#but if you're like me and you like playing RPGs based on tabletop systems and you like interesting stories then you should totally play.

[prokopetz]

Hey why DO all those old tabletop RPGS and adventure games have such weird obtuse "act in this one scene or softlock forever" moments? Like, these weren't designed like arcade games that munch quarters... Why was this sort of thing so commonplace?

(With reference to this post here.)

Funnily enough, for tabletop RPGs there's actually a good answer.

If you're familiar with the popular history of tabletop roleplaying games, you've probably heard the idea that they developed out of fantasy wargaming. That's not actually terribly accurate; tabletop RPGs and fantasy wargames are more like two parallel branches that split off from the recreating-historical-battles kind of wargaming at about the same time, and for the first couple of decades there wasn't a bright line drawn between them like there is today. Many are genuinely hard to classify by contemporary standards – there are a lot of early fantasy wargames that look more like modern tabletop RPGs, and vice versa.

One of the consequences of that lack of sharp distinctions between tabletop RPGs and fantasy wargames is that early tabletop RPGs were often played in a sort of "competitive co-op" format at wargaming tournaments. Multiple groups would run their parties through the same adventure in parallel, and be ranked on their performance; sometimes this would involve scoring points for completing specific objectives, or speedrunning the adventure and aiming for the fastest time, but the most popular tournament format was the survival module: adventures which were deliberately designed to be unreasonably difficult, with whichever group's last surviving character's corpse hit the ground furthest from the dungeon entrance being judged the winner.

The upshot of that popularity is that many published adventures early on – and certainly the greater part of the more infamous ones! – were originally written as survival modules, created to be run competitively at a particular tournament, and later repackaged and sold as commercial products. Of course, practically none of them actually explained that; like nearly all tabletop RPG material of their day, they were written under the assumption that all tabletop roleplayers had come up through organised play at university gaming clubs, and thus already had all the context I've just outlined. This ended up causing no end of confusion when the hobby's mainstream visibility exploded in the early 1980s, and suddenly there were folks who'd picked up the rulebooks at their local bookstores trying to teach themselves how to play from first principles with no prior contact with gaming club culture.

As for why adventure games were also like that... well, this is going to sound bizarre by contemporary standards, and I don't blame you if you don't believe me, but once upon a time, point-and-click adventure games were considered the gold standard for Serious Gaming. Unforgiving routing, bizarre moon-logic puzzles, and a bewildering variety of unique ways to get yourself killed off were held up as the mark of the serious gamer in much the same way that janky soulslike combat systems are today, and a large chunk of the genre was made to cater to that ethos. Gamer culture is a hell of a drug!

(If you're about to ask the obvious follow-up question, "what changed?", the point-and-click adventure game's fall from grace and subsequent dismissal as casual fluff tracks more or less directly with a large demographic shift in the late 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing predominantly female – and, well, you can probably connect the dots from there.)

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Perfect Draw

Shoutouts to this being one of my favorite queer developed TTRPGs in a while and it only fully came out after I had chosen my pride month line up

Touchstones: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Cardfight Vanguard

Genre: Card Game anime, Shonen

What is this game?: Perfect Draw is a tabletop rpg about card games and the kids who play them

How's the gameplay?: Perfect Draw is a powered by the apocalypse game, more info on that here, the narrative bits have some interesting mechanics that play into other systems, but that's not really why you're here. While Perfect Draw's narrative roleplay systems are certainly competent and fun, the REAL meat comes in the form of its extensive in-depth combat system. Players get to build their own deck of custom cards, using either custom or pre-made effects, and get to duke it out in a simplistic albeit very fun TCG, a major thing in the game design is the idea that Winning will always be a hard bargain, and sometimes winning might be the incorrect choice!

What's the setting (If any) like?: Perfect Draw technically is setting agnostic, but it does have a default setting in Shuffle City, a city inspired by the many different cities in Yu-Gi-Oh (Domino City, Heartland City, arguably Neo Domino from 5ds?), its a large city with many strange and unique characters, and a strange underbelly of mystical powers fighting each other for power! Perfect Draw's setting is very loose however, only really requiring the vague idea of magic (kinda) and card games to really get started. What's the tone?: Perfect Draw often has the tone of the anime its based on, high action friendship-fueled powers abound! It's very cute and optimistic, but I've seen darker games work decently well

Session length: Combat can take a little bit, but 2-3 hours is realistic

Number of Players: Perfect draw is, very deliberately, built around smaller groups, 4 players (including GM) is advised

Malleability: As said above, PD does not have a setting, you could theoretically run anything within it!

Resources: This is sadly where the game falters a bit, right now there's a few unofficial Tabletop Simulator add-ons, but that's about it, there's also an official card maker, a card balance calculator, and a few homebrew playbooks, also there's a huuuuge sheet of community made keywords for cards (some of which are written by yours truly!)

I'm a MASSIVE fan of card game anime, they're just so genuine and silly in ways that not a lot of media nowadays is. so seeing a game that appeals so much to me was a godsend! It's a fantastic game made by fantastic people, and I highly recommend it

[dice-wizard]

Hello everyone looking for a new fantasy tabletop game!

You can buy Exalted Essence now.

What's Exalted you ask?

Exalted is an epic fantasy TTRPG where players play the titular Exalted - humans elevated to superhuman/demigod status - in a wild and unique setting that draws inspiration from the ancient world rather than medieval Europe. Creation (the setting) draws key inspirations from the entire world. If you're used to having to make yourself visible on your own in other fantasy, there's probably some representation in Exalted.

It has explicit queer and trans themes about finding your people, creating your own identity, and having the power to punch back at the people who hate you. This isn't incidental. The writing staff is queer as hell. You can hear me break this down more here.

Curious to learn all you can? Well you can get a detailed overview of the entire game on the podcast Systematic Understanding of Everything hosted by myself, @presidentofbirds and @phillycuriosity

If I'm used to D&D 5e why should I pick this up?

Well, I presume if you're reading this post you're already interested in trying something new, so:

The entire game in one book. Exalted: Essence is self contained, character types, equipment, enemies and all!

An exciting style of fantasy that's different than classic D&D but like, textually gay, and very easy to have scenes like ballroom fights, epic galas, and touching homoerotic healing scenes - no house rules required.

But also, tactical depth and combat you can really sink your teeth into if fighting monsters and villains is your bag.

An excuse to use all your d10s at once

Character building and advancement mechanics designed to be familiar to a 5e audience. Characters "level up" based on story beats, and have Advantages, which are functionally similar to class and race features.

A world welcoming to most heroic archetypes, so it's easy to convert your favorite OC.

Extremely kissable dragons, demons, gods, elementals, ghosts, faeries, and unnamed ancient horrors

I'm a fan of a previous edition, what's Essence got for me?

Design focused on alleviating some of the previous versions' missteps

Virtues are back, baby

2e fans will find it an improvement from second edition's mechanical strengths - it's pretty easy to convert all your favorite 2e Charms to XS.

Streamlined versions of familiar rules to make it painless to introduce new friends to the game we love.

The Cliff's notes on Ex3's new Exalt types.

Did I mention it's all of Exalted in one book?

How does it play?

d10 dice pool looking for 7,8,9 as successes. 10s count as two successes, which can lead to explosive, heroic outcomes

Combat system designed to keep all players engaged the entire time - even characters who aren't focused on fighting at all.

Combat also narrows the gap between experienced and new players and players who want to win at RPGs and players who just wanna vibe so GMs aren't tearing their hair out trying to balance encounters.

Social system designed to resolve in a single roll so you can be immersed in role play and not interrupt it with constant rolling - without sacrificing a variety of social approaches

"Ventures" system for characters working on long term projects from traveling across the world to crafting magical wonders to building communities without forcing this to be "downtime" activity

Characters have access to Charms - exception-based special powers that make them extremely good at whatever they focus on.

It's easily my favorite game (and the project I developed that I'm the proudest of), so I'm excited for everyone to try it out.

[zarekthelordofthefries]

The Dragon's Demand RPG

Hey, there's only a week left on the Kickstarter for The Dragon's Demand and they still haven't reached their goal, I need people to know about this because it looks so good and I need it to exist.

It's a CRPG that's based on the Pathfinder Second Edition system in the same way BG3 is based on D&D Fifth Edition, and I adore Pathfinder 2e, it's such an elegant system, and the fact that it's somewhat crunchier than 5e makes it a great candidate for a CRPG since the game can simulate the crunch for you.

If you like BG3, I think you should really consider supporting this game! Pathfinder 2e is an incredible system and Golarion is a wonderful setting.

And look at that! Those units are FLYING! If you ever felt like flying was kind of underwhelming in BG3, you should know that The Dragon's Demand is going to have 3D combat! This is a thing I've wanted from a tactical game for a while but it rarely happens, I'm so excited for this feature.

It's also got such a cute miniatures-based art style with these deliberately-simplified animations that look like you're playing on a tabletop while still being dynamic and changing to fit the environment, and it's just...so delightful. I love it.

Please, if you're into RPGs, especially if you're already into Pathfinder 2e or if you were into Baldur's Gate 3 and want more tabletop conversion CRPGs, please support this game, I want to play it so badly.

(Tumblr isn't letting me link the kickstarter directly, but you can find the link here!)

(look at that goblin. that goblin is one of your companions! you can befriend that goblin and have him throw bombs at your enemies!)

[pixelgrotto]

Dogmatic Dungeon Master

The last four weeks of my gaming time were consumed by Dragon's Dogma 2, an extravagana that's something like experiencing a wild D&D campaign that keeps going off the rails over and over again. (I'm pretty sure Capcom would be pleased with this comparison, seeing that they released promo art heavily based on AD&D's classic Red Box.)

DD2 has been a delight to devote 100+ hours to, and I find myself wishing I'd bought its predecessor ages ago, especially during those Steam sales where it sold for ridiculous prices like three or four dollars. I never did because I thought it looked sort of generic. Joke's on me! To be fair, this second one could also be described as looking generic upon first glance (though Capcom's RE Engine is certainly proving that it's got legs since Resident Evil 7), but I feel like that was an intentional decision. The goal here was clearly to create something with the trappings of the iconic Western fantasy setting (plus the inclusion of cat people, AKA Beastren) to draw players in and get 'em comfortable before presenting them with one of the most wacky open worlds in recent memory.

How's it wacky? Well, DD2 has a billion different systems under the hood, all colliding with each other. There are the systems that dictate the schedules of NPCs, who you can find wandering roads and getting into fights with enemies. Said enemies have their own systems, and on more than one occasion when I was fighting one of the game's huge bosses (drakes, golems, minotaurs, ogres and the like), that fight spilled over into the territory of another boss, who proceeded to attack both me and the first boss. A kaiju rumble ensued as the systems of both bosses collided with each other, and sometimes this rumble veered too close to the borders of a settlement, attracting the attention of pawns, which are basically the sidekicks assisting the game's main character, the Arisen.

If you're playing online, pawns created by other players can randomly appear in your game, and there were many special moments when I ran into a bizarrely off-proportion thief with the incredible name "Frog Nasty" and a half-naked mage dubbed "Lucy Liu." On one such occasion, Frog and Lucy joined my ever-evolving kaiju battle, and the incredible chaos continued until a griffin just happened to swoop down from the sky to snatch me up in its arms. As I went in the sky, I proceeded to climb atop that griffin’s head and smacked it silly with my mace until it dropped me into the ocean where I was devoured by Brine, AKA DD2’s in-world explanation for why you can’t just swim everywhere.

My description of this incident is no exaggeration. Unscripted mischief of this ilk happens every five minutes in this game, and it's the result of all those systems smashing into each other with delicious gusto. That said, not all of the systems work as well as they should, and some are half-baked. For instance, there's a romance/affinity system that's a carryover from the first Dragon's Dogma. The affinity levels of characters are never truly explained, and you can unexpectedly cause random people to fall in love with you by giving them the right gifts again and again, or completing their sidequests at the expense of others. This means that the Vernworth tavern keeper, who plays no important role at all, can suddenly show up in the final cutscene as your true heart's desire, in the clutches of your mortal enemy. I guess even when DD2's systems are half-baked, they still yield entertaining results.

As someone who runs a lot of tabletop RPGs (but often doesn't get the chance to act as a player), Dragon's Dogma 2 truly reminds me of a dedicated Game Master who doesn't mind when players test limits. This is a GM who clearly loves madcap battles full of unexpected twists that can take up an entire gaming session, as well as expansive side quests with more flavor than anything else in the campaign. The main story is not said Game Master's preference, which serves as a handy explanation on why you can find many Reddit threads decrying DD2's plot as kinda blah.

I get these complaints. The game's main missions are not terribly long - 40 or so hours, probably - and the clear meat of DD2 is in the exploration and combat. This isn't to say that the story's total rubbish, as it does have poignant moments in its cyclical, meta take on an Arisen who rises up every couple of years to complete a destiny of fighting the titular dragon. There's a secret endgame that also delves even farther into the tabletop RPG comparisons, giving you the chance to "defy the Dungeon Master," if you will, sending the campaign even further off the rails as you potentially see what happens when the GM just has no shits left to give and decides to turn the world into an apocalypse.

All of this makes DD2 probably one of my favorite open world games. I've been thinking a lot about what sort of open worlds attract me, since I'm a firm believer that more often than not, video games don't need to go all massive. (Give me a small-scale, well-developed area over a massive map filled with junky quest markers.) That said, I've noticed that I like open worlds that buck the Ubisoft-style trend of having busywork for really good writing (The Witcher 3 comes to mind) or simply invest in their mechanics to the point that everything fills up like a wonderful sandbox, with lots of bits and bobs to play with (that would be The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild).

Dragon's Dogma 2 is definitely more on the kooky sandbox side of things, with its oversized monsters at every turn and wonderous pawn shenanigans. The true appeal of this game, however, lies in the little stories that you create with your main pawn and other pawns along the trail. There's something special in the relationship you forge with these AI allies, who aren't real in the slightest, but bring forth that feeling of being a Game Master yourself as you corral them into taking down a drake. I was downright emotional when I said farewell to my main pawn at the end of the game (okay, the fact that I designed her to look like my wife probably helped, but still).

So here's to Dragon's Dogma 2, a wild piece of entertainment commandeered by a Game Master who clearly loves the journey more than the destination. Here's to those moments when you and your loyal pawns are facing down an ogre in its lair, or just barely survive a golem's laser beam after a series of hobgoblins stunlocked you into low health over and over again. Here's to sitting by a campfire, enjoying an unpredictable open world, and realizing the grand truth that comes with all tabletop RPGs - that the unscripted moments truly are the best part of the adventure.

[that-house]

wtf is field of white flowers

It's a tabletop roleplaying game system I've been designing on & off for about four months now!

Originally, it was an unarmed combat minigame I made for D&D, with the intention of making unarmed combat, like, actually interesting. Like, with D&D's default set of rules, there's two ways to handle unarmed combat: roll a contested skill check (or series of checks) or punch each other (for minimal damage unless you're a monk) until someone goes down

The way I decided to spice it up was with a series of Moves:

Swing (big damage but risky)

Jab (lower damage than Swing, but is, in fighting game terms, "plus on block")

Guard (weakest but safest move, and very good against Swing)

Taunt (forces enemies to Swing if successful)

Grapple (enters a grappling minigame where they try to escape while you choke them out)

Everything had a multilayered rock-paper-scissors relationship. For example, if I'm remembering correctly, Swing was good against Jab and great against Taunt, but bad against Grapple and terrible against Guard.

Both players would pick a Move simultaneously, then consult a 25-item table detailing all the possible matchups of Moves. Each player would then roll a skill check based on their Move & Matchup, and then the winner of the contested check would get an advantage based on their Move & Matchup: stuff like making progress towards winning, gaining a bonus on your next turn, stuff like that.

If you won the contest by 5+, it would be a crit and the bonus would be bigger, stuff like moves that don't normally hit your opponent now hitting, or moves that do hit now instantly end the fight in certain matchups

We played it once or twice, and it was pretty fun! Then I realized that if I just made it have its own character creation rules instead of using D&D's, I could make a pretty solid little martial arts game

I swapped out Grapple for the more generic debuff-inflicting Afflict, introduced what would eventually become 80 different special abilities to mix and match in the form of Powers, and allowed players to customize their Moves through the use of Modifiers and custom outcomes

It was originally meant to be a 1v1 "fighting game tournament" sort of game, as a sort of combination deckbuilder/rpg where you compete with friends to make the most optimal build, but then I decided that (a) it actually had a lot of potential as a more traditional rpg and (b) introducing allies would open up a lot of design space for more supportive gameplay

the first playtest was an incredibly unbalanced 1v1 test of white-room optimization that showed promise but revealed a lot of deep issues in the system. the second playtest, months later, was a fucking glorious traditional dungeon crawl through the expansive basement of a missing crime lord, and everyone had a blast with that. it still revealed a shitton of issues, because that's how playtesting goes!

it's gone through a shitload of changes in the time I've been working on it, with currently around 12k words of rules text and customization options, compared to the original "one page and a reference table" that I made for a D&D minigame

i'm gonna be running a bunch of playtests with friends over the summer, and hopefully some day the rulebook gets into a sufficiently organized state that I can post a playtest version that DOESN'T require me to be on speed dial to explain anything i forgot to mention in the rules (and hopefully later an illustrated and finished copy for sale)

[regarding-stories]

When your backstory beats your story (Part 1): Aventuria

(This is going to be a bit of a crossover story between two of my blogs.)

You may not have heard of it, but Germany's best-selling role-playing game is called "The Dark Eye" ("Das Schwarze Auge"). Its first edition beat D&D to market in Germany in the early 80s and has been the dominant tabletop RPG there ever since - generating also several computer games, and finally an English edition that was able to create some hype in the US market, something which its publisher Ulisses increasingly targets (because more customers).

The game itself evolved from a very simplistic system that was fast to pick up over two more editions that revised and expanded it, only to become an overly complex monster in its 4th edition where most people needed a fan-made PC editor to create characters. I don't particularly like the system, which always tended to be "whiffy" (lots of rolling for little effect in combat) and has never been truly fixed, unable to let go of its poor game design legacy.

I have a soft spot for 1st edition, though. It's the first RPG I ever played. It's simple. You're not feeling like a complete idiot (like in many editions of D&D at the beginning). It quickly got you into playing. And there existed some decent adventures of the kind I like.

Sold by the stories

While I personally was more into dungeon-style exploration fantasy, Dark Eye adventures tended more towards stories. (I just happened to be led through an adventure of the style I loved when playing first.) The Dark Eye is probably the most-supported system on this planet when it comes to published adventures, numbering in the hundreds.

Most of these are story-based or focus on character interaction to a good degree, and in fact many Dark Eye gamers are kind of stereotyped as wanting to hang out in taverns and with nobles to have long conversations, invoke the setting gods in their exclamations, and generally be more like LARPers (Live Action RolePlaying - when you dress up). I've encountered way too many of them off- and online to disagree - just like D&D is known for its murder hobo power gamers for a reason.

But given the endless focus on dungeon adventures in D&D and saving the world, The Dark Eye can be a breath of fresh air for getting into well-rounded characters, finding solutions to complex problems, and generally, you know, actually role-playing your character.

You know, most of the things that these days make RPG streaming a thing.

A mixture of more low-key stories and various ideas certainly made it stand out compared to D&D, and to this day such preferences can make you chose one game over the other.

So it makes sense we're talking stories here. So why did the Dark Eye have a backstory problem?

Because it was like this

When you started playing in the 1980s, you basically came into a very settled civilization. There was a large "Middle Empire/Realm" which was the successor the original Empire, and it was a country spanning a big part of the map which was, politically, very static. So were most of its neighbors.

If you picked up the official zine of the setting you would hear of events such as the umpteenth "war" between two impoverished mini-states full of country bumpkins with long rivalries as a recent event. In the early 90s a part of the setting evolved towards the renaissance, but that made it seem even more static. (It was, in some ways, a mirror image of part of the history of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. The not-so-exciting parts, depending on your tastes.)

There were tantalizing hints that some much cooler place existed beyond the ocean, the Golden Land (or Myranor), but they largely remained hints back then. Years later, after I lost interest, it was published as an alternate setting for the game, IIRC. Think about hearing of it being hinted for a long time in the 90s and then finally starting to appear in 2000 onwards. It was just too late for me, personally.

Stoking desires but not fulfilling them was a hallmark of The Dark Eye for a long time. Because interesting things did happen, but they either happened somewhere else, far away, or outright unavailable (like Myranor, a discontinued Hollow Earth setting with Japan as inspiration), or in an even less reachable place - the past.

Splendor Of Days Gone By

There is a temptation for any fantasy author, especially authors writing setting books for players, to make up grand chronologies of past events. People generally blame Tolkien for this, given that he created a grand mythological setting with several long ages as backdrop for his "Lord of the Rings".

The reason the "Tolkien did it too" argument is rather weak (in my book) is, however, that Tolkien created his mythology as the backdrop to an engaging, much-beloved story. Compare how many people have read "The Lord of the Rings" with how many have read "The Silmarillion" and you can immediately see how Tolkien did not slack on giving us a good, dramatic story when we first heard about it.

Not so most fantasy authors.

Reading the Dark Eye's history of the setting itself, you have to wonder about the state of mind the authors. Here they put all those exciting events that almost none of their adventures contained:

A royal family of the Old Empire that fell to demon worship and incest.

A march of 1,000 ogres that razed the biggest city in the world.

Wars of conquest, rebellions, the formation of nations.

Several orc invasions.

A sorcerer-king that was in league with demons.

A magican and philosopher-king who ended that threat and ruled a looong time.

A viking era.

Etc.

I really remember reading this back in the day and, being the newbie I was, just being desperate about how boring the present was. Basically the backstory often kicked ass. It had movers and shakers, big dramatic events, and what the Chinese might call "interesting times."

Fixed After All

Eventually the makers of the game (the editorial board, as they are called), noticed themselves. Somewhere around the year 2000 games with meta-plots became a thing, especially in Germany, and big events kept changing their settings, keeping them interesting and preparing the ground for new adventures. And eventually Aventuria, the world of the Dark Eye, followed suit.

For example by bringing the sorcerer-king back and letting players be the protagonists influencing the events that end up bringing him down. What a novel idea...

Looking at the time-line since you kind of think that maybe these people realized they had buried all the excitement in their own, made-up history, because now there are events in there that are clearly inspired by what "came before" as the setting keeps marching forward.

Why it took them up to two decades to realize this is anybody's guess.

The role of backstory is typically to establish the "why" of elements in your story - or here the why of the setting. In Aventuria's case, it did the job of explaining the borders and where the various nations come from, but somehow, and rather unintentionally, it painted the picture of a dynamic and exciting world that eventually solidified and ended up as a rather sclerotic, phlegmatic version of itself.

In the end, as an author, that would have been the point to ask yourself which makes the better story. And go with that.

[kellshaw]

Author Ask Tag Game!

I'm knee-deep in edits at the moment on Book Two of the Revenant Records, so haven't been able to write all the Deep and Meaningful posts I wanted to. So I'm playing a tag game!

So this open tag came via an open tag @nonsenseramble via @mthollowell-writes reblog.

(Am I doing this right? Should I reblog, reply or just post separately with tags?)

This is about the current book I'm editing at the moment.

What is the main lesson of your story (e.g. kindness, diversity, anti-war), and why did you choose it? It's about accepting things, moving on, gaining wisdom. Lukie was murdered twenty years ago, made a deal with a ghost lord, and returned to the living lands as an undead revenant. Having dealt with her killer, all she wants to do is go home again. But her father's got a new family now, and the magical and mundane worlds are severed from each other because of ancient rituals. When she tries to reconnect with her father, he doesn't believe it's her. Worse, she accidentally causes his soul to become trapped in the Underworld. Her attempts to get it back stir up ancient curses and malevolent forces.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding (like real-life cultures, animals, famous media, websites, etc.)? It's a secondary world modern day setting. A lot of it is figuring out, "What would elves look like in the modern day" and "how does a hidden occult world work and what does magic look like in an age where most of it has passed?" And "what does magic look like when it's all based on pacts?" I pose a question and try to answer it in the setting. Then take out lots of extraneous world-building, leaving enough for the story to work. Also, it's also heavily inspired by all the urban fantasy tabletop rpgs we played in the 1990s/2000s. I'm working on a game for the setting, once I find the System of my Dreams (I've got through so many....) I've run a few games in the setting, and some worldbuilding comes from how the players did!

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, help readers grow as a person? Lukie leaps into things without thinking and makes decisions she thinks are the best at the time but have messy consequences. One idea was to figure out how to grow up when you're stuck at being seventeen forever? How do you escape from a mire of supernatural debt that you took on to gain the power you have? And also, how do maintain your friendship going with your former best friend from high school, after he's forced to become your guardian and control how and when you feed on souls? Especially when he's keeping secrets...

How many chapters is your story going to have? 33. There were twenty eight, but I added a POV character to flesh out a plot line that beta readers thought needed more development. It's working out.

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it? Original work. I'll stick it up on the book store fronts Amazon, Kobo, etc when it's ready.

When and why did you start writing? I've been writing since primary school, but i decided to publish shorter, urban fantasy crime/thrillers after spending years bogged down trying to write epic fantasy. I have a vast graveyard of trunk novels. Sometimes I think about revising them, but I'm working on building up fiction in my current setting first.

Do you have any words of engagement for fellow writers of Writeblr? Keep on writing. Write what you like. Find what works for you—writing every day consistently works for me.

What other writers of Tumblr do you follow? People with cool writing blogs!

Uh, do I tag people now? @anomalousfrequency @jgmartin and everyone else, you're all awesome.

[tirorah]

My picks from the June 2023 Next Fest

In June 2023 there was another Steam Next Fest, and I've finally managed to play all of the demos I'd selected.

Keep in mind that these are my highly personal picks; I mostly explored the turn-based RPG category, as I'm currently not feeling up to much direct action, brain-breaking strategy, etc. (And certain genres are so popular that some good demos will be reported on anyway.)

So, without further ado, here are the games that I liked this time around!

The setup for this one is quite straightforward: You play as one of three heroes-in-training and embark on an important quest through the fantasy land of Alteria. Pretty standard stuff, but it stands out in two ways:

Choosing your hero isn't a simple character swap; it's a perspective shift. These are branching storylines and each character has their own challenges to overcome. And because there are choices for you to make, it's interesting to see how you shape your chosen hero compared to the version you see when you're not in control of them.

This is also a very well-rounded experience. Gameplay is smooth and intuitive, presentation is great, etc. I especially liked how efficient the script is; dialogue makes sense and there are no long world-building monologues to be seen. I encountered some bugs, but those were symptoms of an early build and some of them have already been fixed.

Release date: In Early Access by now, 20% off until 12 July

Yes, this is a meme game, and sometimes you can really feel that, especially in the opening minutes. But this game has genuine charm to it. Sure, you die in one hit, but it's also a story about a wimp slowly learning to stand up for herself and work toward her dream. Crazy, but heartfelt at the same time.

As for gameplay: combat is turn-based and takes place on a grid, where each move expels one turn. The tactical challenge is to use positioning and your arsenal to bonk the enemy into submission before they can pulverise you. There's also an element of rhythm to it, as you need to time button presses to bonk your target more.

The beginning can be rough if you're not into the game's brand of insanity, but give it a shot anyway if you can. It was well worth it for me.

Release date: To be announced

A game about a time loop and the effect it has on a person. In a world that's frozen in time, it's up to Siffrin and their merry band of friends to defeat the King and save everyone. Easier said than done, though, and each failed attempt weighs on their spirit...

A really charming game, with clearly-defined characters, good group dynamics, and an arresting art style. The battle system is Active Time turn-based, but what's super fun is the damage types: Rock, Paper and Scissors. Yes, really. You need to analyse an enemy's appearances or their method of attack to figure out their weakness.

It also has a big focus on mental health though, so make sure to check the content warning section on the itch.io page before playing this.

Lastly, I should mention there's a prototype for the game, called Start Again: A Prologue. This is a somewhat short experience, basically a proof of concept that turned into a complete game. You can buy this if you're interested.

Release date: 2023

Do you like tabletop RPGs? Then this one could be for you! You take control of one of six groups of adventurers, each on a pilgrimage for their own reasons. It's up to you to guide them through a dangerous world...with your faithful dice!

I honestly needed more time with the story and characters to really get a feel for if I liked them or not, but the gameplay is, simply put, engrossing. Dice rolls play into every aspect of this game, from exploration to dialogue checks to combat. Playing this game truly feels like a journey full of potential secrets to uncover.

If you decide to try this game, be warned that this is still in development (like all of these demos). I found the UI rather rough to work with. This is being worked on and I'm confident there will be many improvements in this area.

Release date: Q4 2024

I was a few minutes into the demo when I entered my first battle. A big, red WARNING sign pulsed on my screen, and a giant robotic bee appeared out of a sci-fi hell portal. The protagonist hefted her gun, brandished her sword, and sprung into action as the battle theme started pounding in my ears. I grinned.

LunarLux is a prime example of how a strong visual and aural style can immediately capture one's attention. Fortunately, that's not all it has going for it. While the script isn't that tight and the characters seem rather standard for now, the gameplay is just a whole lot of fun.

Although this is a turn-based system, fighting involves timed blocking and grid-based dodging. And there's a factor of resource management as well; you'll need to work out how to go on the offensive without running out of MP and shield charges. This is not only essential to keep yourself alive, but also factors into your battle rating. Want an S-rank on this fight? Then don't get hit.

Oh, and you have a jetpack that you can fly around with. Just to let you know.

Release date: 2023

This one is an interesting recommend from me, as I found myself stymied by a progress-stopping bug 30 minutes into my playthrough. That's a pretty bad oversight, and yet I can't say it soured me on the game. All it did was cut me off, and that's a shame.

This one has no combat system; instead, the primary gameplay loop is about exploration. You can use your tracking skills to find animals in need and befriend them, and you can piece together clues to solve the secrets of the land.

The narrative has a rather standard mystery setup, but what makes it stand out is the setting: ancient India. This lends the game a completely different feel from a lot of other fantasy RPGs. The time period (and great soundtrack) gives everything a mystical feeling, while the location gives us oft-underutilised cultures to work with.

I want to see more of this.

Release date: 2023

Much like Luminera, I need more time with the story to see how it'll pan out; as it stands, the demo is a true vertical slice and just drops you into the middle of things while avoiding spoilers. The characters definitely have some personality to them though; I liked them.

I have no other criticisms; the game looks and sounds great, and because you can climb and swim around, there's more verticality in the environment design compared to most of the other games on this list.

Combat is smooth and fun; it's turn-based, with each of the three characters getting one action per turn, the order of which you can decide yourself. Each action you take also reduces the action counter for each enemy; deplete it to 0, and the enemy will attack. Sometimes they'll have a big attack charged up, and you'll need to hit them with certain damage types to either reduce the attack's power or cancel it entirely. You can also time your button presses for blocking enemy attacks and increasing the power of your own, but this isn't mandatory.

Finally, there are equippable relics that alter the game experience. The demo has two: one makes the game easier, and the other provides clearer feedback for timing button presses correctly. This kind of modular difficulty is great and more games need it. Especially if you consider how many of the games on this list feature timed button presses; great for interactivity, not so great for accessibility.

Release date: 29 August 2023

Last but certainly not least, it's...not a turn-based RPG at all. No, this is a visual novel. But it's a damn gripping one for me!

Your character is a newly-transferred security officer on a small ship: the JFS Gun-Dog. Your mission? Reconnaissance and backup. But of course, nothing is ever that simple; things are afoot. I don't know what things exactly, but I sure want to know! And your character's traumatic past won't make the challenges you face any easier.

There's a somewhat lengthy tour of the ship for character introduction and world-building purposes. Obviously, if you're playing a visual novel, you should expect copious amounts of words. It's just not the most elegant way to handle things. However, I believe the great atmosphere, interesting characters and narrative are worth it, and there were plenty of fun moments during that section.

Note: The Steam page refers to the main character as male, but you can choose your name and pronouns (he/him, she/her or they/them).

Release date: Coming soon

---

That's it for this particular Next Fest! Please give these demos a try if possible.

And remember: If you like what you see, wishlist the game in question! This helps out indie developers a whole bunch.

[transdaughterofthesun]

So I realize that you might not want an actual answer, just shouting into the circus, but let me stand up and pull out my crayon PhD on game design.

TL:DR It feels so strikingly off in the 3D fallout games and feels neutral to good in baldurs gate due to the systems that surround it and what they are trying to accomplish.

With that out of the way let's start with a simple question, why did the original crpgs use this system? Simple answer, it was used to emulate tabletop rpgs. This might be obvious to anyone familiar with tabletop games, but it's always someone's first time learning something so it's important to set up the ground work. The games by no means were meant to replace tabletop games, but were most likely just a means of visualizing campaigns for their players, and serve as an introduction to both dnd and video games. For those into video games but not tabletop, these were the games that would show why people liked tabletop games and the freedom that comes with it. For tabletop players who didn't play video games, this was a great way to be introduced to the medium and ease of use, while still retaining what they appreciated about tabletop.

Personally, and most likely incorrectly, I would liken these games to early immersive sims. A very bare bones version of it. Now I say early but they are trying to be two different things. Let's look at Deus Ex, blessed be thy game, now tho to see where they differ, and yes I'll be referring to this when bringing fallout 3 up later. Deus Ex puts you in the shows of JC Denton. A very customizable JC Denton, enough so that very few Dentons will ever look alike, but it's still just Denton. You will only ever be playing as him, so right away some choices regarding game design are already made based on his personality. Now I have yet to play the game, heresy I know, but Denton will never pilot a helicopter. He can't lug around 10 barrels of oil in his pockets and toss them at enemies. He has a limited skill set. A large one, but limited. But in exchange you get precise control of the skills the games allow you to use. Think shooting and melee. You control your skill level in these, because that is what was deemed as fun.

Now compare that to Baldurs Gate 1. Not only are you not controlling one character, you're controlling up to 6, not including summons, you aren't controlling someone who has been trained in 50 different ways to shoot someone. You have to build up your skills to the point where dice checks are naught but minor annoyances. That's the big difference in my opinion. In games like Deus Ex you are the hero, you are the special in this world. In Crpgs, often times you start as no one, learning to do things, and like in the real world, fucking up while doing those things. Nobody who has ever learned a skill preforms it flawlessly all the time. You are just someone in this world. You could be important, but you could also end up a stain on the world.

So now what does fallout 3 do that makes this feel so wrong. Simply put, it tries to combine the two experiences into one, without understanding that they don't really mix. Essentially what fallout is saying in the story is: "You are the special, you are the key to this world, all the choices are yours, you are more then human." The speech check meanwhile says: "You are no one and you can and will say the wrong thing at times because you are human." Now one or the other systems by themselves? Great. But it creates such a distinct sense of cognitive dissonance when combined that it just stands out.

New Vegas tho fixes this by implementing a system that doesn't say: "You are no one." Instead it says: "Sorry bud you just aren't charismatic." Or: "Congrats special, you made it, here's your reward for being so special!" It celebrates the fact that you are special.

Now I could explain Baldurs Gate 3, but I would just redirect you to the segment for Baldurs Gate 1.

Thanks for reading and sorry for any spelling or grammer shit. I is tired.

Hey remember when Fallout 3 had percentage chances on speech checks and that just meant players would save scum every speech check until they got it and then in Fallout New Vegas they changed it so it not only made it a hard Yes or No based on how high your speech skill was but also added new dialogue options that would only succeed if your character had the right perks and everyone agreed that system was better

Why is it possible for my baldurs gate character who has 16 charisma and a proficiency in deception to fail a deception check

[other-peoples-coats]

coats hello!! you said you played ttrpgs, but do you have any favorite systems or rulebooks?? also do you have any recommendations for how to start a campaign / one shot and bring everyone into the game? that's kind of. the most difficult thing for me personally to do so I'm looking for advice skdjskns

Hi nonny!

My fave systems/rulebooks are a bit of a grab bag; I started playing tabletops with the classic DnD (4e is what I learnt on; the group I played with played some of the beta rules of 5e for a bit and then swapped wholly over to 5e eventually, once it, y'know, was published.), and I also played a bit of pathfinder, which, like, y'know, not a huge jump there. So I've got, y'know, nostalgic affection for both of those.

(for not table top nerds - pathfinder is literally DnD edition 3.75 - it's built off the rules of 3.5, with the names scrubbed off for not-getting-sued-out-of-existance-by-WotC reasons)

That said, I've had a lot of fun with the Cortex system - the Leverage RPG runs on it, which is a fuck of a lot of fun to play with the right group, though you do need people who are at least somewhat genre savvy and willing to lean into it-- and the FATE system, which, special shout out to 'under the table', which is a prohibition-esque take on authurian legend that is just. so sexy as a world building idea. so much fun to fuck about and do organised crime in. Some of it's a bit janky but what is ttrpg play if not jettisoning that which does not vibe with you.

(I also taught a class using a stripped back version of the fate system, so, y'know, bonus points there; we picked FATE cause it is literally so easy to pick up for newbies and doesn't need Weird Dice)

Annnd then we get into the weeds of sort of obscure/only kind of ttrpgs as classically thought of. My favourite fucking thing in this space is a game called 'the quiet year'; it's half a card based rpg, half a map making game, about a community after the collapse of civilisation. You get 52 turns -- a year -- and at the end the winter kills you all. Which is a bit grim, but it's a lovely, thoughtful game to play.

Similarly, 'dialect' is just...such a fascinating game to play. (possibly, this surprises no one who's shown up here via my ao3; I do love weird language shit). You play as part of an isolated community, and...well, create a dialect for that community, based on events they (you) experience.

And then my final one in this space is a game called microscope, which is...well it's really only kind of a game at all. It's more of a worldbuilding tool, honestly, but it's fun, and it's a great way to come up with some weird ass shit you can then use for a homebrew world.

Ok, so, that's a grab bag of weird ass shit that probably says a lot about me; lets talk about starting games and getting people into them. I'm sort of assuming you mean, like, narratively, not like, the mechanics of finding a group to play with or like, how to organise a session.

(if yes, that's what you mean: sorry bud, on your own there, I haven't had a group to play with since pre-plauge, and most the people I'd play with these days are approximately 10-14hrs behind me in time, which makes scheduling.....hard.)

Anyway.

Starting off a oneshot or a campaign is...honestly it's pretty similar, in my experience; a oneshot does compress the time frame somewhat bc you don't wanna spend an hour being like 'worldbuilding lore drop time' and/or 'plot hook baiting' when you're only playing for like. four hours total, y'know?

If what you're looking for is an inciting incident; some sort of 'hey here's a MEATY PLOT HOOK GO FETCH' sign for your players: the classic is, ofc, 'you meet in a bar'; there's nothing wrong with that, it gives a nice bit of space for players to introduce themselves either explicitly - 'I'm Longfang, a hunter from clan blackthorn' sort of thing  - or implicitly, in the 'lurking around in a corner ala strider' school of character intros. Also a fairly easy way to set the tone - is the bar Notably Sketchy, what else is going on in the bar, are the patrons gregarious or all suspicious, etc.

(obviously, you can theme as appropriate for your world; maybe it's a cafe, or a market, or the guild halls, or a freighter bay.)

Other great inciting incidents that are endlessly adaptable: 

You all wake up In A Place (where you were not before) -  classic mystery hook. A group of strangers are brought together by Mysterious Forces, and need to a)get out of where they are b)investigate what happened and why they are all here. Bonus points if you have a mole; one player who knows — or thinks they know — why they've been chosen(they're secretly part of a gang, they're secretly royalty, they recognize the markings as The Cult That Killed Their [insert relation here], etc.) Extremely fucking funny to make every player think they know, and set up the spiderman meme when all your players stumble over revealing whatever secret they have. 

You all have A Job. Another classic hook - you've been hired to [take macguffin/person] to [place]; you've been hired to [steal thing] from [fancy bitch party]; you've been hired to clear [local basement/dungeon] of [rats/monsters]; etc. Nice easy set up, very basic 'this is Why You Strangers Are Together'. Does require you to have players who will like, take the hook, even if they take it and then immediately wander off to do something else halfway through. The person who hired your players may or may not be a person in specific - it may be A Guild Job, and your players all just got assigned together, or they're having their Normal Bitch Lives travelling coincidentally together and then oh no a monster attacks your trade caravan roll initiative!

Fucked Up Shit Happens, What The Hell. This is the one where you wave the plot hook at your players and are like 'damn that was crazy!' and then let them be like 'shit that was crazy, can I investigate that?'. Obvious ones here are: oh god a body where there should not be one, oh god no body where there should be one, someone rich is doing something sketchy (and your players saw some of it), weird magic/tech shit happened and yr players are the only witnesses. Worldbuilding for this is a lot of contrast - being like 'x is a Weird Thing' helps show, like, what isn't weird, if that makes sense? so like, in star wars, no one is surprised when jedi pull out their lazer swords, so the viewer knows this isn't 'holy fuck you have lazer swords???' situation; on the other hand, when the demogorgon comes clawing out of the wall in stranger things, all the characters shit bricks and the viewer is aware that like, This IS Fucked Up Shit Happening. (obviously, it's a bit more complex than that in context; what I'm getting at is showing NPC reactions to [plot events] helps tell your players about the world.)

Run before the Plot gets you. This is basically a variation on living normal bitch lives -> surprise roll initiative, where your players have Witnessed Something, and now need to Get Fucking Gone before [whoever] Makes Them Gone. Maybe they want to investigate, maybe they don't and the plot is coming for them anyway, but either way, Someone (or something) is trying to find them, and silence them. Sets up a very nice cat and mouse, if you're into that sort of thing - maybe your players saw local prince eating a person, and now they're trying to reveal that the monarchy are all fucking vampires without becoming vampire chow themselves, maybe they're just trying to avoid the government making them sign a bunch of magical NDAs. Very nice way to drop a bit of worldbuilding, because power structures tell you a lot about the world - are the cops corrupt, is this unusual, who's in charge and what's the social contract look like, if you fuck up and get caught are you looking at state sanctioned execution or imprisonment or a quiet knife in an alley, etc.

Nine plot pile up. This one probably has an official name; I always called it this in class, because, well, I think I'm funny. This is the one where your player('s characters) all have their Own Goals going on, and whoopsy, they all overlap! Either they overlap like they're the same goal, 'we might as well work together to Do X', or they overlap like 'I'm trying to steal the orb of magic from the same guy you're trying to kill and wow this is awkward, they need him alive to answer for His Crimes.' This one is a bit more work; you do have to talk a bunch with your players about what sort of character/plot they want to run for their specific character, and keep track of that as well as like, your overarching plot.

For an example: I once played a warlock who had a creature companion that got stronger as I fed it the corpses of defeated enemies, but those had to scale with us; my warlock pact required me to keep feeding it, which ended up with me having to choose between giving up my powers or slaughtering my party-mates after we'd levelled high enough. The main plot of the game was your standard war between kingdoms/gods sort of dnd plot; my character's plot was just… one of the background plots goin on. Another party member was secretly using the party to cover their hostile takeover of their family company; a third was basically a catch me if you can sort of conman who got in way the fuck too deep. The inciting incident for us was being hired by the local king to go Do War Shit (aka You Have A Job); my character had signed up bc war is great for corpses, hostile takeover had signed up bc their family company supplied War Stuff, and conman "signed" "up" and accidentally ended up assigned to do work instead of being left to fuck about with (and steal) supplies.

Also, just generally — fucking steal that shit. Steal like it's your job. Steal like you're in the british museum and all the security just flipped off. Got a movie you like? how's it start, what can you lift from that. Got a book you like? the first ten pages are yours now. If there's an scene or two in a show you like, think about why you like it, and then…copy it. 'My city now' your way through it; for all there's different considerations when it comes to writing the whole of a game, the opening is basically the same as any other story - hook the reader/viewer/player, make them want to find out what happens next. Starting in media res is a time honoured tradition for a reason; work out what your plot is, and then start your players about five minutes after it starts going off the rails, narratively speaking.

If you're looking for worldbuilding advice, though— or, rather, introducing people to your world — well, that's a lot shorter. Throw it at them! drop them right the fuck in. Let them pick it up as you go along - if you're starting in a city, describe the city. Is it cobblestone? are the skyscrapers so tall they vanish into the smog? are the crowds bustling, or are they harried, darting from place to place in fear. When all else fails, go off the five senses - what can your players see, what would they notice? what would they find unusual - their characters, that is. If you're playing in star wars, you wouldn't be like 'HOLY FUCK LAZER SWORDS EXIST???' but you might be like 'oh wow a jedi, I didn't think I'd ever see one in real life!', and 'oh there's a droid' is like, 'oh, a chair'. You might call out that it's a weird chair, maybe, but otherwise it';s like, 'you enter a room, there's wooden chairs around the outside'/'you enter a room, there's a couple of cleaning droinds doing their job'. lets your players know there's droids, but it's not like 'holy fuck robots?'.

Some of this worldbuilding is stuff you should cover in your session zero, if you're running a campaign - that's the one where you set up player characters, etc - and just…y'know, give your players an overview of your world. If you're running a oneshot, cover it when you pitch it to your players - 'I've come up with this cool as shit idea about a world where there's a group of monks with lazer swords in space, also theres robots', for instance, or 'ok, like, a teen coming of age movie set in the eighties, but also there's evil monsters'. Don't be afriad to use a reference point that your players know - emphasis there, no good being like 'imagine the ethical nightmare of animorphs but set in like, a round the twist sort of world', if your players haven't read animorphs and don't know what the fuck round the twist is.

Zero idea how to end this, so. uh hope that helps even a little bit, anon? if you've got more questions, or are like 'dude what theee actual fuck are you on about here', feel free to hit me up again. (also, anyone else reading this). 

[prokopetz]

What's the point of class systems in RPGs? And I don't mean the kind of system where choosing your class just means choosing the skills/feats/equipment your character starts with, which you're then able to expand in whatever direction you want, but the kind of system that's like "if you choose this class, you can have skills A and B, but never skills X and Y. if you want X and Y, you have to play this other class, but then you don't get A and B." it just always seemed needlessly restrctive to me

There are several benefits to having character classes – or something like them – in your game. The following list is by no means complete, but I think it hits most of the high points:

1. They clearly establish the player character archetypes the game expects to see in play. Such archetypes are beneficial from a worldbuilding standpoint (i.e., these are some of the sorts of people you’ll encounter in this setting), a functional standpoint (i.e., these are the things the game’s rules assume a group of player characters will be able to do), and a guiding standpoint (i.e., these are the sorts of things that player characters do). The last one is arguably the most important: many tabletop RPGs suffer from failing to provide any direction with respect to what player characters actually do. With a well-constructed set of character classes, you can simply point to any given class and say “this”.

2. The use of classes or class-like templates makes creating and modifying characters faster, easier, and more reliable. “Faster” and “easier” are obvious, since literally any set of options that’s smaller than “all of them” naturally would be, but “more reliable” is often overlooked. Given an RPG of any non-trivial complexity, it’s fairly easy for a novice player to accidentally create a character who isn’t good at anything, or who’s good at a completely different set of things than they intended them to be good at. Assuming your character classes are competently designed, they come with a guarantee that any given character will be able to contribute within that class’s defined game-mechanical niche. (But don’t undervalue “faster” and “easier”, either; not everybody who’s experienced enough to deal with the nuts and bolts of character construction actually wants to. Sometimes you just want to hit things with your sword!)

3. As an extension of points 1 and 2, a well-designed set of character classes confers strong niche protection. Rather than having to sit everybody down and have a whole discussion to make sure that nobody’s character concept too strongly overlaps with anybody else’s, and that no roles that are vital to the group’s identity and/or the game’s premise are being overlooked, you can just say “everybody pick a different character class” and things will generally work themselves out. Among other things, this means that systems with character classes are typically a better fit for groups who prefer to create characters independently, or groups with erratic or rotating participation where the attending players – and thus, the cast of characters – may vary considerably from session to session.

4. In systems with high mechanical complexity, character classes can reduce the scope of playtesting and the likelihood of unexpected failure modes by limiting the number of combinations of traits that need to be examined. In a system with à la carte character creation, every game-mechanical trait is, in theory, equally likely to be paired with every other game-mechanical trait; even a small number of player character options can lead to a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that need to be playtested. Template-based character creation is a convenient (if not necessarily easy!) way to get a handle on that: not only does it reduce the total number of possible setups you need to test, but it gives you a way to reason about which of those setups are part of the game’s core (and should thus receive lots of attention) and which are edge cases (and can thus be treated more briefly).

5. Restrictions can be a good thing. We all know people who can write for pages and pages if given a very specific prompt, but if they’re told to just write whatever they want, they’ll stare at a blank document forever. You might well be one of those people! Character classes aren’t the only way to provide a structured creative framework during character creation, but they’re one of the better-explored ones.

Of course, if you turn these benefits around it’s also easy to see where a game wouldn’t benefit from having character classes. If your system has a shallow learning curve, the range of game-mechanical traits that player characters can possess is small, character creation is treated as a group activity, and player character archetypes are established through other means, character classes don’t have a whole lot to offer.

[dunkelzahn]

Other things the new OGL does:

Limits it to printed material and 'static electronic files'. No video games, no music, no videos, no podcasts, no virtual tabletops, no comics, no books, no apps, no music, no dances, nothing.

Demands all previously licensed material be put in for reassessment to see if it complies with the new OGL

You can only make fan content if it's 100% free and you never make money off of it.

If you're selling stuff, you need to pay royalties if you're making over $750k a year. If you're crowdfunding or selling stuff on a platform other than Kickstarter, you need to give 25% of that as royalties. If you're using Kickstarter, only 20%.

They're openly and explicitly stating that they're doing this to hamstring other game companies that have built games based off of OGL stuff. It "Wasn't intended to fund" or "subsidize major competitors."

So, what other options do you have for fantasy roleplaying?

GURPS and the Hero System are both universal systems that allow you to build in just about every genre. I've a preference for the Hero System, the engine that Champions runs on, it feels more flexible to me and allows for more genre blending with less unbalance, but if you want to go pure fantasy, GURPS will handle that just fine. They're complex to get into, but once you figure things out, you'll have a wealth of material available for you. Most of the rules actually won't matter that much to you, and the size of their sourcebooks are mostly to cram in as many options as possible.

Pendragon is a roleplaying game about being knights. Specifically Arthurian knights. That's right, you get to be a Knight of the Round Table. It's heavy on roleplay and the timeline spans Arthur's entire lifespan.

Somewhat similar to Pendragon, there's a Prince Valiant RPG out there. I've never gotten the chance to play, sadly, but it looks like good fun and it's really simple.

If you really want to scratch the D&D itch, but don't want to go out to support WotC after this, take a look at the Old School Renaissance community. There's a little gatekeeping here and there, but there's just as many who'd freely welcome new players. It's all based on the original few versions of Dungeons and Dragons, so there's some recognizable aspects, but it'll all be simplified. The tone and expectations for play can be very different than modern D&D, though. There's a ton of options out there, and WotC might be trying to clamp down on them, but the first that comes to mind is Old School Essentials. Still, do some reading.

Godbound is where you go if you don't want to bother with clearing out a basement full of spiders for your first adventure. What if you crossed D&D with Exalted? What if your character was a God? Or, rather, could become one. They hold a shard of deific power inside of them and, as they grow in power and experience, binding Words to themselves to control the divine elements, they might just become the ones needed to restore the damage their predecessors have done to the world. Notable in that most of the basic rules are free on DriveThruRPG. You can buy a 'Deluxe' edition that comes with fifty more pages of rules such as creating mere mortals, creating super-martial arts, adding steampunk/clockwork elements if desired, giant god-mecha, and more.

Dungeon World is Powered by the Apocalypse gaming engine. Basically, you build characters off of specific playbooks and you don't have attributes such as Strength, Dex, Con, but you instead use character themes contained within those playbooks like rolling higher to protect an ally. I've only played a few PbtA games and haven't quite gotten the hang of it, but it's designed to be very rules-light. Other PbtA fantasy games worth mentioning are the official Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, where love can be as dangerous as any blade, and Flying Circus, about playing biplane pilots after the fantasy apocalypse.

The Dark Eye is what the Germans prefer to D&D. Make of that what you will. It's... different.

If you're a fan of the legendary Record of Lodoss War, then you might know it started out as a Basic edition D&D game. What you might not know is that they tried to sell the Lodoss setting to TSR, D&D's creators and owner at the time, but were turned down. So they made their own system, Sword World, which is played with only two six-sided dice. It's never been officially translated into America, but there's a thriving fanbase and the community, partially hosted on Reddit, has translated the core rulebooks.

There's others I haven't mentioned. Dozens of systems out there. There's a Witcher RPG, multiple games based on Lord of the Rings, a Discworld game (officially unoffically made using GURPS), and I didn't touch on 7th Sea, Legend of Five Rings, Blades in the Dark, Mouse Guard... There are even older editions of D&D, some out of print, that bring you settings like Mystara, the Hollow World, Council of Wyrms, Lankhmar, and the venerable Greyhawk. (Some of these will be... dated, fair warning.) And this isn't even touching on sci-fi and modern games (Call of Cthulhu for eldritch horror, Shadowrun for, depending on the edition, either cyberpunk or near-future sci-fi action, Champions for superheroic action, Lancer for mecha battles...)

Now, you don't have to give up 5E/One D&D. If you love it, keep playing it. But if this has soured you on giving WotC your money, just know that there are options. And not even options that will be entirely unfamiliar to you.

So, what is the OGL and why are DnD creators thoroughly screwed?

Tumblr has not been doing a great job at talking about this, but:

With OneDnD, Wizards of the Coast has decided to update the Open Game License (OGL). Said license is what allowed people to create homebrew DnD content and sell it, and even larger companies to use certain sorts of content. Pathfinder, for example, is built on said OGL. This also allows streamers and artists to exist and benefit from said content.

With OneDnD (sometimes called “dnd 6e”), WOTC wants to create a much more restrictive OGL, which will, amongst other things:

Make WOTC take a cut for any DnD-related work (according to Kickstarter, a whole 25% of the benefits)

Let WOTC cancel any project related to DnD up to their discretion

Let WOTC take ANY content made based on their system, and re-sell it without crediting you, or giving you a single cent

And most importantly, revoke the old OGL, which will harm any company or game system that used it as a base, such as Pathfinder. And it means they GET ownership over any homebrew content you may have done for 5e in the past!

It’s important to note that OGLs are supposedly irrevocable. They were planning to use it for OneDnD initially, but they want to apply it retroactively to 5e, somehow. Which is illegal, but lawyers have mentioned there’s a chance they may get away with it given the wording.

This means that anything you make based on DnD (A homebrew item? A character drawing? Even music, according to them?), can get taken and used as they deem appropiate.

These news come from a leak of the OGL, which have been confirmed by multiple reputable sources (including Kickstarter, which has confirmed that WOTC already talked with them about this), and was planned to be released next week.

So, what can we do?

Speak against it. Share the word. Reblog this post. Let people know. Tumblr hasn’t been talking much about this matter, but it’s VERY important to let people know about what is WOTC bringing. 

Boycott them. Do not buy their products. Do not buy games with their IP. Do not watch their movie. CANCEL your DnD Beyond subscription. (Btw, they ARE planning to release more subscription services too!). They do not care about the community, but they care about the money. Make sure to speak through it. 

And maybe consider other TTRPG systems for the time being, Pathfinder’s Paizo has been much nicer to the community, their workers are unionized and are far more healthy overall

[mudaconstructions]

Pinned Post

Since I plugged this blog on my main I guess I should make a pinned post clarifying everything.

I made a silly little sideblog for talking about the Youtube tabletop RPG series made by Sequence Break, starting from Star Road Now, continuing with The Quiet Decay and Severed Strings.

If you're not familiar with it I suggest checking out the official playlist with all the episodes on Youtube to get a feel for it as well as the wiki (beware of spoilers for later parts), but tl;dr it's a collection of TTRPG campaigns set in the same continuity, in the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure universe (albeit it strays from Jojo canon later on.) The events happen in a near-ish future (2088-2140) in the city of Electros, Japan and usually revolve around dealing with some kind of grand moral dilemma told through a series of labyrinthine fights and personal subplots. Also punchghosts. I'll elaborate on the specific parts of the series under the cut.

I won't be tagging spoilers since this is just a tiny thing I have on the side, so if you're interested in this series in any way I suggest you at least finish Star Road Now before continuing.

Star Road Now is generally centered around themes of dreams, self-improvement, potential and family. This is the first entry in the series set in the year 2130, and is the most popular one by far; in fact it's what you usually get when you search "jojo ttrpg" on Youtube. It sets the stage for the rest of the series and is a must-watch if you want to understand what's going on in the other two parts.

The Quiet Decay narrows the scope a bit while retaining some thematic ties to SRN (family and self-improvement are even more prevalent now), but it also explores the inner psyche of many of its characters through the mysterious phenomenon of Black Tears. It's the second entry in the series and is chronologically the earliest one, starting in autumn of 2088, and features some characters from Star Road Now as well as Severed Strings (as to why, see below)

Severed Strings is the third and latest entry in the Sequence Break Jojoverse and is still ongoing, having been run parallel with The Quiet Decay up until the latter's finale. It is a lot more experimental, taking concepts established in canon Jojo and flipping them on their head or otherwise playing with them, though it still retains strong thematic ties to SRN and TQD in the form of familial bonds and what they can mean to a person; it also introduces the theme of freedom and individuality to an extent which becomes more clear later on.

There are some spinoffs to the main series such as On The Road Again (a darker AU of Star Road Now featuring a completely new cast of characters) and Crystal River Romp (an ambiguously canon spinoff set in an amusement park), though I don't know much about them as I haven't watched much from either spinoff.

This blog has a tag system in place to make it easier for me to look for specific types of posts (ie a certain character/part/etc) and it's accessible through mobile as well as desktop. Feel free to reblog anything from here, I don't really care.

My favorite character is Hephaestus Brando from Severed Strings she is the light of my life my quirky little construction worker and generally funny little lady who lives in my head rent-free. I have a couple other characters I really like but you can figure those out on your own.

I think that covers all the bases, feel free to send me an ask or something if you have any questions for me or about the series.

[that-house]

Hey so how did you get started in making tabletop games? I really wanna start but I don't really know where I can look to even get basics. I haven't been able to find anything applicable to it.

Especially since I didn't really have much experience with any games that weren't video games til like a few years ago. And I can for sure see it as a case of a big part of learning is doing both playing games then tweaking those games to be somewhat different in ways that suit you but I just don't have anyone with the time to play.

i mean part of it is just. this has been a huge part of my life literally since elementary school

i loved pretending to be fantasy heroes and whatnot with my friends, and at some point long before i'd heard of D&D i was like "wow i sure am tired of forgetting what my character can do, i should write it down" and made my first ever character sheet which (a) was totally incomprehensible like a week later and (b) got lost super fast

after that i think i encountered the official warrior cats rpg, Warriors Adventure Game, and that inspired me to start making my own games using Word on the family computer. they were not good, as you might expect from a 4th grader

this post is turning out to be Long so

i got more serious about it in middle school. my school had a LARP program, and that was my first ever brush with actual organized RPG stuff. i loved it so much that i wanted to keep doing it over the summer, but didn't have access to the official rules, so i made my own for my friends and I.

one of those LARP friends got me into D&D, and i almost instantly ruined the campaign i ran for him and our other LARP friends with broken homebrew items because ough game design

i got serious about indie ttrpg design in high school. my big project was Reclaim, a sci fi RPG focused on supersoldiers reconquering the planet for humanity after an apocalypse (which gradually morphed into a critique of the military-industrial complex and american imperialism as my brain pathways connected properly in the later half of high school). it was the focus of my college application essay, but the game itself was not great in retrospect

nowadays i've further refined my approach to game design for my high power sci fi/fantasy anime bullshit project, Field of White Flowers, which is definitely the game i'm proudest of to date (it will probably have a basic version of the rules available for free some day, but the full game is enough of an undertaking that I will be charging some money for it)

the issue with advising people on how to make RPG systems is that there isn't necessarily a "right answer." RPGs can be anything. I can say "making a fun game is the most important part" but different people are going to have different definitions of fun.

like some people want crunchy systems with an answer to everything and rules for how many moles of oxygen you can hold in your lungs, while other people want stuff that's more rules light and lets them get right to the narrative and the roleplay. so i think the main thing when designing a game is pick an audience and stick to it: my games' primary audience is usually myself (i like systems with a lot of room for customization and optimization)

the other big tip i have is to play and read as many RPG systems as you can. almost everything has at least one good idea in it somewhere, and even stuff that's just Bad might give you a moment of inspiration while you're laughing at it.

as a suuuper bare-bones outline of what a game might consist of:

Resolution Mechanic: how does your game solve questions like "can i jump over this gap" or "can I cut this mountain in half?" for example, D&D does the whole thing with a d20 + modifiers compared to a number. other systems handle this in different ways. as a baseline it's nice for players' choices to matter, so i like to keep it somewhere between "flip a coin" and "consult thirteen tables based on your Class and Sense of Style, and then add four if you're a Gemini"

Combat: not every RPG needs combat, but the hobby has its roots in wargaming and so a lot of RPGs end up having some element of combat. your combat can be as simple as a more narrative game saying "make a skill check to kill this guy" (and thus overlapping entirely with your Resolution Mechanic) or it can be a multiple-hour tactical engagement like in Lancer

Stakes: what happens if players fail? can they fail? this is stuff like hit points in combat games, or the king finding out about your plans for the revolution in an intrigue game.

Character Creation: you need a Guy to be. how do you make the Guy? can the Guy be a dragon. an offshoot of this is progression: can my Guy get stronger? how?

this is very much an abstraction. games don't necessarily need all of these things. you can have a game without combat, and if you get silly enough with it you might be able to avoid character creation of any sort. it's harder to make a game without a resolution mechanic or stakes and have it be fun, but it's possible someone out there has done it

but that list of four things, in addition to more literary things like tone and setting, are sort of the basic framework my brain operates off of while making games.

at the end of the day, if you want to get good at something, the first step is to get out there and try it! good luck and happy game development!

[becquerelian]

I'm playing Disco Elysium and I'm really enjoying it, it has such a great atmosphere and art direction, and such a thorough history (and I'm still early on, so no spoilers). But I think the thing that stands out to me most as I'm playing, given that the gameplay itself is mostly text-based roleplay -- and I could go on about how interesting it is to have a video game that plays so similarly to a tabletop RPG, but I digress -- is the writing and the characterization.

Disco Elysium somehow manages to make every character feel very real and normal when at the same time they are all very obviously caricatures, all pretty extreme representations of ideas. Each person has their beliefs, they have their set worldview and they won't back down. But that doesn't make these characters unlikeable or ridiculous. There was obviously a lot of care taken with each character to make their individual story feel understandable and real. You can meet someone and feel that you can get a pretty good judgement of them pretty fast, and maybe you can. But that's still never all there is to it. The interweaving of histories and systems is more complicated than that. People are more complicated than that.

I think Measurehead is an interesting example of this. His Advanced Race Theory is not only super distasteful, but also super scientifically wrong. And yet he's immovable, uses it to make himself superior to you and talk down to you. But, talking to him, I still came to like him. He's willing to talk it through with you as long as you take the conversation seriously. He understands people well. He's not afraid to stop a line of thought that he can tell isn't going anywhere, he can tell what you're really aiming for. And he will give it to you. I can think about his Advanced Race Theory, and come back to talk to him about it as a ploy, and he can tell that I'm not actually interested in that debate, and he just.. lets me in to the docks. That's... admirable.

And the game doesn't try to tell you who is right, or more right than someone else. You get to decide. And you get to play however you like, make your sad little detective man believe whatever you choose. If you want to be Measurehead's new Advanced Race Theory pupil rather than going around insisting that it was just for the ploy, you can. I think all this complexity and flexibility is really important for playing with and exploring all these ideas that Disco Elysium sets out to explore. Because ignoring any part of the conversation only weakens your understanding, and everyone comes to their understanding of the world somehow.