#bitd dungeon

[atwas-meme-ing]

Ok, so, since the Wii U and 3ds shops are gonna close down soon, I'm on a mission to collect all the fun Wii U and 3ds games I can find. Here's a list of what I think are some of the best download-only Wii U and 3ds games that I've found. I think most of these may also be on Switch, Steam, or other platforms. And a lot of these are available on both 3ds and Wii U.

3ds

All of the Sonic Game Gear/Master system games that are on 3ds: Sonic 1 and 2, Sonic Blast, Sonic Labyrinth, Triple Trouble, and Tails Adventure. If you don't have the original machines to play them on, then this is the best way to play these. Works so much better than online emulators.

Pretty much anything by Circle and Skipmore. So, the Witch and Hero trilogy, Fairune, Drancia Saga, Ambition of the Slimes. I know I'm forgetting some, but just filter by publisher and look up Circle and Skipmore. All their games are just sooooo fun. Most of them are pretty simple, you can get through them in a few hours, but you really should clear a few hours out of a single day when you sit down to play one because they are highly addictive. Especially Witch and Hero.

Quell: Memento. This is a fun puzzle game with a bittersweet story about a crotchety, old, reclusive man. Your goal is to get him to open up about his life.

Steamworld. Get the whole series, if you can. They are mostly platformer, metroidvania, and/or puzzle styled games where you play as steam-powered robots.

Legend of Dark Witch. Multiple ways to play, side-scrolling platformer game with some magical shooter elements.

Kingdom's Item Shop. This is so cute- you run a shop for magical and heroic items, and you have to go out and fight monsters to get more ingredients. You also get to craft new items.

Alchemic Dungeons. Nothing but dungeons, and you craft what you need as you go along.

Alphadia. High fantasy RPG, but with bioengineering sci-fi story elements.

Severed. Action game with dungeons where you sever monsters' limbs to get upgrades. Not as gross as it sounds.

Excave. It's a trilogy. Dungeon crawler. Cuz, come on, how can you not love dungeon crawlers?

Cursed ex Castilla. Basically a Ghosts 'n Goblins clone, but with its own story. And you can save your place, so that alone makes it worth it XD

Adventure Labyrinth Story. Another dungeon crawler.

Kemco RPG's. There's a bunch of them, and they all have good stories: ASH, Infinite Dunamis, Justice Chronicles... like I said, there's a bunch. Each one puts its own spin on the battle mechanincs.

Ninja Usagimaru. A series of puzzle games where you have to push, pull, and throw blocks to rescue villagers and defeat the monsters. Reminds me of an old block-pushing puzzle game I played years ago and can't remember the name of. Anyway, Usagimaru is fun.

Wii U

1001 Spikes. I'm pretty sure there's more spikes than that in this game X'D. NES-inspired pixel art action game. Get the treasure and escape, but don't stand in one place for too long.

Alphadia Genesis. Prequal to Alphadia (which I mentioned above for 3ds).

More Steamworld games.

Axiom Verge. It honestly looks like a Metroid clone, but Axiom Verge is its own story and has its own rules of gameplay and mechanics. And it ain't easy, by any means.

Bit Dungeon. Dungeon crawler. Yup, that's it, just dungeons. Go ahead, go nuts.

Dragon Fantasy. Highly comedic high fantasy RPG where you play as a bald, middle-aged former hero. There's a whole series. Looks like it was inspired by Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Earthbound.

Defend Your Crypt. This game is backwards! So, usually, you would play as someone trying to break into a crypt to steal treasures, right? Well, in this game, you play as the ghost of a pharaoh who has to activate the traps to avoid getting his treasures stolen. Pixel-art.

Freedom Planet. Now, I know this game's on Steam and Switch, but if you have a little room on your Wii U and not on your Switch, you might want to try it. It's adorable, the characters are funny, the story is good, and it is so heavily inspired by Sega Genesis games.

Human Resource Machine. Stupid little game about the fundamentals of programming. Fun for anyone trying to learn computer science.

Master Reboot and Soul Axiom. These two are a set. They're somewhat minimalized first-person exploration/puzzle games set in one of those storylines where people have uploaded their consciousness into the cloud.

Space Hunted. As far as I know, this is ONLY on Wii U (and it may be the only game in my list that is only on Wii U). If you like the old NES sci-fi games, you HAVE to get this one! If it didn't have a copyright date of 2017, I would have sworn this was an original NES game. Not only are the music and the art true to the era, but it has a very simplistic menu style and it is just as hard as any NES sci-fi shootout I've ever tried.

NES Remix. You have the option to play missions and whole levels from the biggest NES hits (Mario, Kirby, Kid Icarus, Zelda, and more), but the real fun is the Remix levels. Some of them involve characters from one game ending up in another (so you have things like Mario's Boos chasing Kirby), while others have mixed-up versions of the original levels, like reversed or silhouetted levels. (The Kirby egg-eating level drove me nuts because the camera pans in closer and closer with every egg.) I do believe that NES Remix 1, 2, and Ultimate are only on 3ds and Wii U.

Nihilumbra. A spot of darkness escapes from the void and discovers beauty, life, and color, but he eventually develops an existential crisis as he realizes the void will destroy everything in its past as it attempts to reclaim him.

Xeodrifter. Hard. NES-inspired pixel art. Another game that reminds me of Metroid, but the art style is not cloned.

Swords and Soldiers. Strategy battle game, so stupid and hilarious and adorable. Pretty sure there's a whole series, I've only got the first one.

Pixel Slime U. Obviously developed by a true sadist. Pixel art, but there's no way you could confuse this with a retro NES game. Every level has a gimmick- some spin, some are upside-down, some switch from upside-down to right-side-up, and those are the easy ones. Only play if you're a glutton for punishment and you don't get motion sickness. I think it's only on Wii U, so get it while you can.

Olympia Rising. Play as the soul of a warrior trying to escape the rising ocean of acid in Hades. A bit tough.

Twisted Fusion. You've been transported to a world in the sky where all the monsters are allergic to water, so you use water guns to destroy them. And your character's phone has all these apps they can use to upgrade. Gameplay isn't too dynamic, but the setting of the game makes it enjoyable.

Castle Storm. Tower defense. Funny cutscenes, good graphics. Medieval knights vs. barbaric Vikings. But are the Vikings really that barbaric? And is it possible there's a traitor among Sir Gareth's men? Play to find out!

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. The punk sister is stuck in the cutesy world and the cutesy sister is stuck in the punk world. Switch back and forth between them to escape back to reality.

Knytt Underground. Mountain-climbing game- you can climb walls like in Celeste, but there's no stamina limit (also no dash). Journey through the post-apocalyptic underground world as both a mute human and a bouncy ball to ring the 6 bells that will prevent the world from dying. I think Knytt might actually be a series, but this is the first one I've found.

And I'm actually still collecting and intend to get as many as I can right up until the shops close down. Will try to remember to update this list as I find more.

[maahriarts]

Hark! A magpie

[leitereads]

⋆✮↪ ReIntroduction

-emia, meaning presence in blood.

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The crime scene

⇒ Multifandom blog ➣ (series/films) (books) (anime) ⇒ Writeblr, langblr and studyblr ⇒ My visual arts ⇒ Literature, classical art and philosophy ⇒ Music ➣ classical, classic rock, goth, metal and indie ⇒ Dark Academia ⇒ TTRPGs and videogames ⇒ Horror, true crime and oddities ⇒ Medicine and science ⇒ Travelling and lifestyle ⇒ Further info: linktree

The Murderer

⇒ Name: Leite (they/them) ⇒ Age: 21+ ⇒ Blood type: [confidential] ⇒ Murder weapon: blood, sweat and tears ⇒ Profession: medical student ⇒ Location: Portugal ⇒ Languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French ⇒ Other details ➣ (linktree) ⇒ Hobbies ➣ TTRPGs (DnD, CoC, VtM, BitD, etc.) | writing | reading | drawing/painting | horse riding | swimming | HEMA | sportive fencing

Note: I am on holidays, therefore I won't be that active till the 26th July

Confidential Information

This blog may contain sensitive content. Everything potentially concerning is tagged under the tag "cw". Still, user discretion is advised.

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Modus Operandi

✏ WIP: The Apocryphal Truth

Set in the late 1890s-early 1900s, this novel is about a young doctor who doesn't believe in God, just to realise that he is part of what he doesn't believe in.

⇒ Gnostic, cosmic and psychological horror, sci-fi (steampunk and biopunk), historical fiction (speculative history) ⇒ 1st draft - longest WIP till date ⇒ 3rd person POV, likely unreliable narrator

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✏ WIP: The Immortal Emperor's Regicide

Inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game "Blades in the Dark", by John Harper, this WIP started as a collaborative creative writing project, being now a personal WIP. The steampunk city of Doskvol hides away all sorts of scoundrels, aristocracy and insane cults to Eldritch gods. While some criminals don't have any other choice besides a life of crime, some of them have higher ambitions, and the highest of them all is to finish the reign of terror of The Immortal Emperor.

⇒ Horror in general, sci-fi (steampunk, biopunk), mystery, thriller ⇒ 1st draft - adapting the lore and worldbuilding created for the collaborative writing project ⇒ 3rd person omniscient narrator.

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In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

- Fernando Pessoa

This Introduction post is also a WIP. Soon to be added:

Spotify playlist addressing all my favourite music genres.

The link to the content warning tag.

The links to important/personal tags.

Links to an info page about my OCs

[thettrpgtournament]

Got a really cool character from your favorite D&D game? Pathfinder? Monster of the Week? Blades in the Dark? Another tabletop role playing game we didn't list? Now's your chance to show them off to the world and square them off against each other at @thettrpgtournament!

There's currently no submission deadline, but there will be a hard cap of 32 characters, so we encourage you to sign up ASAP.

Read the guidelines here!

Submit your character here!

[handsfreepizza]

Hi guys, I'm broke as shit rn from just a couple months that really had me saying "please say sike". I'm also hitting a solid year of my new job search, I really thought I would have a better paying job by now but damn I do not. I need a win, my dudes. let it be me drawing your favorite lil' guy (gender neutral).

SO. I'm opening commissions. Hell, I'll even work with you on the price if you can only afford so much, because honestly anything counts right now and I get it. let me draw your character, can be for ttrpgs or anything you want really. feel free to message me here on tumblr or on discord also at handsfreepizza. I've also got a shop if that's more your speed.

pls commission me, I swear I'm good for it, thanks!

[ttrpbri]

🌈🌈

[ashenpumpkin]

no context memes from my Blades in the dark Campaign

[queefy-5-layer-burrito]

For the past year I’ve been hosting semi regular board game nights for my friends. Slowly we transitioned from the traditional stuff to more rpg style play.

After doing a one shot Lasers and Feelings, I have managed to get them started on a Blades In The Dark campaign.

I have successfully tricked my friends into tabletop RPGs after years of hesitancy. I fucking win.

[admiralskywhale]

Okay, can't leave well enough alone. BitD teaches you how to play it VERY explicitly and clearly. Every roll is a negotiation between the players and the GM. First, a roll is ONLY MADE if and only if the PC is in a situation where something is being risked. Sure, that can be like health or whatever, but it could also be time, social standing, an undetected position, etc. The player says something they wanna do, then the GM decides if theres an obstacle in the way of that action and what risk that obstacle poses. If there is a risky obstacle, the GM says a roll needs to be made. Then, the PLAYER chooses how they'd like to overcome the obstacle and THEY choose the skill they'd like to use. The GM then tells them their Position and Effect (which has a lot of nuance in the written rules), which is basically just a way of saying how dire the situation becomes if they fail and how effective they should expect their action to be if they succeed (so it's very easy to stop players from, I dunno, expecting to seduce every guard they see by rolling natural 20s, when the guards do not want to be seduced). If the player isn't happy with those potential outcomes, they can try a different skill and describe a different approach to see if their position or effect might improve. If they like the odds, they roll, but before ANY roll, they always have the option to gain up to two bonus dice (at a penalty to some other systems in play) in order to improve their odds. Or instead of a die, they could get a better position or effect. Or they could trade a good position for a worse one in order to get a greater effect. Or vice-versa. The point is, the players and the GM are in constant conversation and negotiation, all in order to defog the expectations both should have when the dice are actually rolled, which is always ALWAYS exciting

as a player you should really internalize the intent/task sentence structure. “i wanna open this door by prying it open with a crowbar,” “i wanna set fire to the hay bale with my firebolt,” “i wanna haggle this price by commenting on some minor scratches.”

very often i see players only stating one of these. either “i wanna open the door” or “i cast firebolt on the hay bale.”

what the intent/task structure does is properly communicate to your GM what a success/failure state looks like, and what kind of challenge they propose. sometimes players have a very specific outcome in mind, but when they just state the task, even a successful attempt will be disappointing because the GM does not know what you want to achieve. and vice versa, just stating your intent puts weight on the GM to not only come up with the consequences to the actions, but what even causes them to begin with.

[maahriarts]

Mavka. Thanatologist. Seeker of truth, hater of fate

[corvidcall]

ive been a halfhearted dnd defender for a minute, bc i was really involved in indie ttrpg twitter for a while and I Am Not Anymore because frankly. it just got too hostile and crab bucket-y. a lot of people acting like critical role or dimension 20 were opposing them by playing a game that had widespread brand recognition (and also getting mad whenever critrole played something OTHER than dnd. i haven't forgotten how hostile everyone i knew in that scene was when critrole played monster hearts. like what do you want??) or like people who play dnd are popular jocks and people who play indie games are bullied nerds. when actually we're all nerds. nobody is cool here.

and i would especially get frustrated when people would recommend games to play instead of dnd that are not at all a comparable experience, or didnt have the same things people liked in dnd. sure, you could play Masks if you want to play a superhero game instead of just reskinning DnD, but Masks is about teens, and the fact that you're playing as teens is core to the mechanics, so it's not a good suggestion for someone who wants to play as adult superheroes. sure you can suggest someone play Blades in the Dark if they want to play a heist team, but BitD is incredibly punishing! every time ive played it, it felt almost impossible to get a full success at anything. that can be fun, if that's the kind of game you want, but if i want to play a game where i feel cool and like im good at things, then BitD is not a good replacement! I cant tell you how many times I've seen people say that you don't need to just reskin dnd when there are games that are more specifically tailored to the experience you want, and then in the same breath act like the games they're suggesting ARENT specific actually and can be used to craft any kind of experience you want. Is the genre baked into the mechanics, or isnt it? because it cant be both!

and thats not even getting into when people would suggest replacements that aren't even close. a lot of "dnd sucks nobody should ever play dnd. instead of dnd, why don't you play MY game, where youre a couple thats getting married in 2 months and you're still planning your wedding?" like... why would i play that instead of dnd, if i want to play dnd? those have nothing in common, beyond the fact that theyre both tabletop games. it's like saying "Instead of watching Star Wars, you should watch Get Out!" sure, they're both MOVIES, and Get Out is GOOD, but i think to suggest that someone who wants to watch Star Wars would have an equal if not better experience watching Get Out instead devalues both. They're not interchangeable because they're trying to do entirely different things

So I would get incredibly frustrated when people acted like people who were choosing to play DnD were just making a mistake, and that they couldn't possibly be getting anything out of playing that game specifically

ALL THAT BEING SAID wizards of the coast sucks ass and they can clean my balls. they should get put in the stocks and i should get to pelt them with tomatoes. i like playing in the sword and sorcery fantasy setting, and dnd was always my go-to game for that because Dungeon World is the worst game I've ever played (i can think of one or two other games in the same sort of setting, but i haven't tried them or met anyone willing to run them) but ah well. WotC can eat shit for this copyright bullshit

[thettrpgtournament]

Got a really cool character from your favorite D&D game? Pathfinder? Monster of the Week? Blades in the Dark? Another tabletop role playing game we didn't list? Now's your chance to show them off to the world and square them off against each other at @thettrpgtournament!

There's currently no submission deadline, but there will be a hard cap of either 32 or 64 characters, depending on how popular this tourney ends up being, so we encourage you to sign up ASAP.

Read the guidelines here!

Submit your character here!

[caughtthedarkness93]

Endlessly, this. I see a ton of people in the tabletop space trying to bend D&D to do things that it's not designed to do when there are systems that are not only designed to do that, but are actually more straightforward in their mechanics and easier to learn. Fate's a really good one! In addition, it's setting-agnostic, so you can flavor it for any setting and genre. One of the big issues with hacking D&D is it's very specifically designed for zero-to-superhero campaigns in a soft magic, high magic setting reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, and if you try to do something that is not that, you wind up chopping out or aggressively modifying a lot of its inherent design. Like Dimension 20 and Critical Role are great, but they're also run by a bunch of people who are absolutely stellar improv artists and have been involved in those spaces for years. The 5e rules aren't doing the heavy lifting there, the players are. If you want to do something that's not that, there are so many easier and smoother ways.

A few favorites of mine:

• City of Mist - designed to do urban fantasy noir, heavy emphasis on character. You play a Rift, essentially an avatar of a mythical figure that is, in some way, in conflict with your normal life. Your mythos gives you supernatural abilities. So you could play an upright legislator with a background in law who is a rift of Robin Hood for a character focused on the conflict between law and justice. Your character's stats are determined by tags - essentially a set of four categories that represent aspects of your character's mundane life or mythos, each with three traits. When a trait is relevant, you can add it to your roll. So our Robin Hood lawmaker might be able to use his public speaking skills to negotiate a hostage situation, or convince a greater threat to stand down, or give a long-winded filibuster-style rant to stall for time. I love this system so much and am bummed that I've barely gotten to play it.

• Savage Worlds - setting agnostic, really well-suited to pulpy action-adventure stuff like Indiana Jones. Your skills are tied to a specific type of dice - so you may have a D6 to hack a computer, or a D10 to look at a map and know where you're going. Usually your goal is 4, but the GM can add modifiers to increase or decrease the difficulty. The real fun part is that when you roll max on a die, it explodes. You roll it again, and if it rolls max again, it explodes again. Keep going until it doesn't. Every 4 you get over your initial target is basically a crit. You can get ludicrously high rolls in this system, and though it has grid-based combat, it's designed to specifically be simple and fast-paced. This is my go-to system when I run a game that I suspect will involve lots of fights because it makes them interesting and dynamic, without bending the game's whole design around them like D&D does, and without using the whole attrition-based rules that D&D has that kind of necessitate several encounters per day. Combat can be a little swingy, but is weighted in favor of the players most of the time.

• Blades in the Dark - designed for dark steampunk fantasy heists. This one's a really interesting one because it's very heavily tied to its setting, but there's also a really good core mechanical engine under the hood. The downside of Blades is that by the time you've hacked it to create a new setting, you've borderline created a whole new system, but the upside is that it gave rise to a whole RPG design movement of Forged in the Dark (FITD) games, and if you want to use the Blades rules to play in a specific genre, someone's already made that. The upshot of this game is that it's purpose built to run a heist game, and there's two phases to it - the mission itself, where you have a resource called stress that lets you do flashbacks to have figured out how you planned for an obstacle the whole time, or Resist a GM's consequence (i.e. when the GM says something bad happens, you can say "Fuck you, no it doesn't") and use special abilities. Then there's Downtime, the time between missions, where you can get ahold of new resources, work off the stress you built up last mission by indulging in a vice, and try to cool off some of the heat from that last mission. It's an ingeniously designed game with a lot of systems that play together really well. Highly recommend giving it a look.

And this just scratches the surface! There's games like Fabula Ultima, which is going for a real fantasy JRPG vibe and does a lot of really cool things with it; Delta Green, which has you as an agent of a shady American spy outfit that investigates the supernatural and where you stay sane by leaning on your relationships with others, but risk damaging those relationships at the same time; millions of really cool systems out there that do amazing things in the space. D&D is what a lot of people know, but it's also a system with massive limitations and a corporate owner that I've seen act highly irresponsibly too many times to want to support any longer. Go see what cool things people have created - I promise you will not regret it. There's nothing stopping you from coming back to D&D if you decide that's what you want to play, but what do you have to lose by trying something new that could be tailor-made to play the campaign you've always wanted to play?

Saw a post that op turned off reblogs on about how a lot of people think DnD 5e is a great system for rp over combat and uh hey y'all

If you want a game system for more structured improv, 5e ain't it. DnD is very combat driven, despite what Dimension 20 and other such shows may lead you to believe.

If you genuinely want a ttrpg system designed with More Structured Improv Roleplay in mind, I'm gonna suggest you go ahead and pick up the FATE Core Rulebook. The system is all about telling a story and the mechanics it has make such clear.

Your character creation process is essentially "What is my character's job, their biggest problem, a facet of themselves from their backstory, and a couple tie ins to the rest of the party?" And then you allocate a few stats and you're basically done.

DnD is great, truly it is. But the story you can tell is extremely restricted by your ability to understand the rules and bend/break them appropriately in ways that don't fuck up the entire system, which takes so much more effort than the average person is usually willing to put in. It's very much genre locked, and taking it out of that high fantasy genre in a way that's fun for you AND your players is a lot harder than people like Brennan Lee Mulligan make it look.

Go pick up FATE. It is not genre dependant. It's all about flavor, and failing forward, and saying, "But your character was literally raised in a barn, don't you think it'd make sense for them to really bomb this conversation with a noble?" and having that actually be a fun mechanic.

If you want to see the system in action, the Nebula Jazz series by ItMeJP on YouTube should do you just fine. It's a Guardians Of The Galaxy-esque campaign with a heavy Music theme laid over top of it. It also features the producer of Monster Prom, Jesse Cox, if that helps.

There are other systems outside of DnD. Your idea might be better suited for one of them. Please. Please look in to other systems before trying to force the rules of DnD 5e to conform to your vision.

[anim-ttrpgs]

The skill point allocation system in Eureka is very elegant.

Is the principle of evening out to 0 something that has often been used in ttrpg design? If so, can you name other games that inspired Eureka in that regard? Or did you come up with it for Eureka?

"All skills can be -n to +n with a cumulative total of 0" seems too usefull, too elegant, as to never been utilized before the year 2024.

I came up with it independently and have literally never seen it anywhere else. I have thought the same way about the Eureka! Point mechanic, though similar things have been done before in other RPGs, just never applied to mystery investigation gameplay. Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

I feel like it must have been used somewhere else at some point in the 50 years of TTRPGs that have been made, I've just never seen it. i agree it feels like too good of an idea to not, like, practically be industry standard, but then again, TTRPGs are not a very innovative industry. It's very stagnant. Most TTRPGs that have come out in the past 50 years have just been D&D clones to some degree or another, and most "innovation" I see has just been "what if we unknowingly reinvented the wheel except this time we made it hexagonal instead of octagonal," total Tesla cybertruck style innovation.

The industry is kind of uniquely set up for that. It's one of the most monopoly-dominated industries/artforms in existence, with one game (of greatly varying quality and thoughtful design between editions) completely dominating it for all 50 years of its existence and being allowed to basically fully define what a "TTRPG" is. The biggest alternative to D&D for the past 20 years has been Pathfinder, which is just like D&D but a little better designed, and before that its biggest competitor was World of Darkness, which, if you actually read their rulebooks, are also designed pretty much like D&D except for some text at the beginning which basically says "you can ignore these extremely dungeon-crawl-y rules to focus more on narrative, don't be like those dumb dungeon crawl players," which if you have been following this blog you know is a load of crap.

Call of Cthuhlu, another big veteran contender for the industry that is still going pretty strong, has been the standard for "investigation" gameplay for nearly 50 years, but it's just a Lovecraft hack of RuneQuest, which was designed for, you guessed it, fantasy dungeon crawling. That's why even though CoC adventure modules do tend to play pretty well with Eureka, most of them are still structured as a short line of like 1 or 2 clues to follow to get the PCs into a spooky scary enclosed dungeon-like monster-filled location as quickly as possible, and you have advice like (uncharitable hyperbole) "if the PCs get stuck, make evidence fall from the sky and land at their feet."

Plus, you have big "actual play" podcasts who really really champion the whole "ignore the rules when they get in the way of your pre-planned three-act-structure plot" and the mega-monopolgy with marketing money making it a selling point that if you ignore the rules enough "D&D5e can do anything."

TTRPGs are also a relatively young artform without a ton of mainstream attention until pretty recently (which, as I mentioned, has been eaten up by D&D5e, Pathfinder, and big "actual plays"), and they are a hard one to participate in because playing a single TTRPG requires a ton of time investment compared to most other popular art forms like books, video games, music, and movies.

All this results in many, many people who play and even design TTRPGs literally never having played anything that wasn't WotC-era D&D, barely one or two degrees of separation from WotC-era D&D, or "it's not important if it's WotC-era D&D or not if you just ignore the rules!" Oh and PbtA and BitD players and designers, you're not immune to this! Those are just the "D&D5e can do anything!" of the indie scene and no they really really are not the best framework/engine for every single game ever!

For all the talent, study, effort, and respect for the artform across the A.N.I.M. team, not even we are immune to this. I haven't played nearly as many TTRPGs as I would like to have before calling myself a "learned" TTRPG designer. There might be some obscure game from 2004 I've never heard of that does some of Eureka's stuff already, that if I had read, I could have made Eureka even better by improving upon and learning from the mistakes of others rather than working in uncharted territory.

So, in conclusion, to use the film industry as an analogy, it's like if, during the past 10 years of every fucking mainstream movie being about superheroes, aspiring film makers, who have watched between 0 and 1 movies that weren't about superheroes, are having the "novel" idea of "what if.. a movie wasn't about superheroes!" and then trying to make a movie not about superheroes with no non-superhero experience or study. And Eureka: The Movie is good and innovative because A.N.I.M. Studios watched a measly 10 different non-superhero movies and studied film theory before making it.

[dailyadventureprompts]

I once watched a scifi show involving the development of artificial intelligence (as in, machines that could actually think), and the creator of the AI talked about how as much as he tried to create a perfect system it was only after removing things from the program and forcing it to adapt and improvise that it ended up learning to actually THINK.

Recently I was thinking about my own experience as a dungeon master, especially in the context of teaching other people to DM at the level I do... and it occurred to me how much of my skill emerged as a way for compensating when the game would somehow break down: when a player is missing, when a storybeat doesn't land right, when the dice are especially cruel. I'd tweak or patch and more often then not my adjustments would only cause the game to break even further, sometimes to the point of turning a session into a miserable slog, sometimes to the point of ending a campaign, or even a friendship or two.

Now I have skills I can transfer beyond the game systems I started with, not only into other ttrpgs (I've been splashing around in BITD, it's fun) but into other aspects of my life: My storytelling has improved dramatically, I'm better at making jokes. I'd argue that I've become a better person (or perhaps just unlocked a greater fraction of my potential) because of the time I spent breaking my d&d games.

I wish this process of learning to be a good DM (or gamemaster in general) was talked about more, as far too often I see it presented as a matter of "someday you'll learn all the rules" when really you only need a general understanding of the rules before you start messing with things and breaking the game in so it becomes what you/your group need it to be.

[secretsnowclub]

Finding My Ideal TTRPG

Of the many things I can say of Disco Elysium, the thing that strikes my gamer brain right now is the system. At its simplest, it's 2d6 + Skill. The gear you wear gives skill bonuses. You can have "Thoughts" that also give bonuses.

In my mind, it's perfect. It's all I need. A skill list and some dice. It's how I ran 5e for so long. But a lot of the 5e skills are boring. And it's not possible to just steal the Disco Elysium skill list and use it, because a lot of it is specifically about being a cop and specifically about being the kind of cop that Harry is.

But I think a good place to start would be to ask similar questions. For instance, if I wanted to make a dungeon crawler that was "my perfect ideal of a dungeon crawler," I could ask "what skills would a dungeon crawler possibly need?"

A question like that might get you a few of the same skills in 5e. But I think the question suffers from being not only too broad, but too boring. The question is flawed because as we've seen over the last 30-40 years is that there are a lot of different ways to do a dungeon crawler.

Troika! isn't The Nightmares Underneath isn't Cyberpunk Red isn't blah blah blah.

I think about Venture from Riley Rethal a lot. One of the Paladin's "Strong Moves" is simply "Kill someone." I imagine a skill list with "murder" on it. Such a strong word to use, but it's a choice. And choices are more important to me than trying to hit a common denominator.

A skill like "Pray" would be open enough but also says something about the world. I think in a game like this, your chosen skills would be the answer to choosing a class. There wouldn't be combat rules beyond roll dice + skill to do a thing. What you do with your skills is the important choice. It's roleplaying.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Kinda losing my train of thought. I'm thinking about how "Thoughts" would work as ways to expand your character. Clocks from BitD would work well to emulate the progression of time, and they're a tool I've used in my dungeon crawler games for a while now.

Essentially, whenever a player wants to learn something. Anything. I have them figure out *how* they're going to learn it, and then I make a clock. And whenever they get the time to sit and work on that thing, we fill in a slice of the clock.

It's a very organic way of growing a character beyond a set level progression or needing to gain EXP at all. Clocks can be filled with time or money. "Pay the thief 50g and she'll train you for the day," or whatever.

You'd never run out of Things to make for the game, because you could just work out more Thoughts, deepening your worldbuilding with them, and giving them in-game benefits.

Gear is another thing that I think would be improved. Y'know, a sword could give you +1 Fighting or Murder, but it might also give you +1 Cool, or a bonus to your negotiating skill. What you wear is more important than Armor Class bonuses or whatever. What you wear would increase or decrease skills. It would *say* something about your character.

A few other things I think about in regards to conceptualizing my "perfect rpg":

The way Pokémon games handle a Pokémon's stats. Attack, Defense, Special Attack, and Special Defense. It's nice and simple and if they were included (reworded of course) in a bigger list of skills, it would help to put choices on an equal footing. If choosing between diplomacy and combat were as easy as putting skill points into particular skills, the choice is on you to decide how you interact with the world.

The skill list determines the various ways "Dungeon Crawler Persons" interact with the world, just as the Disco Elysium skill list shows the various ways a cop like Harry might interact with the world. The skills you choose then are you deciding how to interact with that world. They open and close different doors. Put barricades in your way. Remove others.

Anyways, these are just my rambles right now. I've been thinking about this shit for a while. I've probably tweeted about it before too. It's something I've tried to incorporate into .dungeon//remastered and it's what I plan on incorporating into whatever is next.

Thanks for reading.