#so one gm and two player characters

[myopinionisimportant]

Went to the local community radio station to have a chat about maybe possibly playing some RPGs in a studio and recording it, and (once I actually got someone to answer the door, because... community radio) they were really happy to help! Showed me around, said they were looking at expanding their podcast support, gave me a decent idea of available recording times...nothing set in stone just yet, but still, exciting!

(aaaaaah what am I even doing, am I even REMOTELY qualified for this, will it all fall in a screaming heap!?)

(no shh it will be fine)

(shhhhh)

[sysig]

I have made

the rough

of an improv card game

[maximumzombiecreator]

While it's far from the worst cultural shift in TTRPGs, it really is a shame how much the mainstream standard for prewritten adventures has shifted from short adventure modules to massive hardcover campaigns.

Short modules are just so much better for the types of adventures that most mainstream TTRPGs are good at: you arrive at a place, it's Weird, you meet some cool people, it turns out there's a fucked up little situation going on, you get involved and blow up the situation in whatever way best suits your characters, and then The Adventure Continues. Depending on what happened in the adventure, the GM might decide to bring elements of it back in the future: NPCs you vibed with (or hated), places that you made a connection with, elements of the situation you left unresolved, whatever. Or not! No pressure, because the next adventure is going to be a new weird place with a new fucked up little situation.

Long campaigns, by contrast, constantly need to constrain the players so that they can keep the campaign relatively coherent. Even the ones that work hard not to railroad the players have to limit their ability to impact things so that the players don't somehow avert chapter 10 by doing something way back in chapter 3. And often, this results in very weak connective tissue throughout the adventure, with the character mainly doing what they are told by NPCs who are the ones with the real stake in things. After all, how can the PCs be the main characters when the adventure must be written with no idea of who they are?

And then this in turn feeds this culture where, actually, the Good GM homebrews their own campaign. That way they can actually center the PCs, and not railroad them, and throw out everything they prepped when the PCs refuse to engage with plot hooks and do completely unrelated stuff, because that is the opposite of running the big boxed adventure.

But actually, incorporating the creativity of other writers into your game is great. You can get so much mileage from taking someone else's fucked up little situation and tweaking one or two things to put it in your campaign. You can center the PCs so much when you don't need to protect future story arcs, you can just throw them in the mix and let them do main character shit. It's great.

Most importantly, though, I think more people should be able to have the brain chemistry-altering experience of not knowing what you're going to run next week, and being in the local game shop browsing shelves of dozens of fucked up little situations with some Brom-ass art on the covers and mostly terrible writing peppered with ideas that will stay in your brain forever.

[cavegirlpoems]

I see we're talking about XP!

@thydungeongal and @imsobadatnicknames2 have interesting posts up, and now it's my turn to throw my thoughts out there. SO. I think of XP as the game itself offering you a little bribe. Do the things the game wantss you to be doing, and the game gives you an XP to say thank you. Get enough XP, and you're reward is greater a permanent bump in power, meaning greater ability to exert your will over the world and therefore greater agency. (Systems like Fate Points, Willpower, Inspiration etc work the same, except the increased agency is a temporary one-time thing, not permanent, so at times I'll lump them in).

So. Let's talk about a few different systems and how they handle this.

Let's start at the very begining (a very good place to begin). In the very early editions of D&D - back when Elf was a class - you got XP for treasure. Every gold coin you got out of a dungeon (or equivallent value of other treasure) was 1 XP. This worked well; the game wanted you to go into a dungeon and explore it for treasure, while trying not to die. If you succeeded, you got XP, which made you better at doing that so you could do it again in a more dangerous dungeon. And because treasure is XP, and treasure weighs you down, getting it out is a meaningful activity. Hell, many of these games measure weight and encumbrance on a scale of 'how many coins' to drive this home. It was a good loop. Early D&D has many faults (like the weird racism in the MM) but the xp system is something it absolutely nailed.

Next up, let's look at classic vampire the masquerade. At the end of each session, you get 1 xp just for being there, and then another if your character learned something, if you portrayed your character well, and if your character was 'heroic'. So, what's classic VtM rewarding? Ultimately, it rewards the player for being the kind of player the game wants. If you get into character, engage with the game world, and act like an interesting protagonist, you get rewarded for it. It's a bit fuzzy, and at the GM's discretion, but its very up-front with what it wants to incentivise. It was the 90s, they were still working out how to be a narrative-driven game, but you can see where they were going with it.

OK, now lets look at something a bit weirder; monsterhearts. The main source of XP here will be Moves. Rather than a bolted-on rewards mechanic, each game mechanic you engage with might grant you xp. You can use your strings on another PC to bribe them with XP when you want them to do something. Lots of abilities just give you an XP for doing a thing, such as a Ghost ability that gives you XP for spying on somebody, or aa Fae ability that gives other players XP when they promise you things. Here, XP is baked into the game, but its very up front about being a bribe. Act the way the game wants, or go along with other players' machinations, and you get rewarded for it. And, critically, XP is just one part of a wider game-economy of incentives and metacurrencies; it links in with strings and harm and +1forward in interesting and intricate ways that push the game forward. Monsterhearts is a well designed game, and you should study it.

Finally, let's look at how D&D 5e does it, as a What Not To Do! We have two different options. The first is XP for combat. When you use violence to defeat something, you get XP for it. Under this option, the only way to mechanically improve your character is by killing things. So, we can conclude that D&D is a game that wants you to engage in constant violence. The other option is 'milestone XP'. IE: you level up at the GM's whim, when they feel like it. What does this reward? Fucking nothing. Or, at best, you're rewarded for following the railroad and reaching pre-planned plot moments in a pre-scripted story. You either have no agency in the matter, or are rewarded for subsuming your agency to the will of the GM. (This pattern continues with inspiration rewards, which are given 'when the GM is entertained by you'. Fucking dire.) "Oh!" the 5e fandom says "But a good GM can write a list of achievements that will trigger milestone XP". And yes, they can, but that's not how the text of the game presents it. That's a house rule. That's the GM doing game design to add a new, better, mechanic to the game to fix its failings. Is it any wonder, then, that the 5e fandom puts so mucn weight on the GM's shoulders, and has such a weird semi-antagonistic relationship between GM and player? Is it any wonder that absolutely brutal railroading (and the resulting backlash of disruptive play) is so rife over there? Look at how the incentive structures are built? It's either killing forever or GM-as-god-king! Anyway, yeah. Consider what you reward with XP, because that will become what your game wants. And if you're hacking a game, one of the most efficient hacks is to change what you get XP for and suddenly the game will pivot to something very different.

[valtharr]

In the last few days, I've now had two run-ins with people on this site regarding the idea of a TTRPG's mechanics and rules impacting the roleplay aspect of said game. And from what I can tell, these people - and people like them - have the whole concept backwards.

I think people who only ever played D&D and games like it, people who never played a Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark system, or any other system with narratively-minded mechanics, are under one false impression:

Mechanics exist to restrict.

Seeing how these people argue, what exactly they say, how they reason why "mechanics shouldn't get in the way of roleplaying," that seems to be their core idea: Rules and mechanics are necessary evils that exist solely to "balance" the game by restricting the things both players and GMs can do. The only reasons why someone would want to use mechanics in their RPG is to keep it from devolving into

"I shot you, you're dead!" "No, I'm wearing bulletproof armor!" "I didn't shoot bullets, I shot a laser!" "Well, the armor's also laserproof!" "Nuh-uh, my lasers are so hot that they melt any armor!" "My armor's a material that can't melt!" And so on. Because we have rules, the players can't just say "we beat this challenge", and neither can the GM say "you haven't beaten this challenge." Because the rules are clear, the rules are obvious, the rules tell you what you can and can't do, and that's it.

So obviously, when the idea of mechanics directly interacting with the roleplay - generally seen as the most free and creative part of a TTRPG - seems at best counterintuitive, at worst absolutely wrong. Hearing this idea, people might be inclined to think of a player saying "I'm gonna do X", just for the evil, restrictive mechanics to come in and say "no, you can't just do X! you first have to roll a Do X check! But you also did Y earlier, so you have to roll the Did Y Penalty Die, and if that one comes up higher than your Do X die, you have to look at this table and roll for your Doing X If You Previously Did Y Penalty! But, if you roll double on that roll..."

But like... that's not how it works. Roleplay-oriented mechanics don't exist to restrict people from roleplaying, they're there to encourage people to roleplay!

Let's go with a really good example for this: The flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark (and games based on Blades in the Dark).

In BitD, you can declare a flashback to an earlier point in time. Could be five minutes ago, could be fifty years ago, doesn't matter. You declare a flashback, you describe the scene, you take some stress (the equivalent of damage) and now you have some kind of edge in the present, justified by what happened in the flashback. For example, in the Steeplechase campaign of the Adventure Zone podcast, there was a scene where the PCs confronted a character who ended up making a scandalous confession. One of the players declared a flashback, establishing that, just before they walked in, his character had pressed the record button on a portable recording device hidden in his inner coat pocket. Boom, now they have a recording of the confession.

How many times have you done something like this in a D&D game? How many times did your DM let you do this? I think for most players, that number is pretty low. And for two reasons:

The first, admittedly, has to do with restrictions. If you could just declare that your character actually stole the key to the door you're in front of in an off-screen moment earlier, that would be pretty bonkers. Insanely powerful. But, because BitD has specific mechanics built around flashbacks, there are restrictions to it, so it's a viable option without being overpowered.

But secondly, I think the far more prevalent reason as to why players in games without bespoke flashback mechanics don't utilize flashbacks is because they simply don't even think of them as an option. And that's another thing mechanics can do: Tell players what they (or their characters) can do!

Like, it's generally accepted that the players only control what their characters do, and the GM has power over everything else. That's a base assumption, so most players would never think of establishing facts about the larger world, the NPCs, etc. But there are games that have explicit mechanics for that!

Let's take Fabula Ultima as another example: In that game, you can get "Fabula Points" through certain means. They can then spend those points to do a variety of things. What's literally the first thing on the list of things Fabula Points let you do? "Alter the Story - Alter an existing element or add a new element." I've heard people use this to decide that one of the enemies their group was just about to fight was actually their character's relative, which allowed them to resolve the situation peacefully. I again ask: In your average D&D session, how likely is it that a player would just say "that guy is my cousin"? And if they did, how likely is it that the GM accepts that? But thanks to the Fabula Point mechanic making this an explicit option, thanks to rules explicitly saying "players are allowed to do this", it opens up so many possibilities for story developments that simply would not happen if the GM was the only one allowed to do these things.

And it's only possible because the mechanics say it is. Just how your wizard casting fireball is only possible because the mechanics say it is.

[prokopetz]

Code Green

A game for 3–7 players, about being where you're not supposed to be.

Last night, you were suspended in a tube of brightly coloured goo in an underground research facility, operated by an organisation whose three-letter initialism's meaning is strictly need-to-know. This morning, someone noticed your tube was empty. Nobody has determined how that happened yet, and you're not inclined to stick around until they figure it out!

Or, in other words, it's been nearly a whole week since I got that massive revision to Space Gerbils out the door, and apparently my brain has decided that's enough of a break. This thing was written start to finish in under 12 hours, so let the circumstances of its authorship guide your expectations. Special thanks go once again to Caro Asercion, whose micro-RPG Dwindle introduced me to the design space I'm fucking around with here. Go buy their stuff.

Anyway:

What You'll Need

Code Green is a tabletop RPG for one game moderator (GM) and up to six players. Each player will need a copy of the Profile Grid, below, as well as three tokens of some sort: dice, coins, beads, etc. You'll also need at least five six-sided dice (for the whole group, not per player, though it's fine if each player has their own set). If you're using dice for tokens, it's recommended that the dice you plan to roll be visually distinguishable in case they land on someone's Profile Grid.

Rolling Dice

There are two ways you'll be asked to roll dice in this game: rolling d66, and rolling a dice pool.

To roll d66, roll a six-side die twice, reading the first roll as the "tens" place and the second roll as the "ones" place, yielding a number in the range from 11 to 66. For example, if you rolled a 3 and then a 5, your result is 35. You may also be asked to flip a d66 roll; to do this, take your result and swap the digits without re-rolling. In the preceding example, if you flipped your roll of 35, your new result would be 53.

To roll a dice pool, pick up the indicated number of six-side dice, roll them, and take the highest individual result. Duplicates have no special significance. For example, if you rolled a pool of three dice and got a 2, a 4, and a 4, your result would be 4. If you would ever roll a pool of zero or fewer dice, roll two dice and take the lowest instead.

Character Creation

Each player should create their own character. There are three things about your character which are always true:

You are newly born into the world. You may know things about the world (e.g., from your programming, having read them on a computer terminal, etc.), but you haven't experienced them.

You are implausibly good at remaining inconspicuous; unless you're deliberately drawing attention or doing something which requires a dice roll, humans will almost always fail to spot you.

You are not human. You can decide what that means.

To find out what else is true about your character, roll or choose three times from the Form table, and three times from the Function table, placing your results into the correspondingly labelled slots on the Profile Grid, below, in any order you please. Your three results from each table should be different; if you elected to roll and get the same entry multiple times, flip your result, and re-roll if it's still a duplicate.

Think about what your three Form traits and three Function traits imply about your character's physical makeup, but don't set anything in stone just yet – you'll see why not in a moment.

Finally, roll a six-sided die five times, and record the results in the order in which they're received. The resulting five-digit number is the only name your character has when play begins.

Table 1: Form (d66)

11–12. Blood 13–14. Bones 15–16. Brain 21–22. Claws 23–24. Ears 25–26. Eyes 31–32. Guts 33–34. Hands 35–36. Heart 41–42. Hair 43–44. Legs 45–46. Lungs 51–52. Nose 53–54. Skin 55–56. Tail 61–62. Teeth 63–64. Tongue 65–66. Wings

Table 2: Function (d66)

11–12. Accelerated 13–14. Autonomous 15–16. Auxiliary 21–22. Cryogenic 23–24. Cryptic 25–26. Elastic 31–32. Electric 33–34. Entropic 35–36. Invasive 41–42. Invulnerable 43–44. Kinetic 45–46. Magnetic 51–52. Phasing 53–54. Polymorphic 55–56. Projectile 61–62. Pyrogenic 63–64. Telescopic 65–66. Toxic

Playing the Game

Play proceeds in a series of scenes. In each scene, the GM will set the stage: a challenge to overcome, a peril to escape, a mystery to investigate, etc. Given the nature of your characters, most things will be mysteries to you!

Initial Token Placement

Once the stage has been set, place each of your three tokens on a different square on your Profile Grid. If you have no preference, you can roll d66 for each token and place it in the square whose marked numeric range contains the number you rolled, flipping or re-rolling your result if you get a square which already contains a token. The placement of these tokens represents your initial state when the scene opens. Depending on the nature of your character, this may be reflected by a shifting of internal focus, or by a physical transformation.

Participation

To participate in the scene, simply tell the GM what your character does; the GM will describe how the world responds, and ask what you do next. Whenever you wish – or are forced – to do something more than lurk and observe, you are obliged to make a test.

Making Tests

To make a test, first choose a pair of traits – one Form trait, and one Function trait – with which to face the challenge. For example, if your Form traits are Legs, Tail and Teeth, and your Function traits are Cryptic, Invulnerable and Phasing, you might test your Invulnerable Legs against the trouble at hand.

Next, count the number of tokens present in the rows extending from each of the chosen traits. The illustration below shows which squares would be consulted in the preceding example:

Next, roll a dice pool containing a number of dice equal to the number of tokens present on squares extending from the chosen traits. Do not count a token twice if it's on the square where the two traits intersect (e.g., the green square in the illustration above). In the event that no tokens fall on squares extending from appropriate traits, remember that you are allowed to roll a pool of zero dice by rolling two dice and taking the lowest rather than the highest.

Finally, compare your result to the following table:

1–3. Less than human. Whatever you'd intended to try still happens, but it cannot overcome human opposition (or adversity which would challenge a typical human), and any lasting effects are transitory and easily explained away. 4–5. Mostly human. Your effort can contend with human opposition (or circumstances which would challenge a competent human), and its lasting effects make it obvious that someone (or something) has been interfering with matters. 6. More than human. Your effort easily brushes aside any human opposition, and its lasting effects are impossible to rationalise as anything other than the intervention of inhuman forces.

Without Applicable Traits

In the event that you're forced to make a test and no possible pairing of your traits is applicable, you don't get to roll anything, not even with a pool of zero dice; simply resolve the outcome as though you'd rolled a result of 1–3. Other characters may attempt to preserve you from this fate by assisting you, in which case you roll one die per assisting friend; see below for more details.

Assistance

If you wish to assist another character in making a test, consult your own Profile Grid, considering only those squares which contain tokens. Only the specific pairs of traits represented by the squares on which your tokens fall are eligible for assistance; for example, if one of your tokens falls on the intersection of Cryptic and Teeth, you may assist with Cryptic Teeth, but not any other pair of traits involving Cryptic or Teeth unless those squares also have tokens on them.

If you're able to identify an eligible pair of traits that seems applicable to the test at hand, explain how you're using it to help, and hand the player making the test one extra die. Any number of characters may assist on a given test.

Providing assistance neither requires nor permits your character to adapt (see below) – it needs to be your own test for that!

Adapting

After resolving a test, your character adapts, shifting focus or form to reflect what they've learned. Take one token of your choice from your character sheet, and move it to a different square which doesn't already contain one. You can move any token you wish, but it must end up on a different square than the one it started on unless no valid destinations are available. Adapting is not optional, and must be carried out after every test.

Suffering Strain

If whatever you're making a test against is particularly strenuous or dangerous, you might suffer strain as a consequence. Strain will often be incurred on a result of 1–3, and rarely on a result of 4–5; only the most foolhardy efforts will incur strain even on a result of 6!

To incur strain, roll d66, and place a small X on the square on your Profile Grid whose indicated numeric range contains the number you rolled. If there's a token on that square, immediately move it to an empty square of your choice, unless fewer than three unmarked squares now remain; in that case, simply remove the token entirely.

For the remainder of the scene, tokens may not be moved to any marked square. In addition, if you suffer further strain, and the square indicated by your d66 roll is already marked, your character is incapacitated, and may not participate in tests at all until they recover.

All strain is cleared – and any discarded tokens restored – at the end of each scene. Incapacitated characters also recover at this time.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hello!! Do you know any TTRPGs surrounding translation or languages? 😊 (thanks for all your work btw!!!)

THEME: Language / Translation Games

Hello friend! As someone who studied linguistics in university, I absolutely love talking about all of the funky things languages do! I hope these recommendations tickle your fancy!

Dialect, by Thorny Games.

Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost. In this game, you’ll tell the story of the Isolation by building their language. New words will come from the fundamental aspects of the community: who they are, what they believe in, and how they respond to a changing world.

Dialect uses a deck of cards to help minimize the amount of choices you have to make in character creation, by dealing three cards to each player and having the players choose one from just those three. You track the change of your language over a series of turns, using prompts to help you navigate the conversations that arise in your community as the world around them changes.

Dialect has been very highly regarded as a game that really delivers on the experience that it promises. The grief that accompanies language death really shines through this game, so if you want to combine the wonder of creation with the pain of losing something so integral to your sense of being, this is the game for you.

Tiny Frog Wizards, by @prokopetz

You have mastered the secret arts of sorcery

The very primordial energies of creation and destruction are yours to wield as you will.

You are two inches tall.

Tiny Frog Wizards is a game about tiny frogs, wielding magic using the power of words. When you want to do something magical, you will roll somewhere between 1-3 dice, and use the values of your rolled dice to determine how the range, magnitude, and control of your magic.

What’s important in terms of this game recommendation is the Control aspect, because how well you are able to wield your magic depends on how many words you are able to use to make things happen! It’s a lot easier to use a spell with precision if you have enough words to detail where you want a magical pen to write, or what you want to throw a tiny magic missile at. Not enough words? Then the GM has license to cause some humorous side effects, or, if you roll poorly enough, cause your spells to really go off the rails.

If you like games where you need to choose your words carefully, Tiny Frog Wizards is worth checking out - especially since it’s in free playtest!

Xenolanguage, by Thorny Games.

Xenolanguage is a tabletop role-playing game about first contact with alien life, messy human relationships and what happens when they mix together.  At its core, you explore your pivotal relationships with others on the mission as you uncover meaning in an alien language. The game gives a nod to soulful sci-fi media like Arrival, Story of Your Life and Contact, but tells its own story. It’s a game for 2-4 players in 3-4 hours.

In Xenolangauge, you play as a group of people bound together through a shared past with unsettled questions. Your task is to understand why the aliens have come and what they are trying to tell us. You will soon discover the key to understanding lies in your memories together.

This is definitely an in-person game, as it is meant to come with a modular channeling board that will provide you with alien symbols that you will use to help you interpret messages. This is more than a game about language, it’s about relationship, shared memories, and connection.

Xenolanguage was kickstarted at the beginning of this year, but you can check out the above link to pre-order the game if this sounds interesting to you!

Star-Spawned, by Penguin King Games.

One unearthly night, a ray of colourless light descended from the stars, and under its warping radiance, creatures unlike any the world has ever seen were born. They do not know the world, and they do not know themselves. Unfortunately for the world, they're quick learners!

Star-Spawned is a GMless, oneshot-oriented tabletop RPG in which you don't know what your own traits do when play begins. The names of each group's stats are randomly generated using morpheme chaining, and characters are created while having absolutely no idea what they mean; figuring that out forms the greater part of play.

Star-Spawned is more about self discovery than it is about language, but the use of morpheme-chaining in character creation is intriguing to me. You will randomly roll three pieces of a word, and then chain them together to create a unique Facet, available to the players as stats. These Facets don’t have a meaning when the game begins - you need to play to find out what they mean. If you like playing around with semantics - the meaning of words - this might be a game for you.

Degenerate Semantics, by Mikael Andersson.

Degenerate Semantics is a role-playing game for 1-5 players and one Game Master (GM). The players will each portray a character who live in Emmaloopen's poverty-stricken lower city. They are young, wild, ambitious, and independent. This way of life is threatened by other factions, and the players will need to have their characters work together to survive and thrive.

In the process of playing the game, the players and GM will define and flesh out a language called Bandethal. A collection of street terms and slang, Bandethal is used both as a way to talk openly about illicit activities without alerting authorities and to establish street cred. The terms are liberally mixed in with plain English, or when the language is mature enough, can be used entirely on its own. The characters' success is in large part based on how proficiently the players wield the language.

A friend of mine ran this game for me three or four years ago, and it’s been sitting in the back of my head ever since. Degenerate Semantics was created for a Game Chef competition in 2014, and has remained in the same state since then. I don’t think there’s any more work being done on it, but the game is there for anyone who wants to give it a go - and while there’s a setting that comes with the game, that setting is highly flexible, depending on what your group is interested in. Our group decided to use a lot of gardening metaphors, and undertook a plant-based heist as our act of rebellion! If you want a game about the power that language can give a tightly-knit group, this is the game for you.

I've Also Recommended...

DROWWORD, by Ursidice.

[indierpgnewsletter]

There's Other Kinds Of GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency

(This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter)

I find that broadly there are at least two kinds of GM advice – and they have a very different philosophy underpinning them.

The first kind of advice aims at all costs to maintain verisimilitude. It’s a solution that you can implement without breaking the players’ immersion in their characters. This can just be stuff like Matt Colville explaining that if your players are taking too long discussing plans, guess what, orcs attack! We’ve all probably played a game where people were going in circles and not able to decide what to do. If it looks like we’re not able to decide, we’re probably going to be relieved if the GM makes something happen to break the deadlock and prompt us back into the action.

(Historically, this kind of thing was taken to egregious lengths like Gary Gygax saying if players start acting uppity, have a rock fall on their head. It’s mostly gone now but reddit tells me that Cyberpunk Red which came out relatively recently still says something similar.)

The second flavor of advice involves breaking character and talking to your players directly. I know “talk to your players” is a mantra repeated so often that autocorrect suggests it as soon as you type the letter t. At its worst, this advice is vague and unhelpful. We’ve all considered talking frankly to people in our lives, we just find it awkward and hard and annoying. But, but, but – at its best, just describing the problem as you see it and escalating it from a character discussion to a player discussion will make it go away instantly. Like magic. (If you’re not sure what that means: In a previous issue, I discussed Jason Tocci’s excellent advice on escalating conversation in this way.)

And since the theatrical flavour of advice has the weight of history on its side and transparent advice keeps getting boiled down to mantra form, I thought I’d write down some examples of situations and some alternative ways to handle them:

Situation 1: The players are marines discussing whether to dive into the alien lair and recover their stolen engine (their main goal) or go and see if another missing team of marines is okay. There is only 45 minutes left and this is a one shot.

Theatrical: The other marines suddenly come on the radio and say, “hey we’re okay, please complete the mission.”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. There’s 45 minutes left. If we don’t do the alien lair now, we won’t be able to do it at all. Is that fine?”

Situation 2: The players are low-level fantasy nobodies who have a famous wizard friend. They’re about to tangle with some medium-level bad guy and decide to call in their wizard friend.

Theatrical: When the players try to contact her via a telepathic phone call / spell, she sounds breathless and says she’s busy doing something way more important like fighting a dragon.

Transparent: “Hey, folks. If we get the wizard in, she’ll absolutely make this fight a cakewalk. We won’t even need to roll initiative really. Is that what you want? Or would we rather have a fun fight?”

Situation 3: The players were having fun exploring when they meet a cool NPC (an android! an elf! an android elf!) who has this interesting backstory with an urgent, earth-shattering hook. They go along with the android elf because it seems more important but immediately look like they’re having less fun.

Theatrical: Narrate how the android elf meets a group of other android elves and have the elf say, “Hey, now that I have these folks helping me, you can leave it you want!”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. Talking to you as players here, do we want to stick with this whole android elf plot here? It does mean that we won’t do any open-ended exploration. Which would you prefer?” If they want to ditch the elf plot, you could just retcon it entirely or do the theatrical solution.

All of these situations have happened at my table. They’re all relatively low stakes and I think whichever way you handle it, it’ll probably be fine. But that said, some situations absolutely work better when done transparently so if you’ve never tried the transparent way, give it a shot. If immersion matters a lot to you, try it at the end of the session.

/End

PS. The theatrical options often still require the players to willingly suspend their disbelief and go with it. If a player didn’t play along, they might just say “I thought their radios weren’t working, otherwise we could’ve just contacted them before. Why can they suddenly contact us now?” or “Oh, the wizard is fighting a dragon right now. We can totally wait. There’s no reason we need to fight the bad guy right now.” And sometimes I can’t shut off that part of my brain either so I won’t judge. But if there’s a way to sidestep that situation even coming up, I’m going to take it every time.

[torpedopickle]

I want to talk about how Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves is an excellent use of meta humor applied seamlessly to a story without ever breaking immersion.

Mild spoilers. I'll keep it vague so nothing will be spoiled if you choose to read on

This movie integrates many things that someone familiar with D&D would recognize from the narrative structure of a campaign.

There are some things in particular that demonstrate this particularly well

At one point, the party is joined temporarily by the character Xenk. But he really feels like he'd be an NPC party member controlled by the GM rather than a player. So when the other characters banter and quip, this character doesn't really join in or get their jokes cuz he simply wouldn't have the agency to. More examples of this would be how he's much more capable than the others, but he doesn't overshadow them. He provides aid if it's desperately needed, and will sometimes bail rhe party out of situations they can't manage on their own, just like how a GM should utilize an NPC companion. He even has a quote that perfectly reflects this. "I've given you the tools. Now you have to be the ones to use them". There's even a more direct joke about his NPC behavior. When he leaves the story, he walks off in a random direction, going straight forward, even stepping over obstacles and terrain unnecessarily. This all amounts to him feeling like a very clear GM controlled NPC, however he is presented in a way that still makes him feel entirely faithfull to his own world and does not break immersion

Other ways the movie plays around with the GM campaign structure would be the approach to backstory. The only time a character outright explains what their backstory is, in full, directly to us, is at the very start, to give context for the story going forward, as the character even puts it himself. Backstory later in the movie is told to us whenever it's relevant. Characters will toss in another fact or two about themselves in situations where mentioning a past experience would fit in. Much like how players usually prefer to build their characters.

And one of my favorite instances of being meta about D&D campaign structures comes in the second act.

the characters are faced with a complex and dangerous obstacle. The GM's stand in, xenk, explains the method of progressing through this obstacle correctly. But in true D&D fashion, the party immediately does it wrong and now the campaign has been derailed and the GM's setup squandered. So now they straight up don't have a way forward in the narrative. Logically, it should end there. But that'd be a shit campaign, so the GM would naturally bend the rules to get things back on track. So after the party fails the obstacle, one of them goes; "Hang on, that stick we've had with us the entire time isn't a stick after all! It's actually a magic staff that solves our EXACT predicament at this EXACT time". That is such a clear cut meta joke about GM's having to get things back on track cuz players are all chaotic evil. Is it a plot contrivance? Absolutely. One of the biggest ever. But it's what D&D is built on

[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!

[temporalhiccup]

✨

✨ A game I wish more people were talking about.

Okay SO I seriously SERIOUSLY don't know why people aren't talking about or playing GODSEND. I crash into people's conversations all the time with HELLO HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT GODSEND ITS GREAT WHAT YOURE TALKING ABOUT IS IN GODSEND LETS PLAY IT.

Godsend is cool for SO SO many reasons but here are a few bullet points:

The premise of the game is that the world is coming to an end: there are only so many ages of divinity and humanity left before the apocalypse. So as gods and avatars, you must do what you can to make things go your way, and there is nothing left to lose.

Everyone plays two characters! You play a god, but you also play the human avatar of another god PC of another player. I have seen AMAZING moments when players have acted AGAINST THEIR OWN OTHER CHARACTER because of the DRAMA and it was AMAZING EACH TIME.

But why two characters? You play as one God that sees through all the ages and will be there at the end of days. But with each new age, you play a different human avatar, one who carries out the will of another god. So TECHNICALLY YOU GET MORE THAN TWO CHARACTERS EVEN HOW AMAZING IS THAT.

In general, why aren't there more ttrpgs where you get to play more than one character? Why does the GM get all the fun, huh?

This is a PbtA game but it is DICELESS. DICELESS PBTA. DO YOU HEAR ME. The vibes are impeccable, the execution breathtaking. Basically as gods and avatars, it is not a question of if you are able to do it: you do it! You perform miracles! You defy destiny! You see the threads of destiny! But at what great and terrible and EPIC cost?

Here are examples!

A couple of BASIC moves you can do as a God:

A couple of BASIC moves you can do as an Avatar:

So your stats as an Avatar are how many narrative bonuses or penalties you get when you make a move. DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN. WHY AREN'T THERE MORE GAMES DOING THIS. I AM LOSING MY MIND.

Anyway every time I have read/played this game I have turned completely feral, and I don't know why we're not talking about Godsend. Please go check it out, you may already have it if you bought the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality three years ago.

[zedecksiew]

(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

In the ongoing project of rescuing useful thoughts off Xwitter, here's another hot take of mine, reheated:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

The quote comes from Luke Gearing and his excellent post "Against Incentive", to which I had been reacting.

My thread was mainly intended as a fulsome nodding along to one of Luke's points. It was posted in 2021, and extended in 2023 after Sidney Icarus posed a question to it. So it is two threads.

Here they are, properly paragraphed, hopefully more cleanly expressed:

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(Don't) Incentivise Ethical Behaviour

This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.

As Luke Gearing puts it:

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good---it’s just optimal play."

Bear in mind that I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have rewarding outcomes for players. Any decision should have consequences in the fiction. It serves the ideal of portraying a living, world to have these consequences rendered diegetic:

The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy; pamphlets appear, quoting from your revolutionary speech.

What I am saying is that rewarding abstract mechanical benefits (XP tickets, metacurrency points, etc) for ethical decisions stinks.

+

A subtle but absolutely essential distinction, when it comes to portraying and exploring ethics / morality, in roleplaying games.

Say you reward bonus XP for sparing goblins.

Are your players making a decisions based on how much they value life / the personhood of goblins? Or are they making a decision based on how much they want XP?

Say you declare: "If you help the villagers, the party receives a +1 attitude modifier in this village."

Are your players assisting the community because it is the right thing to do, or are they playing optimally, for a +1 effect?

+

XP As Currency

XP is the ur-example of incentive in TTRPGs. It began with D&D's gold-for-XP, and has never strayed far from that logic.

XP is still currency. Do things the GM / game designer wants you to do? Get paid.

Players use XP to buy better mechanical tools (levels, skills, abilities)---which they can then in turn use to better perform the actions that will net them XP.

Like using gold you stole from goblins to buy a sword, so you can now rob orcs.

I genuinely feel that such systems are valuable. They are models that illuminate the drives fuelling amoral / unethical behaviour.

Material gain is the drive of land-grabbing and colonialism. Logger-barons and empires do get wealthier and more privileged, as a reward for their terrible actions.

+

If you want to present an ethical choice in play, congruent to our real-life dilemmas, there is value in asking:

"Hey, if you kill the goblins you can grab their treasure, and you will get richer. There's no reward for sparing their lives, except that they are thankful."

Which is another way of asking:

"Does your commitment to the ideal of preserving life outweigh the guaranteed material incentives for taking life?"

The ethical choice is the difficult choice, precisely because it involves---as it often does, in real life---sacrificing personal growth and gain. Doling out an XP bounty for doing the right thing makes the ethical choice moot.

"I as the player am making a mechanically optimal choice, but my character is making an ethical choice!"

A cop-out. Owning your cake and eating it too. The fictional fig-leaf of empathy over a calculated a decision to make profit.

+

Sidney Icarus asks a question which I will quote here:

"... those who hold to their beliefs of good behaviour don't feel rewarded, and therefore feel punished. And that's not a good feeling. It's an unpleasant experience to play a game where the righteous players are in rags, and the mercenary fucks have crowns and sceptres. So, what's the design opportunity? How do we make doing the right thing feel pleasant without making it mercenary? Or, like reality, do we acknowledge that ethical acts are valuable only intrinsically and philosophically? I have no idea how to reconcile this."

I would suggest that the above dichotomy---"righteous players in rags, mercs in crowns"---is true if property is recognised as the only true incentive.

+

Friends As Property

Modern games try to solve the righteous-players-in-rags "problem" in various ways. Virtue might not net you treasure or XP, but may give you:

Contact or ally slots, which you can fill in;

Relationship meters you can watch tick up;

Favour points you can cash in later;

etc.

How different are these mechanical incentives from treasure or XP, really?

Your relationships with supposedly living, breathing beings are transformed into abilities for your character: skills you can train; powers you can reliably proc. Pump your relationship score with the orc tribe until calling on them for reinforcements becomes a once-per-month ability.

Relationships become contracts. Regard becomes debt. Put your friend in an ally slot, so they become a tool.

If this is what you want play to be---totally fine! As stated previously, games say powerful things when they portray the engines of profit and property.

But I personally don't think game designers should design employer-employee relationships and disguise these as instances of mutual aid.

+

Friends As Friends

In the OSR campaigns I'm part of, I keep forgetting to record money. Which is usually a big deal in such games, seeing as they are in the grand tradition of gold-for-XP?

In both games, my characters are still 1st-Level pukes, though it's been months.

I'm having a blast, anyway.

My GMs, by virtue of running organic, reactive worlds, have made play rewarding for me. NPCs / geographies remember the party's previous actions, and respond accordingly.

I've been given gills from a river god, after constant prayer;

I've befriended a village of monsters, where we now live;

I've parleyed with the witch of a whole forest, where we may now tread;

I've a boon from the touch of wood wose, after answering his summons.

I cannot count on the wood wose showing up. He is a character in the world, not a power I control. Calling on the wood wose might become a whole adventure.

Little of this stuff is codified my stats or abilities or equipment list. They are mostly all under "misc notes".

Diegetic growth. Narrative change that spirals into more play.

This is the design opportunity, to me:

How do we shape TTRPG play culture in such a way that the "misc notes" gaps in our games are as fun as the systemised bits? What kinds of orientation tools must we provide? What should we say, in our advice sections?

+

A Note About Trust

The reason why it is so hard to imagine play beyond conventional incentive structures has a lot to do with trust.

Sidney again:

One of the core issues is the "low trust table". I'm not designing just for myself but for my audience. For a product. How much can I ask purchasers and their friends to codesign this part with me?

Nerds love numbers and things we can write down in inventories or slots because they are sureties. We've learned to fear fiat or player discretion, traumatised as we are by Problem GMs or That Guys.

The reason why the poverty in Sidney's hypothetical ("righteous players are in rags") sounds so bad is because in truth it represents risk at the game table. If you don't participate in the mechanics legible to your ruleset (the XP and gear to do more game things), you risk gradually being excluded from play.

You have no assurance your fellow players will know how hold space for you; be considerate; work together to portray a living world where NPCs react in meaningful ways---in ways that will be fun and rewarding for everybody playing.

You are giving up the guarantee of mechanical relevance for the possibility of fun interactions and creative social play.

+

The "low trust table" is learned behaviour--the cruft of gamer culture and trauma.

When I game with folks new to TTRPGs, they tend to be decent, considerate. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence from folks playing with school kids / newcomers / etc to suggest my experience is not unique.

If the "low trust table" is indeed learned behaviour, it can be unlearned.

Which rules conventions, now part of the hobby mainstream, were the result of designers designing defensively---shadowboxing against terrible players and the spectre of "unfairness"?

How can we "undesign" such conventions?

Lack of trust is a problem that we have to address in play culture, not rulesets. You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.

+

This is too long already. I'll end with an observation:

Elfgames are not praxis, but doesn't this specific dilemma in the microcosm of our silly elfgames ultimately mirror real-world ethics?

To be moral is to trust in a better world; to be amoral / immoral is to hedge against the guarantee of a worse one.

+++

Further Reading

Some words from around the TTRPG community about incentive and advancement in games:

+

However, the reason there is a big debate about this is that behavioural incentives in games clearly do work, either entirely or at various levels. This applies outside gaming, as well. Why do advertising companies and retail business use "rewards" structures to convince people to buy more of their products? Why do people chase after "Likes" on social media?

A comment by Paul_T to "A Hypothesis on Behavioral Incentives" from a discussion on Story-Games.com

+

the structure and symbolism of the D&D game align with certain structures and values of patriarchy. The game is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.

D&D's Obsession With Phallic Desire from Traverse Fantasy

+

In short, my feeling is that rewarding players with character improvement in return for achieving goals in a specific way impedes some of the key strengths of TTRPGs for little or no benefit in return. 

Incentives from Bastionland

+

When good deeds arise naturally out of the players choices, especially when players rejected other options that were more beneficial to them, it is immensely satisfying. Far more than if players are just assumed to be heroic by default. It gives agency and meaning to player choice.

Make Players Choose To Be Kind from Cosmic Orrery

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Much has been made about 1 GP = 1 XP as the core gameplay loop driver of TSR D+D. But XP for gold retrieved also winds up being something of a de facto capitalistic outlook as well. Success is driven by accumulation of individual wealth -- by an adventuring company, even! So what's a new framework that can be used for underpinning a leftist OSR campaign?

A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR from Legacy of the Bieth

+

Growth should be tied to a specific experience occurring in the fiction. It is more important for a PC to grow more interesting than more skilled or capable. PCs experience growth not necessarily because they’ve gotten more skill and experience, but because they are changed in a significant way.

Cairn FAQ from Cairn RPG / Yochai Gal

+++

Thank you Ram for the Story-Games.com deep cut!

( Image sources: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/neuron-activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/10490978.pdf https://varnam.my/34311/untold-tales-of-indian-labourers-from-rubber-plantations-during-pre-independence-malaya/ https://nobonzo.com/ )

+

PS: used with permission from Sandro, art by Maxa', a reminder to self:

[thydungeongal]

any advice for playing a character very different than you IRL? i know it sounds silly, but i play a warlock who would reasonably have good knowledge of magic that i don’t have as a newer player and would be far more eloquent/persuasive than i am on the spot. my dm asks that we speak in character before resorting to rolls which is great but i feel like i get nerfed for not memorizing books of lore/not being a theatre kid with great improv skills.

I think you should talk to your GM about the need to speak in-character because for some people it can actually be an obstacle. Now, I'm very much an advocate for players describing their characters' actions before they roll, like shit like "Can I roll to persuade this guy" is nothing. But there should not be an insistence on a strict need to speak in-character.

So like, as long as everyone else, more or less, knows what your character is doing and saying, I don't see there being anything wrong with your narration being more detached. It's also okay to switch between these two, describing character actions more abstractly one moment and then speaking lines as your character might speak them the other. A strict insistence on having to speak lines in-character all the time seems unfair, provided you describe what your character is doing in terms of actions and intent.

So anyway, assuming Gonad the Barbarian, you could like do something like "Gonad steps towards the guard and says 'What ho, good guardsman, wouldst thou allow me to go and see yon magistrate?'" or you could just say "Gonad steps towards the guard and asks the guard if he may see the magistrate." And then when asked to present an argument you could just say "Gonad says that it's of utmost importance and waves the letter with the viscount's seal in front of the guard." Like, as much as I like putting on a goblin voice and playing out my character's lines, that shit isn't necessary and this more detached form of narration is just as fine.

And finally, it's literally just okay to ask. I sometimes do this still: sometimes I'm stumped for what a cool line would be for someone to say, and this happens to me on both sides of the GM screen, and sometimes it's fun to just defer to the rest of the table like "Hey I know this would be a perfect moment for Morningwood the Elf to say something epic, but I can't figure it out, does anyone else have an idea?" Like, Morningwood the Elf may be my character but he's part of a narrative that everyone is partaking in creating, so like it's always okay to step back and ask everyone for what would be a good and cool thing for your character to say. Especially as a newer player the rest of the group should be okay with letting you ask them for advice on stuff like this without being weird about it.

Also, the folks at @anim-ttrpgs are very passionate about this sort of thing and especially third person narration, and their game Eureka encourages it very heavily. They have a few interesting posts about it on their page which I hope to dig out once I'm no longer tired, but I apparently slept pretty badly last night and am already nodding off when it is barely past nine here

[utilitycaster]

I think people sometimes go REALLY deep into like, either symbolism or "what does it mean that this character always wears the same color, what does it all mean" in actual play and on the one hand I get it's not visual or limited by budget, so in theory characters could wear any outfit of any color at any time, but it's still very convenient in terms of painting a verbal picture, and serves as a shortcut for your players. Like, take the following two examples:

(from 2x80)

(from 3x45 and 3x57)

Now, there could be a reason why Matt initially picked blue for these two characters (though my hunch is that mage=blue is a very common trope, especially in gaming) but once they are established as "blue" characters, there is a vested interest in keeping them blue because it allows him to (as you can see) successfully hint at who they are to the players or permit an explanation for how they're able to connect the dots. Especially because neither of them have particularly unique descriptions physically (elves and humans with light-colored hair are not uncommon) it's an easy way to say across years and campaigns "yes, this is Allura; yes, this is Ludinus, and based on the looks of it this seems like his tower." (Worth noting for the tower that Matt doesn't even repeat the color, just says it matches his aesthetic). If Yussa were to show up in C3 or a future one-shot, I bet he'll be wearing gold. It's not a bad thing! But it doesn't mean that they only wear one color all the time or that it's necessarily very important; it's a quick code. It's not unlike the TAZ Barry Bluejeans reappearance; the bluejeans don't actually mean anything other than "Griffin didn't feel like saying Sildar Hallwinter, and came up with a joke name" but by describing the character, instead of just going "oh it's Barry" the GM makes it a much more special moment by letting the players figure it out, especially in cases where they can't introduce a character by name because the current party doesn't know them.

[maximumzombiecreator]

do you have any advice for players who are interested in ttrpgs that arent d&d but can't find dms? i can get my friends to play news systems when i run them but sometimes i want to play! but my other dm friends just want to keep running ultra homebrewed barely recognizable versions of 5e

Yeah! There are a couple of approaches I'd recommend in this case.

Since you have other DM friends, you could go with the classic quid pro quo. If there's a specific type of game they're interested in being a player in, or a specific character they're excited to play, you could offer to run a game for them in exchange for them running a game that you'd like to be a player in. Usually this should be limited to games that are relatively fixed in scope. Neither of you is going to want to commit to running an unbounded campaign, but something that's gonna be half a dozen sessions or less feels more reasonable.

With the type of DM who runs 5e-in-name-only this is definitely high risk, high reward. On the one hand, the experience of running another game might show them the joy of running a game that doesn't need to be completely rewritten to do what they want, and you could gain a DM friend who is happy to run other systems. On the other hand, they might just completely house rule and homebrew whatever new system you persuade them to run, so that it's that game in name only as well, which is a disaster. And that's assuming you can persuade them to try at all, even with the bribery of running something for them.

The second approach is what I have called the Grinch technique: if I can't find a reindeer, I'll make one instead. I am regularly converting players to GMs, it is my not particularly secret agenda when I run games.

I find the biggest thing I can do to make this happen is to just be very frank about what I find to be the tools of GMing. Players often have a very grandiose view of GMing: the GM who preps tirelessly and meticulously plots a story and knows every detail of the world. I am very clear that I don't do that. I prep scenarios with a fragile status quo, and I react to how players interact with it. When it comes to obstacles, I don't make solutions, I make problems, and then I just handle how the players approach them. Most of what I do is reacting.

I tell this to all my players, in part just to calibrate their expectations, but if players show an interest, I'll invite them further in. I'll tell them about what documents I maintain over a campaign, what my prep notes look like, little techniques I've learned to make GMing easier. And I'll tell them about games I think they'd be interested in. And when I feel like they're really starting to see how everything I do is really not that difficult, I'll start nudging them in the direction of GMing.

The last approach is to just find online spaces dedicated to this kind of thing. I prefer playing in person to online, which is why I recommend the other two first, but the third approach is definitely easiest. @anim-ttrpgs runs a great book club discord for running indie games that you can check out if you're interested in that! Dedicated discords for the game you're interested in playing almost always have a looking for group channel as well.

Hope some part of that helps.

[toskarin]

A question of curiosity - assuming you play them due to your involvement with a bunch of them, what are your favourite kinds of characters (be it mechanically or narratively) to play in TTRPGS? And do you have any associated anecdotes to go with them?

courtesy readmore

mechanically kinda depends on what's on the menu, but if it's combat-focused, I personally really enjoy characters who "deny" things

not really the kind of character who I'd ever expect a GM to put in their element on purpose (I usually make a conscious effort to remind the GM of things I'm capable of so that I don't trample on any fun setpieces) but definitely the kind of character who modifies objectives just by being in play. I also like magic-users in concept, but that's more of a flavour thing

I think that's reflected a good bit in the kind of narrative play I enjoy, too. when I make a character, I prefer to do it with the rest of the party in mind, less to make the character "compatible" and more to make them sharply contrast in ways that encourage the other characters to have moments where they can reaffirm who they are (both in narrative and out of narrative)

there's a fine balance to strike here. on one end of things, you risk yes-manning so hard that the party quickly becomes a problem solving engine with a single striking surface. on the other end of the things, you risk being The Chaotic Neutral Guy

the space in the middle there represents the characters that people often want to regularly interact with, but rarely want to play. the sort of character who isn't actively disruptive, but raises a lot of red flags when they suddenly show enthusiastic agreement for what you're doing. the kind of character you almost need a diminished sense of discomfort to play without getting in your own feelings about

I adore playing characters who are catered to find plot hooks in other players' characters and tug them just enough to pull them to the surface

most parties have characters who disagree on things that aren't easily resolved. that's always fun, but (because people courteously tend to avoid conflict) it's very rare for those conflicts to come up without GM prompting, and "create productive conflict between two characters without leaving out the rest of the characters or starting a fight between players" is often an equally uncomfortable situation for a GM

lots of fun directions to take it!

have an arc that would benefit from a character taking charge but their player doesn't feel comfortable just Doing That? it helps to have someone else try to take charge who obviously should not be allowed, just to get everyone behind the alternative

have someone with a pure heart who doesn't really get to show that in a party of players who don't want to be mean? maybe someone who's a little more morally-compromised could give them a window for explaining what they actually believe

have a character who's part of some mysterious cult that nobody else is going to find the time to look into? the party could benefit from having a nosy character to justify cracking open that backstory

GM needs to fuck something up to remind the party of how dangerous things are? why not add to the mood by showing what your often-cold character looks like when something manages to actually upset them

[WARNING: DOING ANY OF THIS WALKS THE PRECARIOUSLY THIN LINE BETWEEN BEING COMPELLING AND BEING ANNOYING]

observant readers (well, those who have followed for a while) might have noticed I periodically go on rants about the much-maligned "evil character in a good party" and how both sides of the argument represent a communication and courtesy breakdown. that also very much ties into this sort of thing. I won't go over Tolerable Villainy 101 again, but you get the idea

distilled, I like playing the sort of thoroughly worldly bastards who often end up important in their own right, but mostly on accident, by virtue of being important to what makes other characters compelling