#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.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Heyo! I just love learning about indie rpgs and you are amazing at showcasing everything! You make me want to play anything you recommend!

With that being said, do you have any recommendations of TTRPGs about dancing? I have a friend that really want to have dance battles, and I really want a system to make it more fun!

THEME: Dancing

Hello, thank you for your kind words! I'm happy that you're enjoying the recommendations that I put together. I have a small selection of interesting games and game-things that you might like to look at.

Corps A Corps, by arisia

Corps à Corps is a GM-optional, stat-raising tabletop RPG about fencers in training. Each player portrays a fencer honing body and spirit in pursuit of future triumphs alongside—or against—each other. Taking its cue from sports drama serials, the game unfolds in a series of scenes depicting training or other bits of daily life in a team. Each scene offers fencers a chance to develop skills or strengthen bonds with each other.

From what I can gather by looking on the store page, I think you could easily re-skin Corps A Corps to be about dance battles, rather than fencing. You play through your story over a series of scenes, which involve training, bonding with your team members, and facing off against rivals. You also begin the game with a series of questions to define the world around you, so I think if you wanted to base this game in a world that you’ve already built in another campaign, you might be able to do that!

If you want to focus on the tension that builds when two opposing sides compete in contests of skill, perhaps consider picking up Corps A Corps.

The Fire In Your Heart, by Justin Joyce.

DANCE THE NIGHT AWAY! MAKE FRIDAY NIGHT UNFORGETTABLE! ALLOW YOUR SOUL TO SHINE THROUGH THE RAW QUIVERING POWER OF RHYTHM! IF YOU MASTER THE HOWLING STYLE, YOU TOO CAN ACHIEVE OLYMPIAN HEIGHTS!

This is a re-skin of the basic moves of Masks: A New Generation themed around DANCE and fighting through the raw might of moves and music. 

Inspired by The Get Down, P4: Dancing All Night, and the karaoke sections of Yakuza, this modification to Masks is meant to emulate the raw feeling and power of letting loose on the dance floor. 

A lot of the moves in this hack look promising, including Lose Your Rhythm, Get Down, and Perceive the Beats.I think it’s really interesting that this game uses the basic Masks system - it feels like you’re teenagers learning about themselves, but through the language of dance, rather than through big battles with super villains. Because the game keeps the Influence mechanic, your status amongst your peers is still vitally important - I like the reinterpretation this game has of your influence being something you can gain on the dance floor. I think it makes the game feel more grounded, while still making the players care about what’s going on with each-other’s characters.

Baka Mitai, by Hipólita

The economic boom of the 80s promised a life of glitzy decadence and endless neon opulence for all. That was a crock of shit, huh? The same fat cats who had it made before have it made now. “ Nowhere is this stark class divide more evident than in Nemuranai, the foremost entertainment district in Tokyo, where grandiose cabarets, casinos and hotels sit next to run-down dwellings, struggling small businesses and homeless camps. And no matter who you are, if you’re not in the pocket of the crime lords, you’re living under their thumb. They have a finger in every pie and they only get greedier and more violent with every passing month, making the lives of working people miserable and difficult.

That’s where you and your friends come in.

Baka Mitai may feel a little bit out of left-field, but when I saw this game I thought of the video game Like A Dragon, which has a sizable side-quest revolving around a dance battle. The core system is very good at allowing you to pick your dice pool first and then describe how you succeed or fail after everyone in the group rolls, and it also distills a number of actions into a single turn, where everyone rolls at the same time. I like the freedom the PARAGON system gives players, as well as the opportunities it gives you for teamwork. If your group wants to enter a dance battle with a local gangster to save some face, you could have one person dancing, another person setting the music, and a third character hyping their friend up to the crowd!

You’ll need the core rules for AGON roleplaying system in order to play this game.

A Dance, A duel, by a.fell.

this is a minigame hacked from and written for games of firebrands by d. vincent baker. sometimes you want to dance, but you're dancing with words or fists instead of steps. sometimes you're dueling, but there's more grace to it. whatever it is, this is the game for it. (of course you could just use the dance or the meeting sword to sword games for that-- but where's the fun in that?)

This is a mini-game that you can add to a Firebrands game or perhaps any game, really, about intimacy, dancing, duelling, and using one to mask the other.

This game has a series of questions, which can be used in either a dance or a duel (or something that is a little bit of both). These questions ask about physical movements, small gestures that carry a larger meaning, and a relationship that changes as you move through each question. If you want to take some time out of a game you’re already playing to focus on two players, or if you just want to explore a small roleplay session through the language of dance, you might like this little mini-game.

The Infinite Dancefloor, by Rat Wave Game House.

"The Infinite Dancefloor is every nightclub and none of them. A sprawling, ever growing, ever shifting venue behind a thousand small doors. A party that never ends. A night where the sun never rises. Unfortunately that can make it a pain to actually leave the Infinite Dancefloor once you’re there. But you and your friends are done. You probably should have left at least two hours ago but you didn’t and now you’re here. You’re separated from one of your gang. You need to find them then find an exit. The Infinite Dancefloor won’t make it easy for you. You’ll need to band together and maybe you’re already a little past that but you don’t have much choice. Let’s get outta here already."

The Infinite Dancefloor is a GMless rpg inspired by those rough nights that could have been good, if you just stopped sooner.  You'll use dice and a tarot/oracle deck to determine and overcome Obstacles in your escape from the title venue, such as finding a friend you've been seperated, facing down other partygoers and confronting the location itself.  The Dancefloor will keep warping you back to the beginning, putting pressure on the cracks in your friendship.

This game is inspired by a music album, called Time Flies, by Ladyhawke, and is meant to be played while listening to the album. It’s a tarot-based game all about retrieving a friend of yours from the dancefloor of a night-clube so that all of you can go home.

While the core theme of the game is more about just trying to take care of your friend, I think that if the group is in agreement, dance can also be a core part of the obstacles that stand in the way between you and being able to leave. Perhaps the DJ has cast a spell on the crowd, making it hard to stop dancing - or perhaps your friend doesn’t want to leave until they win in a dance battle against their nemesis.

While the games’ twists and turns depend on the randomness of the tarot deck, since tarot cards are meant to be loosely interpreted, I think that if you went into this game thinking about your obstacles using dance metaphors, this game might give you a little bit of what you’re looking for.

My Jam, by Eric Mersmann.

My Jam is a larp in which players embody high-school musarchs—magicians whose powers are focused through music—at the biggest dance of the year. During the dance you’ll be able to hang with your friends, pick arguments with your frenemies, and moon over your crush, just like any other high school dance. But when your music is playing, you become the most powerful being on the dance floor—and maybe the entire gymnasium! At the end of the night, one of you will be elected Dance Monarch and enact a powerful ritual that can permanently change the world. 

As a LARP, My Jam looks to be a great option for folks who want to do some actual, physical, in-person dancing. Your dance is more than just the moves you can make - it’s also meant to represent magical powers, attached to pieces of music attributed to each player / character. The game comes with recommendations on curating people’s song choices for the space in which the LARP is being held, as well as a few pre-selected songs to set the tone for different stages of the LARP.

There’s some really neat pieces to this game, including covens, which detail the kind of music you might find power in, as well as a rule that gives each player unlimited power for the duration of whatever song they choose to play. At the end of the dance, the group votes on a Dance Monarch - and this choice will also say something about the school year to come.

You might also like…

I Have the High Ground, by Jess Levine Games.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[theresattrpgforthat]

could you reccommend any ttrpgs that have body horror as a major theme ?

THEME: Body Horror

The following recommendations are a few TTRPGs that are full of gut-churning inspiration for any body-horror fan! The covers of these games suggest at the horror within, but for the most part it's the games themselves that contain trigger warnings.

Bloom, by Litza Bronwyn.

BLOOM is a solo gm-less journaling game in which you play a teenage girl trapped in quarantine at a boarding school on an island infected by the Tox, a plague that makes the trees and animals grow huge and hungry, and mutates your body in strange and horrific ways. In it, you will draw cards and write journal entries based on specific prompts in order to craft a story of survival and love.

This game is based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette. BLOOM is directly inspired by the novel Wilder Girls by Rory Power, a New York Times bestseller, and contains spoilers for the book.

Solo games can add a layer to horror because your character is experiencing the Tox by herself; she has nobody to help her. This is also a good option for stories that you might want to tell regardless of whether or not you have a group to share them with. If you have an aptitude for journaling and want to stretch your creative muscles, this might be worth checking out. If you want to check out another solo game of feminine body horror that will send chills up your spine, check out Horse Girl, by BabblegumSam.

Candy Teeth, by World Champ Games Co.

I've worked my whole life to make something worth a damn. To feel something. To make you feel something. To change the world with my art. Until they took my art from me. Now, I only want one thing. I'll make you feel something: Pain.

Candy Teeth is a storytelling game of creativity, power, and violence for 3 players inspired by Brand New Cherry Flavour. Using the included cards and rules, players take turns creating scenes exploring the dynamics between three roles: The Tooth, The Rot, and the Sweetness.

The three of you are working to exact violence and revenge, not just against others, but against yourselves. There’s disturbing images within the game, so it comes with a Parental warning all it’s own, but if you like stories about magic and art interwoven with horror, and you have a play group of exactly three people, this might be the game for you. The creator of this game has also released a game called Necronautilus, which is about agents of Death exploring the universe as clouds of noxious gas. Mother Needs Flesh, by JoPa.

MOTHER roams the galaxy searching for ways to satisfy her hunger. You, her Scions, operate to fulfill her needs. Most of the time, you’ll infiltrate spaceships and moon stations, seeking to end all life aboard so MOTHER can feed on the flesh of your victims. Other times, you’ll forge alliances with pirates and planets to keep MOTHER safe. At dire times, you’ll help MOTHER fight off spacecraft seeking to destroy her. No matter what you do, you do it for MOTHER.

MOTHER NEEDS FLESH is a minimalist tabletop rpg for up to four players and one Game Master. All you need is four, six, eight, ten and twelve-sided dice plus pen and paper to play. This game is based off of the Breathless System, by Fari Rpgs.

This is great for players who want to stretch their tentacles in the cold vacuum of space. This time you are the eldritch horrors, and you have an alien matron to serve. Breathless depends on resources that slowly diminish, so it really puts you on the clock.

Phever, by o.hybridity.

The world as you’ve lived in it is designed to get as much out of you as it can before you reach that tipping point, then lock you down and put you away before you become a monster. 

Wouldn’t you know it: you’re changing.

A Near-Future Body Horror Adventure In a Paranoid World, built on the armature of Jared Sinclair's What's So Cool About Outer Space?

Evade the cops. Trust no one. Find your place in the world as the strange new being you're destined to become.

The other title for this game is What’s so Bad about Spontaneous Teratomorphism? The What’s So Cool about Outer Space game system has quick character generation and relies on 2d6 for pretty much all of your rolls. You can add +1 for advantages, and subtract -1 for disadvantages. If you roll an 8 or higher, you succeed. It’s that easy! Your characters all have physical oddities, something that’s unnerving to characters that aren’t phenotypically volatile. You’re playing people in a harsh world that fears them, full of mutations that are blossoming inside them as you play. The game comes with example PheVers, to give you NPCs or inspiration for your own characters, as well as Axioms for the GM and rumours that serve as excellent plot hooks.

Here for You, by William.

It's a normal day, as normal as anything ever is these days. A notification lights up your screen....

Here For You is a 2-person body horror RPG played with the Major Arcana of a tarot deck. This game takes place in real-time over instant messenger (like text message or Discord) with a standard play session lasting 1 to 1.5 hours.

Play as The Corrupted, a person undergoing terrible changes to their very being, and The Witness, someone they reach out to, scrambling to understand and stop this transformation before it finishes. These two people may be best friends or barely acquaintances but nonetheless are now embroiled in a race against time - and the inevitable. 

Here For You is about a sudden and unexpected change and how to cope with it. It's also a game about trying desperately to save someone even if you can't succeed. The game is ultimately about relationships, and what they mean to us as people. 

This is a quieter, more intimate game, which would work well if you find it hard to find a large number of people who appreciate the same genre as you, or if you want to have a small, private experience. It also works well for folks who can’t play in person, but would like the experience of a real-time roleplaying experience. 

Heart: The City Beneath, by Rowan, Rook and Decard.

Heart: The City Beneath is a tabletop roleplaying game about delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of – or kill you in the process.

It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG from the designers of Spire that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world.

This will give you cannibals, mad trees, forbidden gods, curses, underground pubs and more. Things with too many eyes and too many arms are all too common in the the undercity. Your characters will be strange and eclectic with backstories tied to the weirdness of the world around you. It uses the same mechanics as Spire - the Resistance System.

MÖRK BORG, by Free League Publishing.

MÖRK BORG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world. Who are you? The tomb-robber with silver glittering between cracked fingernails? The mystic who would bend the world’s heart away from it’s inevitable end? Confront power-draining necromancers, skulking skeletal warriors and backstabbing wickheads. Wander the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, the catacombs beneath the Bergen Chrypt or the bedevilled Sarkash forest. But leave hope behind – the world’s cruel fate is sealed, and all your vain heroic efforts are destined to end in death and dismay. Or are they?

If you’re interested in fantasy along with your body horror, this is probably the game for you. It’s gritty and dark and slimy, and much of the third party content that you can find for the game reflects its theme. The mechanics for this game are fast and cruel, which adds to the general feeling of horror. MÖRK BORG has been highly lauded and hacked a number of times, including a hack called ORC BORG, by Grant Howitt.

[caughtthedarkness93]

I've talked similar things before - that Hasbro WOTC seems like the only brand that actually benefits from this generic trademark situation they have.

So a generic trademark is when a brand becomes so synonymous with a specific type of product that it basically becomes another name for it. You've seen this phenomenon in action before - Velcro is probably one of the best examples. Velcro is a specific brand. The actual thing itself is called a hook-and-loop fastener. Same with tissues as Kleenex.

Most brands really don't want this to happen to them. In fact, back when I worked in news, I actually got a cease-and-desist from Bobcat once for when I printed a quote referring to a skid-steer loader as being "Like a Bobcat." The reason being that the more this happens, the less effective advertising a product becomes and if it gets to be consistent enough, you can lose the trademark entirely. This happened to the word escalator.

I'd say at this point D&D is pretty significantly a generic trademark, but what makes it interesting is that since they have a sort of pseudo-monopoly going on for a fairly niche product that has in itself become a sort of lifestyle statement, that generic trademark actually works to Hasbro's benefit. I'm D&D and WOTC critical enough that I won't play D&D anymore unless it's a really good friend running it or there is a pitch that I cannot ignore. 5e is a reason I turn a game down these days. You have to talk me into playing it.

Nonetheless, there are times where I find myself saying I run or play D&D or "It's like D&D" to those who aren't in the TTRPG community because if I say I play tabletop RPGs it takes 20 minutes to explain what that means, or I can just say "It's like D&D" and everyone instantly gets what I mean. I can follow that up by saying "Now it's not D&D specifically," and get into my issues with D&D, but that's niche stuff that people outside the hobby do not care about.

However, because TTRPGs are not an everyday convenience thing like Velcro or Kleenex, that name recognition overtaking the thing itself isn't really a problem for WOTC the same way it is for others. If you want to get into the TTRPG scene, you kind of have to take active steps to do so. And if you see D&D as being essentially synonymous with it, well, three guesses what game you're going to find first. It ain't Ars Magica, that's for sure.

Then the situation compounds itself. People don't get exposed to other games that do things differently, so the base assumptions that are part of D&D never really get challenged, and if people want to play a game in a genre that doesn't fit D&D, they get intimidated by the idea of learning a new system even though D&D is on the more complicated side of system design, and thus, the cycle repeats.

It's all to the benefit of a company that's honestly been pretty shitty to its customer base and has repeatedly broken its promises. It's wild how often WOTC does something that pisses off its fan community, walks it back, and then tries to do it again two months or so later.

Anyway, go check out other RPGs, there are a ton of cool ones out there.

Is it just me or like, do you ever get the feeling that D&D players are the product?

I think I get what you mean and that is a fascinating way to look at it. Like, the game as it exists in the books isn't the point of D&D, the point of D&D isn't playing the game, it's to be a D&D Player? Idk, but if you elaborate on this idea I would love to read more about it

[inktog]

Pet peeve that's bugging me more than usual today: There will never be an official Magic: The Gathering tabletop RPG because the company that makes Magic also makes D&D, so they only care about adapting Magic settings to D&D rules. Which, to be sure, results in some cool stuff.

But D&D is not a generic fantasy roleplaying system (much as WOTC likes to pretend so); it's a particular system for telling a particular type of story. The base assumptions of D&D can only be stretched so far before you start feeling like maybe you're playing the wrong system for the story you want to tell.

Fitting a Magic setting to D&D rules mostly just has the effect of making the classes feel weird and arbitrary. Why are there different rules for wizards and bards and sorcerers and whatnot, when the distinction between the guilds (or the colleges, or the five colors) is way more salient to the story?

I would love a TTRPG built around the color pie. Give me a spell list explicitly tied to my character's most deeply held values and let me run wild, instead of trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

[sepdet]

i go to bmc and happening upon your reblog about using the bi-co's VAX for fanfiction/rp was a hilarious surprise

Hello my dear! Yes, I tagged that hoping to amuse some sister Mawrtyrs across the miles.

The delightful thing is that back then, since fandom often formed in small local groups much like regional bitnets and usenet groups, many homegrown, unique forms of proto-fanfic-before-we-had-a-term-for-it could develop.

In our case, since of course the nerds of Bryn Mawr would be the ones keeping the VAX running, someone had set up a BBS on the VAX's system called Starbucket. As you can guess from the name, it was somewhat tongue in cheek. Individual posts were individual chapters of stories — one had to seek membership to be allowed to post — and then members could comment.

Your main character of your own stories was a self-insert OC Time Lord from Doctor Who. Your traveling companions could be any character who had died in their own timeline, so that if you took them away they wouldn't be missed. (This rule was sometimes bent, because the members of Queen were beloved.) And then, since you had a time machine, you could travel to any multiverse— crossovers ahoy! And a lot of parodies. Companions ranged from Kerr Avon of Blake's 7 to Wolfriders from Elfquest to Roy Fokker from Robotech. Mine were Cally from Blake's 7 and Kassandra of Troy.

You were allowed to write other people's characters, since BBS members mostly knew each other, and it was kind of like gift fic to give each other's characters adventures. (Or killed them off in dramatic ways, because screw continuity. The best story ever was Phantom of the Starbucket, in which the Phantom — this was when the broadway musical first hit — was bumping off everyone's characters, each in a poetically appropriate/hilarious way. I assume Freddie Mercury was the angel of music, although I can't remember now.)

I realized later that Starbucket had originally been set up as a text version of the 80s Doctor Who tabletop rpg in which everyone plays a member of the Celestial Intervention Agency. (In universe, Starbucket was a CIA space station home base where all our TARDISes docked.) But by the time I joined the bbs, the original mission had largely been forgotten, and a lot of stories were crossover contrivances to bring about various characters "boinking" one another. Ah, the quaint days of euphemism-rated fanfic.

Yeah. Anyway. Typical college humor. Good times. Sorry to go off in Anecdote Mode, except not sorry. I hope you're having a wonderful time and finding great nerd friends to offset the stress of academics and *waves had at current events.* Drink deep of Bryn Mawr, because it's marvelous, but you don't need ME to tell you that. Dapper cosplay, by the way!

And if you should happen down that staircase descending into the Dungeon basement of Pembroke East (it's not that exciting, it's just that groups of friends used to be able to bid on undesirable blocks of rooms), the little plaque on the windowsill halfway down proclaiming it the domain of the "Rampaging Anarchist Horde, Renaissance Faire, and Floating Tea Party" commemorates my merry band. Rumors of a sex dungeon or satanic cult were greatly exaggerated. The only naughty thing we were doing down there, apart from the inevitable shacking up after a couple of us figured out we were queer, was keeping a flagrant violation of the housing code. His name was Vasdru, and he was a very sweet cat.