#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

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Oh being a GM is so fucking fun

[amplexadversary]

Man. I watched the critmas special today and I *am* worried that I'm just not going to like watching actual play Daggerheart.

Might be the autism talking but I feel like they went in a direction that's even more "rules-light" than 5e, and I feel like that's pretty close to my lower limit for how much structure makes sense for an actual game.

I was hoping DH would wind up closer to a Pathfinder type of deal, or, since they did want a more modular system, Rogue Trader-ish level of complexity, since they DID come from Pathfinder into CR1.

I feel like I'm definitely going to miss seeing a lot of the strategizing over specific ranges and how long things last and the like. Not to mention I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to read the rulebook to keep up with what's going on unless they release a free PDF version (or someone reliable pirates it; I don't buy games my own group has a <0% chance of playing and my friends are very much d100 system lovers)

[thydungeongal]

Running D&D in 2024 is like, the player community collectively convinced each other that dungeon crawls, resource management and attrition are bad, so now everyone runs games where characters can expect to get into one or two fights a day and characters are never stretched for resources, and most Reddit threads about D&D are GMs asking for help challenging their groups because of said ignoring of the resource management aspect and getting told that a good GM could make it work so obviously they must be a bad GM.

[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.

[prokopetz]

Hi! Do you know of any TTRPGs that can (or must) be played with multiple DMs? Not DM-less systems, DM-More

Since you explicitly specified "not [G]M-less", I'm going to leave aside collaborative worldbuilding games like Microscope, as well as stuff like Belonging Outside Belonging/No Dice, No Masters hacks which do the "anyone can voluntarily step into a temporary GM-like role as needed" thing; one can argue that these are technically "multiple GM" games, but given that every participant has roughly equivalent narrative authority at all times, one could equally say that they simply decline to recognise a player/GM distinction – "if everyone is GM then no-one is", and all that.

So, then: games which have a formal player/GM distinction, but also explicitly require more than one of the latter. The first one that springs to mind is Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North. It's not the first of its genre, but it's certainly the most well known early example. In brief, it's a game for exactly four participants, one of whom takes on the role of the Heart, or player character; another takes on the role of the Mistaken, an antagonistic GM whose explicit goal is to kill or corrupt the Heart; and the other two take on the roles of the New Moon and Full Moon, co-GMs tasked with mediating between the Heart and the Mistaken and playing any non-antagonistic NPCs the Heart encounters. Each of these roles rotates scene by scene, so everyone will eventually have the chance to play all four roles.

(Interestingly, that last point isn't necessarily true in playtest versions of the game, contained some extra stipulations regarding the gender of the Mistaken which explicitly depended on the Heart player's gender, not their character's. This is absent in the published version.)

For a somewhat less esoteric take on the premise, you might instead have a look at Perfect (Unrevised). It's a game about heroic criminals in a quasi-Victorian dystopia, and features a similar rotating-roles setup, save that each player is specifically assigned to be a different player's GM; any time your character is the focus of a scene, your assigned counterpart steps into the role of GM. Like Polaris, it operates on the assumption that generally only one player character will be "on screen" at a time, in this case recommending a sort of anthology framing in which different player characters may indirectly influence each others' stories through the fallout of their actions, but may never encounter each other in person. It differs in that it features multiple GMs serially rather than simultaneously, with participants other than the active player and their assigned GM serving as a sort of semi-interactive audience.

Heroine poses a fun spin on the rotating-GM setup in that the GM role rotates while the player role doesn't. It's very blatantly designed around emulating Labyrinth (1986), with one player taking on the role of the titular Heroine, one player acting as Narrator, and the remainder playing as Companions; i.e., the Heroine's various weird muppety friends, rivals and hangers-on. The way it strays from a conventional one-GM-many-players setup is that the Narrator and the Companions are effectively on the same team, with the Companions functioning as co-GMs each assigned to a specific major NPC. (This might sound like a hair-splitting distinction, but you'll totally get what I mean when you see the rules that Companion play by.) The Narrator role rotates from scene to scene exclusively among Companion players, so the same player remains the Heroine from start to finish while everybody else gets a turn as both Narrator and Companion.

If what you're after is something which is simply built around the assumption or requirement of more than one GM, rather than this "everyone is a GM except for a single, possibly rotating player role" business, I'm afraid your options are much thinner on the ground. Trying to search for games of this type tends to yield results choked with a lot of worthless "well, this one time I was in a D&D group with a co-DM, so technically Dungeons & Dragons counts" anecdotes, which I suspect may be part of the reason you're asking me!

I have to confess it's not really my area; I don't have a great deal of interest in that particular strand of the genre. I was going to plug Pantheon – a game where participants are divided between GM-like gods and player-like mortal champions �� here, but when I checked I noticed that the author seems to have withdrawn the downloadable version from publication, so that's my top rec here off the table. Perhaps this blog's followers will have better suggestions?

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention @jennamoran's Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, which at first blush seems to fall into the same "if everybody is GM then no-one is" category that disqualifies Belonging Outside Belonging and such, save for the very amusing twist that it supports mechanically mediated adversarial play to resolve GM-type rulings: that is, if you and another player disagree regarding what the rules of the game actually are, you can roll dice at each other to determine who's right! It also has a more conventional GM-esque facilitator role in the Weaver, but includes formal procedures for other players to depose the Weaver and usurp their authority, so whether it meets our criteria or not raises some pointed questions about exactly how we're defining both "multiple" and "GM".

[ghuleh-yep]

Chance sfw and nsfw headcanons!

Hii im so glad that a lot of you enjoyed the last thing i wrote! I know i posted a smut fic concept but to be so real i haven’t started to work on that (i got distracted making these headcanons) anyways i hope you guys enjoy this and i hope its not tooo cringe😓

Also my requests are open if anyone wishes to request something!!

Wc: 1,937

Sfw:

When spending time with Chance there’s almost no way to avoid him going on some nerdy tangent. He loves to talk about things he loves, whether it be about the most recent G&G campaign he had been working on or about you, he never seems to keep his mouth shut and that's just how you like it.

When playing G&G he gets so into roleplaying he sometimes forgets that there are other party members and not just the two of you, the other members of the party get annoyed by this habit of his but you find it so endearing.

When playing a session with Lux, Chance's patience wears thin, but with you there he tries his best to keep his composure and not lose his cool on Lux. Whenever Chance can sense he might blow up he gently grabs your hand from around his GM screen, rubbing soothing patterns into your palms, playing around with your fingers, anything to get his mind off of his not so favorite player.

When creating a new one shot or full fleshed out campaign Chance can barely hold himself back from sharing every little detail with you, whether you’re going to be playing the new one shot or not Chance wants it to be a surprise but with all of his excitement and creativity flowing through him he can’t wait to tell you about his new ideas and dialogue he has come up with.

Chance’s love languages would most likely be quality time and words of affirmations, the two of you could be in the same room doing absolutely nothing and Chance is over the moon. He loves to profess his love for you by doing long monologues about how you make his heart jump by just being there and taking interest in the things he loves.

I think he’d enjoy physical touch as well but not as much as the other two, this was already mentioned before but he likes to fidget with your hands while playing a long G&G session. When brainstorming and writing down his ideas he likes to lay down with his head on your lap or vice versa, the feeling of your soft/rough fingertips and nails scratching his scalp and twirling his short hair really does something to him.

Chance’s hugs are the best, his hold is never to lose and never too tight he knows his strength and he knows if he squeezed you a bit too hard your eyes might pop out of your skull, not like you'd mind though. The last thing you'd see and feel would be his handsome face and chest all up in your face.

He also enjoys acts of service, he takes pride in doing stuff for you. If you want something no need to even ask of him, he is already moving before you can get two words out of your mouth. Whether you ask him to create a new character sheet for you (he already has ten new ones just for you) or ask him for a shoulder massage he is at your service. Chance knows how to use his hands for your own pleasure (wink wink) he knows just the right amount of pressure to use, his hands are like a weighted blanket, soft yet so strong he always knows how to make you feel amazing after a stressful day of job hunting.

He loves to roleplay with you, it's one of his favorite pastimes (besides playing and coming up with new G&G one shots)

Chance loves to watch you do simple tasks around the house, you could be doing anything from cooking a meal or mopping the floor Chance is enamored by your beauty/handsomeness, of course he’d get a but jealous when you get distracted by a different object but who wouldn’t he has such an attractive and amazing partner, he knows that your his but that doesn’t stop him from getting that way every once in a while.

He loves to play G&G with the other objects around the house but nothing could ever beat a one on one session between the two of you, he craves your attention just knowing that you're watching his every move and listening to him intently. Knowing that all of your attention is on him he feels a sense of pride bubbling within him.

Late at night when the two of you are cuddled up on the bed, couch, or even a pillow fort Chance without fail is always telling you some sort of tale. Of course he asks if you wish to hear it, not wanting to subject you to hearing something you won’t pay attention to. If you accept his offer he’ll ask what type of tale you’d like to hear and he can come up with anything! You wish to hear something spooky and scary? Chance is cooking up the scariest storyline just for you. Something sweet and romantic? No problem! Hopefully you don’t mind if the main characters are you and himself. Whatever the tale is, Chance gets super into it, just as much as a game of G&G, he’ll use silly voices making sure you’re getting the full experience.

In almost every conversation you have with Chance he’ll almost always without a doubt slip in a pet name or two. His favorites for you are princess/prince, my king/queen, dear/dearest, honey, and if yall are feeling freaky he wouldn’t mind throwing a mistress/mister around every once in a while.

Nsfw:

We already know Chance is a freak in the sheets, that's a fact. He's into basically anything that you’re into, unless it's some crazy ass stuff like watersports he can acknowledge that others may be into it but it's just not for him. Just to give an idea of what Chance is into, here's a few of his kinks– he loves hair pulling, preferably his hair but he doesn’t mind giving your hair a tug or two if you so wish. Roleplay is a big thing for him. I think we all know that, you two could simply be roleplaying a G&G scenario and he has a hard on in his pants the whole time. He loves it when you mark him up– whether it be hickeys, biting, or scratching the hell out of his toned back his eyes are rolling to the back of his head.

Of course for your first time together it’d be pretty vanilla, he doesn’t wanna spook you with anything too crazy just yet.

Let's get it outta the way Chance is BIIIIG like lets be so honest right now he gives big dick energy and he owns it. He’s about 7.5 inches and has a good amount of girth, his tip is a pretty pink/red, his member leans a bit to the right with a slight upward curve. I genuinely don’t know if he’d be circumcised or not so that's all up to your imagination my dearest readers!

Chance likes to keep it trimmed and maintained down there with a sexy happy trail, but if you ever asked him to shave it or grow out his bush, your wish is his command. I feel like he's the typa guy to shave some designs for you down there. If you really wanted it, he’d go in with a facial razor to really make it look pretty just for you. He’d gladly do a heart, a D20, a star, a heart with the first initial of your name, truly anything the world is your oyster! He might even let you do it for him just please let him reciprocate the gesture once you’ve finished your work.

Chance is a service top, your pleasure is the reason he wakes up everyday. Whatever you could possibly want he will do just for you, want him to eat you out/ suck you off all night long? He's in between your thighs until you’re overstimulated or until you’re telling him to stop. You wish to ride him? As soon as you feel the slightest bit of exhaustion, he's using all of his energy to thrust up into you just so you can finish.

Speaking of eating you out/ sucking you off, Chance is a GOD with his mouth, this nerd knows how to use it real good. Even just offhandedly mentioning the idea of him giving you head in a random conversation or G&G session he is stopping whatever yall are doing and getting on his knees right then and there. He’d definitely be the one to suggest you sit on his face, he doesn’t care what you weigh, he is making you sit down with all of your weight. Chance could die down there and he wouldn’t have any qualms about it, if anything it’d be his dream to pass away giving you pleasure. If you tug his hair while he’s giving head or just in general he will be coming in his pants immediately, the feeling of your hands scratching his scalp and messing up his neat hair really does something to him, it makes him all jittery and excited.

He doesn’t mind if you wish to go down on him, he just rather put his mouth to use and pleasure you. But who is he to deny such an offer, he is like a whiny bitch as soon as your lips are on his sensitive tip. If you nip at his thighs while giving him a handjob he is like putty in your hands. It doesn’t take much to turn Chance into a subby whining mess, especially when you reach up to play with his chest he is a wreck.

Chance is big on foreplay, it's one of his favorite pastimes besides playing G&G and writing lore for his future campaigns. He loves how his fingers feel in you while stretching you out just so you can fit him, knowing that he’s so big he needs to prep you each time makes all the cogs turn in his head. He loves watching your face contort in pleasure when he curls his thick fingers in you, watching the way tears form in your eyes or the way your face is all flushed by the things he whispers into your ears.

Chance’s usual pace is slow and deep but if you wish for him to speed up his pace he gladly will. His pace usually depends on the position and or mood of the night/day. I feel like Chance’s favorite position would be any one where he can see your beautiful/handsome face, being able to see you fall apart because of him gets him so hard he’s twitching inside of you. I don’t think he really has a favorite body part on you, he loves all of you– all of your imperfections, everything and anything about you is his favorite.

His favorite spot to cum has to be inside of you especially when you cum with him, the feeling of you squeezing him, sucking him deeper just drives him over the edge each time.

Speaking of edge.. Edge him edge him edge him!! Taunt him when he’s getting close, use him for your own pleasure and when you can sense he's getting anywhere close to his release, by the time you're all spent he still hasn’t came once. If anything, tie him down and leave him there to suffer while you clean yourself up, once you think he's suffered enough you finally give him that sweet release.

[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

[chacaillejdr]

How to write a TTRPG scenario ?

As a TTRPG campaign author, I’ve struggled for years to write scenarios that were coherent, that would not be derailed by players nor would force them onto rails, and that would allow escapism while keeping them hooked. I fumbled a lot until I found a method that I found quite efficient. So I thought I’d share. Of course, what works for one might not for another, but if you’re a beginner in TTRPG scenario writing and you don’t know where to start, well, you never know, this might help you.

The first phase is of course to make a rough draft. Just pour in a text document every single idea you have, without any filter : characters, cool scenes, story twists, gameplay elements… take your time, let your mind work in the background. Then organize every item, see what works with what, what would make sense in a chronological way… and fill the holes between the elements. This would give you a first draft of your scenario, something that should fill about two pages (regardless of whether your scenario is a one-shot or a full campaign).

At this point, the most adventurous GM would have enough material to start an improvised game. This requires a very specific skillset and a lot of memory. You do you, but at this point, I’ve only just started my preparations.

If you want to keep enriching your scenario, you’ll find yourself facing two issues : first, the more structure you have, the less freedom you’ll leave your players, because you have your “canon” on what should happen in your story ; and second you might miss holes in your scenario that your player will certainly have a lot of joy (or confusion) pointing out in the middle of a game. So here’s the trick. Find who is the main antagonist in your story (whether it’s a Dark Lord or your rival in the Most Beautiful Garden Contest, if your RPG is not a sandbox you will have an antagonistic force, else your players won’t have much to do…). Now re-write your scenario, from A to Z, but FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE ANTAGONIST, as if the players were not here, or were naive enough to fall into every single trap. Why ? To deal with both your issues at the same time of course ! On the one hand you can’t control your players’ decisions, but you can do it for your NPCs, so you CAN place your antagonist on rails and compensate every time they go astray without impeding on your players’ freedom. On the other hand, by writing out the details of your antagonist’s dastardly plan, you increase your chances to see a blatant error or omission and correct it.

Once this is done, you’ll want to identify the key elements of this plan, those that your villain absolutely need, else their objectives crumble. Those will be your “fixed points”. Your mission as a GM is to ensure that these fixed points happen no matter what your players do, in order to guide them along your main scenario. The remainder of the plan will be your “mobile points”, which your players will have way more control over. This will create a structure for your story, and you can complete the scenario with the mobile points, leaving as much freedom to your PCs as you want in them.

There’s one last task before you finish your story. Now that you have every step of your scenario, maybe even a division into chapters using the fixed points, you can do three lists : 

the places your players will visit

the NPCs they will meet

the lore elements they’ll have to learn

Using these three lists, you’ll be able to re-write one last time your whole scenario. Now you’ll have a rich story, with a way more formidable antagonistic force, and more freedom for your players.

You can totally start your campaign using these documents, using the three lists as reminders

Of course, if you’re like me and you like to Plan Out Everything in advance, you’re only at the beginning of your work : every place, every NPC, every fixed and mobile point will need their own detailed page ; and some more elements will need detailing. But we’ll talk more about it in a future article, so stay tuned !

[anim-ttrpgs]

Why You Should Try Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Part 10: It Has Intense Action

This is part 10 of a multi-part series of posts about the awesome features of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, in no particular order.

Find the earlier parts here:

Part 1 Link: We Worked Hard on It!

Part 2 Link: It's Easy to Learn!

Part 3 Link: It's Easy to GM!

Part 4 Link: It's Easy to GM and Supports Narrative and Roleplay!

Part 5 Link: It Revolutionizes Investigation and Mystery Solving in TTRPGs

Part 6 Link: PCs are Not Just Mystery Solving Automatons

Part 7 Link: Excellent Time-Keeping Mechanics Keep the Pressure On

Part 8 Link: Fun and Easy Character Creation

Part 9 Link: Themes of Disability

For a while in its development, Eureka had a section dedicated to combat, but now that section is more broadly called “dangerous situations.” It’s rare, but dangerous situations will inevitably come up. The question is, will the PCs be prepared for them? Eureka has rules to cover everything from gunshot wounds to car crashes, from falling off buildings to drowning. If something bad can happen to a person, there’s probably a section in the rulebook covering how it would affect a Eureka PC mechanically. A lot of the times the answer will be they die, but how fast they die, and what they can do to save themselves in that time, is crucial.

Eureka takes a very “trad RPG” approach to this sort of thing, where violence and other dangers are something highly lethal, and therefore best avoided if the PCs are smart, but that the nature of what they’re doing means that it’s bound to happen eventually, and therefore the game rules need to provide a lot of “tools” and options within those situations, thereby creating agency over whether they live or die. PCs do not necessarily have to have “good” combat stats to survive, as many players so far can attest. It encourages them to be clever and cautious about things, and allows them to exorcise that cleverness and caution, without bogging the game down in too many numbers or charts.

Weapons will usually take any character down in one to two hits, and even when unarmed, characters have a wide variety of techniques that they can attempt, including the world’s first ever TTRPG grappling rules that are actually fun and advantageous!

Guns are as deadly in Eureka as in real life, and the type of gun matters a lot. That isn’t to say the exact model makes a huge difference, that would be too granular for what we’re attempting to do. A Glock 19 and a Beretta 92 would both fall under “Semi-Automatic Pistol” and function identically. Trust us, this all runs smoothly once you read it.

Bullets do 4 Penetrative Damage each, and most firearm categories are capable of firing multiple bullets within a single turn, each rolled separately. Direct hits are usually fight-ending, but that isn’t as easy as it sounds. Even with a high Firearms skill, these shots are being taken under extreme duress, and factors like cover, distance, movement, etc. will affect them too. Most shots fired will miss, and you might think that would be boring, but it’s not because of the next thing I’m going to talk about.

The Woo Roll

Named after director John Woo, the Woo Roll is a mechanic that’s makes it so that bullets don’t just disappear into thin air when they miss.

When any shot misses, a Woo Roll is made, which means something is going to happen that changes the situation as a result of that shot. (That’s one Woo Roll per turn, no matter whether one or thirty shots miss.) This roll determines whether the effect is good or bad for the shooter. A good result might mean that the shot hits a fire extinguisher behind the target, spraying him with foam and gas, disrupting his next shot. A bad result might mean the shot hits a gas line, and now the building is on fire. Usually the rule is that it’s whatever the most obvious and interesting thing within the confines of being good or bad for the shooter, but if there isn’t anything around, then we also have tables you can roll on.

Chase Mechanics

Combat is only likely to last a few rounds, but everything characters do in those rounds is crucial. These situations dynamic and deadly, and evolve rapidly, and if things are going south, run away!

Eureka has rules and incentives that can quickly shift the location of a conflict as one or more parties tries to flee. This works pretty similarly to combat, but, of course, the parties are moving and fighting across larger areas, causing the situation to evolve even more rapidly. Characters will have to overcome obstacles to keep ahead of their pursuers or catch up to their targets. These obstacles are rolled on a table that matches the environment the chase is happening in, heres a few highlights [images of entries]

As you can probably see, some of these obstacles can take a character out as easily as an enemy could. The kind of dynamic, cinematic car and foot chases these rules create are always something special.

[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.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint Plays Games: Changelings, Trauma & Gaming

Over the course of October and November, I returned to one of my favourite ttrpgs of all time with @thydungeongal and my girlfriend: Changeling the Lost. About once or twice a year, I get the itch to run the 1st edition of this lovely, lore-heavy game, and every year I come away from it thinking about its potential. This is meant to be a quick break-down of my latest Changeling session, as well as a reflection on the parts of Changeling that really touch my heart.

The Game.

This game happened over three sessions, involving a character creation session, and two sessions of play. We had one character who was a Darkling Gravewright - folks who dealt with the dead in their time in Faerie (and can also see ghosts), and another who was a Fairest Flamesiren, whose entire deal is about burning bright, but also burning out quickly.

I decided to give these girls a murder mystery, with a mortal body found just outside a gate to a Goblin Market, and a missing changeling to track down. We’d talked about themes of grief and addiction prior to my planning stage, so I figured dealing with both a death and a place that offers your wildest dreams (for a price) might be a good place to start.

I don’t like planning out specific plot beats in my games, so instead I tried designing the Market like an adventure location, with various vendors to tempt the players with their wares, while dotting the landscape with NPCs in various states of distress. I figured the Changelings would pick something that resonated with them, and we could go from there. This process also generated a few different villainous characters who could be responsible for the murder, which I’m glad I did, because as usual, what the players decide to do always falls outside the bounds of what the GM plans for.

The story ended up being about saving a kidnapped changeling from a hungry Fae, and bluffing through a group of Privateers (read: mercenaries) and bringing the victim to safety. However, they didn't escape completely unscathed - coming face to face with a True Fae caused a cascade of terrible memories coming back to visit one of our characters right after she thought she'd made it to safety.

Our session was an introduction to the world and lore of Changeling, and I feel like I did a pretty good job on that front. On the other hand, I felt like it was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the things I think Changeling can be about.

The Potential

When it comes to the World of Darkness in general, I think Changeling: the Lost has a relatively sleek amount of lore regarding the various Courts, Seemings, and faerie characters. Each Changeling’s durance can be typified, but ultimately what they went through can be up to the player who designs them, and the Hedge is limitless in its weird and strange creatures, which gives the GM license to create all kinds of goblins and monsters to fit what they want their game to be about - and the players aren’t really expected to know what’s going on in there anyways. Most Freehold history exists in rumour, because talking too openly about it feels like you’re inviting the Fae to your front doorstep, and in the same way, the true nature of the Fae is left up to rumour and superstition, allowing your group to decide what they really are, or leave their nature forever a mystery.

That being said, the toys that you can play with are still more numerous than anything that you can fit into any one campaign, even if you’re playing that campaign for 4+ years. You can very easily play Changeling as a magical urban fantasy game (and I’ve done this fairly regularly with my group), but C:tL also has a lot of poignant themes that can delve into themes about trauma, addiction, and mental health.

Disclaimer: CtL is not always graceful in the way it represents mental health. There are antagonists presented in the books that come across as “madmen”, some pretty gross Merits you can take that can feel bad to play at most tables, and characters that have lost what makes them human, becoming threats to the players. However, I think that the Clarity system does have some interesting ideas in it that, if treated with care, can still provide some interesting depth to the game.

Clarity

Clarity is meant to be a measure of how well your character can tell truth from Fiction - a high enough Clarity score, and you can sniff out a Fae even if they’re trying to hide themselves; a low enough Clarity Score, and you have a hard time differentiating colour and smell, and might even start seeing an overlay of your Durance infiltrating your weekly grocery trip.

Your Changeling moves up in Clarity if they’re able to keep a stable life with elements that help you ground yourself and give you a sense of identity - and mechanically, once you spend Experience points. Your Changeling moves down in Clarity when they suffer “sins” - moments that disrupt that hard-won stability. This sins could be something we’d consider morally fraught, such as stealing, assaulting someone, or murder - but they could also be significant life changes, like losing your job, buying a house, losing a friend or getting married. You also always suffer a Clarity sin when you come in contact with a reminder of your durance - particularly a True Fae.

The higher your Clarity score is, the harder it is to keep yourself there. Smaller and smaller things can trigger a Breaking point, like going a day without human contact, starting a new college course, or using a Faerie token. Furthermore, the lower your Clarity score, the more difficult it is for you to tell truth from fiction - think of the scenes in Mockingjay where Peeta has to ask Katniss “real or not real” and try to trust her answers.

It doesn’t help that so many pieces of the Changeling experience after getting out of the Hedge seems designed to Fuck You Up - like the doppelgänger that’s been living your life ever since you left, or the fact that mortals can’t seem to notice the ways that Faerie has changed you: you can feel the horns on your head, but all they touch is a well-coiffed hairstyle. In many ways it feels like your whole experience with Faerie is invisible - and you’re fairly certain that even if you told a mortal the truth, they’d never believe you. If they did believe you, they would never treat you the same again.

I like this system because it doesn't really measure how "good" or "bad" your character is - instead it's a representation of how your lived experiences can often trigger symptoms even if others get lucky enough to survive those events with their mental health intact. I'm not a bit fan of derangements - but I think dropping in Clarity is an excellent time to ask characters about pieces of their time in Faerie that haunt them, and perhaps saddle them with Frailties instead - what personal rules do you have to follow in order to navigate the world when you have a hard time telling friend from foe?

Other Themes & Metaphors

The Fae themselves are also exquisite boogeymen, mercurial abusers without the familiar human emotions that we might feel more equipped to understand. They act on their whims and follow their appetites - and while real-life abusers often have very human reasons for being that way, we need not feel such compunctions from the Fae.

We might have to feel some compunctions about their right-hand Loyalists however, changelings who have agreed to work for their Fae Masters in exchange for some semblance of freedom. These are enablers: giving the Fae a step into the mortal realm and throwing mortals and other Lost under the bus, just so the True Fae won't turn their abuses back onto them.

Much of the ethos of the seasonal courts in the first edition has to do with different strategies for preventing a day where you find yourself back under your abuser’s control. Do you pretend that everything is fine, because they won’t recognize their victims if they’re happy? Make yourself physically stronger so you can tell yourself that you’ll win next time? Amass magic rituals in the hopes that learning just the right order of steps will keep you safe? Or do you make yourself as un-interesting as possible in the hopes that they give up on you for other prey? (Yes, I think the Winter Court could totally be all about grey-rocking).

On top of that, the Changelings that your characters embody (and interact with) are far from perfect. They have vices, fears and trauma responses that pull and push them into a dance of backstabbing, power-grabbing politics, full of seeking the upper hand and possibly even selling out their fellows in a gambit meant to keep the Fae focused on someone other than them. (A political game or LARP with these themes in mind feels so juicy to me.)

Next is the metaphors of power and/or addiction. The higher your Wyrd is, the more Glamour you can hold, and the more powerful your magic is. At the same time, the more Glamour you can hold, the more you need to hold it: what starts as a fun magical resource can grow into an addiction, if you lean into it hard enough. Sure, your Contracts become easier to activate and you can Incite Bedlam if you get powerful enough, but are you willing to chance withdrawal if you can’t get your daily fix of goblin fruit? How much are you willing to play with human emotions in order to get that sweet sweet taste of anger or grief?

Then there’s the seeming-specific traumas. Beasts struggle with wondering whether they can be human after giving in to animal instinct; Darklings fell into Faerie because they crossed an invisible or moral line and have had to make morally questionable decisions in order to survive. Elementals are used to being treated as part of the scenery, moulded to fit the whims of their captors; Fairest are constantly pressured to be the prettiest or the best with the threat of terrible terrible things should they fail. Ogres have undergone terrible physical hardships, including physical mistreatment and deprivation, while Wizened have been told time and time again that they are only worth something if they are useful. Stepping out of Faerie doesn’t magically “fix” any of these complexes, and as a result each Seeming has to wrestle with stereotypes even amongst their own: if you need someone murdered, go to a Darkling, If you need something made, go to a Wizened. If you need a hot piece of ass, a Fairest is sure to oblige - right?

Lastly, there's the Fetch: a copy of yourself that was made to replace you when the Fae took you away. This other-you is often so much better or so much worse than the person they used to be - they can act as a foil to your character, haunting you or making your life difficult, reminding you of who you used to be, or never letting others forget how badly you may have screwed up. In Changeling society, killing your Fetch is at the very least a regrettably convenient way of tying up loose ends, and at the most, a rite of passage. But it's also a surefire way to risk losing Clarity. Kind of a catch-22 situation, isn't it?

My Experience So Far

Past Changeling sessions I’ve run have included NPCs getting kidnapped by misguided friends, stumbling across characters who were at an all-time Clarity low, trying to save other Changelings from their Faerie kidnappers, cannibals, Fetches, and antagonists who are set out to betray one or more factions of the Freehold that is supposed to protect them. It’s always bits and pieces of what feels like a bigger picture.

On the one hand, I think that's to be expected. There's so much in this game, and I doubt that any campaign can really dig in to all of its systems and complexities. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I’ve been able to really dig into the themes of Changeling: the Lost in the way that I’d really love to be able to do.

The subject matter can be so close to real struggles, that I’m nervous about making those struggles too bare-faced at my local table. Gas-lighting, torture, hallucinations, drug abuse and cannibalism are so very easy to drop into a Changeling game, but are also so very easy to hit uncomfortable moments for someone who's unprepared.

At the same time, I think that playing a game like Changeling with a high-trust table that uses robust safety features has so many interesting stories that can give power to players, even if the setting is technically a horror one. I’ve been having conversations with @psychhound about a lot of the themes that folks try to explore in ttrpgs, especially in response to this post he commented on back in April. To summarize that conversation: TTRPGs are a great way for folks to tackle personal struggles and traumas from a safe place, in ways that can give them a cathartic experience or that can give them a fresh sense of identity. Changeling has been a significant part of those discussions.

I came to Changeling: the Lost as a fairly new GM the first time I picked it up, and the more I learn about Safety Tools and a culture of care, the closer I feel to getting to that game that lives in my head that lured me into TTRPGS in the first place. Every time I come back to It, I think I'm closer to pulling together a Changeling game that sinks its teeth into the themes I’m interested in and hit some of the grime beneath all that glitter. So every time I come back to it, I’m going to create funky little goblins and design weird Fae bars and take the characters’ memories and ask them why they hurt - figuring out how I can twist the knife just enough to peel back the glamour, without opening any wounds that we’re trying to keep closed.

[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.

[tinytablepodcast]

Help Us Choose Our Next Game

We received so many wonderful submissions from the indie ttrpg community of games to play next on Tiny Table. We need your help to narrow them down! We will be taking the top 3 games to Patreon for our patrons in the Mini and Micro tier to vote on.

Reactors and Romance: Reactors and Romance is a rules-light RPG about flirting while piloting a giant robot. You only have one stat, and that is your HEAT 🔥. Your HEAT measures how hot your mech's reactor is getting, and how hot of a pilot you are 😉 Will you fight or flirt your way through battle? Can you keep your mech from overheating? What will it be hotshot? https://jp-bergamo.itch.io/reactors-and-romance 

Dawn of the Orcs: Dawn of the Orcs is a GMless dark fantasy worldbuilding and roleplaying game. You play as the magical technocrats who create the first Orcs as weapons of war, modify and improve them over time, and tell the story of how the Orcs become their own people. https://lymetime.itch.io/dawnoftheorcs 

The Trains of the Glorious Republic of the People: The Trains of the Glorious Republic of the People is a tabletop RPG where players take on the roles of a train crew in a fictional 1930s totalitarian state. Your mission is simple: get yourselves and your unique train from point A to point B though things are never that easy on the tracks of the Glorious Republic. The game requires only d6s, pen, paper, and, above all, your loyalty to the party.

'til it kills us: in ‘til it kills us, you play as a group of young, reckless queer activists fighting to make a difference in the world. you’re angry, and you’re scared, and rightfully so. not to mention, you’re all a little bit fucked up. whether you’re dealing with issues at home, struggling with mental illness, or just learning to stand on your own two feet, life isn’t easy. but you’re also in love with the world, and with each other, so you keep fighting anyway. it’s the only thing you can do. the only problem is your magic. sure, it protects you. sure, it helps you fight. but you can feel it – feeding on the most unpleasant parts of you. and the longer you have this magic, the more you fear by those feelings. you worry it might be powering but you keep fighting. what else is there? remember what you always said: we’re going to keep on fighting ‘til it kills us. https://damsels-dice.itch.io/til-it-kills-us

Dragon and the Warrior: Create your own oldschool JRPG world as you play, by drawing monsters and maps; creating magic items, spells, allies, and quests; or filling the world with towns and dungeons. Every conflict, whether a sword and sorcery combat with monsters, or an argument with your overbearing mother, is imagined as turn based combat with a card based system. Players constantly switch between playing the hero protagonist and taking on varied GM roles, controlling Allies, Monsters, or Treasure! https://orioncanning.itch.io/ 

here, there, be monsters!: here, there, be monsters! is a rules-lite response to monster-hunting media from the monsters' point of view. It is an explicitly queer, antifascist and anti-capitalist game about the monstrous and the weird not as something to be feared, but to be cherished and protected. It features a simple tag-based system and resolution mechanics based on a pair of six-sided dice (2d6), as well as 100 pre-made character backgrounds and dozens of other tables to get you started as fast as you want. Play as a diverse crew of monstrous, anomalous or just generally odd people. Create and populate your own supernatural underworld, abnormal gang and extra-dimensional haven. Hunt monster hunters! Punch nazi occultists! Eat the rich! Protect each other! Fight back! Here, there, be monsters! https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/products/heretherebemonsters 

Speedrune: SpeedRune is a rules-lite ancient world fantasy game. Inspired by myths and fairy tales, players build and maintain a community between seasonal adventures. It's like if Xena: Warrior Princess fought the Bible but weirder. Check it out for free here: https://erinking.itch.io/speedrune

I’m in!: A fast-paced game where you pull off a one-shot heist, including everything from assembling the crew to the getaway. Using the rules of Blackjack to resolve the various obstacles of the game, it's a snazzy, jazzy time! https://gobbogary.itch.io/im-in 

Wizards of the Longest Night: WotLN is a game about WIZARDS, DOMINOES, ESCAPING DEATH and OBSCURE RULINGS. You and your FELLOW WIZARDS are trying to escape DEATH ITSELF as it twists the world around you back towards it. You are FULL OF WIZARD HUBRIS and think you can BEAT BACK THE CONCEPT OF ENTROPY which of course you can, because you have WIZARD MAGIC. You lay down paths to meet death as you lay down cards to beat it. Or tarot. Or scrabble times. Fuck it, play uno. Swap someone's hand. Play poker with a hand full of small rubber pigs. Cast wizard voltron. Read the rules. Cheat at the rules. Stick postit notes on your friend so you can offload your entire hand and declare uno. Watch the gameshow wheel of fortune. Be a horse. Email god. Cast the estrogen spell. BEAT DEATH AT ALL COSTS. The darkness stretches on forever, but if you set enough things on fire you dont need the sun to know the dawn again. https://moonhawk.itch.io/wizards-of-the-longest-night 

Death Cap Sauté: Death Cap Sauté is a GM-less one-shot TTRPG for 2 to 5 players. Players will compete in a deadly cooking competition in the weird post-apocalypse to gain the favor of the elusive Shroomp Lord! Using a simple push-your-luck dice system, face-off in 5 unique cooking challenges to see who will come out on top! https://junkfoodgames.itch.io/death-cap-saut

If you submitted a game to us and don't see it on the list, don't fret! We will be hosting many polls like this and your game is still in consideration. If you game is on here and isn't chosen to move on to our next poll, also don't fret! We may add it on to the next poll again.

[thydungeongal]

That encounter joke Anon is wrong. Every 5e GM I've ever met went the route of "one fight per day oh my boss is already dead accutally he has 50 more hitpoints and now here's 2 more minions now the fight is properly exciting and dramatic" and the lack of a poker face meant we all knew.

How do you feel about that kind of rewriting, anyway?

For context, none of the GMs ever admitted to this on the LFG posts, or the pitches, etc.

I'm not opposed to it on principle. Ultimately I do think it's a bit like "oh so you're shifting the goalposts when it seems like the party is winning the encounter more easily than you think they should have," but ultimately that's just a maladaptive response to a different issue. Which is, once again, people trying to run D&D as a game it very much is not.

D&D isn't a game of epic bossfights where characters snatch victory from the jaws of defeat after an extended combat encounter. It can produce such encounters but they will usually emerge incidentally, not naturally. D&D is ultimately a game of attrition, of managing character resources through the course of an extended period, and even though D&D 5e's actual expectations of what an adventuring day is supposed to look like are whack D&D 5e does support a type of gameplay that relies on managing resources over an adventuring day much better than it does "a single epic setpiece encounter per day."

Because ultimately D&D is at its best when it's about weaponized player agency and system mastery, and in modern D&D this sometimes manifests as "the party knew they were going up against a lich so utilizing everything they know about liches they kicked that guy's ass in two turns." Now that would be really anticlimactic if the GM had set that encounter up as narrative culmination of a campaign that had been leading up to this moment for two years. But if you take it as "just one more encounter in the story of a bunch of assholes trying to grow stronger and more epic" then it's just a moment of those characters getting to flex for a moment.

Now of course adjusting the stats of a monster on the fly is sort of a problem in that it goes against the game and thus undermines player expression within the game. When the group pulls off a cool trick that immediately deals a million points of damage to the dragon's dick and you say "oh actually the dragon had two million hit points" then you're ultimately undermining player expression. I don't think this makes someone a bad GM because the motivation behind it is usually to provide a more entertaining experience for the group, but it is a sign of a GM fighting against the system and not knowing what it does, and they and their group would probably be better served by another game. And given that players won't necessarily know that happened it maintains the illusion that the game does produce that type of encounter.

My advice? As a GM, be honest: "hey, I didn't think you all would one-shot that boss. Are you okay if we add a bit more HP to that thang?" And if this is a consistent issue of the game not producing the type of experience the group wants they should ultimately look for a different game.