#elfgaming

[inklesspen]

D&D and D&D-derived elfgame players, an question:

Does the Wizard class in your game rules have to pick spells for the day from their spellbook, such that during the "day" they will only have a limited subset of spells available to cast?

For example, in D&D 3.5e, the Wizard gets a number of slots and must assign spells to each slot. Want to be able to cast fireball twice? That'll be two level-3 slots please. In Worlds Without Number, on the other hand, a wizard does have to prepare a selection of spells, but may cast each prepared spell as many times as she likes, as long as she does not exceed a spells-per-day limit.

If your game has this rule, does your table actually abide by that rule?

If so, how do you (and/or your fellow players) feel about that rule?

Additional bonus question: If your ruleset allows the Wizard some flexibility around prepared spells (swapping out a prepared spell during a short rest, for instance), do you think that rule goes far enough? Too far? Something else?

[inklesspen]

I once read this post about a dragon with 16 hit points. Yes, 16.

So the party needed a magic item, and they researched and found that a hero wielding said item was slain by a dragon. They get some info from a different dragon’s drake-in-human-form servant, and go and steal said item. Remember, magic in this world doesn’t mean ‘magic’ in the +’s sense, but this spear can pierce souls and is thus necessary to defeat a sorcerer king. Ok, so we have a very angry dragon about to attack something. 16 hp again - ready? The party is riding back into town ready for a nice hot bath, some resupplies (their rations were running low), and a re-focus on hunting down the sorcerer king. The moon goes out for a second, they feel the wind shift, and then something lands on city hall with a massive crack. They have a few seconds to blink before they see a serpentine head snake down and shred a guardsman in mail in a single hit (announce future badness, this is the ‘messy’ tag). They kick up the speed and head towards town. I plop down paper, and quickly draw some snaking streets, sketch out some boxy houses, plop down a big die to represent the dragon. As they’re about to walk in, I pick up a handful of red tokens, and describe the inhalation they feel from this far, and the words in dragon-speech, and basically drop a pile of red on town and explain it’s on fire and how the flames themselves are being shaped and commanded by the dragon. Their horses freak. They manage to get off (a few taking some damage from a panicked horse running and one being hit by a branch). They start advancing through this hellish landscape, where an inconsistent shadow would swoop down and split someone in half, and people burning to death beg for mercy and help while holding swaddled children turning to ash in their arms. The group starts to help the townsfolk (this is not a magical node, so the wizard can’t just ritual up some rain) when a building shatters with the landing of a 4-5 ton creature, and it opens up its pipes, it’s golden eyes burning and it’s metal hide resonates with a roar (terrifying). Their charges scatter, the PC’s have to defy their own terror to attack the thing. They do negligible damage (yay 4 armor) for those that DO anything, and realize that the only person who has a shot at killing this is the armor-penetrating wizard spells. Unfortunately, so does the dragon. What ensues is horrific. One fighter takes up defensive position, when the dragon strikes it doesn’t just do 1d10+5 damage, it rips off his arm (messy remember?) and shreds mail like tissue paper. It does breath weapon attacks that cause ALL of them to defy danger or burn. The party breaks and runs. The dragon laughs and settles to ash the village and eat any survivors. The Dragon had 16 hit points. The party did 9 to it before they left. And when I said left, I mean they ran like rabbits into the night with few provisions, no easy means of recovering them, and no thoughts in their heads other than survival. The moral of the story is it’s not about the hitpoints. In my 4e game the party had a dozen dragon kills under their belt. The dragons were mechanically threatening, they were tricksy, they were tactical, but their claws and teeth didn’t do damage, they did numbers. After this session they explained that they had never been so scared of a monster. Make the fights epic. Use the fiction. Describe their skin curling black from fire. The bones shattering from the unyielding stone grasp of the earth elemental. Most fights clean up the fiction by saying you take 5 damage. Make it stick, make it hard to heal, make them scarred and battle hardened having earned every mark, and every wound a story. You don’t need 2500 hp to make a fight scary or hard.

"Their claws and teeth didn't do damage, they did numbers."

"Most fights clean up the fiction by saying you take 5 damage. Make it stick, make it hard to heal, make them scarred and battle hardened having earned every mark, and every wound a story."

The mechanics described here are from Dungeon World, but the principle can be applied to a variety of games. Remember, "hit points" aren't a measure of how alive you are; they are a measure of how many hits you can take and remain in the fight. You don't need a lot of hit points if everything about you makes it really fucking hard to land a hit on you. And, yeah, it should be really fucking hard to land a hit on a dragon. It's a dragon.

of course there are limits to what kinds of attacks a dragon can perform in-game but it’s fun to think about the actual horrifying possibilities of a dragon battle. like a dragon is a six-ton savagely intelligent flying murder machine with jaws like a steel trap and a voice that can shred you like tissue paper. nothing but your own agility and cunning is stopping that smug bastard from catching you in its claws, lifting you ten thousand feet in the air, and dropping you on a sharp rock like a gull trying to crack an oyster. even the wind from its wings is probably enough to knock you down. and it’s fast too! its scales are tough enough to blunt your sword! it’s got thousands of years of experience with killing noisy little tin-clad toothpick-wielding idiots like you! do you really want to fight that thing? alduin broke through a stone wall with his head

[bad-quail]

Please repost.

[scrumpyfan43]

I'm actually starting writing the "illegal skateboard delivery of fast food to cloistered lost civilizations" game I rolled up here

Possible character types currently include "radical 90s kid," "Burgerpants," "Burgerpants wearing a mascot costume," and "Mormon"

[prokopetz]

Hi, Mr Prokopetz, I'm a big fan. Apologies if you've answered this before, but I was wondering what software you use to create the pdf and epub layouts of your ttrpgs, and whether you'd recommend it to a hobbyist who wants to try putting together something more professional than a gdoc for their own ttrpg?

My workflow is unfortunately not terribly accessible unless you have a fair amount of technical know-how.

In brief, I write all of my games in Notepad++ as HTML documents, taking care to use only the subset of HTML5 tags which are supported by most popular EPUB readers. I then use Calibre (or, more, precisely, the command-line utility that comes with Calibre, though you can get mostly the same results via the GUI) to bundle the HTML document as an EPUB3 file. I typically distribute both the HTML and EPUB versions (the former in a zipfile with all of the fonts and images and such) because web browsers tend to have much better screen-reader support than EPUB apps do.

The PDF, meanwhile, is generated from the same master HTML document using CSS paged media extensions – the layout is all generated automatically based on rules specified in a big, gnarly CSS file, and is never touched by human hands. There are a number of software packages which can do this sort of CSS-driven HTML-to-PDF conversion, some of them free or open source; I use a commercial product called Prince because, to the best of my knowledge, it's the only such software which has out-of-the-box support for PDF/UA semantic tagging (i.e., the stuff you need to do in order to make your PDFs screen-reader friendly), but you have more options if you're willing to tag your PDFs manually. (I am not.)

As for whether I'd recommend doing it this way? Like I said, unless you're a proper gearhead, not really; it's super efficient once you get it all set up – the only version of the game I actually maintain is the master HTML document, and generating updated versions of all the other formats is a one-click affair – but it's really only feasible for me because I already knew how to all that workflow automation stuff for unrelated reasons. I can't imagine teaching yourself all that from scratch just to write elfgames!

[zedecksiew]

THE BLOGGIES 2023: FINALISTS

(If you just want to skip to the list of BLOGGIE finalists, scroll to the "Who Are The BLOGGIES?" section below.)

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WHAT ARE THE BLOGGIES?

Awards for some of the best tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) blog posts to come out in 2022. There will be five awards: Best Theory Blogpost, Best Gameable Blogpost, Best Advice Blogpost, Best Review Blogpost, and, the biggest one, Best Blogpost.

I won Best Blogpost, last year. So I am hosting the BLOGGIES, this year.

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WHY ARE THE BLOGGIES?

Blogs are worth celebrating. Barring the actual playing of actual games, they are our most fertile field, our most volatile laboratory. Longform, text-based, and informal---they are a place to jot down our most outre design ideas. Free and publicly available---they are a vector for open debate and serendipitous discourse. Perhaps most importantly: relatively free of algorithmic social-media pressures---they are the best chance we have at a cultural memory.

I got into TTRPGs because of blogs.

The BLOGGIES are, at best, an affirmation of the above. At least, they are a way to celebrate 64 excellent blog posts from the last year, and maybe get them in front of people who did not read them the first time.

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HOW ARE THE BLOGGIES?

Nominations: I put an open call for blog-post nominations on Christmas 2023; I also canvassed the TTRPG communities I am part of. Nominated posts had to be from between 1 December 2022 to 31 December 2023.

I closed the nomination period on 1 Jan 2024 with 149 blog posts for consideration. I read / re-read them all.

I chose a slate of 64 finalists, according to the following metrics, in order:

Enthusiasm---a post got multiple nominations;

Diversity---no one blog was allowed to be a finalist more than once in a category (except the Reviews category, where this rule was tied to individual writers, due to shared review blogs);

Notability---a post was extraordinary in presenting a novel idea, addressing an important subject, or reflecting a community current.

Obviously, that last metric is highly subjective, and limited to my knowledge and perspective in the scene. I did my best.

I will not have final final say. Finalists will go head to head, vying for to be anointed best of the best by ballot. The bracket was seeded in order of number of nominations received. The BLOGGIES await your vote, o TTRPG folx.

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WHEN ARE THE BLOGGIES?

Throughout January 2024! Voting is >>>NOW OPEN<<< on Google Forms according to the following schedule (I will link to the forms and result threads as I post them):

First Week January - THEORY

3 January: Round of 16

4 January: Round of 8

5 January: Round of 4

6 January: Quarterfinals (winners in category) - Results

Second Week January - GAMEABLE

10 January: Round of 16

11 January: Round of 8

12 January: Round of 4

13 January: Quarterfinals (winners in category) - Results

Third Week January - ADVICE

17 January: Round of 16

18 January: Round of 8

19 January: Round of 4

20 January: Quarterfinals (winners in category) - Results

Fourth Week January - REVIEW

24 January: Round of 16

25 January: Round of 8

26 January: Round of 4

27 January: Quarterfinals (winners in category) - Results

31 January - FINALS

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WHO ARE THE BLOGGIES?

Your BLOGGIES 2023 FINALISTS are (presented in bracket order):

(High-res version here)

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THEORY

🥉 (1) being a problem - playable orcs at the limits of humanity, from Majestic Fly Whisk Some deep thinking about the racialisation of the orc in elfgames, why mainstream fixes fall short, and ways to move beyond.

vs

(16) #132: Axes of Game Design, from The Indie RPG Newsletter An exploration of the design axes / spectrums on which every TTRPG may fall.

(8) The Genres the OSR Can't Do, from A Knight At The Opera Sketching the limits of the OSR playstyle by looking at genres which are too differently-bound for it to emulate.

vs

(9) RPG Transcript Analysis: Critical Role, from Trilemma Adventures Examining a style of play through transcript analysis (looking at what is actually being said during a session), with Critical Role as case study.

🥈 (5) Critical GLOG: Base Resolution Mechanics, from Goblin Punch A deep dive into dice and resolution mechanics, and what they do in practice.

vs

(12) My favorite problems, from Failure Tolerated A list of design problems in TTRPGs, and a case for game design and theory to be driven by problem-solving.

(4) Roleplay Is Folk Art, from Wizard Thief Fighter An impassioned call to consider TTRPGs as folk art as opposed to corpocratic walled-garden IPs.

vs

(13) ART, PRODUCT, BOARD GAMES AND MAUSRITTER, from Fail Forward Critique of reviews that accuse TTRPGs for being too slick; interrogating the assumptions behind the label “commercial”.

(6) Toolbox Design, from The Dododecahedron Considering the principles of designing TTRPGs like toolboxes, through the lens of Cairn RPG and similar.

vs

(11) Mario vs ActRaiser vs Final Fantasy vs Zelda - Types of Advancement in RPGs, from Rise Up Comus Identifying some general types of advancement in TTRPGs, using videogames as a comparative lens.

(3) Posters, Posers and POSR(s), from Prismatic Wasteland Relitigating whether the OSR is dead, and defining its successor, the Post-OSR.

vs

(14) psychosis is badly written in tabletop games, from paper cult “Attempting to mechanize something so intensely personal, different, and mutable as mental illness is complicated. I think that makes these depictions bad!”

(7) “Rules Elide” and Its Consequences, from Jared Considering the implications of the maxim that "a game is about X when you have rules for everything but X".

vs

(10) Models of High-Level Play, from Benign Brown Beast Loose but useful classifications for types of high-level play: domains; god-like play; etc.

🥇 (2) OSR Rules Families, from Traverse Fantasy Sketching the landscape of the OSR, how various systems function, and how their attributes cluster and trend together.

vs

(15) Moralising and manipulation in tabletop roleplaying games, from Playful Void The importance of having design preferences without tying these preferences to moral judgments.

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GAMEABLE

🥉 (1) Flux Space, from Papers & Pencils A point-crawl procedure specifically designed for labyrinths / dungeons that are architecturally confusing / samey.

vs

(16) Generating Elevation in a Hexcrawl, from Traveler's Rest Procedures and advice on how to generate a mountain-crawl: hiking-focused adventure geography.

(8) The Autumn of Summers, from False Machine God-monsters born of summer, the hunting culture around such beasts, and random tables to generate their attributes.

vs

(9) MIMICS, from Vaults Of Vaarn A spread of novel pretender-creatures, with ecological and social implications.

(5) Another take on demihumans as social constructs, from Cavegirl's Game Stuff What if we consider fantasy races not as separate species, but as differing social roles?

vs

(12) The Apocalypse Archive, from Bearded Devil An unfinished by exemplary #dungeon23 attempt that includes wonderful maps and soundtrack notes.

🥈 (4) Pointcrawling Character Creation, from Rise Up Comus A framework for tying character generation to a geography, generating history and familiarity with campaign locales.

vs

(13) how to be erased, from Straits Of Anian Procedures for getting lost and getting led astray, and the kith and spirits one meets in those places.

(6) Dungeon Skirmishing, from All Dead Generations Feature-complete skirmish combat mechanics for OD&D, and the design rationales thereof.

vs

(11) Zelda-Style NPC Personalities, from To Distant Lands A system of generating quick and punchy NPCs, inspired by the way Zelda videogames present NPCs.

(3) GULCH, from Mindstorm A starter town specifically designed for contemporary (horror, urban fantasy, non-fantasy) campaigns.

vs

(14) Down the Road: Local Situation Design, from Deeper In The Game A procedure for quickly generating a powderkeg situation in a local geography of play.

🥇 (7) Laws of the Land: meaningful terrain via in-fiction limits and conditions, from Was It Likely? A method to generate meaningful diegetic terrain and tone in an adventuring region.

vs

(10) False Equivalent Exchange, from The Graverobber's Guide A novel magic system, done in natural language, with discussion on how it could be used in play.

(2) Deeper Catacombs, from Benign Brown Beast Iteration notes and a presentation of a comprehensive dungeon tracking procedure.

vs

(15) Inadvisable Decisions (GLΔG), from The Nothic's Eye An evocative alienist character class, based on drawing the attention of alter-describable things from beyond.

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ADVICE

🥈 (1) How to Handle Parley as an OSR DM, from Goblin Punch Comprehensive notes on how to run non-combat encounters without resorting to boring rolls.

vs

(16) GM Pointers: Live-Text Games, from Shadow & Fae Good reminders on how to run live-text games better, so they are better coordinated and don't take forever.

(8) ONLY Roll Initiative, from Bastionland Considerations on how to adjudicate combats, if initiative were the only dice roll in a combat system.

vs

(9) Action Mysteries, from A Knight At The Opera Asserting that good TTRPGs mysteries involve action---not just figuring out the truth but opposing the antagonist's goals.

(5) Modular Ecology, from The Graverobber's Guide A practical approach to including gameable ecology in TTRPGs, by tying materials to specific locations and conditions of the world.

vs

(12) ULTIMATE ANIMIST MECHANIC: EVERYTHING IS A REACTION, from Alone In The Labyrinth How to run a game where all actions are resolved by reaction roll: everything in the world responds by how much they like you.

(4) Game Mastering Like A Park Ranger, from SILVERARM Advice about GM-ing, based on the real-world work experience of being a park ranger.

vs

(13) An OSR approach to Spotlight, from Permanent Cranial Damage The suggestion that intentionally spotlighting characters solves the real-life problem of spotlighting players nicely.

(6) #Dungeon23, from Win Conditions The idea that spawned a thousand notebook dungeons, plus salient advice on how to start / keep going.

vs

(11) The Storyteller Technique, from Possum Creek Games When writing TTRPGs, imagine your game text as a diegetic artefact in the world of the game.

�� (3) RANSACKING THE ROOM, from Mindstorm A simple and powerful three-step method to handle room-searching in games: inspect, search, and ransack.

vs

(14) Cairn Crash Course, from Widdershins Wanderings A masterclass example on how to write player guides to a game, for Cairn RPG.

(7) AN EXAMPLE OF FKR (NEAR-)DICELESS COMBAT (WITH COSMIC ORRERY!), from Underground Adventures Describing combat in a Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying (FKR) game, useful in understanding that playstyle.

vs

🥇 (10) Re-inventing the Wilderness: Part 1 - Introduction, from sachagoat Figuring out problems with wilderness exploration, and applying a mental-map framework from urban-theory academia.

(2) Dungeon Design, Process and Keys, from All Dead Generations A detailed process to designing and keying a traditional dungeon adventure.

vs

(15) THE D&D IN MY HEAD: In Only 6 Load-Bearing Numbers, from I Cast Light! Identifying the essential and minimum rules you need to remember, to run D&D.

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REVIEW

🥇 (1) An Empty Africa - PF2E's The Mwangi Expanse and the strange career of Black Atlanticism, from Majestic Fly Whisk A review of Pathfinder’s "The Mwangi Expanse", and a discussion of Black Atlanticism's fraught relationship with its sourcelands.

vs

(16) What Hull Breach Teaches Us, from Mazirian's Garden An assessment of the Mothership RPG third-party "Hull Breach" anthology as a "new standard for anthology companions".

(8) Grave Trespass - Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game, from Bones Of Contention A review of the Labyrinth RPG. It’s got all these things which are "bad" in RPGs, so why does it work?

vs

(9) The First Rumor Tables, Part 2: Caverns of Thracia or Caverns of Quasqueton?, from Tom Van Winkle's Return To Gaming An investigation into the origins of rumour tables in TTRPGs. Did TSR plagiarise Jaquays?

(5) Standing up for D&D's Gen X: 2e (Part 1), from Mythlands Of Erce A full-throated defense of D&D2E, viewing it in the context of its time and as a refinement over 1E.

vs

(12) Systemcrawl: Break!! RPG, from Widdershins Wanderings A review and system analysis of Break!! RPG, which marries JRPG and OSR inspirations.

(4) Dungeon Crawls in Cinema, from Directsun Games Evaluating several films on the basis of how well they function as dungeon crawls.

vs

(13) Reasonable Reviews, from Rise Up Comus A general overview of TTRPG reviews, and what may or may not make them useful.

(6) Deep Dive: A|STATE, from The Indie Game Reading Club A review of a|state, and how it builds on and departs from the Blades In The Dark formula.

vs

(11) I Read Cloud Empress, from Playful Void A review of Cloud Empress, the first descendant of the Mothership RPG ruleset.

🥈 (3) Plagiarism in Unconquered (2022), from Traverse Fantasy A forensic analysis of how Unconquered plagiarised Ultraviolet Grasslands and Vaults Of Vaarn.

vs

(14) Rod, Reel, & Fist (Review), from Benign Brown Beast A substantial review of Rod, Reel, & Fist, a "system-forward fishing simulation RPG".

(7) Pedantic Wasteland - Vampire Cruise, from Bones Of Contention A review of Vampire Cruise, a largely system-neutral horror-comedy adventure set at sea.

vs

(10) Dragon Magazine: Player Advice Collection Overview, from Attronarch Athenaeum A comprehensive read-through and rating of 143 Dragon Magazine advice articles.

(2) Spire: The Monstrosity of Empire, the Necessity of Violence, from A A Voigt A comparative-literature analysis of Spire RPG through R F Kuang’s spec-fic novel "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence".

vs

🥉 (15) MICROBLOG: CHILDREN'S BOOKS AND TABLETOP GAMES, from Fail Forward Considering the influence of children’s books on TTRPG designers and works like "Barkeep on the Borderlands".

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It is difficult to describe how hard it was for me to whittle down the list of nominees to these finalists. I consider each of these 64 a landmark in 2023's TTRPG thinkings, and the folks from which they issue essential reading, going forward. They already deserve a prize.

So here it is, dear bloggers: a hand-carved linocut "finalist's pin" graphic you are free to use on your sites / posts, should you wish:

(High-res downloadable version HERE)

Thank you for writing! And good luck in the coming rounds of voting!

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CORRECTION: A blog post from 2021 (Not All Crunch Is the Same, from A Knight At The Opera), was included in the soft-launch posting of this list. An error on the part of its nominator, compounded by a data-entry error on my part. It has since been replaced by a post from the same blog with the actual most nominations (The Genres the OSR Can't Do). I have also double-checked my lists and all finalists. Apologies for my error!

[farmergadda]

NEW BLOGPOST! Go to Hell! Literally, it's a Shortcut. Here's my proof of Concept for a Minecraft Nether Depthcrawl for OSR/POSR Elfgames, complete with the Nether Wastes Biome for your adventuring dis-pleasure!

[bad-quail]

How is this for a pitch?

The Basics

Plunderdark is a Dice Game for Heroic Adventures in a Late Medieval Dark Fantasy Anti-Canon Sandbox. It centers play around underdog Heroes pursuing their Convictions to make their grim and perilous world a better place.

Dark Fantasy

Imagine the world at the start of Willow or The Dark Crystal. The world is in the grip of an Evil Despot. The forces of Good, insofar as they exist, are in hiding or on the back foot. Foolhardy scholars collude with the powers of the Hidden World to work sinister sorceries. Remnants of past ages dot the countryside, promising wealth and fame to those who plumb their depths, and doom to those who linger too long in their hollows.

Late Medieval

Imagine our world in the decades preceding the Protestant Reformation and the invasion of the New World. Armored knights exist alongside castles and early firearms. The printing press is a new invention, allowing information to move and propagate faster than ever before. The progeny of conquerors and despots have grown fat on the exploitation of the common folk for nigh on a thousand years. Wealthy merchant adventurers exploit the trust of their common kin and the greed of the nobility they aspire to surpass to amass their own great fortunes.

Anti-Canon Sandbox

The Gamemaster is not solely responsible for defining the setting of play. The entire table collaborates to define the contours of the world, and creates Heroes invested in that world. Play is directed by the Heroes and their Convictions. The Gamemaster does not compose a plot, but provides opportunities and obstacles for the Heroes to pursue their Convictions.

[scrumpyfan43]

Me making big dumb tables that make something interesting, rather than actual games with mechanics and an intent to tell any kind of story

No offense but I think some of you would be a lot happier writing a fictional atlas or encyclopedia instead of a narrative story

[dankdungeonsrpg]

Thalassophobia

Nefarious Lich by Jerry Tiritilli

A little while ago I talked about FEAR mechanics, considering some ways we could adapt Mothership or ALIEN to our #elfgames.

I discussed a couple possible systems, preferring a d20 table.

So I Made It

I'm slowly but surely working my way through the manuscript for a Shadowdark setting guide. A greatly expanded version of something I did for an itch jam in '23.

Here's the rule from my previous post:

Any time a Character finds themself in a terrifying or desperate situation the GM may choose to have them gain 1d6 Stress Points. Track these points somewhere on the character sheet.

Whenever a Player makes a d20 roll, if their result is less than or equal to their current Stress they consult the Panic Table to see how their Character reacts.

Players may give their Character 1d6 Stress to gain ADV on their next roll.

Critical Failures always result in Panic.

Critical Success reduces total Character Stress by 1d6 points.

To make the roll table I looked to results from Mothership, ALIEN, and Call of Cthulhu.

forgive some really nasty justified text, put the layout together quickly

As you can probably tell from this table, it is effectively a heavily edited version of the Mothership list.

However I was really taken by results like Hysterics and Amnesia which appear in Call of Cthulhu, so I ran with those for the second half of my table. The idea is that the further you get in, the more the results show the mind reflexively protecting itself from what it's experiencing.

My only issue with this list is that not all results give clear role playing direction for the player. Suspicious or Persona can offer some great moments at the table, but Accursed not as much.

Something to think on.

Up Next...

The setting guide has all sorts of body horror in it, from the harm of living in an alien environment, to the strangeness of deep sea creatures, to bizarre arcane mutations.

I'm really excited to share those tables and associated rules!

[onslaughtsixdotcom]

Heartbreaker vs. Craphack

The difference between a heartbreaker and a craphack is, you think a heartbreaker will be finished.

I started using the word "craphack" a few months ago to talk about my in-progress fantasy d20 elfgame. (This is a separate project from CRAWL, which has entered a process of hibernation. Its no longer in active development.)

I had a lot of names for this thing. It really started when the OGL shit hit the fan and I was already seeing how affordable low-run booklet prints were. The idea of creating a booklet with a bunch of my house rules and favourite tables, and getting it printed, became a kind of cool idea. Simultaneously, WotC quickly jettisoned a bunch of the coolest ideas for 5e 2024. Initially I was like: well, let's compile those ideas and I'll make a home game out of what I liked.

I called this document 5e Killer. This stems from a phrase I said in early 2023: If you are a major TTRPG publisher and you aren't already working on your 5e Killer for release in Fall 2024, you're fucking up.

I am not a major TTRPG publisher. But why not do my own? At least for my home game.

Somewhere I got pissed at the limitations of "sticking to 5e." I also realized I was just tinkering with it. I did finish a version of this doc. We are playing my 5e game with it now. (I do not like the changes 2024 5e, or any other base ruleset, has implemented. I like this setup enough.)

But, this wasn't "done." Many core problems I had with 5e were still sort of there. Unsure of how to solve them, I backburnered it and began looking at other systems. Perhaps I would find someone else's heartbreaker and be able to modify that, or find a perfect beginning point I could launch out of.

I spent most of 2024 experimenting with other ideas and doing other projects, including converting my Dungeon23 megadungeon to OSE, writing it up, and running the Kickstarter. I spent a month and a half making an OSE house rules document and compilation in anticipation of printing that out, both for home use and convention play. While doing this I actually started to solidify some more ideas about what I liked and what I wanted out of...all of this.

While doing this, little bits and pieces have always come into focus. I now have a canonical equipment list for basically all fantasy games going forward. I have a d100 magic item list and I'm slowly working on d100 spells (although Skerples may yet beat me to the punch). And, I found Outcast Silver Raiders, a game I initially called my "forever game," about three weeks after I made my first document compiling info for the latest version of my craphack.

The craphack doesn't exist except in my head. There are like 8 versions of half formed thoughts, in Discord self-messages and Affinity Publisher projects and Google Docs. They are, if anything, a dialogue with myself, wherein I repeatedly ask: What do I want out of the game?

I like the idea of hit die as damage die; weapons shouldnt have variable damage.

I like the idea of saving throws existing separately from skill checks, existing separately from attack rolls.

I like having lots and lots of classes and ancestries. About 10 each is a sweet spot for me.

I like games where you always roll high to succeed. I am not a fan of roll under.

Likewise, I like the DM being able to set a difficulty class/target number for the player to hit, even on skill checks. Some doors are harder to open than others, some locks are harder to pick than others. (The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic exists and is brilliant, but I prefer to use it for situational bonuses: this is an objectively DC15 check but if you do a thing you can have advantage to maybe do it easier.)

I like monsters having simpler statblocks than players do, with their primary stats being hit die and number, AC, and what they can do on their combat turn. I can make them do anything I want outside of that. I'm the DM.

Somewhere I have a table of every monster "type" and their average 5e stats and I want to expand on that to create basically a monster Rosetta stone for this game, combined with established and working power sets, so that I could easily create monsters on the fly during sessions without having to prep them.

I don't mind even the most mundane classes (like fighter and thief) having a few "special abilities," like 5e Action Surge or whatever. But IMO 5e gives you far too many of these, and worse, has too many options. (For my "forever game," I don't think I want subclasses.)

I like OSR vibes for mechanics, but people played heroic games with these same systems for 15 years, and anyone who says otherwise is fucking kidding themselves.

I like and use miniatures but also sometimes use theater of the mind for some encounters, especially against solo non-boss monsters. The system should easily support both.

I like individual initiative. I think there's still some improvement on my "everyone rolls a d6, if the monster beats any players they roll first, btw lower is better" system. I also wish I could use the Initiative Clock but I think it's a little too fiddly.

We don't need bonus actions or minor actions or anything like that. Too much design. You can move and do one other thing.

I like having a defined list of spells and at least semi-Vancian magic with spell slots. I am open to not having spell slots, but spellcasters should still pick from a list of pre-defined spells. No Knave, Cairn, bastards.-style "combine these random words to make a vague spell and work with the DM to figure out what it does" nonsense.

It's REALLY easy to see where all of these ideas sort of overlap and become relevant to how I imagine playing the game and the flow state that I desire. It's rules that don't get in the way and give all players an equal amount of cool shit they can do on their turn besides attacking. It's also easy to see how many games are outright thrown out by what I am imagining: no Cairn, Knave, OSE, Shadowdark, 5e, Five Torches Deep, etc. etc. (The only one that actually does hit the mark is, appropriately, Outcast Silver Raiders.)

So, where does this all coalesce? As I move around pieces and think about this, it might never coalesce. When I was on Take Flight, Cat and I talked about the idea that you might never finish The System, and That's Okay. It can be the old car that your dad tinkers with in the garage every other weekend and says, one day I'll get it all fixed up, I swear. It's his hobby, the same way game design can be your hobby--even if you are also a professional game designer with other projects that definitely are moving forward, being published, that you're doing the work on.

But my craphack exists and I swear one day I'm definitely gonna finish it, for sure.

[quajzen]

Resolution "Mechanics"

Some D&D resolution "mechanics" that reflect what you are resolving. No dice! All player skill, taken to extreme. Not written with a specific edition/game in mind.

Inspired by the stopwatch post at Dreaming Dragonslayer.

1. Dexterity/reaction check: play Red Hands 3 rounds, if the player escapes a slap 2 times you succeed.

2. Strength check: Arm wrestle your GM. Player win means check succeeds.

3. Charisma/Persuasion check: straight face contest. Persuading party (player or GM) must make their character's request in the most funny way possible. Check successful if straight face is broken. What can be done as part of the persuasion is up to your table.

4. Constitution check: GM sets a number of shots of a liquor of their choice. Finishing all the shots with a straight face/no complaints means a successful check. Gets more fun as the session goes on!

5. Wisdom/perception check: staring contest with GM. GM blinks first means check successful.

6. Intelligence check: Best of 3 rounds of rock paper scissors against the GM. You gotta out think your opponent!

7. Disarm traps/Pick locks check: solve a physical puzzle of some sort: blacksmith puzzle/Rubik's cube type of thing. This could be capped in duration for binary success/failure, timed to see how long in-game it takes, or be made a group puzzle.

8. Medicine check/bind wounds: set a fast metronome and play, using a blunt object, that game where you tap in between the player's outstretched fingers really fast (forget what it's called, see gif below but DON'T USE A KNIFE). Similar to 7, can be made binary resolution or a degree of success. You could increase the metronome 10 bpm every 30 seconds and see how many 30 second intervals are completed without a mistake, then have a rule on how to convert that to healing.

Overall, I think these are fun. They really make player skill not just a knowledge thing, but literally physical skills. It also allows real life downtime actions: become a speed cuber to waltz through a trap dungeon. Will almost certainly need a mixup after a while, whether increasing difficulty or providing different mechanics for diegetically different challenges (different lock mechanisms may require different size Rubik's cubes).

Any others?

[plunderpress]

But first you have to gently break it to them that other games do actually exist.

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

[petterwass]

It will never not be funny to me that my workplace computer blocks pretty much every non-news site I could use to waste time: I can't go on RPG.NET to discuss elfgames, I can't go on Goonhammer to get articles on tabletop gaming, but it does NOT block Ao3! So I can, and indeed have spent entire surgeries reading fanfics about my blorbos :)

[fantasyfantasygames]

MiDDDle Space

MiDDDle Space, Stacked Studios, 2002

@identityuniverse sent me a copy of this and I would like to return it please.

The map of Middle-Earth is, as many fantasy maps are, roughly page-sized. It fades out near the edges of its flat world. It is extremely rare for someone working with Middle-Earth to fill in the least bit of that blank space. This game does it in a very unusual manner: it fills that blank space with outer space. It's a little bit Spelljammer, but it's more Starfinder. Elves and Ewarves and even the occasional Ent colony in space, with big ol' spaceships.

"But why the weird spelling?" you may be asking. Well, that's because it's a cross of Tolkien and extremely horny 90's cult TV show Lexx. You know. DDD like a bra size.

Which also explains the name of the game studio.

The setting doesn't bother explaining how anyone got into space or talking about that obviously-Middle-Earth-shaped postage stamp in the corner. It's all about "planet of the Warriors of Men" and "planet of the Dwarven smiths" and "ice planet of the Elven sex clothiers". I like the "Forest Asteroid of the Ents" but that might be more because I love space-forest stuff and Ents. NPCs are bog-standard stock characters who also want to bone.

The rules look kind of like they started off as Rolemaster (MERP, really) hack before shifting over to d20. It uses some custom classes to cover things like the Animist, Mentalist, Mystic, etc. It has plenty of critical hit/fail tables. It ports in some MERP skills directly, overwriting some d20 skills with them. There are places that refer to MERP mechanics like Maneuver rolls, which were not ported in. It's mostly playable if you're willing to do a fair amount of house-ruling.

You have a choice of five ships, with build-your-own ships in a supplement that's "coming soon" (it is not). One of the ships is very Lexx-looking, with the insectoid feel and the phallic look. It's very powerful and extremely unmaneuverable. You can also get a Spelljammer-like galleon with sails and everything, one that looks like an Elven Armada vessel, a vaguely Millennium-Falcon-like ship, or you can each get your own small ship to flit around in. I kinda like that last option. There is never any crew; the ship flies fine with just however many PCs you have. Regardless of which ship you pick, you're going to have a very rock-paper-scissors setup against other vessels and utter domination against anything ground-based.

The art is halfway between Elfquest and Dr. Voluptua. It's all greyscale. I do kinda like that you can see the artist improve in their anatomy and backgrounds over the course of the few years it took to create the game. It does not have a fun-and-sexy sense of humor, and the game plays things straight in multiple senses.

Honestly the thing that makes me unhappy about this game is that it's lazy. If you want to make a horny elfgame (or a horny-elf game), you do you. There are plenty of them out there, another one is fine. But don't make it a knockoff of two or three different IPs, with mechanics from two more, and nothing in it that really provides commentary on any of the above. Do something different or do satire, don't just push out content.

MiDDDle Space was swamped in the d20 tsunami. There were only about 200 copies made in the first place, so it's a bit of a collector's item in some corners.

[thydungeongal]

A lot of people replying to my post about not needing to write a detailed background for your RPG characters are genuinely missing the point with their replies of "well, it really is a matter of taste." In modern TTRPG culture, especially on the D&D side of things, the idea of characters needing deep and expansive backstories to grant them legitimacy and to give the GM material to hook the players with is normalized, and the point of the post isn't that expansive character backstories are necessarily bad, but the idea that characters need them to be legitimate is false. As a player, bringing a blank slate character to the table and discovering who they are through play is perfectly fine.

Also, while I do think it's good of the GM to prep material that players will want to engage with, it should be a two-way street: players should show up to the game with a willingness to engage with the GM's prep. Not everything the GM preps needs to be tailored specifically for the player characters (and to be truthful: the idea that there is stuff going on in the fiction that may not interest the player characters at all but that is still going on in the background can make the narrative feel more organic and make players more engaged with the fiction.

And also this does apply to GMs as well: the player who doesn't want to write an extended lore document for you to read is fine, but conversely you don't have to write a long lore document to clue your players into the world. It is perfectly fine to have your players and their characters discover your setting through play. It's fine.

If you enjoy worldbuilding that's fine, if you enjoy writing character backstories, that also is fine, but also not giving your fellow players homework should also be uncontroversially fine and you shouldn't be required to do homework to grant legitimacy to your elfgames.