#it was technically a different rpg system

[thejesterconcept]

Cannot stress enough how awkward it is pulling up to the first campaign with the besties, only to discover I'm the ONLY ONE that invested in dragons as to read and scower through everything for them. Thought it was universal

[eelslippers]

It's that type of night. (The session is also starting literally now.)

[sprintingowl]

Deadball

Deadball Second Edition is a platinum bestseller on DrivethruRPG. This means it's in the top 2% of all products on the site. Its back cover has an endorsement from Sports Illustrated Kids.

It's also not an rpg I'd heard about until I discovered all of these facts one after another.

I was raised in a profoundly anti-sports household. My father would say stuff like "sports is for people who can't think" and "there's no point in exercising, everything in your body goes away eventually." So I didn't learn really any of the rules of the more popular American sports until I was in my mid twenties, and I've been to two ballgames in my life. I appreciate the enthusiasm that people have for sports, but it's in the same way that I appreciate anyone talking about their specific fandom.

One of the things that struck me reading Deadball was its sense of reverence for the sport. Its language isn't flowery. It's plain and technical and smart. But its love for baseball radiates off of the pages. Not like a blind adoration. But like when a dog sits with you on the porch.

For folks familiar with indie rpgs, there's a tone throughout the book that feels OSR. Deadball doesn't claim to be a precise simulation or a baseball wargame or anything like that---instead it lays out a bunch of rules and then encourages you to treat them like a recipe, adjusting to your taste. And it does this *while* being a detailed simulation that skirts the line of wargaming, which is an extremely OSR thing to do.

For folks not familiar with baseball, Deadball starts off assuming you know nothing and it explains the core rules of the sport before trying to pin dice and mechanics onto anything. It also explains baseball notation (which I was not able to decipher) and it uses this notation to track a play-by-play report of each game. Following this is an example of play and---in a move I think more rpgs should steal from---it has you play out a few rounds of this example of play. Again, this is all before it's really had a section explaining its rules.

In terms of characters and stats, Deadball is a detailed game. You can play modern or early 1900s baseball, and players can be of any gender on the same team, so there's a sort of alt history flavor to the whole experience, but there's also an intricate dice roll for every at bat and a full list of complex baseball feats that any character can have alongside their normal baseball stats. Plus there's a full table for oddities (things not normally covered by the rules of baseball, such as a raccoon straying onto the field and attacking a pitcher,) and a whole fatigue system for pitchers that contributes a strong sense of momentum to the game.

Deadball is also as much about franchises as it is about individual games, and you can also scout players, trade players, track injuries, track aging, appoint managers of different temperaments, rest pitchers in between games, etc.

For fans of specific athletes, Deadball includes rules for creating players, for playing in different eras, for adapting historical greats into one massively achronological superteam, and for playing through two different campaigns---one in a 2020s that wasn't and one in the 1910s.

There's also thankfully a simplified single roll you can use to abstract an entire game, allowing you to speed through seasons and potentially take a franchise far into the future. Finances and concession sales and things like that aren't tracked, but Deadball has already had a few expansions and a second edition, so this might be its next frontier.

Overall, my takeaway from Deadball is that it's a heck of a game. It's a remarkably detailed single or multiplayer simulation that I think might work really well for play-by-post (you could get a few friends to form a league and have a whole discord about it,) and it could certainly be used to generate some Blaseball if you start tweaking the rules as you play and never stop.

It's also an interesting read from a purely rpg design perspective. Deadball recognizes that its rules have the potential to be a little overbearing and so it puts in lots of little checks against that. It also keeps its more complex systems from sprawling out of control by trying to pack as much information as possible into a single dice roll.

For someone like me who has zero background in baseball, I don't think I'd properly play Deadball unless I had a bunch of friends who were into it and I could ride along with that enthusiasm. However as a designer I like the book a lot, and I'm putting it on my shelf of rpgs that have been formative for me, alongside Into The Odd, Monsterhearts, Mausritter, and Transit.

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Ryuutama

A treat for the Dragon likers in our audience, wait til Warrenguard for some more though

Genre: Exploration! Touchstones: Ghibli Films, Trail of Oregon (not ACTUALLY but its a good comparison point)

What is this game?: Ryuutama is a game about travelling... somewhere! you're not big damn heroes though, just merchants and artisans

How's the gameplay?: Ryuutama uses a system where skill checks will most of the time use two dice and two skills, so for example chopping down a tree might be [Str + Dex], then you add those two numbers together + Your mod in each respective skill to get your final number! at times you might also need to use different dice sizes, for example a d8 and a d4, and sometimes you'll only roll one die, those are very difficult checks. Character creation is a breeze! Choose a class (from options like Minstrel, Noble, Farmer, or Merchant), a Style (from Magic/Attack/Technical), Stats, your preferred weapon, a personal item, and minor details, thats it! The interesting part of Ryuutama is of course, the GM, you see the GM is playing a character throughout the campaign as well as narrating everything, this character is the Ryuujin, a powerful dragon that can assume a less threatening form in order to approach the party, as well as a humanoid form with horns, dragons have an Artifact (A major gameplay modification) and a list of Benedictions (Powerful effects that change the rules for one session) and Reveils (Powerful abilities that immediately have some sort of effect)

What's the setting (If any) like?: The setting is created by the GMs and Players working together, though high fantasy is expected!

What's the tone?: Ryuutama is a laid back, chill game... well mostly, a Crimson dragon GM or Black Dragon GM can change the game's tone widely, changing it to either a combat focused game (not recommended, the combat's p light) or a dark intrigue game

Session length: 1-3 hours! Ryuutama's built for shorter sessions

Number of Players: 3-5 players, including the GM

Malleability: Pretty low, there's no real setting but you wanna keep it in High Fantasy ville for the most part

Resources: Ryuutama is actually a pretty big game, so theres some resources if you're willing to look, character sheets, mood playlists, supplements, all available and translated

Ryuutama is a chill, pleasant walk through a world of magic and monsters, you'll need to fight sometimes, but the challenges in the world mostly come from yourselves and the world around you, its a cute game!

[felassan]

New article from IGN: 'How Dragon Age: The Veilguard Used Lessons From The Sims to Craft Its Character Creator and More'

Inside the intricate systems that bring BioWare's RPG to life.

"Corinne Busche wasn’t looking for a job when she sat down for lunch with BioWare’s leadership team in 2019. She had been a fan of BioWare’s games since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, and she wanted to, in her words, “meet my heroes.” “So I went to lunch with a couple of folks in the leadership team at BioWare, and we started riffing about progression systems and skill trees and economies, and we just really resonated with one another,” Busche remembers. “And much to my surprise, they expressed an interest in me joining, and it was kind of the question you don't have to ask me twice. That was such a dream opportunity, and to be able to step in this space, visit the studio, see my favorite characters on display throughout the walls, I was immediately sold. Immediately.” Busche was coming off a stint at Maxis, where she helped design the systems on various The Sims projects. In taking the helm of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, she became part of a wider talent pipeline flowing from Maxis to other parts of the games industry. It’s a pipeline that includes the likes of Eric Holmberg-Weidler, who was credited with fine-tuning many of the systems that comprised The Sims 4 before spearheading the Professions revamp in World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion. Justin Camden, who also worked on The Sims, is one of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s technical designers."

"Systematic discovery At first blush, it might not seem like The Sims has much in common with an RPG like Dragon Age outside the fact that they both feature romance in some way. Going back to its release in 2000, The Sims has garnered a reputation as a casual, frequently silly lifestyle simulator; the game where you remove a ladder from a swimming pool and watch your poor little Sims drown. Under the hood, though, The Sims is a complex web of systems, progression and relationships. Sims have jobs. They gain skills. They fall in love. “Maxis is a great place for designers to hone their skills,” Busche says. “There are many projects across differing platforms and service models happening simultaneously which give a rare opportunity for a breadth of experience. What people may not realize about the Sims, given its playful outward nature, is the underlying systems and mechanics are deceptively deep – especially as a dev. One of the more interesting parts of coming up through Maxis as a designer is the experience you get with simulation, emergent gameplay, and emotionally relatable player experiences. It’s just a really unique opportunity being a part of these teams, and those are skillsets that can benefit a number of different games and genres.” Busche’s systems design background is evident throughout The Veilguard. It includes extensive skill trees, with sub-classes that are geared around different weapon types and styles of play, and the choices you make also resonate deeply throughout the story. It’s also possible to level up your relationship with individual factions and shopkeepers, which in turn opens up new possibilities for acquiring unique gear, and characters bear long-lasting scars depending on the choices you make. Systems are layered throughout Dragon Age, deepening the player’s intertwined connection with the world and the characters that inhabit it. “What's so wonderful about [The Sims] is there's so much autonomy in that game, and we find that RPG players are hungry for that same sense of autonomy, making decisions, influencing characters. And what you might not realize in the Sims is behind the scenes, there are some really robust progression systems, game economies, character behaviors for their own AI and autonomy… a lot of really fascinating parallels,” Busche says. “So in that regard, I'm very grateful to my time there, being able to take some of those learnings, whether it's about how to convey romantic progression to the player, or design skill progression, game pacing, a lot of really interesting transferable ideas that you might not think about on the surface." In The Sims, characters go through their daily lives in an idealized world filled with strange but charming characters like Bonehilda (Dragon Age, it should be mentioned, has its own living skeleton in Manfred). While Dragon Age’s characters are still bound by the demands of the story, BioWare goes out of its way to make them seem more alive. As we talk about in our hands-on preview that went up last week, Dragon Age is filled with little messages noting how, for instance, you “traded verbal jabs” with Solas. As we’ll go into in a future article, both platonic and romantic relationships are a big part of how characters grow in Dragon Age. And of course, as anyone who has played a BioWare or Sims game knows, both games have their share of woohooing."

"How Dragon Age learned from The Sims' character creator Ultimately, though, it’s the character creator where the resemblance between the two is the most apparent. Dragon Age’s character creator is extensive, allowing players to adjust physical characteristics including chest size, the crookedness of a character’s nose, and whether or not their eyes are bloodshot, among other features. While custom characters are a time-honored BioWare tradition going back to the days of Baldur’s Gate, The Veilguard draws from the lessons of The Sims in everything from body customization to the flow of the user interface. Cross-pollination like this is common within EA, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard borrows from plenty of other sources as well. That incredible hair technology, for example, got its start within EA’s sports games, meaning your Rook can have a luscious mane like Lionel Messi. But the character creator is perhaps the greatest inflection point between Dragon Age and The Sims. “Character creators are extremely complex, and in many ways even more personal. It’s so important that players feel they can be represented and feel pride in that representation as they go through the creation process,” Busche says. “In particular, I remember we were struggling with some of our iconography, and we turned to each other and said ‘how did The Sims 4 handle this?’ While the technology and UI is quite a bit different, the underlying goals and lessons were quite similar.” She adds that Maxis has a “tremendous wealth of knowledge when it comes to representing gender, identity, and the surprising number of localization issues that come along with that when you’re releasing in different regions and languages.” “It’s always nice when you can draw from that prior experience. See what worked, what didn’t, and how expectations have evolved. The fun part is now we get to pay that forward and have been sharing our knowledge with other teams,” Busche says. On a moment-to-moment basis, of course, The Sims and Dragon Age are two very different games with very different goals. One is a single-player action RPG, the other a lifestyle sim. As studios, too, BioWare and Maxis are in very different places right now. The Sims has been a powerhouse franchise for more than two decades, and EA is seeking to expand its reach with a new movie. BioWare, meanwhile, is seeking to rebuild after stumbling badly with Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda. But when creator Will Wright first decided to focus on the people inhabiting his games, the world he crafted wasn’t too dissimilar from the one found in Dragon Age. Both use unique systems to create reactive, imaginative worlds full of interesting choices, filled with characters with their own inner lives. It’s a philosophy that’s always been part of BioWare’s legacy; now, in The Veilguard, it finally gets to be on full display once again. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on October 31. Make sure to keep an eye on IGN all this month as our IGN First coverage continues."

[source]

[jennamoran]

The Far Roofs: Systems

Hi!

Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. More specifically, I want to give a general overview of its game mechanics!

So the idea that first started the Far Roofs on the road to being its own game came out of me thinking a lot about what large projects feel like.

I was in one of those moods where I felt like the important thing in an RPG system was the parallel between that system and real-world experience. Where I felt like the key to art was always thinking about the end goal, or at least a local goal, as one did the work; and, the key to design was symmetry between the goals and methods, the means and ends.

I don't always feel that way, but it's how I work when I'm feeling both ambitious and technical.

So what I wanted to do was come up with an RPG mechanic that was really like the thing it was simulating:

Finding answers. Solving problems. Doing big things.

And it struck me that what that felt like, really, was a bit like ...

You get pieces over time. You wiggle them around. You try to fit them together. Sometimes, they fit together into larger pieces and then eventually a whole. Sometimes you just collect them and wiggle them around until suddenly there's an insight, an oh!, and you now know everything works.

The ideal thing to do here would probably be having a bag of widgets that can fit together in different ways---not as universally as Legos or whatever, but, like, gears and connectors and springs and motors and whatever. If I were going to be building a computer game I would probably think along those lines, anyway. You'd go to your screen of bits and bobs and move them around with your mouse until it hooked together into something that you liked.

... that's not really feasible for a tabletop RPG, though, at least, not with my typical financial resources. I could probably swing making that kind of thing, finding a 3d printing or woodworking partner or something to make the pieces, for the final kickstarter, but I don't have the resources to make a bunch of different physical object sets over time while I'm playtesting.

So the way I decided that I could implement this was by drawing letter tiles.

That I could do a system where you'd draw letter tiles ... not constantly, not specifically when you were working, but over time; in the moments, most of all, that could give you insight or progress.

Then, at some point, you'd have enough of them.

You'd see a word.

That word'd be your answer.

... not necessarily the word itself, but, like, what the word means to you and what the answer means to you, those would be the same.

The word would be a symbol for the answer that you've found, as a player and a character.

(The leftover letters would then stick around in your hand, bits of thought and experience that didn't directly lead to a solution there, but might help with something else later on.)

Anyway, I figured that this basic idea was feasible because, like, lots of people own Scrabble sets. Even if you don't, they're easier to find than sets of dice!

For a short indie game focused on just that this would probably have been enough of a mechanic all on its own. For a large release, though, the game needed more.

After thinking about it I decided that what it wanted was two more core resolution systems:

One, for stuff like, say ... kickstarter results ... where you're more interested in "how well did this do?" or "how good of an answer is this?" than in whether those results better fit AXLOTL or TEXTUAL. For this, I added cards, which you draw like letter tiles and combine into poker hands. A face card is probably enough for a baseline success, a pair of Kings would make the results rather exciting, and a royal flush result would smash records.

The other core system was for like ... everyday stuff. For starting a campfire or jumping a gap. That, by established RPG tradition, would use dice.

...

I guess technically it didn't have to; I mean, like, most of my games have been diceless, and in fact we've gotten to a point in the hobby where that's just "sort of unusual" instead of actually rare.

But, like, I like dice. I do. If I don't use them often, it's because I don't like the empty page of where to start in the first place building a bespoke diced system when I have so many good diceless systems right there.

... this time, though, I decided to just go for it.

--

The Dice System

So a long, long time ago I was working on a game called the Weapons of the Gods RPG. Eos Press had brought me in to do the setting, and somewhere in the middle of that endeavor, the game lost its system.

I only ever heard Eos' side of this, and these days I tend to take Eos' claims with a grain of salt ... but, my best guess is that all this stuff did happen, just, with a little more context that I don't and might not ever know?

Anyway, as best as I remember, the first writer they had doing their system quit midway through development. So they brought in a newer team to do the system, and halfway through that the team decided they'd have more fun using the system for their own game, and instead wrote up a quick alternate system for Weapons of the Gods to use.

This would have been fine if the alternate system were any good, but it was ... pretty obviously a quick kludge. It was ...

I think the best word for it would be "bad."

I don't even like the system they took away to be their own game, but at least I could believe that it was constructed with love. It was janky but like in a heartfelt way.

The replacement system was more the kind of thing where if you stepped in it you'd need a new pair of shoes.

It upset me.

It upset me, and so, full wroth, I decided to write a system to use for the game.

Now, I'd never done a diced system before at that point. My only solo game had been Nobilis. So I took a bunch of dice and started rolling them, to see ... like ... what the most fun way of reading them was.

Where I landed, ultimately, was looking for matches.

The core system for Weapons of the Gods was basically, roll some number of d10s, and if you got 3 4s, that was a 34. If you got 2 9s, that was a 29. If your best die was a 7 and you had no pairs at all, you got 1 7. 17.

It didn't have any really amazing statistical properties, but the act of rolling was fun. It was rhythmic, you know, you'd see 3 4s and putting them together into 34 was a tiny tiny dopamine shot at the cost of basically zero brain effort. It was pattern recognition, which the brain tends to enjoy.

I mean, obviously, it would pall in a few minutes if you just sat there rolling the dice for no reason ... but, as far as dice rolling goes, it was fun.

So when I went to do an optional diced system for the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, years later, to post here on tumblr ... I already knew what would make that roll fun. That is, rolling a handful of dice and looking for matches.

What about making it even more fun?

... well, critical results are fun, so what about adding them and aiming to have a lot of them, though still like rare enough to surprise?

It made sense to me to call no matches at all a critical failure, and a triple a critical success. So I started fiddling with dice pool size to get the numbers where I wanted them.

I'm reconstructing a bit at this point, but I imagine that I hit 6d10 and was like: "these are roughly the right odds, but this is one too many dice to look at quickly on the table, and I don't like that critical failure would be a bit more common than crit success."

So after some wrestling with things I wound up with a dice pool of 5d6, which is the dice pool I'm still using today.

If you roll 5d6, you'll probably get a pair. But now and then, you'll get a triple (or more!) My combinatorics is rusty, so I might have missed a case, but, like ... 17% of the time, triples, quadruples, or quintuples? And around 9% chance, for no matches at all?

I think I was probably looking for 15% and 10%, that those were likely my optimum, but ... well, 5d6 comes pretty close. Roughly 25% total was about as far as I thought I could push critical results while still having them feel kind or rare. Like ...

If I'm rolling a d20 in a D&D-like system, and if I'm going to succeed on an 18+, that's around when success is exciting, right? Maybe 17+, though that's pushing it? So we want to fall in the 15-20% range for a "special good roll." And people have been playing for a very long time now with the 5% chance of a "1" as a "special bad roll," and that seemed fine, so, like, 20-25% chance total is good.

And like ...

People talk a lot about Rolemaster crit fail tables in my vicinity, and complain about the whiff fests you see in some games where you keep rolling and rolling and nothing good or bad actually happens, and so I was naturally drawn to pushing crit failure odds a bit higher than you see in a d20-type game.

Now, one way people in indie circles tend to address "whiff fests" is by rethinking the whole dice-rolling ... paradigm ... so you never whiff; setting things up, in short, so that every roll means something, and every success and failure mean something too.

It's a leaner, richer way of doing things than you see in, say, D&D.

... I just didn't feel like it, here, because the whole point of things was to make dice rolling fun. I wanted people coming out of traditional games to be able to just pick up the dice and say "I'm rolling for this!" because the roll would be fun. Because consulting the dice oracle here, would be fun.

So in the end, that was the heart of it:

A 5d6 roll, focusing on the ease of counting matches and the high but not exorbitant frequency of special results.

But at the same time ...

I'm indie enough that I do really like rolls where, you know, every outcome is meaningful. Where you roll, and there's never a "whiff," just a set of possible meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the time, where I'm leaning into "rolls are fun, go ahead and roll," what it means to succeed, to fail, to crit, all that's up to the group, and sometimes it'll be unsatisfying. Other times, you'll crit succeed or crit fail and the GM will give you basically the exact same result as you'd have gotten on a regular success or failure, just, you know, jazzing up the description a bit with more narrative weight.

But I did manage to pull out about a third of the rolls you'll wind up actually making and assign strong mechanical and narrative weight to each outcome. Where what you were doing was well enough defined in the system that I could add some real meat to those crits, and even regular success and regular failure.

... though that's a story, I think, to be told some other time. ^_^

[theinstagrahame]

It's a bad day, and I've been dragging my heels on this. But, I got a bunch of neat new TTRPG stuff in October, so here's what landed in my mailbox.

Break!! - A few years ago, I stumbled on some art on Twitter. It was fun, it was vibrant, and it felt inviting. I wanted to know more, looked into the artist, and discovered it was spot art for an upcoming RPG called Break!! So, I kept an eye on it. The book is beautiful, well laid-out, and really cool, so maybe one good thing came from Twitter*.

The Electric State - Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood have been pretty high on my "To Play" lists for years. A follow-up, set in a similar (or the same?) world was kind of an instant pickup. Not as interested in the movie, but the game seems pretty rad.

The Geologist's Primer - I picked up the Herbalist's Primer when it came out, and was really impressed with the quality and care that went into it, so when I saw "That but for rocks" was in the works, I was definitely already in. Also excited for the follow up "Mushrooms next time".

Starkhollow Hall - I accidentally fell into a Gothic Fiction kick over Spooky Month, so the timing of this was perfect. I don't know a ton about the GUMSHOE system, but I do feel like what I know about it makes it a perfect fit for the genre. Gothic heroines (and I guess heroes) are at their best when they know there's a dangerous mystery at the heart of what's happening around them, and go looking for it anyway.

Forsaken - Kyle Tam is, honestly, a designer to watch. I picked this up because it was part of an Afterthought Committee project, which is a team I've also really enjoyed work from (my game Water Landing is built off of their game Cast Away). Does a better job of establishing a sort of grimdark/Soulsbourne vibe than some stuff that explicitly tries to.

Iron Edda Reforged - The pitch for this caught me immediately: Cyberpunk Norse Mythology. Tracy Barnett is another Designer to Watch, and I really like all of their stuff--haven't played the original Iron Edda, but have heard it on Party of One and really dug it. Was really hyped to see this come into being.

Electrum Archive v2 - I went through a Weird Sci-Fi phase this year, and the original Electrum Archive was an early pick for it. I really loved the world, the way each class worked differently, and the magic/currency/MacGuffin that it used. Obviously I wanted more, because the second book is here.

Alice is Missing - Silent Falls - My friends and I have been talking about the prospect of another Alice is Missing game since playing the first one about two years ago. It was a really memorable experience, partly due to the game's really compelling design, and to some of the in-moment decisions we made (I played the facilitator character, who starts the game having returned after a long absence, and another player immediately got pissed at them for sorta abandoning the group. it created an interesting play dynamic for the whole session)

Kill Him Faster - I picked up a previous Kovidae Games book as a lark: a collection of exercise-based RPGs. I nearly ignored their other stuff, but this had a pretty compelling pitch: What if time-travel was invented mostly so people could speedrun murdering Hitler. Since Eat the Reich came out, I've thought a bit about Hitler Revenge Fantasy as a genre, and honestly, I'm kinda into it. He was a loser, and deserves to be reduced to a video game villain and killed over and over again; so, yeah. Let's kill him faster next time.

Splat (issue 5) - I'm not usually one for essays and interviews, but this is a zine featuring and by some folks I really like and respect, and this one is packed with thoughts about the state of the indie TTRPG scene and industry from a diverse and immensely talented group. It's honestly a must-read.

(Already getting a few things for the next edition, but also feeling too garbage after the Clusterfuck Election to think about doing anything else today...)

---

footnote: * Technically, two good things came from Twitter. I also once expressed sorrow that I'd missed out on a limited T-shirt from a web comic artist that said "Sorry, Glenn, the only Beck I listen to has two turntables and a microphone", and the creator saw it and had an extra in my size.

[thydungeongal]

Do you have a game suggestion for someone who wants to run a ttrpg with just 2 or 3 other friends, with a custom plot and world, with lots of room for improvisation, MUCH more focus on plot / exploration than combat, and minimal pre-session setup for the DM? I've played D&D as both player and DM, but it doesn't suit my purposes. I know from following you that there are a whole world of other options, but I'm unsure where to begin looking.

Hmmm, this is a very broad and I'm not exactly a fan of positioning plot as distinct from combat (in many narratives combat is very much a part of the plot and actually drives the narrative!). But I'll let that go and focus on the meat or the ask. What you clearly want is a light engine that is easy to improvise with on the fly and that will be easily adaptable to multiple different settings.

There are lots of what I would class as this type of rules light setting neutral engines and many of them are explicitly portrayed as toolkits for building your own games in. Caltrop Core is a classic: technically it's just a system reference for a d4-based toolkit for building your own games, but it has some guidance for actually building your own game.

For something that requires a bit less assembly there's always RISUS, a simple RPG meant for somewhat comedic games but with a surprising amount of tech built around it. The main game is free and there's a RISUS Companion available for ten bucks which extrapolates a bunch of new ideas out of its solid simple core. Setting neutral, minimal prep, the perfect game for running quick and fast games.

Also I'm going to throw one more thing onto the pile, which isn't a game recommendation but a way to find more: the Physical Games category on itch.io is chock full of cool stuff if you know what you're looking for! Narrowing it down to games with the tag "Exploration" already gives a bunch of really good games (FORGE, Mausritter, World of Dungeons, etc.) and by narrowing it down further you can find so many cool games.

[vintagerpg]

Phoenix Command (1986) isn’t technically an RPG. Rather, it is a small arms (and later, through expansion, all sorts of arms) combat system intended to replace existing systems for such in your favorite game. Why you would do such a disservice to your favorite game like that is beyond me, but hey, who am I to judge?

This thing is painfully complex. There are an eye-watering 35 different hit locations tied to a percentile table (Rolled a 30? That’s a hit to the stomach/spleen!). Weapons all have an aim time that impacts accuracy. There is an alphabet soup of abbreviations. There are tables galore, not a one of which I can parse. It’s gotta be one of the most complicated RPG systems ever conceived.

I love it. It’s so unapologetic. I will never play it or take it seriously, but I will forever appreciate its utter hostility to fast and smooth gameplay. That clip-art Rambo on the cover, covered with so many guns he probably can’t move, is the best possible mascot. He sums it all up perfectly.

Even better: the designers couldn’t even deal with this shit. When Leading Edge produced Living Steel and the various licensed games (Dracula, Aliens, Lawnmower Man lol), they used a simplified version of the Phoenix Command combat system. Humbled by their own creation. Beautiful.

[paper-mario-wiki]

whats crafting mechanics in the isekai. like the way the world works or like minecraft crafting recipes.

many isekai (most of them nowadays, really) have RPG logic engrained into the universe, the exploitation of which usually ending up to be the pin holding the protagonist up as the Most Powerful Dude.

for example, in the (bland) manhwa i'm currently reading (technically in manhwa it's not called isekai, the genre is called transmigration i think) called "Astral Pet Store" he, essentially, runs a pokemon center/daycare/pokemart. a lot of the stories main goals are like. upgrading incubators and finding rare materials. and i like that stuff! it's enjoyable to see Guy Get Stronger Like Video Game.

in other stories there are different kinds of progression and crafting systems. like in Slime Reincarnation, theres a lot of time in the early story dedicated to what is basically RPG settlement building.

[ashaflemythal]

I haven’t seen any real critical takes on veilguard on here, so I wanted to add my 2 cents and open up a discussion bc at this moment I would say I’m beefing with BioWare lol.

Firstly, did I have fun playing veilguard? Uh, yes? I guess? Technically? I would definitely say the combat system and a lot of the gameplay itself is far better than it has been in previous games, and made me more engaged.

However, the writing issues at BioWare came to a major head here.

1) i didn’t feel like they went into the political and social implications of what was going on at all?? The elven gods coming back would bring so many other consequences beyond the destruction and blight. We didn’t see how this affected the way elves were treated, especially somewhere like Tevinter.

2) what happened to the Templar/mage conflict? The implications of the elven gods being alive and back are that then the chant and chantry are mostly wrong. There is no “magic was made to serve man and never rule over him.” This would likely make mages lash out at templars for being oppressed over what have turned out to essentially be lies. The templars then would likely split into those that leave the chant and focus on the real threats before them, and those who dig in their heels and decide that mages should still be oppressed bc of the dangers no matter what the chantry says. This would be such an interesting political shift to witness! And I’m sad we didn’t get this amount of depth

3) what happened to Solas’ followers? There was something so interesting to explore about having current elves helping him because they felt he was doing the right thing. We don’t run into any of his followers at all! And elves would definitely have more than enough reason to seek the world of the ancients and return to Arlathan given tevinter slavery and general oppression across Thedas, so what happened to that?

4) the only complex companion relationship that is allowed in-game is with rook and whoever was hardened with the treviso/minrathous choice. Otherwise, you can’t really have an antagonistic relationship with any of them. The only way to not progress a good relationship is to not engage in their content which I feel like is very weak writing. In DAI, you walk in on Cassandra and varric physically fighting and have to side with one of them. You can tell Cullen to keep taking lyrium. You can pick the wrong option in a companion quest and worsen your relationship. Where was that in this game?

5) the roleplaying, or lack there of. Sometimes I would pick the most aggressive option and it would still sound pretty nice, all things considered, where is my ability to feel differently outside of the very narrow window the game provides?

6) the STAKES of it all. The companions all seem very chill about things, all things considered. They are finding out things that would politically turn thedas on its head, and they’re having these calm discussions around a coffee table. I’m currently on my second play through, and it feels like none of these discoveries are given the weight they deserved, after three games of built up lore.

7) the gods’ allies. The motivations of the bad guys can pretty much be summed up by saying “want power” and that creates such shallow villains. Like yeah, obviously they’re bad bc they just want power and don’t care about people, but what about villains that do care about others? Villains that are complicated? I mean hell even though Alexius was mostly like “yes corypheus power” there was that grounding aspect of him wanting to save his son who was sick. I don’t feel like we had anything that tangible or real from major villains in veilguard

Ok, long post, but I do feel like BioWare has started to shy away from nuance and gray areas in a way I don’t like. It is important to show the complicated perspectives of evil people because that is the same thing we have to deal with irl. As an action-adventure game, it’s fine, but veilguard can scarcely call itself a true rpg. I don’t know, my feelings about it are complicated but all I know is that this game was quite disappointing to me especially compared to DAI, and I want to hope for better from the next game but given the way their BioWare’s last couple releases have gone I can’t say I’m expecting a lot. Anyway, how are yall feeling fr?

[willknightauthor]

I'm so stoked! I've had so many breakthroughs simultaneously on this system!

I've been churning through RPG after RPG, trying to find everything useful, see every way it's been done. It's been a whirlwind, and I'm still in the middle of it, but I've been surprised at how little variation there is. Even the free form, "roleplaying forward," GM-less jam games do a lot of the same things as each other. Even if the mechanics are technically different, using different dice, the goals and ethos of the designs are identical. And we're all aware of the hoard of OSR/NSR games.

It started out with my fascination with balancing simulation and character-driven storytelling in a fun way, eventually becoming a desire to fix my frustrations with the World of Darkness. While I enjoy the campy, B-movie side of horror in the World of Darkness, I myself am more of an A24 type of writer (e.g. Midsommar, The VVitch, Under the Skin). The worlds I like to build, even when surreal, have solid internal logic. I crave that balance between the impossible and the gritty, between the beautiful and the horrifying.

I figured out how to tie everything to one health system, which itself is tied to one 10d6 dice pool. Now stress and health are one thing, and it directly affects what type of dice you roll, which changes odds and side effects. Your stats and your combat exhaustion determine the number of dice rolled, which means the more you do in combat, the fewer dice you have, and the lower your odds of success.

Because it's a d6 pool with success on one 6, the probability changes roughly linearly compared to other dice pool systems. Because there's only one vector for probability--more or less dice--difficulty is an easy thing for the GM to determine, and the probability of the roll quickly judged.

By tying actions to the dice pool via fatigue, I realized I can encourage scrappy, gritty, tactical combat by rewarding players with a second wind, meaning they get dice back. Now there's momentum between attackers and defenders. If you get backed into a corner with no options you start getting exhausted, but if you find a way to scramble out of it, jab them in the eyes, utilize the environment, make them hit their ally, then you recover and turn the tables. Even the initiative system ties into this scrappy back-and-forth, since initiative changes non-randomly during combat. And this is all in a zone-based “theater of the mind” combat system.

I've completely eliminated experience. Instead when you do difficult things and take risks, you get temporary boosts to that skill for future rolls. To permanently advance it you must engage in training, either as a side activity or during down time, over a realistic amount of time. At the highest levels you have to go on personal quests to advance your skills. Thus your skill advancement is tied to roleplaying.

Going up a single point in anything is very difficult though. Most of the "character advancement" instead is about character change. You gain new skills and abandon others, and via your new skills you can acquire a new "class." Basic advancement is quantitative, but all significant advancement is qualitative, using skills themselves as currency. You don’t just advance, you adapt.

Your "class" is advanced through a customizable narrative achievement tree. Thus to become a better mage, you must pursue life goals, narrative turning points, and personal transformations, based on their own ambitions and your ambitions for them as a character.

Almost every stat is an abstract representation of the character's internal qualities and state. Those internal states then have mechanical effects during the game if you can roleplay them: goals, passions, memories, knowledge, social ties, reputation, etc. It's conceptual, but it's not the loosy-goosy LARP style. There are mechanics with numerical and statistical effects, they're just tied to qualitative stats driven by roleplaying.

Importantly, there are many hooks for alternate or additional systems, especially weird and supernatural ones. I hate it when "magic" just amounts to a list of very narrow spells and their usages. Now there are many mechanical hooks for supernatural things tied to capabilities, knowledge, motivations, social role, self-image, core memories, etc.

I designed it backwards from multiple future games which will be very weird and abstract. The system as it stands represents the gritty foundation of any number of future games emphasizing social intrigue, personal horror, heart-pounding combat, and Lovecraftian worldbuilding. It's the ruleset for the regular, mortal humans, doing possible things in the real world… but with mechanical possibilities for much more.

Here are the games which inspired or influenced the design. I think it gives you a sense of how diverse and specific the design choices are.

Wraith: The Oblivion

Alien RPG

Over the Edge

Heart

The Wildsea

The Burning Wheel

Fate

Thousand Year Old Vampire

Na Ratunek Marsowi

Feng Shui

Barbarians of Lemuria

Mythras

Exalted

Fireborn

Delta Green

Reign

Gumshoe

Shock: Social Science Fiction

The True OSR: Obsolete Shitty Rules

The Devil, John Moulton

Cyberpunk RED

Dune RPG

Mothership

Streets of Peril

His Majesty the Worm

The Cypher System

Next I need to look into more (genuinely) experimental systems, especially ones involving memory and investigation. "The Between" and "Brindlewood Bay" are next on my list. The closest vibe design-wise I've gotten is from "Broken Empires" (which I'm so stoked for).

It's getting to the point where the overall rules are all set enough that I can drill down to specific numbers for everything, make some premade characters, and start playtesting. Fuck yeah.

[asklilmissrarity]

WIP - Melodi Opening Cutscene

I won't be revealing a LOT of sneak previews of Melodi, but when this cutscene is complete, it will serve as a teaser for the game being officially in production.

For now, may this serve as a proof of concept and an introduction into what to expect in the world of Melodi.

Melodi is being produced in RPG Maker, and cutscenes will be in this style for storytelling purposes. Not fully animated, but sort of animatic. The animatic style is very much hearkening to using Tumblr's inline image viewing system to make pseudo-animations frame by frame.

The difference between red and gray backgrounds is that red is the color of unshaped dreams, while the other is the waking world. Melodi's species may not sleep, but they can daydream very vividly.

In this scene, we are introduced to our protagonist, Melodi, the scatterbrained Ellinai ("Moon Elf"), and her History Professor, the esteemed Eliah Sterium (He is a Whimzy, magical dream unicorns).

In Melodi's universe, a slap with a ruler isn't even close to the worst things a teacher will do to their students.

[Note: I will be making a Discord server for Melodi game development, and that server will be utilized for asking questions, seeing art production, WIPs and other things, as well as information about how you can support the production of Melodi, be it financially, technically (teaching me how to RPG Maker) or simply with vocal support. It will also have channels for discussion on different topics such as characters, lore, fan art, draw-along streams, spoiler discussion and theories about upcoming story beats. I'll be posting here when the Discord is created and I hope many of you join! Please keep in mind that the game is very violent and raunchy, but is not pornographic. It will be rated M but will not contain nudity. Sexual references, yes, but visually speaking it will not contain porn. I just wanted to make this clear right away before moving forward in production with the game.]

[rpgsandbox]

MCDM’s first original game, a new Heroic Fantasy RPG from the folks who brought you;

Strongholds & Followers

Kingdoms & Warfare

The Illrigger

The Beastheart

The Talent

Flee, Mortals!

Where Evil Lives

Comes a brand new game, built from the ground up to give you a better system for running a better game.

Xorannox, The Tyract Lord Syuul

A Fantasy RPG where your character starts, at level 1, already a hero. Maybe even locally famous! You might meet in a tavern, or start in the middle of the action! 

Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.

Basically, any adventure or story you’re running in your current Fantasy RPG, you can do that in this game. Just, in a more straightforward and fun way, unburdened by sacred cows from the 1970s.

You can absolutely run epic games with heroes exploring dungeons, but this game is not about dungeoncrawling. You don’t track torches or rations or worry about running out of light.

You can plunge, heedless of danger, into a dark and haunted forest, but this game is not about exploration. No hexes to explore.

By focusing on the core fantasy of epic heroes fighting monsters and tyranny, we think we can deliver a better experience for your friends and your table.

Fighting monsters in this game is a dynamic, action-oriented blast. Heroes and monsters often have abilities that knock their opponents into walls, through doors, into each other. 

Every hero has a small array of cool, thematic abilities they can use every round. You gain resources in this game as you play, so battles get more epic as they go. No slog.

The game uses 2d6, plus a handful of d4s and d8s. When you attack, you roll 2d6, add one of your attributes, and that is how much damage you do. Your attack roll IS your damage roll. 

You cannot miss. No more wasted turns, no more burning resources on spells only for your target to “save.”

Lady Morgant Lord Saxton

We love fighting monsters! But there’s more to the game than that!

Certain NPCs can be negotiated with to get them to change their allegiance or reconsider their actions. (Technically, ANY npc can be negotiated with but there’s usually only one per adventure) These NPCs have stats like Patience and Interest. 

We also plan on rules for Research & Crafting to let players unlock ancient secrets and build wonderous marvels. 

We have ideas for how to make language fluency relevant, better rules for wealth, renown. But it’s unknown how much of that we can fit in a 400 page rulebook.

full resolution - What is this game?

full resolution - Building A Heroic Narrative

full resolution - Tactician

full resolution - Dwarves

full resolution - Revenants

full resolution - Forced Movement

full resolution - Kits

full resolution - Necromancer

We are funding two books!

Heroes Basically, The Rulebook. Approximately 400 pages of rules for making characters, character customization, advancement. There’ll be ancestries (classic and new!), classes, skills, rules for combat, negotiation, research & crafting, and more!

We really like customizing characters and giving players lots of options. Even two heroes of the same class and ancestry can be very different in this game.

Monsters A monster book! Basically, Flee, Mortals! without the Villain Parties or Environments. MOST of the monsters in our 5E monster book, plus all the stuff we had to cut, and a bunch of new stuff!

You’ll also get rules for building balanced (or deliberately unbalanced depending on how much trouble your players have gotten into) encounters.

We’ve been testing and developing this game internally for almost a year now, but that was just the folks at the office and our friends. The first packet went to our Contract Testers back in August and have been pounding on it ever since.

The game is already working and it’s already fun! For the next 18 months we’ll be adding more classes, ancestries, progression, customization, and rewards.

We take testing very seriously. We want to make books that are fun to read, full of great ideas for your world and your game, and fun to play and that takes time. Polish, iteration, and lots of testing.

You do not need to take our work for it, come to the Discord and talk to them directly, or join a future playtest.

We think we can get these two PDFs finished by June of 2025, but we don’t think you’ll have to wait that long to play it.

If things go well, we intend to get you, our backers, a playtest packet sometime next year, hopefully by Q2 2024. 

We intend to publish this game under an open license, probably something like the Shadowdark license, because we want you, and anyone who wants to, to make, share, publish their own work using these rules and set in this world.

We hope, by the time the PDF exists, folks will not only have been playing this game for months, they’ll be making, sharing, selling their own original works using this material.

Lord Kenway Pinna

Backerkit campaign ends: Jan 5, 2024 at 8:01am GMT

Website: [MCDM Productions] [facebook] [twitter] [instagram] [youtube] [discord]

[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

[flameshadowconjuring]

I did not have high expectations (mechanically) for the Stormlight/Cosmere rpg, same as with any IP tie-in game, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read the beta rules. From what I have read, I would rather run or play in the Cosmere rpg than the three rpgs that I have played extensively (DnD 5e, FFG Star Wars, Pathfinder 2e). I am going to be comparing the Cosmere rpg to these three frames of reference of mine, and explain what I like about it. This is all theory for now, though I will run the Bridge 9 one-shot in a couple of weeks for my playgroup. And yes, I know that most of the Cosmere rpg ain't novel. Beyond borrowing from 2-3 of my three frames of reference, the initiative is basically the one from 'Shadow of the Demon Lord', etc.

I have mixed feelings about the plot die. I don't actually like narrative mechanics in the first place. That being said, no system I've played was devoid of mechanics I dislike, and the plot die is (almost) the least objectionable a core narrative mechanic could be for me, beyond nonexistence. The obvious point of comparison for me is obviously the Star Wars system. The plot die's opportunity and complication are basically analogous to SW's triumph/advantage and despair/threat. In addition to that, the lead designer of the Cosmere rpg, Andrew Fischer, also worked on the SW system.

I think that the plot die is better than the Star Wars dicepool mechanic in every possible way. First of all, the plot die is an opt-in kind of deal. Barring a few player abilities (the existence of which is my only criticism of the plot die), the GM decides whether it gets rolled or not, with the rules advising the GM to use it roughly 30% of the time, specifically in exciting moments. In Star Wars, every roll produces these narrative effects. Yes, technically, 1s and 20s also produce complications and opportunities in the Cosmere rpg, but the designers added them because people played like that was already the case because of how they are used to crits from other games. A tenth chance of one of these is much lower than almost 100% like in SW. Anyway, the point is that when we played the Star Wars system, having to come up with narrative stuff on every roll was a chore, rather than fun and exciting. Sometimes I would get a triumph on a roll for a routine check, and rather than that being exciting, it was more like 'uhh, what does this even mean?'. Sure, there are mechanical ways in Star Wars to spend advantages and threats and so on. What tended to happen in combat though was that unless you used advantages to crit someone or auto-fire, you just used it to give someone else a bonus die. And the most likely result from a bonus die beyond a blank was getting an advantage. The same principle happened out of combat, where we often took strain for threats and regained for advantages. A lot of abstract resources were pushed around, with a negligible net effect. Certainly not something worth that giant hassle. Also, sometimes you would get a triumph effect and three threats. That was always hard to interpret.

Secondly, the plot die is way simpler, which has a whole host of benefits. In SW, there are six different narrative dice with specialized symbols. You have to buy a lot of overpriced plastic to even play the game. The plot die of the Cosmere is a single d6. Sure, its nicer to use the custom one you can buy from Brotherwise, but the beta rules advise on how to use a normal d6 for the plot die. 1,2 are complications, with a bonus to your roll equal to twice what you rolled (+2 or +4), 3,4 are blanks, and 5,6 are opportunities. That is easy to remember, since higher numbers=better narrative result. While you could technically do the same with SW, the fact that there are six of them, including d12s, makes it completely impractical. Also, the dice in SW have either only all positive effects or only all negative effects. If you are gonna do this entire narrative crap, at least do interesting stuff with it, like higher chance of success but with negative narrative effect. Those make for better stories and better game design. And oh look, that is exactly what the plot die does. So, yeah. In case you couldn't tell, I hate the action resolution dicepool mechanic of SW.

I really like the progression system of the Cosmere rpg, with the exception of using milestone advancement (though its inclusion's suckery is mitigated by the goal/reward thing). It is actually conceptually very simple, but very flexible, meaning there is a lot of meaningful choice without overwhelming a new player. Every level, you get (in addition to a couple other things) one talent from one of your skill trees, called paths. I am currently a player in a Pf2e campaign, and leveling up is a chore rather than fun. Different levels give you different kinds of feats, so it is not very straight forward. It also takes a long time to read all the feats I qualify for, most of which don't even interest me. Also, it is very easy in Pathfinder to screw up if you don't plan out your characters progression in advance. When I started, I took the ranger's crossbow feat. Turns out that was a trap: no other feats actually help crossbows, and most of the good ranger feats require you to attack multiple times or in melee, neither of which a crossbow is made for. In a skill tree system like Cosmere, it is very easy to identify what talents I can take, and I can immediately see whether a talent is something I can build on by seeing how many talents are further down from it.

Star Wars also uses skill trees, but you basically get one big tree with a lot of filler talents you have to take to progress, but which you aren't actually interested in. The Cosmere rpg has a stronger focus on mixing and matching from different trees, with trees going less deep, having less filler. That looks more fun to me. This in-built multipathing is really cool. Multiclassing in DnD 5e was an afterthought, and is either very suboptimal or very broken, with barely anything in-between. I like how the Cosmere rpg is like 'hey, most characters fit multiple archetypes, lets reflect that in the game by not only supporting multiclassing from the ground up, but also actively encourage it'. Also the one talent per level thing makes leveling very manageable from a complexity standpoint.

Moving on to the magic, I really like that PCs don't start out magical. You earn your cool powers through play. Also, they said that they balanced the heroic (non-magical) and invested (magical) paths against each other, so that it is perfectly valid to only take talents from heroic paths and those who take invested path talents will often alternate between those and heroic ones. If true, that sounds awesome. And of course, the magic is Sanderson magic, so its really good. The best way to encourage creativity in players is to give them a smallish list of options, but have these options be very flexible. That is exactly how the Stormlight magic system works, with characters being closer to superheroes than DnD spellcasters. I think that is way more interesting. One of the frustrating things with DnD 5e is that the magic is never explained in a way that the GM can intuit how it works. Instead, they just spell out exactly what any given spell does, making them very rigid. Spellcasters have too many options, each of which is super rigid. Worst of both worlds. With the Cosmere, though I am not an arcanist superfan, I do understand the magic well enough that I am confident in adjudicating creative uses of powers (which the system explicitly supports!). Investiture, which is basically mp, is also just so much cleaner than spellslots, a vestigial leftover from vancian magic that the DnD designers were too cowardly to kill completely.

Finally, combat. I dislike armor class, so I am a big fan of armor just reducing damage, like the soak value in SW or DR in Gurps. The initiative system has me most excited to be honest. I think it will really speed up combat in multiple ways. For one, there is no die rolling and writing down initiative values and ordering them. Players basically just say when they want to do their turn. This also should make them more attentive, since they can't just wait for the GM to call their name. It also means that players can guarantee to go after each other, so that should encourage cooperation and teamwork. The distinction between fast two-action turns and slow three-action turns looks like it will force players to make a meaningful choice every turn. Overall, looks like a simple, clean and fast initiative system. The two-three actions remind me of Pf2e, though notably the reaction is much more relevant in the Cosmere rpg.

The graze rule, where a character on a miss can still spend 1 focus to deal their weapon's damage dice to their target, is very interesting. My initial instinct was to think that it is really OP. It would probably be a really OP rule if armor did not reduce damage, but given that it has gone through extensive playtesting, I assume that it is actually balanced. Assuming it is balanced, I think its pretty cool, since it means that you still managed to do something, even if you missed your one attack of the round. Makes it less frustrating.

So yeah, those were my main thoughts on the Cosmere rpg. It is not my most anticipated rpg, but I do intend to back and run it and am also really looking forward to the world guide as a fan of the books.