#diceless rpg

[dungeonofthedragon]

Added ten more community copies of Nowhere Home. Go forth, my friends, and have emotional journeys as outcast monsters!

[nodicenomasters]

Daily Diceless: Arcane Academy

Play as a gang of magical misfits taking their first steps into the world of Hexenview Academy. Make new friends and avert disaster as you uncover one another's secrets. 

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played WANDERHOME

By Jay Dragon

Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.

A diceless and GM-less game, built on the Belonging Outside Belonging engine

[corrosivesquid]

What's this?! Two games in a month?! Actually, this one has been sitting for a moment but I wanted to release the playtest to a wider audience. In Split Soul, you play as an elemental trying to stitch the reality of you and your reality back together. Play as two characters, two pieces of the same whole and walk through a broken world. Written on the DICE system means you will need two decks of cards, one for the GM and the other for the players. Future Vision of the game is to release more playbooks, more professional art, and any other bumps in the road that need smoothing

[gwiggs]

Just finished a 3 year long Amber Diceless RPG campaign. This is my character Pelt - a demigod who was abandoned in the wilderness as a child, only to be rediscovered 200 years later after he had long-since gone feral.

Uneducated and unprepared, he was taken to a kingdom at the edge of the multiverse and wrapped up in courtly politics. In his adventures, he made many friends and met long-lost relatives. He got into plenty of fights, earned a fair few amount of scars, he loved, he grieved, and he learned of the powers and responsibilities that come with being a scion of the most powerful family in the multiverse. And he learned of the atrocities that can be committed by people with such power.

And in the end, he returned to his home in the wilderness. No longer a scared, desperate child trying to survive, but as its warden and protector. The Untamed King of the Deep Wilds.

I had a ton of fun with this guy, it was an amazing campaign. I'm more than a little sad that his story is over, but it was a fantastic ride.

Art by the inimitable @carniekisses, who drew Pelt (and his cousins, the other player characters) for us at the beginning of the campaign.

[chronivore]

Active Exploits Diceless Roleplaying - Precis Intermedia | Active Exploits Diceless | DriveThruRPG

[dungeonofthedragon]

A reminder that I also run several side blogs revolving around ttrpg goodness!

A Forged in the Dark blog celebrating everything FitD (from character art to whole games!)

A blog dedicated to diceless ttrpg.

Small Adventures, a blog for one page and pamphlet sized rpgs. Currently doing a daily 'Small Spotlight' on different games!

[nodicenomasters]

Daily Diceless: Loot

Explore the world and fight monsters in this LUMEN 2.0 game where your capabilities are entirely dictated by the loot you carry with you!

[rampagingpoet]

The two I'm most familiar with are Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine and Glitch, both by Dr. Jenna Moran. Her earlier work Nobilis is also diceless, but I'm still on my first readthrough of the rules.

While the specifics vary quite a lot, randomized results are replaced by spending points from limited pools. Characters that are better at certain things usually need to spend fewer points for the same results. You always get the result you pay for; a lot of the depth comes in deciding whether you can afford the result you want.

In Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, the results of your actions are tied to the "Intention Ladder". Higher numbers for an Intention (action, or set of related actions) have better results. Intention 0 is pretty much failure, an attempt that did nothing or even made things worse. Intention 2 is enough to "accomplish a task; have a tangible impact on the world." All the way up at Intention 8 you can "do something really productive" that makes your life much better.

The primary resource is called Will. It refreshes on a regular basis. Will can be spent to increase the level of an Intention. You add any Will spent to your skill level, and subtract the level of any Obstacles in your way. People with high skills don't usually have to spend Will to get useful results; people without a relevant skill have to make due with spending more Will.

Uncertainly enters the system in two ways: you don't necessarily know the Obstacle rating for your Intention up-front, and you don't know if you'll need to set another Intention for something else later.

There are also Miracle Points used to power other, more specific, abilities. A miracle does exactly what it says and doesn't usually interact with Will and Intentions directly. Miracles might implicitly reduce the Obstacle an action faces though; most people don't have a way to make sunbeams break through the clouds to shine on their friends in a moment of hardship, but the Child of the Sun can invoke one of their miracles to do so.

Glitch: A Story of the Not, uses specific mechanically-defined actions instead of the Intention Ladder. Every action has an Action Level. Actions of a higher level are generally either more powerful or more helpful, if you can think of a way to apply them.

Each Action is tied to an Attribute. Actions up to your level in the relevant attribute are free, but to push yourself beyond that you have to pay a Cost equal to the difference. In cases of direct conflict (I stab him! Nuh-uh I obliterate you first!), the action with the higher Action Level usually wins. When in doubt, you can end up in a bidding war to see who's willing to spend more Cost to push their effective Action Level higher. Longer conflicts might have a specific overall Cost threshold the party needs to hit or just go to whichever side spent more Cost overall before time ran out. (Assuming they aren't ended earlier through the narrative).

Each Attribute has its own associated Cost. In general you can only power up an action by spending from the associated pool. You might be too worn-out to do your taxes, but still have enough void-juice to hurl the entire tax office screaming into the Beyond.

"Taking Damage" also spends points of an associated cost. In effect, every action you take that isn't free is "cast from Hit Points."

Unlike Will, the Costs do not fully refresh themselves on a set cadence. They recover slowly over time, or sometimes in larger chunks when you complete character goals. Alternatively you can take a Wound to recover a larger chunk all at once. Wounds have narrative consequences, and taking too many Wounds over the course of a campaign is the only way to perma-die.

Uncertainly now enters in three ways:

Is this important enough for me to spend a campaign-limited resource on?

How much do I need to spend to overcome my opposition, without going too far overboard?

Uh-oh, the conflict seems to be winding down without a decisive winner. Have I bled for this? Have I spent enough to win?

I've only briefly played Glitch and haven't had a chance to play Chuubo's, but my impression is the different refresh mechanics for an ultimately similar system (spend points to do better, skills add to points spent) lead to very different incentives and ways to think about using your limited resources. Neither require dice to provide uncertain outcomes; your own evaluations of the situation and what's important to your character provide all the uncertainly you could need.

Reading some of my notes apparently a lot of people feel that they would benefit from someone sitting their asses down and learning them some probability, and to be fair tabletop RPG math isn't so complex that even an English major like me couldn't explain it in such a way that most people would understand it.

Anyway on a completely different note, the funny thing in my experience is that even if you explain the numbies and how to arrive at them, at the end of the day most people are really bad at actually interpreting those numbies. Even in percentile-based systems where your exact chances out of a hundred are made immediately obvious (a 47% chance is a forty-seven per centum [New Latin for "by the hundred"] chance) most people fall on a number of probability-based fallacies whose names I can't remember but I think Gambler's fallacy is at least one of them. Anyway what I mean is that when a number is higher than 50% it should succeed more often than fail, so like guy who has a 55% chance of succeeding voice why do I keep failing 45% of the time

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Trans made TTRPGs

Due to… recent events that I would rather not talk about, today's post is a highlight of different tabletop games made by trans peeps! These games are fantastic in their own right, of course, but you can also know that they were made by incredibly cool and attractive people

(Also, these are flyover descs of the game, they'll get more in-depth singular posts later, this is because I am lazy)

Perfect Draw is a phenomenal card game TTRPG that was funded in less than a day on backerkit, it's incredibly fun and has simple to learn hard to master rules for creating custom cards, go check it out!

Songs for the dusk is fucking good, pardon my language, but it's a damn good post apocalyptic game about building community in a post-capitalist-post-apocalypse-post-whatever world. do yourself a favor and if you only check out one game in this list, check this one out, its a beautiful game.

Flying Circus is set in a WW1 inspired fantasy setting full of witches, weird eldritch fish people (who are chill as hell), cults, dead nobility, and other such things. It's inspired by Porco Rosso primarily but it has other touchstones.

Wanderhome is a game about being cute little guys going on a silly adventure and growing as the seasons change, its GMless and very fun

https://weregazelle.itch.io/armour-astir Armour Astir has been featured in here before but its so damn good I had to post it twice. AA demonstrates a fundamental knowledge of the themes of mech shows in a way that very few other games show, its awesome

Kitchen Knightmares is… more of a LARP but its still really dang cool, its about being a knight serving people in a restaurant, its played using discord so its incredibly accessible

https://grimogre.itch.io/michtim Michtim is a game about being small critters protecting their forest from nasty people who wish to harm it, not via brutal violence (sadly) but via friendship and understanding (which is a good substitute to violence)

ok this technically doesn't count but I'm putting it here anyways cuz its like one of my favorite ttrpgs of all time TSL is a game about baring your heart and dueling away with people who you'll probably kiss 10 minutes later, its very very fanfic-ey and inspired by queer narratives. I put it here because its made by a team, and the expansion has a setting specifically meant to be a trans "allegory", so I'll say it counts, honestly just go check it out its good shit

https://willuhl.itch.io/mystic-lilies

Mystic Lillies is a game inspired by ZUN's Touhou Project about witches dueling powerful foes, each other, and themselves. Mystic Lillies features rapid character creation and a unique diceless form of rolling which instead uses a standard playing card deck.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/141424/nobilis-the-game-of-sovereign-powers-2002-edition I… want to do a more general overview on Jenna K as an important figure in indie RPG design, but for now just know that Nobilis is good

https://temporalhiccup.itch.io/apocalypse-keys Apocalypse Keys is a game inspired by Doom Patrol, Hellboy, X-men, and other comics about monstrousness being an allegory for disenfranchisement. Apocalypse Keys is also here because its published by Evilhat so its very cleaned up and fancy but I love how the second you check out the dev's other stuff you can tell they are a lot more experimental with their stuff, this is not a critique, it is in fact a compliment

Fellowship! I've posted about this game before, but it is again here. Fellowship has a fun concept that it uses very well mostly, its a game about defining your character's culture, and I think that's really really cool

Voidheart Symphony is a really cool game about psychic rebellion in a city that really does not like you, the more you discover for yourself the better

Panic at the Dojo is a phenomenal ttrpg based on what the Brazilian would call "Pancadaria", which basically means, fucking other's people shit up. Character Creation is incredibly open and free, meaning that many character concepts are available

Legacy 2e is a game about controlling an entire faction's choices across time, its very fun

remember to be kind to a trans person today! oh also don't even try to be transphobic in the reblogs or replies, you will be blocked so fast your head will spin

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

500th Pool ! Have you played NOBILIS ?

By Jenna Moran

You were living your life. You were mortal. But then something divine, something essential reached down its hand, and touched your soul, and now you are bicycles. You are breakfast cereal. You are the very living breath of fire. You are the soul of every single computer. You are love. You are stars.

Nobilis is a game about playing gods, and more specifically about traveling the universe, engaging in cosmic struggles, doomed romances, and extremely fancy parties.

[twistingbrambles]

I got bored

[corrosivesquid]

Wanna ttrpg with cards instead of dice? Want to create a world and then burn it with your friends? Do you like Enneagrams? Open up a nice deck, gather some friends, and enjoy a GMless dose of Neon Shadows! Play as one of the 9 ennegram based playbooks, create a world with a blank map, and begin to tell the story of your characters as they follow their desires. Will you save the city from a ruthless govt? Maybe trek the wilderness of the world outside the city? Explore old Aether mines? It's your story to tell, how will you tell it?

[theresattrpgforthat]

TTRPGs for people with dyscalculia?

THEME : Dyscalculia Friendly.

Hello friend, I’m going to first point you to the Math-Lite Chaotic Murder Hobos recommendation post I wrote up a year or two ago.

What I understand about dyscalculia is that in can affect the ability to do mental math, but I'm not sure how much it affects number recognition. I have a few games here that ask you to read the faces on a die, but I don't think any of them expect you to do any addition. I hope you find something fun on this list!

Cats of Catthulu, by Joel Sparks.

CATS OF CATTHULHU is the beloved rules-light roleplaying game in which the players take the part of ordinary cats, secretly defending human civilization from the Chaos Cults of the other animals. All the players have to do is act like cats, while the Cat Herder arranges exciting challenges for them—anything from snacky time to daringly interrupting dire rituals.

In Cats of Catthulhu, the way the story will go is always a mystery. You and your friends play to find out what happens. One person, the Cat Herder, arranges the secrets and situations, and sets the scene, but even they don’t know where the night will end. The players take the role of individual, ordinary cats. All you really need to do is act like a cat.

It might be a bit difficult to get your hands on them, but the original dice for Cats of Catthulhu don’t have any numbers on them; instead, they have sad cats and happy cats. Whenever a cat does something, they roll 2 of these dice. Rolling a Happy Cat is a success; rolling a Sad Cat is a failure. The reasoning behind these dice is: cats can’t do math!

If you can’t get your hands on cat dice, you can use any old d6, and regard 1-2 as Sad Cats and 3-6 as Happy Cats. You’ll also want to get some kind of physical token to use as Treats, which are player currency used to allow free re-rolls. Cats of Catthulhu is great for groups who are mostly getting together to just have a fun time, ready to act silly and get into all kinds of shenanigans.

DUSK, by Gila RPGs.

Equipped with the latest suntech, you are tasked with venturing out into the Dusk, and helping bring a new dawn to humanity. The Dusk does not want you there. 

Good luck.

In DUSK, you play as Shards, survivors on the planet Obron after the devastating nova-event that saw your world destroyed. Now you wield powerful technology fueled by pieces of your dead sun, in hopes of surviving another day. DUSK uses the LUMEN 2.0 system, and is a diceless RPG focused on resource management rather than luck or chance. 

As a diceless game, DUSK feels a lot different from a number of other diceless games, and I think that’s because of the style of game it’s working off of. LUMEN games are more about strategy than they are about narrative, and in DUSK that’s carried forward in the form of Suntech, items that require energy to power and provide specific advantages.

DUSK is still a relatively new game, but the designer is prolific in the amount of quality work he’s released in the past - and so when he says that there’s more to come, you best believe there’s more to come. If you’d still like to roll dice but you like the idea of the setting in this game, you might want to check out NOVA, which also uses the LUMEN system but gives you dice to roll or LUNA, a game about cultists trying to destroy the moon. Both of these games use pools of d6’s and ask you to look for the highest number, so I don’t think there’s that much math involved.

CASE & SOUL, by Briar Sovereign.

CASE&SOUL is a lightweight tabletop game for telling action-packed stories in the mecha genre. CASE&SOUL is designed for one-shots and short to mid length campaigns. Speed through a lightweight downtime; hire freelancers to pad out your Crew’s skills on missions. Customize your playbooks with SOUL moves, and enjoy a cut-down FITD gameplay with just the essentials for fast and flexible sessions.

Forged in the Dark games use a dice pool, rather than abilities with modifiers. You add dice from various places on your worksheet, and try to roll at least one 4 or higher. Rolling a 4 or 5 is usually a mixed success, and rolling a 6 is a complete success. Personally, I’m a big fan of games that use dice pools, as I’m also not a fan of trying to add up all of those numbers, and having to just look for the single highest dice helps speed up action resolution.

At the same time, Forged in the Dark games can have a lot of moving pieces at once, especially if the GM wants to track a large number of factions, or players want to plan multiple-stage missions. CASE & SOUL advertises itself as a slimmed-down version of these kinds of games, but I can’t tell whether or not that is the case when I look at the character sheets. What intrigues me is the CASE and SOUL tracks; I think your CASE is your Mech, and it receives Harm differently than your SOUL, which is an interesting way to measure how much your mech is (or is not) part of you.

Keyforge: Secrets of the Crucible, by Edge Studio.

In the center of the universe hangs the Crucible, a gigantic artificial world created by the enigmatic Architects and home to countless beings and cultures. Here, impossibly advanced technologies mix with arcane powers to make for a setting unlike any other! Uncovering the secrets of this mysterious world will take all your skills—but the potential rewards are boundless…

Explore this world of boundless opportunity in Secrets of the Crucible, a new sourcebook for the Genesys Roleplaying System set in the KeyForge universe!

You’ll need the Genesys Rulebook for this one, because the main reason I’m recommending Secrets of the Crucible is because of the dice system. Genesys dice don’t use numbers; they use symbols that represent success and failure - and they also have symbols that deepen the nuance of each roll. You can roll advantages or disadvantages that calibrate exactly how much you succeed, as well as triumphs or despairs that give you the same kind of highs and lows as a Nat 20 or a Nat 1 in D&D. This means that each roll tells you so much more about what’s going on around you than just whether you open a door or sweet-talk a guard.

As for the setting, Keyforge is originally a card game published by Fantasy Flight games, about a world called the Crucible, full of secrets that various factions are competing to unlock. It reminds me of the worlds of Magic: the Gathering or League of Legends, with various settings that look very distinct from each-other, and represent different styles of play.

SHIVER, by Parable Games.

WHAT IS SHIVER?

SHIVER is a tabletop roleplaying game that lets players bring their favourite scary movies, spooky tv shows, and horror stories to life. Ever wanted to play through the plot of your favourite film on the tabletop? Or wanted to make sequels, prequels and original stories in the worlds of pop culture you love? SHIVER lets you play that!

SHIVER is setting neutral allowing you to play any story, anytime, and as anyone. Want to play a game of teens in survival mode against a zombie horde? Kids on Bikes who dread exploring a haunted house on Halloween night? Or perhaps a medieval monster hunter looking for a werewolf, vampire or mage? SHIVER can deliver stories and characters for anything from cult pulp classic to Cthulhu fuelled eldritch mystery.

The designer of SHIVER set out with the goal of making games easier for his friends, who had similar struggles with games that had too much math involved. Players roll six-sided and eight-sided dice with various symbols on them, looking for the symbol that represents their character's strengths. The more difficult the task is, the more of the required symbol you need. The game itself is recognized as a class-act horror game, good for everything from pulp-action to gothic fiction to slasher horror. If you don't have the special dice, you can substitute with d6's & d8's, or you can use the free Dice Roller designed for this game.

Tournament Arc, by Biscuit Fund Games.

Are you looking to experience the triumphs and defeats of Space Hyper-Basketball? Need to feel the epic highs and dizzying lows of card games in the post-apocalypse? Want to face the trials and tribulations of the cheese-rolling World Circuit?

Tournament Arc is your very own collaborative sports anime experience, made in the diceless Belonging Outside Belonging engine popularized by games like Dream Askew and Wanderhome. In every thrilling episode, you’ll play the part of the Team as they negotiate the complexities of their daily lives, explore a collaboratively created world, and, most importantly, play the Game.

Tournament Arc is both diceless and GM-less, and is designed to tell stories about teambuilding and competitive sports, although the setting appears to be pretty flexible. The Belonging Outside Belonging game system provides each character type with prompts, and sorts those prompts into different categories. Usually there will be some things you can always do that generate tokens as well as narrative obstacles, and then other things that you can only do when you spend tokens - and as a result, also help characters confront those narrative obstacles. If you have players that like having something tactile to keep in their hands as they play, you might like Tournament Arc.

Warehouse Bitches, by Darling Demon Games.

The Time Worm arrived as it was prophesied just as the crown fell upon his head, and all potentials collapsed into a single haunted citadel, which you call Hex City. You are transgender punks and goths from earth, and in this place your powerful hearts make you witches, daemons, beast-people and arcane architects. We bide our time, smoking and drinking, playing video games and eyeing the crumbling walls of our enemy, The Lord of Olympus.

In Warehouse Bitches, you play as one of the titular warehouse-dwelling trans folk in the hellish Hex City. In this GMless Belonging Outside Belonging game with a unique coin-flip mechanic, you'll wield magic, build allies across the city and fight back against the bastards in subtle ways.

I’ve already explained a bit about how Belonging Outside Belonging works, but Warehouse Bitches adds another layer by using coins as tokens. Using coins, your options are different depending on whether or not the coin is on Heads or Tails. The moves on your character sheet are not just differentiated between Strong and Vulnerable, they’re also differentiated between Heads or Tails, and you must have matching sides of the coins showing in order to be able to use those moves. Characters also have Magic moves, which require the player to flip every coin they currently hold, and reassign those coins based on whatever side they land on.

Warehouse Bitches has only 4 playbooks as it stands now, so a group of 4 players is probably the largest group that can play the book as it stands now. The game is GM-less, but looking at the rules, I think it would be possible to have someone pick up the GM role in order to introduce complications and narrate the actions of various other factions in town. Similar to other BoB games, there are zones that have various elements and details that need to be decided as you play, which will also help provide events and interesting features that keep the game fresh and exciting.

[prokopetz]

I don't disagree that there's some level of congruence between filmgoers who defend narrow viewership by acting like it's a binary choice between watching the latest MCU film and watching black-and-white Eastern European art films about depression, and tabletop RPG players who defend narrow playership by acting like it's a binary choice between playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and playing one-page diceless storygames about gay catgirls smoking cigarettes.

The difference, of course, is that folks who advocate expanding one's cinematic horizons are rarely advocating going straight from watching the latest MCU film to watching black-and-while Eastern European art films about depression, whereas folks who advocate expanding one's tabletop roleplaying horizons very often are, in fact, advocating going straight from playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition to playing one-page diceless storygames about gay catgirls smoking cigarettes.

[thydungeongal]

ik doing game recs isnt your forte but this seems worth a shot since its relevant to some things you do talk about. Are there any non-dnd games youd recommend to someone coming into rpgs whos less confident in freeform RP but more familiar with tt war n skirmish games?

Ik its one of those things where dnd might on paper be an actual suggestion but in practice its like ive seen you say where every group seems to want to ignore most stats and especially in combat try and make ""theatre of the mind"" work when it feels like its be easier to all involved if we just dropped some little guys on some graph paper but everyone seems desperate to avoid that

Yeah, if you're coming from the direction of tabletop wargames and skirmish games then yeah D&D would actually work. But I think there are other good options if you want a game that's explicitly about moving dudes on a grid and doesn't pretend otherwise (I have a huge rant in my back pocket about "theater of the mind" and how it's actually one of the biggest lies ever concocted by D&D's designers and the fact that the player base has bought that lie is maddening, MADDENING I SAY).

First of all, I'm going to hype up Tactiquest by @level2janitor again. It's a game very clearly inspired by D&D in its genre and it's a very neat RPG that is very much about teams of fantasy folks hitting each other on the grid. The current playtest edition is also completely free!

Beacon is a tactical fantasy RPG that is basically like. What if we took the mech combat of Lancer and made the mechs fantasy RPG characters instead? It's a very tactically deep RPG with a sort of a Final Fantasy meets D&D vibe to its setting, and there's a lot to love there.

Speaking of Lancer, there's also ICON by one of the creators of Lancer. Also grid-based, also heavily about tactical combat. Very cool presentation. Yeah

And finally, Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics. This one is fun because it combines so many influences from all around the tabletop RPG space: there's a bit of Dungeon Crawl Classics, 4e, there's domain management, there's a pretty clear campaign framework to follow. It's filled to the brim with so much cool stuff I really hope to be able to take it out for a spin some day.