they pleased.

I can't stress enough just how much trouble is caused when the GM feels like they have to make all of the important decisions about the plot. It leads to what I have taken to calling GM Fanfic Syndrome (I got this name from someone else on Tumblr but I can't find the post any more). You write a long, epic story, but never ever finish it because the conclusion of the story is always too far out for the players to directly tackle.

The symptoms are caused when the GM thinks way too far ahead about how their game is going to play out, but fails to think about all of the steps required to get there, and how many ways that those steps might fail to come to fruition.

People who spend a lot of time in their own heads tend to play out these scenarios like little movies in their head. By the time they get to the table, they've thought it out a hundred different ways in every direction, and yet somehow it still doesn't end up playing out how it did in their heads.

So by creating these little inflection points where the players get to choose which missions they want to undertake, the GM never gets the chance to write too far ahead. For GMs with ADHD, depression, or anxiety, this can actually be somewhat helpful. The rules act as guardrails, to prevent you from over-preparing on things that don't actually help you run the game better. And it forces the game to be run in units of time that never exceed a few sessions, so there is always a hard limit on how long the campaign can go for.

Marching to the West

The assumption that there should be a hard limit on adventure length, and that players should take part in the process of adventure planning, is not new. Lancer did not invent these ideas, it merely codified them in its own rules.

You can trace these ideas back a long ways, all the way back to the beginning of the hobby. The original game of D&D was billed as being "for 4-50 players." Obviously that sounds crazy on the face of it, but when you realize why, it starts to make sense.

Early games of D&D were designed to be run as part of a "Gaming Club" of up to 50 people. The idea was that the GM would run games for different groups of people at different times. Those players would schedule a time to attack a dungeon, so the GM would know what they needed to prep and when it needed to be done by.

There are two more really interesting mechanics buried in those old rules:

Adventures needed to be completed in a single session. Regardless of whether or not the dungeon was complete, the player is sent back to town at the end of the 3-6 hours allotted to play, possibly with a negative consequence applied to them;

Time moves forward in real time in the game world between sessions. If it's been 6 days since the player last played, it's also been 6 days since their character has done anything as well.

The reason for these rules is that other groups are also undertaking adventures elsewhere in the game world, and those adventures might even interfere with the adventures of other players. For example, some other players might schedule an attempt to complete a particularly juicy dungeon before another group, so the second group arrives to the dungeon to find it's already been looted.

While some of this might not sound overly fun, there are a couple of other assumptions that this style of game makes that I think are really helpful:

The game world is a small portion of the total world with a town at the center of it.

The town is never used as an adventure site. It's always assumed that if the players can undertake adventures in the town, they will choose to, because the town is a place of safety.

The adventure is always close enough to the town that the players can get there in a day.

The player is never assumed to have only one character, rather they have an entire stable of characters so that they aren't playing the same class over and over again every adventure.

These assumptions rhyme closely with another very influential culture of play called a "West Marches" campaign.

The basic idea of a West Marches campaign is thus: A DM assembles a group of players, up to 50, and perhaps nominates some co-DMs as well. The players are responsible for scheduling and deciding on an adventure to tackle. They come to the DM and say "We would like to go here and do this on this date" and the DM says "You got it."

This still has the "Everything has to be done in one session" requirement, because you can't guarantee that this exact group of people is going to have the same availability at any time after this. So it's not necessarily the best idea for a smaller group, which doesn't have the same problem of scheduling.

Solving the "4 Month" problem with a new Play Culture

But what you can see here is that there are ideas here that actually help us in the scenario I laid out above. Remember, here are my problems:

I'm not getting the input from the players that I need, so instead of finishing the adventure and starting a new one, I stretch the current one out;

Because I don't have a finish for the adventure planned until weeks out, I can't give up the GM chair until the adventure is through;

I've set too long of an arbitrary time limit compared to the amount I was able to commit to.

So how would I solve these problems, knowing what I know now?

Well, I would implement a set of rules, directly inspired by that classic culture of play that didn't even assume that a GM would be running the same adventure for longer than one session. Let alone 4-6 months! So what do we do to make the game more sustainable?

Keep the action of the campaign centralized to one area. The party should always have the opportunity to take downtime, pursue projects, etc. and it's much harder to do that when they're on some long journey to the other side of the world.

Keep every adventure to about 4-6 sessions total. Don't let the players take long rests mid-session. If they can't complete the adventure without taking a long rest, then they can't complete the adventure at all. Letting players take a long rest resets their attrition and allows them to unnecessarily prolong an adventure.

Don't place the adventure sites too far away that the party might take more than a session to get there. The party should not be able to take a long rest in the wild, so don't bog them down with pointless random encounters before they arrive at the adventure site.

After the adventure, work with the players to set clear goals for them to pursue over the course of the next adventure. You can come up with a consequence for failure if it happens, but at the very least, the players should have an unambiguous goal to tackle. Or, allow another player to jump into the GM chair, so I can play.

This set of assumptions accomplishes two really important things:

It alleviates the requirement on the GM to plot out a long campaign with narrative arcs that require the players to essentially follow a script;

It creates inflection points in the narrative where anyone could swap out, including you, the GM. Because nothing is planned out too far in advance, anyone can swap out between adventures, no problem. The continuity of the world is retained in the town and the players' characters.

That last part is really important because it directly alleviates a major source of GM burnout, which is that sense of obligation to keep the game running. The task of keeping the game alive now falls on the entire group, so the players have an equal stake in the game. If they don't want the game to flame out, they always have an opportunity to pick up the slack.

In a long-term game with an intricate plot line, it's incumbent on the GM to see things through to the end. If they set up a plot line, they now have a responsibility to execute on it. They can't hand a game off to another GM mid-adventure, and they can't expect another GM to execute on a plot that they introduced.

So a better way of doing things would be to simply not make up a long overarching plot at all. Keep things simple so that you could theoretically hand off to someone else if you had to. Or you could even switch systems! Let the smaller adventures and the downtime sessions in town handle the heavy lifting of the storytelling. Allow a story to emerge naturally from the players' behaviour, rather than imposing it through a rigidly defined plot.

These are rules that I'm likely going to be implementing going forward for the sake of my own sanity. If you ever find yourself feeling over-committed to the role of GMing, and it's causing burnout, then maybe these ideas that I've linked to might help you alleviate some of that pain.

In Summary

I caused myself to burn out by over-committing to a game because I let my anxiety about letting down my group override my better judgment;

I examined the reasons why I felt pressured to run "Epic-length" campaigns, and how it negatively affected my ability to run games;

I remembered a time when I ran Lancer and it actually worked because of the imposition of structure that prevented me from over-preparing;

I adopted a new set of rules for my future campaigns that allows more flexibility and less stress about having committed to a long "Epic" campaign.

[christiansorrell]

TTRPG Read-Through: Patchwork World

Here is a read-through I did last year (originally posted on Twitter) of one of the most unique PbtA games I've ever read: Patchwork World by Aaron King! - Christian

Credits up first. I know a lot of these folks and they are really cool! Excited to dig into this. I've heard good things, and it's been a while since I've read or played any Powered by the Apocalypse.

This is a cool, strong set up for me. I really like settings that ask characters to face a changing world and either take up change themselves or work to restore the old way of things. It's a headspace I find myself in a lot IRL these days so it's fun to explore.

I'm interested to see how the no stats, no playbooks angle of this game works, considering playbooks are typically such a staple of PbtA games.

Standard three-tired success, mixed success, fail forward resolution for rolls here and questions on the moves determine your bonus to the roll. Easy peasy. +2 is the max bonus.

Other types of rolls are described here. Interested to see how they come into play. I also love clocks and use them in pretty much every game I run so it's nice to see those laid out here too.

We just love a lil guy, don't we folks?

A good chunk of the opening here is spent on laying out a lot of solid foundations of roleplaying generally. It feels like a book (so far) that would work for entirely new players. It doesn't feel essential for me, but I never mind a game that supports varied experience levels.

Character creation is wide open, especially since there aren't playbooks and the text stresses that character creation is very much worldbuilding because of this. Fate-like concepts and tags are in here too which are things I generally enjoy. I like the Drawback mechanic.

Moves are in the playback I set in the other room so I'm gonna go grab those. You get two chosen moves and everyone has access to a number of default moves. You've got three other life/XP things to keep track of too. I'm especially interested in Hex.

There are a lot of moves! They seem quite varied and often very weird, fitting well with the titular patchwork world. You can have a duck's slick soul to dodge more easily or a magical space suit or speak to birds or be good at cartography. Overwhelming, but in an exciting way.

You also choose a community as a party. While PCs all have their original homelands (before the end of the old worlds), you know have a community that gets its own little sheet. This is a cool reshaping of the Gangs from Blades. I also like how the community can change over time.

Coming back to a PbtA game after months of more OSR-minded stuff, I think a lot of what these games contain are things that experienced players would say you could just do in any game at any time that it makes sense in the story, but I do find value in stating what's possible.

Esp since many players come to games with artificial limits on their options (whether that's from video games, more traditional RPGs, etc.). I just think good GMing here requires making sure that the players don't limit themselves just to the bevy of explicit options either.

GM moves (mostly to guide the response to failed rolls). I really think the community aspect of this set up is one of the biggest appeals to me so far. That and the wild list of moves, which I'm sure makes for amazing parties of characters.

I always feel like it's never something I should be in my own writing (for some probably unnecessary reason), but I enjoy the first-person, casual writing style throughout the book. Makes for a very chill read.

Good to see this game employs the Branson Reese style of NPC naming.

Stress acts as a single catch-all health and challenge rating for NPCs. Ideally, I'd hope this would help lead to the PCs approaching encounters with more than just violence.

Sections like this are what I'm referring to when I say this book feels very friendly to new players. It's got little anecdotes and thoughts like this throughout.

Look, it's been a while since I've seen A Christmas Story but... it didn't have ghosts in it right?

There's a sample adventure in the back (which I'll skip for this read-through) plus loads of random tables. Some wonderfully bizarre stuff in the characters and faction tables. Really gives you a good idea for how gonzo you can go with the setting.

Love these two in particular

Optional rules include hard mode (which I just think is kind of funny to see in PbtA, but could be cool if you lean heavy into the post-apoc setting) and some optional moves. I like that some moves focus on romance, something I enjoy IRL but never think to focus on in games.

I was wondering why this was the sixth edition!

That's all for the book itself. Going back to the packet to dig into the things I missed. Some expected bits in here but always one or two unique options I really enjoy. Leaking hex is cool (and could have some troubling cascade effects in certain situations).

I definitely wish, at least in sitting down to read like this, that the contents of the player packet was also in the book itself. I think PbtA has this tendency of leading to loads of pages on the table, but it can make them very easy to pick up and play or to learn as you play.

That element is definitely here, but I think the vast number of wide-ranging moves and the excitement that would drum up in my player group would more than makeup for that initial overwhelming feel of "whoa, that's a lot of papers out on the table".

Overall, it's the most I've wanted to play a game in this style in a while. I like that the base setup for the world is very much up to the players to determine via the characters they make. I like that PCs here will probably feel unlike any other folks have played before.

The community aspect feels like where I'd want to center my story around, as a player. Seeing that shift and change over time feels like it would be very rewarding and would help lean into the "the old world is dead, what do we want the new world to look like?" theme I enjoy.

Because Aaron King is cool and recently hit a lot of Twitter followers, Patchwork Worlds is now Pay-what-you-want over on Itch.

I'm not sure if physical copies are readily available. For full disclosure (guess I should have said this up front), I got this copy for free from Aaron! Not for the purposes of this thread or anything, just for fun a while back.

Thanks for reading more ramblings from me! If you like to do that sort of thing, check out my newsletter - Missives from the MeatCastle. It's got writings on my work, cool stuff I've run across the web in the last month, and exclusive rpg stuff! https://meatcastle.substack.com

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint Plays Games: What Pre-Generated Characters Can Do For You.

From July to October of 2024, the Dice Exploder Discord Server ran the Pregens Game Jam, a game jam all about using characters that have been created for a specific table, or that have been created to streamline the process of learning a game.

Incidentally, at the same time, I was setting up the playtest server for Protect the Child, and, primarily inspired by Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, I decided to run my play-tests using a pre-gen format: I’d run a series of sessions using pre-generated characters, that could be picked up by various players depending on what games fit their schedules. I did this out of necessity - my hours are all over the place, and I can’t consistently run games at the same times on the same days.

As we started play testing, I noted some interesting things happening among my players. The first thing I noticed was that the players latched onto the pre-generated characters fairly easily - and their attachment caught them off guard. More than one person told me that they were surprised that they could care so much about a character they didn’t write themselves.

The second thing that I noticed is that players were really excited to take ownership over a character. Certain character story-lines or backgrounds resonated with them, and as a result some of my play-testers are making a real effort to come back so they can see the next chapter of their character’s story. It’s really gratifying, knowing that there’s something in these pre-gens that has them coming back for more - it feels kind of like having a favourite character in a tv show or book. Since I’m the one who wrote those pre-gens, I won’t deny it does a good thing for the ego!

For folks in the Dice Exploder server, this might not come as a surprise, as I’m sure experiences in games like Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine and Eat the Reich have both been hot topics in the ttrpg podcast sphere recently. These kinds of games are likely one of the reasons why the pre-gen game jam was such a hot event.

However, I think there’s some more potential that could be pulled out of this. I think embracing pre-gens can do a number of really interesting things for your ttrpg experience, both in one-shots, as well as in longer campaigns - and I’m going to digress about that, after I talk about four games that I used as experiments over the past month.

Lady Blackbird

I ran Lady Blackbird for the Open Hearth this past month. It’s a game that is exquisitely designed, because it makes the on-ramp for new players so easy. The characters written for the game are well-defined, with explicit personalities and goals that are designed to mesh well together and give the group reasons to both work together and engage in character friction. It’s also got some really stellar advice on improv, which was invaluable to me back when I was a first-time GM.

So much of the game asks you to turn to the players to build on the world around them. How does Captain Vance feel when Natasha talks about her pirate lover? Is Snargle intimidated or enthralled by Naomi? What kind of jail is the group stuck in, and why does Kale know a way out? From the get-go, the players are encouraged to throw in bits and pieces of the world, and the GM can then pick up on those bits and pieces and turn them back on the players, making the world relevant to the pieces that the players are interested in.

The group who ran it was great: everyone was willing to add to the world, and riff off of what had already been built. The characters sought out connections with each-other, and I found it rather easy to work in the elements that folks had indicated they were interested in - primarily butch lesbians, magical mishaps, and rebel activity.

The players also have a lot of creative control over their characters. You don’t have to stick with any of your characters’ pre-written goals: Natasha can give up on the search for her lover, Naomi can forego her quest for vengeance, and Snargle can choose to stop their witty banter whenever they like. As a reward for a big change in personality, the player immediately gains access to a new goal that tells us what they prioritize, and still rewards them for leaning into it. Every time I run Lady Blackbird, the players’ interpretations of their characters is different, and that’s what makes the game so re-playable for me.

Subway Runners

I also ran Subway Runners on the Open Hearth. Similar to Lady Blackbird, Subway Runners uses pre-generated characters, but these characters are randomly generated: their motivations, skills and equipment can be used to develop a personality, but those personalities aren’t customized with the narrative in mind. Of course, the narrative isn’t really planned ahead of time either - your characters will always go on missions in the subway tunnels and come across strange critters or magical problems, but the details of any given foray are also randomly generated.

This doesn’t really stop the players from making some really strong choices. One player noticed that both his character and another were looking to find the cure for immortality, so they turned it into a rivalry. Another player noticed that his character had been given a spider-silk suit, and made it a key part of their character’s presentation. The randomly generated mission told me that it would involve a bunch of raccoons in a Death cult, so I wove that together with the monster description to make the monster the raccoon’s interpretation of Death.

Overall, the pre-generated nature of Subway Runners is incredibly useful in making it a no-prep, easy-start game. I don’t think I’d recommend it as a first-time game in the same way I’d rec Lady Blackbird, primarily because I think the GM needs to have a strong understanding of Forged-in-the-Dark rules to keep the game running smoothly. However, I think Subway Runners definitely solves the time problem - you don’t spend precious game time creating a character, and a busy GM can still have an adventure put together in five minutes.

Blades in the Dark

I wrote up some pre-gen characters in Blades for my home group, pre-selecting the Smugglers crew, and taking a one-page mission out of Hour of Chains, a series of unofficial Scores written by A Couple of Drakes. The players showed up, chose a character from a pile, and wrote in their name, background, look, and a few pips. Their core stats, connections, and abilities were all chosen for them, and I told them that while they had to start at Brisco’s Noodle Palace, they could decide why.

The players had a lot of fun coming up with shenanigans, but at the end of the session, one player told me that they would have appreciated a fully-created character, complete with backstory. Another player told me that they weren't sure whether or not they were “allowed” to do something with the lore, as Blades has some lore built into the setting, and it’s hard to parse what is immutable and what is up to interpretation. I personally love coming up with the canon on the spot, but for folks who are new to this style of play, it seems that having some of that lore pre-defined might give them some confidence when it comes to determining what their character “would do”.

Compared to Lady Blackbird, I think this observation makes sense. Since Blades uses playbooks, I think the choices when it comes to motivations are made when the player choose a playbook. I had the ability to select the playbooks that I thought made the most sense for the Score I chose, but there were still enough playbooks available that all of the players had multiple options to choose from. Out of all of the sessions I ran with this experiment, I think that Blades was the weakest, and I think the reason for that is because I left so many pieces of the set-up undefined.

Apocalypse World

For Apocalypse World, I wrote up a very specific setting, and designed the characters using the Mad Max series and the Silo series as primary inspirations. The post-apocalyptic settlement was an underground bunker with levels sectioned off for various jobs. I chose a series of playbooks that resonated with the setting I had in mind, and pre-selected gear, followers, stats and abilities. I also wrote up three threats, with loose ties to at least two playbooks each, with the expectation that I could pick up whichever threat made sense for the playbooks my players decided to engage with.

In short, I did exactly the opposite of what the Bakers recommend in the game: I planned nearly the entire thing beforehand.

That being said, I think the session was a really strong one. The players were quite happy to pick up the characters and play into the conceits I’d designed into them, for the most part, although one person did a bit of toggling with their gear to more suit the character they wanted to play. It took a little bit for folks to warm up to the confrontation mechanics, but when they realized how much the game encouraged turning on each-other, we were off to the races.

We ended the game with scenes that pointed to a snapshot of a larger story, which felt fitting despite the fact that I typically see PbtA systems as games that really reward you if you stick with them for a multi-session campaign. However, I went into the session expecting to play a one-shot, and we got a really fruitful experience out of it.

The Takeaway.

While I can still see the merits of creating your own character, and I certainly won’t stop running games using that format, I think that I’ve developed a newfound appreciation for pre-generated characters, whether they are built into the game, or they’re made to make the game easier to learn.

Pre-gens also solve a lot of problems that can be common in new tables: your characters already have a reason for working together, you can learn how to play the game using a template that’s built to work well, you have more time actually spent playing together, and you can engage with a story that your character is designed to be relevant to.

Pre-gens also give the GM a chance to build their own desires and boundaries into the story from base one: in Lily’s Angels, a pre-gen setting for Protect the Child, I was able to bake in the themes about transphobia, religious violence and state violence into both the setting and the characters. The people who sat down at that table sat down because of those themes, not in spite of them. In all of my one-shot games, regardless of how much of the character was written beforehand, the nature of the game meant that the players still had agency over who their characters were and what they did. The background was a jumping off point - it gave everyone a base to work from, and as time went on, they found their own reasons for engaging with the story as it was presented.

Additionally, in all of the games where the characters had strong backstories and well-defined personalities written into them, the players found reasons to really care about what was put there on purpose. A player who picks up Cyrus Vance in Lady Blackbird might pick them up precisely because they’re in love with Natasha, and a player who picks up Sal in Yazeba’s B&B probably wants to engage with the artist’s struggle to find his signature style.

If you go the extra mile, I think you can use this set-up regardless of the game. In Apocalypse World, the work is a little more than normal, but I don’t think it’s terribly much. In Rotted Capes, World of Darkness, or Call of Cthulhu, I think that it’s a substantially bigger ask, but traditional games are also very likely to have pre-gens as part of the book, built for starting adventures - it’s just a question of whether that starting adventure is actually right for the kind of game you want out of that rule-set.

When it comes to my own game, Protect the Child - I made the pre-generated settings primarily to make play-testing easier, but I think I’ve stumbled on a little goldmine by accident. Using setting packs for a new table takes away a significant amount of set-up for the GM, and gives new players concrete characters that communicate the goals of the game without having to struggle through a series of character choices first.

Oh, and I also wrote a setting for the Pre-Gens game jam: Protect the Child: Digital Glitch. It’s a game designed to talk about disability, corporate subscription models, and questions of ownership, and I think it’s pretty rad.