#the more i GM masks the more i want to play masks

[heybiji]

"I came to try and save you."

"You're doing a great job."

bit from the Halloween issue of the MASKS game I'm running. they were both dressed up as Ghostface but I didn't feel like drawing the mask even though it was the whole point!! the delinquent (westley) got buried in a coffin for a halloween game called Coffin King, but the jocks left him in there, then the nerd/doomed (adrian) went through a teleportation portal by accident and ended up trapped in the coffin with him, so we ended up with two ghostfaces in a coffin. BUT I DON'T WANNA DRAW THE GHOSTFACE MASKS!!

[sprintingowl]

What Non DnD TTRPGs Feel Like

Okay, quick thread about what playing different non DnD ttrpgs feels like.

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Pathfinder

This is DnD. It feels like DnD. It's like going to a slightly different church. Some of the words used during the service are different, but at the end of it the pulpit turns out to be a mimic and you cast Entangle and summon your direwolf.

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Fate

This is Rule Of Cool with additional rules. The GM has powers to one-up you or lead you into temptation, but you have powers to one-up the GM, and all these powers use the same kind of token that you ultimately shuffle back and forth.

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Savage Worlds

Handwave-style DnD (positive connotation.)

The GM has a lot of freedom to pick genre and setting, and the gameplay is sleeker, rule-of-cool-ier without losing meaningful combat or character building.

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Call Of Cthulhu

You may not be an old librarian, but you sure are built like one. Most acts of violence can flatten you in a couple of hits, but violence doesn't happen often. It's the punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence. Atmosphere and pacing rule over this land.

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World Of Darkness

This is a game about getting deep into your character's headspace. It's about figuring out who they are and roleplaying them passionately. Your backstory choices and powers have a huge affect on how you interact with the world around you.

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Warhammer Fantasy / Dark Heresy

You are Scrumbles McGrumbles, a walking heap of morbidity and washed-up soldiering. You are trying to find your place in a world that's having an even worse day than you are. Your best friend is a ratcatcher. Together you will be heroes.

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OSR (Mork Borg, Mausritter, Into The Odd, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, Cairn, tons more)

DnD boiled down to two components: GMing + Making A Guy. GMing is made as easy as possible and PCs are somewhat disposable, so the story is the hijinks you get into together.

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Powered By The Apocalypse (Masks, Nahual, Monsterhearts, Pasion De Las Pasiones, tons more)

The goal is to get into trouble and stir up drama. Succeeding on a roll with no consequences is rare, but when you fail you fail forward into even bigger, messier drama.

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Blades In The Dark

You go on missions and then return to your base. The missions are about choices as much as about rolls, and you build your base together to make yourselves more powerful as a squad.

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Trophy

Your goal is to lose. Specifically, it's to lose in a dramatic and harrowing fashion that sticks with everyone at the table. Think movies like Annihilation, but as oneshot games.

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Golden Sky Stories

You like everyone at the table with you. When someone does something adorable, you can award them exp. The highlight of the session is someone getting flustered and/or speaking in a squeaky voice.

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Ryuutama

You are going on a journey and helping other people along the way. Important choices include packing lunch, wearing appropriate clothing, and completely filling your canteen. Combat is a cozy, pastel color jrpg.

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The Indie

There are so, so many games that are just completely their own thing, and that I can't squeeze into a single thread. If you discover you like game mechanics and you want to Get Weird with seeing what they can do, there is an entire scene here waiting to welcome you.

--

Stuff I Missed

There's lots of stuff I haven't played, or didn't remember in the moment, or absolutely love but it would take a whole thread to explain why I love it. I will do more game recommendations in the future, but you can also comment systems you like below!

[theresattrpgforthat]

As someone who designs games, are there any specific games you've read that do interesting things with the Forged in the Dark or Powered By The Apocalypse systems that get you excited to write your own stuff?

(Asking those two since Protect the Child is FitD, also excited to hear if another system is excited rant worthy)

My friend, thank you so much for giving me space to ramble lovingly about games and mechanics. I don’t know if anything suggested here will be new exactly, but I am relishing the chance to talk about how the games I’ve read and played have impacted my design journey.

This is going to be a walk-through of various games that have given me a lot of tools to work with. Right now my head is full of Protect the Child, so I'm not really thinking about any other design projects, but I hope you enjoy this nonetheless!

Brinkwood, by Far Horizons Co-Op, Slugblaster, by Wilkie’s Candy Lab, and Moth-Light, by Dissonance.

I knew of a few Forged in the Dark hacks before I heard about Brinkwood, but when I realized that the Masks were basically communal playbooks, my mind was blown. Both Slugblaster and Moth-Light appealed to me because of their setting, but when I read the rule-books I was also impressed by how they were able to take the base Forged in the Dark and change it to make the rules work for the proper genre and tone.

Brinkwood takes the playbooks with special powers and makes them communal. You can pick up a new set of powers every time but still play the same character, so you can have variety while still pursuing the same character’s storyline. Because the Masks are shared, the “crew playbook” doesn’t look the same as it does in a lot of other Blades hacks, as no matter what Masks you take, you’re still engaging in a rebellion against vampires. Brinkwood also gives the GM a lot of guidance on how to flavour the antagonists in a way that is challenging, interesting and dangerous, while also giving the players a way to veto any subject matter that bleeds too much into real-life boundaries. Honestly, I think Brinkwood probably directly influenced my game A Terrible Fate more than Protect the Child, but the initial moment of realizing how much you can play with the game was a really important step in my development.

Slugblaster re-organizes your dice resources as Boost & Kick, and shifts Stress into a currency (Trouble) that you have to spend, rather than a time bomb. This gives your characters more longevity and takes away a lot of the gritty trauma that works for Blades, but doesn’t make sense for hover-boarding teens. Additionally, Slugblaster gives agency of faction creation over to the players in a way that’s way more personalized than it is in Blades. Specific questions are meant to be answered by specific playbooks, which I think is a great way to speed up crew relationships, as well as ensuring that each player at the table has a piece of the world that they contribute to. When setting decisions are left up to the group as a nebulous whole, one player may have more say over setting creation just because they have the loudest voice or the most ideas. By giving specific choices to specific playbooks, you’re ensuring that each player has a piece of the world they can point to and claim as theirs.

Moth-Light takes the CATS safety tool and embeds it into Pact creation, allowing the genre and tone to shift the way the game is played slightly to reflect the kind of story the group wants to tell. The core setting is the same - a planet with gigantic bugs - but the ways the characters interact with the setting changes depending on the Pact that you choose. I think this is a genius way to give a group a way to use Safety Tools without them necessarily realizing it, and it ensure that the group enters the story on the same page. This mindset fuelled my choice to present the world-building as a series of questions for the players to answer, establishing some truths about the technology levels and the use of magic before players make their characters, setting some basic limitations to make sure folks are on the same page. Currently however, I don’t think I’ve achieved the seamless translation of CATS into a game-appropriate setting exercise - I’ve just ported CATS into the game.

External Containment Bureau, by Mythic Gazetteer.

External Containment Bureau minimizes a lot of their character options and does away with playbook options in order to make character creation customizable while still quick, and one of the primary ways they did this was by changing the way gear rules work in the game. In standard Blades, you can only use equipment to improve your Effect, but in ECB, you can use your equipment to add +1d or improve Effect. This is primarily because ECB doesn’t use stats in the way Blades does, but I liked the way that little tweak gave the player an additional resource.

Additionally, ECB doesn’t care about load. Instead, the character comes with some gear associated with their department, and a few gear slots that they can fill themselves. You can always have everything in your Gear section on you - the limitation is in what’s available. I really liked how the game provided a balance between gear that made sense for your department and gear that reflects the way the player wants to portray their character, so I did the same thing in Protect the Child.

Antiquarian Adventures, by acegiak

I heard about the way Stress works in Antiquarian Adventures when I was listening to the Dice Exploder podcast, and it sparked a lot of thoughts about what Stress can be used for, especially since I knew that I didn’t want to give the characters Trauma in Protect the Child. Thematically, it doesn’t make sense to imply that parenting is inherently traumatic, and I don’t want to cast the Child as a source of trauma for the parents.

Antiquarian Adventures solves this problem by allowing Stress to re-set every time you fill it, as long as the player is able to dictate how the character suffers some kind of setback or brings about some form of trouble as a result of getting too stressed out. The exact trouble is attached to the playbook, adding to the distinct flavour of each trope. In Protect the Child, I made sure to add one Reaction that was unique to the playbook, to reflect the same kind of thing.

Last Fleet, by Black Armada Games.

Last Fleet blew me away with the Pressure mechanic. It’s a physical manifestation of stress that exists in the setting, that doubles as both a player resource and a ticking clock. You can spend Pressure to give yourself a better chance at success, but once it hits its cap, your character is forced into a situation that that they cause themselves.

In many ways, Last Fleet is doing something similar to Antiquarian Adventures, but the one thing it adds is that it gives the player options in terms of how they’ll cause trouble. Some options overlap across playbooks, but each playbook has a unique collection that helps keep it somewhat distinct from the others. One of the best moments I had in play was when one of my players realized that he had the option to actually turn on the group - the reaction was like a little present he’d just unwrapped for the entire group, and it made for an extremely memorable moment for the table.

Last Fleet also inspired me to shorten the Stress Clock in Protect the Child. Base Blades has a 8-mark Stress track, but in early play-tests, I felt like it was difficult for anyone to fill up their clock in a single session. The Last Fleet Pressure track can only hold 5 marks of Pressure, and re-setting it doesn’t empty the track, but rather puts it at 2. I think that constant Stress provides a bit of a friction point for players, which is needed since it’s easier for players to achieve bigger dice pools in Protect the Child.

Beam Saber, by Austin Ramsey

When I was agonizing about how to encourage more roleplay between players, someone recommended that I read through Girl By Moonlight. Unfortunately, I don’t own a copy of Girl by Moonlight. I do, however, own a copy of Beam Saber, so when I decided to comb through other Blades games for relationship mechanics, I stumbled on the relationship clocks of Beam Saber.

In Beam Saber, you write down beliefs you have of each other character in the party, and attach each belief to a slice on a Connection clock. During downtime, you have the option to Cut Loose, which helps two Pilots relieve stress with each-other at the same time as filling the Connection clock. Filling the clock awards XP as well as provides the characters an opportunity to confront each-other about the way they see each-other.

I liked the idea of using time together as a chance to relieve stress. As far as I understand, this moment of connection is also seen in Girl by Moonlight, but I decided to limit the amount of stress you could relieve in Protect the Child because I’m still operating under the ethos I was introduced to in Last Fleet - I want to keep the characters under a lot of pressure, making room for them to make terrible decisions, and therefore giving them room to grow.

Lady Blackbird, by John Harper.

I returned to Lady Blackbird when I realized that the way I’ve set up runs in PtC means that it may be hard for players to do things like engage in long-term projects, or train for XP in a regular Downtime session. I also noticed that it was hard to get the players to roleplay with each-other with the way that Downtime is written in base Blades - it’s often navigated through in a very procedural way. Finally, I wanted to make the game a bit more one-shot friendly, with a way to present a Downtime-like section partway through the game without bogging down play too much.

Lady Blackbird has moments in between Action scenes where it explicitly encourages players to engage in flashbacks or character interactions in ways that allow them to clear conditions and provide a bit of exposition into their backstory. This, coupled with the Impressions in Beam Saber, gave me the tools to both encourage the players to role-play while also giving them the tools to foster relationships with each-other.

Right now, Rest Stops only have two moves: Bond with the Child and Bond with Each-Other. By reducing both of your options to moments where your character interacts with other characters, and encouraging both of these options to reflect your character’s ideals and history, I’m hoping to provide some of the maintenance of Downtime while encouraging the role-play that happens in Lady Blackbird. Longer downtime actions are relegated to Time Passes, which will only come up in campaign play.

I still haven’t perfected this stage though. For example, I haven’t figured out what to do about wounds.

Apocalypse Keys, by Rae Nedjadi / @temporalhiccup.

It’s kind of hard to quantify or describe the influence Apocalypse Keys had on my design, but I’ll give it a shot.

In Apocalypse Keys, your character never has to fail. There’s always options to give yourself a success, it’s just a question of how much you want to sacrifice parts of who your character is in order to get what you want. Apocalypse Keys is itself an amalgamation of a number of different mechanics from various places, such as the way you use tokens to improve your rolls, as originally found in Libretè, or the Theorize roll, popularized in Brindlewood Bay but originating in Codex: Moonlight.

The character playbooks are also centred on different struggles that the player has decided to wrestle with. The Summoned has a lot of moments centred on fighting destiny, while the Last wrestles with grief and loss. Some of the themes in these playbooks give you a lot of freedom to explore struggles and traumas that affect people in real life, but are flavoured in a way to give your monsters great power and extremely interesting backstories.

Finally, the way your character looks is completely up to you, and is irrelevant to the things your character can do. If you want a thousand glowing eyes, it doesn’t matter which playbook you choose. If you want to be the spirit of all werewolves that came before you, it doesn’t matter which playbook you choose. If you want to carry a golden spear that can listen to the regrets of the restless dead, I don’t think it matters what playbook you choose. I think that there’s a bit of a carryover from what I love about Changeling: the Lost to be found in Apocalypse Keys, in that your character’s origin and presentation can be as varied as whatever you can imagine, and can fit into the themes of whatever playbook you decide to wrestle with.

Protect the Child doesn’t directly borrow any mechanics from Apocalypse Keys, but I think the ethos behind the design is there. I want the players to experience the same creative freedom, while tying down specific themes to specific playbooks. I want to enable conversations about real issues that affect real people, while allowing the table to situate those issues in whatever setting makes the most sense for the group. I want the players to feel powerful, and at the same time recognize that the biggest obstacles to being good parent are generally incredibly personal.

I also admire the way that Nedjadi designs, from the rigorous play testing, to the purposeful openness about his inspirations, to his careful documentation of who has inspired him and where his ideas came from. I think being able to provide a clear through-line to the ways your were influenced by other design works is good for the historians of our hobby, and it also reinforces a culture in which game designers influence and allow themselves to be influenced by each-other.

[txttletale]

having thoughts about your point that players/the gm shouldn’t have to design anything for a good ttrpg and wondering if i’m thinking of the gm’s role using inaccurate terms. what would you call the gm’s responses to uncertain mechanical situations in a given game (e.g. a mixed success in pbta - the onus is on the gm to come up with what that means, following some guidance from the rules.)

it seems like something that people find comforting about d&d is that even though the rules are overly complex (and often confusing), many of the common mechanics have clearcut (and boring) outcomes (such as save or suck, hit or miss, etc), meaning the gm doesn’t have to produce/interpret a result themselves. is the other approach (i.e. rules-light) putting more “design” weight on the gm? or is that thinking of it too formally?

otherwise, good design being the gm’s responsibility seems like it just falls under the umbrella of playing in good faith - whatever the situation, it’s bad faith to create untenable/insoluble scenarios that the players can’t meaningfully navigate

yeah, i mean--PBtA games have a list of GM moves, right? when a player has a mixed success, usually that means they succeed and the GM makes a GM move. and obviously those moves have choices and stuff the GM needs to come up with -- something like Monster of the Week's "Put someone in trouble" or "Separate them" definitely require the GM to think of how that works in the fiction -- but that isn't game design, right? the mechanical aspect of that has been handled by the game's rules text. so i think that if there's more weight on the GM i think it's strictly creative weight rather than design weight, unlike the 5e GM who is forced to mechanize anything they might want to make up and is often left without any mechanical guidance

and i mean, i think in general 5e (and dnd more broadly) give the GM absolutely fucking nothing to work with. there are literally no GM-facing mechanical levels other than enemy statblocks (which also, unlike something like Lancer or even fucking 4th Edition, come with no guidance on how to use them or how to assemble combat encounters with them). it's much, much easier to GM a game with GM moves, because then you have an actual set of mechanical levers available to you--and of course, like the aforementioned "Separate them", these levers automatically lend themselves to telling the sort of stories the game advertise for their genre. here's some GM moves from other PBtA systems that, just by seeing them as a mechanical lever, can push the story into the genre and tone directions the game wants to emulate:

Put innocents in danger (Masks, teenage superhero drama)

Reveal an unwelcome truth (Fellowship, high fantasy adventure)

Make honour and shame real (Sagas of the Icelanders, saga-era viking drama)

Bring their gender into it (Night Witches, Soviet airwomen war story)

Make them teach a class (Pigsmoke, magic-school cutthroat academia)

and one of the absolute best things about GM moves (and similar mechanics, like BitD's consequences, or BOB's setting sheet moves) is that because they are clearly delineated and restricted, there's no self-policing. because a dnd 5th edition DM can, rules as written, say at any point "100 ogres appear and beat you to death", they always have to be navigating a series of unspoken social contracts, creating threats but never threats which can win, introducing problems and consequences at a rate that keeps stakes up but is also fundamentally winnable, make everythign feel 'fair'. and dnd players have learned to accept this all as just the table stakes of a GM role, but it doesn't have to be. because all that is game design, and in a better game, that design is taken care of. GM moves say 'look, we've already thought about pacing and fairness, here's the levers we've pre-designed for you to pull, go nuts and tell a story with them'.

so in my opinion PBtA mixed successes represent a lot less onus on the GM to design the game for the designers than anything that happens in 5th edition outside of individual clearly resolvable combat actions--and it's one of the reasons i started having much more fun with TTRPGs once i stopped GMing 5e and realized that other games gave me actual tools and support to work with instead of expecting me to do all that bull shit

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Aita for never making white ttrpg characters?

Title is a little weird, but I play a lot of ttrpgs with friends. I (M19) am white, so is all but one girl in our ttrpg group (F23), she’s Puerto Rican.

Anyways, all the games we play are rpgs based in the real world, whether they be urban fantasy or horror, they’re never in fantasy worlds. I like to explore different cultures, researching them and designing accurate characters for these games. I made a Bangladeshi girl for a MASKS: New Generations game who wanted to be the first desi superhero in America and was attending a superhero boarding school in upstate New York, I made half Iraqi/half Black boy in a homebrew power by the apocalypse game who was raised by his Chinese step-mother and was adopted into a giant extended family that took place in Brooklyn NYC, I made a black camp counselor for a Sleepaway oneshot, and I made a Mexican/Cajun boy for a Monsterhearts game taking place in south Louisiana.

For every character, I took my time and did days of research into backgrounds, cultures, and potential sensitivity issues. The last thing I want is to misrepresent a culture. The Puerto Rican girl in our group, let’s call her “Mary”, has never had a problem with my characters, but I’ve gotten comments from other players that it’s weird that I never play any white characters. I’ve made a white character twice; one for a Ten Candles game who was a 50 year old vet (and I miss him everyday, easily one of my favorite one-off characters because of his intense hatred of the Dallas Cowboys), and one for a homebrew 80’s slasher game who somehow because the first jock to be a final girl (He was too pure for this world, can’t wait to play his reincarnation in an ALENS game)

Our forever GM hasn’t ever had an issue with my characters, she even brings a giant variety of NPCs from all over to her games and makes the whole experience so much fun. The few times she’s made characters, they’ve always had great chemistry with mine and I’ve always had a good time

But, even with Mary’s and the GM’s approval, I still feel off about the comments of the other players. I love my characters, and the research I do for them helps me as a writer as that’s my profession atm. It seems like every time I propose a new character who isn’t white, I get asked “so what part of the world are they from now?” or “aren’t you German? Are you scared of doing a German character?” or other questions like that

I don’t play ttrpgs to insert myself into different fantasies, I play ttrpgs to explore new characters and new settings through different experiences. I don’t want to be labeled racist, but I understand if I’m coming off that way. If I’m voted the asshole, I’ll reflect and learn why. Commenters, deffo tell me how I can be better.

Anyways, AITA?

TL:DR, I’m white, I make primarily POC characters in ttrpgs, my group is annoyed and makes passive aggressive comments each time I do so. Aita for not making more white characters?

🔮

to find this later ^^^

What are these acronyms?

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

Hi! 10kDays has had a vice grip on my psyche for the last week or so, and I'm really excited to play the preview. However, I don't wanna make anyone else in my group GM this game just because I want to play it, so I'd like to try out the GMless mode of play, and so would they, but none of us have any experience with that style of game.

Is there any game you'd recommend we look at for a general picture of how you intend GMless play to work? I do own Ironsworn, which has a GMless mode, so if that jives with what you're intending that would be really convenient lmao.

Thanks for your time!

So there's a couple of thoughts i have here, starting with the shape of the game and the pieces of it that need different kinds and amounts of attention:

The game itself is kind of designed in three strands: courses, combat, and the Face game.

Courses are an adaptation of the Arc/quest mechanic from Jenna Moran's Glitch. I've found that they reduce the GM load hugely, for two reasons: you can roll up half an hour before game, ask "who wants to be in the spotlight, what does your quest say is happening in your life right now, and what needs to happen?", and drop something in. Connections and debts are also designed to give you improv prompts, and to a slightly lesser extent perspectives. The other benefit of Courses is that they move planning burden from "GM, night before game" to "player, whenever they want to think about their blorbo". So on a large-scale, "figure out what the campaign looks like" view, you can get away with improvising every session and just following your own character arcs. Likewise, the District moves and intentions are intended to give GMs an easy "i don't know what to do next" button, and the focuses of mask/gear/bell are intended to share around the responsibilities of worldbuilding. Ironsworn's oracles are another example of how to help outsource some of that decision-making, and it's the reason Appendix Yi is earmarked to be a million random tables. For more information on how oracles work, please google Jay Dragon's Sleepaway on your work computer (or at least read this Twitter thread from NightlingBug).

There are a couple story structures that are well suited to wuxia and this game. There's the Shaolin Soccer/shadowrunner/classic ttrpg setup where you are clearly a team, and there are enemy teams, and you are doing hijinks against them. But there's also a Jin Yong wuxia epic type thing where you have, let's say three or four PCs, and you're maybe nominally on the same side but you're clashing a lot and you're tied together by sworn and blood kinship and you keep running into each other. I think the most pared-down version of 10kdays you could run and still call it a full game is 3 players, characters living sort of far apart so they rarely run into each other, and interactions are 2 of the PCs clashing at a time while the 3rd player picks up any NPCs, throws in some District moves, etc. You could do a 2-player game but the kinds of interactions you could have would be severely limited, I think. The Face game of politicking and building support structures is kind of just... you two, face to face.

Now the problem on everyone's mind is fighting. It's attention-intensive, everyone's interested in it, and depending on your setup there can be loads of combatants that a GM would normally be expected to pilot. Again, there are a couple of scaffolds for trying to do this GMless. The sample Techniques in Appendix Jia come with combat tactics to make use of them, so any player can pick up an NPC combatant and figure out what they're going to do. Fight choreographing like this runs the pitfall of it feeling sort of bad to hurt your friends effectively, at least for some tables, but there is the incentive of hitting your friend's Bite highlight when you grab the corpo thug and bite them in the ass.

It is one of my mid-to-low priorities to create like algorithm type protocols for enemy fighters to run themselves, though that's still in the pipe dream phase. One thing I'm looking at here is Katabasis by Rathayibacter, which has a super cool system for easily lining up combatant actions, enemy or not). Maybe I'll end up with literal combat loop Turing machines or something.

There's one more option here which is to lean the other way -- to foreground the GM themselves being a player. I'm talking Ryuutama dragons, I'm talking Fellowship Overlords. Obviously I one hundred percent have not added this yet, and I'm not even set that I will, but it's definitely a tool I'm thinking of to help manage the wuxia/cyberpunk/other bullshit genre merger. If you went this way, it would look like picking a district -- secret note, each district is built to amplify a genre. Gongshan is made to focus on wuxia/the bell, Jiaotou is made to focus on cyber/the gear, Youzhou is made to focus on punk/the mask, Jingcai Xin is made to focus on court and courtroom politics, and Yuanhai is made to play Nezha Reborn. Pick a district that corresponds to the genre the GM is playing as, turn those Moves into Heroic/Humbling Moves and the landmarks/NPCs into Treasures and Connections, turn the Intentions into Skills. Now you can combine this with what I first talked about, sharing out cognitive load, and focus on playing as a district/genre. Is that meaningfully different from being a GM, who let's recall still counts as a player at the table? I'm a sicko who loves being a GM so I'm unqualified to comment, but try out any combination of these options and see how they take you.

[best-fnaf-song-competition]

WELCOME to the Best FNAF Song Of 2023 Tournament!!!

EVERY SINGLE SONG that got nominated is included in this bracket! Here's hoping we get some fun matchups!

Polls will be linked directly under the read more!

FINALS!!!

Stuck Inside has been disqualified due to substantiated claims of grooming by Black Gryph0n. An emergency poll has replaced it with Lovely Things

PLAYLIST

NOMINATION SPREADSHEET

(in case you want to see what people said about a particular song!)

DISCORD SERVER

Round 1A

Fate (Junimations) VS. Bunny Boy (Freeced) VS. Let Me In (CoffeeLemon)

Through The Valley (EvidentlyFresh) VS. Long Ago (Green Music)

Gasoline (NerdOut!) VS. Save Me (KryFuZe)

Pictures (Kyle Allen) VS. Ruin (ChewieCatt)

Five Nights (FabvL) VS. Human-Shaped Grave (LOCKE) VS. They Aren't Alright (TryHardNinja)

Close To Home (DAGames) VS. Ghost In The Machine (Shadrow)

Behind The Mask (APAngryPiggy) VS. In The Ruins (TryHardNinja) VS. This Is The Last Night (JTMusic)

Lovely Things (JTMusic) VS. Stuck Inside (BlackGryph0n)

Back For Another Bite (JTMusic) VS. Ruined Lullaby (CG5) VS. Brought This On Yourself (TryHardNinja)

This Opportunity (Tynado) VS. Blood Runs Thicker (PARANOiD DJ)

You're Coming With Us (MonochroMenace) VS. What Remains Of Me (LongestSoloEver)

Tilt-A-Whirl (Man On The Internet) VS. Freddy You're Supposed To Be On Lockdown (MiatriSs)

Better (Nightcove The Fox) VS. Lost Souls (ChewieCatt) VS. A Bad Thing (Nightcove The Fox)

Render Me Alive (TryHardNinja) VS. I've Been Here The Whole Time (WereWING)

Make Me Whole (KryFuZe) VS. Ruin (Alpha25)

Cries Of The Missing (Eleven) VS. Graveyard Shift (Doctor Siren)

Round 1B

You've Been Wrong (Logan Pettipas) VS. In My Eyes Now (Nigthcove The Fox) VS. What Lurks In Shadows (KryFuZe)

Digging Your Grave (Lexo) VS. Mechanized And Alive (Arcadify)

Chronicles Of Bonnie - Treachery (Scraton) VS. Treat You Right (NerdOut!)

Come Play (Lydia The Bard) VS. I Found You (APAngryPiggy)

Ruin (Nightcove The Fox) VS. Afton's Empire (KryFuZe) VS. Bad Rabbit (TryHardNinja)

You're The Key (Kyle Allen) VS. Stuck In Your Ruin (Shawn Christmas)

Like A Disguise (Nightcove The Fox) VS. Time Keeps Ticking (Griffinilla)

Bury Me In Metal (Tynado) VS. Let Me Out (APAngryPiggy)

Terrible Things (Axie) VS. Ballad Of The Walking Machines (CG5) VS. The Mimic Song (Rockit Music)

Coming Back For More (DHeusta) VS. One Of Us (Nightcove The Fox)

Everything (EvidentlyFresh) VS. Connection Terminated (TheManBeHisLa)

Remnants Of Gold (Tynado) VS. Endless Nights (SubwayTacoMan)

Take Me Home (Nightcove The Fox) VS. A Silicon Soul (j-gems) VS. Hand And Eye (Man On The Internet)

Far Too Long (Nightcove The Fox) VS. Run (xXtha)

What Are You? (KryFuZe) VS. Five Unholy Nights (Cormick Murray)

Built To Be Grand (GM) VS. Your Wrath (MsBakuBeats)

Round 2

Bunny Boy (Freeced) VS. Through The Valley (EvidentlyFresh)

Save Me (KryFuZe) VS. Ruin (ChewieCatt)

Five Nights (FabvL) VS. Ghost In The Machine (Shadrow)

Behind The Mask (APAngryPiggy) VS. Stuck Inside (BlackGryph0n)

Back For Another Bite (JTMusic) VS. Blood Runs Thicker (PARANOiD DJ)

What Remains Of Me (LongestSoloEver) VS. Tilt-A-Whirl (Man On The Internet)

Lost Souls (ChewieCatt) VS. Render Me Alive (TryHardNinja)

Ruin (Alpha25) VS. Graveyard Shift (Doctor Siren)

What Lurks In Shadows (KryFuZe) VS. Digging Your Grave (Lexo)

Chronicles Of Bonnie - Treachery (Scraton) VS. I Found You (APAngryPiggy)

Afton's Empire (KryFuZe) VS. Bad Rabbit (TryHardNinja) VS. You're The Key (Kyle Allen)

Time Keeps Ticking (Griffinilla) VS. Bury Me In Metal (Tynado)

Terrible Things (Axie) VS. One Of Us (Nightcove The Fox)

Everything (EvidentlyFresh) VS. Remnants Of Gold (Tynado)

Hand And Eye (Man On The Internet) VS. Far Too Long (Nightcove The Fox)

Five Unholy Nights (Cormick Murray) VS. Your Wrath (MsBakuBeats)

Round 3

Through The Valley (EvidentlyFresh) VS. Ruin (ChewieCatt)

Ghost In The Machine (Shadrow) VS. Lovely Things (JT Music)

Back For Another Bite (JTMusic) VS. Tilt-A-Whirl (Man On The Internet)

Render Me Alive (TryHardNinja) VS. Graveyard Shift (Doctor Siren)

Digging Your Grave (Lexo) VS. I Found You (APAngryPiggy)

You're They Key (Kyle Allen) VS. Bury Me In Metal (Tynado)

Terrible Things (Axie) VS. Remnants Of Gold (Tynado)

Far Too Long (Nightcove The Fox) VS. Five Unholy Nights (Cormick Murray)

Round 4

Ruin (ChewieCatt) VS. Lovely Things (JT Music)

Back For Another Bite (JTMusic) VS. Graveyard Shift (Doctor Siren)

I Found You (APAngryPiggy) VS. Bury Me In Metal (Tynado)

Terrible Things (Axie) VS. Far Too Long (Nightcove The Fox)

Round 5

Lovely Things (JTMusic) VS. Back For Another Bite (JTMusic)

Bury Me In Metal (Tynado) VS. Terrible Things (Axie)

FINALS

Back For Another Bite (JTMusic) VS. Terrible Things (Axie)

[sabrinahawthorne]

The Forever Game, pt 2: What Gets to Be a Forever Game?

referencing this post

Let's talk about what counts as a Forever Game, shall we? Considering it's a term I saw once on a post I can no longer find and proceeded to formalize with Proper Noun Caps, it certainly can't prove to be a reductive taxonomy, can it?

As I mentioned in part 1, I think of Forever Games as being a type of game on its own - something with a certain approach to character design & progression, which is built with some assumption of long-term play. After all, I don't usually suggest Mage: The Awakening as a one-shot game.

This conception clearly isn't universal - a number of respondents brought up the fact that just about any game can be the one a table comes back to as their baseline, so long as they like it enough. And that's absolutely true - For the end user, any game can serve any purpose. Unfortunately, and with respect to the people who brought it up, this observation just isn't very useful for our purposes.

It's absolutely true that any game can be someone's forever game. But that's a feature of tabletop games as a medium - the fact is, at the end of the day all games take place inside our heads. This is why people use D&D 5th edition as a murder mystery game, or a tabletop-visual-novel; they understand that the fundamental mechanism of this art form is the limitless power of imagination, and are comfortable using the same rules framework every time to build whatever narrative they like, regardless of whether or not better-tailored alternatives exist.

If we want to get on the same page about Forever Games, we need to look at something concrete - like on-paper design of games themselves. That in mind, let me put forth some qualities that a Forever Game might have:

Almost certainly a trad game. While games like Wanderhome exist, the vast majority of titles I'd list as forever game candidates have a GM and probably use at least two denominations of dice.

A multi-faceted character framework. In other words, a race/class system is better suited for a Forever Game than simple Playbooks, generally speaking. This is for replayability's sake. Some folks play wizards all the time, every time - but if you've just spent five years as Slagnarr the Axinator, it might be nice to start over as a healer for the next go round.

A customizable progression track. The more a game allows you to make a capital-B-Build, the better. This is part & parcel with the above point, re: replayability, but it serves another purpose - embodying your character concept. Imagination is well and good, but there's something special about having a class feature that supports the way you want to play your character. It makes them feel more real.

At least one game mode that involves intricate mechanical interactions. The classic version of this is a grid combat system - but a crunchy exploration system or involved crafting mechanic are also good examples of this. The more rich and interesting a game's... well, game elements are, the better the game will hold up over time. Note that I don't say complex, but rich. There's a reason GURPS light is more popular than the full ruleset. Games tend to last longer when they give more of the table something to be doing at any given time, minimizing dead zones in play.

Little in the way of social mechanics. Hear me out on this - for a lot of tables, the ability to get together with friends, put on a mask, and goof off without fear of social repercussion is a huge draw. Having to do the same kinds of rules reference for politicking that you use for mosnter slaying doesn't facilitate the fantasy; it hinders freedom of play. You want the chance to fail your Will save because it creates interesting drama. The idea that you might be punished for shamelessly flirting with the King while his consort is Right There ruins the fun. A table's forever game is going to be something that lets them play casually. I don't think this is a controversial opinion; the idea of a "beer and pretzels" game is older than I am, and anyone who's been in a long-term game with friends knows how loosey-goosey things can get. I think that facilitating jokes has a solid correlation to facilitating coming back to the game.

This isn't really working towards anything. Really, I just wanted to take the opportunity of my own vagueness to elaborate a bit on what exactly I mean when I say "forever game," so if I decide to keep poking the hornet's nest, we can at least agree on whether I'm using a stick or a branch.

[goldyke]

if you have the time, what are your favorite ttrpgs? I'm interested in getting into the genre but dnd is kind of hard to break into. Again, you don't have to answer if this would take too much time to explain. Thank you!

So I’ve played about 35 different games, mostly one shots. I’ve had the benefit of playing with people I trust which can greatly influence game play. Below I’m going to include the full list of games with brief descriptions, but favorites first.

I definitely prefer non-traditional, narrative, and gmless games, so that will be a running theme.

Tales From the Loop has to go first because it’s the game that made me fall in love with ttrpgs. This game has Stranger Things vibes. You play a preteen in the 80s in a town where weird shit is constantly happening. This game is more on the traditional side. There’s a GM running the story, you roll for skill checks, there’s probably a specific story playing out that your gm will try to hook you on to. This game uses only 6 sided dice. There is a sequel listed below for teens in the 90s.

Fall of Magic is a narrative rpg with at most 3 dice rolls in the entire game. FoM is played on a beautiful, handmade map. Your characters progress through the cities on the map as you collaboratively tell the story of your journey to the birthplace of magic. Every city on the map has locations in it with a narrative prompt. Each player decides what location to visit and acts a scene at the location answering the prompt. Anything you say becomes true. There are no rolls. Nothing makes me want to write an epic fantasy more than a good game of Fall of Magic

Pasión De Las Pasiones is a PBTA game, which is one of my favorite systems. In it you play a character from a long-running telenovela. I suggest only playing with a gm familiar with the genre who can do justice to the setting. There’s lots of scandal and intrigue. In fact one of the possible characters to play is the secret evil twin of any of your fellow players. PBTA gamesone are closer to traditional with dice rolls and a gm, but emphasizes the narrative more. Rolls are based on you committing to certain tropes and are boosted by narratives rather than any sort of character skills. (I also suggest checking out other PBTA games.)

A Quiet Year is a map drawing game. All you need to play are a deck of cards, a printout of what the cards mean, and drawing materials. You tell the story of a community rebuilding after a harsh winter, answering prompts from the cards for each week of the year. As you build the village and create the story, you draw a map to show all you have done. No artistic skill is necessary. You do not play a character in this game. There is no gm. There are no dice rolls. This is the map from my last game. (I prefer to use wrapping paper for more space)

Dialect is a language building game in which you collaboratively make up new words that become completely normal to you through play. You play as members of an isolated community of any sort (lost mars colonies, online message boards, a thieves guild) which breaks down over the course of the game. You play out the evolution and eventual dissolution of your joint language. Each turn comes with a prompt for which you create a word and then play a scene. This is great as a stand-alone but I love the idea of using it as worldbuilding for a larger campaign.

I will hopefully do another post talking more about someone games tomorrow

(Warning for q slur used once below cut)

This is a list of all the games I’ve played with a short description for each. I do not recommend all of these, but feel free to ask more about any of them. I’ll talk more about some of these in future posts.

Masks (teenage super heroes. PBTA)

Paranoia (dystopian bureaucratic comedy horror)

Weave (app based multi genre. Left very little impression for me)

Tales from the loop (80s teenage horror mystery. D6 based game)

Things from the flood (90s teenage horror mystery. Sequel to above)

Descent into Midnight (map drawing game. psychic underwater entities in a community fighting an influence. PBTA.)

Dream askew (queer enclave as society falls PBTA. Book also contains a jewish companion game set in a shtetl, Dream Apart)

Rippers (dark Victorian. supernatural hunters)

Pasion de las Pasiones (telenovela the rpg. NDNM)

Fall of magic (map based, gmless, story telling game. High fantasy. I own but have not yet played their second scroll game City of Winter)

-

Fiasco (multi genre heist-gone-wrong game. Gmless. D6 based)

Inspecteres (ghostbusters-esque, bureaucratic comedy. Some mockumentary elements.)

Dnd (we all know this one)

Quiet year (map drawing, gmless game on the growth of community)

Dialect (linguistics based game telling the story of a collapse of community)

Microscope (world-building game played over the course of an era. Great for works building for a larger campaign)

Lady blackbird (single scenario game- helping a noble escape arranged marriage. Steampunk)

Lasers and feelings (Star Trek, basically. One pager. Great for new players and gms. Good system to build a home brew based on)

Castle falkenstein (steampunk+fantasy adventure)

Headspace (cyberpunk, anticorp. Emotionally intense/triggering)

-

Mouse guard (mouse fantasy adventures)

Numenara (science fantasy adventure game. Earth based, 1000 years off)

Manifest (sci-fi western)

Damn the man save the music (employees try to save their dying indie record store and achieve their personal goals. 90s)

Ryutaama (npcs travel and experience the joy of existence)

Dead Halt (a hotels AI has gone rogue. You work there. Try to survive. Horror-ish but in a campy way)

Knave (a very simplified fantasy adventure game)

Thirteenth Age (similar to dnd with a few unique interesting features. Made by creators of dnd 3&4)

Anomaly (tarot based gmless game about a sinister organization investigating supernatural anomalies)

Visigoths vs. Mall goths (conflicts and romance between the warriors who sacked Ancient Rome and 20th century spooky teens. Takes place in a mall in 1996)

-

Arcana Academy (magic school game. Don’t play with strangers because they will fall into HP tropes)

Alice is Missing (silent game played over discord or similar. A mystery is solved through texts and group chats

Worlds Without Numbers (large world fantasy adventure game. OSR. Similar in concept to dnd but with plenty of differences. More human centric)

Nahual (Mestizo shapeshifting angel hunting underdogs)

Sign (sign language building game. Deaf children develop their language collaboratively in a new school setting. Played silently.)

[nykloss]

stumbled across some of your posts about a code lyoko ttrpg

i am interested please tell me more 😭

ive been wanting to run code lyoko dnd for so long but i dont have the smarts to change dnd to make it feel code lyoko

Hey there! I'm super excited that someone's interested in this because it's such a passion project of mine haha, I'm sorry in advance if this answer is more than you bargained for!

To give you the rundown, I ran a very brief and experimental dnd 5e hack for Code Lyoko a couple of years ago for some friends. It was a lot of fun, but the system was SO badly Frankenstein'ed that we ran into a lot of technical issues, especially regarding the Lyoko/reality split and how it effected different builds. The old guide for that hack can be found here for free, but please take note that it is very informal and poorly optimized!

Recently though, I've been experimenting with non-dnd systems and building my own tabletop games, which is where Warriors of Xanadu comes into play. (This might get lengthy so feel free to skip to the TLDR.)

Warriors of Xanadu is a code-lyoko/garage-kids inspired system that I'm working on myself with the help of a few more experienced friends. It's built off of the Apocalypse World framework (basically a 2d6 system–if you've played Monster of the Week, Masks, or Avatar: Legends, think something like that) specifically designed to work well with the world and story CL provides. That means all the gameplay mechanics are inherently relevant to running code-lyoko-inspired adventures and there's no extra work to be done on your part. It's also a lot easier to teach/learn than something like DnD. (Even the character sheets are designed to be accessible so players could technically make their character with just their printed-off sheets and no additional resources! Much easier than dnd.)

Each non-GM player plays as a "Hero" and chooses a unique combination of a playbook (centered around academic character tropes like cool kid, geek, class clown, etc.) and a class sheet (how they appear on "Xanadu," with options like rogue, mage, warrior, etc.). Then, In-game, heroes go through episodic challenges where they encounter problems in reality caused by "the Virus," and must transport themselves to Xanadu to combat it. There's also a handful of original mechanics relating to social/academic rapport, corruption from the supercomputer, etc. The health/harm system and combat is inspired by Apocalypse World and Monster of the Week, and is meant to inspire a more survival/horror element than what something like dnd would provide. (Essentially the goal is not to engage in and "win" lengthy combat encounters, but to stay alive and usually avoid enemies when possible.)

I feel it's also important to note that it's not 1:1 Code Lyoko; it's very transformative and a handful of ideas are heavily abstracted to be more fun in a ttrpg setting. It's open-ended and customizable enough that you could technically run an unrelated story with it. That also means that there's some fun surprises for folks familiar with Code Lyoko, though, and you could still run something close-to-canon if you wanted.

The first draft of WoX is about 60-70% completed, I just need to finish the GM-heavy parts of the manual, finish some of the moves, and actually put together fillable playbooks/class sheets. I'm hoping to have it completed and ready to playtest by the end of the summer, but that's a loose deadline. Once I've done some playtesting and gotten feedback from others, I'll probably release the first public version on drivethru rpg and/or itch.io as a free or PWYW sorta deal.

TLDR; Warriors of Xanadu is a powered-by-the-apocalypse style trrpg system I'm working on. It's made from the ground up to support a Code Lyoko inspired campaign. I'm almost done with it but still have some work to do!

If you're comfy coming off of anon, I'd be happy to make note of you and send you the playtest version when I'm done with it, or answer any additional questions! (Same goes for anyone else reading this!)

[heybiji]

hi!!! i just wanted to say i really love all of your MASKS stuff. i'm something of a newbie when it comes to the TTRPG community, but MASKS seems to be not very well-known and i think that's a real shame. i'm a huge fan of old-school superhero-adjacent stuff, especially the silver- and bronze-age ones!

by the way, i was wondering if you'd be willing to share some tips for a first-time GM? you don't have to if you'd rather not! i just figured i'd try asking since i was planning on GMing a MASKS campaign for some of my friends later, but despite my decade's worth of roleplaying experience i've never been in a TTRPG campaign nor a GM (or similar) role before

Thank you so much!! I was just lamenting about how I felt bad for the MASKS tag because it is now flooded with all my npc nonsense hahah so this is really nice to hear.

It's awesome you're planning on running a MASKS game for your friends!! There is an indispensable post on twitter I saw that has a LOT of great tips for running MASKS that I recommend checking out. But for my own personal tips that are just me things, here's what I got. Sorry it's gonna be extremely long-winded, it may take a few months to read through it.

(Note: I am also hugely into RP and probably put more into it than what is necessary, especially with MASKS which is meant to be able to be played out of the box. It was definitely not played out of the box in our case because I require a lot out of myself and everyone else to feel good about running something. if anyone else wants to continue seeing me as a normal human being please don't click the Keep Reading)

Since you're running it, make the world interesting to you. If the world runs around themes you're personally interested in then you'll have a much easier time coming up with answers on the fly. For me, themes I'm interested in that lend themselves well to a superhero world: money, power, family, celebrity, media, the 24 hour news cycle and the desensitization of violence. Because I'm interested in this stuff anyway, wrapping a world around them makes it much simpler for me to figure out how the world ticks and thus how the characters fit into it and how the world reacts to them, and I am DESPERATE to find out how the characters react to all the questions and expectations the world is imposing upon them.

Make sure your players have a good grasp of the tone of story so they can make characters that gel well within it. For me the tone is a lil more adult because I'm not personally into younger morality tale stories in tone, it's pretty grounded, and I think comedy and tragedy work hand in hand so I lean into them.

Talk. A lot. Talk about the characters, talk about the world. MASKS is fun because it's a LOT of talking and figuring out the narrative together. It's not a lot of crunchy mechanics, it's all around seeing how the characters react to the world narratively, all hurt and comfort and emotions which (for me) requires people to have a good grasp on their characters and the world. I like to give my players "homework" where I ask them a question involving their characters in some way like "what hero did your character look up to as a child?" so they get to come up with past heroes, or "How does your character feel about _____?" etc etc. The only fans are gonna be your table and fans love to talk so be the biggest fans of the PCs!!

Figure out your framing. I know in MASKS they suggest framing it like a comic book, and basically talking about the frames on screen. For me, because I'm more into movies and tv than comics, I frame it like that. So I have an active "camera" in play during sessions and will ask things like "would anyone like to grab the camera?" to encourage the players to put the character into a scene or "what does the audience see as the camera focuses in on your character in this emotional moment?" There is a LOT of playing up to the camera and framing the sessions as episodes of a show, so it's like, okay, you have several options but what is going to be interesting for the audience to see? I find this encourages the players to have their characters take bigger swings and feel comfortable letting us into how their character is feeling because it all looks GREAT on camera. The camera loves it. The PCs are the story after all.

Because I frame it a show, I also like to play individual ending songs over the "credits" at the end of each episode. So I asked my players to make playlists for their characters so if I feel an episode had a lot of emotional focus on one character in particular, I can play one of their songs at the end of the episode! I also made a general MASKS playlist with a bunch of songs from the era we set it in (2004) to pull from. It's a fun little addition that I really enjoy and that I hope makes it all feel more special.

The Dino Donut Effect: create landmarks in your world. (OK THIS IS GONNA BE LONG BUT WORK WITH ME HERE) They don't have to be locations, more solid landmarks of the story that the characters can refer back to and lean on to make the world feel more "real." I call it the Dino Donut Effect because in our world the thing that made everything click into place was talking out the backstory of one of the PC's figuring out they had the power negation ability. We were talking one night trying to figure it out; we wanted the character to fall out of a building and be caught by a flying superhero and accidentally turn off their powers, so they toss the kid to another flying supe whose powers also get turned off. But we were like... holy shit what is the height of a building needed that can handle this much action in the air without them hitting the ground in 3 seconds. So after a long night of talking about terminal velocity and looking at Splat Calculators we figured out the height of the building, and we needed them to crash into something that wouldn't fuckin kill them. The first suggestion was a truck full of bananas. Nah. We landed on a giant balloon that could take the impact. And the balloon became a giant T-Rex holding a donut that was the mascot of the city's beloved decades old donut shop Dino Donut. And so we decided that one of the two flying supes grabbed onto the kid and the other and flew into the giant balloon to try and keep them all alive, which destroyed the balloon, which was a city institution, and there was a crowd of children there that day that saw their friend Dino Donut die. Killed by a superhero. The balloon deflated loudly so it sounded like Dino Donut was screaming in agony. All the kids were traumatized (screaming crying throwing up), the city was furious because everyone loved Dino Donut, it was constantly in the news cycle, and it ruined the career of the supe that "killed Dino Donut." AND THEN THEY REPLACED THE DINO DONUT BALLOON WITH A LAME "UPDATED DESIGN" DINO DONUT STATUE which everyone hates and people consider to be a memorial to the old Dino Donut. ANYWAY, the Dino Donut effect is that now all the PCs have one single incident to refer back to that they all have feelings about. A couple of them were there that day and heard Dino Donut scream, one is now the protege of the disgraced superhero that killed Dino Donut so she feels uncomfortable talking about it, there's the kid that was saved that day but was sworn to secrecy by the supe so no one would find out about his power negation ability, and then there's the kid that wasn't there because she's an alien that just arrived to earth and now the kids have to explain the incident to her with all their varying opinions. Now the PCs' meeting spot is at a Dino Donut. Having this one solid incident that is both funny and kind of goes into the themes of the world has been an absolute treat. Creating "landmarks" like that in the world has done so much and now I'm like okay I'm gonna try to do this moving forward with any other thing I run.

anyway these are my extremely specific to me tips. my RP standards are kind of high which makes me a bit of a terror but also when the flowers bloom from it it feels GREAT. i'm not sure if this will help but hopefully there is something there that can be useful!

MASKS is fun and simple once you get the hang of it, though, so I'm sure whatever you do you and your players will have a lot of fun! especially if you're someone who is into RP which is the background I'm coming from too; MASKS is extremely narrative! i'll be looking in the tag for your game hehe

(The Day Dino Donut Died art by JD)

[roadbread]

hi! what can you tell me about Chaz and Tales of Breville (I assume this is a superhero universe you came up with that he’s in)

first off- sorry i didn't answer this for a long time- apparently you can't edit answer drafts on mobile?? so I had to wait until I used tumblr on a desktop again.

So..

Chaz was originally an NPC in a different masks campaign "Halcyon High School Stories", but since the GM from that game kinda abandoned it, I brought Chaz back as my character in a different friend's Masks campaign, "Tales of Breville".

So, with this version of Chaz, he's not a time traveler,(and not friends with Kenny: another character of mine), but just a regular kid. A kid with a knack for invention. Call him Jimmy Neutron, or younger knock-off iron man, he just likes building things. And programming. He builds a variety of gadgets as well as building his own mechanical super-suit.

He's also hard to get along with and doesn't have too many people he would call "a friend". He loves his dog, Mr. Butterscotch and sometimes invents new dog toys/ puzzles for him to solve.

When he meets Sean and Hiroko- they eventually break down his metaphorical firewall and he lets himself get closer to his peers.

Chaz likes to think of himself as the 'logical' guy- spending his time working out the most efficient way of getting what he wants/needs when solving crimes. He finds relationships to be transactional (like teaming up with the cops to gain info for a case or pretending to accept a new hero out of nowhere only to keep a closer eye on him and figure out what's really happening).

He is very smart when it comes to engineering and mechanical know-how, and if it's a science- well, he'll probably understand it by the end of the night.

He very much was that kid who took apart the DVD player to figure out how it works then put it back together with a newer upgraded disk drive.

His parents work at a hospital, his mom is a surgeon and his father a registered nurse. From years of hanging out after school there he picked up a lot of info about anatomy and the limits and extremes of human kind.

Let me know if you have specific questions or want to know more about Sean and Hiroko- I can ask the people who play them what they wanna say.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Games with an atypical division of Player/GM responsibilities? For example, in Fellowship, the players have final say in lore/world building questions, not the GM. (Not counting GMless games, which have atypical GM duties by default)

Alternatively, if that's too niche: any games explicitly designed for rotating GMs and/or 'West Marches' style campaigns.

THEME: Unique Player Responsibilities / Rotating GMs

Hello there! I hope to do your ask justice, although I feel more at home talking about the first half of your question than the second. I’ll ask my followers to supply some more suggestions in the tags/reblogs, and throw at you what I have!

Fae’s Anatomy, by Hebanon Games.

Fae’s Anatomy is a comedic storytelling RPG wrapped around a challenging logic puzzle, recreating the high-stakes melodrama of medical procedurals like Grey’s Anatomy, House, and General Hospital. 

Anybody can be an expert in Fae’s Anatomy. The game is set in a world where all forms of magic, spirituality, and mysticism are science. Science? Just another form of wizardry. Quackary, superstition, and pseudo-science work, but so does chemotherapy, antibiotics, and sound medicine.

In many ways, I’d say Fae’s Anatomy feels like a typical ttrpg: you have one person giving hints and clues to the rest of the players, who will use certain skills and abilities to solve a problem. But the closest role to the GM role - the Patient - is simply different from the doctors in what limits them. The Patient is suffering from some kind of mysterious illness, and while they have a little bit of information available to their general illness, the app presented to them to help them run through the diagnosis keeps the solution obscured enough to keep them on their toes. The Patient also has to role-play their symptoms well enough to help point the doctors in the right direction. In some ways, it feels like Fae’s Anatomy is an elegant form of charades - and if you want to hear how this game plays, you can check out the special episodes that Lawful Great Adventures recorded using this game!

Apocalypse Keys, by Rae Nedjadi @temporalhiccup

The Doomsday Clock is ticking down and emotions run high as you and your team of DIVISION agents struggle to find the Keys before the villainous Harbingers unlock the Doors of Power and bring about the apocalypse.

As an Omen class monster, you are the only thing capable of holding back the apocalypse. Combat occult threats and investigate supernatural phenomena alongside your team of supernatural agents working for the shadowy DIVISION. But in a world that shuns monsters like you, only your deepest, most heartfelt bonds can grant you the power to stop those who seek to unlock Doom’s Door.

There are two ways in which Apocalypse Keys uniquely empowers the players in ways I consider slightly unorthodox. Firstly, there’s the fact that the lore of DIVISION, the shadowy government agency that holds your monsters leash, isn’t fully fleshed out at the beginning of play. It’s slowly uncovered with each mission and playbook advancement, with the players being presented with questions and workshopping the answers together.

Second is the mystery mechanic, which was popularized by Brindlewood Bay and The Between, and also made its way into games such as External Containment Bureau and Bump in the Dark. While the GM designs clues and thinks about what kinds of Harbingers might be responsible for this specific apocalypse, it’s up to the players to decide what the answer to the mystery actually is - and it’s the player’s roll that determines how accurate they are.

Brinkwood, Blood of Tyrants, by Far Horizons Co-Op.

Mask up. Spill blood. Drink the Rich.

The world is not as it should be. The rich feed, literally, upon the poor, as blood-sucking vampires who barely bother to conceal their horrific, parasitic nature. The downtrodden peoples of the world struggle under the burdens of rent, payable through the sweat of their labor or the blood of their veins. Evil has triumphed. Many have given in to despair. But all is not lost.

In Brinkwood, you take on the role of renegades, thieves, and rebels struggling for freedom and liberation in a castylpunk world controlled by vampires. Radicalized by tragedy, you have taken up arms and fled into the forests, where you were taken in by unlikely allies - the fae, forgotten creatures of myth - who offered a different path and the means to fight back against your oppressors. Masks, forged of old wood and older magic, are the final tool left to fight a war long ago lost. If you wear them, they will take their price, etching themselves upon your very soul. But they will also let you spill the blood of the rich and powerful vampires that now rule the land, and from that blood strengthen yourself and your movement.

There’s a lot of things about Brinkwood that I absolutely love, from the way the mask playbooks are meant to be swapped among the characters/players with every mission, to the slow but steady revolution that you build by fostering connections with various factions in the Bloody Isles. But for the purpose of this request, we need to talk about Your Exquisite Fae.

Your Exquisite Fae is the process by which the group collaboratively creates a faerie patron, otherworldly and uniquely powerful. It’s inspired by the game Exquisite Corpse, which has each player draw a piece of a drawing without knowing what the others have already created. In Your Exquisite Fae, the players receive answers to prompts written by other players but aren’t given hints as to what the context was - and then they elaborate on what those answers mean. For example, one player might state that the Fae has eyes that reflect the night sky, gleaming like a thousand distant starts. The second player might decide that those eyes see the deepest fears of the enemy, giving the group an advantage at finding weaknesses and secrets when spying on vampires.

Ars Magica, by Atlas Games.

Ars Magica is the award-winning roleplaying game by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein•Hagen about wizards and their allies in Mythic Europe. This flexible, deeply built world can support games that are historically accurate or fantasy-based, epic or small scale, political or personal.

Players work together to tell the story of their covenant — all of the magi, their companions, and grogs. This history can span decades. It might be heroic, tragic, or both in turn. The covenant could influence the entirety of Mythic Europe or the fates of a small corner of the world.

Spells will be cast. Duels won and lost. Houses may rise and fall. But magic is forever.

The last time I talked about this game, one of my followers pointed out that this was an incredibly complex game that was designed to accommodate rotating GMs. The game styles itself as a troupe-style game, which means you’re not just responsible for your mages, but also your companions and servants. If you want a game with complex relationships and big-picture conflicts, this might be the game for you.

Slugblaster, by Mikey Hamm.

In the small town of Hillview, teenage hoverboarders sneak into other dimensions to explore, film tricks, go viral, and get away from the problems at home. It’s dangerous. It’s stupid. It’s got parent groups in a panic. And it’s the coolest thing ever.

This is Slugblaster. A table-top rpg about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool.

It may look like a small thing, but during crew creation, each character playbook has specific roles in determining the crew’s resources and relationships. The Grit picks a faction that trusts the crew. The Guts chooses a faction that the crew has somehow annoyed. Each player draws a portal between the known multiverses, but the Smarts draws two. The Chill has final say over where you hang out when you’re not Slugblasting, and The Heart has final say over your crew name.

I’ve drawn direct inspiration from this setup in my own game that I’m playtesting, by giving each playbook final say over some element in the world, and I think it really boosts player agency and gives them control over the kind of story the group wants to tell.

Planedawn Orphans, by Sharkbomb Studios.

Planedawn Orphans is a campaign kit that helps you prepare a campaign for the fantasy role-playing game of your choice. It provides a flexible and versatile framework to start a campaign. The campaign kit will help you get started and provide structure and support, but some assembly is required.

Set in the Planar City, a strange melting pot that connects the vast diversity of the multiverse. You all play Planar Orphans stranded in this city, your original home worlds destroyed, corrupted or lost. A mysterious Patron has brought you together, provided you with a base of operations and tasked you to complete a Planar Key. This key will let you create a new plane for you and your fellow refugees. Your quest will bring you to exotic places filled with strange creatures and bizarre phenomena.

This isn’t a standalone rpg, but rather a campaign kit for whatever system you like - or even multiple systems! I’m recommending this toolkit because I’m actually planning to use it to run a series of rotating-gm games later this year, with a friend of mine. You’re building your own custom dimension by jumping into a series of vastly different worlds, and your home base is built collectively. There’s a lot of player agency and GM agency here, as players have plenty of control over their home dimensions (since they can’t ever go back) and the GMs can take turns designing custom worlds for the party to jump into. I definitely recommend checking it out.

Also Check Out

Asymmetrical Games Rec Post

[txttletale]

You mentioned that dnd is a bad system for beginners (which I 100% agree with. It’s was my first and I still barely grasp the rules), what ttrpgs do you think would actually be good for beginners?

alright i’ve had a few asks asking after TTRPG recs with different criteria so here’s some good TTRPGs FOR BEGINNERS: 

Dream Askew is a GMless game about being part of a queer commune in the post-apocalypse. it’s great for roleplay--it’s diceless, with all mechanics centering around spending tokens to have your character do something cool and gaining tokens by playing into their flaws--and it splits the burden of the GM position by having players pass around responsibility for invidividual threats and setting elements like ‘raiders’ or ‘the psychic maelstrom ravaging th world’. gay af also

Trophy Gold is a dark fantasy game about pushing your luck and losing your humanity out of desperation. it has extremely simple rules, an inbuilt system for advancing scenes in the form of the ‘hunt’ roll, and the only good take on a ‘spell list’ i’ve ever seen in an RPG. look out: this one is pretty grim and designed to often end in tragedy.

Slugblaster: Kickflip Over A Quantum Centipede is the exact opposite tonally. it’s about being in a 90s teen movie from the future, doing sick hoverboard stunts in alternate dimensions, and having drama with your parents. it’s goofy and cheesy in the best ways and it has a lot of heart.

Crescent Moon is about kids going on a magical adventure. you want whimsy, you want magic, you want a dedicated mechanic for employing the power of friendship? play Crescent Moon. it has a great system for tracking ‘items’ as little cards. plus the art is lovely. i cannot give any more comprehensive review than: it sparks joy.

Masks: A New Generation is the absolute peak of PBtA design. it’s about superheroes, but unlike something like mutants & masterminds it’s not concerned with the specifics of superpowers on a mechanical level, but on the emotional conflicts that come with being a superhero in the vein of the teen titans. if you’re interested in powered by the apocalypse games (and imo you should be! they’re a great place to start) this is the premier example imo.

[dojae-huh]

Sometimes, when I psychoanalyze Jaehyun, I couldn't help but think how his possible attraction to men is not surprising. Ever since, Jaehyun already demonstrated how his father is actually the leading figure in his life, which may come as surprising because familial norms are used to having mothers as source of comfort (and from the 127 documentary, a lot of the members did not really grow up with good father figures). But from Jaehyun's stories, it is his father that he seeks comfort and guidance from. Jaehyun likes people that are assertive, mature, wise, stable, yet still comforting and gentle. I couldn't help but think how he possibly patterns the traits he look in a partner after his father (Freud, you will always be famous :D), and how Doyoung perfectly exhibited these traits.

Contrary to his image, Jaehyun is not dominant. His recent interaction with Lauv shows that. He is shy and reserved, but his natural softness and smile are enough to make it look like he is sociable. (That's why I doubt his claims of being an E in the MBTI, when he shows major signs of introversion, even Doyoung is more sociable than him and the latter is a proud ISFJ). I remember he was asked if he would like to be a leader or older member of the group and he answered he enjoyed being younger and not taking charge. His personality is chill and ebbs and flows, he prefers someone leading him instead of taking the lead, yet at the same time, gives him the space to be stubborn and be on his own occasionally. I think someone like Doyoung is really a perfect partner from him.

Orientation develops pre-birth.

Jaehyun had his granny. She coddled him a lot in childhood, and wrote letters with commentary on his dancing when he was a trainee. He talked about her a lot during EnNaNa.

I won't pretend I know for sure, but Jae started mentioning his father (and going for advice to him, playing sports) when he talked about himself as a young adult.

Regardless, the father is definitely the more openly affectionate parent. Jaehyun talked about his mother being a reserved person, and how it was a problem for him, several times.

Doyoung is not a very stable person, heh. Based on whom did you write the list of traits? Who are the other people Jaehyun likes for their personality we know of? (bedise GM, who hardly can be counted) Ten, WW and Yuta don't answer the list.

Koreans are in general shy during first meetings. And even men in their 40s can be very giggly or hesitant. Evenso, normally there is more awkwardness and "don't raise your head", than real shyness. While Jaehyun, despite years as a celebrity, has to rely on "bro" gestures to somehow mask how socially inept he is. Lauv, indeed, was a clear case. They both are of similar age, both have similar status as celebs, Jae is a fan and had motivation to give a good impression, charm and forge a friendship for future collabs. And yet Jae retrited immidiently after a hug or an eye-to-eye.

And no, Jaehyun is not an E. Koreans lie about their MBTI-s in general. Some celebs even lie about their birthdates.

This moment with Doyoung and Taemin from 2016 is good for comparison. Doyoung was awkward, but he pushed himself to do what he had to do, play along.

I think JaeHyuk (and JaeWoo, in the past especially) is good at highlighting Jae's non-assertiveness. Haechan literally can push Jae against the wall, heh. And when Jae wants to stand his ground or has his way, he does it with the help of his stuborness and defiance rather than dominance. Jaehyun can't behave in a way as to be perceived by Woo as a hyung (whose word is finite), so he opts to slight agressiveness and cold responces.

I don't know how Jae's father is, but we might see Jae emulating him (as an example most close to him) in his relatioship with Yuta. With Yuta Jaehyun is a protective figure.

I wouldn't say Jaehyun has a chill personality, lol. He is no Taeil. Jaehyun is accepting, that's different. He is very moody though, can be emotional. In 2018 or 2019 neos joked how TaeJae squabbles were their favourite show at that time.

[mooestriovermind]

TTRPG Players?

Edit:

I have found enough players to fill out my schedule!

Thank you to everyone who applied!

---

I'm not going to aggressively tag this because this is mostly a question for my followers, but if you find this post, the invitation still stands.

I'm looking to run (a) PbtA game(s) as the GM, specifically:

Masks, TSL, and Dungeon World

Again, I will only be running the following games, barring extreme circumstances:

Masks

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Dungeon World

More information below.

Meeting Time

The timeframe of the campaign will be selected based on the availability of myself and the players. My current schedule is incompatible with meeting before (1600 or 4 PM) Mountain Time on a weekday, and weekends are unavailable. I will want to meet on a weekly basis, but biweekly is also acceptable given proper context.

Method of Playing

The game will be hosted on its own Discord server that I will make. If I get enough requests from people that aren't too incompatible, I may create more than one Discord server, each extra server for its own campaign and set of people. You may participate in multiple campaigns, if you somehow have the time.

Player Requirements

I will probably interview you a little bit if you volunteer, to make sure you're not, like, impossible to interact with because of severe ideological differences. I will also need to know the times you are available to attempt to form a day and time for us to meet.

If you're a trans woman, I will likely be biased and want you to join.

Closing

I feel like this may be a good way for us to become friends / better friends, if you're interested in becoming my friend but find it difficult to find a reason to interact with me.

I do hope we can find enough players with similar schedules to play together! If anyone has any questions, or wishes to contact me to request to join a campaign, I will be occasionally checking my Tumblr DMs, but it's far better if you add my at my Discord, "mindgirl" (naturally without the quotation marks)