#same ttrpg system

[new-vales]

And for our final batch!

Alison (left) and Copper (right), two more NPCs in our MnM campaign. They, too, are dressed up for the college debut ball.

This art was done in collaboration with one of the members of the party.

[maspers]

Hundred Line as a TTRPG AU

Crap maybe this *is* my latest obsession. Anyway here's the AU where Hundred Line is a frankly insane tabletop game campaign being played by people who definitely had no idea what they were getting into. (Spoilers, obviously)

Takumi quite possibly had the most stressful time in the group's previous campaign, and was looking forward to something relatively more straightforward. He was also expecting to have significantly less of a role in the main plot, building a relatively simple Fighter character with a rather generic personality. He just wants to take a break, have fun with his friends, and not think too hard. Obviously this didn't pan out for him, and suddenly he's stuck dealing with being the centerpiece of the most convoluted plot known to mankind. He rolls with it, thankfully, but not without complaint.

Darumi has been begging the group to play a Danganronpa-style campaign for ages, and has finally decided to completely throw away subtlety with her character in this campaign. At first everyone is genuinely annoyed with her for doing this, but as the plot progresses and things get more complicated she starts getting more interested in what's actually happening in the game, which leads to her PC becoming more nuanced as things progress, culminating in some absolutely brilliant moments down the line that the group will remember forever.

Eito is a huge fan of playing very cliched character archetypes and injecting some personality into them to make them fun for everyone else at the table, so at first his character in this campaign seemed very on-brand for him... until suddenly All The Things happen and the rest of the group screamed at him for like twenty minutes straight. He just chuckles and comments that he's relieved none of the other players caught a glimpse of his character sheet earlier in the story and spoiled the twists ahead of time. Then he proceeds to continue playing the most unhinged character in the party. He also incidentally ends up having the most scheduling conflicts later on, but that doesn't stop him from still engaging in shenanigans every time he sits down at the table.

Tsubasa had been hoping to experiment a little in this campaign. When she learned the group had decided on aiming for a sci-fi setting, she thought designing a character around fighting in a vehicle would be interesting and unorthodox (it even required a bit of homebrew). Instead she ended up being this campaign's Only Sane Person, and all those mechanical Skills she got for the car ended up making her the only PC that can reliably do useful stuff outside of combat. She's at first a bit disgruntled about not getting more of the spotlight, but soon changes her tune when she realizes how insane this campaign is.

Nozomi actually wasn't originally part of this campaign, or part of the group at all, but she was a mutual friend of the group who'd expressed interest in playing. Plus, the group really needed a healer. So they let her join. Since she created her character after the others, she decided to give her PC a connection to the backstory of Takumi's character, just to spice things up a little. Since she's new to the game, the GM decided to help her out a bit too by sneakily telling her some of the plot twists in advance, but she ends up not needing much assistance. She takes to the game like a duck to water and soon reveals some really impressive roleplaying chops.

Shion is the campaign's Game Master, who has been working on designing this campaign for over a year and he is SO HYPED to finally show it off to his friends. He slammed the massive binder down on the table, said it was the outline for the campaign, and everyone recoiled in horror. But he'd proven himself to be a genuinely good and fair GM in the past so they were willing to give it a shot, and soon he had them all hooked. Which is good, because despite his massive collection of plans and notes somehow the group STILL manages to go off the rails and he has to improvise... which ultimately leads to him stealing plotlines from other genres.

The rest of the Hundred Line characters are NPCs, because despite them all being extremely cool having over a dozen of players in one campaign is a bit much. I considered Gaku, Kurara, Takemaru, and Yugamu as potential options for a sixth player but eh it wasn't the vibe. Yugamu might be Shion's GMPC? Perhaps most if not all of the NPCs are at least vaguely based on people Shion knows IRL. Gaku seems like the type of person who wouldn't have the time or patience to play with the group but he's still their friend or something so there's an NPC made in his honor.

They do in fact keep playing through multiple Routes. Shion asked everyone to keep backups of their starting character sheets "for reasons" which means implementing the "Special Review" mechanic isn't too difficult, and after everyone got over freaking out about the Day 100 reveals, they soon got really into the whole alternate endings gimmick. None of the group had ever played a campaign with a plot like this one before, and between Shion's extensive notes and everyone else's propensity for derailing things they can just keep coming back to this campaign over and over and over again whenever they have downtime. They all agree having the chance to explore the same group of characters from multiple angles is exciting. Even when they move on to other campaigns, the group often ends up coming back to this one to try out a new route in the form of a oneshot or twoshot game.

Other random thoughts on this idea:

When they finally did the Killing Game Route, Darumi literally shrieked so loudly from excitement that she shattered glass.

It's a running gag at the table that Takumi's character keeps getting love interests in each route. He's genuinely trying to avoid this, but he also cares too much about the game to deliberately prevent it ("It would be out of character!") and eventually he just groans every time another romance arc begins.

Honestly quite a lot of the game is the rest of the group trolling the heck out of Takumi. But he's a good sport about it, and they know not to go too far because usually the games are hosted at his place and he provides snacks.

Tsubasa didn't mean for vomiting to become a recurring character trait, it just kind of kept happening and soon she had no choice but to just kind of let it continue to be a thing. It really shouldn't be funny, but for some reason it never fails to get someone to laugh.

The entire Retsnom Route was Shion making things up on the fly ("monster" backwards? really?) and letting Darumi do whatever she wanted. It was nuts.

Shion does in fact do voices for all the characters, and he invented the entire Futuran conlang from scratch. He's very proud of it, but the players didn't really put too much effort into trying to decipher it during the first route so he just dropped it, disappointed. They didn't realize it was a full conlang until later on, and all of them apologized to him for not letting him show it off more.

The Cult of Takumi Route is this group's Noodle Incident. None of them will ever speak of it ever again.

Since this campaign was her first time playing this game, Nozomi ends up with a very skewed idea of what the game system is NORMALLY like. Now in every campaign she plays since, she's always way more paranoid about crazy plot shifts, even when it's someone else taking their turn as GM and clearly aiming for something more light-hearted.

Eito has never played a character like the one he plays in this game before or since, but because his character in this campaign was so jarring every character he's made since receives tons of side-eye and suspicion from other players. "I swear, I'm literally just playing a normal cleric this time, really! Can't you trust me on this?" "NEVER AGAIN."

Takumi has passed out on the table multiple times.

Everyone agrees Tsubasa is the MVP because of her ability to fix things and otherwise contribute to the party and plot in ways that don't involve combat or assorted shenaniganry. That, or it's because she always brings the food everyone likes, and is the one person actively trying to keep track of all the routes and points of divergences despite that having very little to do with her character.

Everyone has screamed some variation of "What even IS this?!?" at Shion at least twice. And "Are you kidding me?", as well as just exasperated screams and expletives. Shion just laughs it off.

Speaking of Shion, inviting a new player (Nozomi) was actually kind of a risk because Shion's games often have those "GM inserting their fetishes into the game for their own amusement" vibes. Shion isn't actually doing this on purpose, he's genuinely oblivious to just how Weird the Weird Stuff he puts in his games is, but while the group is used to it they're aware other people might get the wrong idea. Thankfully Nozomi's known most of the group for quite some time, so she kind of knew what to expect from Shion.

Just as how Darumi's wanted to do a Danganronpa campaign for ages, Eito has wanted to play a character wielding a scythe for ages. He's had the descriptions of Judge, Jury, and Executioner written down on a WIP Google Doc for half a decade, but in previous campaigns he either couldn't figure out how to make it work or it was just too unrealistic for the campaign setting (scythes aren't good weapons, really). But in this campaign Shion is letting the group do basically whatever they want for combat and Eito is ecstatic.

The whole "Nozomi stays by Moko's bedside for ages" thing genuinely caught Shion off guard despite most of the first route generally going to play, so he needed to make up the stuff about needing to get medicine in order to bait her away. The entire thunderstorm scene was a happy accident. Shion can't believe it worked out as well as it did.

Darumi actually made cosplay for everyone, and they all went to a local Con dressed up as their characters' combat uniforms. Quite a few people noticed and asked questions, leading the group to have to explain themselves and that their costumes were based off of their own TTRPG campaign that they'd been running for over a year and a half at that point. Someone recommended they try doing an Actual Play series. Obviously they couldn't do an Actual Play of their Hundred Line characters (since the audience wouldn't have context), but they still thought it was a neat idea, so instead their Actual Play series was Persona 2 (Darumi is GMing, Nozomi plays Tatsuya, Tsubasa plays Lisa, Eito plays Eikichi, Takumi plays Maya, and Shion plays Jun. And then when they do a second season for Eternal Punishment, Nozomi and Takumi are still Tatsuya and Maya but now Tsubasa plays Katsuya, Shion's playing Ulala, and Eito's playing Baofu).

"Shion I swear if you unfold your GM screen to reveal a laptop with a custom-programmed visual novel on it I will shove my water bottle down your throat."

Nozomi is not a violent person but over the course of the campaign she ends up slapping Eito in the face not once but twice. The second time was because he insisted on wearing sunglasses every time his character wore sunglasses, and pretending it was for the same reason.

All of the players vow to protect the Shouma NPC with their lives. Shion is baffled because Shouma's explicitly supposed to be a tank that soaks up damage and protects the players, not the other way around.

Each player has their own favorite route. Takumi's is the True Route, naturally.

[vegalocity]

I mentioned this in a server chat but i think it's funny-

now that i actually have been a dungeon master for Dungeons and Dragons im physically incapable of watching the gravity falls episode "Dungeons Dungeons and More Dungeons" because i cant possibly be expected to presume that the lesson was 'Stan and Mabel need to learn to get out of their comfort zone and might end up surprised' when Ford and Dipper are shown to be extremely inhospitable DMs to anyone with a different play style other than themselves

[druzysaur]

he’s a real cool radical rex

[kingthunder]

I've seen so many dnd-critical posts going around lately that boil down to "you're playing dnd wrong, go play another system." What? Why do you care how anyone else is playing dnd? Play it if you like it and don't play it if you don't. If you like it but you're not vibing with your group, find a different group. Why do we have to make up fictional dnd players who are doing it "wrong" and tell at them that they're not having fun? Who the fuck cares? I have a mortgage and existential dread, I cannot imagine giving a single shit what other people are playing or how they're playing it.

[summitclan-chronicles]

hello!! i've been really enjoying keeping up with and reading all of the various questions and posts on the blog so far, i'm really excited to see where everything goes with SCC!! ^_^

i had a minor question im not sure if you may have answered before (if so, i likely missed it), but are there any dice rolling or other ttrpg systems in SCC? :0c for things like hunting/fighting/other "coin toss" outcomes, general success/fail etc. i know some have super integrated systems, others optional dice, and some not at all where things are plotted out ooc! i'm just a bit curious if there's anything in place so far for these aspects broadly :]

thank you in advance & i hope you have a wonderful day/evening/so on!

Hi there!

I haven't had this question yet, so thank you very much for asking!

As a confession, I actually don't mesh well with such dice systems - so no, there's nothing like that enforced or encouraged on Summitclan's server. We also won't have any bots! However, if you'd like to privately roll some dice for yourself, totally go for it.

[thesnacken]

My controversial take ig is that while DnD isn't a spectacular system, preferring it is infinitely less dunk-worthy than this surge of people making shitting on DnD a pillar of their personal philosophy.

Being a dick about the game everyone is enjoying isn't going to make any other game better.

[rizzlegukgak]

i hope in the final fantasy high season they spend every episode of it spitting on a dungeons & dragons gameboard for 2 hours while talking about how much WoTC fucking sucks and then roleplaying without touching a dice even once <3 peace and love on planet earth. try not to ruin it for the rest of us real fans though, okay?

why have you let a greedy capitalist company suck the joy from your soul so? you can play the game that was purchased by hasbro without creating a shrine in your home to capitalist overlords and sacrificing your first born to them. you can just enjoy the sport of basketball without personally donating millions to the NBA. don’t let your hatred of capitalism (which is the objectively and morally correct way to feel about capitalism, don’t get me wrong) create a hateful and callous mindset toward the things you once enjoyed.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

heartbreaking: you're trying to fiddle with the level of crunch-assisted flavoring, difficulty, and extra moving parts of a system/hack of yours as you go based on what's fun in the moment, but the pacing you enjoy varies and you keep having to pull back on mechanics that add Enrichment sometimes and other times just bog you down 😔

[macrocosmus]

And I mean characters that you've put time into, not ones for oneshots or campaigns that sputtered out. Ones that you've had for a few levels, or whatever system equivalent you have.

[thepioden]

PBTA: If I want to write a fun improv story with my friends I can just join a text-based RP community like we did in 2003.

THINGS I AM UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT BY GAME SYSTEM

D&D: Please put a disclaimer that you are not a universal system. Every time I see someone try to do a political mystery game in D&D, I take 3d10 psychic damage and have to make a death saving throw.

Pathfinder: Look. If i wanted to play a game about fighting Cthulhu there is an extremely famous game specifically designed around doing that. Literally no-one is ever going to say "Wow, I want to play a Cthulhu themed game! Time to stat up a musical halfling from a magical fantasy land!".

Chronicles Of Darkness: Just admit no-one uses any of your rules. You have Social Door Rules and Integrity Conditions and Corruption Levels and I bet at most 50% of COD players could tell me which of those I made up. Just admit people aren't dressing up as Alucard The Bringer Of Shadows because they want to sit down and do calculus.

World Of Darkness: You know that old guy who's still doing his job even though he is way too old to do it any more, but he's now an institution so you can't get rid of him? Like that. The 90s called and they want literally everything about this back.

Call Of Cthulhu: I appreciate the commitment to authenticity, but maybe stop hiring actual disgraced mental asylum directors from the 1920s to design your sanity system?

GURPS: Look. Look. Listen. We both know that you just want to write history textbooks. These are history textbooks with a few stat blocks begrudgingly put in. If you just give me a book on early Chinese history I will read it and go "ah, very interesting!". You don't need to put in a list of character choices. We're all nerds. We'll read them. Live your best life.

Powered By The Apocalypse: I actually can't think of anything wrong with PBTA. That's not a bit, this is literally the perfect system. Take notes everyone else.

Mutants and Masterminds/Heroes System: Your systems have probably the most customizable character creation in the world and you both just make reskins of the Justice League over and over again. Maybe we only need one "thinly veiled copyrighted characters" setting? You can fight over it once you decipher your combat mechanics.

FATE: Ok I won't lie, I have no idea how the fuck FATE works. I have read the rules repeatedly and played three games and I still have no idea what invoking an aspect means. I don't know why. I grasped the rules of fucking Nobilis but this one just psychologically eludes me. This is more a problem with me I guess, but I'm still annoyed.

Warhammer 40k: Have you considered spending less on avocado toast? Then you might be able to afford to charge less for things?

Exalted: Apart from the lore, the setting, the mechanics, the metaplot, the character creation and the dodgy narrative implications, I can't think of anything to improve here.

[thydungeongal]

Actually, when I think about it, in the context of most traditional challenge-based TTRPGs (your Calls of Cthulhu, Dungeonses & Dragonses, and Rolesmaster) "no consequences for failure" doesn't really track as a system criticism but more as an adventure design issue. Okay, it's also a bit of a system issue, but I digress.

In most official Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green scenarios I've read the authors seem to consider their story a bit too precious not to have it happen, so they build a bunch of fail-safes to make sure that the investigators get funneled towards some kind of satisfying outcome, which comes off as feeling very inorganic. And I don't necessarily mean fail-safes like "multiple paths of clues to follow," instead I mean "if the investigators are struggling with finding information let them make IDEA or LUCK rolls!"

This same is true of D&D adventure design starting already in the early eighties but really coming to fore in the AD&D 2e era. Some of AD&D 2e's adventure modules are the absolute dregs in this regard, with the player characters literally as spectators to a linear succession of events that have a great effect on the metaplot, and with combat encounters sprinkled in. It's not even that without the player characters the story won't happen, it's that without the player characters there will be no one to watch the actual story happen. (This is a good campaign design question by the way: are you writing a campaign where the player characters are always reacting, always running after the bad guys who have already done a bad deed, always rushing to prevent a bad thing from being done, or are the player characters actual agents causing things to happen in the world?)

But anyway, that's not great. The mystery that has to be solved or the player characters won't get to see the exciting climax or the caravan moving through a series of plot points will make failure feel bad, because within that kind of adventure design failure can only ever feel like "the player characters must take a scenic route to victory."

But it actually is possible to have an adventure which accommodates for failure even when mechanically failure itself only means "the character didn't do the thing." It's the character-driven challenge game, best exemplified by the dungeon crawl.

"How do I make sure the characters find all the clues" becomes a non-issue once you accept that they might not find all the clues and the consequences of that can be as interesting as finding all the clues. "What if this fight is too hard" well then the characters can choose not to engage, and if they do engage and find it too difficult they can retreat.

[jessica-problems]

Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:

A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."

--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---

So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.

If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.

[psychhound]

announcing spiritkeep: a therapeutic ttrpg

howdy all! some big announcements!!!

first, im nearing the end of my master's program, studying rhetoric and writing, games, and educational psychology. im about halfway done with my thesis, and figured it was time to make an announcement …

my thesis, entitled "designing ​spiritkeep​: therapeutically applied RPGs as a discourse community" is … about what it says on the tin :) in it, I look at the practice of TA-RPGs, which are TTRPGs run for the express purpose of inducing therapeutic growth. TA-RPGs are usually run by a clinician, like a therapist or counselor, or a certified therapeutic game master. my thesis is looking at the needs of therapeutic game masters as a community and asking … what do they need from TTRPGs that isn't currently available?

the thesis takes concepts from rhetoric, linguistics, game studies, literature studies, psychology, and more to ask the question … what would a TTRPG specifically designed for therapeutic use look like? i examine concepts like bleed, close to home characters, dramatic rehearsal, performative speech acts, fixed vs growth mindsets, information processing theory, and more. i also look at criteria set forth by current TA-RPG practitioners for what makes a good TA-RPG, and examine five current games against those criteria. then, i put together the research into a foundation for spiritkeep, a dedicated TA-RPG

spiritkeep is designed around the goal of helping teens and adults heal from complex trauma

that said, its perfectly suitable for a homegame as well, as long as everyone is on the same page and approaches it with the mindset of collaborative growth. all in all, it's still going to be a fun game and a good TTRPG!!

in spiritkeep, you play as a smalltown taskforce with the shared goal of restoring your currently struggling community to a thriving state. you go out on missions like finding resources, diplomacy with neighboring cities, researching ecological problems, and more, while you slowly make your town a better place to live. spiritkeep includes collaborative worldbuilding, a large assortment of playbook options like the Wayfarer, the Knight, the Ghost, or the Shepherd (all designed to hit where it hurts, at least a little!), and a brand new system inspired by PBtA, FitD, BOB, WoD, and more. while the game is designed around grappling with identity and learning how to grow, it can also get a bit tactical and crunchy!! the new dice mechanic makes you think on your feet with every roll

this announcement is also to say that i am beginning the initial crowdfunding of the game through itch. right now, im trying to raise funds to pay the fee to my school to make my thesis open access, meaning anyone can read it. then, remaining funds will go towards things like resources, consultants, art for the kickstarter, and everything else i need to get this project off the ground. ideally, ill be able to team with a publisher to cover the logistics of business while i can focus on the game itself. once the game is finished, there will still be plenty of playtesting, consulting, and other work to do. but!!! this post marks my first steps towards what has been my dream for years now

this sale is how im starting the funding process. it includes the zine preview of my thesis, covering my chapter outline and big concepts, and also my first TA-RPG: with breath & sword, a solo game to help players calm down from anxiety. both items have community copies available: please feel free to grab one if you can't contribute !!

questions, comments, or partnership offers can be sent to psychhoundgames @ gmail(.)com

thanks y'all!!! wish me luck!!!! 🥰🥰🥰

[rampagingpoet]

This. Regardless of whether the designer is intentionally designs balance tools or not, there will exist groups of creatures that are easy for an average Level X party to fight and groups that are difficult or impossible for a Level X party to fight. There exists a level at which defeating a big old dragon in a straight-up deathmatch is plausible and levels below which it is not. Failing to consider combat balance doesn't make that fact go away.

For example, consider the Effective Hit Dice (EHD) standard created by Delta of Delta's D&D Hotspot. He took the original Dungeons and Dragons box set, which predates 3E-style balance tools by over two decades, and built a combat simulator with every published monster. Then he ran thousands of simulations of different levels and numbers of Fighters against all them monsters in the game. From these simulations, the power of a monster can be standardized against the power of an Fighter at some level. Compare a party's total levels to the EHD of a group of monsters, and boom! Balance tool!

Refusing to create the tool as a designer doesn't make combat balance just go away. It exists and can be measured independent of designer intent.

On the flipside, your encounter balance tools and your stocking procedures do not have to be perfectly aligned. Maybe you have charts by "dungeon level", or you know wolves are usually encountered in temperate forests and live in packs of about 4-10 adult members. When you go to sort out who's living on the 3rd floor of the dungeon or what people travelling through the woods might encounters, those procedures will be there. They don't have to care about what level one particular adventuring party you're running the game for currently is. Your party has to care about how dangerous these areas are!

Wolves live in temperate or cold forests. They group themselves into packs of about 4-10 members. When you (as a DM or designer) are building an encounter chart for a cold or temperate forest, it's reasonable to add an entry for "2d4+2 wolves". Other entries on that chart might be "a pixie", "a black bear", or "The 5th-level Halfling Wizard Ribyn Cinderwood, whose tower lies within". Your sense of what lives in the world creates the chart.

Then, afterwords, your encounter balance tools tell you that a 1st-level party will be torn to shreds if they get into an actual fight with anything. It turns out the woods are dangerous, and you should not go wandering off the road if you can help it. Sure, not every random encounter will be a fight. Maybe the wolves just stalk you a little to evaluate whether you'd make good prey. Maybe the bear takes one look at a group of loud, metal-clad humanoids and runs the other way. But maybe they don't. Maybe a hungry wolf pack outnumbers you two to one, and they'll brave your torches to pick off your slowest friend. Maybe by the time you saw the bear cub its mom was already charging. Maybe Ribyn decides she doesn't like the look of these heavily-armed strangers so close to her home and drops a fireball on you. And then, if you're 1st level, you die.

... but you probably live if you're 3rd level. And if you're all 5th level then the wolf/bear/wizard picked the wrong warband to mess with.

So you can have encounter balance and "unbalanced" stocking procedures pretty easily.

The stocking procedures care about what might, logically, be present at location X.

The encounter balance tools inform you at what levels the range of things encountered at location X are easy/challenging/deadly.

Characters within the world aware of some of those risks can communicate the danger appropriately.

Then if the characters choose to go somewhere where the inhabitants are "too easy" or "too hard" by the encounter balance metrics, that's on them. They had the tools to evaluate the risks and rewards available to them.

"But doesn't having a notion of 'balanced' combat inherently imply that all combat encounters are expected to be fair and winnable" well, no – it implies only that the GM has the ability to know whether a given combat encounter is fair and winnable.

There's a story that's been going around for decades about a Dungeons & Dragons party who encountered a large room full of treasure while exploring a dungeon. Immediately suspicious, they asked their GM a series of detailed questions about the room, but no obvious dangers were identified. Satisfied, they moved into the room – and were immediately set upon and eaten by the dragon that had been sitting atop the pile of treasure the whole time, which the GM hadn't mentioned because the players never specifically asked about the presence of living creatures within the room.

While this is obviously an extreme and ridiculous case, it illustrates an important point: as GM, you're the group's eyes and ears. If you don't describe something, the player characters literally can't see it – that dragon was effectively invisible from their perspective. The trick is that active malice isn't the only way to invisible-dragon your players; a group can also find themselves invisible-dragoned because the GM simply failed to provide sufficient information for the risk in question to be identified. This can happen through neglect, but it can also happen because the GM themself was unaware that the risk was present.

Now, hold on, you might be saying: the GM "plays" the entire world. How is it possible for the GM not to know that a risk is present? Well, that brings us back around to the subject of combat balance.

A game in which "balanced" combat is a meaningful thing to discuss is typically going to be one in which both the players and the GM are actually making strategic, tactical, and/or logistical decisions, rather than merely producing a description of their characters making such decisions. Without a good handle on the interplay of these decisions, it's completely possible for the GM to be wrong about the level of risk the scenario they've constructed entails.

That's actually pretty critical, because even if you don't care about the game being fair and winnable (and that's a perfectly valid stance), your players are still depending on you to be their eyes and ears, and to give them enough information to make good decisions about whether the fight in front of them is one they can win. A game where not every fight is expected to be winnable needs to be a game where the players have the opportunity to walk away.

No matter how objective you try to be, your own sense of the answer to that question is inevitably going to colour how you communicate about it. You being wrong about the level of risk at hand inherently increases the chance that your players will make bad choices. The party eating a TPK because they made a stupid decision is one thing; the party eating a TPK because they made a decision that looked reasonable from their perspective based on your unwitting miscommunication of the level of risk involved is quite another!

Sure, once the dice hit the table I'm probably going to realise that I fucked up, and I can adjust things on the fly to bring the level of risk that's actually present in line with the level of risk I communicated – but that's extra work I don't need with everything else that's on my plate. And that's a best-case scenario; if I'm running the game for a hardcore let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may group (and such groups tend to have a pretty significant overlap with groups that are cool with not every fight being winnable), I may not be able to adjust the fight's parameters on the fly without violating the social contract of the table.

Basically, whenever I see an OSR game with tactically crunchy combat brag about how its author never even thinks about "balance", what that's telling me is that running this game is going to create a whole lot of extra work for me as a GM. This is not a selling point.

[txttletale]

hello...what is this "eidolon playtest". i thought it was perhaps some kind of MTG since you like that and "playtest" but then i keep seeing like.....random character art. is this a tabletop thing. is it mtg and i just dont understand mtg. i know i can probably google this but jt seems like something you wnjoy and id like to hear you talk about it :^)

eidolon playtest is an actual play series in which the creators of the ttrpg 'eidolon: become your best self' and their friends -- as the name implies -- playtest aforementioned TTRPG. it has a pretty interesting format in which the same GM runs two separate campaigns for two different parties which slowly become more and more intertwined until they start crossing over directly. so far they have two pairs of campaigns finished, eidolon POP and ROCK (seasons 1 & 2) and eidolon SKA and DISCO (seasons 3 & 4), and season 5 (eidolon VGM and EDM) currently ongoing. they also have a couple of short mini-campaigns of 3-4 sessions each, which i'm not going to list all of because there's a lot.

eidolon playtest is really good for so many reasons i can't possibly provide a comprehensive account but here's some:

the tables are really, really good at taking something and running with it. the number of goofy, seemingly one-off jokes that get called back to and built up and end up becoming extremely serious and plot-critical has to be in the double digits by now

there is very much a lack of... for want of a better word 'preciousness' to the play -- like, one of the things i really don't like about dimension 20 is that because there is an entire production staff making all these little minis and sets, right, there is an investment and a need to put the money in front of the camera, it's basically impossible for e.g. combat encounters to be skipped or for anything to go too 'off the rails'. meanwhile in eidolon everyone will get excited when someone pulls a fucking insane plan out of nowhere that radically reshapes an encoutner, or when someone rolls/draws badly and something awful happens -- i fucking love that kind of play, where everyone is excited to see cool shit happen whether it's bad or good, and the eidolon playtest team do it really well

the characters are really good and bounce off each other really well. something i commented recently is that i love diska for the fact thaqt nonoe of the players are afraid to have their character just be a huge cunt sometimes. every campaign has some amount of interpersonal drama and it always seems like the players are really excited to have it, too. there are conflicts, some get resolved, some don't, some spiral into irreconcilable differences, some pave the way for extremely close bonds.

eidolon, the system (especially the 2e version that's used for diska onwards) is a great system which encourages fun and cool things to happen. every character has a jojo-style extremely specific power, which means that fights aren't boring slogs of people rolling dice (i hate combat in actual plays that use wargames, lol, even games with well-balanced combat systems that are fun to play often make horrible audio) but instead wacky and consistently dramatic encounters where the players make clever and creative use of their powers to take on a freak-of-the-week

the cast is just really damn good! i mentioned how the characters on all the shows have ineresting and complex dynamics, but even apart from that there's just so many characters on this show that i'm genuinely attached too, so many memorable and interesting pcs and npcs.

the show is funny as fuck!! constant laugh out loud bits throughout every campaign, often alongside the extremely heartfelt or dramatic ones. i've been refernecing a bit from eidolon disco so much recently it's been driving oen of my gfs crazy (you can buy rat poison for free at the store)

i, yknow, go back and forth on whether to mention this when recommending it bc i'm sure that the eidolon playtest folks don't, like, want to be pigeonholed as A Trans Podcast or whatever, but, like, when it feels like every AP podcast that advertises itself or is advertised as 'super queer' is like, two cis gay people and maybe one transmasc if you're lucky at an otherwise super cishet table -- it is such a breath of fresh air to listen to an actual play with a legit preponderance of transfem and nonbinary players playing all kinds of trans and queer characters.

tldr: its like homestuck but good