#Tabletop Role Playing Game

[i-am-rano]

I believe this might have been already said by someone at some point, but I feel like what I have to say is tangentially related to the recent trends in online ttrpg spaces and so I'm going to say it anyway.

When writing a TTRPG YOU CAN EXPLAIN WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A CERTAIN MECHANIC. It's legal. You won't go to jail for that. It's so helpful. Please do it.

I'm running early beta tests of my own ttrpg and all of my testers find it so surprisingly useful. The fact that the little explanation next to your rule has a little "this is to facilitate X amongst the players" or something like that at the end is of great help to the players and of even greater help to the GM, and I can't stress this enough.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Help Save the World of TTRPGs and Their Creators.

Okay I’m being a little dramatic, but at the same time I’m pretty serious. This is a call to action, and the livelihoods of myself and lots of other people, many of them (like myself) disabled, are depending on it. This is a post about why, what you can do about it, and (perhaps least often answered) how.

This post is actually an accompaniment to another discussion by someone else. If you don’t want to listen to a 90-minute in-depth discussion of much of what I’m about to tell you, you can just keep reading. Otherwise, click here or here and listen to this either before or after you read this post. (They’re the same thing, just different sources.)

If you have ever made or reblogged posts urging people to switch from Google Chrome to Firefox, you should be willing to at least give a try to other TTRPGs besides D&D5e for much the same principle reasons. I’m not telling you you have to hate D&D5e, and I’m not telling you you have to quit D&D5e, I’m just asking you to try some other games. If you don’t like them, and you really want to go back to D&D5e, then go back to D&D5e. But how can you really know you won’t like other games if you have literally never tried them? This post is a post about why and how to try them. If you’re thinking right now that you don’t want to try them, I urge you to look below to see if any of your reasons for not wanting to try them are covered there. Because the monopoly that WotC’s D&D5e has on TTRPGs as a whole is bad for me as a game designer, and it’s bad for you as a game player. It’s even bad for you if you like D&D5e. A fuller discussion of the why and how this is the case can be found in the links above, but it isn’t fully necessary for understanding this post, it’ll just give you a better perspective on it.

If you’re a D&D5e player, I’m sure at some point or another, you’ve been told “play a different game”, and it must get frustrating without the context of why and how. This post is here to give you the why and how.

[The following paragraph has been edited because the original wording made it sound like we think all weird TTRPGs suck.]

Before that though, one more thing to get out of the way. I'm going to level with you. There’s a lot of weird games out there.

You are gonna see a lot of weird TTRPGs when you take the plunge. Many of them try to completely reinvent what a TTRPG even is, and some fail spectacularly, others really do even up doing something very interesting even if they don't end up being what a core TTRPG player wants. But not every indie RPG is a Bladefish, lots and lots of them are more 'traditional' and will feel very familiar to you, I promise. (And you might even find that you like the weird experimental bladefish type ones, these are usually ideal for one-session plays when your usual group can't play your usual game for any reason.)

You're also going to probably see a lot of very bad games, and man have I got some stories of very bad games, but for now I'm just saying to make sure you read the reviews, or go through curators (several of which will be listed below), before you buy.

Now that that is out of the way, I’m going to go down a list of concerns you may have for why not, and then explain the how.

“I don’t want to learn a whole new set of rules after I already spent so much time learning D&D5e.”

Learning a new set of rules is not going to be as hard as you think. Most other TTRPGs aren’t like that. D&D5e is far on the high end of the scale for TTRPGs being hard and time-consuming to learn and play. If you’ve only played D&D5e, it might trick you into thinking that learning any TTRPG is an overwhelmingly time-consuming task, but this is really mostly a D&D5e problem, not a TTRPG problem as a whole.

“D&D5e has all of these extra online tools to help you play it.”

So what? People have been playing TTRPGs without the help of computers for 50 years. To play a well-designed TTRPG you won’t need a computer. Yes, even if you're bad at math. There are some TTRPGs out there that barely even use math.

“I’m too invested in the narrative and characters of my group’s current ongoing D&D5e campaign to switch to something else.”

There are other games, with better design made by better people for less money, that are the same kind of game as D&D5e, that your current characters, lore, and plot will fit right into and do it better. And no, it's not just Pathfinder, there's others.

“I can’t afford to play another TTRPG.”

You probably can. If you’ve only played D&D5e, you might have been made to think that TTRPGs are a very expensive hobby. They aren’t. D&D5e is actually uniquely expensive, costing more than 3x more than the next most expensive TTRPG I can think of right now. Even on the more expensive end, other TTRPG books will cost you no more than $60, most will cost you less than $20, and a whole lot of them are just free. If you somehow still can’t afford another TTRPG, come to the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book club mentioned below, nominate the game, and if it wins the vote we will straight up buy it for you.

(By the way, if you had any of the above concerns about trying other games besides D&D5e, that really makes it sound like you are in a textbook abusive relationship with D&D5e. This is how abusers control their partners, and how empires control their citizens, by teaching you to think that nothing could ever get any better, and even though they treat you bad, the Other will treat you even worse.)

“If I don’t play D&D5e, which TTRPG should I play?”

That’s a pretty limited question to be asking, because there will be no one TTRPG for everything. And no, D&D5e is not the one TTRPG for everything, Hasbro’s marketing team is just lying to you. (Pathfinder and PbtA are not the one system for everything either!) Do you only play one video game or only watch one movie or only read one book? When you finish watching an action movie like Mad Max, and then you want to watch a horror movie, do you just rewind Mad Max and watch it over again but this time you act scared the whole time? No, you watch a different movie. I’m asking you to give the artistic medium of TTRPGs the same respect you would give movies.

“I want to play something besides D&D5e, but my friends won’t play anything else!”

I have several answers to this.

Try showing them this post.

If that doesn’t work: Make them. Put your foot down. This works especially well if you are the DM. Tell them you won’t run another session of D&D5e until they agree to give what you want to do at least one try instead of always doing only what they want to do. This is, like, playing 101. We learned this in kindergarten. If your friend really wants to play something else, you should give their game a try, or you’re not really being a very good friend.

If that doesn’t work, find another group. This doesn’t even mean that you have to leave your existing group. A good place to start would be the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club which will be mentioned and linked below. You can also go to the subreddit of any game you’re interested in and probably meet people there who have the same problem you do and want to put together a group to play something other than D&D5e. You might get along great with these people, you might not, but you won’t know until you try. Just make sure to have a robust “session zero” so everyone is on the same page. This is a good practice for any group but it is especially important for a group made of players you’ve just met.

“I only watch actual plays.”

Then watch actual plays of games that aren’t D&D5e. These podcasts struggle for the same reasons that indie RPGs struggle, because of the brand recognition and brand loyalty D&D5e has, despite their merit. I don’t watch actual plays, or else I would be able to list more of them. So, anyone who does watch actual plays, please help me out by commenting on this post with some non-D&D5e actual plays you like. And please do me a favor and don’t list actual plays that only play one non-D&D5e system, list ones that go through a variety of systems. The first one I can think of is Tiny Table.

“I can just homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e.”

Even though I want to, I’m not going to try and argue that you can’t actually homebrew away all the problems with D&D5e. Instead, I’m going to ask you why you’re buying two $50 rulebooks just to throw away half the pages. In most other good RPGs, you don’t need to change the rules to make them fun, they’re fun right out the box.

“But homebrewing D&D5e into any kind of game is fun! You can homebrew anything out of D&D5e!”

Firstly, I promise that this is not unique to D&D5e. Secondly, then you would probably have more fun homebrewing a system that gives you a better starting point for reaching your goal. Also, what if I told you that there are entire RPG systems out there that are made just for this? There are RPG systems that were designed for the purpose of being a toolbox and set of materials for you to work with to make exactly the game you want to make. Some examples are GURPS, Savage Worlds, Basic RolePlaying, Caltrop Core, and (as much as I loathe it) PbtA.

“I’m not supporting WotC’s monopoly because I pirate all the D&D5e books.”

Then you’re still not supporting the smaller developers that this monopoly is crushing, either.

Now, here’s the how. Because I promise you, there’s not just one, but probably a dozen other RPGs out there that will scratch your exact itch.

Here’s how to find them. This won’t be a comprehensive list because I’ve already been typing this for like 3 hours already. Those reading this, please go ahead and comment more to help fill out the list.

First, I’m gonna plug one of my own major projects, because it’s my post. The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club. It’s a discord server that treats playing TTRPGs like a book club, with the goal of introducing members to a wide variety of games other than D&D5e. RPGs are nominated by members, then we hold a vote to decide what to read and play for a short campaign, then we repeat. There is no financial, time, or schedule investment required to join this book club, I promise it is very schedule-friendly, because we assign people to different groups based of schedule compatibility. You don’t have to play each campaign, or any campaign, you can just read along and participate in discussion that way. And if you can’t afford to buy the rulebook we’re going to be reading, we will make sure you get a PDF of it for free. That is how committed we are to getting non-D&D5e RPGs into people’s hands. Here is an invite link.

Next, there are quite a few tumblr blogs you can follow to get recommendations shown to you frequently.

@indierpgnewsletter

@indie-ttrpg-of-the-day

@theresattrpgforthat

@haveyouplayedthisttrpg

@indiepressrevolution

Plenty of podcasts, journalists, and youtubers out there do in-depth discussions of different systems regularly, a couple I can think of off the top of my head are:

Storyteller Conclave (I’m actually going to be interviewed live on this show on April 10th!)

Seth Skorkowsky

Questing Beast

The Gaming Table

Rascal News

Lastly, you can just go looking. Browse r/rpg, drivethrurpg.com, indie press revolution, and itch.io.

Now, if you really want to support me and my team specifically Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, our debut TTRPG, is going to launch on Kickstarter on April 10th and we need all the help we can get. Set a reminder from the Kickstarter page through this link.

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, there’s plenty of ways to get one!

Subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

Donate to our ko-fi and send us an email with proof that you did, and we’ll email you back with the full Eureka prerelease package with the most updated version at the time of responding! (The email address can be found if you scroll down to the bottom of our website.)

We also have merchanise.

[keevabobeeva]

In werewolf the apocalypse what determines what a wolf born garous human form will look like? My natural assumption is it'd look like a member of whatever the dominant ethnic group is in the area it's from but why would it? What connection do they share that would dictate that? Is it that they are both mystically connected to the land and that connection determines what people look like? That feels like the most fitting given WtAs generally animistic world. but if that is the case, isn't it kind of weird that 'what people here should look like' is baked into the soul of the land?

But let's abandon the idea that they wouldn't necessarily just look like whatever humans live nearby. Is it that individual garous desire? Does this wolf with human like intelligence subtly want to look like some guy named Greg? If a wolf at a sanctuary turned out to be a werewolf and changed into their homid form, would they look like their favorite one of the sanctuaries employees? (Could a Garous homid and wolf forms have differently gendered bodies? Surely a wolf wouldn't care about gender enough to care about whether the form it would want to take matches the gender humans have assigned it)

What if it's just random? Like hitting the randomize button in a character creator. Does every wolf have a randomized gijinka living inside of them waiting to be freed?

[ultimavela]

"Up is Out" is now in drivethrurpg !!

Up is Out is a co-op solo role playing game of exploration, resource management, map making, journaling, asymmetrical roles, and lore creation, that uses books you already own as sources to spark your imagination.

If anyone plays it, I'd love to hear your thoughts and know if you had fun with it :)

[andysuriano]

Are YOU ready for what’s next to come? Remember to follow @lostcompanyofficial , we might post the full piece soon…

[willknightauthor]

I had an epiphany while watching Matt Colville talk about D&D 5e vs. other RPGs and classic D&D. Dungeon Meshi isn't just inspired by D&D, it's specifically older editions of D&D.

It's very heavy on exploration, problem-solving, and survival-horror, and very light on the magic powers and superhuman warriors. The entire story revolves around a bunch of very weak and mortal people crawling one absolutely massive dungeon full of things that will kill them (even though they're all very experienced). That's why they care so much about dungeon ecology: it allows them to solve otherwise invincible monsters and survive low supplies, just like in an OSR game.

It's basically a cute anime version of Shadowdark. I don't know why it took so long for that to click.

[gigantic-spider]

Itchmas 2024 - Day 12

Riding the Ley Line by Moss Bosch (beatingthebinary)

Riding the Ley Line is a simple, solo LARP to play whenever you're riding public transportation. I've read it before, but upon rereading it for my Itchmas 2024 reviews I realized that it had inadvertently served as an inspiration for a game I recently made with the help of a friend. That game is not currently available digitally, nor do I want to sully this review with a plug for my own stuff, but I wanted to say it here as it didn't make it into the acknowledgments of that game.

This phenomenon, of something half-remembered or basically forgotten bubbling under the corrugated surface of your brain's folds until it erupts unbidden days, weeks, months, even years later, is what I love about TTRPGs and the creative process in general. Even tiny games, lovingly designed, like Riding the Ley Line, can have an impact on the world, can touch people's lives in a way that was perhaps unanticipated. And games like this, that play with how you engage with the world around you and ask you to see the mundane in a different and more fantastical way, are perfectly primed to do just that. I love this game, and I love this genre of game. What a great way to round out Itchmas 2024.

[tinytablepodcast]

Looking for Autumnal Horror/Spooky TTRPG Game

Hello! We have a friend who is looking for a game that has the vibe of Gravity Falls and Over the Garden Wall. Very much a fall time, horror-ish, child vibe. Any suggestions?

[zachholmbergart]

Just a part of my con season prep!

[theonyxpath]

On this day in 2016, we released Mage: The Awakening Second Edition in PDF or POD via our partners at @drivethrurpg.com! This Storytelling Game of Modern Sorcery uses the Chronicles of Darkness rules. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/181754/mage-the-awakening-2nd-edition?affiliate_id=13&src=OPPTumblr

[i-am-rano]

One of the most interesting feelings when writing a TTRPG is when you get an idea for a mechanic, and you just assume it's gonna fit into the system, but somewhere in the process you realize you can just toss it away, because that's not the kind of game you're making.

For me this happened with damage types. I initially set out to have several, with damage types like "Fire" or "Piercing" or "Holy" but, in the process of writing some spells, I realized that I really don't need that? I can just keep it in "physical damage" or "energy damage" categories and that's it, I don't need to reinvent the wheel with damage types, this is political intrigue exploration fantasy (think Disciples 2 meets Dragon Age 2), not a tactical dungeon crawl. I thought about the players for example encountering a fire elemental, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn't think of a reason as to why wouldn't it just be able to resist energy damage, the minute detail of Fire damage VS Lightning damage does not matter in a game where I want to invoke a feeling of party-bonding and fantasy pseudo-detective fiction and where the characters have moves like "I spend a limited resource to make my last stand against an overwhelming enemy force".

It has come to the point, where I want to be rid of the three-action-points-per-turn mechanic, since realistically how much of the gameplay is going to be tactical combat? Well not much to be honest 🤷‍♂️

[anim-ttrpgs]

The Kickstarter for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Live!!

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is our team’s debut TTRPG, over three years in the making! The campaign will run from April 10th to May 10th!

How far would you go to learn the truth?

Play amateur detectives caught up in things they barely understand, and explore how the lives of your characters unravel as they push themselves to dig deeper into the unknown!

Tense investigations!

Delve into an investigation-focused mystery and horror system that lets players take initiative and use their characters’ unique strengths to find clues and deduce conclusions themselves. A few bad rolls won’t get the party hopelessly stuck, but at the same time Eureka respects their intellect and lets them take charge of solving the mystery!

Character-driven gameplay!

Stats and abilities are based on who your character is as a person. Freeform character creation allows you to build a totally unique little guy, and have a totally unique gameplay experience with him! This is supported by the backbone of the Composure mechanic. Stress, fear, fatigue, and hunger will wear your investigators down as they trudge deeper into the unknown. Food, sleep, and connections with their fellow investigators are the only way to keep them going!

Secrets inside and out! 

Any investigator could be a monster, helping their friends while trying not to reveal their true natures. The party will learn to trust and rely on each other, or explode into a tangled net of drama!

Intense, tactical combat! 

Hits are devastating, and misses are unpredictable–firing a gun will always change the situation somehow, for better or for worse!

Now in Technicolor!

Evocative artwork from talented femme-fatales @chaospyromancy and @qsycomplainsalot and the mysterious @theblackwarden paint a gorgeously-realized portrait of a world with shadows lurking in every corner.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. We are almost at the end, we just need some financial support to put the finishing touches on it and make the final push to get it ready for official release!

With every stretch goal we meet, the game gets better and better. Tons of beautiful new artwork, new options for gameplay, and even two entirely new playable Monsters could be added to the book, so visit the Kickstarter and secure your copy today!

If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!

If you’re interested in a more updated and improved version of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy than the free demo you got from our website, subscribe to our Patreon where we frequently roll our new updates for the prerelease version!

You can also support us on Ko-fi, or by checking out our merchandise!

Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[milda-matilda]

Short rpg that I made a while ago after possibly playing too much Dark Souls, all while grasping at the feeling of discovering both a new world and a new a new game, and no matter how many times I play it or its sequels I can never regain that first playthrough.

[ultimavela]

Hey! I leave here two mechanics that I have developed for my OSR/NSR-like game that may be of interest to some of you (?)

Dominance and Maneuvers.

They are very easy to implement, and they may help you to give mechanical weight to those amazing narrative moments that you and your players have in combat.

Dominance represents the strategic, psychological, and violent dominance that a character has in combat. And it increases when characters do things to better their “position” in combat.

Maneuvers represent actions you do that affect an enemy when they or you are attacking/defending. They are expressed as a change in the enemy, but require an effort from you.

The idea of both Dominance and Maneuvers is to increase the possibilities that PC/NPCs have in combat. Making combat more dynamic, and giving options different from “I just attack”, but with a simple expression on the mechanics of the game.

[shrikepublishing]

[whensuddenlygames]

Seeking LATAM TTRPG writers!

We've a game project that is seeking LATAM writers to help with a PAID project. So if you love cryptids, magic, and the 90s then we want to talk with you. Email info@whensuddenly.games to learn more.